Museum Making

Narratives, Architectures, Exhibitions

Suzanne Macleod, Laura Hourston Hanks, Jonathan Hale, Suzanne Macleod, Laura Hourston Hanks, Jonathan Hale

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781136445743
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Archaeology
• Index: Social Sciences

Over recent decades, many museums, galleries and historic sites around the world have enjoyed an unprecedented level of large-scale investment in their capital infrastructure, in building refurbishments and new gallery displays. This period has also seen the creation of countless new purpose-built museums and galleries, suggesting a fundamental re-evaluation of the processes of designing and shaping of museums.

Museum Making: Narratives, Architectures, Exhibitions examines this re-making by exploring the inherently spatial character of narrative in the museum and its potential to connect on the deepest levels with human perception and imagination. Through this uniting theme, the chapters explore the power of narratives as structured experiences unfolding in space and time as well as the use of theatre, film and other technologies of storytelling by contemporary museum makers to generate meaningful and, it is argued here, highly effective and affective museum spaces. Contributions by an internationally diverse group of museum and heritage professionals, exhibition designers, architects and artists with academics from a range of disciplines including museum studies, theatre studies, architecture, design and history cut across traditional boundaries including the historical and the contemporary and together explore the various roles and functions of narrative as a mechanism for the creation of engaging and meaningful interpretive environments.

Part 1

Narrative, Space, Identity

Introduction

The chapters in Part I explore the complex relations between narrative, space and identity. Through varied case studies and detailed historical accounts, all are concerned with the ways in which the physical material of museums and galleries can be manipulated to generate narratives – to tell stories in space. A number of themes recur throughout the chapters but most particularly there emerges a sense of the tension between political and institutional narratives and the messy realities of life; between sometimes oppressive, totalizing narratives and the multiplicity of identities which make up societies; between disciplinary narratives and the need for atmospheres of imagination as a route to an emotional experience; and, linked to this, between a reading of experience as intellectual and conceptual as opposed to sensory and embodied; factual as opposed to fictive; linear as opposed to labyrinthine. Rather than arguing for one or the other, the chapters chart a gentler line, calling for an embracing of the imaginary, theatrical, fictional and autobiographical characteristics and capacities of the physical stuff of museums and galleries, and the generation of an interpretive approach to processes of museum design. If an understanding of the very direct relationship between memory and physical journeys through layers of history informs many of the chapters, there is also an awareness of the need for gaps, inconsistencies and, most importantly, for use. It is through bodies in space and through use that narrative, space and identity are activated. Across the chapters can be read off a sense of the politics of this making and the need for cultural spaces which enable memory, imagination and anticipation as routes to identity formation.

In Chapter 1 Rachel Morris makes a compelling argument for acknowledging the defining characteristic of museums as places of imagination. Drawing attention to multiple examples of imaginary museums created by artists and writers, Morris explores the magical and fantastical qualities of museums that writers and makers of fiction are attracted to. Morris questions whether all museums have a thread of fiction and imagination running through them and asks, what happens when imaginary museums overturn the basic assumption that museums tell historical truths?

The imaginary and the fictional are taken up in Chapters 2 and 3. In Chapter 2 Greer Crawley explores a series of explicitly theatrical museum presentations which utilize the scenographic as a route to challenging visitors’ perceptions and generating ‘atmospheres of imagination’. In an approach which consciously harnesses the physicality of the museum to heighten experience, Crawley argues that theatricality is opening up opportunities ‘to experiment with forms of performativity, narrative and visual imagery that create new possibilities for interpretation and presentation’.

In Chapter 3 Laura Hourston Hanks turns the focus to that most well-used of museum media, the written text. Picking up Morris’ discussion of literature from Chapter 1 and drawing across a range of examples, Hanks explores the ‘manifold relationships’ between written text and museum space. Using a range of literary devices from meta-narrative and metaphor to plot and characterization, Hanks reveals both the sophisticated spatial stories embedded in her case study exhibitions, and the enormous value of literary or writerly approaches to museum design.

If Morris, Crawley and Hanks focus our attention on the imaginary, theatrical and writerly as approaches to museum making and routes in to our inner selves, Chapters 4, 5 and 6 focus on the historical and the political. In Chapter 4, Christopher R. Marshall discusses the making of the Parthenon Galleries at the British Museum in the 1920s and 30s. Exploring the debates surrounding the various designs and its patron, Joseph Duveen’s, desire for an epic presentation which spoke of the importance and worth of the Parthenon Sculptures, Marshall unearths the complex narratives that drove the design project and were embedded in the final built form. Marshall pulls this debate up to the present day through an analysis of Tschumi’s Acropolis Museum in Athens, its counter-narratives and the politics at stake in these two archetypal museum displays.

In Chapter 5 Suzanne MacLeod takes Yorkshire Sculpture Park as the focus of her analysis. Exploring its socialist origins, the chapter attempts to get behind descriptions of the Park as ‘magical’ and ‘other worldly’ to reveal a history of making based on a delicate negotiation of both a politics of landscape and the politics of sculpture’s display. Museum making here is an ongoing process and the chapter raises our awareness of the delicate balancing act involved in physically manifesting mission in a space that navigates the open, the emotional and the imaginary as well as the closed and focused world of the expert.

In Chapter 6 Nic Coetzer analyses three museums in post-apartheid South Africa, exploring the ways in which their physical forms embody the political stance of each institution and reminding us of the oppressive potentialities of museum design. Like MacLeod, Coetzer places a particular emphasis on process, critiquing the demands and outcomes of the contemporary focus on design competitions and a ‘design idea’ and arguing instead for a process and product that celebrates the mess and chaos of the everyday. These generous museum spaces chart a path between grand narratives and ordinary life, prioritize access and equality and open out space for dialogue, emotion and visitor-driven experience. It is then through myriad uses and myriad narratives that a route towards a democratic museum space might seem possible.

Visitor-driven experience is taken up as the main focus of Chapter 7 where Jenny Kidd concentrates her attention on visitors as the co-producers of museum narratives. In her review of a participatory performance at Manchester Museum, Kidd illustrates the complexity of individual narrative construction and the need for acceptance of a sometimes wide discrepancy between the narratives projected by the museum and those constructed by the visitor. In the example discussed here the physical museum becomes a witness to the heritage as understood by the participant and also a concrete legitimizer of that narrative.

Part I ends with two very different chapters, both of which are concerned with the creative potential of narrative for museum making. In Chapter 8 Lee H. Skolnick introduces the concept of ‘epiphany’ as the goal of the museum architect. Drawing our attention to the revelatory qualities of a range of building types beyond the museum, Skolnick asks how museum architects can reach beyond narrative through the choreographing of spatial elements, in order to make meaning manifest. Finally, in Chapter 9 Stephen Greenberg explores the relationships between time, space and memory. Rejecting formed spaces for found spaces, Greenberg considers how the theatrical, atmospheric, multimedia and most of all narrative, can be utilized at the level of the city as a route to built environments that encourage memory and imagination. What emerges in Greenberg’s analysis and across all the chapters in Part I is a shared ambition for museums to somehow touch the spiritual and emotional side of audiences and a recognition of the complex relations between narratives, built forms and identity, as central to this endeavour.

1

Imaginary Museums

What Mainstream Museums can Learn from Them

Rachel Morris

The history of imaginary museums is a long and curious one. It also has more relevance for real-world museums than might at first sight be apparent. The world, when one stops to think about it, abounds in imaginary museums. There are museums on paper, created by writers and artists; there are virtual museums on the web; there are museum catalogues that amount to museums in themselves; there are conceptual museums, conceived of and designed in every detail before they are built; and there is even the version of a museum that we all carry in our heads when we step into a real one – because just as no two readers ever read the same book so no two visitors ever go into the same museum.

More subtly, there are museums that are real enough – and yet have a distinct thread of imagination running through them. Not surprisingly these are usually the creation of one inspired individual. Take Sir John Soane’s Museum in Lincoln’s Inn Fields where downstairs in the Monks Yard Soane created the sham ruins of a monastery, with broken arches, pediments and other architectural fragments. It seems clear that Soane was storytelling, using things in three dimensions, and what’s more, telling a very particular story, a story about himself. The Soane Museum is a form of autobiography – for ruins, it seems, expressed Soane’s feelings of unhappy persecution.¹ Confirmation of his taste for storytelling comes from a short story that he wrote called Crude Hints towards a History of my House, in which he imagined visitors coming to his house at some future time when Lincoln’s Inn Fields lie in ruins and visitors are trying to make sense of them. Soane, it seems, was a storyteller by instinct – and was creating a museum, as many artists and writers have done since, as a way to tell stories about the world and about himself.

Snowshill Manor in Gloucestershire is another inspired creation by an artist trying to understand himself through things – this time the architect Charles Wade. Wade spent his life collecting and displaying the abandoned mementoes of other ages with such talent that the objects seem to quiver on the verge of life, including, bafflingly, two dozen Samurai Warriors, some of them mysteriously picked up by Wade in a local junk shop in Cheltenham. As at the Soane Museum a thread of gifted imagination and playfulness runs through Snowshill, as well as sadness at the passing of time and, in Wade’s case, a yearning for childhood – his favourite room in the house was an attic room called ‘Seventh Heaven’ which he filled with toys from his childhood. These threads of feeling – playfulness but also sadness, a yearning for lost times, the sensation of there being a lost paradise at the beginning of our lives – are all themes that occur again and again in imaginary museums.

So there are many kinds of imaginary museums but the two that interest me here are those imaginary museums created by people who would think of themselves as novelists, artists or film makers – and those that have one foot in more conventional museum making, that are often indeed described as museums, but still have a powerful thread of imagination running through them.

Imaginary museums turn up all kinds of interesting questions. They make us wonder why writers and artists use the museum as a metaphor and what it enables them to say. But also, what kinds of imaginary museums do they create? Why do some people storytell with things? Do all museums have a thread of fiction making and imagination running through them? And what happens when these imaginary museums overturn the basic principle of real museums – that they should tell historical truths? And the more I have looked at these questions the more it seems to me that this subject isn’t a whimsical divergence from the study of mainstream museums, but that – as the title of this chapter suggests – there is much that real museums can learn from paper ones.

The first thing to be said is that museums and novels share a lot in common. Each affords us the pleasures that come from entering complete and self-contained worlds, and what’s more, worlds that have been reduced to a miniature scale, at least in comparison with the universe that they reflect. Even the biggest museum in the world is smaller than the universe it describes – or, to put it another way, all museums are games of boxes inside boxes. Likewise a novel is a world between book covers and small enough to carry in one’s hand. Human beings love to enter miniature worlds and the secret pleasure of both novels and museums, is that they allow us to do exactly this.²

The second thing to be said is that inventing paper museums is nothing new. The seventeenth-century English philosopher Thomas Browne described in words a museum that he called the Musaeum Clausum, the ‘Closed or Secret Museum’. Some of the fantastical, imaginary objects in his museum included ‘A large Ostrich’s Egg, whereon is neatly and fully wrought that famous battle of Alcazar, in which three Kings lost their lives’ and ‘A Glass of Spirits made of Ethereal Salt, Hermetically sealed up, kept continually in Quick Silver and so volatile a nature that it will scarcely endure the Light’.³

Now it’s clear from reading his book that the Musaeum Clausum was a deliberate, knowing invention of Browne’s and, what’s more, one with a strong thread of playful pleasure running through it. It’s the same thread of playful pleasure that one also sees at the Museum of Jurassic Technology in California – which, as everyone knows, is an apparently truthful but actually largely invented Cabinet of Curiosities in Los Angeles, featuring a cast of mostly imaginary characters – although, to the deep and delightful confusion of the visitors, not all of them are invented. Again there is the ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Museum Making The Place of Narrative
• Part 1 Narrative, Space, Identity
• Part 2 Narrative, Perception, Embodiment
• Part 3 Narrative, Media, Mediation
• Select Bibliography
• Index