Civilizing the Museum

The Collected Writings of Elaine Heumann Gurian

Elaine Heumann Gurian

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781134247066
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Religious Architecture

Written over a thirty-five year career, the essays in Civilizing the Museum introduce students to the powerful, sometimes contested, and often unrealized notion that museums should welcome all because they house the collective memory of all.

Drawing on her experience working in and with museums in the US and throughout the world, Author Elaine Heumann Gurian explores the possibilities for making museums more central and relevant to society.

The twenty-two essays are organized around five main themes:

• museum definitions
• civic responsibility and social service
• architectural spaces
• exhibitions
• spirituality and rationality.

And these themes address the elements that would make museums more inclusive such as:

• exhibition technique
• space configurations
• the personality of the director
• the role of social service
• power sharing
• types of museums
• the need for emotion humour and spirituality.

Without abandoning the traditional museum processes, Gurian shows how museums can honour tradition whilst embracing the new.

Enriched by her experience in groundbreaking museums, Gurian has provided a book that provokes thought, dialogue and action for students and professionals in the field to realize the inclusive potential of museums.

Part I
THE IMPORTANCE OF “AND”

About opportunities, possibilities, taxonomy, and definitions

Museums are more varied than casual observers assume – not only in size and subject matter but, more interestingly, in intention and motivation. Museum directors may choose from many programmatic and organizational options while still pursuing missions that remain legitimately within the museum community. The choice of mission and the means of accomplishing it follow from the museum leadership’s underlying philosophy about visitors, objects, citizenship, and civic responsibility.
The politics and worldview of the board and staff governance team will determine museum policies and procedures, and thus the nature of the museum experience. The essays in this section review some of the options that museum leaders can consider when choosing the kind of museum they wish to run.

1
THE CONCEPT OF FAIRNESS

A debate at the American Association of Museums, 1990

The following essay is based on notes I used for a debate presented at the American Association of Museums (AAM) Annual Meeting in Chicago on May 5, 1990. Brett Waller, then the director of the Indianapolis Museum of Art, and I had engaged in spirited debate in many informal settings in the past, and we were urged to make it a public discourse, which we did on this occasion. We sparred over the question of whether an immutable canon exists, forming an objective standard for aesthetic judgments, or instead if all things are relative and change based on the culture and objects in question. Brett always took the objectivist position, and I always took the relativist position.

The AAM session was organized using formal academic debate rules. Joallyn Archambault, director of the American Indian Program of the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, and an enrolled member of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe of North and South Dakota, agreed to be my second in speaking for the issue. Speaking against was Brett Waller, seconded by Katharine Lee Reid, then the director of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.

The other team (and my second) did a creditable job, and in all fairness their remarks should be here too, but alas they are absent. A recent volume of essays by art museum directors is a good reflection of the objectivist point of view (Cuno 2004).

***

Let me begin by asserting that I believe there is no absolute truth. There is only opinion, deeply held and often subconsciously influenced by many things, including facts, events, and tangible objects. Among these opinions are scientists’ closer and closer approximate descriptions of nature. The notion that the world’s natural forces are governed by discoverable and, therefore, ultimately predictable patterns is under question. “The rest is commentary,” my forefathers would say.

Commentary is shaped by the times, politics, life experiences, ethnicity, and social class of the commentator. For each belief sincerely presented there is often a countervailing belief, and many intermediate positions in between, no less sincerely held.

Commentary (also known as interpretation) exists in all forms of discourse and disciplines. I know that my distinguished opposition will speak of immutable canons, allowing one to distinguish “good” from “bad,” and facts, separating “actuality” from “invention.” But I do not believe in such absolutes.

Our confidence in the infallibility of our leaders has waned and been replaced by an acknowledgment of their human failings. We no longer believe automatically in the kind teacher, the all-knowing president, the protective policeman, the infallible physician. Fairness means (among other things) teaching the audience to adopt a skeptical approach to “knowledge” and to learn to ask for a second opinion. We owe no less to our visitors.

The glories of the machine age and our belief in better lives through technology were founding principles of many science museums, but are now muted by our understanding of the world’s finite resources and the global caring that must prevail if we are to survive. Fairness suggests we include within our technological exhibitions a balancing concern for the environment and its long-term implications for our economy.

The appearance of many vocal ethnic groups gaining power in many places around the globe reminds us that presentations of history, art, and anthropology reflect the presenter as much as the presented. Having been voiceless in the past in the preparation of our exhibitions, minority people find themselves absent, or unrecognizable, in our museums. Their growing unhappiness with this situation is causing us to rethink our collections and presentation strategies. We are more often including the views of the interpreted. That seems only fair to me.

Anthropologists no longer believe in an unchanging culture, if they ever did; rather, they believe that all cultures evolve over time. Thus, more and more of our cultural exhibitions are including contemporary material of evolving cultures rather than period pieces statically presented in a frozen moment in time. And that seems fair to me.

Today there is a growing appreciation within academia that the presenter, the interrogator, the commentator, and the collector of data and objects all affect the information they are working with through the mediating influence of their own experiences and beliefs. Since we in the museum field play many of these roles, what responsibility do we have to understand and then reveal our own personal biases?

Let me state two of my own personal aspirations for fairness within the museum field:

• All exhibitions and public programs should encourage viewers to evaluate, perhaps even with skepticism, the content presented in order to make use of it within their own personal frameworks.
• All producers should overtly reveal their personal identities, backgrounds, and points of view and place them publicly for all to see.

Let me go further. Exhibition creators have often written their label copy with an amalgam of centrist generalizations presented with a dispassionate authoritative voice. They prefer that conflicting ideas and contrary evidence remain the responsibility of others, such as college courses, scholarly journals, evening programs attended by few, and, occasionally, the exhibition catalogue. I believe that is unfair to the visitor.

Fairness demands that we present our audiences with the broadest range of conflicting facts and opinions within the exhibition – or alternatively, having taken a single viewpoint, reveal ourselves (the authors) by name, bias, class, education, and opinion.

To do otherwise suggests that audiences are children unable to think for themselves. To continue in our old practices is to believe in the right of a nonelected power elite to transmit its values untested and unexamined. Our audiences are not our children; our audiences are our friends and potential colleagues. We owe them respect. Anything else is unfair.

But, you ask, in the world of the relative, how will we know what is good? We won’t. We never did. In my former life, I owned a picture that was deaccessioned by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, around 1930. They refocused their collection then and continue to do so now because their notions of good and value have constantly changed. Reassessment is not new within the field of aesthetics; art historians have always done so. What is new is the claim that more than one voice, one class, one tradition might deserve to be part of the decision-making process; that in fact many voices might need to be heard, and often simultaneously; that we significantly broaden our profession’s understanding of authority and of worth. To do this we must also broaden our staffs and expand our collections to include multiple viewpoints from within our own organizations.

Finally, and not surprisingly, this debate is, in the end, a political conversation about power and control. It is about the transmission of values and an argument for sharing authority.

We ought to believe in good common sense. At the edges of this argument we must remain conciliatory and not fundamentalist. I am not advocating the replacement of one dogma with another. I am advocating the replacement of hegemony with multiple viewpoints. For me, the term “fairness” brings with it a requirement for balance, and for equity.

Bibliography

Cuno, J. (ed.) (2004) Whose Muse? Art Museums and the Public Trust, Princeton, NJ, Cambridge, MA: Princeton University Press and Harvard University Art Museums.

2
THE IMPORTANCE OF “AND”

A comment on Excellence and Equity,¹ 1992

In tennis, at the end of the day you’re a winner or a loser. You know exactly where you stand . . . I don’t need that anymore. I don’t need my happiness, my well-being, to be based on winning and losing.

(Chris Evert (1992) in The Columbia World of Quotations (1996))

We Americans have consistently believed in the importance of winning. “There is no such thing as second place” is an adage we have all heard. The childhood game of “King of the Mountain” has trained our youngsters to believe that at the top of the pyramid there is only one “king.”

This simple idea – that there are only single winners – affects our intellectual life as well. The idea that two equally weighted ideas could both be “primary” has not often been tolerated; one must be supreme. A group discussion in which more than one competing idea is presented usually leads to a discussion of priorities.

“And” is a word we learned to read in the first grade and one we have used orally much earlier. We all know the meaning of “and” – it is a word that links things together. Yet in the arena of ideas, we consistently behave as if “and” means “or.”

The American Association of Museums report Excellence and Equity: Education and the Public Dimension of Museums uses “and” in the title (AAM 1991). This report made a concerted attempt to accept the two major ideas proposed by factions within the field – equity and excellence – as equal and without priority. The equity faction of the task force that prepared the report advocated for attention to previously underserved visitor groups and cultural sensitivity when consulting with them. The excellence group felt that scholarship was primary and should not be “dumbed down” in order to accommodate new audiences. After much discussion in which each proponent attempted to “win” the group over, the task force decided to go forward with both rather than one or the other. These ideas, which were seen as conflicting, were instead linked with “and.”

However, for the museum field to go forward, we must do more than make political peace by linking words. We must believe in what we have written, namely that complex organizations must and should espouse the coexistence of more than one primary mission. That restatement should include attention to public service even when the results are potentially conflictive with other mission priorities.

The intent of the task force was to promote real inclusion – the acceptance of multiple ideas and the sharing of power with those who hold them – within the institutions and the professions that we love. For example, we can have both ethnically focused museums and generic museums that are inclusive in their respective presentations. We can simultaneously be citizens of the country, even the world, and be functioning members of our specific community. There can be an intellectual canon of the Western tradition that is valuable for all of us to learn, and we can simultaneously learn about the glories of the rest of the world using the appropriate canons associated with each culture. Research and public service can both be primary if the museum administration wishes it. Can equity and excellence exist side by side without one diminishing the other? Of course!

One can postulate that the internal fight for idea primacy within the task force was not only intellectual but one of implicit resource allocation. In all candor, to have a museum hierarchy that includes more than one primary idea – more than one department at the top – assumes that the institution plans to fund the work associated with these fundamental ideas more or less equally.

The report raises the issue of money rather obliquely, but the task force intended that fundamental ideas should have dollars commensurate with their place in the mission hierarchy. Realistically, to fund ideas equally is either to garner lots of new money or to reallocate what funds there are among programs according to the new pecking order. That step will diminish the monetary hegemony of the former winners and engender anxiety and anger among the previously funded.

An implied requirement to shift resources is probably the most uncomfortable consequence of the report. The haves will argue that to give up anything is to diminish the quality and thereby the excellence of their work. And in fact, some diminution of quality or scope may occur temporarily in response to an altered resource landscape. But we cannot proclaim the report a success without acknowledging that implementation – even including difficult budgetary actions – should follow. In public service, both excellence and equity can occur in each of our museums if we so wish it, and public service itself can become one of the primary missions of each of our museums if that becomes our collective intention. The task force hopes it has persuaded the field and that there will no longer be only single winners.

Afterword

In 1989, Joel Bloom was president of the American Association of Museums as well as director of the Franklin Institute. He had always been a supporter of museum education. Furthermore, he was a supporter of women’s equity in the workplace. The majority of museum educators at the time, like teachers in the public schools, were women. Given the prevailing organizational hierarchy, which has long favored research and curatorial functions over those of public service, it was rare thateducators held positions of power within their own organization. Combining these two advocacy positions (education and women’s rights), Joel established the Task Force on Museum Education and charged the group with producing a policy paper for consideration by the AAM council.

The individuals who were asked to participate were high-profile members of the museum education community, representatives of private foundations and government grant-making agencies, and sympathetic directors and deputies of museums. I was a member of the group.²

Excellence and Equity, the result of the group’s work, became a museum touchstone worldwide. That it had such an impact was a surprise to many, myself included, who had served on the committee.

The report gave prominent voice to the premise that museums should, at a minimum, have a mission that balanced the focus between the audience and the objects. It stated that museums had not only an important public dimension but a public responsibility:

Museums can no longer...