New Museology

Peter Vergo

• Publisher: Reaktion Books
• Year: 1997
• ISBN:
  9781861896704
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

With essays by Charles Saumarez Smith, Ludmilla Jordanova, Paul Greenhalgh, Colin Sorensen, Nick Merriman, Stephen Bann, Philip Wright, Norman Palmer and Peter Vergo."A lively and controversial symposium... thought-provoking"— The Sunday Times (Paperbacks of the Year, 1989)"The essays are all distinguished by their topicality and lucidity."— Museum News "A welcome addition to the library of Museology"— Art Monthly "The New Museology is essential reading for all those seeking to understand the current debate in museum ideologies."— International Journal of Museum Management and Scholarship

I
Museums, Artefacts, and Meanings

CHARLES SAUMAREZ SMITH

The original intention behind the establishment of museums was that they should remove artefacts from their current context of ownership and use, from their circulation in the world of private property, and insert them into a new environment which would provide them with a different meaning. The essential feature of museums – and what differentiates them from the many extensive private collections which preceded them – was, first, that the meanings which were attributed to the artefacts were held to be not arbitrary; and, second, that the collections should be open and accessible to at least a portion of the public, who were expected to obtain some form of educational benefit from the experience. This is evident in the historical trajectory which led to the formation of museums in England.

In the seventeenth century there was a complex spectrum of collections which might be open to the public, as, for example, the collections of John Tradescant the elder at Lambeth, which could be visited on payment of a fee; but the essential characteristic of Tradescant’s collection, and why it is better described in its original terminology as ‘The Ark’ than as a museum, was its personal nature and that its accumulation was owing to a single individual who retained the power and freedom to alter the nature of the display.¹ It was not until the collection had been inherited by Elias Ashmole and donated to the University of Oxford that it took on the name of ‘museum’ in recognition of its nature as a public foundation rather than a personal collection. This is made clear in the wording of the original regulations of the museum dated 21 June 1686:

Because the knowledge of Nature is very necessarie to humaine life, health, & the conveniences thereof, & because that knowledge cannot be soe well & usefully attain’d, except the history of Nature be knowne & considered; and to this [end], is requisite the inspection of Particulars, especially those as are extraordinary in their Fabrick, or usefull in Medicine, or applyed to Manufacture or Trade.²

Knowledge was to be promoted through the study of three-dimensional artefacts for the benefit of the public in a collection which was expected to be established in perpetuity. The first usage of the word ‘museum’ in its sense not just of an antique institution dedicated to the study of the Muses, but as a modern institution which might contribute to the advancement of learning, is recorded by the Oxford English Dictionary as being in 1683, when Elias Ashmole’s collection was referred to in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society as a ‘Musaeum’.³

This process of transformation from a private collection into a public institution is equally evident in the foundation of the British Museum, the most important institution in dominating the public consciousness of what a museum is. The collections of the British Museum originated in the massive and diverse private collections of Sir Hans Sloane, which were housed first in Great Russell Street and subsequently in Cheyne Walk. There they were accessible to interested members of the public and were arranged with an attempt at systematic classification and taxonomic order. On 29 July 1749, Sloane made his will bequeathing the collections to the public on payment of £20,000 to his family. As Horace Walpole wrote to Sir Horace Mann on 14 February 1753:

You will scarce guess how I employ my time; chiefly at present in the guardianship of embryos and cockleshells. Sir Hans Sloane is dead, and has made me one of the trustees to his museum, which is to be offered for twenty thousand pounds to the King, the Parliament, the royal academies of Petersburg, Berlin, Paris and Madrid. He valued it at fourscore thousand, and so would anybody who loves hippopotamuses, sharks with one ear, and spiders as big as geese!⁴

Yet, in spite of this attitude of mind, the collections were in due course purchased by Parliament and were installed for the benefit of the public in Montagu House in Bloomsbury. Once again, the proper designation of the collection as a museum came at the point when it was acquired on behalf of the public and when it was assumed that the collection would not subsequently be in any way dispersed. The collection remained essentially the same in the way that it was ordered, but its status and meaning were adjusted in terms of a degree of public ownership and a sense of perpetuity. It had become a museum. As the act of incorporation stated, it was intended ‘not only for the inspection and entertainment of the learned and the curious, but for the general use and benefit of the public’, even though the Trustees immediately instituted a system of fees which effectively restricted the nature of the public which could obtain admittance.

By the second half of the nineteenth century, the tendencies which had been evident in the first foundation of museums were generally accepted and effectively promoted by the Government. These tendencies may be reduced to four principal characteristics which cluster round the definition of a museum: the first is that the collections on display should in some way contribute to the advancement of knowledge through study of them; the second, which is closely related, is that the collections should not be arbitrarily arranged, but should be organised according to some systematic and recognisable scheme of classification; the third is that they should be owned and administered not by a private individual, but by more than one person on behalf of the public; the fourth is that they should be reasonably accessible to the public, if necessary by special arrangement and on payment of a fee.

This mixture of meanings provided a powerful degree of idealism in the boom time in the establishment of museums in the second half of the nineteenth century. This idealism is clearly evident, for example, in the origins of the South Kensington Museum. The museum was not established for the purposes of a limited or restricted scholarship, let alone for the development of specialist connoisseurship in the field of the applied arts, but with a broad instrumental and utilitarian purpose that it might be conducive towards the education of public taste in order to promote a better understanding of the rôle of design in British manufactures.⁵ As Henry Cole wrote in his first report to the Department of Practical Art:

The Museum is intended to be used, and to the utmost extent consistent with the preservation of the articles; and not only used physically, but to be taken about and lectured upon. For my own part, I venture to think that unless museums and galleries are made subservient to purposes of education, they dwindle into very sleepy and useless institutions.⁶

The extent to which this original intention was fulfilled is made clear in Moncure Conway’s Travels in South Kensington, published in 1882. Conway came from Virginia. He had been brought up on the banks of the Rappahannock river, trained as a lawyer, became for a short time a Methodist minister, abandoned this for Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he made friends with Emerson, Thoreau and Longfellow, then came to England where he met Leslie Stephen, Carlyle, Dickens, John Stuart Mill and Rossetti, before becoming a minister at South Place, Finsbury, and building a house in Bedford Park. Travels in South Kensington illustrates very clearly¡ the sense of intellectual interest which surrounded the formation of the South Kensington Museum, because of the capacity of artefacts systematically organised to demonstrate aspects of cultural difference and change. Some of this interest is faintly repellent, clearly demonstrating a form of intellectual imperialism, annexing colonial territory into a uniform system of laws of social development; but what is impressive is that, at this stage in the museum’s development, objects were not viewed purely for their own sake as fragments from a shattered historical universe, but rather as possible indicators, as metonyms, for comparative study. As Conway wrote, the visitor will ‘find at every step that he is really exploring in this gallery of pots and dishes strata marked all over with the vestiges of human and ethnical development’.⁷ He reminded his readers, ‘This institution, it is important to remember, did not grow out of any desire to heap curiosities together or to make any popular display; it grew out of a desire for industrial art culture.’⁸ It had over a million visitors a year.

In the second half of the twentieth century, the high idealism and the academic intentions which lay behind the foundation of museums are in danger of being forgotten. One of the most insistent problems that museums face is precisely the idea that artefacts can be, and should be, divorced from their original context of ownership and use, and redisplayed in a different context of meaning, which is regarded as having a superior authority. Central to this belief in the superior authority of museums is the idea that they will provide a safe and neutral environment in which artefacts will be removed from the day-to-day transactions which lead to the transformation and decay of their physical appearance. Museums are assumed to operate outside the zone in which artefacts change in ownership and epistemological meaning. Yet anyone who has attended closely to the movement of artefacts in a museum will know that the assumption that, in a museum, artefacts are somehow static, safe, and out of the territory in which their meaning and use can be transformed, is demonstrably false. The process whereby the meaning of artefacts can be transformed through their history within a museum can be illustrated by three case studies of the way artefacts have been treated in the Victoria and Albert Museum.

These three case studies are not intended to be representative; rather the opposite. They concern artefacts which are, in some way, particularly problematic, which do not fit easily into an otherwise ostensibly neutral environment, and which hit a boundary of consciousness in our understanding of the nature and purpose of museums. By exploring the problems posed by these case studies, it is possible to throw light on the broader issues of methods of display and interpretation.

The first of the artefacts to be considered is the Saxon god, Thuner, which recently arrived in the British sculpture gallery. It is worth prefixing the discussion by stating unequivocally that this is a good example of the public benefits of museums. The statue was one of a group of Saxon deities commissioned by Lord Cobham from the Flemish sculptor J. M. Rysbrack for the eighteenth century gardens at Stowe. It was sold from Stowe in 1921 and then lost to scholarly and public view. It turned up in the gardens of an obscure prep school in Hampshire, where it was reputedly used as a cricket stump, and was sent to Phillips to be auctioned in 1985. It was then acquired by the V & A with help from the National Arts Collections Fund and placed in its present prominent position, looking angry and uncomfortable amongst the serried ranks of portrait busts. Had it not been acquired by the museum, there is every likelihood that it would have been sold to a private collector, probably abroad, and so, once again, would have disappeared, known only to specialists and to the circle of friends and acquaintances of whoever was fortunate enough to acquire it.⁹

There is a question here about how one weighs up the relative merits of private possession and public ownership, which in this case seems reasonably straightforward, but would become less so if, as happens, the work was confined to a store. But a more significant problem is the way that the sculpture sits so uncomfortably in its surroundings. This was emphasised when the statue was first displayed by the fact that it was placed on the makeshift wooden stretcher which had been used to transport it, thereby signalling its recent arrival, as if it was only making a temporary public appearance. It has now been given a more permanent wooden plinth, while a higher one is constructed comparable to the one on which it was displayed at Stowe; but it still looks out of place.

There are several ways of trying to explain the apparent awkwardness of the statue in its surroundings. The first is to say that it belongs to a different genre from the other works nearby: it was made to be seen from a distance in a garden and so is carved more crudely and vigorously. The second might be to introduce an argument of quality and suggest that it is a great work by a sculptor who was attempting to establish a public reputation in a piece which was bound to be seen by large numbers of the eighteenth century aristocracy, whereas many of the other works on display are more private busts by sculptors who did not necessarily have the same abilities as Rysbrack. Neither of these arguments is satisfactory. Part of the reason why the Rysbrack statue stands out so conspicuously is that it has not yet been sent to be conserved and still retains the covering of lichen which it acquired during its long sojourn in the gardens of Stowe and the Hampshire prep school. In amongst the clean and polished portrait busts and the rather academic display, it still retains vestiges of its life in, and passage through, the outside world. It has not yet been accommodated and absorbed by its museum environment.

J. M. Rysbrack, the Saxon god Thuner (V & A A10-1985), in Gallery 50 of the Victoria and Albert Museum.

This case study provides an indication of the changing status of the artefact as it travelled through its history from the time when it was first commissioned, most probably as a monument to its owner’s antiquarian learning, with possible political innuendoes, by reference to the freedom of the Saxon state in contrast to Walpole’s England; through the later eighteenth century, when it was seen and admired by visitors to Stowe in relation to its original landscape setting; through the nineteenth and early twentieth century when it was gradually forgotten and lost significance; a brief moment of commodity value when it appeared in the Stowe sale and then a long era of neglect when it served as a prep school cricket stump; sudden press interest in the statue as a lost work of art, in danger of being exported; an attempt by the Georgian Group to block its sale on the grounds that it was a garden fixture; the attention of a national museum when the prestige of individual curators and the purchasing power of a particular department come into play. At each point the statue is subjected to multiple readings: as a commodity, as an early work by Rysbrack, as a representation of an obscure Saxon deity, as private or as public property, as a fine old bearded man who is growing lichen.

The literature of the transformation of goods as they travel through a life-cycle suggests that once artefacts appear in museums they enter a safe and neutral ground, outside the arena where they are subjected to multiple pressures of meaning.¹⁰ This is not true; on the contrary, museums present all sorts of different territories for display, with the result that the complexities of epistemological reading continue. Arguments about artefacts tend to be conducted in strictly binary terms: are they in public or private possession? are they what they pretend to be? are they good or bad? In fact, the museum itself frequently changes and adjusts the status of artefacts in its collections, by the way they are presented and displayed, and it is important to be aware that museums are not neutral territory.

The second artefact to be considered as a case study is a doorway. The problem with this doorway is, more or less, exactly the opposite from that of the Rysbrack statue; it is an artefact which, although equally prominently on display, has essentially been lost to view from both public and scholarly attention. It is the doorway which has been adopted as the logo for V & A Enterprises, the company which Sir Roy Strong has promised will turn the V & A into the Laura Ashley of the 1990s.¹¹

The current label states boldly that it is a

DOORWAY
ENGLISH: About 1680

As is the way with museum labels, this conceals a complex history. As might be suspected from its size, it was not in fact a doorway, but an entrance archway into a long forecourt, which led off Mark Lane in the City of London to No. 33 Mark Lane, a grand, three-storey, brick house of the late seventeenth century, with good quality wood-carving on the staircase inside as well as in the archway. In 1884, the house had become offices for an assortment of shippers, merchants and solicitors and, in that year, was presented to the museum by a Major Pery Standish.

An archway from 33 Mark Lane (V & A 1122–1884), Gallery 49 of the Victoria and Albert Museum.

The art referee who reported on the acquisition of the Mark Lane archway by what was then known as the South Kensington Museum was John Hungerford Pollen, a significant figure in the early history of the museum.¹² He had been educated at Eton and Christ Church, Oxford, where, like so many of his generation, he had come under the influence of the high church Oxford Movement. Following ordination, he converted to Rome and then practised as a decorative artist in a flat, pseudomedieval idiom. In 1863 he was appointed an Assistant Keeper of the South Kensington Museum, for which he wrote several descrip...