The Art of Museum Exhibitions

How Story and Imagination Create Aesthetic Experiences

Leslie Bedford

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781315418957
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Ciencias sociales
• Categoría: Arqueología

Leslie Bedford, former director of the highly regarded Bank Street College museum leadership program, expands the museum professional's vision of exhibitions beyond the simple goal of transmitting knowledge to the visitor. Her view of exhibitions as interactive, emotional, embodied, imaginative experiences opens a new vista for those designing them. Using examples both from her own work at the Boston Children's Museum and from other institutions around the globe, Bedford offers the museum professional a bold new vision built around narrative, imagination, and aesthetics, merging the work of the educator with that of the artist. It is important reading for all museum professionals.

Part One
Contemporary Exhibition Theories

Chapter 1

Exhibitions as Education

I know that when I was a kid, something in the [American] Museum of Natural History in New York made a big impression on me, but I didn’t know that until I was an adult. Because I found myself, in my early twenties, around the time I was interested in working in museums, visiting the Museum of Natural History.

I was studying anthropology, so I took a walk through the anthropology halls, and I turned this corner and there was this moment, this shock to me, of something that was a very deeply buried image from my childhood that I had never thought about, this image just came back to me with a shock. And it was seeing a diorama of a South American Indian hunter . . . It was a full-size mannequin, and he had a blowgun in his hand, and he was aiming it up at this little patch of trees and forest with birds in it, in a very dark hall, with a light on him.

And, as I came upon this in my twenties, it was like some door suddenly opened, and I realized that I had suddenly seen this when I was a child. And there was just this recognition of something that was very strange, powerful, a little scary, and also just fascinating. What was this all about? . . . I don’t have any more intellectual content to put to that, but it was something that had obviously made a deep impression, was buried all those years, and I never knew about until I discovered it again (M. Spock 1992, 16.3; 2000b, 21).¹ Since first opening to the public, museums have been educational institutions. As Alma Wittlin wrote in 1949, “the creation of the Public Museum was an expression of the eighteenth-century spirit of enlightenment which generated enthusiasm for equality of opportunity in learning” (quoted in Hein 2006b, 2).² But for and by whom and according to which principles and what practices such education was to be achieved was contentious, and remains so. George Hein (2006b) provides a thorough review of our current understanding of the evolution of both the educational mission of museums and the scope of work and professional training required for those who implement it. For the purposes of this book, the most important point is the emergence and continuing prominence of museum education as a separate field and function in the twentieth century. But regardless of who was in charge of the work—director, curator, docent, or educator—or how broadly or narrowly defined, museums and exhibitions, their most public medium, were and are designed to educate.

This chapter explores some of the rich stew of current thinking about exhibition as an educational medium from three perspectives: museum history; the well-established but still-evolving field of museum education (with a brief note on design); and the relatively new area of visitor studies. An analysis of the exhibition Choosing to Participate illustrates the practical implementation of many of these ideas while highlighting the inevitable tensions between theory and practice. In chapter 2, this palette of ideas expands into other domains, including social work, anthropology, and participatory design, with the goal of unpacking the traditional model of exhibition as education—one still enshrined in practice in many, if not most, museums.

Museum History

In Museums and American Intellectual Life 1876–1926 (1998), historian Steven Conn calls museums “sites of intellectual and cultural debate where the prevailing cultural ideas and assumptions of American society were put on display and where changes in those assumptions were reflected” (12–13). His analysis of how and among whom this debate transpired during the formative years of the modern American museum provides a critical foundation for understanding contemporary thinking about museums and exhibitions.

These nineteenth-century institutions—art, natural history, anthropology, and history museums––embodied the Victorian worldview, what Conn calls a “metanarrative of evolutionary progress.” As he says of that time, “a trip through the galleries followed a trajectory from simple to complex, from savage to civilized, from ancient to modern” (1998, 5).

At the heart of this optimistic narrative of progress were the museum’s collections, the artifacts supporting the era’s “object-based epistemology,” and the important role museums played in creating and disseminating knowledge. According to Conn, objects “were seen by many intellectuals as yielding new knowledge and museums, not universities, were seen as the places where the work of producing that knowledge would take place” (1998, 15). Knowledge was inherent in objects; visitors did not require additional interpretation since they, like curators, were assumed to be able to read the record inscribed within the objects.³

Conn does not discuss museum education—which assumes an interest in the visitor—perhaps because it didn’t really exist. While the mission of nineteenth-century museums was fundamentally educational, neither the role of educator nor an articulated philosophy of teaching and learning were part of the original landscape. But as Hein has pointed out, at that time, the world of formal education had an equally impoverished understanding of both public access and pedagogy (2006b, 3). By the late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries, however, differing perspectives on the core mission of education were becoming identified with leaders in the field. George Brown Goode at the Smithsonian Institution argued for educational programming but drew the line at schoolchildren; Benjamin Ives Gilman at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, became known for his advocacy of the aesthetic experience but paid attention as well to the nonconnoisseur; and John Cotton Dana established the Newark Museum with the goal of social and civic utility (Hein 2006b, 4–5). These perspectives continue to play out today.⁴

But it wasn’t until the late twentieth century that “the visitor experience”—as a formal term and a field of inquiry—came into its own. In the meantime, it seems unlikely that the typical practitioner would have questioned either the evolutionary metanarrative or the established understanding of how learning happens. Knowledge existed independently of the learner and thus could be transmitted intact through collections and, starting in the early 1900s, through programs, labels, and trained docents.

In truth, museums, like anything else, are products of their times. To celebrate its 2006 centennial, the American Association of Museums commissioned Marjorie Schwarzer to write the lively and thorough narrative Riches, Rivals, and Radicals: 100 Years of Museums in America. In an earlier draft of her chapter on exhibitions, Schwarzer reviews the influence of contemporary trends in thought on the ways museums created their exhibitions:

In the 1920s, museums looked to the Cyclorama and world’s fairs. The goal was realistic environments for collections, like habitat dioramas and period rooms. From the 1930s to the 1950s, they looked to the Bauhaus and new fields like industrial design and photojournalism to invent the white cube. The goal was neutral environments that ordered the world according to textbook precision. During the 1960s and ’70s, they looked to educational psychology and political activism to design active learning spaces. The goal was connection and social relevance. In the 1980s and ’90s, they looked to multiculturalism, computer technology, and business team models. The goal was multi-sensory environments that could convey multiple points of view (Schwarzer 2004).

Aside from Schwarzer’s book and a handful of other writings, little has been published about the history of museums’ interactions with their visitors. For the most part, the field relies on the writings of thoughtful practitioners who tend to focus on the present rather than the past. A good example is Gail Anderson’s Reinventing the Museum, an edited collection of articles illustrating her widely shared theory of change in twentieth-century museums, which she labels the “paradigm shift” from collection-driven to visitor-centered institutions (2012). Anderson also cites and summarizes other changes in her “Reinventing the Museum Tool,” a table comparing traditional to reinvented museums according to their institutional values, governance, management strategies, and communication ideology—some fifty-two pairings in all. For instance, she says that compared to a traditional museum, a reinvented institution believes in civic engagement and multiple viewpoints, is mission driven and models shared leadership, is a learning organization committed to strategic positioning, and welcomes differences and dialogue. She encourages institutions to use these terms as part of an internal dialogue and self-assessment. The late Stephen Weil, a lawyer, deputy museum director, and intellectual spokesman for the field, summed up the reinvented museum most succinctly in the title of his contribution to the Daedalus issue on America’s museums (1999): “From Being about Something to Being for Somebody: The Ongoing Transformation of the American Museum.”

While I subscribe to and teach this perspective, I share a concern that we adopt it too literally. Museum studies is a new field (aside from a handful of nontraditional schools, there is as yet no doctoral program in museum studies or museum education in the United States), and we have too few thinkers to guide us. Lacking strong grounding in history, we too easily fall for what Gary Kulik calls the evolving morality play of the development of the modern museum: from “aristocratic patronage and fear of vulgar crowds” to public funding and the “embrace of all” (Kulik 1992, 11). The division between traditional and reinvented, among other issues, underplays the ways in which nineteenthth-century museums emphasized public education.

Nevertheless, Anderson’s paradigm shift is useful and frequently invoked, and certainly the concept of visitor-centered practice has gained enormous currency in recent decades. Regardless of when the transformation actually began and how widespread it is, the notion of a shift represents a view of museums that contrasts in many ways with the nineteenth-century model that Conn and others have detailed. And it has enormous implications for the theory and practice of exhibitions.

Museum Education

Although museum history and institutional context provide useful insights into understanding exhibitions, another set of theoretical frameworks looks more explicitly at the medium itself. These models come from the fields of museum education (rather recently rearticulated as museum or free-choice learning) and visitor studies. While many museum educators and exhibition staff may never have studied the history of museums, they are likely to be familiar with the work, or at least the names, of those scholars whose ideas have enriched the conversation about exhibitions. This chapter looks at three examples: educator and scholar Lisa Roberts’s focus on interpretation as narrative; George Hein’s approach to constructivist educational theory; and John Falk and Lynn Dierking’s work in visitor studies. Other highly influential thinkers include Howard Gardner and his theory of multiple intelligences;⁵ Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s work on flow and the meaning of objects (see chapter 5);⁶ and the writings of many other scholars and practitioners whose work continues to enrich the field.⁷

Lisa Roberts and Postmodernism

Lisa Roberts, who trained as a museum educator and became a museum director, analyzes challenges to the nineteenth-century canon in From Knowledge to Narrative: Educators and the Changing Museum (1997).⁸ She focuses on the presumption that exhibitions should display a body of expert knowledge acquired through scholarly research and transmitted intact to all visitors through the curator’s selection of objects and text, with some limited assistance from a designer. Drawing on the methodologies of ethnography (participant observer on the exhibition team) and literary criticism (exhibition as text), she uses the development of an actual exhibition from the Chicago Botanic Garden to explore several critical themes in museum education: education as entertainment, as experience, as empowerment, and as ethics. In her final chapter, “Education as Narrative,” she summarizes where the field is now and some of the implications of this ongoing evolution. Her goal throughout is to highlight the major role educators have played in effecting and institutionalizing this change.

Within her extensive discussion of the history of entertainment vs. scholarship, Roberts refers to the recent field of leisure studies to support the thesis that museums are a form of leisure activity for which an understanding of visitor motivation is critical.⁹ This emerging perspective argues that exhibitions need to be enjoyable, possibly playful, and even fun. Her focus on the needs of the visitor resonates with the emerging impact of postmodernist thinking on the museum field, which, for the most part, has been slow to appreciate its import.

The term postmodern refers to the mid- to late twentieth-century seismic epistemological shift that challenged the premises of Enlightenment-modernist thought—for example, the existence of absolute truths and the supremacy of reason as the basis of knowledge. The newer relativistic perspective of postmodernism posits the importance of sociocultural and other contexts for understanding how each individual, through personal interpretation, creates his or her own meaning; there is no truth to which all would subscribe, and reason becomes only one path for self-discovery.

Postmodern thinking thus challenges the very raison d’être of museums: their authoritative interpretation of the objects in their collections, the foundation of the museological canon. The new scholarship claims that what matters isn’t what the museum owns or displays but how the visitor interprets it. Personal experience becomes as legitimate a source of meaning as curatorial knowledge, which, according to this point of view, is also contextual and interpretive rather than unassailable truth. In Roberts’s view, with the advent of postmodernism, “the very nature of museums’ exhibit function has been altered. Once a seemingly straightforward matter of displaying collections, exhibition can be viewed as an eminently interpretive endeavor: not just that the information exhibits present is subject to multiple interpretations, but the very act of presentation is fundamentally interpretive” (Roberts 1997, 74–75).

The new focus on individual interpretation converged with changing notions of authenticity, of what constitutes the “real,” and thus of what exhibitions are about. If exhibitions are acts of personal interpretation that need to be entertaining as well as educational, then how can one define and include the authentic object (see chapter 6)?

As the field’s growing understanding of how people actually interact with exhibitions began to shape both approach and content, the medium was reframed as participatory experience, a new model that could best be crafted by someone versed in the new understanding. That person was not the curator, who would be too wedded to content expertise, or the educator, who might only care about communication, but a new, hybrid agent: the exhibition develop...