Museums and the Interpretation of Visual Culture

Eilean Hooper-Greenhill

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000282481
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Social Sciences
• Categoria: Sociology

This is a multi-disciplinary study that adopts an innovative and original approach to a highly topical question, that of meaning-making in museums, focusing its attention on pedagogy and visual culture.This work explores such questions as:

• How and why is it that museums select and arrange artefacts, shape knowledge, construct a view?
• How do museums produce values?
• How do active audiences make meaning from what they experience in museums?

This stimulating book provokes debate and discussion on these topics and puts forward the idea of a new museum - the post-museum, which will challenge the familiar modernist museum. A must for students and professionals in the field.

1
Culture and meaning in the museum

How is meaning produced in museums? How do the pedagogic approaches of the museum intersect with the interpretive processes of the visitor? How has this changed? In asking questions about the interpretation of visual culture in museums the themes of narrative, difference, and identity arise in relation to interpretive processes and museum pedagogy. These are complex and multilayered matters, where meanings rooted in the past clash with contemporary interpretations that challenge their continued validity. The ways in which museums work today are based on ideas that emerged in nineteenth-century Europe - many of these ideas are no longer relevant. The idea of the museum is changing; it is being transformed and re-imagined. It is not certain yet what this new museum form, which I call the post-museum, will be and where it will come from, but its development is being driven by questions of meaning.

Issues of meaning-making in museums

The biggest challenge facing museums at the present time is the reconceptualisation of the museum/audience relationship. After almost a century of rather remote relationships between museums and the public, museums today are seeking ways to embrace their visitors more closely. As museums are increasingly expected to provide socially inclusive environments for life-long learning this need for closeness to audiences is rapidly becoming more pressing.

The relationship of a museum to its visitors is frequently discussed in terms which prioritise an educational relationship. The educational role of the museum is longstanding and well-established as a concept, but its focus, character and aims are the subjects of much professional debate. Part of the reason for this uncertainty about what museum and gallery education might be, and what form museum pedagogy should take, is a lack of knowledge within the museum of the profound changes that have occurred over the past century in educational processes and structures outside museums. A further issue is how far the educational role of the museum is considered in relation to broader questions about the uses of culture within society.

In most formal institutions of education such as schools, colleges and universities, both the content and the methods used in teaching and learning have been radically changed since the turn of the century. The content of the school curriculum has been subject to debate and analysis in political and sociological fields. In addition, the professionalisation of teachers in educational institutions has become well-established. Information about the effectiveness of different teaching methods, knowledge about different approaches to learning, and experience of the use and relevance of subject-matter for specific age-groups have been the subjects of systematic research for at least the last fifty years. There has also been a considerable development of organisations that work within communities outside formal institutions, using approaches that can be described as part of a life-long learning philosophy. This work is frequently carried out within a framework that must acknowledge the political dimensions of both education and culture, as issues of resources are a daily matter. The articulation of culture, education and power is significant in this area of educational provision.

The concept of ‘education’ has been deepened and widened, as it has been acknowledged that teaching and learning is not limited to formal institutions but takes place throughout life, in countless informal locations. Formal educational processes are only a small, and not always very effective, part of those learning processes that are necessary throughout life, and which involve both the acquisition of new knowledge and experience, and also the use of existing skills and knowledge. A focus on enabling learning has led to an interest in the ways in which individuals make their experience of formal and informal learning personally meaningful and relevant. The focus on personal interpretation opens up issues of identity and culture.

Corresponding analyses within the museum field have come much later, and have been much less far-reaching. In many museums, knowledge about their visitors and attention to their learning processes are rudimentary. The old concept of ‘education’ as a formal didactic process limited to specific times and places is still in place, and thus the educational role of the museum is likely to be understood as formal provision for pre-booked groups such as schoolchildren. This work, even though it is highly skilled, is frequently relegated to junior staff, and not always prioritised within management decision-making processes. There is little understanding of the potential of museums for life-long learning, and the powerful pedagogic role of displays and exhibitions is barely acknowledged, and seldom researched. At a time when a very rapid development of a closer and more qualitative relationship to existing and new audiences is required, in many museums the necessary concepts, expertise, and staff are lacking.

During the second half of the nineteenth century museums were understood to be educational institutions with important and far-reaching social roles. However, their pedagogic approach was based both on a formal didacticism and on the conviction that placing objects on view was sufficient to ensure learning. Thus museum displays were used to transmit the universal laws of object-based disciplines (with natural history as the paradigm), which were presented in formal and authoritative ways to undifferentiated mass audiences. Today this approach is no longer appropriate. The view of education as a process that prioritises the experience and learning needs of the learner, combined with a greater recognition of the diverse social characteristics and cultural attitudes of differentiated audiences, demands now that museums develop new forms of relationships with visitor and user communities which are based on more interpersonal methods of communication, and on much broader approaches to pedagogy. The uses that visitors make of museum visits need to be considered, and this raises questions about the cultural possibilities that museums open up.

The pedagogic functions of museums can be analysed by reviewing both what is said, and how it is said. Museum pedagogy is structured firstly through the narratives constructed by museum displays and secondly through the methods used to communicate these narratives. Museum pedagogy produces a visual environment for learning where visitors deploy their own interpretive strategies and repertoires. What happens when someone enters a museum and looks at the displays and exhibitions?¹ How do they construct meaning from what they see, and how is this meaning influenced by the intentions of the producers of the exhibition? What are the conditions for the construction of meaning in museums, the conditions for the interpretation of visual culture? These complex and multilayered matters are the questions which this book addresses.

Meaning in museums is constructed in relation to the collections which the museum holds. Questions arise about which objects have been collected and why, and what is known about them from which perspective. One critical element in the construction of meaning within museums is the presence or absence of particular objects; a second vital consideration is that of the frameworks of intelligibility into which collected objects are placed. Objects in museums are assembled to make visual statements which combine to produce visual narratives. Collections as a whole, and also individual exhibitions, are the result of purposeful activities which are informed by ideas about what is significant and what is not. Both collections and exhibitions embody ideas and values, although the degree to which these are explicitly articulated is variable.

Individual objects have shifting and ambiguous relationships to meaning. Being themselves mute, their significance is open to interpretation. They may be viewed from a number of positions, which may be diverse in history and culture. They may be drawn into a conversation through a number of different strategies, by a range of different individual subjects, who talk about them in ways that are meaningful to themselves as speakers. They may be understood through factual information, or may be invested with emotional significance. Although they all have life-histories, these may be well-known or, alternatively, unknown or forgotten. Objects are subject to multiple interpretations, some of which may be contradictory.

If individual objects are complex in relation to meaning, exhibitions - groups of objects combined with words and images - are more complex still. Here, meaning lies in the relationships between the objects and other elements; it is combinatorial and relational. The ideas that displays have been mounted to communicate are sometimes (but not always) clearly suggested in the texts of the exhibition, which may offer a preferred interpretation of the various visual elements. However, experience of the visual is not the same as experience of the text; it is more open, and at the same time more difficult to talk about. In museum exhibitions, curators, especially in art museums, frequently prefer to leave the meaning potential open and ambiguous. Even where exhibition texts may indicate intended readings of exhibitions, as in science museums, this by no means guarantees a unified way of responding to the experience of the exhibition.

Visual experience cannot always be articulated verbally, and this makes it more difficult to discuss, to share, to understand. The gut response to colour, the physical reaction to mass, the engagement with the visual that is both embodied and cerebral, remains mysterious. Within museums, the phenomenon of display (or of exhibition) is the major form of pedagogy. It is the experience of the displays that for most visitors defines the museum, and it is through displays that museums produce and communicate knowledge. However, exhibitions, as visual technologies, are problematic forms of pedagogy. Methods of producing exhibitions are well-developed, with museum professionals very clear about how objects should be brought together, considered from the point of view of physical care, and placed on public display; but the interpretation made by visitors of exhibitions are much less well understood, analysed or researched. The concept of reviewing both the interpretations of visitors and the interpretations of the curators as part of the development process of specific exhibitions is still not understood or explored in most museums. In teaching, the knowledge, attitudes and perceptions that students bring to any learning situation needs to be the starting point for the construction of learning materials; in the development of exhibitions it is still very rare to find this level of attention to the knowledge of visitors.

Exhibitions are produced to communicate meaningful visual and textual statements, but there is no guarantee that the intended meaning will be achieved. Visitors to museum exhibitions respond in diverse ways. They may or may not perceive the intended meanings, and, perceiving them, they may or may not agree with them, find them interesting, or pay attention to them. For example, where art exhibitions may be put together to show art historical schools or movements, visitors may be operating within much more personal frameworks of interpretation. A visitor to The Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, wrote about her response to a painting in the Canadian Historical Galleries:

My paternal Grandmother was born in Glace Bay. For my entire life I have wondered what her childhood was like. Until very recently, I have been able only to communicate with her in shouts and sign language. She is 92. She will die soon, but now I have seen her home. Now the words are not as necessary. Thank you.²

Displays must of course have some kind of inner coherence which should be made clear to the viewer; this is a part of the professional responsibility of the curator or exhibition development team. However, visitors will construct their own coherence none the less, which may or may not comply with that of the curator.

Meanings within exhibitions can generally be found at several levels. A collection of beehives from the Museum of Popular Arts and Traditions in Paris, for example, illustrates a range of solutions to a problem: that of housing bees. But does this illustrate how several forms (tubular, conical, spherical), using several different materials (wood, straw, bark), can be used in the same way? Does it demonstrate regional variations? Does it celebrate creativity? Does it make social statements about the French peasantry? All these interpretations are possible; the curator’s text panels may indicate the intention of the display, but other meanings may also be made by viewers.

Processes of interpretation are not singular, but multiple, and they proceed from a range of starting points. According to the role being played by the visitor at the time (parent, scholar, tour guide, artist, recluse) different aspects of potential meaning will be mobilised from the materials provided by the museum. Meaning is produced by museum visitors from their own point of view, using whatever skills and knowledge they may have, according to the contingent demands of the moment, and in response to the experience offered by the museum.

The structure of museum pedagogy

The experience offered by the museum will depend on the collections held, and assumptions about what should be said using the collections. The statements that the collections make can be communicated in various ways, and different styles of display can be used; these statements and display styles embody curatorial concepts about the identities of visitors, their knowledge, and their uses of the exhibition. The pedagogy of the museum can be analysed in relation to both content and style.

Pedagogic content refers to what is said, or the subject-matter of teaching; in museums this means the statements made by the museum with its collections, the subject-matter of the permanent displays or the temporary exhibitions. Pedagogic style refers to the way in which something is said, or teaching method; in museums this refers to the style of communication in displays, which includes the way the objects are used or placed, the way the text is written, the provision within the exhibition for various forms of sensory engagement (including visual, tactile, auditory senses), the use of light and colour, the use of space, and so on.

There is of course a relationship between content and style, as the mode, or style, of communication itself communicates ideas about expected responses, or about appropriate behaviour. This ‘hidden curriculum’ embodies attitudes, perceptions and values, which although they are not explicitly stated seem to b...