Doing Museology Differently

Duncan Grewcock

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136274954
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Museum Studies

One might believe that museum studies is a stable field of academic inquiry based on a set of familiar institutional forms and functions. But as institutions museums have never been stable or singular, and neither has the discipline of museum studies. Museum studies as a field of academic inquiry has received little critical attention. One result of this neglect has arguably been a lack of invention in museum studies; another is the distancing of academic museum studies from museum practice.

Doing Museology Differently charts a different course. A critical?creative reflection on academic practice, the book takes the form of a narrative account of museological fieldwork. A research story unfolds, challenging academic conventions at the level of its own presentation: the book combines critical museum visiting with an autobiographical voice. The identification of a previously underexplored interdisciplinary space leads the author to experiment with museum studies using contemporary developments in the theory and practice of human geography. The new approaches to museological research and representation that emerge from this unique inquiry challenge assumed institutional and intellectual boundaries and act as a call to further creative experimentation.

Part I
Adventures in Museology

Distanced critique is a useful but boring tool. I like the idea of throwing myself into the fray.

(Dion in Kwon 1997, 20)

1
Termini

Departures, Arrivals, Returns

Food for Thought

In her book Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum (2002), Sharon Macdonald gives a detailed ethnographic account of the Museum’s development of the ‘permanent’ Food for Thought gallery that opened to the public in October 1989.

January 2007. I have just completed reading Macdonald’s book. I couldn’t remember the Food for Thought gallery from my previous visits to the Science Museum. I check the Museum’s website. The gallery does not appear on the main gallery floor plan. By typing in a search for ‘food for thought’ it appears marked on the first floor. The web page includes a panoramic photographic view of the gallery. I can ‘see’ the exhibition online (albeit without making out any of the detail) if not physically ‘visit’ it¹.

I thought I’d better get to the Science Museum to complete the picture of Macdonald’s book by visiting Food for Thought and seeing it for myself. It is the morning of 24th January 2007; mid-week and during school term-time (when museums are generally less busy). Although it takes a bit of finding Food for Thought has closed down. A “Visitor Information” notice on the boarded-up gallery entrance explains.

This gallery is currently closed to the public [i.e. me]. We are redeveloping it so we can use our extensive collections to tell new stories about science and technology. We apologise for any inconvenience caused.

Disappointing as this is, only then do I really ‘see’ where Food for Thought was in relation to other spaces on the first floor (something that Macdonald does not comment on). It occupies an open balcony space.

This balcony space looks down onto the ground floor’s Making of the Modern World exhibition. Making of the Modern World leads directly into the Wellcome Wing, the Science Museum’s major multi-million pound Millennium development of 2000; still all shiny and new. I had visited those spaces many times, but not noticed the galleries above. Not only that, but Food for Thought has displays facing it on the opposite side of the balcony space that are open to the public (on the measurement of time). Taken together this is a series of spaces occupying a forgotten corner of the

Museum. By simply moving around the space a little I can see right into the messy state of what Food for Thought has become.

From my field notes scribbled at the time: “what’s really sad is you can see the gallery half dead … being butchered.” No doubt inspired by the food theme, on reflection this reaction is a little exaggerated. Nevertheless, change in museums is messy, disruptive and often visible; museum practices bleed into one another and are ever-present within the museum experience. Museums made and re-made. Museums-in-the-making.

During the rest of my visit that day I started paying attention to all the small or large mundane spaces, signs, signals, materials and events that betray these shifting relationships; that open spaces of disruption within the public spaces of the museum. A large, heavy wooden door in a main corridor with a clock over it. Listening to a group of teenage school children misbehave in front of their teacher. Goods lifts and public lifts. Official plaques commemorating long passed opening ceremonies. Floor plans and signage of varying vintages. A locked door to “Occupational Health”. An empty wall-mounted box for an Automated External Defibrillator. “Gallery closure”. “Caution. Cleaning in Progress”. “Don’t climb!”. CCTV cameras. “Work in progress”.

What if my research does not seek to privilege the researcher’s desire to get behind the scenes but instead concentrates on all publicly accessible spaces and the mundane practices and materials of the museum that share this space? To focus renewed attention on the messy things that discipline and disrupt, all of which help to perform the museum? How might this be done?

Hello, Mr Crow

December 2006. My chosen approach to doing fieldwork through a single, detailed, ethnographic case study is faltering. Time is passing. My mood is gloomy. What do I want from the field, what I am trying to achieve? I decide to head north to Glasgow early in the new year.

Six months previously Glasgow’s Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum had re-opened to the public after a £28 million refurbishment; the New Century Project. This is the largest museum of Glasgow City Council’s museum service. I had read warm praise for the New Century Project both in the museum and national press (Rees Leahy 2006a, Heal 2006a and 2006b, Cumming 2006). The director of Glasgow Museums had published a thoughtful academic paper on the epistemological future of museums using the example of Kelvingrove (O’Neill 2006), and a practice-based account of the project planning process had also appeared (Fitzgerald 2005). There was buzz². It was a good news story. A museum doing things differently. Shaking things up. “Glasgow remix” (Rees Leahy 2006a, 12). I had briefly visited Kelvingrove once before, two or maybe three years previously. I had no firm memory of that visit or of the museum’s content. The impression that stayed with me was of an impressive building the inside of which was confusing, murky and had seen better days. I do remember bumping into Elvis Presley on a staircase landing.

12th January 2007. The train from London Euston is over 2 hours late arriving in Glasgow Central. Problems in the Lake District apparently. I worry that I won’t be able to get to where I’ll be staying in time to pick up the key. Stranded in an unfamiliar city. I make it.

The walk to the Museum the next day takes me 25 minutes or so. It is raining, cold, and very windy; broken umbrellas abandoned on the pavement. I enter the Museum through its main entrance on Argyle Street, a major thoroughfare of the city.

Kelvingrove’s encyclopaedic collections have been redistributed and redisplayed through a series of story-led displays. The east galleries communicate stories of Life, the west galleries stories of Expression. Chance encounters. Nature. Culture. Glasgow, Scotland, Britain, The World.

In Life I encounter stories of Cultural Survival, juxtaposing the remote island of St Kilda ‘on the edge of the world’ and the last pearl fishermen of Scotland with stories of peoples from Africa and Australia. Throughout the Life galleries human and non-human life is displayed together as connected not isolated. Human life is life after all. The Life galleries seem to be founded on a basic assumption of the value of life in all its forms and the often negative impacts of human activity on the world.

A small collection of objects tells us something about the life of a girl who died in childhood. It is a moving testament to the value of mundane belongings and their significance in a material world.

Evidence

When Margaret died, her mother put all her clothes, toys and treasures in a suitcase. Years later, her family gave the suitcase and its contents to Glasgow Museums. From these, we know a lot—but not everything—about Margaret³.

Expression is more particularly focused on art and design. Bald, bleached and gurning representations of human heads hang from the East Court ceiling. Masterpieces of Italian Renaissance art are displayed alongside arms and armour—beauty and brutality cheek by jowl.

Kelvingrove moves effortlessly between different scales from the local to the global, the national and the international. There is a tangible guiding intelligence and warm voice behind these displays.

I have been walking around the Museum for over an hour. I head downstairs to see a video installation in a new temporary exhibition space. I turn at the bottom of the stairs. An exploding assemblage of objects flies toward me.

At its centre is Mr Crow; a cyborg figure in the belly of the museum. A figure from myth, legend, science fiction. A bronzed human body with a crow head. The physical and metaphorical heart and soul of Kelvingrove, Mr Crow is crafted through a dissolving boundary of Expression and Life. Emerging from him fly objects of culture and nature, books and typewriters, antlers and birds. Within him merged, outside separated, classified, collected, brought back together and presented.

And Elvis has not left the building. He has moved. He points to Life. To Elephants and Spitfires. My spirits are refreshed and renewed. I am thinking differently. I am thinking with museums.

Kelvingrove Revisited

After my first visit to the new Kelvingrove in January 2007, I revisited the city and its museums in July and October the same year. Although my focus remained on Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, these subsequent visits enabled me to become more familiar with the city and the diversity of Glasgow’s museums. The process of revisiting changes your perspective. To visit museums where you are normally resident is one thing. To visit a museum in an unfamiliar place as a tourist (even a tourist-researcher) is another. It changes how you approach museums, physically and intellectually. Becoming a tourist-visitor made me more self-conscious about ideas of situatedness and positionality within a research project. This was compounded by Kelvingrove’s new approach to narrative and its unusual juxtapositions, the mixing up of collections and the redrawing (and in some cases removal) of conventional disciplinary boundaries, multiplying the questions I was already asking of museums and museum study.

Museums exist in time as well as in space. Time is most often measured in museum study from century to century, and occasionally, from decade to decade. Day to day or month to month change rarely features. This more mundane cycle of change is central to the lived experience of museum visiting—particularly for the academic researcher. What can visits made over the course of a single year contribute to academic museum study?

Revisiting refines and can change one’s critical response to a museum. Revisiting is a vitally important component of the process of museum study. You find that not only do museums change, but so does your critical perspective. My first visit was overwhelmingly positive. But this was less critical or academic than a personal, emotional response to a museum that had clearly set out to do things differently. Having reached a low point in my own research, I found Kelvingrove genuinely uplifting, sharing the view of many of the initial reviewers. During subsequent visits I developed a more critical response to what the museum-as-institution was attempting to do differently and how well I felt this was being achieved in practice, something that could be translated into other museum contexts.

9th–13th July 2007

My flight for Glasgow leaves Heathrow Airport at 11.15 a.m. I’ve checked in and am sitting near my departure gate having a coffee. My table looks out onto one of the runways. Planes land and taxi a...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Other Title Page
• Beginnings After the Lord Mayor's Show
• Part I Adventures in Museology
• Part II Relational Museum Studies
• Appendix
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index