Centering the Museum

Writings for the Post-Covid Age

Elaine Heumann Gurian

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000428131
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Kunst
• Subtopic: Museumswissenschaft

Drawing on Elaine Heumann Gurian's fifty years of museum experience, Centering the Museum calls on the profession to help visitors experience their shared humanity and find social uses for public buildings, in order to make museums more central and useful to everyone in difficult times.

Following the same format as Civilizing the Museum, this new volume includes material written especially for a re-emergent time and relevant public lectures not included in the author's previous book. Divided into six separate content clusters, with over twenty different essays, the book identifies many small, subtle ways museums can become welcoming to more—and to all. Drawing on her extensive experience as a deputy director, senior advisor to high-profile government museums, lecturer and teacher around the world, the author provides recommendations for inclusive actions by intertwining sociological thinking with practical decision-making strategies. Writing reflectively, Elaine also provides heritage students and professionals with insights that will help move their careers and organizations into more equitable, yet successful, terrain.

Centering the Museum will be an excellent companion volume to Civilizing the Museum and, as such, will be a useful support for emerging museum leaders. It will be especially interesting to academics and students engaged in the study of cultural administration, as well as museum and heritage practitioners working around the world.

PART I

The Museum Visitor's Exhibition Quest: Personalization, Complexity, and Multiple Outcomes

DOI: 10.4324/9781003096221-3

The processes, materials, and techniques used to create museum exhibitions have expanded over the last century to include multiple technologies, reproductions, and touchable material. Presentation methods have often followed various learning theories, were pioneered by different types of museums, and ultimately were adopted widely.

Through these essays, I argue that exhibitions should have differing simultaneous layers, not speak with a unified museum-determined voice, and instead present different viewpoints, point out complexity and nuance, be less neutral in tone, include spirituality and emotion, and satisfy diverse personal interests—all at the same time.

Exhibitions should have many concurrent messages, not just one, allowing visitors the opportunity to follow their own personal quests.

1

The Essential Museum

Decoupling the Content from the Object, 2006¹

DOI: 10.4324/9781003096221-4

Ethnologists, anthropologists, folklorists, economists, engineers, consumers, and users never see objects. They see only plans, actions, behaviors, arrangements, habits, heuristics, abilities, collections of practices of which certain portions seem a little more durable and others a little more transient, though one can never say which one, steel or memory, things or words, stones or laws, guarantees the longer duration.

(Latour, 2000)

What if our profession created a museum in which visitors could comfortably search for answers to their questions regardless of the importance placed on such matters by others, just as Latour suggests members of specific professions do? This paper will explore the philosophy behind and the ingredients and procedures necessary to produce such a museum. This new type of museum I wish to characterize as essential. (This may be wishful thinking. We may, in the end, have to settle for useful.)

I contend that most museums are important but not essential establishments. I acknowledge that the customary museum continues to be valuable for some, beloved by its adherents, and defended against transformation by those who understand and celebrate its value. Nevertheless, I propose that there is room for another kind of museum, one that arises not from organized presentations by those in control, but one that puts power into the hands of the user. As Ramirez observed, “people are somewhat exhausted after 25 years of blockbuster exhibits being served up with these heavy tomes and yammering ‘Acoustiguides’ and all the learned labels. These days, they want the opportunity to escape that kind of directed discovery” (Ramirez, 2001).

I suggest that while some useful experimenting with power shifts are already underfoot within museums, most notably in resource centers and study-storage locations² that are embedded within galleries, there is no current category of museum in which the visitor is intended to be the prime assembler of existent content, based on his or her own need.

I am interested in transforming how users think of museum visits—from an occasional day out to a drop-in service. I believe small local museums are the best candidates for enabling this transformation because they can program more nimbly and with less fuss than can highly visited larger establishments. If, and when, these small neighborhood museums come to be regarded as a useful stop in the ordinary day of the local citizen, I believe that, like the library in that very same community, the museum will have become essential.

In this new museum, the staff’s role will be changed. Their current responsibility as the controlling authority determining the choice of displayed objects, interpretation, and expressed viewpoint will be diminished, and their role as a facilitator will be expanded.

We know that many potential visitors have not felt interested in, welcomed, or included by traditional museums and have demonstrated their indifference by not attending. I believe there is a correlation between the intellectual control by staff and the lack of relevance seen by many of our citizens.

The essential museum would begin with four assumptions:

1. All people have questions, curiosity, and insights about a variety of matters large and small.
2. Satisfaction of internalized issues is linked to more than fact acquisition and may include aesthetic pleasure, social interaction, and personal validation (recognition and memory).
3. A museum could be a useful place to explore these.
4. Visitors can turn their interest into satisfied discovery if the appropriate tools are present and easy to use.

Unfettered browsing of objects will be the central organizing motif in this museum, and to facilitate that, the majority of the museum’s artifacts will be on view. The technique of visual storage installation will be expanded and take on renewed importance.

Attendant information, broadly collected, will be considered almost as important as the objects themselves, and thus a database with a branching program of multiple topics will be available within easy reach. To access the database, a technological finding aid will be on hand so that the visitor can successfully sort through the multiplicity of available data. Visitors in this new museum, once satisfied with their search, can, if they wish, offer the results of their investigation or their queries to subsequent visitors through a technological collector mechanism. Everyone who enters has the possibility of becoming both investigator and facilitator.

I am assuming the museum, and its collections, already exist. It is the mission that is radically changing. Once the purpose of such a museum is established, the staff will concentrate on researching relevant objects, acquiring more objects if necessary, locating, collecting, and collating associated information from a broad array of sources, and facilitating the public’s access to the same.

While this sounds like the standard curatorial job, the fundamental mediating role of the curator will have changed. The curator will not select the objects to view since all can be seen. Nor will the curator be the only creator of appropriate topics. Instead, almost all information and artifacts will be made available, and the user will mentally combine them as he or she sees fit. As users engage, more examples of combinations will arise. The museum will become a visual nonjudgmental repository in which many intellectual directions are possible. No topic, save illegal and hurtful ones, will be off limits. I can see that will be the cause of much discussion, but the notion that a subject is too trivial or seen by staff as unworthy will no longer be determinative.

Before the reader finds this model too radical, consider that this is not dissimilar from the way shopping malls, the internet, or libraries currently operate. I wish to align the essential museum with these models.

Why Create a New Kind of Museum?

Why create a new kind of museum? In part because surveys have continued to show that museum visitors remain a narrow segment of our society. Try as we wish to broaden the user group through many different strategies, we have, by and large, failed to make an appreciable dent.

Museum visitors remain predominantly well-educated and relatively affluent, while the majority of our citizens stay beyond our doors. So, I began to consider how else museums might operate if they wanted to broaden their audiences—that is, if they wished the profile of visitors to include more people from the lower, middle, and working classes, and more users who fit in minority, immigrant, adolescent, high-school credentialed, and drop-out groups than is currently the case. If the rhetoric about museums continues to suggest that museums are inherently critical civic spaces, then we must propose new strategies that would involve more of the citizenry.

In the last half-century, curators, who are generally steeped in museum traditions, have seen their role criticized, and in response, they have changed their voice and intention from that of a benevolent but authoritarian leader into that of a benign and helpful teacher. They have incorporated new strategies of exhibition technique and given credence to the theories involving various learning modalities (Gardner, 1983; Hein, 1998).

Overall, the traditional museum has generally become less stuffy, with added visitor amenities that encourage seating, eating, researching, shopping, and socializing. These changes have helped most museums evolve from being formal temples of contemplation into more inviting gathering places. The iconic museum has begun to look different from its turn-of-the-century forebear.

To enlarge the audience from the continuing relatively static profile, many have encouraged additional approaches: expanding collections to include works created by underrepresented peoples; adding exhibition subject matter to appeal to specific disenfranchised audiences; utilizing exhibition techniques that appeal to many ages, interests, and learning styles; and fostering mixed-use spaces in response to theories of city planners, especially those of Jane Jacobs (Jacobs, 1961). I have suggested that museums should combine these steps with continued thoroughgoing community liaison work (Gurian, 2001, 2005b). Most recently, I have advocated for free admission as a vital audience-building strategy (Gurian, 2005a).

Reluctantly, I now concede that these measures, while useful, will not permanently expand the audience very much. I am newly convinced that the potential for broadening the profile of the attendees visiting the traditional museum is limited. Instead, museums of inclusion may be possible only if the object-focused mission is separated from the equally traditional, but less well understood, intellectual control of staff, and a new mission is substituted that satisfies a range of personal motivations by facilitating individual inquiry. In short, while I am not advocating that all museums need to change in this way, I am saying that the role, potential relevance, and impact of the traditional museum, while useful, is more limited than I had formerly believed.

I concede that the public wants, and may even need, these time-honored, often iconic, museums. I remain a member of that public. Still, the history of these museums is intertwined with the history of social and economic power. Carol Duncan and Alan Wallach describe a “Universal Survey Museum (one which operates as a ritual experience intended to transmit the notions of cultural excellence).” They state:

The Museum’s primary function is ideological. It is meant to impress upon those who use or pass through it, society’s most revered beliefs and values … The visitor moves through a programmed experience that casts him in the role of an ideal citizen – a member of an idealized “public” and heir to an ideal, civilized past … Even in their smallest details … museums reveal their real function, which is to reinforce among some people the feeling of belonging and among others, the feeling of exclusion.

(Duncan & Wallach, 2004, pp. 52, 54, 62)

If this view is only partially correct, then it is not just object choice or intimidating architecture that is keeping the majority of the public from feeling welcomed in museums, it is the nexus between those objects, what is said about them, and by whom.

Libraries

Have you ever wondered why some contemporary collecting institutions, like libraries, serve an audience both larger, and more diverse, than museums, while others, for example, archives, do not? I believe that the library’s easy access and intention to provide nonprescriptive service for its users are the distinctions that deserve to be explored and emulated. I suggest that the perception of the library as a helper, rather than a teaching institution, interests a broader array of users. I propose that there is a link between the public’s greater use and appreciation of libraries and the fact that they are funded as a matter of course (rather than the exception) by politicians. Changing museums so that they, too, serve a broader audience, may result in enhanced governmental funding opportunities.

The process for acquiring library materials uses a system equivalent to museums. But unlike museums, libraries treat and present each item in much the same way. Except for occasional holdings of rare books, there is no value-laden hierarchy imposed on the collection or access to it. Most important for the purposes of this paper, within a broad array of possibilities, the determination of the topic for research is in the mind of the user rather than preselected by the librarian, though librarians are also allowed to propose some i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• About the author
• List of Abbreviations
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Centering the Museum
• Museum Basics: Definition and Principles
• PART I: The Museum Visitor’s Exhibition Quest: Personalization, Complexity, and Multiple Outcomes
• PART II: Museum Administration Techniques Must Mirror Philosophy: Fairness and Justice Toward Staff
• PART III: Museums Have Agency: Useful Activism in Museums
• PART IV: Museums’ Obligation to Provide Public Space: Placing Museums in a Broadened Civic Sphere
• PART V: Museums Are Part of Larger Systems: Dissolving Boundaries to Provide Coordinated Society-wide Benefits
• PART VI: Memoir Snippets: The Professional Uses of Personal Experience
• Index