Introduction
This book has several intentions. The first is to present two studies conducted in two different museums, across which a particular method of audience evaluation was developed. Another is to open up a cross-disciplinary conversation between cultural geography and museum studies for what one has to offer the other. But perhaps this bookâs most ambitious intention is to prompt a re-thinking of how we experience heritage that acknowledges the power of the non-representational. This is not easy at the best of times but is perhaps even more difficult in a field like museum studies where representational discourses have dominated for decades.
In terms of this bookâs structure, Chapter 1 takes on the role of providing a rationale grounded in recent developments in museology. Chapter 2 shifts the focus from theory to practice and the work of museum curators and evaluation officers. Chapters 3 and 4 are longer, empirical chapters in which we explore questions of methodology as well as the findings from two studiesâone conducted at the Museo Laboratorio della Mente (Museum of the Mind) in Rome and the other at Melbourne Museum and its 2014â2018 WWI: Love and Sorrow exhibition. In both cases, exhibits were designed to provoke emotional responses in museum visitors with the aim of promoting a particular social message. In this book, we interrogate these curatorial intentions alongside our own attempts at developing a new method of audience evaluation that might allow us to do so.
New Museology and the Performative Museum
In many respects, the new museology is not ânewâ at all. It is generally recognised to have emerged in the 1970s with a call to museums to make changes to the ways they regarded themselves in relation to their visitors (McCall & Gray, 2013). No longer were museums to be regarded as the âcultural authorityâ they were in the colonial era but as institutions with social responsibilities. This necessitated a shift in the function of museums such that they became less about the display of artefacts selected for their perceived cultural value and more about their âsuccess or neglect in the eyes of the publicâ (Vergo, 1989, p. 3). It also made it incumbent on museums to take the representation of marginalised peoples and histories more seriously.
This shift in the theory and practice of museums was largely a political one (Message & Witcomb, 2015). It was important for museums to not been seen by the public as the agents of government but as being for, and about, the public. This re-positioning of the museum away from the cultural and towards the social meant that museums had to âlet goâ of curatorial traditions of exclusivity and start to embrace an attitude to exhibition and display that was more broadly inclusive. As Fleming (2005) suggests, museums have had to find â⊠the quickest way to the hearts and minds of the local peopleâ (p. 222). This still presents enormous challenges for museums in how they recognise, interact, include, and represent âthe otherâ (Witcomb, 2015). Part of this challenge has been for museums to see themselves not simply as institutions but as vectors of social change (Dudley & Message, 2013). At the same time, museums understand that they are embedded in the strata of the societies which they aim to influence and that these societies are always dynamic and changing. As a consequence, the contemporary museum is more about visitor engagement and community building than ever before, charged with the task of empowering the âunmediated citizenâ to speak (Snell, 2018).
As if the task of giving voice to long neglected peoples and their histories were not enough, contemporary museums are expected not only to educate but also to entertain. As Poulot (2014) states â⊠museums dedicate more and more of their work to the demands of lived experience, to the memories of the body and the senses, in the encounter with analysis and knowledge, to which they once laid claimâ (emphasis added, p. 215). This might involve anything from the dramatising of knowledge through storytelling to the staging of large-scale events (KjĂŠr, 2016). The goal is to make visitors feel inspired and transformed by their experiences of the museum. As such, the contemporary museum has become a psychological enterprise, one which places considerable pressure on curators to find bigger and better ways of âenlivening the archiveâ (Candlin, 2015; Spalding, 2002).
Smith (2015) goes so far to suggest that, rather than learning experiences, contemporary museums create cultural performances designed to make visitors feel. In this respect, she agrees with other scholars in the field of museum studies that heritage is best understood as a âverbâ and not as a ânounâ (Smith & Akagawa, 2009). Visitors come to museums, not necessarily to be challenged but to have their sense of self, views, and opinions validated. This is a view that contests the notion of lifelong learning, one that Smith (2015) argues is reinforced by the museumâs deployment of quantitative methods of assess knowledge gains. What is ignored in the process is the complex interplay between emotions, feelings, and identity that the museum cultivates and what these dimensions of the museum experience contribute to the social and cultural identities of visitors. In this regard, what is âlearnedâ is not guaranteed to correspond to the intentions of the museum and can be very difficult for visitors to express in words.
Performing cultural heritage means thinking about what we do with the past in the present (Fleishman, 2012; HĂ€chler, 2015). To this end, the contemporary museum engages with all sorts of performative and narrative techniques including live theatre performances, dance, and drama-based activities (Jackson & Kidd, 2012). The performative museum, as a concept, goes beyond the use of performance as a tool or medium for learning but to a greater appreciation of heritage as a process in which audiences participate. Tupan (2012) puts this in another way, seeing what contemporary museums do as a kind of âpostmodern energeticsâ. At the heart of it is a metaphysical understanding that museums and their artefacts emerge from the âsame stuffâ as visitors themselves. Therefore, the effects of the performative museum are â⊠made known of the interaction between material processes and signifying practices, bodies and artefacts that transgress museum sp...