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Museums, museums, museums
Museum Management
and Curatorship
(1992), 11, 185-192
Museums, Museums, Museums THEODORE ANTON SANDE
Museums, Museums, Museums-they abound! We live in the museum age. There is a museum for virtually any subject you can name, somewhere in the world. There are museums devoted to fine art, to the decorative arts, to science, to industry, to technology, to natural history and to regional history, to automobiles, to aircraft and all forms of transportation, to medicine, to criminology, to clocks and watches, to musical boxes, to costume and textiles, to jewelry, to pottery and glass; to tin, copper, steel and, according to a Wall Street Journal article published in summer 1991, there is a museum devoted to nuts. There are historic house museums and living history museums and zoos, and arboreta and railroad museums. There is even a subway museum. There are non-museums, by current definition, that call themselves museums, and for Cleveland the Children’s Museum and the Health Education Museum are two local examples. And, lastly, there are commercial operations that do not call themselves museums, exactly, but have a museological connotation: the Epcot Center, Old Norway in Wisconsin, and the large, very popular aquariums around the United States of America being several of this type that come to mind. All evoke Howard Nemerov’s Deep Woods image of history: Which slows, shudders, and shifts as the trucks do, In hearing-distance, on the highway hill, And staggers onward elsewhere with its load Of statues, candelabra, buttons, gold; No prior period in history has witnessed such a plethora of institutions that, in one form or another, present themselves to the public as collectors and displayers of old things and specimens from the natural world. Never before has so much stuff from the past survived and been saved, repaired, catalogued, exhibited and explained for the presumed good of society. What has caused this seeming hunger to look at, to touch, to know the tangible evidence of the exotic and the earlier days? Why, in a time when there appears to be a popular indifference to the serious study of history, are there all these places that display the things of the past? How did these institutions we call ‘museums’ come about in the first place, and what are some of the key issues surrounding them today that museum staff are currently addressing? Part of the problem resides with the word ‘museum’ itself. Literally, from the Greek, it means: the place of the muses. The muses were the nine daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne (memory). They were nymphs, or inferior divinities, and they generally appeared as young, beautiful and modest virgins representing their respective arts:
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Museums, Museums, Museums
186 Calliope Clio
- Epic poetry, - History
Rhetoric
and chief of the muses
- Astronomy - Music - Comedy - Amorous poetry Te~s~chore - Dance Melpomene - Tragedy Polyhymnia - Sacred music Urania
Eutelpe Thalia Erato
Only two of the nine, Clio and Urania, the muses of history and astronomy, represent fields that we would readily associate with museums today; the other seven epitomize what we broadly call the performing arts. Thus, to the ancients it would appear that a museum would reasonably have been understood as a place where the muses act, an auditorium or an amphitheatre. There is nothing expressed or implied in the roles of the muses that even remotely suggests that they collect, conserve or display material things: the oral tradition and written words, ideas, yes; but objects, tangible evidence, no. Indeed, neither painting nor sculpture was identified as worthy of a separate muse. The Greeks were interested more in universal truths than in particular things, so the muses, in effect, provide the grist for the philosopher’s mill-and that grist was not of even value. M. I. Finley, in The Use and Abuse o~~~sto~, for example, quotes from the ninth chapter of Aristotle’s Poetics: Poetry is more philosophical and more weighty than history, for poetry speaks rather of the universal, history of the particular. By the universal I mean that such or such a kind of man will say or do such or such things from probability or necessity; that is the aim of poetry, adding proper names to the characters. By the particular I mean what Alcibiades did and what he suffered. If we turn Dictionary,
to a typical modern dictionary (Webster’s New Universal Unabridged 2nd edn, 1983, in this case), we find the word museum defined as:
From the Greek: Mouseion-a place for the muses, or for study, a library-a building, room, etc., for preserving and exhibiting rare, interesting, or typical specimens of works of art, science, invention, etc., or of antiquities, curiosities or objects of natural history. The phrase ‘a place for the muses’ is deliciously vague, but consistent with the ancient connotation, since it can mean anywhere that someone stands who wishes to conjure them forth: a train seat, for instance, becomes a transient museum while a suburban commuter reads a Penguin paperback Thucydides. The Bolton Theatre of The Cleveland Play House is a museum during any given performance, as is the Arabica coffee house during a poetry recital. But in the modern world we tend to skip over that broad generalization and come to rest on the part that reads: ‘a building . . . for preserving and exhibiting rare, interesting, or typical specimens or works of art, science, invention, etc., or of antiquities, curiosities or subjects of natural history’. Within the museum field, the generalization ‘a place for the muses’ is assumed to mean a fixed place with a very specific mission. The American Association of Museums in 1970 defined a museum as: and permanent non-profit institution, essentially educational or . . . an organized aesthetic in purpose, with professional staff, which owns and utilizes tangible objects, cares for them and exhibits them to the public on some regular schedule.
THEODORE ANTON SANDE
Taking this definition a step further, and emphasizing society, the International Council of Museums (ICOM),
187
the museum’s active role in agreed in 1974 that:
A museum is a non-profit making, permanent institution in the service of society and of its development, and open to the public which acquires, conserves, researches, communicates and exhibits, for purposes of study, education and enjoyment, material evidence of man and his environment. Nothing of this sort existed in the classical world, as far as we know, except, perhaps, at the Alexandria Library. In the Judeo-Christian era, the Vatican Library became a major collector of manuscripts and artifacts, but it could hardly be said that it was ‘open to the public’ or that it was in ‘the service of society’ as we understand that phrase today. The same is true of the cabinets of curiosity created by a few noblemen and intellectuals during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. It is not until the 18th century that we begin to see emerging an intellectual curiosity about the past that sets the foundation for the encyclopedically based, scientifically and systematically ordered museums that became firmly established in western civilization by the late 19th century. As has been shown elsewhere, with respect to the historic preservation movement, the influences that come together to create the fertile climate for the modern museum are: (I) the enlightenment, that breaks the western Judeo-Christian cultural continuity of 1700 years; (2) the Cartesian perception of incremental time, that raises the possibility of dividing the past into discrete, seemingly objective, sequential blocks of time that can be artificially segmented, identified and studied; (3) the passion for classification of the material world, that cultivates the belief that all things have a logical place in a rational and comprehensive universe; and (4) the shocking realization that, through industrialism, we had achieved the power to alter the natural world, and that, whereas until the 18th century human beings existed within a dominant natural environment, now they had acquired the ability to overpower and destroy both nature and their own creations. Thus the need was perceived to save what would otherwise be obliterated. This latter strand is the key to understanding the current flowering of museums. We must reach far back in our heritage to find an approximate precedent. The origin of the concept of a museum, in the conservational and catastrophic sense, is found in the Book of Genesis, chapters 6 through 8, where the story is told of Noah and the Ark. According to this Hebrew legend, God, displeased with the living beings he has created, decides to destroy them: And, behold, I, even I, do bring a flood of waters upon the earth to destroy all flesh, wherein is the breath of life, from under heaven; and every thing that is in the earth shall die. Then,
God tempers his wrath: But with thee [Noah] will I establish my covenant; and thou and thy sons, and thy wife, and thy sons’ wives with thee. And of every living thing of all flesh, two of every sort shall thou bring into the ark, to keep them alive with thee; they shall be male and female.
Noah becomes, at least for a little while, the first Noah’s mission is clearly that generated by the the realization of an impending loss and the need that of surviving the flood with his cargo intact so after all other tainted forms of life had been gotten
living-history museum director. fourth condition cited above; that is, to protect against it. Noah’s task was that a more perfect life could continue rid of. His Ark was a practical answer
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to a catastrophic situation, not a scientific or intellectual venture to learn more about the natural world. From the ancient, dark time of this Hebrew tale through classical mythology, ancient history and over 1700 years of Christian tradition, objects, material things, in and of themselves, occupied a minor place in intellectual life. Painting and sculpture flourished at various times but, even in the Renaissance, the painter or the sculptor was more craftsman than artist, as we understand that term today. The Ancient, Medieval and Renaissance artisans did not often invent the subjects they depicted. Success or failure depended upon how faithfully they told, in visual terms, the story or represented the idea desired by their patrons. Michelangelo’s genius resided in his ability both to meet and transcend the limitations of the artistic program given him by the patron, not in inventing the program itself. His work was intended for a particular room or cathedral and was not a generalized expression conceived for the neutral walls of a museum. Art from ancient times to the 19th century was literal, specific, purposeful and practical. If it was also beautiful to the viewer, so much the better. Many beautiful things were made over this 4000-year interval: not just pictures and statues, but jewelry, silver and gold dishes, and goblets, pottery and glass, as we now see in our museums. However, these things were all made to be used and enjoyed at the time, and some were deliberately modified as fashion changed from one period to the next. Silver utensils, one’s tangible wealth in early America, were frequently melted down and reworked to suit current taste up to the end of the 18th century. And, other than in the churches, or civic structures and squares, where selected works of art symbolized the power of the ecclesiastical or royal authority, the rare and the beautiful objects were shared by the privileged few and used only by them. Public access to great works of secular art and to other rare and beautiful objects comes only in the 19th century, and relatively late at that. In short, up to the 19th century there is no need for art museums because the works of art were, so to speak, in use for the purposes they were intended to serve, and these purposes had nothing to do with public education about art per se: religious instruction and propaganda, yes; art appreciation, no. Today’s didactic, comparative exhibitions of artworks on off-white walls, with pictures arranged in chronological order, presumably for the edification of visitors far removed from the paintings’ origins, would never have occurred to the pre-18th-century mind. Let me give one graphic example of the contemporary art museum that goes beyond mere display to become a place where the artists themselves actually participate in 17 creating the museum. The front page of The Wull Street Journal for Thursday, October 1991, carried an article on the Mattress Factory, an old six-story warehouse on Pittsburgh’s North Side. It was founded in 1977 as a museum by a sculptor named Barbara Luderowski. Funded by a mix of governmental and private money, she has managed to commission over 70 artists, worldwide, to create what is billed as the only permanent collection of installation art. John Caldwell, Curator of Painting and Sculpture at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, is quoted as saying of the Mattress Factory: ‘It’s one of the great undiscovered cultural resources in America. The art you see there usually can’t be seen anywhere else except New York, and often not even there.’ Some examples : a walk-in freezer full of Victorian furniture; a dank a huge enclosure of hay to be climbed, sat on and basement display of shoe-boxes; smelled; and a room full of 6600 Budweiser beer cans, American flags and debris. It’s easy to scoff at this sort of thing, but, quite frankly, it fascinates me and I’m eager to visit it. Why? Because the Mattress Factory seems to me to be conceptually close to the
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classical sense of a museum, a place for the muses which at the same time meets the generally accepted standards of a museum. The ICOM definition of a museum, quoted above, was revised in 1989. It still incorporates the key elements accepted by most persons active in the museum field today, and perhaps we should look at it again a little more closely: A museum is a non-profit making, permanent institution in the service of society and of its development, and open to the public, which acquires, conserves, researches, communicates, and exhibits, for purposes of study, education and enjoyment, material evidence of people and their environment. There is something of the camel about this definition. It is clearly the work of a committee-even worse, an international committee-and it is a model of the kind of statement, produced by such bodies, that tries very, very hard not to offend anyone. It is, however, a distilling to the essence of the contemporary museum ideal. There are four key components of this ideal and they are rather in inverse order to the ICOM statement. First, there must be a collection (material evidence of people and their environment). Second, the collection serves the purposes of study, education, cultural advancement and enjoyment through the acquisition, conservation and presentation of the collection. Third, the institution that is responsible for housing and displaying the collection has a permanent place of public service in its society. And, fourth, it is an institution that rises above commercial consideration so as to be able to devote itself fully and objectively to public service. What is remarkable about this modern museum ideal is not that museums, as we know them, were so late in coming, but that they have come to be at all. For the fact of the matter is that a museum, as defined by ICOM and in the strictest sense, is an un-natural institution. It exists to save for study and amusement material things that would, in the normal course of events in the natural world, decay and disappear. Matter-at least the matter of our common-sense existence-is governed by the Second Law of Thermodynamics and over some period of time, however long or short, it will disintegrate, unless something is done continuously to counteract this natural tendency. Museums are society’s agents for doing precisely that; they carry on the continual, never-to-end process of preserving the physical evidence of human existence and the natural world. Not only is this evidence physically impermanent, most of it was not created with the intention that it remain. The vast majority of things human beings make are, and always have been, made to meet immediate objectives. Expediency, not durability, characterizes what humankind produces for daily living. The products of government, religion, science and the arts, on the other hand, are, intentionally, exceptions. They seek long-range objectives, continuity, perpetuation, order and process that transcend the short-term demands of daily life. Even their works, however, are subject to obsolescence and decay. Additionally, the objects in museum collections are, quite literally, out of place. They were not made for museum display, but for utilitarian, ceremonial and decorative purposes totally outside the context of a museum. These things of human existence and the material world are the residue of life and the selected representations of our biosphere. The only exception I can think of to this generalization is the work of modern artists that is designed and executed primarily, if not exclusively, for museum display, as we have seen in the case of the Mattress Factory. And this is, in effect, an aberration resulting from the separation of artists from their original, integral craft function in society as the expressive force of the established ecclesiastical and secular orders that exist
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in Western European civilization up to the l&h-century cultural break I cited earlier. The schism between artist and society is an evident and logical reflection of the schism between the pre- and post-industrial worlds. The fact that museum objects are things that, in general, have been removed from their original contexts places on the museum the fundamental responsibility of proving these contexts and replicating them, where this is instructive. It is the registrar’s job to acquire and maintain the documentary evidence, to establish the provenance of the objects in the collection. It is the curator’s job to make the objects comprehensible to the visiting public, to interpret them, to breathe life into them by the artificial mechanical and electronic techniques of display. Since society is constantly changing, the collections must be reinterpreted and re-presented from time to time in order to assure that their meaning is not lost to the contemporary world. This sounds easier than it is in practice because we are not always sensitive to changes in the culture of which we are a part. Further, objects placed in museums tend to acquire a life and value of their own, totally disassociated from their origins. The result, either way, leads us back to the cabinets of curiosity of the pre-industrial era, but without the over-arching cultural tradition of that time. A museum, then, is an agent of society that seeks to counteract the natural tendency to decay of material things. It also must act to accommodate the broad societal changes that are always occurring around it by preserving the intellectual value and the cultural meaning of the objects in its collections. These are the two primary forces the museum continually faces. Each museum has its own collecting goals. No one museum either wants to, or has the capacity to, acquire everything. Museums define their collecting objectives through their charter, mission statements and collecting policies. As noted at the beginning of this article, we have reached a point where virtually everything of the physical world, man-made and natural, is being collected today by one or another museum, or saved in historic buildings and historic districts. Most of these museums are new and, I think, show a broad cultural tendency to save that is less a reflection of healthy intellectual curiosity than it is a pathological drive to preserve what are found to be the valuable elements of our artificial and natural environments. If this is, indeed, a valid surmise and everything conceivable is embraced by this modern tendency, then we must conclude that we have reached a point in today’s world of morbid insecurity about the present. The present is always in a state of flux. However, the intensity of that state has increased steadily in the western world, especially, since the 18th century: its Age of Enlightenment, which saw the collapse of the old, dominant ecclesiastical order; the Industrial Revolution, which gave to humans for the first time ever the capability of radically altering or destroying their own creations and the natural world; and the series of large-scale mechanized wars, beginning with the US Civil War of 1861-65 and culminating in the 20th-century’s Global 30 Years War, and 1939-45, and numerous lesser savage with its two principal phases: 1914-18 campaigns in between. With the end of the second phase in 1945, the Nuclear Age, ushered in that year by the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, established a new plateau beyond large-scale mechanized warfare that is truly apocalyptic, and this has heightened the level of collective fear regarding human mortality. The atomic bomb embodies all the destructive potential that sensitive observers saw 200 years ago. Recent easings of tension between Eastern Europe, the Soviet States and the USA has not changed the fundamental fact that the human race has created the capacity to destroy itself. We do not know what the future holds. We only know that it will be different from what has existed in the past. And although that past began to lose its long-standing
THEODORE ANTON SANDE
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integrity almost 300 years ago, strands of it remain, even in the contemporary, volatile, transition period. For those who are troubled and fearful about this condition-and there appear to be many-the museum becomes a source of stability, a place where things are permanently fixed in time, a place where things seem to be safe, a place, like Noah’s Ark, where that which is within is protected from the hostile surrounding environment. I cannot predict the future museum any more than can others; but I can speculate. What I see are two well-defined and long-standing trends that will develop in intensity, accelerated by computer technology. They will probably mature separately. The first trend is what I call the move toward ‘ultimate quantification’. This type of museum of the future will become primarily a massive storehouse containing exhaustive amounts of material on its subject (art, science, regional history or whatever). Each artifact will be extensively catalogued and cross-referenced in every conceivable way so that virtually any inquiry regarding it, its relation to other objects of its type across time, to other similar objects of its period and to the society that produced it can be tested and analysed. The main focus would be collecting, research and continuing reinterpretation resulting in scholarly reports and publications. Exhibition would be confined to what are today styled ‘study-storage displays’ or to highly specialized, changing exhibits. These museums will be maintained by the state and not by private sources. A current instance of the type of highly intellectualized exhibition this kind of museum might mount was the 1890s show at the Nordic Museum in Stockholm, Sweden. I saw it in mid-September 1991 and found it incomprehensible. A Swedish colleague has since explained to me that the curators organized the display on deconstructivist principles. No wonder I saw so many perplexed and bemused looks on the visitors’ faces. It is unlikely that many of them were familiar with deconstructivism or would understand its application to a museum exhibition. Yet, for a small group of intellectuals, I am sure this exhibition can provide a rarefied satisfaction. The appeal here is to the specialist, not to the general visitor. The second trend, diametrically opposite to the first, I term the ‘heightened historical reality’ approach. At its best, this development could lead to a truly educational experience; at its worst, to sensationalism. The Epcot Center of today is the crude basis of heightened historical reality as I see its possibilities through increasingly realistic computer-generated simulation. Where natural history museums in particular have used for so many years the static diorama to give the visitor a plausible sense of environment and habitat in the natural world, the computerized simulators will be able seemingly to place the visitor in an active natural environment. The same will be true for history museums. In place of the frozen tableau of a historical event, there will be dynamic presentations that draw the visitor into the action as if he or she were present when the historical moment occurred. The possibilities and the risks are enormous: to be present at the signing of the Declaration of Independence is one thing; to be at the entrance of a Nazi concentration camp’s working gas-chamber is quite another. Who will create this heightened historical reality? What are its limits? And, the crucial question: are we any closer to a true understanding of the past by experiencing something that so graphically stimulates the senses, but that may be grounded on sparse or distorted historical information? Does the technology help us to know the past or does it merely create another barrier to our understanding? These ‘museums of sensory experience’ will be commercial ventures, as I see it, created primarily for profit; a few may be established and maintained by the state for purposes of propaganda. The trend towards commercialism is well advanced already through various
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Museums,
Museums
museum revenue-producing programs, including: paid admission, membership subscription and merchandizing initiatives. High-priced travelling shows are aggressively marketed and are as important-perhaps more important-to a major museum’s sales shop as they are to a museum’s educational galleries. Tee-shirts, coffee mugs, jewelry, slick (but rarely read) catalogues and any other conceivable commercial spin-off from the show’s theme are shamelessly promoted. Just imagine the commercial potential when a museum can virtually knock out the customer (and subliminally induce buying) with heightened historical reality! Coupled with this increased commercialism, and to some degree sparked by it, both the Internal Revenue Service and the Financial Accounting Standards Board are taking steps now that could lead to the elimination of the charitable non-profit corporate concept within the decade. So, here we are standing with another poet, Robert Frost, at that point in the yellow wood where two roads diverged. Museums will have to choose which road they will take. The decision as to which way to go may be forced upon them before the turn of the century. Some will naturally tend towards the well-worn path of traditional collecting and research. They will be sustained by one or another form of governmental support. Some will venture further into commercial entrepreneurship and sensationalism. But are these paths really as divergent as they seem? Maybe not. Perhaps a synthesis of the two is possible. It is conceivable that somewhere over the hills and through the valleys of the future the two paths may converge on the Elysian Plain of a Teilhard de Chardin-like holistic union: paradise. Mattress Factory, anyone?
and Curatorship
(1992), 11, 185-192
Museums, Museums, Museums THEODORE ANTON SANDE
Museums, Museums, Museums-they abound! We live in the museum age. There is a museum for virtually any subject you can name, somewhere in the world. There are museums devoted to fine art, to the decorative arts, to science, to industry, to technology, to natural history and to regional history, to automobiles, to aircraft and all forms of transportation, to medicine, to criminology, to clocks and watches, to musical boxes, to costume and textiles, to jewelry, to pottery and glass; to tin, copper, steel and, according to a Wall Street Journal article published in summer 1991, there is a museum devoted to nuts. There are historic house museums and living history museums and zoos, and arboreta and railroad museums. There is even a subway museum. There are non-museums, by current definition, that call themselves museums, and for Cleveland the Children’s Museum and the Health Education Museum are two local examples. And, lastly, there are commercial operations that do not call themselves museums, exactly, but have a museological connotation: the Epcot Center, Old Norway in Wisconsin, and the large, very popular aquariums around the United States of America being several of this type that come to mind. All evoke Howard Nemerov’s Deep Woods image of history: Which slows, shudders, and shifts as the trucks do, In hearing-distance, on the highway hill, And staggers onward elsewhere with its load Of statues, candelabra, buttons, gold; No prior period in history has witnessed such a plethora of institutions that, in one form or another, present themselves to the public as collectors and displayers of old things and specimens from the natural world. Never before has so much stuff from the past survived and been saved, repaired, catalogued, exhibited and explained for the presumed good of society. What has caused this seeming hunger to look at, to touch, to know the tangible evidence of the exotic and the earlier days? Why, in a time when there appears to be a popular indifference to the serious study of history, are there all these places that display the things of the past? How did these institutions we call ‘museums’ come about in the first place, and what are some of the key issues surrounding them today that museum staff are currently addressing? Part of the problem resides with the word ‘museum’ itself. Literally, from the Greek, it means: the place of the muses. The muses were the nine daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne (memory). They were nymphs, or inferior divinities, and they generally appeared as young, beautiful and modest virgins representing their respective arts:
0260-4779/92/02
0185-08
0
1992 Butterworth-Heinemann
Ltd
Museums, Museums, Museums
186 Calliope Clio
- Epic poetry, - History
Rhetoric
and chief of the muses
- Astronomy - Music - Comedy - Amorous poetry Te~s~chore - Dance Melpomene - Tragedy Polyhymnia - Sacred music Urania
Eutelpe Thalia Erato
Only two of the nine, Clio and Urania, the muses of history and astronomy, represent fields that we would readily associate with museums today; the other seven epitomize what we broadly call the performing arts. Thus, to the ancients it would appear that a museum would reasonably have been understood as a place where the muses act, an auditorium or an amphitheatre. There is nothing expressed or implied in the roles of the muses that even remotely suggests that they collect, conserve or display material things: the oral tradition and written words, ideas, yes; but objects, tangible evidence, no. Indeed, neither painting nor sculpture was identified as worthy of a separate muse. The Greeks were interested more in universal truths than in particular things, so the muses, in effect, provide the grist for the philosopher’s mill-and that grist was not of even value. M. I. Finley, in The Use and Abuse o~~~sto~, for example, quotes from the ninth chapter of Aristotle’s Poetics: Poetry is more philosophical and more weighty than history, for poetry speaks rather of the universal, history of the particular. By the universal I mean that such or such a kind of man will say or do such or such things from probability or necessity; that is the aim of poetry, adding proper names to the characters. By the particular I mean what Alcibiades did and what he suffered. If we turn Dictionary,
to a typical modern dictionary (Webster’s New Universal Unabridged 2nd edn, 1983, in this case), we find the word museum defined as:
From the Greek: Mouseion-a place for the muses, or for study, a library-a building, room, etc., for preserving and exhibiting rare, interesting, or typical specimens of works of art, science, invention, etc., or of antiquities, curiosities or objects of natural history. The phrase ‘a place for the muses’ is deliciously vague, but consistent with the ancient connotation, since it can mean anywhere that someone stands who wishes to conjure them forth: a train seat, for instance, becomes a transient museum while a suburban commuter reads a Penguin paperback Thucydides. The Bolton Theatre of The Cleveland Play House is a museum during any given performance, as is the Arabica coffee house during a poetry recital. But in the modern world we tend to skip over that broad generalization and come to rest on the part that reads: ‘a building . . . for preserving and exhibiting rare, interesting, or typical specimens or works of art, science, invention, etc., or of antiquities, curiosities or subjects of natural history’. Within the museum field, the generalization ‘a place for the muses’ is assumed to mean a fixed place with a very specific mission. The American Association of Museums in 1970 defined a museum as: and permanent non-profit institution, essentially educational or . . . an organized aesthetic in purpose, with professional staff, which owns and utilizes tangible objects, cares for them and exhibits them to the public on some regular schedule.
THEODORE ANTON SANDE
Taking this definition a step further, and emphasizing society, the International Council of Museums (ICOM),
187
the museum’s active role in agreed in 1974 that:
A museum is a non-profit making, permanent institution in the service of society and of its development, and open to the public which acquires, conserves, researches, communicates and exhibits, for purposes of study, education and enjoyment, material evidence of man and his environment. Nothing of this sort existed in the classical world, as far as we know, except, perhaps, at the Alexandria Library. In the Judeo-Christian era, the Vatican Library became a major collector of manuscripts and artifacts, but it could hardly be said that it was ‘open to the public’ or that it was in ‘the service of society’ as we understand that phrase today. The same is true of the cabinets of curiosity created by a few noblemen and intellectuals during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. It is not until the 18th century that we begin to see emerging an intellectual curiosity about the past that sets the foundation for the encyclopedically based, scientifically and systematically ordered museums that became firmly established in western civilization by the late 19th century. As has been shown elsewhere, with respect to the historic preservation movement, the influences that come together to create the fertile climate for the modern museum are: (I) the enlightenment, that breaks the western Judeo-Christian cultural continuity of 1700 years; (2) the Cartesian perception of incremental time, that raises the possibility of dividing the past into discrete, seemingly objective, sequential blocks of time that can be artificially segmented, identified and studied; (3) the passion for classification of the material world, that cultivates the belief that all things have a logical place in a rational and comprehensive universe; and (4) the shocking realization that, through industrialism, we had achieved the power to alter the natural world, and that, whereas until the 18th century human beings existed within a dominant natural environment, now they had acquired the ability to overpower and destroy both nature and their own creations. Thus the need was perceived to save what would otherwise be obliterated. This latter strand is the key to understanding the current flowering of museums. We must reach far back in our heritage to find an approximate precedent. The origin of the concept of a museum, in the conservational and catastrophic sense, is found in the Book of Genesis, chapters 6 through 8, where the story is told of Noah and the Ark. According to this Hebrew legend, God, displeased with the living beings he has created, decides to destroy them: And, behold, I, even I, do bring a flood of waters upon the earth to destroy all flesh, wherein is the breath of life, from under heaven; and every thing that is in the earth shall die. Then,
God tempers his wrath: But with thee [Noah] will I establish my covenant; and thou and thy sons, and thy wife, and thy sons’ wives with thee. And of every living thing of all flesh, two of every sort shall thou bring into the ark, to keep them alive with thee; they shall be male and female.
Noah becomes, at least for a little while, the first Noah’s mission is clearly that generated by the the realization of an impending loss and the need that of surviving the flood with his cargo intact so after all other tainted forms of life had been gotten
living-history museum director. fourth condition cited above; that is, to protect against it. Noah’s task was that a more perfect life could continue rid of. His Ark was a practical answer
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to a catastrophic situation, not a scientific or intellectual venture to learn more about the natural world. From the ancient, dark time of this Hebrew tale through classical mythology, ancient history and over 1700 years of Christian tradition, objects, material things, in and of themselves, occupied a minor place in intellectual life. Painting and sculpture flourished at various times but, even in the Renaissance, the painter or the sculptor was more craftsman than artist, as we understand that term today. The Ancient, Medieval and Renaissance artisans did not often invent the subjects they depicted. Success or failure depended upon how faithfully they told, in visual terms, the story or represented the idea desired by their patrons. Michelangelo’s genius resided in his ability both to meet and transcend the limitations of the artistic program given him by the patron, not in inventing the program itself. His work was intended for a particular room or cathedral and was not a generalized expression conceived for the neutral walls of a museum. Art from ancient times to the 19th century was literal, specific, purposeful and practical. If it was also beautiful to the viewer, so much the better. Many beautiful things were made over this 4000-year interval: not just pictures and statues, but jewelry, silver and gold dishes, and goblets, pottery and glass, as we now see in our museums. However, these things were all made to be used and enjoyed at the time, and some were deliberately modified as fashion changed from one period to the next. Silver utensils, one’s tangible wealth in early America, were frequently melted down and reworked to suit current taste up to the end of the 18th century. And, other than in the churches, or civic structures and squares, where selected works of art symbolized the power of the ecclesiastical or royal authority, the rare and the beautiful objects were shared by the privileged few and used only by them. Public access to great works of secular art and to other rare and beautiful objects comes only in the 19th century, and relatively late at that. In short, up to the 19th century there is no need for art museums because the works of art were, so to speak, in use for the purposes they were intended to serve, and these purposes had nothing to do with public education about art per se: religious instruction and propaganda, yes; art appreciation, no. Today’s didactic, comparative exhibitions of artworks on off-white walls, with pictures arranged in chronological order, presumably for the edification of visitors far removed from the paintings’ origins, would never have occurred to the pre-18th-century mind. Let me give one graphic example of the contemporary art museum that goes beyond mere display to become a place where the artists themselves actually participate in 17 creating the museum. The front page of The Wull Street Journal for Thursday, October 1991, carried an article on the Mattress Factory, an old six-story warehouse on Pittsburgh’s North Side. It was founded in 1977 as a museum by a sculptor named Barbara Luderowski. Funded by a mix of governmental and private money, she has managed to commission over 70 artists, worldwide, to create what is billed as the only permanent collection of installation art. John Caldwell, Curator of Painting and Sculpture at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, is quoted as saying of the Mattress Factory: ‘It’s one of the great undiscovered cultural resources in America. The art you see there usually can’t be seen anywhere else except New York, and often not even there.’ Some examples : a walk-in freezer full of Victorian furniture; a dank a huge enclosure of hay to be climbed, sat on and basement display of shoe-boxes; smelled; and a room full of 6600 Budweiser beer cans, American flags and debris. It’s easy to scoff at this sort of thing, but, quite frankly, it fascinates me and I’m eager to visit it. Why? Because the Mattress Factory seems to me to be conceptually close to the
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classical sense of a museum, a place for the muses which at the same time meets the generally accepted standards of a museum. The ICOM definition of a museum, quoted above, was revised in 1989. It still incorporates the key elements accepted by most persons active in the museum field today, and perhaps we should look at it again a little more closely: A museum is a non-profit making, permanent institution in the service of society and of its development, and open to the public, which acquires, conserves, researches, communicates, and exhibits, for purposes of study, education and enjoyment, material evidence of people and their environment. There is something of the camel about this definition. It is clearly the work of a committee-even worse, an international committee-and it is a model of the kind of statement, produced by such bodies, that tries very, very hard not to offend anyone. It is, however, a distilling to the essence of the contemporary museum ideal. There are four key components of this ideal and they are rather in inverse order to the ICOM statement. First, there must be a collection (material evidence of people and their environment). Second, the collection serves the purposes of study, education, cultural advancement and enjoyment through the acquisition, conservation and presentation of the collection. Third, the institution that is responsible for housing and displaying the collection has a permanent place of public service in its society. And, fourth, it is an institution that rises above commercial consideration so as to be able to devote itself fully and objectively to public service. What is remarkable about this modern museum ideal is not that museums, as we know them, were so late in coming, but that they have come to be at all. For the fact of the matter is that a museum, as defined by ICOM and in the strictest sense, is an un-natural institution. It exists to save for study and amusement material things that would, in the normal course of events in the natural world, decay and disappear. Matter-at least the matter of our common-sense existence-is governed by the Second Law of Thermodynamics and over some period of time, however long or short, it will disintegrate, unless something is done continuously to counteract this natural tendency. Museums are society’s agents for doing precisely that; they carry on the continual, never-to-end process of preserving the physical evidence of human existence and the natural world. Not only is this evidence physically impermanent, most of it was not created with the intention that it remain. The vast majority of things human beings make are, and always have been, made to meet immediate objectives. Expediency, not durability, characterizes what humankind produces for daily living. The products of government, religion, science and the arts, on the other hand, are, intentionally, exceptions. They seek long-range objectives, continuity, perpetuation, order and process that transcend the short-term demands of daily life. Even their works, however, are subject to obsolescence and decay. Additionally, the objects in museum collections are, quite literally, out of place. They were not made for museum display, but for utilitarian, ceremonial and decorative purposes totally outside the context of a museum. These things of human existence and the material world are the residue of life and the selected representations of our biosphere. The only exception I can think of to this generalization is the work of modern artists that is designed and executed primarily, if not exclusively, for museum display, as we have seen in the case of the Mattress Factory. And this is, in effect, an aberration resulting from the separation of artists from their original, integral craft function in society as the expressive force of the established ecclesiastical and secular orders that exist
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in Western European civilization up to the l&h-century cultural break I cited earlier. The schism between artist and society is an evident and logical reflection of the schism between the pre- and post-industrial worlds. The fact that museum objects are things that, in general, have been removed from their original contexts places on the museum the fundamental responsibility of proving these contexts and replicating them, where this is instructive. It is the registrar’s job to acquire and maintain the documentary evidence, to establish the provenance of the objects in the collection. It is the curator’s job to make the objects comprehensible to the visiting public, to interpret them, to breathe life into them by the artificial mechanical and electronic techniques of display. Since society is constantly changing, the collections must be reinterpreted and re-presented from time to time in order to assure that their meaning is not lost to the contemporary world. This sounds easier than it is in practice because we are not always sensitive to changes in the culture of which we are a part. Further, objects placed in museums tend to acquire a life and value of their own, totally disassociated from their origins. The result, either way, leads us back to the cabinets of curiosity of the pre-industrial era, but without the over-arching cultural tradition of that time. A museum, then, is an agent of society that seeks to counteract the natural tendency to decay of material things. It also must act to accommodate the broad societal changes that are always occurring around it by preserving the intellectual value and the cultural meaning of the objects in its collections. These are the two primary forces the museum continually faces. Each museum has its own collecting goals. No one museum either wants to, or has the capacity to, acquire everything. Museums define their collecting objectives through their charter, mission statements and collecting policies. As noted at the beginning of this article, we have reached a point where virtually everything of the physical world, man-made and natural, is being collected today by one or another museum, or saved in historic buildings and historic districts. Most of these museums are new and, I think, show a broad cultural tendency to save that is less a reflection of healthy intellectual curiosity than it is a pathological drive to preserve what are found to be the valuable elements of our artificial and natural environments. If this is, indeed, a valid surmise and everything conceivable is embraced by this modern tendency, then we must conclude that we have reached a point in today’s world of morbid insecurity about the present. The present is always in a state of flux. However, the intensity of that state has increased steadily in the western world, especially, since the 18th century: its Age of Enlightenment, which saw the collapse of the old, dominant ecclesiastical order; the Industrial Revolution, which gave to humans for the first time ever the capability of radically altering or destroying their own creations and the natural world; and the series of large-scale mechanized wars, beginning with the US Civil War of 1861-65 and culminating in the 20th-century’s Global 30 Years War, and 1939-45, and numerous lesser savage with its two principal phases: 1914-18 campaigns in between. With the end of the second phase in 1945, the Nuclear Age, ushered in that year by the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, established a new plateau beyond large-scale mechanized warfare that is truly apocalyptic, and this has heightened the level of collective fear regarding human mortality. The atomic bomb embodies all the destructive potential that sensitive observers saw 200 years ago. Recent easings of tension between Eastern Europe, the Soviet States and the USA has not changed the fundamental fact that the human race has created the capacity to destroy itself. We do not know what the future holds. We only know that it will be different from what has existed in the past. And although that past began to lose its long-standing
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integrity almost 300 years ago, strands of it remain, even in the contemporary, volatile, transition period. For those who are troubled and fearful about this condition-and there appear to be many-the museum becomes a source of stability, a place where things are permanently fixed in time, a place where things seem to be safe, a place, like Noah’s Ark, where that which is within is protected from the hostile surrounding environment. I cannot predict the future museum any more than can others; but I can speculate. What I see are two well-defined and long-standing trends that will develop in intensity, accelerated by computer technology. They will probably mature separately. The first trend is what I call the move toward ‘ultimate quantification’. This type of museum of the future will become primarily a massive storehouse containing exhaustive amounts of material on its subject (art, science, regional history or whatever). Each artifact will be extensively catalogued and cross-referenced in every conceivable way so that virtually any inquiry regarding it, its relation to other objects of its type across time, to other similar objects of its period and to the society that produced it can be tested and analysed. The main focus would be collecting, research and continuing reinterpretation resulting in scholarly reports and publications. Exhibition would be confined to what are today styled ‘study-storage displays’ or to highly specialized, changing exhibits. These museums will be maintained by the state and not by private sources. A current instance of the type of highly intellectualized exhibition this kind of museum might mount was the 1890s show at the Nordic Museum in Stockholm, Sweden. I saw it in mid-September 1991 and found it incomprehensible. A Swedish colleague has since explained to me that the curators organized the display on deconstructivist principles. No wonder I saw so many perplexed and bemused looks on the visitors’ faces. It is unlikely that many of them were familiar with deconstructivism or would understand its application to a museum exhibition. Yet, for a small group of intellectuals, I am sure this exhibition can provide a rarefied satisfaction. The appeal here is to the specialist, not to the general visitor. The second trend, diametrically opposite to the first, I term the ‘heightened historical reality’ approach. At its best, this development could lead to a truly educational experience; at its worst, to sensationalism. The Epcot Center of today is the crude basis of heightened historical reality as I see its possibilities through increasingly realistic computer-generated simulation. Where natural history museums in particular have used for so many years the static diorama to give the visitor a plausible sense of environment and habitat in the natural world, the computerized simulators will be able seemingly to place the visitor in an active natural environment. The same will be true for history museums. In place of the frozen tableau of a historical event, there will be dynamic presentations that draw the visitor into the action as if he or she were present when the historical moment occurred. The possibilities and the risks are enormous: to be present at the signing of the Declaration of Independence is one thing; to be at the entrance of a Nazi concentration camp’s working gas-chamber is quite another. Who will create this heightened historical reality? What are its limits? And, the crucial question: are we any closer to a true understanding of the past by experiencing something that so graphically stimulates the senses, but that may be grounded on sparse or distorted historical information? Does the technology help us to know the past or does it merely create another barrier to our understanding? These ‘museums of sensory experience’ will be commercial ventures, as I see it, created primarily for profit; a few may be established and maintained by the state for purposes of propaganda. The trend towards commercialism is well advanced already through various
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museum revenue-producing programs, including: paid admission, membership subscription and merchandizing initiatives. High-priced travelling shows are aggressively marketed and are as important-perhaps more important-to a major museum’s sales shop as they are to a museum’s educational galleries. Tee-shirts, coffee mugs, jewelry, slick (but rarely read) catalogues and any other conceivable commercial spin-off from the show’s theme are shamelessly promoted. Just imagine the commercial potential when a museum can virtually knock out the customer (and subliminally induce buying) with heightened historical reality! Coupled with this increased commercialism, and to some degree sparked by it, both the Internal Revenue Service and the Financial Accounting Standards Board are taking steps now that could lead to the elimination of the charitable non-profit corporate concept within the decade. So, here we are standing with another poet, Robert Frost, at that point in the yellow wood where two roads diverged. Museums will have to choose which road they will take. The decision as to which way to go may be forced upon them before the turn of the century. Some will naturally tend towards the well-worn path of traditional collecting and research. They will be sustained by one or another form of governmental support. Some will venture further into commercial entrepreneurship and sensationalism. But are these paths really as divergent as they seem? Maybe not. Perhaps a synthesis of the two is possible. It is conceivable that somewhere over the hills and through the valleys of the future the two paths may converge on the Elysian Plain of a Teilhard de Chardin-like holistic union: paradise. Mattress Factory, anyone?