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Polarity in museum policy
The InternattonalJournal
of Musewn
Managementand
Curatorship
(1986), 5,65-72
Polarity in Museum Policy Dutch Museums
as an Expression
of Present-day
Society
HENKOVERDUIN
At the height of its material prosperity, Western culture had by the end of the 1960s made a U-turn. Certain catchwords suffice to summon up the images of the fermenting world of those days in all its intensity. Paris: the events of May 1968. New York, Washington: Vietnam protest demonstrations. Liverpool, London: Beatles, Carnaby Street. Amsterdam: Provo-happenings, university democratization. In the middle of this culture-shock the Dutch museums lay dormant, in all their splendour, not unlike Sleeping Beauty dreaming the last dreams of her hundred years’ sleep. In the very year of the Paris student revolt 324 Dutch museums welcomed fewer than 7 million visitors. Most of these museums were run by the various public sector authorities, and these were not particularly generous towards either collections or education. Purchasing budgets were relatively low and in the entire country fewer than 20 educators were then in post. Fifteen years later, the princes of ‘Culture’ and ‘Economics’ have woken the Museum Sleeping Beauty with their kisses. One enticed her to qualitative changes, whilst the other became her companion in both prosperity and budget cuts. Today the number of museums comes close to 600, and the visitors have more than doubled to over 15 million. Strengthened by a policy document concerning museums issued by the Minister of Culture in 1976, in which the museum was considered to be a means of achieving human happiness, the number of museum educators has increased to 3/4OO, and although exact figures are not available, the number of museum objects acquired is likely to have increased along the same lines. Together Dutch museums must today possess many millions of objects. As President of the Nederlandse Museumvereniging (Dutch Museum Association) in 1984, I presented a paper to the ICOFOM Congress held in Leyden, and for this conference of museologists I chose these museum objects as the basis of my discourse, using their changing significance as a means of clarifying official policy in the Netherlands towards its museums. In my opinion the museum reflects society as a whole. It can be thought of as a single cell: enlarged under the microscope one is able to deduce many of the characteristics of the entire organism. Indeed it would seem - and this anticipates much of what I am going to postulate - that museum policy, as far as management structure and content are concerned, is just as fragmentary as the culture of our entire society. Collected as a simple object today, each material aspect of our existence will become a vehicle conveying history tomorrow. A museum houses historical reality as distilled through selected objects. In a certain sense the museum is closer to reality than any other form of historiography. Historical reality commences as fact, but it gradually changes into fiction as time goes by and each period adds its own interpretations to the original fact. Not everything is collected into the museum, since the museum immediately applies 0260-4779/86/01 0065.08503.0001986 Butrenvorrh
&Co(Publishers)Ltd
66
Polarity in Mmwn
Polrc~: Dutch Museums
its own specific reductions to reality; but the authentic museum object will always remain the starting-point. Unlike written accounts, the museum measures every interpretation against its material origins, and in this sense museums are the strongest part of our collective memory. They literally make visible our society’s history of ideas in various layers of meaning. Not only are they the material point of reference for our rational interpretations of the history of art and science, they even represent our collective subconscious, what the psychologist Jung calls ‘archetypes’. From all the possible means of interpretation of muscum objects I here select two as the opposite ends of the vital thread which runs through the history of Western culture, and my theoretical starting-point is best explained by reference to objects of immediate significance today. Few are not acquainted with the products of those designers who have been working since 1981 in Milan under the names of ‘Memphis’ and ‘Alchemia’. Exuberantly designed ‘furniture’, as a manifestation of so-called anti-design, offers our curators of applied arts exciting topics for discussion. What is it that symbolizes their language of form? Alessandro Mendini, the major theorist of the group, asks the designers no longer to make ‘a true, real and fixed design’. They must abandon the idea of a ‘perfect design which will live forever’. Quite the contrary, he states: Let us try to imagine the opposite: change in a thing may be of greater importance uncertainty more important than certainty, and Romantic than stability, significance more vital than rational. Such a statement, for me, is as true for museum policy as it is for furniture. Mendini calls on his colleagues to besiege the internationalist and functional fortress of the Bauhaus designers with Romantic, non-functional and by definition uncertain forms. I challenge my colleagues to fight the narrowly rational line of thought, in which the museums have been wrapped up by our public sector authorities with their various policy documents, by becoming involved themselves. I will return to this later. Mendini’s ideas take their place within the force-field between Ratio and Romanticism which has controlled our culture since the middle of the 18th century, but they also have their roots in the sub-layers of our consciousness, in the archetypal rhythm of life, personified by the Greek gods Apollo and Dionysus. They are the extremes of Classical civilization. One is the god of light, the protector of organized society. The other, being the god of wine, represents overwhelming ecstasy. They are the dialectic representations of archetypes that are, more or less, the unconscious basis of our Western society, that is until Friedrich Nietzsche, in 1872, placed the Apollonian element in our culture in clear opposmon to the Dionysiac and made the contrast conscious. The one term signifies quiet, balance and harmony; the other reflects the passionate and the unlimited. Apollo is Ratio, and Dionysus, his direct adversary, is Passion. From our understanding of the collective unconscious, these dialectic gods lead the way towards my second pair of notions--Ratio and Romanticism. These bring us back again to the intellectual and artistic traditions of the times in which the modern museum was born. In the 18th century the need to provide a general education for much larger numbers of people sprang from the ideals of the Enlightenment. In England and France museums emerged; collections which, until then, had been in the private possession of monarchs became public. They revealed a universal world, and just as the and prelates, EncyclopCdie by Diderot and d’Alembert gave its readers a complete world-picture, so the museums of those days reflected the entire cosmos, the works of nature and mankind as a single whole. In that world Man moves about, as thephilosophes associated with the social change and its regulation. The EncyclopPdie saw him, open to manipulation,
HENK OVERDUIN
67
thinkers of the Enlightenment passionately believed in progress and the possibilities for Man if he set out to change the conditions of his own life. Knowledge and science would automatically further that progress. When we move on into our own times we find many traces of the ideas of the Rationalists throughout our present system. Of course there are a few museums left, such as the Teylers Museum in Haarlem, which ha\Te so far retained their own vision of the arts and sciences, but other collections formed between the Enlightenment and our own times owe more to the optimism of the Dutch museums after the 1960s. We are beginning to reduce both Man and museum to psychological and social facts, knowledge about which is supposed to bring about changes. First we subject our public to market research and then classify their social backgrounds in relation to their ‘museum Meanwhile museum educational departments are growing tremendously, behaviour’. as well as colleagues from other and their staff particularly, with the politicians, museums, set out the rationalist picture of mankind in which Man, and thus the visitor to a museum, can be manipulated at will. At the same time the Dutch have become conscious that even the traditional museum cannot escape the pressure of social conformity, or, even more strongly, that it can be steered. Then, in the Netherlands, the becomes the focus of policy decisions which prove to be museum system techno-bureaucratic. Museums come within the field of controllable reality. Just like the curators who attempt to make their collections more objective, possibly using data management techniques, or the museum educators who are systematically gathering facts concerning their target groups, which until then they had approached intuitively, museum authorities as well as museum directors are setting out to formulate a policy of controllability. The number of official reports on museums increases rapidly--I know of at least 30-and the forthcoming policy document concerning museums, to be issued by the Minister in the Netherlands, can end this line of thought. But we can also arrive at the present-day museum via another historical line, by retracing our steps back from the Memphis design to the 18th century, where we find instead the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Some see him also as part of the French Enlightenment, but others regard him as the herald of the Romanticism which was to dominate European culture and the museum. Rousseau has by no means ceased to act as a historical source of influence. His reputation is based on the fact that he turned against the established cultural ideas of his own days, and he did not believe the Rationalists’ optimistic analyses. The cultural establishment made him suffer and he fought it from the position of Nature. One of the ideas he put forward is that art and science could lead to greater and greater heights, but that human nature and social intercourse were becoming more and more corrupted. Man thus lives in tension and a web of contradictions, alienated from his own nature. He clings to superficial things instead of returning to the state of his origin, to simplicity, frankness and the morality of the natural life. Rousseau’s richly fertile philosophy gave birth to Romanticism and so became the warp that, with the Rationalists’ woof, was to allow the weaving of the colourful patchwork which is the history of ideas embodied in the Western museums, We know how Romanticism gave expression to the idea of ‘the nation’ and nationalistic historiography in our museums. We also realize how strongly Rousseau’s varied pedagogical ideas have influenced our educational systems until this very day. More than anything else, however, the importance of his philosophy lies in the fact that, again and again, it was an inspiration for those protesting against the accepted cultural standards of their times. Rousseau’s quest for the unspoilt, natural state of mankind is an ever-present beacon in the history of our museums. The art museums, for instance, began in the 20th
68
Polarity in Museum Policy: Dutch Museums
century to select works on the basis of nature and primitivism, even believing in 'natural talents'. Artists were supposed to possess still some 'primitive' powers which other modern men had lost, so the products of the primitive, the mentally disturbed, the naive and of young, unspoilt children are welcomed in their midst, and also, quite recently, graffiti painters. There is hardly any kind of museum which can escape completely Rousseau's influence. The traditional ethnographical museum, for instance, exhibited the so-called 'primitive man' in his natural state and by implication praised his culture as throwing light on an earlier, happier stage in Western culture. In this way, shortly after the turn of the century, the ethnological museum in the Netherlands came into existence as a reaction against the impact of the Industrial Revolution whilst it searched for the roots of its own culture, in an unconscious expression of social criticism. The roots, it was expected, were to be found in rural areas--'the more primitive, the better'. But, coming back to the present day, it would seem, from a report on the Dutch museums of natural history, entitled A Matter of Life and Death (1983), and in the ways in which our illustrious friend in the 18th century and the critical movement of the 1970s cross each other's paths in moral judgements, that our culture has almost killed 'innocent' nature. Although every object retains an individual value, it becomes normative within the context of the museum. Consequently every kind of museum policy adds new meanings to objects, and my vision of the two-track history of museum ideas may be familiar to many museologists. But I wish to demonstrate the necessity of dialectics in our profession. In the museum Ratio and Romanticism are lost without each other. The history of museums yields all too many examples of what may go wrong if one of them disappears beyond the horizon of our consciousness. One-sided Rationalism may result in excessive materialism and the naive assumption that Man will behave 'rationally' (or be well adjusted), even in the museum. One-sided Romanticism can bring us instead oppressive ethnic solidarity and sentiments. It is my belief that a balanced museum policy will acquire its shape between those poles, and I can now sketch in some major lines in Dutch museum policy over the past 15 years, comparing them to my normative duo of Ratio and Romanticism, and for this I will follow four tracks through our recent past: 1. Updating (the relationship between the museum and the outside world is brought up-to-date); 2. Changing notion of culture (the traditional notion of culture shifts towards emancipatory meanings); 3. Change in relationship to the past (our relationship with the past has changed drastically in the recent decades); 4. Demands of the public.
Updating Every time an eccentric point of view on contemporary art is combined with a clear vision of the public function of the museum this combination creates a milestone in museum history. Circa 1970 a group of young art historians had gathered round Museumjournaal--at the time the only contemporary art periodical in the Netherlands--and again questioned the function of art in society. Was the museum supposed to cover the whole field of contemporary visual culture and to comment upon it, or was art a strictly autonomous phenomenon? Fifteen years later it seems as if their ideas have been consigned to the shelves in the mausoleum of art history, like those of so many other avant-gardes of the past, but other types of museums have taken over their debate on the
HENK OVERDUIN
69
socialization of the museum. As early as the Renaissance, the Western world had appropriated elements of non-Western cultures without acknowledging these sources of inspiration for cultural change. Quite often these sources were indeed considered inferior. After the 1960s a new attitude towards non-Western cultures became evident. A massive quantity of the products of exotic cultures were imported, but this time not merely for economic reasons, they also represented a kind of self-reflection. The threat of technology and further industrialization made us long for 'more innocent' cultures on a large scale. In the 1970s exoticism became a regular part of Dutch everyday life. O u r ethnographical museums translated this new cultural drift into presentations in which criticism of the self-centred colonial Western past emerged into the more topical issues of the Third World. Craft museums responded as well, shifting the boundaries of their world. At present they are very interested in objects which document exchanges of forms and ideas between various cultures, processes which quite often continued for long periods of time. Similar developments took place in museums of natural history, and in their combined report, A Matter of Life and Death, the Dutch museums of natural history expressed their strong criticism of the way in which Man and industry posed a threat to nature. The collections of the museum thus no longer bore witness only to the past; they were helping Man to take new bearings in a changing world.
Changing Notion of Culture From the 1960s, in the Netherlands, the boundaries of the notion of 'culture' have been carefully examined and re-established. There are many impulses. In the first place there is the democratization of society, which, almost automatically, created tension between the so-called 'elite' culture and the culture of the powerless. Connected with this, academic attitudes in certain circles changed as well. A group of historians began to point to gaps in historiography and they discovered the historiography of the 'common people', of workers and women. They opened their eyes to the impulses coming from cultural and sexual minorities and counter-cultures. Historiography became more human, as it were. Influenced by cultural anthropologists, some historians did not confine themselves to the objects, but searched for hidden meanings. Finally the changing notion of culture was made legitimate in the Netherlands for educational ideals. As early as the turn of this century attempts had been made to educate the 'common people' through art and culture, but now it was postulated that an understanding of one's historical situation was a first necessity in order to reach that goal. Dutch museums as well had, in the past, been collecting rather one-sidedly the culture of the upper classes, and so they were very hesitant with regard to these new social and academic ideas. In an attempt to summarize the state of affairs, it can be said that, certainly in temporary exhibitions in the Netherlands, the emancipation of the 'common people' has become an established fact. A limited number of museums apply themselves to the art and the cultural history of women and cultural minorities. Plans have even been made to organize documentary exhibitions about punk rockers, and to include the results of these in the collections. But there are still many questions to be answered. Where do we get tlae objects from? Does an object stand for itself, or does it symbolize a coherent cultural pattern? Does one only document the object, or does one also record its usage? With the possible answers, I can see another problem for the museums right away: an interesting loss of distinction between the various types of museums occurs. Does the exhibition about the life of a young Turkish boy, compared to that of a Dutch
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Polarity in Museum Policy: Dutch Museums
boy, belong in an historical or an ethnographical museum? And where do the punk rockers, with their important artistic emanation, reside: in a museum for history, art or craft? The 19th century concept of culture on which the museum was based is beginning to lose its stability in the Netherlands.
Change in Relationship to the Past By the end of the 1960s Dutch society and some of her chroniclers were beginning to select facts from history in a different manner. For the sake of convenience I use the word 'nostalgia', though not in the sentimental sense that we use nowadays. I see this idea with rather realistic eyes: nostalgia refers to an historical notion that is limited in time to a past that people still know from their own, or each other's memory. It has biographical aspects and does not go back any further than the turn of this century. The new thing about this historical notion is its scale: nostalgia permeates all the strata of society. Everyone can be an object of history or a writer of history. For the Dutch museums nostalgia has had extensive consequences. Historiography became more intimate than it had ever been before, history moved from the macro-level to the micro-level: the single person became for some the cell from which the history of a society could be recorded. In this way the small regional museums were given an unexpected opportunity. Their number increased tremendously during the 1970s, and they channelled the attention the Dutch developed for the small history. A second result of nostalgia is the current debate about collecting contemporary culture, the theme of the 1984 conference in Leyden. In the past, history was set back in time, but nostalgia has taught us that today's object may be tomorrow's history. Nostalgia prepares us to think of our own time as a collectable item. Since 1981 these issues have been discussed in seminars organized by the historical section of the Dutch Museums Association. Finally, nostalgia has been the cause of a considerable increase in the number of visitors to Dutch museums. Despite its initial role as a progressive force in Dutch culture, nostalgia was soon given a sentimental quality. All the sharp edges were taken off the past, and soft colours were added. Thus the perception of the museum changed, and our visitors attributed meanings to the objects which we had not intended. The past and the museum ended up being part of a culture of unproblematic enjoyment.
Demands of the Public Responding to a general need for democratization, including the arts and sciences, almost every politician in the 1970s felt obliged to take the educational role of the museum seriously. In fact it was the only time when one could speak of a consistent museum policy on the part of the public sector authorities in the Netherlands, both nationally and locally. Educational departments were expanded or founded all over the country and the number of museum educators increased to fifteen times as many as compared to 1968. It was well worth it. Whilst renowned diffusers of culture complained that the overall numbers of visitors were declining and that the socio-economic composition of the public for other traditional cultural activities, such as theatres and concert halls, was one-sided, the museums on the other hand turned out to be attracting more visitors. And their socio-economic position changed as well: in 1974, 11 per cent of the museum public came from the lower classes; in 1980 this percentage had risen to 20 per cent. At first the museums were scared by the intense interest from the political world, and the response to the Minister of Culture's 1976 policy document concerning
HENK OVERDUIN
71
museums was generally negative. In it the educational function of the museum was equated with that of conservation, but today there is hardly any debate, except perhaps in the modern art museum, which has also lost its advanced position in this respect. In those early years that welfare revolution within the museum walls was surrounded by an aura of novelty. The expectations of society could identify themselves with the museum educator's activities, which were sometimes quite revolutionary. More than their colleagues, the museum educators contributed to the formulation of new theories in the profession and to the debate on museum policies. In its pre-scientific stage the young discipline of museology in the Netherlands owed much to education, but today it seems that for the museum educators the law of retarded progress has come into force. In the struggle for their own identity the formulation of targets has lagged behind a little and the emphasis now lies too much on educational means.
Conclusions From the above analyses it is apparent in what sense the present situation has influenced m y interpretations of the Dutch museum system over the past decade. My choice from the recent museum past has been determined by what I consider good or bad in the present. In the eyes of the public sector authorities culture today seems to be a matter of economics, plus and minus. The only weapon the museum has at its disposal is the creative power of its people and its objects. My analyses are based upon value-judgements, and going by the criteria that I draw from the two-track tradition of the museum, Ratio and Romanticism, I would like to point to a number of situations in which the necessary polarity is wanting. Firstly, like central government, the museums as well can put too much Ratio in their policy. With regard to museum education the heritage of the Enlightenment has not been favourable to us over the past decade. We regarded Man too much as a causal construction. We surrounded our objects with language. O n the condition that all sentences remained short, difficult words were omitted and the right tone was adopted for the 'target group', we believed that our public wanted to and had to learn all sorts of things in the museum. Personally, I have left this optimistic concept of Man behind. I believe that the quality of the object precedes the exact observation, which cannot be caught in language. Secondly, due to trends I have already indicated, the museum has become part of a generally accepted recreational pattern. Recreation is number one in the sentimental variants of nostalgia, exoticism and the natural state. Education only comes in second place, being a learning process or a change of mentality. I take this escape from reality seriously, as a criticism of our present society, but nevertheless I believe that some museums conform too much to these pleasant primitivistic and atavistic ideas about the past. With this extremely sentimental variant of Rousseau the balance between looking back and looking ahead is completely disturbed. In our ideas about objects as well, Ratio can too often be missing. I think that things are getting out of hand when it comes to the expansion of our combined museum collections and the founding of new museums. Its controllability will be the museums' problem of the future. For example, the Haags Gemeentemuseum, one of the largest and most varied in the Netherlands, acquires approximately 5000 additional objects every year. So the collecting activities of this, the museum in which I myself work, gives birth every year to the equivalent of a good-sized regional museum. Apart from that, every year sees some 20 new museums founded. Furthermore, the meanings of the objects do
72
Polarity in Museum Policy: Dutch Museums
not increase as an arithmetical progression, but rather logarithmically, with each object evoking associations with other objects. To my knowledge this almost irreversible process has not been formulated as such before. Developing further the above, I am beginning to wonder what the limitations of the museum really are. The museum scene itself invented the notion of the 'ecomuseum'. Thus each fragment of reality, so to speak, could be isolated by putting a sign saying 'Museum' above it. O n the other hand, mass culture is pulling a paradoxical joke on us by turning collecting into a trend. N o w that a landscape can be a museum and there is no limitation to private persons starting up museums, I will be frank: I do not like it at all when two amateurs fill a couple of rooms with old toys, open up a candy stbre next door, call it a museum and apply for a government subsidy within two years. I will not object to our Minister controlling this kind of museum Romanticism by means of some tests of efficiency, and he could also protect the word 'Museum' by means of legal measures.
Final Reflection I think that the Netherlands does not recognize a true museum policy in the centralistic sense of the word. It would not fit in with the delicate structure of the Dutch museum system. New developments have always been formulated by the museums themselves, and it is only in the field of museum education that society, through the central government, poses some justified questions. However, all the Ministerial policy documents, including those published in 1921, 1952 and 1976, have almost never posed new questions to the museums. They have only confirmed the practices already operating in the museum world, or part of it, for a long time.
of Musewn
Managementand
Curatorship
(1986), 5,65-72
Polarity in Museum Policy Dutch Museums
as an Expression
of Present-day
Society
HENKOVERDUIN
At the height of its material prosperity, Western culture had by the end of the 1960s made a U-turn. Certain catchwords suffice to summon up the images of the fermenting world of those days in all its intensity. Paris: the events of May 1968. New York, Washington: Vietnam protest demonstrations. Liverpool, London: Beatles, Carnaby Street. Amsterdam: Provo-happenings, university democratization. In the middle of this culture-shock the Dutch museums lay dormant, in all their splendour, not unlike Sleeping Beauty dreaming the last dreams of her hundred years’ sleep. In the very year of the Paris student revolt 324 Dutch museums welcomed fewer than 7 million visitors. Most of these museums were run by the various public sector authorities, and these were not particularly generous towards either collections or education. Purchasing budgets were relatively low and in the entire country fewer than 20 educators were then in post. Fifteen years later, the princes of ‘Culture’ and ‘Economics’ have woken the Museum Sleeping Beauty with their kisses. One enticed her to qualitative changes, whilst the other became her companion in both prosperity and budget cuts. Today the number of museums comes close to 600, and the visitors have more than doubled to over 15 million. Strengthened by a policy document concerning museums issued by the Minister of Culture in 1976, in which the museum was considered to be a means of achieving human happiness, the number of museum educators has increased to 3/4OO, and although exact figures are not available, the number of museum objects acquired is likely to have increased along the same lines. Together Dutch museums must today possess many millions of objects. As President of the Nederlandse Museumvereniging (Dutch Museum Association) in 1984, I presented a paper to the ICOFOM Congress held in Leyden, and for this conference of museologists I chose these museum objects as the basis of my discourse, using their changing significance as a means of clarifying official policy in the Netherlands towards its museums. In my opinion the museum reflects society as a whole. It can be thought of as a single cell: enlarged under the microscope one is able to deduce many of the characteristics of the entire organism. Indeed it would seem - and this anticipates much of what I am going to postulate - that museum policy, as far as management structure and content are concerned, is just as fragmentary as the culture of our entire society. Collected as a simple object today, each material aspect of our existence will become a vehicle conveying history tomorrow. A museum houses historical reality as distilled through selected objects. In a certain sense the museum is closer to reality than any other form of historiography. Historical reality commences as fact, but it gradually changes into fiction as time goes by and each period adds its own interpretations to the original fact. Not everything is collected into the museum, since the museum immediately applies 0260-4779/86/01 0065.08503.0001986 Butrenvorrh
&Co(Publishers)Ltd
66
Polarity in Mmwn
Polrc~: Dutch Museums
its own specific reductions to reality; but the authentic museum object will always remain the starting-point. Unlike written accounts, the museum measures every interpretation against its material origins, and in this sense museums are the strongest part of our collective memory. They literally make visible our society’s history of ideas in various layers of meaning. Not only are they the material point of reference for our rational interpretations of the history of art and science, they even represent our collective subconscious, what the psychologist Jung calls ‘archetypes’. From all the possible means of interpretation of muscum objects I here select two as the opposite ends of the vital thread which runs through the history of Western culture, and my theoretical starting-point is best explained by reference to objects of immediate significance today. Few are not acquainted with the products of those designers who have been working since 1981 in Milan under the names of ‘Memphis’ and ‘Alchemia’. Exuberantly designed ‘furniture’, as a manifestation of so-called anti-design, offers our curators of applied arts exciting topics for discussion. What is it that symbolizes their language of form? Alessandro Mendini, the major theorist of the group, asks the designers no longer to make ‘a true, real and fixed design’. They must abandon the idea of a ‘perfect design which will live forever’. Quite the contrary, he states: Let us try to imagine the opposite: change in a thing may be of greater importance uncertainty more important than certainty, and Romantic than stability, significance more vital than rational. Such a statement, for me, is as true for museum policy as it is for furniture. Mendini calls on his colleagues to besiege the internationalist and functional fortress of the Bauhaus designers with Romantic, non-functional and by definition uncertain forms. I challenge my colleagues to fight the narrowly rational line of thought, in which the museums have been wrapped up by our public sector authorities with their various policy documents, by becoming involved themselves. I will return to this later. Mendini’s ideas take their place within the force-field between Ratio and Romanticism which has controlled our culture since the middle of the 18th century, but they also have their roots in the sub-layers of our consciousness, in the archetypal rhythm of life, personified by the Greek gods Apollo and Dionysus. They are the extremes of Classical civilization. One is the god of light, the protector of organized society. The other, being the god of wine, represents overwhelming ecstasy. They are the dialectic representations of archetypes that are, more or less, the unconscious basis of our Western society, that is until Friedrich Nietzsche, in 1872, placed the Apollonian element in our culture in clear opposmon to the Dionysiac and made the contrast conscious. The one term signifies quiet, balance and harmony; the other reflects the passionate and the unlimited. Apollo is Ratio, and Dionysus, his direct adversary, is Passion. From our understanding of the collective unconscious, these dialectic gods lead the way towards my second pair of notions--Ratio and Romanticism. These bring us back again to the intellectual and artistic traditions of the times in which the modern museum was born. In the 18th century the need to provide a general education for much larger numbers of people sprang from the ideals of the Enlightenment. In England and France museums emerged; collections which, until then, had been in the private possession of monarchs became public. They revealed a universal world, and just as the and prelates, EncyclopCdie by Diderot and d’Alembert gave its readers a complete world-picture, so the museums of those days reflected the entire cosmos, the works of nature and mankind as a single whole. In that world Man moves about, as thephilosophes associated with the social change and its regulation. The EncyclopPdie saw him, open to manipulation,
HENK OVERDUIN
67
thinkers of the Enlightenment passionately believed in progress and the possibilities for Man if he set out to change the conditions of his own life. Knowledge and science would automatically further that progress. When we move on into our own times we find many traces of the ideas of the Rationalists throughout our present system. Of course there are a few museums left, such as the Teylers Museum in Haarlem, which ha\Te so far retained their own vision of the arts and sciences, but other collections formed between the Enlightenment and our own times owe more to the optimism of the Dutch museums after the 1960s. We are beginning to reduce both Man and museum to psychological and social facts, knowledge about which is supposed to bring about changes. First we subject our public to market research and then classify their social backgrounds in relation to their ‘museum Meanwhile museum educational departments are growing tremendously, behaviour’. as well as colleagues from other and their staff particularly, with the politicians, museums, set out the rationalist picture of mankind in which Man, and thus the visitor to a museum, can be manipulated at will. At the same time the Dutch have become conscious that even the traditional museum cannot escape the pressure of social conformity, or, even more strongly, that it can be steered. Then, in the Netherlands, the becomes the focus of policy decisions which prove to be museum system techno-bureaucratic. Museums come within the field of controllable reality. Just like the curators who attempt to make their collections more objective, possibly using data management techniques, or the museum educators who are systematically gathering facts concerning their target groups, which until then they had approached intuitively, museum authorities as well as museum directors are setting out to formulate a policy of controllability. The number of official reports on museums increases rapidly--I know of at least 30-and the forthcoming policy document concerning museums, to be issued by the Minister in the Netherlands, can end this line of thought. But we can also arrive at the present-day museum via another historical line, by retracing our steps back from the Memphis design to the 18th century, where we find instead the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Some see him also as part of the French Enlightenment, but others regard him as the herald of the Romanticism which was to dominate European culture and the museum. Rousseau has by no means ceased to act as a historical source of influence. His reputation is based on the fact that he turned against the established cultural ideas of his own days, and he did not believe the Rationalists’ optimistic analyses. The cultural establishment made him suffer and he fought it from the position of Nature. One of the ideas he put forward is that art and science could lead to greater and greater heights, but that human nature and social intercourse were becoming more and more corrupted. Man thus lives in tension and a web of contradictions, alienated from his own nature. He clings to superficial things instead of returning to the state of his origin, to simplicity, frankness and the morality of the natural life. Rousseau’s richly fertile philosophy gave birth to Romanticism and so became the warp that, with the Rationalists’ woof, was to allow the weaving of the colourful patchwork which is the history of ideas embodied in the Western museums, We know how Romanticism gave expression to the idea of ‘the nation’ and nationalistic historiography in our museums. We also realize how strongly Rousseau’s varied pedagogical ideas have influenced our educational systems until this very day. More than anything else, however, the importance of his philosophy lies in the fact that, again and again, it was an inspiration for those protesting against the accepted cultural standards of their times. Rousseau’s quest for the unspoilt, natural state of mankind is an ever-present beacon in the history of our museums. The art museums, for instance, began in the 20th
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Polarity in Museum Policy: Dutch Museums
century to select works on the basis of nature and primitivism, even believing in 'natural talents'. Artists were supposed to possess still some 'primitive' powers which other modern men had lost, so the products of the primitive, the mentally disturbed, the naive and of young, unspoilt children are welcomed in their midst, and also, quite recently, graffiti painters. There is hardly any kind of museum which can escape completely Rousseau's influence. The traditional ethnographical museum, for instance, exhibited the so-called 'primitive man' in his natural state and by implication praised his culture as throwing light on an earlier, happier stage in Western culture. In this way, shortly after the turn of the century, the ethnological museum in the Netherlands came into existence as a reaction against the impact of the Industrial Revolution whilst it searched for the roots of its own culture, in an unconscious expression of social criticism. The roots, it was expected, were to be found in rural areas--'the more primitive, the better'. But, coming back to the present day, it would seem, from a report on the Dutch museums of natural history, entitled A Matter of Life and Death (1983), and in the ways in which our illustrious friend in the 18th century and the critical movement of the 1970s cross each other's paths in moral judgements, that our culture has almost killed 'innocent' nature. Although every object retains an individual value, it becomes normative within the context of the museum. Consequently every kind of museum policy adds new meanings to objects, and my vision of the two-track history of museum ideas may be familiar to many museologists. But I wish to demonstrate the necessity of dialectics in our profession. In the museum Ratio and Romanticism are lost without each other. The history of museums yields all too many examples of what may go wrong if one of them disappears beyond the horizon of our consciousness. One-sided Rationalism may result in excessive materialism and the naive assumption that Man will behave 'rationally' (or be well adjusted), even in the museum. One-sided Romanticism can bring us instead oppressive ethnic solidarity and sentiments. It is my belief that a balanced museum policy will acquire its shape between those poles, and I can now sketch in some major lines in Dutch museum policy over the past 15 years, comparing them to my normative duo of Ratio and Romanticism, and for this I will follow four tracks through our recent past: 1. Updating (the relationship between the museum and the outside world is brought up-to-date); 2. Changing notion of culture (the traditional notion of culture shifts towards emancipatory meanings); 3. Change in relationship to the past (our relationship with the past has changed drastically in the recent decades); 4. Demands of the public.
Updating Every time an eccentric point of view on contemporary art is combined with a clear vision of the public function of the museum this combination creates a milestone in museum history. Circa 1970 a group of young art historians had gathered round Museumjournaal--at the time the only contemporary art periodical in the Netherlands--and again questioned the function of art in society. Was the museum supposed to cover the whole field of contemporary visual culture and to comment upon it, or was art a strictly autonomous phenomenon? Fifteen years later it seems as if their ideas have been consigned to the shelves in the mausoleum of art history, like those of so many other avant-gardes of the past, but other types of museums have taken over their debate on the
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socialization of the museum. As early as the Renaissance, the Western world had appropriated elements of non-Western cultures without acknowledging these sources of inspiration for cultural change. Quite often these sources were indeed considered inferior. After the 1960s a new attitude towards non-Western cultures became evident. A massive quantity of the products of exotic cultures were imported, but this time not merely for economic reasons, they also represented a kind of self-reflection. The threat of technology and further industrialization made us long for 'more innocent' cultures on a large scale. In the 1970s exoticism became a regular part of Dutch everyday life. O u r ethnographical museums translated this new cultural drift into presentations in which criticism of the self-centred colonial Western past emerged into the more topical issues of the Third World. Craft museums responded as well, shifting the boundaries of their world. At present they are very interested in objects which document exchanges of forms and ideas between various cultures, processes which quite often continued for long periods of time. Similar developments took place in museums of natural history, and in their combined report, A Matter of Life and Death, the Dutch museums of natural history expressed their strong criticism of the way in which Man and industry posed a threat to nature. The collections of the museum thus no longer bore witness only to the past; they were helping Man to take new bearings in a changing world.
Changing Notion of Culture From the 1960s, in the Netherlands, the boundaries of the notion of 'culture' have been carefully examined and re-established. There are many impulses. In the first place there is the democratization of society, which, almost automatically, created tension between the so-called 'elite' culture and the culture of the powerless. Connected with this, academic attitudes in certain circles changed as well. A group of historians began to point to gaps in historiography and they discovered the historiography of the 'common people', of workers and women. They opened their eyes to the impulses coming from cultural and sexual minorities and counter-cultures. Historiography became more human, as it were. Influenced by cultural anthropologists, some historians did not confine themselves to the objects, but searched for hidden meanings. Finally the changing notion of culture was made legitimate in the Netherlands for educational ideals. As early as the turn of this century attempts had been made to educate the 'common people' through art and culture, but now it was postulated that an understanding of one's historical situation was a first necessity in order to reach that goal. Dutch museums as well had, in the past, been collecting rather one-sidedly the culture of the upper classes, and so they were very hesitant with regard to these new social and academic ideas. In an attempt to summarize the state of affairs, it can be said that, certainly in temporary exhibitions in the Netherlands, the emancipation of the 'common people' has become an established fact. A limited number of museums apply themselves to the art and the cultural history of women and cultural minorities. Plans have even been made to organize documentary exhibitions about punk rockers, and to include the results of these in the collections. But there are still many questions to be answered. Where do we get tlae objects from? Does an object stand for itself, or does it symbolize a coherent cultural pattern? Does one only document the object, or does one also record its usage? With the possible answers, I can see another problem for the museums right away: an interesting loss of distinction between the various types of museums occurs. Does the exhibition about the life of a young Turkish boy, compared to that of a Dutch
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boy, belong in an historical or an ethnographical museum? And where do the punk rockers, with their important artistic emanation, reside: in a museum for history, art or craft? The 19th century concept of culture on which the museum was based is beginning to lose its stability in the Netherlands.
Change in Relationship to the Past By the end of the 1960s Dutch society and some of her chroniclers were beginning to select facts from history in a different manner. For the sake of convenience I use the word 'nostalgia', though not in the sentimental sense that we use nowadays. I see this idea with rather realistic eyes: nostalgia refers to an historical notion that is limited in time to a past that people still know from their own, or each other's memory. It has biographical aspects and does not go back any further than the turn of this century. The new thing about this historical notion is its scale: nostalgia permeates all the strata of society. Everyone can be an object of history or a writer of history. For the Dutch museums nostalgia has had extensive consequences. Historiography became more intimate than it had ever been before, history moved from the macro-level to the micro-level: the single person became for some the cell from which the history of a society could be recorded. In this way the small regional museums were given an unexpected opportunity. Their number increased tremendously during the 1970s, and they channelled the attention the Dutch developed for the small history. A second result of nostalgia is the current debate about collecting contemporary culture, the theme of the 1984 conference in Leyden. In the past, history was set back in time, but nostalgia has taught us that today's object may be tomorrow's history. Nostalgia prepares us to think of our own time as a collectable item. Since 1981 these issues have been discussed in seminars organized by the historical section of the Dutch Museums Association. Finally, nostalgia has been the cause of a considerable increase in the number of visitors to Dutch museums. Despite its initial role as a progressive force in Dutch culture, nostalgia was soon given a sentimental quality. All the sharp edges were taken off the past, and soft colours were added. Thus the perception of the museum changed, and our visitors attributed meanings to the objects which we had not intended. The past and the museum ended up being part of a culture of unproblematic enjoyment.
Demands of the Public Responding to a general need for democratization, including the arts and sciences, almost every politician in the 1970s felt obliged to take the educational role of the museum seriously. In fact it was the only time when one could speak of a consistent museum policy on the part of the public sector authorities in the Netherlands, both nationally and locally. Educational departments were expanded or founded all over the country and the number of museum educators increased to fifteen times as many as compared to 1968. It was well worth it. Whilst renowned diffusers of culture complained that the overall numbers of visitors were declining and that the socio-economic composition of the public for other traditional cultural activities, such as theatres and concert halls, was one-sided, the museums on the other hand turned out to be attracting more visitors. And their socio-economic position changed as well: in 1974, 11 per cent of the museum public came from the lower classes; in 1980 this percentage had risen to 20 per cent. At first the museums were scared by the intense interest from the political world, and the response to the Minister of Culture's 1976 policy document concerning
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museums was generally negative. In it the educational function of the museum was equated with that of conservation, but today there is hardly any debate, except perhaps in the modern art museum, which has also lost its advanced position in this respect. In those early years that welfare revolution within the museum walls was surrounded by an aura of novelty. The expectations of society could identify themselves with the museum educator's activities, which were sometimes quite revolutionary. More than their colleagues, the museum educators contributed to the formulation of new theories in the profession and to the debate on museum policies. In its pre-scientific stage the young discipline of museology in the Netherlands owed much to education, but today it seems that for the museum educators the law of retarded progress has come into force. In the struggle for their own identity the formulation of targets has lagged behind a little and the emphasis now lies too much on educational means.
Conclusions From the above analyses it is apparent in what sense the present situation has influenced m y interpretations of the Dutch museum system over the past decade. My choice from the recent museum past has been determined by what I consider good or bad in the present. In the eyes of the public sector authorities culture today seems to be a matter of economics, plus and minus. The only weapon the museum has at its disposal is the creative power of its people and its objects. My analyses are based upon value-judgements, and going by the criteria that I draw from the two-track tradition of the museum, Ratio and Romanticism, I would like to point to a number of situations in which the necessary polarity is wanting. Firstly, like central government, the museums as well can put too much Ratio in their policy. With regard to museum education the heritage of the Enlightenment has not been favourable to us over the past decade. We regarded Man too much as a causal construction. We surrounded our objects with language. O n the condition that all sentences remained short, difficult words were omitted and the right tone was adopted for the 'target group', we believed that our public wanted to and had to learn all sorts of things in the museum. Personally, I have left this optimistic concept of Man behind. I believe that the quality of the object precedes the exact observation, which cannot be caught in language. Secondly, due to trends I have already indicated, the museum has become part of a generally accepted recreational pattern. Recreation is number one in the sentimental variants of nostalgia, exoticism and the natural state. Education only comes in second place, being a learning process or a change of mentality. I take this escape from reality seriously, as a criticism of our present society, but nevertheless I believe that some museums conform too much to these pleasant primitivistic and atavistic ideas about the past. With this extremely sentimental variant of Rousseau the balance between looking back and looking ahead is completely disturbed. In our ideas about objects as well, Ratio can too often be missing. I think that things are getting out of hand when it comes to the expansion of our combined museum collections and the founding of new museums. Its controllability will be the museums' problem of the future. For example, the Haags Gemeentemuseum, one of the largest and most varied in the Netherlands, acquires approximately 5000 additional objects every year. So the collecting activities of this, the museum in which I myself work, gives birth every year to the equivalent of a good-sized regional museum. Apart from that, every year sees some 20 new museums founded. Furthermore, the meanings of the objects do
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not increase as an arithmetical progression, but rather logarithmically, with each object evoking associations with other objects. To my knowledge this almost irreversible process has not been formulated as such before. Developing further the above, I am beginning to wonder what the limitations of the museum really are. The museum scene itself invented the notion of the 'ecomuseum'. Thus each fragment of reality, so to speak, could be isolated by putting a sign saying 'Museum' above it. O n the other hand, mass culture is pulling a paradoxical joke on us by turning collecting into a trend. N o w that a landscape can be a museum and there is no limitation to private persons starting up museums, I will be frank: I do not like it at all when two amateurs fill a couple of rooms with old toys, open up a candy stbre next door, call it a museum and apply for a government subsidy within two years. I will not object to our Minister controlling this kind of museum Romanticism by means of some tests of efficiency, and he could also protect the word 'Museum' by means of legal measures.
Final Reflection I think that the Netherlands does not recognize a true museum policy in the centralistic sense of the word. It would not fit in with the delicate structure of the Dutch museum system. New developments have always been formulated by the museums themselves, and it is only in the field of museum education that society, through the central government, poses some justified questions. However, all the Ministerial policy documents, including those published in 1921, 1952 and 1976, have almost never posed new questions to the museums. They have only confirmed the practices already operating in the museum world, or part of it, for a long time.