What this is about...

I started this blog because I have a strong interest in strategic planning, increasing revenue while maintaining organisational integrity, and making museums engaging places that are accessible to the widest audience possible. It is my goal to start conversations or trains of thought that can help museum stakeholders improve their organisation.

Tuesday, March 22, 2011

Art, Literature, and Museum Experience Ethics

This blog post comparing P.K. Dick and William Leavitt provided an interesting (and art-targeted) additional point to a trip I took recently to Southwell Workhouse with my partner and some of his historian colleagues. We were led around by one of the academics who had advised the National Trust when they first acquired the property. Because we had our own tour guide, we forewent the usual audio guides and enjoyed a mixed history of the building. This led to quite the discussion on the presentation, the omissions, and the modifications made, and something like a case study in how museums tell mediated truths.

When one enters the first room on the audio guide tour, a narrator explains the divided entrances that sort men, women, and children. According to our subject experts, not only was this a fabrication at Southwell, it just wasn't done. To most people educated in the Western world, there is only one thing this particular set up can evoke: the Holocaust. Torn between understanding the need to make a point about the difference between workhouse life and the outside world, and making a respectful, educational, but accurate presentation of life in a Victorian institution, I ended up disappointed.

Walls were whitewashed so that no trace of graffiti or other signs of the building's former inhabitants are visible. The museum literature pointed out that in the Workhouse, there was nothing but time. Inmates, they claimed, cleaned every facet spic and span constantly, despite the presence of large amounts of Workhouse-era graffiti when the building came to the trust. There was no mention on maps nor models as to where the mentally unfit, whether the result of syphilitic dementia or a genetic defect, would have been contained (in a part of the House not open to the public, we found out). The courtyard still drains into the cellar, yet the building has dehumidifiers and the only problems with damp were almost certainly intentional and on the top floor.

The rooms are unfurnished because apparently they went unphotographed and no one is sure of the type of furnishings or their layout. Despite the fact that there are dehumidifiers at work in at least portions of the house, it is unheated to preserve the sense of chill.

These two sets of facts when combined created a troubling picture of the visitor experience at Southwell. With an understanding that our group did not receive the full experience the way the National Trust expected us to, I still had a hard time with the way the house was edited. Not including furniture in room displays to prevent inaccuracy portrays the exhibition as highly concerned with facts. On the other hand, whitewashing both the walls and the layout conceal certain truths that would make the experience more accurate. I understand there are logistical concerns, such as the fact that once the graffiti is preserved in situ as an exhibit, visitor movement would be severely restricted. I am not asking for this kind of full disclosure.

To go back to the blog entry, I am quite happy with the mechanical bird method of production--as long as visitors realise they are seeing mechanical birds. Maybe the National Trust (or any number of other museums) is a bit too conservative to embrace the latest thinking. A post-modern, post-structuralist approach that lets all the wires hang out would encourage visitors to explore the ideas behind why the exhibition is the way it is, while the house is maintained in its current state. Instead of leading visitors to believe that the Workhouse is the way it is because that's how it always was, there is a tremendous opportunity to discuss Victorian Ideals and how the museum (and by extension, the National Trust in this case study) represents them.

I will leave the slippery slope between informing and entertaining for another entry. If museums are presenting "The Truth", don't they have an ethical obligation to draw a visible line between fact and interpretation? Should museums make a commitment to telling the truth, or labelling interpretation, throughout the experience?

Wednesday, March 2, 2011

An Interesting Advertisement

Apparently LACMA will be placing this in 3D movie theatres across the US... What do you think?