Towards Museum 3.0 – One persons junk is another persons weapon – towards a manifesto that existentially blows up museums and galleries to calibrate for an emerging present.
Museum’s Outmoded Embedded Ideologies
Is it possible to reform the foundational paradigm and present reality of a museum? Does the weight of history, the weight of their history, make them largely immovable, unresponsive to our twenty-first century society and culture?
There is a lot of merit in tearing up/down much of the museum institution. As a culture, as a society, we should admit that the foundational tropes of museology are no longer relevant. If these tropes aren’t dead, they should be killed off. Start again. Start over. Rather than trim around the edges, we need remove their outmoded embedded ideologies. Rather than partial insubstantial reframing, museums need to have their architectural, exhibition and cultural agendas substantively upended.
I think we need reprioritize the museum’s mandate to be about asking difficult questions rather than supplying inadequate answers. It should be less about making the visitor feel good, coherent, edified, and become more about about making one feel provoked, uncomfortable, questioning.
A museum is an instrument of perception, if not a tool of outright propaganda. In the overwhelming number of cases around the world, museums are tools of propaganda justifying a colonialist past, extolling the virtues of the oppressing “victor”, at the expense of the subjugated oppressed. Implicitly, museums subscribe to the idea that they can somehow arrive at an evidentially based, coherent, and legitimate narrative on a specific event or time frame. That, in effect, one can freeze time, and with an authoritative voice, let people know what happened in that moment.
Let’s recognize the implicit twin lies of objectivity and the lie of progress. Let’s recognize too, the power of language. Individual words like “holdings” vs “collections” and stealing vs acquiring vs borrowing. As well as the authoritative power of a narrative.
Rewriting museum’s mandates and programming language using more inclusive politically correct language is not good enough. Pledging to be more representative in the collections isn’t good enough. Having token exhibits from a contrarian perspective isn’t good enough. Even in the cases where indigenous peoples have made their own museums, they are are still engaging in the terms of the oppressor. These treasures hoards, oftentimes ill-gotten are essentially “winners” spoils, linearly sequenced, elegantly and definitively framed, housed in a typically stodgy edifice, all arranged to justify the expansionist aggression of the patrician founders. The purpose built edifice is virtually impossible to challenge by even the most progressive and well meaning exhibition, as fundamentally, the exhibit must conform to the institutional norms, and the edifice remains.
Extolling the virtues of the colonizers is wrong, even reprehensible. And it is also small minded. For many of us, the most interesting parts of the renowned Capital museums are the non western, non euro centric cultures represented. Yet, do any of these depictions belong anywhere near a museum, the embodiment of a European victory march? In contrast, extolling the virtues of the colonizers – seems ridiculously small minded, as museums remain locked up treasure troves of ill-gotten goods.
Artifacts do not retain their validity taken from their legitimate contexts. Most – if not all? – museums are operating from false premises: that there is a sanctified historical meaning or legitimacy that will be gleaned by regarding objects taken out of their legitimizing contexts, and that this meaning can be retained or re-assigned or re-imbued into artifacts by means of presenting them in some sort of sequential narrative. Not only are such narratives always incomplete, for the overwhelming majority of indigenous cultures, the very idea of linear time is anathema to their traditional worldview.
How to “value”? Is it possible for something to retain value, when it is removed from the context in which it accrued its value in the first place? Meaning is not magically retained by the naming of things, or the ordering of things, or the containment of things within a certain frame. Objects don’t have talismanic powers in and of themselves. They need be imbued with these powers over time, and honoured by the shared values of their society. The relative talismanic powers of the indigenous people’s artifacts, have not only been been killed of their former power, but they have accrued the static, immovable, constipated power of the colonialist enterprise.
The ends do not justify the means. Also implicit in museums are the embodiment of the sentiment – in this context quite horrifying – that the ends justify the means. They don’t! One problem lies in the premise of their origin as cabinets of curiosities, “victory cabinets”, family heirlooms, and spoils of colonization. The colonizers/winners task was fundamentally dishonest because they knowingly claimed land, at the end of a gun, that they knew was not theirs. Soon after arriving they learned that the colonized people had completely different premises of ownership, sense of time, sense of value, which they knowingly, dishonestly, took advantage of. Even the trading or buying of artifacts inevitably came about by completely unbalanced “agreements”. I’m thinking of missionaries knowingly trading and “gifting” pox infected blankets, as well as the desperate starving artist. Such fundamentally unbalanced “agreements” continued by the be-quested foundational collections of most major museums. And it was not just the indigenous that were fleeced, other marginalized and oppressed peoples were as well – people of colour, poor people, people from minority religions or subordinate cultures, and starving artists. More often than not, the museum’s collection were started around some pious wealthy merchant or cleric who on their deathbed, after living a life of selfish hoarding, suddenly decided they were concerned for the well being – “the education” – of others.
We must undermine the one-sided cultural and historical narrative . Accept that the conventional associated narratives around the collections are incomplete, too limited in scope. Really, they are no more legitimate than a contemporary fictional one. I believe it is our duty as cultural workers, if not every single person in the so-called first world – me as an artist and exhibition designer, you as a curator, you as a cultural official – to continually and actively undermine the one-sided culture and history.
Willful naivety – I often speak of willful naivety as being a starting point for creation in a world where everything has been done. In an expansive and open minded way, let’s ask what else could a museum be? This is the seat of the “will” I am talking about in willful naivety.
Make museums predicated on asking questions. Museums are predicated on the collections and their efficacy in answering a narrative. Lets switch it around, make museums predicated on asking questions. Allow them to express doubt, be non conclusive, be difficult. Even make us feel uncomfortable.
Remain in the not knowing. Museum managers and administrators should transition to being about facilitating and holding contradiction and holding questions alive rather than providing definitive answers. Remain in the not knowing. We need to stop spoon feeding our audience. Lets make room and allow speculation, activation by the visitors imaginations. Lets allow some materials to remain secret, mysterious, un-illuminated, only partially revealed and concealed.
The entire museum edifice needs to come down. The issues facing museums are not simply issues about phrasing. The artifacts need be decolonized, the photos need be decolonized, the organizational structure of them needs to be decolonized, and the very architecture needs be decolonized. But decolonizing isn’t enough. Answering how to decolonize the built architecture is especially daunting. One would imagine, emptying is a start. Most indigenous groups don’t look at the world through a euro-centric’s eyes. At the risk of stereotyping, indigenous peoples views are most often oral, temporally dynamic, less static.
We should empty them! Society and museum custodians should abandon the idea of permanent collections. It’s an attempt to freeze time, itself problematic. Dismantle the centralized architectures. Divide up the resources into smaller units. Bring the stuff back to the people. Even in small town museums, the priority should be returning the artifacts to the donors family or the victims. The rest can be auctioned. If they are not returned, sold or collected within a certain timeframe, either bring them to the dump, recycling depots or destroy them.
Deploy a new language of organizing principles. Out with the inappropriate language of order, sequence, balance, logic, rationality, perfection, symmetry, truth, definitions, answers, etc. Let’s deploy in its place the language of contradiction, collage, montage, juxtaposition, incompleteness, nonsense, confusion, fiction, mystery, questions.
Reframe as seats of the muses. At the root of the word museum, is the concept of a “seat of the muses”, meant to amuse, and invoke inspiration. Leave the central space of the museum be empty. Hollow out the present central spaces. (Like LAs old Temporary Contemporary, by Frank Gehry.) It becomes potent – full of potential – by the absence of signs and objects. It becomes a space for contemplation. To ruminate, to reflect.
Inconvenience as the modus operandi. Let’s have exhibitions be inconvenient – the height too low, the floors crooked, the walls sticky or covered in soot, badly signed, with poor lighting, slightly hidden. Of course, provoking such unease might be resisted by bylaw officers and insurers. (But let’s be honest, people skydive and party on the water in the age of Covid19.)
New tech doesn’t solve or mask anything. Assigning technological solutions to the age old problems of musology does not validate these museums outdated modes. Oftentimes the technology itself – the medium itself – gets in the way of any alternate message.
Stop making group experiences and start making singular experiences. One person at a time. The typical museum perspective is aspiring to be too broad reaching, too consensual. Instead make the experiences singular, specific, reaching one person at a time. Yes I mean literally the “perspective”.