Death and the idea of museums

(My usual excuse for not blogging much = Text Festival organising, preparing for the government destruction of public services, writing the Tragedy of Althusserianism, etc.).

Anyway, I joined the Museum-id network recently (http://museum-id.ning.com/ ). A quick trawl through more recent discussions that drew my attention to a question from Steph Mastoris, Head of the National Waterfront Museum: Are Museums About Stories or Objects? He answers:

"The boring and safe answer is, of course, that museums are about both. Objects are central to the very existence of the museum, but without telling stories about them the museum is just a storehouse. For me, the key issue here is much more about whether the museum's displays begin with the object or the story. I feel that the concept-centred display is far more robust and logical than one driven by what is available in the stores. The imperative to inform that lies at the heart of the museum's purpose is best served when coherent narratives are on offer. Once these stories are established the museum's collections really come into their own by providing unrivalled sources of evidence. Indeed, such a clear narrative structure also enhances the more random inspirational powers that objects possess. It is so easy to say "let the objects speak for themselves", but their language and their messages are often difficult to understand without a good narrative context. So we need museums that are story-driven, but object rich. "

Although Mastoris uses the phrased ‘concept-centred display’, ‘story-driven’ privileges narration, linearity over concept; I read his conclusion as bypassing ideas as the driver of the concept of a museum (despite the word itself of course being rooted in ‘the place sacred to the Muses’).

Contrary to a response framed in museological theory, my reflex in these sorts of debates is more phenomenological, referenced back to my own first museum ‘epiphany’ in the Isle of Man. Back before the Manx Museum had its rationalising extension and modernisation, it was a magical place. When asked questions about what museums are for, or how museums work best I am always taken back to a memory from 1972 standing in the museum’s reconstruction of a dimly lit Victorian shopping street and looking up to see the giant skeleton of a whale hanging overhead. It made no sense (probably a mixture of historic display accident and/or lack of storage space) but it remains my most striking experience in any museum. When I last visited everything had changed for the less imaginative. This panorama link:
http://www.gov.im/tourism/attractions/virtualtours/ManxMuseum.xml
now shows the whale skeleton hovering above where it ‘should’ be in a natural history gallery. I have thought often on why this bizarre juxtaposition worked. It clearly wasn’t a curatorial strategy – generally deliberate curatorial surrealism is egotistic and irritating – it had hung like that since the early Sixties, I think; I’d guess in a time when a little isolated island museum didn’t even have what we now think of as a curator. It wasn’t an ostentatious surrealist act; it was just the way the architecture of the building worked. When you were upstairs you could see the skeleton contextualised with the natural history collection but in the ‘street’ the outline of whale flew overhead. In terms of the debate about what are museums about, this experience is about an object (the skeleton) but, unless you are a museum professional who can interpret the installation as an operational configuration, there was no story. I recall and still find that the installation was unfathomable: it was what it was and was magical because of that. That moment represented, and still does, the possibility of imaginative space; in negating any meaning at all except itself it offered the exhilaration of creative freedom in an act without precedence. My answer to “Are museums about objects or stories” is neither. For me, museums are about the possibility of freedom, the ground for creativity. The curatorial responsibility is the mobilisation of objects to create the opportunity for that space. This is why the political imperative over the last decade or more for UK museums to be educational, to spoon feed the visitor and the school pupil with the story, is fundamentally destructive to museums’ value and raison d’etre.

With the new Dark Age pending in the UK and the sad and sudden death of Sue’s father, this question and my intuitive response to it, were in my mind when I checked out the People’s History Museum exhibition “Death and the Working Class” this week.

http://www.phm.org.uk/changing-exhibitions-gallery/death-and-the-working-class/

This video link gives a pretty good visual of the layout.

http://player.vimeo.com/video/16393923

Although I have blogged previously about how disappointing the new PHM is, I approached the show with an open mind, maybe even optimism – reasoning that the banality of the permanent displays could be put down to funder sensitivity/expectation of political neutrality but that a temporary show working with such an emotive subject has the room, even the imperative, to address the seriousness of its intent.

Predictably given where PHM seems to have located itself, Death and the Working Class lacks the idea that would make it a serious show: anger. It is a bland social history show of objects supported only by fragments of context. It doesn’t evoke the idea of death or the experience of people dying. The display goes down the route of parsing the subject by themes:

preparing for death
causes of death
laying out
the ceremony
wakes and wills
mourning and remembrance

but the absence of the theme of struggle leaves you wondering why it bother to mention Class in its title. How can you curate such as show and not impart a sense of injustice in the viewer?

Whatever seriousness the exhibition could claim is badly undermined by the ubiquitous nonsense of ‘access’ play. In amongst the exhibits you are invited to read an epitaph and guess whose name it relates to under a flap you lift. There is a comments board where you are invited to write your own epitaph. On the floor there is a snakes and ladders game with coloured plastic skulls as pieces. But the stupidity prize has to go to the rack of mourning clothes with its sign “Put on these mourning clothes: how do they make you feel?” This is really unacceptable - especially having had Sue's father's funeral last week.

The badge machine is broken

I have been looking forward to the reopening of the remodelled and extended National People’s History Museum http://www.phm.org.uk/ as I held the old version in very high esteem. So high in fact that I used to have to steel myself for a visit because some of the histories, displays, documents, the moments of social revelation were so powerful that I would be moved to tears. This was the only museum that had such a profound effect on me – although appalling, even the Hiroshima Atomic Museum didn’t touch me so deeply.

Living in Manchester you have to have low architectural expectations – an ‘international’ city with no (contemporary) international architecture. Walking passed the museum every day, I have parenthesised my view of Austin-Smith: Lord design (http://www.austinsmithlord.com/ ) as competent mediocrity (although having seen the interior the ‘competent’ may be generous – picture: the foyer, notice the big column right in front of the information desk). But this isn’t an architecture review; so, hopeful for the survival of something special, for my first hopeful visit I committed not to let any architectural flaws detract from the central experience.

The warmth and earnestness of the staff as we entered lifted the spirits with a sense of a collective endeavour committed to the seriousness of the mission to privilege and treasure the memory of working class struggle. And then to the museum proper… and my heart sank.

The first thing we looked at was the temporary photography exhibition “Carried Away” – “taking a sideways look at protest through the last 100 years, illustrated by images of individuals being forcibly removed from the protests by the authorities.” (As it was an exhibition of images illustrating forcibly removal from protests, I am not sure what was ‘sideways’ about it). Many of the images from anti-fascist riots in the 30’s through the Miner’s Strike, anti-apartheid, anti-nuclear, etc, were powerful, and I really wanted them to accumulate into the emotive effect I craved, a celebration of resistance and courage, but the neat arrangement of images circled something crass in the centre of the space: a (new) tent on a photo vinyl of grass on the floor and a (new) rainbow flag hanging. It was a clumsy reference to the peace camps but what pushed it over the edge was a table beside it with colouring pencils and a badge making machine. In another part of the room I looked at the comments book – the comment which caught my eye was from a child: “very very nice but the badge machine is broken”. Obviously a child’s critical vocabulary is unrefined, and I dont actually care that the machine was broken - that's what happens - but this seemed to be a double indictment of the display rather than the play equipment: fundamentally, those images shouldn’t be very very nice but they had become strangely photographically interesting rather than politically engaging; and the broken badge match is symbolic of an aesthetic problem at the heart of the conception of the museum. There now seems to be a museological conceit that the history of workers’ struggle is manifest as primarily a graphic style, that trade unions’ and protest campaigns’ are characterized by their use of sloganising badges rather than ideas.



The frequent repetition of the museum’s new circular logo itself announces the importance of the badge as the focal point of the history.



The case is repeated in the colour coding of the displays (see sign)













And pulling out from this colour text we see a juxtaposition which again reinforces this idea.









Moving to the two floors of galleries, paradoxically, despite the colour coding, displays, items and ideas are jumbled and confusingly juxtaposed; really appalling moments of people’s struggle are thrown away; the uplifting cultures of hope are dissipated, collective aspirations for beauty and justice are marginal. At this point, I confess that there was an elephant in the museum which was completely invisible to me. Or should I say monster in the museum. It took Sue to point it out: this is a children’s museum! I think I have conditioned myself not to see the dismal signs but with her observation the sad reality confronts you.

Everywhere there are colouring-in activities, dressing up opportunities, lift the flap to find out, act out with puppets displays. If only I had remained blind to it. Faced with this I would just dismiss a museum as no interest, but as Sue used to be teacher, she made professional comments – though actually equally critical: her view is that given modern children’s greater sophistication and at the same time shorter attention span, this model of display and activity is outmoded for engaging children over 6. A good example of the problem is the pictured puppet activity. Puppets of British political leaders from the 70s and 80s. The label invites children, for that is height at which the “TV” is located, to conduct interviews. As Sue observed, what educational value does that have? The children have no knowledge of who the puppets represent or any of the political stances/philosophies which those figures stood for.

Because UK museums are measured by the number of visitors, as currently configured the museum will be a success in those terms; it will be loved by families with toddlers (2-6 year olds can pick up a Busy Bee explorer backpack) and schools – the latter because it is almost a school worksheet on the wall. It offers all the labour-saving preparation work that teachers relish. But Sue summed up the problem thus: The history of people’s struggle has been reduced to the form of Spot the Dog.


I think(hope) the museum as a whole is a more complex picture; the value of its work is immeasurable; it has very significant labour history archives, serious relationships with academic institutions and international working history museums which are commensurate to the seriousness of the history it retains. However, curatorially, it has been infected by the national cultural policy which homogenises and dumbs everything down. Given that this museum should be the inspirational repository of a class memory, a memorial to the ordinary made heroic, and a rallying idea that progressive change has and can be achieved, the prioritisation of toddlerism directly contradicts, neuters and marginalises the idea and experience that “there are ideas worth fighting for”. For me, the most powerful museum has been brought low. For the next few weeks the museum is in a ‘soft opening’ period, but sadly has conceptually located its public access at the level of Kids in Museums and as such it now seems distant from the idea of positive social and political change in favour of the central edict of public funding: the importance of civic and capital management of public thought. I felt a little sad for the staff whom I respect greatly, who in my experience are committed to the idea, optimism and knowledge of workers’ history but the policy landscape in which the museum operates, distorts its past in the deadening political shift that has redefined community (of idea, geography or workplace) as family, family as Engels observed the organisational unit of capitalism, and family as a mediated child-obsessed hierarchy in which complexity or collective action by definition are unnecessary and undesirable.

– Clock yourself in