Ideas
Re-forming the Museum, Root and Branch - Victoria Dickenson, Canadian Museum for Human Rights
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Reforming the Museum, Root and Branch
By Dr Victoria Dickenson, Chief Knowledge Officer/ Chef du savoir, Canadian Museum for Human Rights/ Musée canadien des droits de la personne
Gertrude Stein once famously said, ‘You can be a Museum or you can be Modern, but you can’t be both.’1 So, can you be a museum and radical? What does it mean to be both?
In common parlance, to radicalize is to depart from tradition, to reform and transform institutions and behaviours, moving them closer to the ‘left.’ The left, as understood after the French Revolution, is the side of the people, so that the radical museum is by definition of the people, or democratic.Democracy means that the people rule. While it is, as Donald C. Lummis reminds us, a simple clear principle, it also poses ‘a maddening, tantalizing puzzle to humankind.’ There is no fixed solution to the puzzle of how to achieve and realize democracy in our collective life, only historical projects. Lummis suggests that democracy can be, however, a critical standard against which our best efforts and our institutions must be measured. The radical museum, then, must be measured against the critical standard of democracy, and more than that, against a radical democracy, ‘democracy in its essential form, democracy at its root, quite precisely the thing itself.’2 In this sense radical does not so much modify democracy as intensify it. Radical democracy is intensely inclusive, in that it excludes no one from its practice or its reach. It is also subversive, in that it is oppositional to all expressions of power that are not reflective of the people. How does the museum measure up? Can it be radical in a democratic sense, fully public and inclusive, even subversive, and if not, what is to be done?
A return to roots
Has the museum ever been radical? What is the museum at its root, the thing itself? The roots of the museum as a social institution lie deep in the rich soil of the western Enlightenment. It was an integral part of the Enlightenment enterprise of the creation of new knowledge and its dissemination, founded on a very particular and innovative idea that presumed the world might be known through its productions, and through organizing them, new understanding would be generated. This was also a radically inclusive idea. The creators of early museums, such as that of the Royal Society, actively solicited objects in the hope of constructing a universal microcosm to mirror nature.3 To return to the roots of the museum, then, is to return to an ideal of inclusion, that all the world might be mirrored through the collections, and that an encyclopaedic knowledge about the world would be reflected in the museum.
The original form of the museum also contained another novel concept, the notion of public access. Private cabinets and the Repository of the Royal Society were restricted to guests or members, but Sir Hans Sloane’s bequest deeded his collections to the nation as a whole, creating what is arguably the first truly public museum. Parliament conjoined on the Trustees of the newly created British Museum that it offer a public space, ‘not only for the Inspection and Entertainment of the learned and the curious,’ but also ‘for the general use and benefit of the Public.’ This radical inclusivity was initially narrowly construed by the Trustees, who decided to admit only ‘the learned and those of polite behaviour and superior (sic) degree,’4 but it was nevertheless a fundamental principle of the museum form. Three decades later, the French Revolution threw open the doors of the aristocratic collections to the people, to make of the Louvre a great national museum. As Thackeray recounted, by 1841 the people did indeed throng its galleries:
‘Yesterday there were at the very least two thousand common soldiers in the place... examining the pictures in company with fifteen hundred grisettes, two hundred liberated shop-boys, eighteen hundred and forty-one artist-apprentices, half-a-dozen of livery servants, and many scores of fellows with caps, and jackets, and copper-coloured countenances, and gold earrings, and large ugly hands, that are hammering, weaving or filing all the week.’5 By the mid-19th century, the crowds of London were also clamouring for easier access to the displays of the British Museum, and in the great democracy of America, the Charleston museum was ‘open every day from 9 o’clock and brilliantly illuminated every evening.’6 To return to roots, then, is to return to a principle of generous public access, a notion of inclusivity that characterized the museum form as an essentially democratic social institution.
The Museum uprooted: Selection and segregation
If the museum was founded on an ideal of inclusivity, both in its material collections and its public access, it is a surprise, then, that the most trenchant criticisms of the institution have focussed on its exclusionary role. Contemporary critics have castigated the museum for lacunae in the collections, as well as barriers to access. How did it happen that this institution that at one point embodied a radical inclusivity become epitomized as the tired creature of elitism and state hegemony? This transformation was due in part to the very activity that distinguished the museum as knowledge creator – the act of collecting, and in part to new articulations around the museum’s role in public education.
As the products of the known world became more evidently various, the idea of the visible microcosm became increasingly difficult to realize, despite the efforts of the omnium gatherum collectors who sought out examples of every bird, butterfly, stone, or shell, as well as exotic weapons, dress, and art objects. Faced with vast, unwieldy collections, museum keepers began to adopt organizing principles based on new theories of natural selection, of art history, or the study of human development. They arranged objects in series, which both illustrated and defined a particular idea about the world, be it the evolution of the horse, or the development of Baroque painting. Each deliberate selection entailed the exclusion of objects that did not illustrate the idea, with the leftover bits and pieces relegated to bottom drawers or distant corners of vast reserves.7 The public space was equally transformed by this same process. The collections were divided into study series and synoptic or display series, the latter installed attractively in the public galleries, the former screened from public view.
This process of selection and segregation, in its time seen as an innovative approach to rationalization of holdings and a means to communicate clearly to the public the leading ideas of the era, led to a fundamental change within the institution. The museum ceased to present collections that mirrored nature - however imperfectly - and began to present ideas. George Brown Goode, Assistant Secretary of the Smithsonian, famously said in 1888, ‘The people’s museum should be much more than a house full of specimens in glass cases. It should be a house full of ideas arranged with the strictest attention to system.’8
The exclusionary nature of these systematic idea displays led almost immediately, as Tony Bennett has pointed out, to demands for reform by those who saw themselves or their ideas excluded.9 Bennett suggests that this critique of ‘representational adequacy’ was inevitable, and inherent in the contradictory nature of the 19th-century museum’s form, which revealed ‘the disparity between, on the one hand, the museum’s universalist aspirations embodied in the claim that the order of things and peoples it shaped into being was generally representative of humanity and, on the other hand, the fact that any particular museum display can always be held to be partial, selective and inadequate in relation to this objective.’10
For nineteenth-century museum keepers like Goode, however, the very selectivity of the displays made the museum one of the key instruments of the democratic state. It would serve not only to educate, but also to enlighten citizens, as ‘one of the chief agencies of the higher civilization.’ The ‘higher civilization’ was defined by the ‘experts who are to organize, arrange, and explain the museums,’ men like Goode and other civic-minded, serious men.11 The museum of the future ‘in this democratic land’ was not, however, directed at these men; rather, it would be explicitly adapted to the needs of ‘the mechanic, the factory operator, the day-laborer, the salesman, and the clerk, as much as to those of the professional man and the man of leisure.’12 It is precisely in this ‘civilizing’ work that contemporary critics see the development of the museum’s role as hegemonic agent of the state or of elite culture, using the power of public visualisation of a particular world view to exclude conflicting visions of society.13 This was not a museum of the people, but an institution directed at the people. It created a ‘them and us’ paradigm that continues to permeate the relationship between many museums and the communities they attempt to serve, an effective barrier to access.14
The tantalizing puzzle
To return to the original question, can the museum be radical in a democratic sense, fully public and inclusive, and if not, what is to be done? How can the museum be truly of, as well as for the people? The inadequacy of the museum as instrument to meet its own aspirations has been at the heart of institutional critique almost since its inception. It could not mirror Nature, and attempts to use its limited capacities to teach and inform, foundered on its inability to be inclusive, to privilege all stories within its reified presentations. It invited the many, but demanded that they accept the interpretations of the few. Surprisingly, given this history and form, the museum has persisted and proliferated, even being adapted by non-Western cultures.15 Why? I would contend that it is the deeply rooted social form of the public museum, its premise of open access to knowledge that constitutes the basis for its continuing social utility.16 Robert Janes in a recent article in Curator magazine, while worrying that ‘Museums have inadvertently arrived at a metaphorical watershed...’ also acknowledges that the form itself has a ‘privileged position grounded in public trust, respect and support.’17 Can the social form of the museum as a respected repository, an honest keeper open to all, now be re-formed to fulfill its own original promise of inclusivity, to be a radical museum?
Building a radical museum
We are currently working to create in Canada a completely new museum of ideas, but not in the sense of George Brown Goode. In this case the ideas are the actual stuff of the museum, the collections themselves. The Canadian Museum for Human Rights is being constructed in Winnipeg, Manitoba, at the literal heart of Canada. It is a federal institution whose legislated Mandate is: ‘To explore the subject of human rights, with special but not exclusive reference to Canada, in order to enhance the public’s understanding of human rights, to promote respect for others, and to encourage reflection and dialogue.’
Further, ‘The Canadian Museum for Human Rights is an embodiment of Canada’s commitment to democracy, freedom, human rights, and the rule of law. Organizational values such as objectivity, innovation, and inclusiveness underpin all Museum activities so that operations mirror and advance our mandate.’18 This new national museum seeks not only to document and make visible the global culture of human rights as it is expressed in the hearts, minds and lived experience of people, but also to be truly inclusive in its content as well as in its accessibility. Choosing the museum form was contentious;19 there was, however, a tacit acknowledgement that the museum, though charged by many as exclusionary, has as Janes noted, deep power in the public imagination.20 The Canadian Museum for Human Rights aims to be radically inclusive, in both its collections and its access. As Lummis noted, there is no fixed solution for democracy, and there is no single way to build a radical museum. The Museum for Human Rights is looking broadly at best practice, but there are three areas we are exploring which to me hold enormous promise for the realization of an intensively inclusive museum.
The first centres around the telling of stories. The Canadian Museum for Human Rights is an institution founded without existing physical collections, and a mandate to fill its reserves with the accounts by individuals of their thoughts and experiences. The documentation of human rights is somewhat like citizen science - everyone has a valuable contribution to make, because the ideas of human rights themselves are grounded in our intuitions of justice and our human rights imagination. While there are scholars of the human rights movement and its legal expressions, the Museum privileges the knowledge of ordinary people as well as that of experts. In Canada now there is also emerging a new understanding of the importance of the stories Indigenous people tell about who we are and how we relate to one another. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission, founded in 2009 and also headquartered in Winnipeg, is asking survivors and others to tell their stories about the experience of Residential schools, an attempt at cultural assimilation that abrogated the human rights of Indigenous people in Canada.21 The Museum cannot begin to fulfil its mandate if it does not incorporate these stories into the heart of the institution; moreover, these stories and the Aboriginal voices that tell them must be heard throughout the Museum, included in the national discourse.
The second is about the importance of territory. Indigenous people in Canada say that if you respect territory, you cannot go far wrong. Respecting territory means taking seriously the assertion that knowledge derives from territory and the holistic understanding of the relationships between people, the land, the water, the plants, and the animals.
Acknowledging territory means taking seriously the local in all its aspects. The local is no longer parochial. As we look deeper into a particular place, we reveal the world, and one of the gifts of our technologically mediated society is the understanding that the local story is always our story, because we share a common humanity and hold our territory in common. Robert Janes calls for a ‘mindful museum,’ and cites Paul Hawkin’s contention that solutions to problems arise from place and culture, ‘when local people are empowered and honored.’22 There are many ways in which museums can empower and honour their communities, from taking seriously the documenting of the rapidly changing histories of particular places, to re-thinking the way museum spaces can serve the needs of local residents. The Canadian Museum for Human Rights is being constructed on Treaty 1 territory. Staff at the Museum work with and listen to a Council of Elders to build a museum whose very materials (wood, light, water) embody the territory, and whose exhibitions reflect the knowledge held in the land. When the Museum is open, visitors will listen to the voices of Elders too, as they recount their perspectives on our human rights and responsibilities. Museum staff has been meeting as well with other local stakeholders from the Winnipeg area. Like most Canadian cities, Winnipeg is a highly culturally diverse community. While 10% of the population is of Aboriginal origin, its residents reflect Canada’s history of massive immigration. As we work with local people, through them we connect with the world, hearing stories from other terrains where human rights have not been respected, and places where the struggle has been successful.23
The third area of great promise is public engagement. In 1990, Tony Bennett hoped that museums could become ‘more fully dialogic ... allowing the museum to function as a site for the enunciation of plural and differentiated statements, enabling it to function as an instrument for public debate.’ He saw the role of curator shifting from expert to facilitator, ‘to assist groups outside the museum to use its resources to make authored statements within it.’24 In 2009, the Canadian Museum for Human Rights went to twenty cities in Canada, and met with almost 2000 people, asking them what they wanted to see in their new museum. As much as possible, the new museum will be ‘curated by Canadians,’ privileging the stories and subjects they told us they wanted to see. This kind of engagement cannot end with a single exercise, and the Museum is developing its strategies to become, as Nina Simon urges, truly ‘participatory,’ to ensure that the visitors and the community play governing roles in what the museum says and how it says it.25
As museums shake off the constraints of expert selection, they can encourage objects and ideas to be seen through multiple perspectives. As Sharon Macdonald has noted, ‘Museums have always had – to varying extents - a good deal of serendipity, of the kind of fuzzy logic that means that there will be objects in the collections that can be readily re-presented into new, perhaps more connective, displays.’26 This is what numerous artists, famously Fred Wilson in his 1992 exhibition ‘Mining the Museum’, have been able to do. Beyond the serendipity of new contexts, is the understanding of new roles for objects. In 1989, James Clifford watched Tlingit elders use artefacts as ‘aides-mémoires, occasions for the telling of stories and the singing of songs.’ From this, he saw that the museum might function as a ‘contact zone’ to ‘work the borderlands between different worlds, histories, and cosmologies.’27 The new Canadian Museum for Human Rights in Winnipeg is being built precisely as this kind of contact zone, using the stories people tell about injustice and the global human rights struggle as the objects of the museum, and encouraging visitors to listen to the stories and tell their own, from their own viewpoints. It is also working to provide visitors and those who access the stories through the Museum’s web presence, with the tools to not only reflect on human rights, and to speak with others about it, but to do something, to take action on an individual basis, to participate in the ongoing global struggle to build a universal human rights culture. The Museum will provide animators and facilitators on the floor and online, not to direct the visitor experience, but to make a truly participatory experience possible.
So, will the Canadian Museum for Human Rights be a radical museum? If radical means democratic, and democratic means inclusive, and as Lummis would have it, also inherently subversive of the accepted order of things, the answer is yes.
Dr Victoria Dickenson
Chief Knowledge Officer/ Chef du savoir
Canadian Museum for Human Rights/
Musée canadien des droits de la personne
1. Stein was referring to the Museum of Modern Art.
2. C. Douglas Lummis, Radical Democracy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997) 25
3. Robert Hooke, the President of the Society, described his ideal museum as a dictionary that allowed one ‘to read the book of nature.’ In Richard Yeo, ‘Encyclopaedic Collectors, Ephraim Chambers and Sir Hans Sloan,’ 29-36 in R.G.W. Anderson, M. L. Caygill, L. Syson (eds) Enlightening the British, Knowledge, discovery and the museum in the eighteenth century (London: British Museum, 2003) 29
4. Marjorie L. Caygill, ‘From Private Collection to Public Museum. The Sloane Collection at Chelsea and the British Museum in Montagu House,’ 18-28, in Anderson et al (2003), 19
5. By William Makepeace Thackeray, ‘Of Men and Pictures: A propos a walk in the Louvre, Paris: June 1841,’ in Ballads, Critical Reviews, Tales, Various Essays, Letters, Sketches, Etc (New York: Harper, 1899), 365 (http://openlibrary.org/works/OL16248W/Ballads_critical_reviews_tales_various_essays_letters_sketches_etc; accessed September 6, 2010).
6. As early as 1824 an editorial in the Charleston Courier stated that ‘In these enlightened times, a public museum is as necessary an appendage to a city as a public newspaper or a public library.’ Paul M. Rea, ‘One Hundred and Fifty Years of Museum History,’ Science, New Series, Vol. 57, No. 1485 (Jun. 15, 1923), pp. 677-681, 678; (http://www.jstor.org/stable/1646860; accessed September 4, 2010)
7. The consequences of this for knowledge creation are recounted by Stephen Jay Gould in Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History (New York: W.W. Norton, 1989).
8. He also said, ‘I once tried to express this thought by saying An efficient educational museum may be described as a collection of instructive labels each illustrated by a well selected specimen.’ George Brown Goode, ‘Museum History and Museum of History,’ A Paper read before the American Historical Association, Washington DC, December 26-28, 1888 (New York, Knickerbocker Press, 1889) 262 (http://books.google.ca/books?id=ZmUtAAAAYAAJ&dq=george%20brown%20goode&pg=PA251#v=onepage&q&f=false ; accessed September 1, 2010).
9. In 1913, for example, the avant-garde Armory Show in New York was viewed as a challenge to the exclusions of the established art institutions. For an excellent overview, see the website created by the University of Virginia: (http://xroads.virginia.edu/~museum/armory/armoryshow.html ; accessed September 5, 2010). This critique has continued. With the rise of the ‘new history’ beginning in the 1960s, museums were targeted by social and labour historians, feminists, and later by environmental and queer studies scholars and others, for their exclusion of the objects associated with women and children, poverty, the history of the working class and the underclass, and later queer and gender history, to name only a few areas.
10. Tony Bennett, ‘The Political Rationality of the Museum,’ Continuum: The Australian Journal of Media & Culture, vol. 3 no 1 (1990) ; (http://wwwmcc.murdoch.edu.au/ReadingRoom/3.1/Bennett.html ; accessed September 1, 2010)
11. Goode, 263
12. Goode echoes the reforming zeal of George Birkbeck, founder of the Mechanics Institute in Britain, and a number of philanthropists on both sides of the water who founded and equipped museums to be in Paul Rea’s words, ‘popular universities.’ Rea, 680
13. See Sharon Macdonald’s excellent article on the role of museums in shaping public identities: ‘Public museums, then, were from their beginnings embroiled in the attempt to culture a public and encourage people to imagine and experience themselves as members of an ordered but nevertheless sentimentalized nation-state... They helped to convey senses of both stability and progress. They helped to instantiate a ‘scientific’, ‘objective’ way of seeing - a gaze which could ‘forget’ its own positionedness. They helped to think identities as bounded and coherent.’ Sharon Macdonald, ‘Museums, national, postnational and transcultural identities,’ museum and society, 1 (1), 2003: 1-16, 5
14. See Nina Simon’s description of the language used by black visitors to an exhibition on Slavery in New York at the New York Historical Society in 2005. In Nina Simon, The Participatory Museum (Museum 2.0 2010), 145-6
15. For James Clifford, this global spread makes the museum the ultimate symbol of the new ‘global hegemony of Western institutions allied with capitalists markets and the projects of national elites.’ (9) He notes, however, that the tribal world has also ‘appropriated and transculturated’ the museum to its own ends. (212) James Clifford, Routes: Travel and translation in the late twentieth century (Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard Univ. Press, 1997)
16. The form was delineated in the first British Museum Act in 1753. It was to be a ‘general Repository’ with ‘free Access’ for the ‘to all studious and curious persons.’ Its purpose was the Advancement and Improvement of ‘speculative Knowledge. Caygill, 19.
17. Robert R. Janes, ‘The Mindful Museum,’ CURATOR 53/3, July 2010, 325-338, 326
18. See ‘About the Museum’ on the Museum’s website (http://humanrightsmuseum.ca/about-museum/mandate-vision-and-values; accessed September 9, 2010).
19. Even in 1920, John Cotton Dana noted the problem of being a ‘museum.’ His New Museums would be ‘institutions of usefulness so great that they are paying in some cases fair returns on their costs, even though burdened with the handicap of being called museums.’ John Cotton Dana, A Plan for a New Museum, The Kind of Museum it Will Profit a City to Maintain, Elmtree Press, Woodstock, Vermont, 1920
20. See the findings on museums and trustworthiness in the United States (Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen, The Presence of the Past, New York: Columbia University Press, 1998; also http://chnm.gmu.edu/survey/, accessed September 10, 2010), or in Canada (Canadians and their pasts project: http://www.canadiansandtheirpasts.ca/index.html, accessed September 10, 2010).
21. For more information about the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and Residential schools, see the TRC website (http://www.trc.ca/websites/trcinstitution/index.php?p=3, accessed September 10, 2010).
22. Janes, 330.
23. See, for example, the description of Marc Kuly’s Storytelling Class: http://www.winnipegfilmgroup.com/cinematheque/the_storytelling_project.aspx; accessed September 12,2010).
24. Bennett, np.
25. Simon, i.
26. Macdonald,11
27. Clifford, 189, 212. The Museum of Anthropology at University of British Columbia has in fact rebuilt the institution around the notion that collections should be visible and community knowledge privileged (see the Reciprocal Research Network website: http://www.moa.ubc.ca/RRN/about_overview.html).
This is an exclusive free chapter from our new book: The Radical Museum: democracy, dialogue & debate.
Find out more about the book and order your copy: The Radical Museum: democracy, dialogue & debate
