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REISERAPPORT
DECORATIVE ARTS AND DESIGN MUSEUMS AND THE FUTURE OF COLLECTING ICDAD Conference in Vienna 2007 If our ancestors were her now, they would have no difficulty recognising this modern collecting problem, for they too had faced it, often within a few years of the establishment of our institutions. But when they began the modern phase of institutional collecting, almost two centuries ago, they felt they were, in many ways, dealing with a finite world. What they did not foresee initially was that the documentation of objects as well as information of the objects also could be undertaken by utilising modern film, tape recording etc. and now digitisation. Theirs was a world of discovery. Modern disciplines were formed and ways of knowing took on an empirical rigour which was made concrete in the new museum. However, by the late 20th Century this disciplinary framework had matured to a point of postmodernist deconstruction, and was now set in a world of digitisation and information networking. The “hard core” concept of knowledge gathering, which has underpinned earlier collecting, now became situated in a complex interconnected and overlapping jumble of media, methods and philosophies, which contributed to individual ways of knowing. Here belief, personal meaning making and politics conflicted with, if not superseded, and earlier philosophy of disinterested and rational objectivity. In this new world, legitimacy and authority were manoeuvred into the arguments of one group to question the collecting and interpretive rights of another. Having sensed the power relations inherent in cultural representation, museums sougth preferred viewpoints determined by morality and ethics. Institutional collecting, which could now be seen as a power-ridden act of authoring social memory, called for fundamental review. This increased disciplinary reflection has reconfigured the object in knowledge creation and representation. Even in rational science, which has for the most part been unaltered by postmodernism, the collectable object is no longer at the heart of its ambitions. The 19th century preoccupation with order disappeared long ago. Thus, however we might wish to view it, the collected object seems no longer to be as central to knowledge creation as it was. This is not to say that all intellectual pursuits are now devoid of the need for objects. Our scientific field in decorative arts and design still retain a taxonomic corner where objects remains the key. But whereas once the object was accepted as a source of evidence leading to absolute truth, now its claims are not beyond doubt. This, however, is just one side of the interpretive equation: the readings that are possible from the object. The other side of the equation concerns the use of the object in the interpretation of knowledge to the audience; the role of the object in communication. Even here, the real thing may seem less essential. Many activities, which once relied upon its presence, are now achieved using other media: media in which dynamism of the living event gives and even greater sense of witnessing the “Truth” or in which levels of interactivity and interrogation permit doubts to be removed. One wonders what had happened if the early Victorians had had access to the movie camera or Internet. Would we had had a museum culture? But then the early 21st. century Web, with is free access, encyclopaedic qualities, and failing curation, is perhaps more like the museum than we realise. If, then, our museums – defined as they are by the possession of these, now often altered, objects – are to exist in the future, how should we confront collecting ? How do our efforts of collecting fit into the modern way of knowing? Are our museums moving beyond the object and beyond the disciplinary knowledge? Are they destined to become centers solely for personal meaning making, the solution of contemporary social issues, and for educational experiences ? Certainly many recent changes have suggested this kind of a future, but there are others which seem to suggest a return to core values of curatorship. One possible future, being much discussed at this time, lies in the world of digitisation. Across Europe, for example, there are grand plans for a pervasive “Ambient Intelligence Landscape (AmIL) which is to be built around network “digital libriaries” (repositories of digital material) which grow from, and echoe, our physical museums and libraries. In fact the architects of the AmIL world are developing a knowledge infrastructure exactly like that created by museum builders in the 19th century. To this emerging world then, the lessons of 200 years of museum collecting, provide both a model and a warning. A full review of digital “collecting” is beyond my scope, but I am mindful that much contemporary collecting will be replaced by activity focused on digital capture, which will be undertaken without the survival of a physical counterpart. Clearly the authority and credibility of the digitising institution will play a critical role in validating digital data just as it does in preserving and relaying data associated with material objects. In this new world, the relationship between the public and the expert remains the same: the expert distils a “truth” and the public decides whether to trust in it. What is interesting about these developments is that the fundamental drive to collect and engage with “real things” remains. The computer scientists. Like museum curators, retain a firm belief in both the inherent faculty of the object and the ease with which it can be gathered up. It is social change of the kind suggested by this Ambient Intelligence Landscape world which raises doubts and questions about the future of collecting but yet also suggests that in one form or another its future is assured. Changes of this kind predicted by the new technological visionary has been an constant companion to museum development. It was only in the last four decades of the 20th. Century for example, that a new professionalism transformed the museums’s relations with its collections. The implication was that the profession had been living a lie. Professions are, amongst other things, identified by standards, but there seemed to be none. This was, however, not the modern manifestation it appeared to be. Subsequent research revealed that collection abuse had been the norm for 160 years- governed by social and political patterns of power. As part of a large influx of fresh and idealistic graduates into our museums in the 1960s and 1970s they, like everyone who joins long-established institutions, discovered a past disguised by myth and rumour. What they saw was real enough and did indeed speak of failure and neglect. A glorious past, had , it seemed been betrayed. Betrayel however, may be the wrong word. Throughout their existence our museums have suffered from gross underfunding. Recent professionalisation , in the context of social change, provides useful insights into the world in which our museums operate and within which we aim to develop collections. The process of professionalising practice can be traced back to the birth of our museums when many curatorial benchmarks were established. The latter decades of the 19th. Century developed innovative practices in thematic display and education. Although it is easy for museums to believe theirs are inherited problems, we should not fool ourselves into thinking that our predecessors, of even 150 years ago, were any less sophisticated when they came to consider their actions. They too for example, had to deal with relativist philosophies which suggested that the object was an illusion. Their museums, like ours, were a key mechanism for accomodating and facilitating social change. They too had to deal in their museums with the interactive of secular society and religious belief, as has again become important in the setting of the 21 st. cent. multiculturalism, immigration and terrorism. They too had the knowhow, but not the means. What they did not have was modern levels of resource, and when that resource came along these disciplines were no longer at the height of museum fashion. From the 1970s, our museums entered and entirely new world: museum communication, became increasingly studied and incorporated into ever more sophisticated exhibition design; informal education programmes expanded; the conservation profession grew from its tiny foothold; collection management was transformed and the contents of registers and index cards were soon flowing into computers, while emerging documentation specialists struggled to keep up with rapid technological change and horrendous backlogs. More widely, specialists groups and agencies began to provide support of a kind that overcame local deficiencies. Many of these innovations were homegrown but they were set in a world undergoing what was first called “Americanisation” and surprisingly many museum practices also came to Europe from across the Atlantic. These late 2oth. Century changes represented a concerted effort to put things right, to make a leap of professionalisation after a 150 year creep. The 1970s and 80s were important decades in this regard but are light years away from the mobile, networked and information-ridden world of the present. In the 1980s computer interactives in museums were still a rarity. Clearly museums were adapting but the most significant change for the museums was in the mid 1980s to recognise the place of change itself in their fortunes, and to discover that institutions can actually utilise the opportunities of change to secure their futures. For museums, which had once so valued a monolithic immutability, this conceptual shift was revolutionary, for the museum itself became an increasingly elastic concept. Conservative institutions opened up and offered a wide range of training and consultancy services. And became more focused, businesslike, public friendly and pluralistically funded, yet preserving its collection and research identity. This is not to suggest that its staff don’t still complain, that it has lost rare skilles and scarce knowledge, that its public are perfectly happy, or that its managers don’t have to paddle hard to keep the ark afloat, but this museum has certainly adapted to the modern context and made itself capable of embracing future change. Other museums have been less successful at adapting to constant change,-but restructuring is only a short-termed solution. The future for the decorative arts and design museums and for collecting lies in the production of flexible systems and flexible workforces. One side effect of the financial emphasis, which arrived in the 1980s was that the cost of maintaining collections no longer could be quietly concealed. This caused for anxiety and frustration among professionals who knew that collections had never been properly funded and therefore hade never had the opportunity to prove their worth. Spreadsheet accountability entered the world of museums, as it had done in other sectors, and museums adopted management techniques from industry to monitor their performance and plan for change. But figures do not make facts. They can be ill-conceived , wrongly used and misunderstood. They also take on a life of their own. In some extreme cases this approach has taken on irrational qualities by trying to quantify meanings and values. But there is undeniably a relationship between the numbers that define the things we collect and the number that appears in black – or red – a the bottom of the museum balance sheet. In the early 1980s environmental agencies replaced the bald economics of cost-benefit analysis with more qualitative environmental impact analysis. Similarly, in the late 1990s, a new wave of increasingly qualitative evaluation gained a foothold in the museum sector – particularly in the learning in museums. These more reasoned methods are what we might expect in a mature “knowledge-based-society”. Accountablity is fundamental to all institutional practices, and no less so to the act of collecting , but it needs to be understood, measured and analysed using appropriate tools which bring improvement to practices rather than merely stir up a desire for political change. Museums were invented to capture and keep against a background of change, not TO change. Yet, inevitably the collected thing is called upon to perform in ways that were never intended by the museum at its point of collection, simply because of the impact of change. It is not that the power or relevance of real objects is questioned here but rather the public, and indeed the staff, require something else of them. Our audience is changing and its “ways of knowing” have been altered. The future context of collecting will almost certainly change as much as they have in the last 25 years. Some changes ,such as in available technologies, are more predictable, but where political and social forces operate change is always an unknown. However, we can expect the era of accountability to continue, so change will continue to present risks to longterm institutions. The recent past tells us that museums can expect no assurances of having a future unless they too change in order to demonstrate their relevance. Change here is not simply a matter of educational or exhibition programming, it refers to shifts in the museum’s underpinning philosophy. The past is gone, and while we can attempt to hold onto its remnants in our collections and interpretations, we cannot run museums in ways that were conceived on past models. It is here, in this rather challenging world that the future of collecting exists. And as one of our most heavily-guarded, fundamental and conservative activities, collecting will be one of the hardest to re-orientate. The introduction Collecting policies has made a marked shift towards rationalising, and suppousedly intellectualising practices. These collecting policies may be gatekeeper documents. Though the acquisition committees often interpret these documents. This is necessary but this practice remains uncommon and imperfect, because most policies contain sufficient vague statements and lack a deeper intellectual rationale for collecting. Collecting policies continue to conceive of objects as facts which can be gathered up,- but this underestimates the interpretative process which make sense of the material world. It is a 19th cent. principle which most of us have failed to question. In fact few collecting policies contain sufficient framework for defining a collection philosophy. They focus instead on simple object acquisition and are thus engaged in a kind of objects fetishism – that is a human- object relationship where the object has magical power over us. Collecting policies need to be replaced by strategies which adopt a more long-term, holistic, inclusive, integrated, cooperative, sustainable, rational and thoughtful view of the purpose of institutional collecting. These are pervasive themes in most areas where the modern world is being restructured. They need to work their way more extensively into decorative arts and design museum collecting and to do so museums will require a deeper understanding of how material culture works in society and how it can be made to work in the museum. |
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