Eva-Maria Troelenberg proposes two opposing metaphors for museums, the
“temple” and the “forum” (2). The museum-as-temple is detached from daily life and imbued with a kind of sacredness that comes from its authoritative presence on a higher sphere. Andrea Witcomb likens the museum-as-temple to a treasure house that contains objects valued according to their physical characteristics and that furthermore is capable of communicating abstract moral qualities by means of these unique characteristics (105).
The temple is an apt model for the kind of traditional museum that came into existence in post-Enlightenment Europe and became an instrument for social improvement in the nineteenth century there (Barrett 110). However, this model is problematic in a dynamic, rapidly changing environment: its very detachment makes it static, an unresponsive monolith. Troelenberg recounts Jean Cocteau’s comment that the Louvre in Paris is “a morgue, where one goes to identify one’s friends” and adds that this characterization
. . . moves just slightly away from the idea of the ‘temple’ towards a more sinister sphere, while the double sense of the French term ‘morgue,’
designating a mortuary but potentially also alluding to an attitude of arrogance, hauteur, and self-containment, seems to open an ironic and at the same time nightmarish play with the image of the museum as well as with the attitude of the existentialist beholder (4).
The movement called New Museology replaced the temple model in the mid-twentieth century with the model of the museum-as-forum, an institution which provides open spaces of cross-cultural and social exchange to its communities (Troelenberg 1). If this change is indeed as widespread as Troelenberg claims – and my experience working as a museum professional concurs with Murray Ross’s observation that there is still a significant percentage of the museum-as-temple cohabiting with the museum-as-forum (85) – what is the best way to accomplish this massive makeover? The scholars I
surveyed in this field agree that the switch of metaphors has the potential to be a positive one, but they disagree on how this is to be accomplished. For example, Kylie Message and Andrea Witcomb see the current phase of New Museology enabling museums to play a transformative role for their communities by providing a space where different
disciplines, theoretical approaches, and practices can meet (1), whereas Tony Bennett suggests the modern museum claims to be democratic and available to all but is really still racist, sexist, and based on bourgeois ideals of behaviour (97).
Paul O’Neill and Mick Wilson believe museums have undergone an educational turn, focusing attention on museums as sites not of either authority or plurality, but of education (21). The authors relate education to the circulation of ideas: rather than being primarily collections of objects, museums are primarily centres of ideas. Eileen Hooper-Greenhill concurs with this view, adding that “meaning is to be found neither wholly in the object nor wholly in the viewer. Meaning is dialogic – a dialogue between viewer and object” (117). In this dialogue, Phillip Yenawine asks, what kind of information is the most useful to a visitor? Is it of primary importance in a guided interpretation to include
actual information about the work of art, or is it enough to give the visitor a meaningful experience of discovering the work for herself (25)? He comes down on the side of the meaningful experience over the information, but other writers disagree. Rika Burnham and Elliot Kai-Kee recommend asking no questions (109) while Mike Murawski and Jackie Delamatre advocate a blended approach of some questions and some information as the best interpretive approach (sec.1). These writers are exchanging views about interpretation from the perspective of the museum, thinking about what kind of
information – or meaning – the museum has to impart to its visitors. They all argue from the position that museums are centres of ideas rather than collections of objects. Other writers use “stories” interchangeably with “ideas” as the central concern of museums. For example, Leslie Bedford maintains that “These storytelling skills insure our place within human society and probably imply that information not structured as a story is more likely to be forgotten” (30). An opposing view comes from Sandra Dudley, whose commitment to sensory engagement with objects I referenced in the Introductory Chapter. Like Dudley, I tend to see museums, not as collections of objects, but as communicating through objects. Message and Witcomb use the term “nondiscursive” to describe this method of communication (xlvi). This term seems to me to confuse the issue since what objects communicate is ideas, stories, and meanings. Objects in a museum display communicate these ideas, stories, and meanings, not only through the official means of displays and texts, which I am calling “museum agency,” but through their own agency, and, significantly for this study, through the patterns on their surfaces and in their structures. By this statement, I do not mean to suggest a stance of “methodological
animism,” as Gerhard Wolf puts it, but instead follow his lead when he terms the gallery encounter he has with a little, ancient, Chinese pot-bellied jar with two human feet as possessed of a “contingency of presence” and therefore as dynamic and generative (‘Image, Object, Art’ 159). I will come back to the implications of object agency in the section on the Visual Cultures literature.