communicating the museum 2013 slideshare

7/27/2019 Communicating the Museum 2013 Slideshare

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Strange tales

how curiosity(almost)

killed the curator

presented at Communicating the Museum Conference 2013


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curator

one having a cure of souls xiv (PPl.); guardian of a

minor, lunatic, etc., XV (Lydg.); manager, governor,spec. as member of an academic body XVII-AN.

curatour=(O)F. curateur, or the source L. curator,

orem, agent-noun f. curare;

see CURE,-ATOR

In considering a near death experience it was thought best toconsider Who Really Is The Curator? and in doing so we turned to

the etymology of the term. We know that curators collect, conserve

and convey ideas about collections. They hold the keys to the vaults

in part via their hold on the truth of the object.


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curepreserve for keeping XVII.-(O)F. curer take care of,

clean=Pr., Sp. curar, It. curare:-L. curare care for

cure, f. cura.

The same base is repr. in

accurate, curious, procure, secure

Being accurate, caretaking and collecting are all part of the curator role.But what of the curious? What if untruths could equally open doors onto

the collection via tapping into the curious rather than the accurate base

of the role. Significant benefits have flowed to museums through the

convention of making defensible and scholarly claims to exclusively adult

audiences. Yet, the surfeit of care in selecting and writing about collections

can result institutional inertia.


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The museum has what I call the god voice. The

museum speaks and you dont know who is speaking

Its like the aggregation of sensibilities(Myers, H. 2010: 83)

The projects we are about to show you demonstrate an alternate approach, to

both audiences and curatorship. We will share with you the surprising

outcomes when we invited artists and authors to make up museum labels in

exhibitions where the objects were selected by neither an academic nor acurator.

And where we invited our visitors to write and publish their labels in the same

space.


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And where this interweaving of artist collaboration, fictional narratives, social and

participatory elements embraced the family audience- captured here in its messy

complexity in an illustration by Shaun Tan. Rather than the death of the curator we

present the case that these projects have the potential to liberate those caught in the

headlights of deity expectations not simply via the creative use of lies but through

forging new relationships with the collection and our visitors.


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Whilst Sydneys weather is heavenly most of the time, our institutionis Earthbound and we are not gods. We are not high caste in the

museum panoply rather we speak to you from public programs and

the family audience. As you will see this plays a significant role in

our story.


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Our Museum is the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney, Australia. It holds a

fascinating and idiosyncratic collection of over 500,000 objects, built up over

130 years, spanning history, science, technology, design, industry,

decorative arts, music, transport and space exploration. The Museum at

one time sought to interpret the wonders of the Industrial Age. As a twentyfirst century museum, we seek to enable visitors to discover and be

inspired by human ingenuity. Our brief is broad, and our intention is to be

an 'open' Museum open to rich engagement, to new conversations about

the collection These delightful projects fulfill both the brief and the

intention yet came off the back of years of organisational and cultural

change in the creative use of our permanent collectionchange that isongoing.


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Late last century when writing books

about the collection for very young childrenabout shoes. I selected this one not for its

uncoupled status but because it was

handmade and woven. The external publisher and its early

childhood literacy advisor insisted we photoshop in another shoe to

make it a pair as every other page started with These shoes .Weintended to point out the fake shoe in the backpages with the object

descriptionsthe curator felt it necessary that I seek permission

from the head of collections to temporarily make them a pair. This

entailed a written submission, a meeting and some discomfort.

So how did we get from the errant photoshopped shoe to even

consider making up labelsand what were the deeper issues and

implications of this journey. Four key principles provided a

framework for these successful literary interventions.


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1TAP INTO THE CURIOUS

Firstly, its certainly is not a directive to write nonsense for no one but a

careful strategy of artists and object selection. Take the objects.


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Curious things beget curiosity, feed the imagination and can connect togreat, small, smart and deeply personal stories. Conventional exhibitionsrequire supplementation, scholarly research and a curatorial structure for

visitors to decode the selected museum story. Yet any object can be ripe

for display and enrichment especially when its to be a springboard for

imaginative thinking rather than purely a mnemonic.


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2CATCH YOUR MASTER STORYTELLER

Collaborate with a master storyteller, giving them open artistic license,

within a specific brief, and then maintain an active creative dialogue.


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Shaun Tan was our first storyteller: a renowned author , animator(2011 Oscar, Animated Short film) and more importantly for this

Swedish setting the 2011 Astrid Lindgren Prize for childrens

literature. Collaborations with three other leading artists followed,

connecting the collection with the creativity of both children and

adults alike. Lets first look Shaun Tans The Odditoreum.


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The playful outcome was a small exhibition (book, program, websiteand travelling show). Shauns brief was to concoct stories behind 11

especially unusual Museum objects. Shauns response was to not to

simply write the fantastical but to ornament the possible in a kind of

bricolage (described as a way of combining and recombining a

closed set of materials to come up with new ideas). The verypopular media mash-ups fit this description and so too does Shaun

Tans approach to writing for the Museum. He sought information

about each object from our records and undertook his own research

to combine two concepts into a new idea.

G id d t ti d i b 6


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Guide dog test ing device number 6

This enormous liquorice all-sorts shoe is one of several outlandish

objects used to test young guide dogs for their susceptibility to

distraction while on duty. A tricycle inside the shoe allows a rider to

manoeuvre this colourful vehicle while prospective guide dogs are put

through their paces.

Guide dog testing device number 6This enormous liquorice all-sorts shoe is one of several outlandish objects used to test young guide dogs for their susceptibility to distrac


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3MAKE CONNECTIONS

OBJECT, TEXT & VISITOR EXPERIENCE

Finding a creative point of connection between object, text and the visitoris the key, rather than object significance. The artists we selected created

narratives that were subtle, plausible and multi-layered, with strange and

humorous twists. There was no dumbing down for family visitors. For The

Odditoreum seven labels were written by young children as part of our practice

of visitor collaboration and treated with the same production values as were

those written by Shaun Tan.

Visitors in all projects were given the opportunity to make their own creative

response using writing stations where they could self-publish labels . Visitors

responded in kind writing thousands of labels with many penned by children.

These constantly changing displays became one of the most popular aspects

of all the exhibitions featuring fictional narratives.


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We then went onto The Tinytoreum which featured an inventive

goanna and illustrated labels


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We couldnt resist this shot of a visitor who brought his own binoculars in.


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Revealwas a departure from the previous oreum projects in that it was asmall collection based tour illuminating 20 objects already on display.The

program was a series of texts, written in invisible ink in dimly lit placesadjacent to a featured object only be revealed by a black light torch. Our

collaborator was Morris Gleitzman another successful Australian writer

reviewed as an author that can write for children and young adults with

optimism about the power of story to inform and guide. Morris wanted the

response to each narrative to be This could be true.


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He was an unusualneighbour, seemed nice,

but we didnt see much of

him. Kept to himself. Bit

noisy. Always in his shedhammering and sawing

and drilling. I think he was

a bit shy. Took him eight

years to actually speak tome. And then all he said

was, Excuse me, have

you got the time?


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Mum always made us sit up

straight. Thats why she loved

this chair. I didnt. Each time I

sat on it there were two sad

mouths. I bet Mr Mackintoshdidnt even want to design

such an uncomfortable chair. I

bet his mum made him.


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Its a celebration of what museums

are really repositories of the human imagination.

Every made object is the distillation

of at least some imagining, and good museums use

this to light up the imaginations of their visitors

(Morris Gleitzman, 2011)


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4SHIFT THE INSTITUTIONAL CULTURE

SUPPORT A VISITOR-CENTRIC

EXPERIENCE

The Oopsatoreumis the third in the Museums oreum series and

reprises our successful collaboration with Shaun Tan. Already a

book, the exhibition opens in November 2013.

The Oopsatoreum: the inventions of Henry Mintoxexhibition will

connect visitors to the collection and their own creativity whilst

unraveling some important truths about the process of innovation.


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To quote Shaun:

While the Odditoreum wandered randomly from medieval cannonballs to

genetically engineered moths, the Oopsatoreum involved more of an

overarching narrative, with some emphasis on mechanical objects and

accidents. I responded with the character of an imaginary inventor, Henry A.

Mintox: spectacularly unsuccessful and therefore largely unknown, at least

until this museum 'retrospective'. Many of the actual objects, from a hearing-aids to a mechanical dog, are recast as failed innovations. In some cases

being too far ahead of their time, such as an early attempt to introduce

mobile text-messaging using pre-electronic technology. Beneath the

silliness of the project there is actually an important observation: all

invention begins as a daring act of imagination, and beings with a play of

outlandish ideas. For every success that filters into daily use, there arecountless failures that are as important a testament to creative spirit.

Aimed at anyone who has ever made a mistake The Oopsatoreum will have

very broad appeal.


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Love trumpet, 1899

The invention of early hearing aids or ear trumpets both fascinatedand frustrated Henry Mintox in equal measure. Mere amplification

is of little interest to me, he wrote, when so much of the world

remains unheard in the first instance. ..


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This ball was used todecode secret messagesfrom Russia. The messageswere entered into the ball

using the same principlesof the telephone. Eachletter was a series ofnumbers, and the spaceswere made by pressing thelarge round button on top.

Once decoded, letters cameout of the slots in the baseon small arms, spelling outthe message. This inventionwas abandoned after itcontinually spelt out therecipe for Borscht.

Owen MacNamara, Amelia Smiles andHelena Kertesz, ages 12, 15 and 15


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The character of Henry didnt trust the patent system so he took torecording his inventions on postcards which he mailed to himself.

Each of the postcards is from the museums collection over printed

with Shauns illustrations.


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Programming, not specialist curatorial, staff led these exhibitionteams. In our museum, programs play an increasingly important

role in audience development. Nevertheless, balancing scholarship

with creative engagement was challenging for many departmentsand remains a tension for curators and programmers. Steadfast,

friendly team communication was as important as senior

management support for a more open, participatory and accessible

Museum. Key in shifting our Museums organisational culture, was

this role of public programming staff, with their particular experienceand expertise in building creative collaborations with creatives

(performers, writers, groups and alliances). This capacity provided

another direction for the curators, who typically connect and feel at

home with, scholars and collectors. Understanding and embracing

the family audience, and the audience runs on the board, helped

to underpin the shift of these programs or installations from being

supplementary elements to major exhibitions, to becoming

commissioning authors and destination audience drivers for family

based exhibitions.


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We are now at our conclusion where we reflect on our learnings.

Fictional narratives are a new window into reality, a new avenue for

curatorial practices and full of humour, a quality rarely intentionally

at play in a Museum label. A seminar recently held in Sydney

explored what happens when objects cut loose from their

disciplinary moorings: when things formerly known as decorative,

scientific, natural, ethnographic, artistic, domestic, technological or

fictional come together to form new allegiances and break old

dogmas. The host commenting that when you allow curiosity to be

your curatorial guide objects start curating themselves. Objects force

their way into exhibitions and resonances seem to spring up. Thechallenge is how to capture that spirit for the audience


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In this era of the participatory museum, where this term is most

often connected with social media interactivity, these exhibitions

demonstrate that meaningful content can also be generated from

multiple voices in a low-tech, low-cost, manner that is genuinely

creative in outcome.

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