When I became a curator in the 1980s, there was much excitable talk about the importance of contemporary collecting. Museums, as repositories of old things, the argument went, were about the past. So it seemed daring to suggest that the present demanded to be represented in collections.
To an extent, this phenomenon was associated with the rise of social history. Just as 'history from below' had sought, in EP Thompson's potent phrase, to rescue ordinary people in the past from 'the condescension of posterity', so social history curators sought to collect the objects that accompanied ordinary people through their lives.
This inversion, which placed the ordinary above the supposedly great, was one of the wellsprings of contemporary collecting: if the ordinary was significant to our account of the past, then surely it mattered to the present, too. And, in the present the ordinary is available to collect in a way that the extraordinary is not.
Social history collecting also assumed something of the ethnographic mode; curators 'acting the stranger' could collect the chattels in the present that had meaning to the communities they were seeking to represent.
Science and technology museums have always exhibited and collected contemporary objects. From the early years of the South Kensington Museum, teaching collections of contemporary apparatus rubbed shoulders with historical objects.
Between the two world wars, a commercially attuned Science Museum displayed the latest models of scientific and technological apparatus, taking them on loan from companies with the intention of replacing them with the latest models when they came out.
It can be argued that for much of the Science Museum's history, it was not the contemporary, but the historical that was problematic. This may well be because the museum's staff shared the cultural consensus that novelty is science's core characteristic.
In this view, science wipes away the falsities of the past and replaces them with new understanding that points the way to the future; technology follows in its footsteps with the products that usher in an age of contentment and ease. And yet the sparkling new technologies we collect this year are next decade's historical curiosities: what price the Walkman in the age of the iPod?
In the past the risk was that without appropriate historical scholarship, such collections came to be conceptualised in terms of historically-naive technological evolutionism with the objects arranged in faux-Linnaean sequences. The audience for these collections was often seen to be 'posterity'; we imagined our successor curators patting us on the back for collecting precisely the type of material that we rather wish our predecessors had collected for our use.
But now, increasingly, collecting in contemporary science and technology is considered to be problematic because they have become such enormous fields, employing millions of workers worldwide in hundreds of disciplines. How can the modern, understaffed museum ever hope to shadow so much activity?
Ultimately, the contemporary is only a passing category. It is more important to collect with a contemporary sensibility than merely to collect contemporary things. First, we must ensure that our collecting is relevant to contemporary audiences. Inevitably, this entails reducing the emphasis on posterity as our prime audience, although we can only guess at the tastes and interests of future audiences.
Paradoxically, collecting with a contemporary sensibility also requires curators to have sophisticated historical understanding. For science and technology curators, the probing, sceptical and analytical nature of academic history of science offers concrete models of how we may think about our subjects.
We are no more required to be bound by the ways in which our predecessors collected than historians are obliged to tell the old heroic stories they inherited from earlier colleagues.
Finally, contemporary relevance and historical sense come together in the consideration of how to collect in new fields that trespass against old categories. In collecting software, for example, the physical object is only incidentally associated with the meaning that we are seeking to convey.
Similarly, for science museums to collect contemporary art may not be obviously comfortable in the category of the represented or of the representation of science. But artworks are potent for our audiences in challenging the ambiguities of the world that science and technology have created, as visitors to our new energy gallery are discovering.
Tim Boon is the head of collections at the Science Museum, London
To an extent, this phenomenon was associated with the rise of social history. Just as 'history from below' had sought, in EP Thompson's potent phrase, to rescue ordinary people in the past from 'the condescension of posterity', so social history curators sought to collect the objects that accompanied ordinary people through their lives.
This inversion, which placed the ordinary above the supposedly great, was one of the wellsprings of contemporary collecting: if the ordinary was significant to our account of the past, then surely it mattered to the present, too. And, in the present the ordinary is available to collect in a way that the extraordinary is not.
Social history collecting also assumed something of the ethnographic mode; curators 'acting the stranger' could collect the chattels in the present that had meaning to the communities they were seeking to represent.
Science and technology museums have always exhibited and collected contemporary objects. From the early years of the South Kensington Museum, teaching collections of contemporary apparatus rubbed shoulders with historical objects.
Between the two world wars, a commercially attuned Science Museum displayed the latest models of scientific and technological apparatus, taking them on loan from companies with the intention of replacing them with the latest models when they came out.
It can be argued that for much of the Science Museum's history, it was not the contemporary, but the historical that was problematic. This may well be because the museum's staff shared the cultural consensus that novelty is science's core characteristic.
In this view, science wipes away the falsities of the past and replaces them with new understanding that points the way to the future; technology follows in its footsteps with the products that usher in an age of contentment and ease. And yet the sparkling new technologies we collect this year are next decade's historical curiosities: what price the Walkman in the age of the iPod?
In the past the risk was that without appropriate historical scholarship, such collections came to be conceptualised in terms of historically-naive technological evolutionism with the objects arranged in faux-Linnaean sequences. The audience for these collections was often seen to be 'posterity'; we imagined our successor curators patting us on the back for collecting precisely the type of material that we rather wish our predecessors had collected for our use.
But now, increasingly, collecting in contemporary science and technology is considered to be problematic because they have become such enormous fields, employing millions of workers worldwide in hundreds of disciplines. How can the modern, understaffed museum ever hope to shadow so much activity?
Ultimately, the contemporary is only a passing category. It is more important to collect with a contemporary sensibility than merely to collect contemporary things. First, we must ensure that our collecting is relevant to contemporary audiences. Inevitably, this entails reducing the emphasis on posterity as our prime audience, although we can only guess at the tastes and interests of future audiences.
Paradoxically, collecting with a contemporary sensibility also requires curators to have sophisticated historical understanding. For science and technology curators, the probing, sceptical and analytical nature of academic history of science offers concrete models of how we may think about our subjects.
We are no more required to be bound by the ways in which our predecessors collected than historians are obliged to tell the old heroic stories they inherited from earlier colleagues.
Finally, contemporary relevance and historical sense come together in the consideration of how to collect in new fields that trespass against old categories. In collecting software, for example, the physical object is only incidentally associated with the meaning that we are seeking to convey.
Similarly, for science museums to collect contemporary art may not be obviously comfortable in the category of the represented or of the representation of science. But artworks are potent for our audiences in challenging the ambiguities of the world that science and technology have created, as visitors to our new energy gallery are discovering.
Tim Boon is the head of collections at the Science Museum, London
