Some dictionaries claim to be concise. Museums, their close-relatives, make no such claims.
Museums and dictionaries though are driven by a common desire to contain every possible object or word, even though most are never looked at or looked up. As a result my Concise Oxford Dictionary has 1,558 pages of closely typed words and the Manchester Museum has four and a quarter million objects.
The Concise Dictionary of Dress, an exhibition created by Judith Clark and Adam Phillips and held earlier this year, used the ruse of a dictionary to reflect on the Victoria and Albert Museum’s reserve dress collections at Blythe House in Hammersmith.
What are these collections being held in reserve for? Unlike footballers in the reserve team it is unlikely that even a tiny proportion of them will ever get to play. Those collections at Blythe House and elsewhere are being kept for something other than a chance to be displayed.
Holding onto collections does not fit with today’s managerialist culture that requires all activity to have measurable outcomes. And yet we are not asked to measure the outcome of having four and a quarter million objects in store.
It isn’t really the vastness of collections that is breathtaking, given the scale of human activity and the diversity of the natural world. It’s the hoarding that is curious, the banging up of objects in a prison of a store.
Phillips suggests that dictionaries are “just-in-case books” that are mostly left unread. It is tempting to conclude that museums are just-in-case institutions. Just in case these archaeological remains become useful in the future, we’ll keep them.
In fact, although many museum objects are unused, they aren’t there just-in-case. They aren’t collections-in-waiting, there is nothing more for them to aspire to.
This is because, ironically, it is the existence of collections rather than their use that is their raison d’etre. They are a deterrent against not-knowing and meaninglessness and loss; we can sleep easier knowing all the objects are in the ark of the museum.
In a funding and policy climate where use and concrete outcomes are supposedly paramount, this may not cut much ice. But what might help us is the current interest in how museums can assist the nation’s wellbeing.
The psychoanalyst Hanna Segal argues that artistic creation stems from a reparative impulse, a wish to atone for destructive impulses, whether actual or those acted out in fantasy: “The impulse is to recover and recreate this lost world.”
My hunch is that museums can be thought about as symbolic representations of this internal world. Museums ensure the survival of objects despite our destruction of them. And curators need to keep on collecting new ones in order to confirm that objects have survived repeated attempts to destroy them.
Museums carry out acts of reparation, restitution, restoration and repair. It seems important for our wellbeing to know that somewhere there are people who are finding, restoring and keeping broken or lost objects.
And increasingly it seems important to know that museums are able to make reparation for past deeds through the restitution of objects to their ‘rightful’ place.
If we can find a way of describing all this we could articulate these new purposes, as well as the tried and tested ones of preservation and learning, and further understand the spell that evocative objects hold over us.
Myna Trustram, is the research manager, Renaissance North West.
email: m.trustram@manchester.gov.uk
