Working with and around smaller museums and museum services over the past few months, I have been struck by how very far down the food chain these organisations can often now seem to be.
The promised cascade of Renaissance assistance has for many been more of a drip than a waterfall. At the same time, the language of the new philosophies has little resonance among most of their staff.
To mix the maritime metaphors, it’s as though the flagship and its flotilla, already well over the horizon ahead of the fleet, are relying on satellite technology to keep in touch while the crew of smaller boats are still struggling with semaphore and flags.
I got the same feeling when I was reading Sandra Dudley’s Museum Materialities. Here was a debate which does not preoccupy many of the coffee breaks in museums outside London. Often, but thank heavens not always, it’s a discourse conducted in a language which tends to obscure rather than enlighten.
“Undoing Cartesian mental/material distinctions, and re-emphasising the mutual embeddedness of sensory modalities, sensible material qualities and the personal influences individual perceiving subjects bring to bear has the potential to inform museum practice in creative ways,” writes Dudley in her introduction.
Elsewhere we are told that the Colombian artist Doris Salcedo no longer includes words in her work, rather she allows the narrative to unfold along “a teleological or etiological continuum”.
Salcedo, you will recall, was the creator of Shibboleth, the symbolic crack across the floor of Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, a 2007 work which also features here in a perceptive essay by Helen Rees Leahy.
You will have gathered by now that I did not find Museum Materialities an easy read. In her foreword Susan Pearce invites the reader “to enjoy” the essays that follow. And I tried, really I did.
Perhaps it’s just me, but a book that “examines materiality and other perceptual and ontological qualities of objects themselves; embodied sensory and cognitive engagements… with particular objects or object types [and] notions of aesthetics, affect and well-being in a museum or gallery” does not go high on my wish list.
To be fair this is not a publication designed for the ordinary reader; it’s an academic book for an academic readership, constructed within that stylistic template that seems to encourage repetition and in which everything is meticulously referenced to the point where the endless parenthesised references almost deliberately break up the rhythm and narrative flow of the text.
And then there was a little voice that kept whispering in my ear Ways of Seeing.
Dudley has brought together 17 contributors to this exploration of the relationships between objects and people in museums. She doesn’t reveal her brief to her authors – curators, artists, academics – but like a skilful impresario she has encouraged them to offer wide variety in their perspectives and subject matter.
The cast list includes Birmingham Museum’s Sultanganj Buddha, the ephemeral work of Andy Goldsworthy, Cheltenham’s reserve collection, Winston Churchill – “We are all worms. But I do believe I am a glow worm” – and Virginia Woolf.
For me it is those that offer the most personal perspectives that work best perhaps because they break through the language barrier – a good example being the evocation of memories prompted by Howard Morphy’s early evening walk up Mt Painter, the hill behind his Canberra home, when the smell of burning eucalyptus initiated a kind of antipodean counterpart to Proust and the madeleines.
And then I remembered that “the way we see things is structured by what we know or what we believe” from John Berger’s revolutionary Ways of Seeing, published in 1972.
Twenty or more years ago it would have been impossible that Museum Materialities contained no mention of Berger – had I missed it? Quickly to the index – nothing. Funny that.
Timothy Mason is an arts and heritage consultant
