Biomedicine on Display

Nina has a point — her favourite museums are idiosyncratic. There are lots of “perfectly nice, perfectly forgettable” museums, but those that stick in one’s memory are those with individuality, like the Museum of Jurassic Technology. They are often small, because they are not run by committees, and the staff is passionate about what they are doing.

Yet, as Ninas points out, most small idiosyncratic museums strive to become bigger and more mainstream rather than remain small, quirky and passionate and cultivating their idiosyncracy. She gives four reasons for this:

Funders and potential donors tend to look for particular benchmarks of professionalism (appropriately), and few are comfortable funding the most risky or content-specific institutions.

As money gets tight, museums look for exhibits, program strategies, and revenue streams that are “proven” by other institutions’ successes, rather than charting their own potentially risky path.

Many museums no longer employ in-house exhibit developers, relying instead on a short list of contractors and consultants. Design firms’ projects often have a common look across different cities and institutions.

Small museums, which are most likely to cultivate local, distinctive voice and approaches, often have an inferiority complex. Rather than asserting their uniqueness, they try to emulate large museums.

Science centers are among the worst. They have, Ninas suggests, three additional reasons for homogeneity:

The audience cycles frequently as families “age out.” Institutions may feel less of a need to offer something unusual or distinctive if the audience will keep refreshing every few years.

The content is often seen as not being community-specific. Science is science, and grocery store exhibits are grocery store exhibits. Funders like the NSF have encouraged science centers in particular to share their techniques and evaluations, which is fabulous but also leads to rampant and sometimes unthinking imitation.

These museums have undergone the fastest growth in the industry in the past thirty years. There is a big business of selling exhibits, copies of exhibits, and exhibit recipe books, and many individuals who start new institutions rely almost entirely on these vehicles to fill their galleries.

I certainly share Nina’s love of idiosyncratic institutions — and I can certainly see the risk of becoming bigger and more established. Can we keep the passion even though we are slowly growing?

Like most museums, Medical Museion is a member of the International  Council of Museums (ICOM). The major benefit of membership is that you don’t have to pay entrance to other member museums (and sometimes are allowed to bypass the queue by getting in through the VIP entrance, which gives a kick of feeling important).

But except for this, one doesn’t really get much out of the hefty membership fee. ICOM, with its headquarters in the UNESCO building in Paris, is just another big transnational bureaucracy.

In the good old days of Western imperialism, ICOM promoted wholesome European and American values. Not so anymore. The 22nd General Conference will be held in Shanghai in November this year on the theme ‘Museums for Social Harmony’.

Took me some time to get my memory in order. In fact, last I heard the term ’social harmony’ was in a Xinhua news report from the Sixth Plenum of the 16th Central Committee meeting of the Chinese Communist Party, held in Beijing in 2006.

Building social harmony, said a CPC spokesperson then, ”is a major strategic move taken by the Party to build a fair and just society and attain sustainable social and economic development”. And now, four years later, this strategic move has already been adopted by ICOM.

As a corollary, ’Museums for Social Harmony’, has also been chosen as the theme for this year’s International Museum Day on Tuesday 18 May.  

Actually, when you think about it, it’s not that surprising. I don’t believe this is a specific ICOM phenomenon. Transnational bureaucracies probably have quite a lot in common with CPC’s world view of a socially harmonic, market economy-based society.

We have a old and pretty dysfunctional website. Shall we rebuild it (using the university’s system) or not?

All other great museums have fancy, big websites with lots of rich media functionalities. They cost hundreds of hours and enormous sums of money to build and maintain. Are they worth it? Or are the days of big websites numbered?

Mitch Joel (TwistImage) believes so (March 6), and I think he has a good argument.  If you think about how people find and connect to brands, they don’t necessarily do so through Google or other search engines anymore: “In fact, more and more people are having their first brand interaction on their mobile device. There are many people who are also connecting to brands for the first time in spaces like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube.”

This doesn’t necessarily mean that website is about to become extinct. But it means that institutional branding is much more than one, big and centralized website:  “it is more than likely that we’re going to see more and more brands create multiple spaces and platforms to ensure that they’re connecting with the right people in the right communities”. And even if institutions use microblogging and other platforms, they usually think about them as instruments to drive people back to their own, controlled, website: “The truth is that the more vibrant community for a brand may be happening more through a mobile app or online social network platform… or something else or something in addition to it”.

Worth some thought.

In the early morning — just before Johanna began to make the usual noices to indicate she wanted to be transferred to our bed for a last cosy hour of sleep — my eyes fell on this sentence in a piece by Douglas Haddow in Adbusters (‘The coming barbarism’):

Rather than Bourriaud’s altermodernism, we should pursue an alter-realism: dispense with the art gallery altogether and make reality our experimentation lab.

I admit it’s taken out of context. Nevertheless, try to translate the sentence into the domain of science/medical museums and sci- and bioart, as represented by, for example, the Wellcome Collection:

Dispense with the sci- and bioart gallery and make scientific reality our experimentation lab.

In other words, don’t move the aesthetic out of the laboratory into galleries and museum exhibitions (this is what all sci- and bioartists so far have been doing). Go to the lab instead, do some real experiments and re-frame this practice into an aesthetic experiment within the walls of the lab itself. The lab is your art gallery.

I’ve just received the announcement for the 11th annual meeting of Universeum (the European network for university heritage) in my inbox.

The meeting will be held in Uppsala, 17-20 June, on the theme ‘University Heritage: Present and Future’. The organisers invite submissions of papers devoted to “academic heritage in its broadest sense, tangible and intangible, namely the preservation, study, access and promotion of university collections, museums, archives, libraries, and buildings of historical and scientific significance”.

Academic heritage institutions traditional roles are collecting, preservation, research and teaching. Increasingly, they are expected to develop public programs and exhibitions as well as to assume a stronger role in marketing their university’s identity. These roles can pose considerable challenges. How can we position ourselves within the growing constraints of generating external funding, creating new audiences and keeping our institutions’ identity?

The present and future status of university museums is a very important topic for a museum like ours (we are a unit under the University of Copenhagen). But frankly, this call doesn’t sound as inspiring as it could have been. I had expected a more clearly defined theme for the meeting, focusing more on, for example, the complicated transition phase that university museums are in at the moment — squeezed as they are between, on the one hand, schemes for national research governance based on scientometrics etc. and, on the other hand, new market-oriented and populist national museum policies. Both trends are eroding traditional scholarly ideals for the production and preservation of and engagement with the academic heritage.

And frankly, the format of the meeting looks pretty uninspiring too. Proposals are invited for the usual 20 min (including 5 min discussion!) presentation format only. I would have expected a somewhat more imaginative spectrum of formats, like panels, group discussions, small workshops on selected topics, etc. I don’t expect online Twitter-sessions, but if Universeum has the ambition to set agendas for the future of European university museums, it should strive for sharper thematic programmes and a more up-to-date meeting format.

But one can of course be happily surprised. And Uppsala is absolutely gorgeous in early June. So if you haven’t been discouraged by this post, send your proposal + short bio + short mention of research interests to universeum@gustavianum.uu.se — before 15 March, 2010. 

More info here: http://www.gustavianum.uu.se/universeum2010.

Can’t resist forwarding a query from Keni Sturgeon, curator at Mission Mill Museum (a textile museum in Oregon), on the ACUMG-list. Keni, who also teaches museum studies at Western Oregon University, is in the midst of planning “a graduate course on Small Museums” and would like some input from other small museums, especially college and university museums/galleries:

So, if you were in a position to hire a new, entry level employee fresh out of a museum studies program in grad school, what things would you want them to know about working in a small museum? What would be the top three skills they could come with? In what ways do you see small museums as being different from mid-large size museums and how does that difference impact your job?

Good question — what kind of skills do we look for when interviewing applicants for jobs in a small university museum like ours?

• We cannot afford to hire people who are too specialised; a small museum curator needs to be a jack of all trades.
• At the same time he/she must be a master of at least one trade to uphold general academic-curatorial standards.
• All museums want staff with excellent collaborative skills — but for a small museum the lack of such skills is a disaster.
• Academic-curatorial staff in small museums is expected to be willing to do all kinds of jobs, from cleaning artefacts for the next exhibition (which always opens next week) to writing trail-blazing academic articles in high-impact, peer-reviewed journals.

What else are we looking for?

(added on 11 January):
Quoted from the discussion on ACUMG-list:
Lesley Wright, Faulconer Gallery, Grinnell College suggests:

I would be looking for an employee who writes and speaks well, who is organized and task oriented, and who is willing to pitch in and do a wide range of tasks. The biggest difference to me between small museums and larger museums is the lack of specialization. I direct (e.g., administer), but I also curate and handle much of our public relations. And I teach. And I can design an exhibition if I need to. And I write grants. And I lead tours. I would hope any graduate of a museums studies program could do budgeting, and knows how to work with a budget. Grant writing would be a big plus. A familiarity with art handling would be great. And a desire to make art accessible to a wide public is a must. I would also welcome a recent grad’s knowledge about the wider field of museums, as we are all prone to getting buried in our work and lose sight of the bigger picture. Finally, prima donas need not apply. I need employees who can work well with a wide range of people.

and Phillip Earenfight, The Trout Gallery, Dickinson College, adds

Sincere devotion to serving the public and passion for the work.
Good judgment.
Flexibility and creativity on the fly with a eye towards keeping priorities in order.
Keen visual skills.
Solid writing and speaking.
Attention to detail.

Great list of qualities (virtues?) needed by a museum like ours. Any more comments?

Science centers — institutions for the promotion of public engagement with science and technology — have mushroomed all over the world since Frank Oppenheimer started Exploratorium in San Francisco more than forty years ago. (Jessica has just written an interesting review of K. C. Cole’s recent biography of Oppenheimer).

Would you agree with this view of the typical science center?

Situated in industrial-looking steel, glass and concrete buildings painted in bright colours, these institutions understand their basic aim as promoting a warm and cozy excitement about science and technology, especially to young people. They do so by presenting science in a flashy and Disneylandish way and by serving a variety of fast foods and ice cream in the cafeteria. The heart of a typical science center is a floor space crowded with ‘apparatuses’ and ‘installations’ where the kids can do ‘interactive experiments’, meaning they are supposed to push buttons and watch awesome electric sparks before rushing off to the next ‘experiment’; there’s a lot of running and yelling in science centers. All this is called ‘informal learning’, which means that the kids may (!) return home with some elementary understanding of gravity or electricity or the migration patterns of birds, knowledge which they would otherwise probably have needed several minutes to acquire by reading a book or by paying attention in class for a moment. But they surely have had fun — and so have their accompanying dads (and moms?). Most importantly the risk of meeting drunkards and abusive adults is much lesser than in an ordinary amusement park. You can safely leave your kid alone and wait for them to be so exhausted that you can bring them home and get them to bed early.

I’m afraid many of my colleagues would hardly object against this deliberately caricaturised view of an ideal-typical science center. These institutions have a notoriusly bad press among curators and historians of science.

But maybe it’s time to change this attitude, because it seems like the science center institution is about to come to age after decades of uncritical expansion.

In the announcement for its 21st annual conference in 2010, the European network of science centers (Ecsite) admits that they may so far have presented science in a too positive and uncritical light. Therefore, this year’s meeting will take “a critical and thought-provoking look at the work of science centres”: “What happens when we stop playing it safe? What risks do we take in our exhibitions and programmes?”.

Actually similar kinds of self-critical questions were asked in some of the earlier Ecsite-conferences. For example, the 2006 meeting asked whether science centres are for children only — and what the kids are really learning?

Are questions like these signs of the beginning of a fundamental change in the science center as an institution? Could it be the case that science centers are becoming more interested in adult audiences, a change which of course demands a less naïve attitude to science and technology?

If so, they are mirroring the tendency in history of science museums to focus more and more on outreach — unfortunately at the expense of their collections and their research programmes. Are we, for better or for worse, witnessing a convergence between the science center and the science museum as institutions?

At the last weekly staff lunch meeting we had a short discussion about the notions of ‘topical’ and ‘timely’ exhibitions. A ‘topical/timely’ (Danish: aktuel) exhibition is one that relates to current social or political events, like for example showing a climate exhibition here in 2009.

One argument in the discussion was: Aren’t topical/timely exhibitions exactly what university museums by definition ought to avoid getting involved in? If university museums are by definition elitist — because universities are by definition elitist, as we discussed in a couple of earlier posts (here and here and well summarised by Adam here) — then their job is not primarily to create topical/timely exhibitions (even though this is an absolutely worthwhile thing to do) but rather to create exhibitions that set the agenda for what will become topical/timely. That is, one would expect university museums to be in the lead museologically, because the rest of the university has (at least in its self-understanding) taken on the role to be cognitively leading.

In a sense this is quite trivial. Going beyond what is topical/timely is what drives not just the world of science and scholarshíp but also much of the world of music, visual arts, literature, film making, fashion, etc. Neither scientists nor artists are content with creating knowledge or works of art that are topical/timely; they want to create new and so far untopical/untimely conceptual worlds, new data, new procedures, which are by definition untimely when they appear.

But many museums — especially, and paradoxically, university museums — still behave as if they stand outside the world of scholarship and creative arts. They want to cater for the current taste rather than change the taste.

And here comes the conondrum: the quest for untimeliness seems to be problematic for us who believe in the positive value of the notion of ‘museum 2.0′ (participatory museum). I mean, how can you wish to restructure the museum with its collections and displays into a user-driven institution while at the same time promoting the creation of new and unseen museum visions and practices? Can you do both without becoming a schizophrenic museum? And generally speaking, how do museums handle the tension between being avantgardish and being populist.

Psychiatric museums have come a long way since their early days. Before the 1980s, private collections of aficionados made up the field. Since then, several psychiatric museums have emerged. Today, these institutions have turned into modern museums creating numerous exhibitions and reaching large audiences. The most successful of the psychiatric museums have more than 140.000 visitors a year. In addition, collaboration between various psychiatric museums has become an important issue, especially for the museums in Europe. In June 2009, the joint project “Connecting the European Mind” was approved by the Education, Audiovisual and Cultural Executive Agency (EACEA) This project will lead to a number of multilateral initiatives in the period 2009-2011. Furthermore, international conferences play an important role in the exchange of information between the museums.

Last week the city of Prague hosted one of these conferences. Participants of 19 countries in Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia, North and South America showed up at Bohnice Psychiatric Hospital to attend the 2nd International Conference on Psychiatric Museums and History of Psychiatry (Oct. 29-31, 2009).The Bohnice Psychiatric Hospital and the city of Prague had a special interest in arranging the conference. As Ivan David and Dagmar Zaludová explained at the conference, a new international exhibition “Mental Illness in the Course of Ages” has been scheduled to be held at the National Museum of Prague in 2010. This exhibition is also intended to be part of the celebration of the 100th anniversary of the Psychiatric Hospital in Prague-Bohnice. The exhibition will be located in two halls of 278 m2 and 253 m2 and in the foyer (431 m2) in a new building of the National Museum in close vicinity to the Wenceslas Square in the heart of Prague.

Besides the upcoming exhibition in Prague, a wide range of historical and museological topics were discussed at the conference. A key theme that emerged from the discussions was the relationship between art and psychiatry. Art played, some way or another, an important role for all the museums represented at the conference. Psychiatric museums such as Bethlem Royal Hospital Museum (UK), The Museum, Psychiatric Hospital in Aarhus (Denmark), The Unconscious Museum (Brazil), and The Museum Dr. Guislain (Belgium) all have large collections of psychiatric art (often referred to as “outsider art” or “l’art brut“. At the congress Kate Forde, curator of the Wellcome Collection in London, presented the project “Madness and Modernity, Mental Illness and the Visual Arts in Vienna 1900”, , and Tatiana Goncalves (Brazil), Mia Lejsted (Denmark), Hans Looijen of Het Dolhuys (Haarlem, NE) and Rolf Brüggemann, director of MuSeele in Göppingen (Germany), touched on similar subjects. The Minds Museum (Museo Laboratorio della Mente) in Rome has worked together with Studio Azzurro, a Milan-based art collective that works with interactive and video environments. In October 2008, the Minds Museum reopened after a high-tech overhaul by Studio Azzuro. In Prague, Martelli Pompeo talked about the new exhibition of Museo Laboratorio della Mente and showed a psychiatric history film made by the Rome museum. Not only artwork and film but also music is an essential element of the very popular museum, Sultan Bayezid II Health Museum in Edirne, Turkey. In Edirne visitors of the museum can listen to music (played by a live orchestra) that once was part of music therapy at the old Ottoman hospital. The Edirne museum has won a number of awards, including the Council of Europe Museum Award in 2004.

Apart from the relationship between art and psychiatry, the issue of how to exhibit the history of psychiatry was a central theme at the conference in Prague. The physical settings of psychiatric museums today are diverse. Some museums, such as Het Dolhuys in Haarlem and the Museum in Aarhus, have very large and unique historic buildings for their exhibitions, whereas others, such as Bethlem Royal Hospital Museum, have small buildings and restricted facilities. In order to reach a larger audience, Bethlem Royal Hospital Museum has specialised in running off-site exhibitions. At the conference in Prague, Michael Phillips of Bethlem Museum talked about the pros and cons of doing off-site exhibitions.

Christina Vanja of the Landeswohlfahrtsverband Hessen elaborated over the many memorials, archives and museums in the German Federal State of Hesse. The mental hospitals in Hesse were involved in the Nazi “Euthanasia-Program”, and approximately 20.000 patients of Hessian hospitals were killed in the period 1940 to 1945. The central memorial for the victims in Hesse is in Hadamar.

At the same time as the Action T4 was carried out in Germany, family care reached its highest level in the Belgium town Geel. Bert Boeckx of the Public Psychiatric Care Centre in Geel (OPZ) outlined the long and fascinating story of family care in Geel. In September 2009, a permanent exhibition on the history of psychiatric foster care was established in Geel. In the last presentation of the conference, Pavel Kalvach and Zdenek Kalvach gave a thorough account of the troubled history of dementia; a story in which Prague physician Oskar Fischer played an important role.

Ivan David, Dagmar Zaludová, and other employees of Bohnice Psychiatric Hospital had done an excellent job of arranging the conference. The next conference will be held in 2011. For anyone interested in reading more about psychiatric museums, I recommend the book by Rolf Brüggemann and Gisela Smid-Krebs, Locating the Soul. Museums of Psychiatry in Europe (Mabuse Verlag 2007)

In one of his last blog posts Thomas argued that university museums are basically elitist institutions. 

Thomas argues that the basic success criterion for museums is the popularity of their exhibitions and number of visitors where on the other side the success criterion for a university museum is the quality and originality of their research. Of course I can’t speak on behalf of all the museums out there but I could easily imagine that many museum professionals could be offended by that statement. Actually I’m quite certain that a lot of great research is done by curators who are not employed by a university museum.

Anyways, as to quality and originality I totally agree. That is a worthy goal but something still troubles me. Especially the following sentence:

In other words, in contrast to museums in general, which are institutions with a broad, popular appeal, ’university museums’ are basically elitist institutions.

What does that actually mean and what happened to the idea of research to the benefit of the people? Was that just a crazy idea that some students back in the sixties and seventies used as a slogan?

When I hear the word elitist it triggers some very unfortunate associations. Who is the elite? What notions of power are we operating with here?

At the Medical Museion we have some fantastic collections. Don’t we have a duty to open them up for the general public in a way that could be understood also by people who are not college educated? There is a democratic principle in this that I fear might be lost if we chose to communicate in a way that only the elite can understand.

Also I really don’t buy the following sentence:

Better provide original solutions to small but fundamental display problems than build big and popular exhibitions.

There is absolutely no reason why these two should be in opposition to each other. Let’s make innovative and popular exhibitions. Access to the medical cultural inheritance should be as democratic as possible and not just something that is withheld for the elite.

University of Copenhagen has several museums (among them Medical Museion). And our university isn’t alone. Many, if not most, universities around the world have their own museums, or at least historical collections. There are in fact so many of the kind that the international museum council (ICOM) has set up a subcommittee specifically for university museums and collections (UMAC).

What defines a ‘university museum’? The only criterion for membership in UMAC seems to be that the museum shall be part of a university organisation — contentwise it can be about almost anything related to the university. So from UMAC’s point of view, a ’university museum’ is primarily defined by ownership.

Fair enough, but otherwise, when thinking of ’university museums’ most people probably think in terms of content — i.e, ‘university museums’ are institutions that collect and display the history of the university. (In the same way that we think of an ‘army museum’ as one that collects and displays artefacts from the history of the armed forces, irrespective of whether it is owned by the army or by the city.) A ‘university museum’ has all kinds of stuff from good old university days, maybe even the university’s archive and image collection.

However, in our internal discussions here at Medical Museion I have often thought of ’university museum’ in a third sense, namely as a museum that functions as a university unit. And this in turn has everything to do with criteria for success.

The usual basic success criterion for museums is the popularity of their exhibitions and the number of visitors; the success criterion for university units on the other hand is the quality and originality of their research.

What distinguishes a ’university museum’ in this third sense is that its criterion for success lies closer to that of the university than that of the ordinary museum. It’s the quality and originality of its research, curatorship and exhibition work that defines it as a ’university museums’.

Of course, university museums want people (in large numbers) to see their exhibitions. But that aside, the basic criterion for success is whether their research and curatorial work contributes to new museological agendas or not. Better provide original solutions to small but fundamental display problems than build big and popular exhibitions.

In other words, in contrast to museums in general, which are institutions with a broad, popular appeal, ’university museums’ are basically elitist institutions.

Part of the fun of being involved in a medical museum these days is that the notion of ‘biomedicine’ is so much broader than traditional medicine and health care taught in faculties of medicine and health science.

As a university institution for biomedical science communication we are, by default as it were, confronted with some of the most fundamental issues in the world today. Financial crisis, atomic weapon threats and global warming  aside — the rapid technical development in biology and biomedicine raises some pretty hefty social, political and ethical questions which we, as a museum, can hardly avoid dealing with if we want to stay just minimally atuned to the world around us.

Take the issue of synthetic biology. Forget about the potentials benefits and risks of stem cell biology, nanotech, gene therapy, and so forth. Synthetic biology — the design and construction of new biological systems not found in nature, for example, constructing living cells from simple molecules (proto-cells); creating new biological systems based on biochemical pathways not found in nature; etc — is potentially more powerful, not least for medical therapy and human enhancement. 

Is it safe and secure? Well, of course it isn’t! In yesterday’s issue of Public Service Review: Science and Technology, Markus Schmidt, who leads the SYNBIOSAFE project at the Organisation for International Dialogue and Conflict Management, raises some of the problems involved in the development of synthetic biology:

With the availability of genetic sequence information available on the internet and outsourcing of DNA synthesis to specialised synthesis companies, we are facing the risk that some person with malicious intents might place an order for pathogenic genes.

But there is always two sides to new technologies. In the future, more and more people will probably be able to construct new biological systems (read: democratic technology). Already, the annual International Genetically Engineered Machine competition in Boston invites students from all over the world to construct new biologies. And there are several DIY biotech groups who want to get the techne out of the laboratory, to bring it to the people. Such democratisation of synthetic biology might, as Schmidt rightly observes, lead to a creative revolution similar to that we have seen in the computer industry and the internet. Imagine synthbio 2.0 — love it or hate it.

Schmidt’s institute is only the last in a row of initiatives to discuss the safety and the political, governance and ethical issues involved in synthetic biology. Two years ago a report from the J. Craig Venter Institute discussed the governance problems associated with synthetic biology, and last year a report from the International Association of Synthetic Biology proposed a number of technical solutions for improved biosecurity. And there are several other initiatives around — enough to fill the agenda of a future-looking medical museum.

Schmidt’s analysis is expanded in M. Schmidt, A. Kelle, A. Ganguli-Mitra and H. de Vriend, eds., Synthetic Biology: The technoscience and its societal consequences (2009); there is also a 55 min video here: SYNBIOSAFE: Synthetic biology and its social and ethical implications.

The Copenhagen Doctoral School of Cultural Studies is organising an interesting conference in Copenhagen on 6-7 November. Under the title “Event Culture: The Museum and Its Staging of Contemporary Art”, the conference will discuss the changing role of the art museum and the role of contemporary art within the art museum during the past decades — particularly how museums as institutions for preserving and producing knowledge “for eternity” have increasingly become “arenas for experience and events of the moment”:

The shared tendency between museums and contemporary art towards staging and performing ephemeral events and experiences changes the fundamental functions of the museum within a broader cultural context and might indeed change the very role of art in society as well.

I believe this is an interesting and timely topic for science, technology and medical museums as well; especially the three ways in which the conference is supposed to handle this topic is very relevant for the STM-museum world:

First, the organisers point out that “the idea of preservation was central to the founding of museum institutions” but that preservation seems less important today:

Rather, the focus has shifted towards another core aspect of the museum institution, namely that of public accessibility and audiences. This indicates a shift from substance and solidity towards activity and performance; the representation of history, which can be considered an important motive for preservation, has gradually become less outspoken, while representation of contemporaneousness in various guises simultaneously has grown in significance. This raises many questions, among them the questions of what knowledge the museum institution produces and which public demands it facilitates.

They also maintain that these changes “manifest themselves in a tendency towards privileging the temporary exhibition over the permanent collection”:

The permanent collection regarded as the sum of the preservation efforts of the museum institution seems largely to have become a burden rather than an asset, whereas the temporary exhibition is viewed as the medium that holds the potential of drawing a large number of audiences. This tendency is followed by a growing number of freelance curators that work independently of institutions and consequently outside of museums with permanent collections. The expertise of the curator has changed from classical art historical knowledge and skills to knowledge of ‘the state of the art’ of the art scene and that of ‘story telling’ or generating narratives. This raises questions of the role of the curator both in and outside museums today, and of the qualifications, competences, skills and responsibilities of the curator.

Finally, they suggest that these changes “are evident in the privileging of the thematic exhibition format over the chronological exhibition format, and the group show over the solo show”:

Classical art historical exhibition formats such as the monographic exhibition and the survey show are superseded by exhibitions that concentrate on thematic groupings of art works, often disregarding principles of chronology, history, style and medium in favour of staging connections or ‘dialogues’ of a thematic or formal nature between artworks. The raison d’être of the exhibition seems in general to be moving from that of generating knowledge to that of creating events and sensations, stressing the theatrical and spectacular qualities of artworks. The innovations in the field of exhibition aesthetics raise questions of what kinds of context that are being provided and what kinds of knowledge that are being produced in museum exhibitions, and how the audience is supposed to, and indeed given the option to, engage in this production.

All these three topics are extremely relevant for the way we think about the changing practices and roles of STM history museums as well. Not that the tendencies haven’t been discussed before, but this conference addresses them head-on and in one comprehensive setting.

Deadline for registration: 22 October. See further http://eventculture.ikk.ku.dk

Yesterday, Vancouver-based writer and curator Robin Laurence wrote a persuasive plaidoyer for post-postmodern art, which I believe has some implications for the understanding of bioart in museums (I’ve been musing about bioart in sci/tech/med museums before).

Laurence identifies a movement of “emerging and established artists who are working with found and salvaged materials, discarded objects and even detritus in what could be seen as a ’shabby’ or ‘garbage’ aesthetic” which draws attention to “everyday waste and overconsumption”:

British artist John Isaacs employs not scrap lumber or old paint cans, but wax and epoxy resin to create highly realistic sculptures. Often grisly and unsettling, they reflect the profound anxieties of our age. In another approach, artists are embracing a modest scale and old-fashioned media, such as drawing, painting, collage and fiber. Their humble, handmade creations suggest the emergence of a “kitchen table” sensibility. Raymond Pettibon, for example, is acclaimed for his cartoon-like ink drawings on paper, which are filled with social and political observations and quotes from literature and popular culture. Ghada Amer represents a neo-feminist sensibility. Her work, which often consists of embroidered paintings, sculptures and installations, addresses the condition of women, including their sexuality and desire. Her canvases, their images and text embroidered in colored threads, also reveal the kind of gestural, abstract-expressionist painting that postmodernists long ago abandoned. This suggests that the individual “mark” is also part of the new aesthetic.

Rirkrit Tiravanija attempts to change the emphasis in art from the making of objects and their viewing within an institution to socializing and the sharing of experiences. These experiences often revolve around food, which the artist prepares and serves to his audiences – who are also participants in the creation of his art.

In addition to these artists, Robin Laurence focuses her search-light on the legions of street artists,

whose political, social and environmental beliefs are temporarily communicated in alleys, vacant lots and abandoned telephone booths – through graffiti murals, urban ‘interventions,’ posters, stickers … and drawings dropped into the gutter. Again their strategies aren’t new, but they’ve taken on a new urgency in light of today’s economic and environmental crises.

Obviously, bioart is a contested genre. There is a strong tendency to turn bioart into institutionalised high art. This is what, for example, the Wellcome Collection is doing, over and over again (and how could they do otherwise?). We too: in fact, every exhibition we have produced has contained an element of this “postmodern trend toward large, glossy and expensive production”. Our latest exhibition, Split + Splice, is a good example. It may not be as expensive as Olafur Eliasson’s productions. But it’s surely expensive compared to what most medical museums tend to use to spend on artwork!

But — and this is my point — sometimes we have moved into the sphere of urban intervention art, like in the 2006 exhibition ‘Sygdommens Ansigt’ [The Face of Disease] by Huskegruppen. That’s almost it, however. We’ve still got a lot to do in that direction.

Just got a letter from the University of Bath librarian, who says that the National [i.e., UK] Cataloguing Unit for the Archives of Contemporary Scientists is closing 31 October. That’s sad, because in the 22 years since the unit moved to Bath, it has been instrumental in securing nearly 200 scholarly archives in institutional libraries around the UK — a very important contribution to the preservation of an important part of the contemporary scientific and engineering heritage. I haven’t heard about any similar closures in other European countries, so let’s hope this is not the beginning of a broader tendency to neglect the history of contemporary science, technology and medicine.