Biomedicine on Display

Two weeks ago I mentioned that the Museums Journal had published Ken Arnolds and my Dogme 95-style manifesto for creating science, technology and medicine exhibitions, first presented last September at a conference organised by Medical Museion in Copenhagen. We have now received the journal’s permission to publish the full version of the manifesto. Enjoy and/or criticize!

Just over 15 years ago, Danish directors Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg spearheaded Dogme 95, a manifesto to purify the art of film-making.

The aim was to engage audiences more profoundly and make sure they weren’t distracted by over-production. The Dogme manifesto ruled out special effects, post-production changes and other tricks in order to focus on the story and the performances.

Since then, writers, theatre directors and other arts practitioners have all found inspiration in Dogme 95’s back-to-basics philosophy. Dogme has been criticised, as have some of the films made according to its rules, but as exhibition producers, this classic vow of chastity has inspired us as a way of guiding and sharpening the creative practice of making science, technology and medicine exhibitions.

These rules have been written and published with almost indecent speed. They are deliberately provocative prompts for further discussion. This manifesto is not a definitive set of working proposals, but a draft, which will no doubt be modified and sharpened through challenge and feedback.

And anyone who knows the institutions we are based at will be aware that the exhibitions we have presided over have often not followed one or more of these rules.

This manifesto is almost reference-free, but this does not mean we think the ideas are purely our own. There are vast bodies of literature on science communication, exhibition making, art history and museology; we have read some of this literature and been influenced by it. We also have learned much from the museums we have visited.

1. Exhibitions should be research-led, not a form of dissemination

Curators should use exhibitions to find things out (for themselves and for their visitors) and not just regurgitate what is already known. Good curators are inspired and imaginative researchers who find and then build on the investigations of experts and colleagues, juxtaposing varied understandings about their chosen topic. They add their own insights and gradually come up with new ideas and perspectives.

2. A scientist should always be involved in the exhibition, a technologist if it is about technology

Don’t shy away from drawing on real expertise in interpreting a topic or finding exhibits. But this is not to say that the aim of the exhibition is simply to give voice to the views of these experts. They are not, nor should they be encouraged to see themselves as, the curators, but it is vital that their perspectives are present in the final exhibition.

3. Be clear about exhibitions being “multi-authored”

Exhibitions emerge from curatorial collaborations between experts and designers. But a show’s funders, the institutional context and other stakeholders have a bearing on the final outcome; it should be possible for exhibition visitors to find out about these influences.

The project teams who make exhibitions deserve to be credited. Those responsible for the show not only need to take a bow, they also need to be held responsible for its contents and impact.

4. Use only original material

Exhibitions should engage audiences with original material rather than reproductions and props. If you cannot illustrate a topic with original artefacts, images and documents, ask yourself if an exhibition is the best way to make the point. Models, replicas and reproductions can be shown, but only if this is the point of showing them.

Reproductions of artworks should not be used, unless the work’s natural medium is “facsimile” – for example, digital photographs. The use of scientific and medical images raises complicated questions, such as what is the “original” format of a microscopic image of a cell?

Most scientific images today are minted as digital data, and their final appearance invariably owes much to enhancements and cropping. How this material should be displayed and labelled needs consideration. It is often better to leave it out all together.

5. Never show ready-made science

Focus on the processes of science: science in the making; the triumph of discovery; the frustration and blind alleys explored along the way. Also, look at the social and cultural processes of scientific ideas becoming accepted and embedded.

6. Jealously guard a place for mystery and wonder

Exhibitions provide opportunities to explore topics in ways that bring new light to sometimes forgotten or less-well understood aspects of medicine, science, technology and their histories. But this urge to demystify subjects should not be allowed to render exhibitions earnestly didactic.

Deliberately include some exhibits about which less, rather than more, is known – curious exhibits that just cannot completely be accounted for. Visitors should leave exhibitions wanting to find out more.

7. Reject most exhibition ideas

Exhibitions represent the meeting point between subjects and material culture, and can be approached from either end – themes or objects first, or a mixture of the two. But often, topics that seem promising will not be worth developing because there simply aren’t good enough objects with which to explore or support them.

Similarly, many areas of material culture end up just not being interesting enough to make a show about. Too often, exhibitions are made from empty ideas of stupid objects. It is worth searching for a topic and a set of objects that harmoniously amplify and mutually enrich each other.

8. Leave out as much as possible

Less is usually more in exhibitions. Visitors will remember and enjoy looking at 10 carefully chosen things more than a 100 that are reasonably well selected.

The most important aspect of an exhibition is its outer boundaries, which keep out the mass of distractions that lie beyond. In the digital era, a core value of a museum exhibition is that it makes its point through displaying a few selected original objects.

9. Embrace the showbusiness of exhibitions

Audiences come to exhibitions in their leisure time and deserve to be lifted out of themselves. They will respond to the drama of the best exhibits, displays, design, writing and lighting.

Make sure that all of this is done well and given the greatest polish. This will enhance the presence of the objects and the impact of the ideas. Don’t be ashamed to admit that making exhibitions is, in part, a matter of putting on a show.

10. Celebrate the ephemeral quality of exhibitions

Catalogues, web-presence and filmed versions of exhibitions can lengthen the shadows cast by exhibitions, but they will never come close to keeping alive the actual experience of visiting a show.

This is an important part of the magic of exhibitions. Like good pieces of theatre, they gain much of their energy by being around for a limited time and then disappearing. The fact that they are time-limited gives their makers a degree of freedom to experiment and be daring. Grasp it!

11. Make exhibitions true to the geography of their venues

The principle is that knowledge is “situated” – the context in which we contemplate and acquire it can seem as important as the ideas or facts themselves. Exhibition makers need to think hard about how to work with the “place” of an exhibition.

Consider what is lost in touring an exhibition where the subject becomes detached from the local context. The country, the city, the venue, the room, and the set and design of an exhibition, even the showcases and the orientation of individual objects – all have a bearing on the meanings that audiences derive from them.

12. Avoid artificial lighting

Use natural light where possible. Start with the light available and build up from it. If possible, reveal the windows and keep the doors open. Let the natural layout of the building be apparent, make it clear where you have introduced false walls. This will enable visitors to keep a sense of where they are.

And don’t fall into the trap of imagining that the background for an exhibition has either to be a neutral black box or a pristine white cube. Ideally, a show should look and feel very different on a midsummer morning to a winter evening.

13. Always involve more than one sense

It is impossible for visitors to turn off their non-visual senses in an exhibition – they will hear, touch and smell things no matter what. So make sure that some of the tactile, audio, or olfactory experiences of an exhibition are curated. Exhibitions work by teasing their visitors into thinking that they could get close enough to what they see to touch it, even while making sure they don’t.

But curators should think about how to introduce at least a few objects that visitors can touch. Never use artificial sounds or odours, but try hard to find ways to enhance the audio and olfactory qualities of the original objects, getting visitors to use their ears and noses.

14. Make exhibitions for inquisitive adults

If you aim at educationally under-achieving primary school children, it will be impossible to engage anyone else (and you are unlikely to engage even your target audience). Many children and teenagers are keenly attracted to adult culture, but very few adults see the attraction of young material.

Never make exhibitions for educational purposes – other media and methods are more effective. It’s also worth bearing in mind that exhibitions are, by their nature, a “childish” medium, bringing out playfulness in all of us. This should be encouraged, but to focus deliberately on young audiences reaps diminishing returns.

15. Remember that visitors ultimately make their own exhibitions

Some visitors might not be interested in reading what the curators write, while others might not look at many objects. Some will be interested in aspects of a topic that the curators might not have come across.

Because of this, when an exhibition opens, it is only ever the second or third draft of an idea that will, through revision, reach maybe its eighth or ninth incarnation by the time it closes.

Exhibitions should be alive, and change is a vital part of life. Even in the most “stable” shows, lights will need adjusting and labels redrafting. An exhibit might even have to be removed or replaced. More radically, some exhibitions should be deliberately half-finished, or set up so that updates can be added halfway through.

16. Make exhibitions the jumping off place for further engagement

Good exhibitions are the point of departure for a longer relationship. The value of exhibitions should only partly be judged by analysing how many people come, how long they spent in a show and what they think of it. On this basis alone, most exhibitions are foolishly expensive ventures, particularly in these cash-strapped times.

Don’t forget that, just occasionally, exhibitions can really change visitors’ lives and this is worth a lot. Effective exhibitions can also bring in new objects to museums, have an impact on recruitment, add to shop sales, improve the organisation’s reputation, and provide a context for corporate celebrations. There is a virtual avalanche of cultural capital that can flow from them: this should be valued from the start.

17. Don’t be afraid to bend, break or reinvent the rules

Ken Arnold’s and my Dogme-style “manifesto” for creating science, technology and medicine exhibitions has just been published as a feature article in the last issue (#2/2011) of the Museums Journal.

We’ve been inspired by Danish directors Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg, who spearheaded the now 15 years old Dogme 95 manifesto for purifying the art of film-making. They wanted to engage audiences more profoundly and make sure viewers weren’t distracted by over-production, and therefore ruled out special effects, post-production changes, and other tricks in order to focus on the story and the performances.

Since then, writers, theatre directors and other arts practitioners have all found inspiration in Dogme 95’s back-to-basics philosophy. Surely, Dogme has been criticised, as have some of the films made according to its rules, but as exhibition producers, this classic vow of chastity has been an inspiration to us as a way of guiding and sharpening the creative practice of making science, technology and medicine exhibitions.

So last August we sat down to discuss the possibility of making a Dogme-inspired manifesto for museum exhibitions in our field. For example, could we translate the idea that ‘props and sets’ must not be brought onto a film set and that filming must be done on location? Actually, this was pretty easy to relocate in exhibition terms. Dogme 95’s determination that sounds in a film should not be produced apart from the visual aspect was also suggestive to us, as were the ‘commandments’ that filming must take place where the action takes place, that there should be no artificial lighting, and that the film takes place here and now.

Other Dogme 95 proposals prompted us fundamentally to disagree – for example, their insistence that the director of a film should not be credited (in contrast, we are very much in favour of the notion of the auteur in exhibition making). A number of the other rules that we have come up with more narrowly relate to exhibition making in the specific context we are concerned with.

Our museum rules are deliberately provocative prompts for further discussion. This manifesto is not a definitive set of working proposals, but a draft, which will no doubt be modified and sharpened through challenge and feedback. And anyone who knows the institutions we are based at (Wellcome Collection in London and Medical Museion in Copenhagen) will be aware that we have often not followed one or more of these rules.

Furthermore, this manifesto is almost reference-free. This does not mean we think the ideas are purely our own. There are vast bodies of literature on science communication, exhibition making, art history and museology; we have read some of this literature and been influenced by it. We also have learned much from other museums. For example, the Industrial Icons show at the Danish Museum of Art & Design (2004), which borrowed dozens of instruments from Medical Museion’s collections, opened my eyes to the aesthetic dimension of contemporary medical technology. And Ken had been inspired by exhibitions like Spectacular Bodies (2001) at the Hayward Gallery in London and a show on Walker Evans’s postcard collection (2009), at the Metropolitan Museum in New York.

See a list of the dogmas here and a short video presentation here. The full dogma text is behind the Museum Journal‘s paywall. [Added 16 February: now we've got Museums Journal's permission to reproduce it in full -- see here]

Alain de Botton is an object of dismay to many philosophers because he doesn’t comply with the ritual behaviours of professional philosophy.

But for all of us who don’t consider the publication of peer reviewed articles in academic journals as the fundamental purpose of philosophy, his comments on current human affairs are often refreshing and thought provoking.

A while ago he suggested, in his weekly column in BBC News, that arts and humanities departments should consider offering people guidance how to live, rather than just provide tools for critical thinking. The commentators were divided into those who thought he was in principle onto something and those who thought he was just insane.

Last Friday, de Botton did the trick again, now on the topic of museums. His point of departure for this column is the widely spread suggestion that museums (i.e., art museums; he doesn’t mention other kinds of museums) function as our time’s secular version of temples and churches.

However, in one crucial aspect, museums seem to refuse to play the role of secular temples: they seem to be incapable of linking their exhibitions and objects to “the needs of our souls”:

They don’t do enough with the treasures they have because they present them to us in bland academic ways that fail to engage with the real potential of art, which is — I argue — to change us for the better.

Drawing on Hegel, who defined art as “the sensuous presentation of ideas”, de Botton suggests that “good art is the sensuous presentation of those ideas which matter most to the proper functioning of our souls, and yet which we are most inclined to forget”. Which, in his understanding, helps us answer what a museum should be, viz.:

a machine for putting before us pictures, photographs and statues that try to change us, that propagandise on behalf of ideas like kindness, love, faith and sacrifice. It should be a place to convert you.

At first sight, it looks like de Botton has become a religious convert. But that’s not the case (he claims he’s “a complete atheist”) and that’s not the point of his argument. He’s just ”curious”, he says, about the approach churches take towards art — i.e., “not to put pretty things in front of us, but to use pretty things to change us”.

Accordingly, de Botton suggests that the modern secular museum might allow itself to be inspired by a secular version of the Christian approach to art: ”What if they too decided that art had a specific purpose — to make us good and wise and kind — and tried to use the art in their collections to prompt us to be so?” What if museums gave up their neutral, distant stance and asked visitors to ”look at this image and remember to be patient”, or ”use this sculpture to meditate on what you too could do to bring about a fairer world”?

In short, de Botton wants museum curators ”dare to reinvent their spaces so that they can be more than dead libraries for the creations of the past” and to ”co-opt works of art to the direct task of helping us to live: to achieve self-knowledge, to remember forgiveness and love and to stay sensitive to the pains suffered by our ever troubled species and its urgently imperilled planet”.

I can easily imagine how many of my museum colleagues might think Alain de Botton is really insane (or at least outlandish, retro and generally embarassing). Isn’t a critical museum the true aim of a reflective and theoretically well-informed curatorial profession? (Cf. my earlier post on Piotr Piotrowski and the notion of ‘the critical museum’). Isn’t Alain de Botton just a reactionary crypto-Christian who want to turn museums back into a didactical regime worthy of the old GDR?

Well, maybe de Botton is a crypto-Christian. But even so, he has a point, and I think this point is valid, also for other kinds of museums than art museums.

Now, some kinds of museums do already live up to the call for edification. Many natural history museums, for example, more or less explictly see it as their aim to teach their visitors to take care of nature, help protect fauna and flora, help stop species extinction, and save the planet from climate catastrophies and ecosystem destruction. Such museums have more explicit educational and edifying aims.

So what about history and culture museums? Most such museums are probably more like art museums than natural history museums. They try to avoid being seen as didactic, educational and edifying. True, most such museums want to be critical in one way or the other — of racism, sexism, nationalism, capitalism, consumerism, militarism, Western cultural hegemonism, etc. etc — but they rarely present explicit positive alternatives of how we can negate the negative -isms and live better lives.

But is a ’critical museum’ devoid of any explicit edifying ambitions the only alternative to a traditional nationalistic and high-culture agenda for historical and culture museums? Here Alain de Botton asks the right question, I think. How can we make exhibitions and display our artefacts in a way that change us and our society for the better? Without degenerating into teaching institutions!

In the last session of the conference in September, Thomas Schnalke from Berliner Medizinhistorisches Museum made an allegory on the situation of the medical museums today, suggesting that these kinds of museums might be conceived as patients suffering from a molecular medicine and virtual reality virus.

He went on to put forward that art and artists, if they are willing and allowed to be specific, can be the cure that enables the medical museums to handle the challenge of representing contemporary and future biomedicine. Read Thomas’ full abstract here.

The discussion afterwards focused on whether the space constructed by artists, museum curators and the museum building together can or should be conceived as a narrative, as telling a story or whether there is a danger of the narrative taking over and taking us away from the actual objects on display.

Comments were heard from Roger Cooter, Thomas Söderqvist, Karen Ingham and Lucy Lyons.

See a list of the abstracts here. Read more about the EAMHMS video clip project here.

A month ago, the Director of the Polish National Museum in Warsaw, Piotr Piotrowski, resigned after the museum’s Board of Trustees had rejected his strategy for the development of the museum. The resignation took place only two years after the Board of Trustees had offered Piotrowski the position on the basis of his proposal for an earlier version of a radical change of the museum, called ‘The critical museum’.

The aim of this proposal was to open the museum to the problems of today’s world and transform it from its status as a provincial version of great museums to an independent institution of intellectual culture which was to compete with commercial tourist attractions. Some local observers believe the Board of Trustee’s rejection of Piotrowski’s strategic plans for the futher development of the museum was related to last summer’s controversial exhibition ’Ars Homoerotica‘; others believe he had to resign because the museum staff couldn’t accept the new strategy.

Whatever reason, Piotrowski’s ideas about a ‘critical museum’ are important and deserve wider circulation. I’m grateful for his permission to post this English translation of a summary of his thoughts:

Critical Museum
In fact, simplifying to some extent, one can distinguish among three types of museums: museum as a temple attended by the faithful who believe in the dogma of the “sacred” character of art, museum as a place of entertainment, “mcdonaldized,” as it were, and involved in the global networks of consumerism and tourism, and museum as a forum which wants to perform critical tasks and encourage reflection on the changing world both on the macro- and micro-scale.

The idea of the museum-as-forum, which Hans Belting refers only to one type of the museum as a response to the globalization of culture and its local aspects, i. e. to the MoCA, should be applied to the mission of another type, i. e. the “universal survey museum.” (Hans Belting, “Contemporary Art and the Museum in the Global Age,” in Peter Weibel, Andrea Buddensieg, eds, Contemporary Art and the Museum. Ostfildern: Hantje Cantz Verlag, 2007, pp. 30-37).

The potential of the “provincialization of the West” in respect to museums I can see in the idea of the “critical museum” – on the one hand, local, not to say “provincial,” and on the other, global. The role of museums is not so much to help develop a new “empire,” but a global politeia, a global constitution of the world on the local, not to say, “provincial” agora. Only such a museum will be able to support the ways of controlling international politics. It will do it by its influence and by addressing local problems which, because of the cosmopolitization of the local, are acquiring global significance. In other words, what gives us a chance is the idea of a local “critical museum” with global ambitions.

There are at least two levels on which such a museum can operate. One of them is its participation on the local agora, analyzing social and political questions, recognized as the key ones for a particular community. Since, however, local communities are in the process of global changing, to address local issues is at the same time global. Not only London is a cosmopolitan European city with its multicultural social strata. Also smaller cities in Europe, including Central and Eastern Europe, are changing their character in the same way, too, however, not in the same extent. Warsaw for example is not such a cosmopolitan center as London, is not a metropolis in the above mentioned degree, and perhaps will never be. However, its character is changing very fast. The local society is much more complex and differentiated in terms of ethnic, political, sexual etc. identities, than it used to be before 1989. The critical museum, thus, should address these processes.

The other level is to rethink the internal condition of the museum in such a historical context, and develop a sort of self-criticism. Something as a critique of local artistic cannons, or relations between local and international art history, should be a subject of a new museum strategy. In one word: both of them, i.e. museum participation in the agora and reshaping its traditional (national and hierarchical) concept of the museum, should be a point of departure in the process of creating the idea of the critical museum, and at the same time its new identity in the face of contemporary cultural and social processes. The theoretical basis of such a museum concept is the museum studies, called also critical museum studies, or new museology, has been developing for ca. thirty years mostly at the universities and art criticism.

Will museums or, more precisely, the type of museum called “universal survey museum,” rooted in a nationalist ideology and European, Western hegemony, prove able to face the challenge? Will the potential of scholarship, if one defines it as critical reflection on reality, be used to transform museums into critical institutions, to cover the distance between the critique of the institution to the institution that is critical? Will the museum or, again, more precisely, the “universal survey museum,” use critical theory, well developed at the universities, and change it into critical practice? Will it drop its role of the mausoleum and become a public forum shaping a politeia? All these questions still remain to be answered.

© Piotr Piotrowski, 2010.

At the conference in September, Ken Arnold and Thomas Söderqvist presented 15 dogmas for museum practice.

Inspired by the Danish film directors Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg’s Dogme95, Ken and Thomas’  list included points like “Leave out as much as possible”, “Never show ready-made science”, “Avoid artificial lighting”, “Use no replicas or reproductions, just original artefacts, images and documents” and last but not least “Don’t be afraid to bend, break or reinvent these rules”. Read their abstract here.

The discussion afterwards included a lot of critical reactions to the restrictions of the dogmas. The speakers were accused of, and admitted to, self-contradiction, the whole point of the dogmas being to start discussions about some of the things we take for granted when we work in a museum context. There were also suggestions for additional dogmas such as “Make controversial displays”.

Comments were heard from Morten Skydsgaard, Henrik Treimo, Yin Chung Au, Ramunas Kondratas and Nurin Veis.

See a list of the abstracts here. Read more about the EAMHMS video clip project here.

At the conference in September, Kim Sawchuk talked about why, in this micro-molecular age, we are still hanging on to the fantasy of travelling inside the anatomical spaces of our own bodies. Kim admits that she herself has become what she calls a ‘biotourist’, a person who visits medical museums in order to experience the sublime and grotesque landscapes of her own body.

Kim pointed out that museums are part of the reproduction of this narrative of fictional travels through the body. She analyzed the fictions offered to the visitor through vectors in terms of their scale; how we are asked to mentally enlarge objects or shrink ourselves in order to understand the different levels of the biology of our bodies, or space; how the visitor’s movement through the exhibition affects her understanding of the things displayed. Read Kim’s full abstract here.

In the discussion afterwards it was said that the notion of the sublime and grotesque and the issue of scale pointed back to a renaissance perspective on the human body. On the other hand there were references to very new exhibitions made just along those lines.

There were comments from Christa Habrich, Robert Bud, Adam Bencard, Claudia Stein, John Durant and Nurin Veis.

See a list of the abstracts here. Read more about the EAMHMS video clip project here.

This session at the conference “Contemporary medical science and technology as a challenge to museums” in Copenhagen last month circled around the concept of the Renaissance Wunderkammer, and how we might use techniques of curiosity and wonder to engage people with scientific and historical objects.

Joanna Ebenstein —who writes the blog Morbid Anatomy— talked about how we can use the feelings an object or a collection of objects evoke to make the museum visit a personal and interesting journey.

Joanna suggested we display artefacts in a way that appeal to the visitors’ curiosity. Better let people be inspired to investigate objects and their history for themselves, instead of presenting them with an educational fact sheet. Curiosity cabinets don’t tell straightforward stories, but activate the visitors.

In the discussion afterwards it was pointed out that the curiosity cabinet’s clustered and intimate atmosphere might be a challenge to modern museum aesthetics. There might also be a danger that it mystifies science. On the other hand the Wunderkammer aesthetic could be useful for museums who don’t wish to present answers as much as incite people to ask more questions.

The power of the Wunderkammer approach for presenting contemporary medicine was questioned. However, in Joanna’s view recent biomedicine is just as emotionally evocative as the objects of the original curiosity cabinets. Feelings of horror when confronted with the perspective of being able to clone living human beings, or wonder at the intricate microscopic chaos of the molecular microworld are also evoked by many kinds of contemporary objects, she suggested.

The discussion after Joanna’s presentation included comments from John Durant, Kim Sawchuk, Kristen Ehrenberger, Danny Birchall, Karen Ingham, Robert Bud, Robert Martensen, Claudia Stein and Ramunas Kondratas (see the end of the clip).

Read Joanna’s full abstract here.

For a list of all conference abstracts, see here. Read more about this video clip project here.

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The implication of the theme — ‘Contemporary medicine and technology as a challenge to museums’ — for this year’s biannual EAMHMS conference in Copenhagen last month is that it is difficult to exhibit the molecular level of the recent medical understanding of the body. How can we display such molecular and other tiny structures? And what metaphors and discourses do we use to describe a molecular understanding of the body?

The session “The molecular in the museum” discussed this problem. Jim Garretts, senior curator at the Thackray Museum in Leeds, suggested in his presentation that we work more closely together with researchers and research institutions, so as to allow the visitors to get an insight into practical medical science today. That way our abstract idea of things like the molecular is transformed into a more practice-based understanding of how the molecule functions in the body. Read Jim’s full abstract here.

After Jim’s presentation our own postdoc Adam Bencard put the idea of the molecular body into a larger philosophical perspective. He argued that there is a change in our understanding of the body, from a focus on genomics and the idea of life as text, towards proteomics and a focus on the materiality of being. This shift is interesting and profiting for museums because it puts the materiality of our exhibition objects, and the physical engagement with medical science that we provide, into focus. Read Adam’s full abstract here.

After these two presentations followed a lively discussion with contributions from, among others, John Durant, Danny Birchall, Suzanne Anker, Morten Skydsgaard, and Thomas Schnalke.

(Read more about the EAMHMS video clip project here).

From Medical Museion's collections

Tiffany Jenkins is soon coming out with a book titled Contesting Human Remains in Museum Collections: The Crisis of Cultural Authority in Routledge’s ‘Research in Museum Studies’ series.

Drawing on interviews, ethnographic work, and media and policy documents, the book analyzes, says Routledge’s announcement, “the influences at play on the contestation over human remains, and examines the social construction of this problem”.

One potentially interesting result of Jenkin’s analysis (which supports my own experience here in Denmark) is that

the strongest campaigning activity has been waged, not by social movements external to the institution, as they are frequently characterized, but by actors inside it

As Jenkins points out, this has implications for how we theorise the museum.

The fact that Tiffany Jenkins is arts and society director of the sometimes contested (see here and here) London-based think-tank Institute of Ideas, makes it an even more intereresting publication. I’ve already ordered a copy, although 70 GBP is a pretty hefty price tag.

Travel guides and leisure sections in the newspapers regularly list museums you just “must” see. But I’ve never actually seen a list of museums that I’m supposed to be discouraged from visiting.

Until now — here’s one that covers “the most unnecessary museums in the United States”: 

The Museum of Bad Art: The justification for this one was thin at best when it launched in the early 1990s, but at this point, it’s safe to say that the Internet’s a much better repository of terrible and useless art. Why not use this building to showcase, you know, good stuff?
The Museum of Menstruation and Women’s Health: Case in point: This website is devoted to the history of menstruation, for those who just can’t live another month without knowing what tampons were like in the 1940s. Totally random and completely unnecessary.
The Washington Banana Museum: It’s a museum. About bananas. Any money you spend getting here is money you deserved to lose.
Frank and Jane Clement Brick Museum: It’s literally rooms filled with old bricks. And just in case you want to pop in on a lark, it’s “by appointment only.” I guess brick fans are hardcore people.
The Cockroach Hall of Fame and Museum: If you’ve ever wanted to see dead roaches posed in a variety of scenes and costumes, this is the place. Seriously, though: How is there a demand for this kind of thing?
Leila’s Hair Museum: Started by a former hairdresser, this Missouri museum is devoted to hair, and features rows and rows of hair wreaths in frames. More than a little creepy.
The Hammer Museum: I refuse to believe there are enough different types of hammer — you know, a stick with a weight on the end — to justify the existence of an entire museum dedicated to their history. There are more than 1,500 hammers on display at Alaska’s Hammer Museum, which is 1,499 more than you need to know about.
The Giant Shoe Museum: It’s not a giant museum of shoes; it’s a museum of giant shoes. Dedicated to oversized footwear, this oddball museum in Washington ranks as one of the most superfluous in the country.
Kansas Barbed Wire Museum: I am sure that the proprietors of this barbed wire museum are wonderful people, but there is no more unnecessary field trip for local schools than a day spent looking at old hunks of twisted metal.
National Mustard Museum: This Wisconsin museum has been around for a quarter century, during which time nothing about mustard has changed at all. It’s still yellow and made for hot dogs. That’s it.
Bergstrom-Mahler Museum: Don’t let the vaguely normal name fool you: This museum is devoted to paperweights of all shapes and sizes. Pretty? Sure, if that’s your thing. But a museum dedicated to hunks of glass and metal used on coffee tables is a bit much.

(Quoted from here).

Good idea. There must be many more around the world. But — on the other hand — what’s “unnecessary”? Some of these museums actually sound quite interesting. Full of curiosities. Curiosities themselves. So maybe this is the list of museums I’d really like to visit when I get to the US next time :-)

So please make our day — send us nominations for the most unnecessary science, technology and medical museum (globalwise).

Ready for some digital intoxication again:

Adrienne Fletcher, a graduate student in the Department of Journalism and Communications at the University of Florida has made a social media museum research survey which says something about how (American) museums intend to and actually use social web media.

Facebook is considered the most effective medium, with Twitter on a second place. Typical time spent is 1-2 staff members for an average of 45 minutes a day. Fletcher’s summary of the results is that:

American museums believe that social media are important but are not currently using it for high levels of dialogic engagement. For the moment, museums are mostly involved with one-way communication strategies using mostly Facebook and Twitter to focus on event listing, reminders, reaching larger or newer audiences, and promotional messaging. However there does seem to be some evidence to suggest that museums are trying to increase their use of social media for more two-way and multi-way communication strategies.

Sounds pretty plausible, also for European ears.

I just read a short article by Marion Maria Ruisinger (curator of the medical collections at the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg) in the UMAC Journal — and was struck by the fact that she declares, without much ado, that

“three-dimensional objects … have an immense potential for the communication of science”.

I agree, intuitively. I’ve used the same argument in applications for funding. However, it is one thing to claim that this is the case (and intuitively feel it is right), another thing is to give empirical evidence for it and, if it turns out to be the case, to give some reasons for why (I’m one of those modernist oldies who like empirical evidence and rational arguments  :-).

So, is it true? Do we have any substantial empirically based studies that tell us that people understand or engage better with science after having been confronted with material artefacts from museum collections?

And if this is the case — why is it then that artefacts have such an alleged immense potential for the communication of science — in addition to what can be communicated via popular books, magazine articles, newspapers, TV programs, websites, podcasts, Facebook-groups, Flickr-images, blogs, etc.?

All of us who have been following Nina’s blog about museum 2.0 are happy to hear that her book project about visitor participation in museums, science centers, libraries and art galleries has come to a temporary end.

She describes The Participatory Museum as “a practical guide to visitor participation … the nuts and bolts of successful participatory projects” in cultural institutions. The first half of the book focuses on principles, the other on practice, mission and staff culture. It’s available both in paperback and as a PDF/ebook, but Nina is also about to publish a free online version later this month.

True to the participatory spirit of her blog and book project (she has involved hundreds of volunteers in the writing and production process) Nina will continue to make the website for the book a place for continued discussion and debate.

Nina’s visit here at Medical Museion in Copenhagen in October was inspiring and I’m looking very much forward to reading her book — and to see the reviews and the comments on her website.

A few months ago, I advertised the meeting ‘KörperGegenwart, neue Technologien, neue Sammlungen’ to be held at the Deutsches Hygiene-Museum in Dresden, 22-24 April.

Now the program has been finalised — and it looks very good! After a plenary discussion on ‘Schauplätze der Schönheit: Klinik, Kunst, Medien und Museen’ on Thursday evening, there follows two days of presentations, most of which seem to be very relevant for the future of medical and science museums:

• ‘Körperspuren im Deutschen Hygiene-Museum. Strategien und Objekte’ (Susanne Roeßiger, Deutsches Hygiene-Museum, Dresden)
• ‘Auf Biegen und Brechen. Zur (In)Formierung des Körpers’ (Stefan Rieger, Ruhr-Universität Bochum)
• ‘Der Körper und seine Teile. Vom Präparat zum transplantierten Organ’ (Katrin Solhdju, Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung, Berlin)
• ‘Vom Körper zum Maß. Zur Geschichte der Konfektionsgrößen’ (Daniela Döring, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)
• Vermessene Menschen. Vom Fingerabdruck bis zum Ganzkörperscan’ (Erika Feyerabend, BioSkop-Forum zur Beobachtung der Biowissenschaften e.V.)
• ‘Prothesen exponieren. Sichtbarkeiten neuer Technologien’ (Karin Harrasse, Kunsthochschule für Medien Köln)
• ‘Design in der Orthetik. Innovative Prinzipien der Körperanformung’ (Andreas Mühlenberend, resolutdesign; Hochschule Magdeburg-Stendal)
• ‘Wie sieht der bionische Mensch aus?’ (Friedrich Ditsch, Technische Universität Dresden)
• ‘”It’s a Material World”´: Situiertheit, Verkörperung und Materialität in der neueren Robotik’ (Jutta Weber, Universität Bielefeld)
• ‘Von der Nasen- zur Gesichtstransplantation: Zur Geschichte und Zukunft der kosmetischen Chirurgie’ (Sander L. Gilman, Emory University, Atlanta)
• ‘Science Fashion´: TechnoNaturen und deren alltagskulturellen Umdeutungen im System der Mode’ (Elke Gaugel, Akademie der Bildenden Künste, Wien)
• ‘Wie kommt die Seele ins Museum? Medizinische Museen und das Transzendentale’ (Robert Bud, Science Museum, London)
• ‘Den biomedizinischen Apparat ausstellen: Materialität und Digitalität in “Split + Splice” (Kopenhagen)’ (Susanne Bauer, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)
• ‘Die Schärfung des Blicks. Kunstinterventionen in anatomischen Sammlungen’ (Ingeborg Reichle, Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften)
• ‘Körperwissen in der Kunst’ (Ute Meta Bauer, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Boston)

As you can see, all presentations are in German — so the germanophilically challenged may have problems.

More here and here.