It was nearly twenty years ago, in the April 1970 issue of Museum News, that Joseph Veach Noble—later to serve as a distinguished president of the American Association of Museums—published his “Museum Manifesto.” In it, Noble briefly described what he took to be the five basic responsibilities of every museum: to collect, to conserve, to study, to interpret, and to exhibit. Stressed as well was the interrelationship among these responsibilities. “[T]hey form,” he said, “an entity. They are like the five fingers of a hand, each independent but united for common purpose. If a museum omits or slights any of these five responsibilities, it has handicapped itself immeasurably.”
During the two decades since, Noble’s five-part analysis of museum functions has proven enormously useful. As an evaluative tool, it has supplied a series of perspectives from which a museum’s performance might be systematically judged. Employed as an armature, it has provided a sturdy framework around which to build such diverse structures as museum organizational charts, collections management policies, and the curricula of various museum studies programs.
Despite its utility, however, a superseding paradigm now appears to be emerging. By no means entirely new, it amends rather than replaces Noble’s 1970 formulation. In so doing, it is both prescriptive with respect to the future operation of museums and, to some degree, correspondingly questioning (if not actually critical) of certain of their recent past practices.
A version of this new paradigm was first introduced to me by Peter van Mensch, the Dutch museologist who teaches at the Reinwardt Academy in Leiden. As analyzed by van Mensch, the essential functions of museums are reduced to three: to preserve (to collect being viewed as simply an early step in that process), to study (a function that remains unchanged) and to communicate (this third function being a combination of Noble’s final two, i.e., to interpret and to exhibit). Noteworthy is the degree to which van Mensch’s analysis parallels that of John Henry Merryman of the Stanford University Law School in his recent studies of public policy with respect to cultural property. The basic framework of any such policy, Merryman has concluded, must be based upon “the ordered triad of preservation, truth and access.”
In seeking to establish a more direct link between the museum’s activities as a collecting institution and its ability to preserve what it actually collects, this amended approach closely accords with the positions most recently taken by the major professional organizations representing the field. Thus, paragraph 3.1 of the Code of Professional Ethics adopted by the International Council of Museums at its 1986 triennial meeting in Buenos Aires provides: “Museums should not, except in very exceptional circumstances, acquire material that the museum is unlikely to be able to catalogue, conserve, store or exhibit, as appropriate, in a proper manner.”
In a similar vein is the position taken by the AAM in its 1984 report Museums for a New Century. In the first recommendation of that report, museums were urged to collect “carefully and purposefully.” Specifically suggested was that every museum must “exercise care by collecting within its capacity to house and preserve the objects, artifacts and specimens in its stewardship.” Earlier pronouncements did not link these activities so strongly. Indeed, the AAM’s 1925 ethics code—its first—did not address the matter of preservation at all.
To say that a museum ought not collect artifacts and specimens for which it cannot properly care—whether because of their inherent fragility or because the institution lacks the resources necessary to do so—has more than an ethical dimension. It has practical implications that extend to the acquisition process itself, potentially strengthening the role of the conservation specialist vis à vis that of the curator. The rarity, importance, or desirability of an object may no longer be a wholly sufficient (albeit still necessary) justification for its acquisition. Equally basic might be the question of its future care.
Such a fusion of the question of desirability with the question of preservability might, moreover, better undergird the increasingly made demand that the proffer to a museum of a collection object be accompanied by the proffer of the resources required for its long-term care. Museums are, for the most part, neither archives nor depositories of last resort. They can no longer (if they ever could) afford to look after boundless agglomerations of objects acquired for no better reason than that they became available. The careful shaping of a collection intended for a mission-driven use requires a more considered balance between the collection that is assembled and the museum’s ability to provide that collection with a proper level of care.
Nonetheless, this perception of a tighter link between collecting and preserving—this sense that they should not, as Noble had originally conceived of them, be considered as interrelated functions but, rather, as different aspects of the same function—ought not cause any too great an alteration of current museum practices. Its implications are not nearly so far-reaching as those of the second change that this new paradigm contemplates—the fusion of the museum’s interpretive and exhibition functions. In place today is a widely utilized scheme of museum organization that reflects the notion that interpretation is an activity distinct from (and most frequently posterior to) the display of museum objects in an exhibition format. This is most evident in the existence of separate departments of museum education.
Critical to understand is that this perceived fusion of interpretation and exhibition does not arise from any sense that these functions should be combined. It comes, rather, from the realization that these functions are so intertwined with one another as to be inseparable. What has become compellingly clear is the extent to which—like speech, like writing, like every other form of human discourse—an exhibition is shaped from its very outset by the values, attitudes, and assumptions of those who choose and arrange the objects that it contains. Whatever the power of the explanatory materials created to surround these objects—didactic labels, gallery handouts, catalogues, recorded tours, docent talks, lectures, films, and symposia—it is the exhibition itself, and not this educational nimbus, that radiates the strongest interpretive emanations. As the late René d’Harnoncourt, then director of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, observed some thirty years ago: “There is no such thing as a neutral installation.”
This phenomenon has recently drawn increasing attention. Writing in the summer 1987 issue of the Canadian magazine Muse, Deidre Sklar, a researcher working with Native American artifacts, discussed the paradox of displaying such materials under normal museum conditions. “Time and space in a museum,” she wrote, “are defined in terms of the confines of the collection, not of the context from which [the collection is] drawn. Visiting hours from ten to five and glass exhibit cases define Euro-American, not native American time and space.”
In that same issue, the Canadian anthropologist Chris Miller-Marti speculated as to whether museum exhibits, regardless of the time and place with which they ostensibly deal, must not inescapably reflect the values and beliefs of contemporary society. Central to these, she suggested, were the “concepts of progress, technology, rationality and domination over nature.” What museum exhibits appear to be telling us, she concluded, is “more about ourselves than our ancestors, more about our own values and concepts than those of the culture they profess to portray.”
The Smithsonian Institution addressed this same issue in the fall of 1988 when it played host to an international conference—The Poetics and Politics of Representation—that addressed the question of whether and how one culture could appropriately present another in a museum setting. In a preliminary description of the program, the organizers described it thus:
[We] will consider the fundamental relationship between ideas and objects, conception and presentation in the context of exhibitions. We will organize … around two general approaches: the poetics and politics of representation. Poetics, in this case, may be understood as identifying the underlying narrative/aesthetic patterns within exhibitions. The politics of representation refers to the social circumstances in which exhibitions are organized, presented, and understood. Clearly, these are intersecting domains which draw on a common pool of historical memory and shared (often unconscious) assumption.
As in anthropology, so in art. A workshop presented at the February 1989 conference of the College Art Association dealt with nineteenth-century American landscape painting and challenged the adequacy of how such works were generally exhibited. Specifically raised was the question of how museums “might find modes of installation and exhibition which illuminate more effectively the multivalent significance of images and the complexity of their ideological function as forms of cultural expressiveness.”
This increasing recognition of the inseparability of the museum’s interpretive and exhibition functions raises a host of important questions. Should museum education appropriately remain the responsibility of a separate department? If so, should that department—as distinct from a curatorial department—also be principally responsible for the organization of exhibitions? In either event, to what extent are museum workers able to articulate for themselves the values, attitudes, and assumptions that underlie the exhibitions they now organize? To what degree can or ought those values, attitudes, and assumptions be articulated to the visiting public as well? Must those values, attitudes, and assumptions always be considered as “givens,” or might they sometimes (and, if so, when and by whose initiative) require some modification?
A further question—possibly even more important—concerns the scope of the interactions and experiences that we might envision this combined interpretive-exhibition function as embracing. Do we currently have available a single term that does full justice to the full range of these? So far as it goes, “communication”—the description proposed by van Mensch—has several distinct advantages. For one thing, it would be consonant with many of the most fundamental goals that museums have characterized themselves as pursuing, especially with respect to the education of their visitors. These goals—in a mix that varies widely from museum to museum—would certainly include: to provide access, to disseminate information, to instruct, to illuminate and clarify historic or contemporary situations and relationships, to set standards, to introduce and strengthen cultural values, to elevate taste, to pose issues, to develop skills, to offer a sense of empowerment, to establish and promote social identity and—in the most extreme instances—to inculcate and to persuade.
A second advantage of van Mensch’s description is the ease with which it would permit some simple model of linear communication to be used as a tool to measure a museum’s effectiveness. If we conceive of the museum fundamentally as a formulator and broadcaster of messages, then it ought be a relatively simple task to evaluate the success of its operations. Exactly what messages is the museum seeking to transmit? Is it able to formulate and transmit those messages in a manner that is consistently free of static, distortion, and interference? Are those messages being clearly received by their intended audience? Few competing models of the museum offer comparably useful tools.
Nonetheless, as a description, van Mensch’s “communication” does not appear to go far enough. By equating the visitor’s experience of museum-going with the successful receipt of a message, this notion of the “museum as transmitter” both overestimates the role of the museum’s intentions and underestimates the wealth and emotional range of visitor responses. Moreover, its suggestion that museum-going ought be an experience in which, ideally, control lies wholly on the side of the museum seems unacceptable. Also unacceptable (and lacking, as well, in humility) is its implicit suggestion that the museum is a place of one-way communication in which the facts, values, and skills possessed by those responsible for its operation are consistently superior to the facts, values, and skills possessed by its visitors.
Our own common experience of attending museums—an experience that invariably preceded our experience of working in them—ought tell us that this is too restrictive. We all know that museums are more than just places of transmission. We know that they are also places of stimulation, not merely of their visitors alone but sometimes of their surrounding communities as well. We know that, sometimes, they can be far more even than that. If we are to have an amended paradigm through which to reorganize the way that we think about museums, then that paradigm must be inclusive enough fully to reflect such a “more.” It requires room for the largest vision that those of us who work in museums have of what the museum experience can be.
Such an expanded vision must, moreover, acknowledge that museum visitors may and frequently do have agendas that are not our agendas (or, indeed, that the public may have museum-related experiences that are not part of any agenda at all). Museum-goers may legitimately be seeking frivolous diversion, consolation, social status, an opportunity for reverence, companionship, solitude, or innumerable other group or individual goals. Museum-going is neither a tidy nor a predictable activity. Parents and children, visiting a museum for wholly familial reasons, may find themselves unexpectedly awed or even enthralled. The communication that takes place in a museum may as usefully occur between one visitor and another as between the museum and the visitor.
These experiences ought not be devalued simply because they were not part of our plan. At its finest, least calculable, and most magical moments, the museum can be more than merely a communicator or a stimulant. Museum-going can be a deeply affective experience. In the words with which the AAM’s current president Joel N. Bloom closed his 1988 inaugural address, the museum can be and must remain “a place of wonder.”
How can we capture this? Might some other term reflect this richness of possibility more adequately than “communicate”? “Make accessible,” “make available,” and “present” suggest themselves as terms descriptive of what museums do with respect to their collections, but they each appear too passive. Somewhat better might be “provide,” i.e., museums not only provide their visiting and nonvisiting publics with access, information, standards, etc., but, as well, provide the setting for important experiences that may be wholly beyond the museum’s control or intention. “Provide,” though, also seems too passive. The failure thus far to find such a term ought not, however, be thought to undermine this model. Aside from its neatness in constructing a paradigm, the reduction of this broad range of museum experiences to a single term is not really necessary. More important would be to retain its breadth.
Still, if this emerging three-function paradigm appears to be of value, the effort to more fully articulate the range and consequences of its third term ought be pursued. It no longer seems adequate simply to say that this interpretative/exhibition function—essentially a museum’s public program—is important because it contributes to (in Robert Hughes’s wryly turned phrase) “human betterment.” We need to be able to define the purposes for which a museum deals with its public in far finer and more precise ways than we thus far have. Acknowledging how greatly the answers might differ from one museum to another, or even at different times within the history of any single museum, we must be able to say just what a museum would like the outcome of its public program to be. Should this outcome impact a visitor’s life in some significant way? If so, in what dimensions, when, how greatly, and how often? Do we believe that this outcome can come about wholly from our own exertions, or do we conceive of the visitor as a collaborator in this effort? Is the impact of the museum limited to its visitors or does its role—as an authority, as an arbiter—extend into the community generally? If so, in what ways, how far, and toward what ends?
Seeking to answer these questions more sharply might help us better to define what it is, ideally, that we envision the museum as doing in its third function. It might also provide us with a more solid justification than we have sometimes heretofore had in seeking the resources that we need to undertake and maintain our other, interconnected and equally vital functions—the preservation and study of our collections. If we can craft a new paradigm even nearly as sturdy as the one that Noble contributed to the museum field in 1970, we will indeed have performed an important service.
Reprinted, with permission, from Museum News, March/April 1990. Copyright © 1990, American Association of Museums. All rights reserved.