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contents issue 6

22 28

04 EDITORIAL As the museum world braces for brutal times we must try not lose sight of the potential of museums 06 A LINE IN THE SAND Nick Poole on why the museum sector must set aside old differences and come together to fight the cuts 08 CAN YOU FEEL THE LOVE? Are the politicians listening? Gregory Chamberlain on making the case for museum funding 10 CREATIVITY AND EXPERIMENTATION Selma Holo and Mari-Tere Alvarez argue for creativity & experimentation as a continuing value in museums 14 A REPUBLIC OF MUSEUMS Tim Desmond on building a new shared approach to museums creating social change 22 MUSEUM ARCHITECTURE RETROSPECTIVE - 1 Is the age of landmark museums coming to an end? We look at a decade of remarkable architecture 28 METHODOLOGIES FOR CHANGE Reflections on the practice of the District Six Museum in Cape Town - by Bonita Bennett 36 FUTURE MUSEUM REPORT (by cats) The Pinky Show provide some notes on their timetravel museum expeditions - 2028-2098 48 HAPPINESS - CAN IT RENEW MUSEUMS? Tony Butler on why concentrating on happiness would have a profound effect on museums 54 A MUSEUM STATE OF MIND It’s not just collections that define a museum’s uniqueness or identity argues Claire Benjamin 60 WHAT HAPPENS WHEN MUSEUMS CLOSE? Paul Fraser Webb tackles the question no-one really wants to ask - the answer is of vital importance 64 MUSEUMS & AUGMENTED REALITY How Streetmuseum helped launch a new set of galleries and why it was such a huge success 70 ASK A CURATOR REVIEW ‘Ask a Curator’ became the hottest Twitter subject in the world by mid morning on 1 September... 82 MUSEUMS AND ME Why I work in a museum - by Kate Craddy, Director, Galicia Jewish Museum, Poland 3

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editorial As the museum world braces for brutal times we must not allow some enforced retreat to basics consume our conviction to make a difference in society. That would be a mistake. For although some policy makers and influencers seem not to recognise the remarkable work museums undertake, those who work in them witness it every day. I was reminded again of the power of museums on a recent visit to the International Slavery Museum (ISM) in Liverpool. The place was packed – school groups, teenagers, families, adults, tourists – all joined in a journey of awareness, knowledge and perhaps now moved to act more robustly against injustice and to challenge contemporary forms of racism and discrimination. The provocation was clear – not just to understand the past but to fight for a better future. I was at ISM for the inaugural conference of the Federation of International Human Rights Museums (FIHRM). Museums from over 20 countries were represented at the event which aimed to help museums which deal with sensitive and controversial subjects to work together and share new thinking and initiatives in a supportive environment. It was a fascinating and inspirational couple of days which reaffirmed and reinvigorated my conviction in the capacity of museums to change perceptions, raise awareness, tackle ignorance, broaden the mind and promote consciousness, responsibility and understanding. I’m pleased to say I’m now working with FIHRM to publish a book - Museums Fighting for Human Rights - which will allow leading voices to share ideas and approaches in an international collaboration. All proceeds from the book will support the important work of FIHRM. The ‘Human Rights’ volume joins a collection of eight books I’m currently editing which are due to be published next year - including The Radical Museum: democracy, dialogue and debate, and Museums and Meaning: idiosyncrasy, individuality and identity. It’s a massive but hugely satisfying project with over 100 contributors from museums all over the world. I’ll let you know when the books are available. In the closing remarks of the first day of the FIHRM conference, when discusing some of the challenges ahead, David Fleming, Director of National Museums Liverpool, said something which particularly resonated with me: ‘None of this is going to be easy but we have a serious purpose and must dare to do’. And that’s the point. For all of us working in the museums sector the future is filled with challenges – financial, political, societal – but against these sometimes adverse circumstances we must never lose sight of the potential of museums and should always endeavour to ‘dare to do’. Gregory Chamberlain

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Museum Cuts A Line in the Sand by Nick Poole

The sad news of the proposed closure of the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council (MLA), UK Film Council and Advisory Council on Libraries is the opening salvo in a battle that promises to be both bloody and strangely one-sided. The Treasury has brilliantly engineered public support for a Spending Review which will most likely change the entire landscape of museum, library and archive service provision and there is little hope looking either to the general public or to the media for support in the coming months. Although many have expressed mixed feelings about the MLA and quangos in general, it is likely that people will really only see their true value when they are gone. While the worlds of strategy and policy may seem far removed from the realities of the daily grind, the world of politics 6

has a direct impact on how much money there is flowing through the veins of our sector. It is a tremendous irony that MLA has been most adept at playing the political game on behalf of museums in what seems likely to be its final year. There has always been a silent pact between MLA and the sector it represents - that MLA will represent and give focus to the voice of museums, but that because the vast majority of this work goes on behind the scenes and in private, it depends on the trust of the sector that its role is worthwhile. It is always important to remember that with MLA, we will also be losing a team of some of the most dedicated, passionate and committed professionals in our industry. Although, as Roy Clare says, it is important not to count MLA out of the game - its current

circumstances will inevitably undermine its ability to coordinate an effective defence against the impending public spending Ice Age. At a time when museums are caught in a particularly nasty crosswind - the backlash against what was perceived to be a New Labour protectorate meeting the increased public demand for meaningful cultural experiences - the departure of the MLA will leave us exposed and shivering without an effective line of defence. Because it was not the last budget, nor the bonfire of the quangos that most threatens museums, archives and libraries. It is the chain reaction that will occur following savage cuts in local budgets that will enable anti-culture councillors throughout the country to do what they have been prevented from doing for a decade

Secondly, and critically, there is no one but a loosely-defined group of sector organisations and networks to draw a line in the sand and to fight to defend it in the coming years. How many museums, libraries or archives will we lose? How many collections will be hurriedly and carelessly dispersed, or sold off in apologetic racks? How many will end up in boxes under the desk of the town clerk? How many will rush into trusts and public/private partnerships with their hands tied behind their backs? How far are we willing to let things slide, and how will we coordinate our voices and the various eddies of influence we each hold to ensure that the Government knows both that there is a limit and that we are not willing to let them exceed it? Roy Clare, early in his tenure at MLA, said

“How far are we willing to let things slide, and how will we coordinate our voices and the various eddies of influence we each hold to ensure that the Government knows both that there is a limit and that we are not willing to let them exceed it?” or more and withdrawing wholesale from cultural service provision. In the absence of a national strategic voice, of a positive economic case being made and re-made, of a behind-the-scenes lobby of the Local Government Association, every single individual museum in receipt of Local Authority money will be left to fend for itself. It’s highly unlikely that the real motive behind the withdrawal of the quangos is economic - none of the announcements made so far have touched on the issue of how much money will be saved in the process. What it does is remove two important things, in the absence of which the cuts will be easier to make. The first is simply the removal of a standard around which people could organise themselves. If it is no-one’s job to hold a national overview of who is being cut, where and how much, then it is much harder to put up the kind of coordinated and strategic response required and for which I have often argued.

‘we are the people we have been waiting for’. At the time it was a call to arms to the sector, to take ownership of its destiny and not always be looking to others to defend us, or to find the magic words to unlock the Treasury coffers. Now, in what promises to be a dark hour for culture, I think his words resonate more than ever. It will take a considerable time before the Arts Council can reorganise themselves to provide an effective strategic coordination for culture. Until then, we have the Museums Association, the Collections Trust, AIM and a number of important professional and thematic networks. In the coming months, we have to come together, set aside old differences and agree as a professional community exactly where we will put our line in the sand. We are the people we have been waiting for. Nick Poole, Chief Executive, Collections Trust 7

Can You feel the Love?

Making the Case for Museum Funding by Gregory Chamberlain We can now welcome a new member to the museum fan club. None other than Prime Minister David Cameron - our new cheerleader-inchief. In a recent speech about the importance of tourism to the UK he argued it was “fundamental to rebuilding and rebalancing our economy”. He went on to say it was “about more than economics” and talked about his love of going on holiday in Britain. His reason? “I love our historic monuments, our castles, country houses...I love our national parks...historic gardens...our museums”. You got that? LOVE. While I’m pleased to hear a national leader profess his love for museums - and not just in terms of their economic impact but because, you know, he actually likes going to them - words alone simply aren’t enough. Not when museums currently face cuts that threaten their ongoing success - even their survival. So, will the warm words be backed by action? And by action I mean money and my fear is they won’t. With the UK Government’s Comprehensive Spending Review imminent and Local Authorities looking at cutting spending hard, UK museums - national, regional and local, face a difficult and worrying time. Of course we have to acknowledge the poor state of public finances and be considered in how the UK museums sector responds sensibly to cuts. So we have to argue why museums are essential to this government. They are for two main reasons: Their role in tourism is significant to the government’s economic growth strategy, and they form a vital central pillar in building a better society (Big or otherwise). There are many more reasons why museums are of huge consequence, and we need to ensure we articulate them as well, but tourism and society chime with the coalition. But this is where it gets demoralising. The case for museums is being well made by many in the sector. It’s a strong case that should be making a difference. But is the advice, lobbying and economic argument simply falling on deaf ears? How seriously is the issue being considered and is it being communicated forcibly enough to the Treasury? Do they know what is at stake? 8

Why harm a sector which makes such a positive contribution across society - children, families, elders, the vulnerable - in such a costeffective way, while at the same time contributing a great deal to the economy - local and national - and to the UK’s standing in the world? The government needs to act carefully here. Museums are not a soft target for cuts. For the legacy of any administration is, as David Cameron says, about ‘more than economics’. So what will be this government’s legacy to culture? This is the moment it will be defined. They can choose to be seen as enlightened custodians who helped steer museums through difficult times or cultural yobs who damaged civic society due to panic or some kind of outdated ideological zeal. We all know that there will be big cuts across the public sector and accept museums won’t escape unscathed. But let’s be absolutely clear that the level of cuts museums currently face will cause substantial and sustained harm to what is currently a world-class sector and one the UK Government should be proud and eager to invest in and continue to see flourish. Our message to Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt should be that it’s essential the scale and ferocity of planned cuts are reduced to a minimum. The Government needs to act with care to ensure they don’t jeopardise an entire sector - one which plays an important role in the future economic prosperity of the country and an essential one in the fabric of society - for short-term and relatively minor savings. They need to act sensibly. Recently Culture Minister Ed Vaizey remarked on BBC radio that “I wouldn’t panic yet...I’m pretty certain that it won’t be the kind of doomsday scenario that a lot of people seem to be depicting”. Well let’s hope not. But as Nick Poole argues in ‘A Line in the Sand’ we all need to come together and make the compelling and convincing case for continued investment in museums. So, in an era of austerity we must accept there will be change, re-imagine the future, prepare for the worst, hope for the best and trust museums feel the love from the politicians.

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“The things we fear most in organizations — fluctuations, disturbances, and imbalances — are the primary sources of creativity” Margaret J. Wheatley, Leadership and the New Science: Discovering Order in a Chaotic World (1999) Fluctuations, disturbances and imbalances! As societally engaged organizations living in the midst of such pervasively unstable conditions today, museums must be able to navigate through the perfect storm that always seems always ready to assault us – if, that is, we are to build a sustainable future. In such unsettling times museums will find creativity and experimentation to be vital navigational tools sustain themselves for now and for the inevitable rough patches that will always be waiting in the wings. The adoption of creativity and experimentation as an ongoing value implies the acceptance of constant vision and re-vision as standard rather than exceptional behaviour. Indeed, creativity and experimentation are not just great tools for crisis management. They must begin to characterize all museums all the time. How then, if that were to be the case, to deal with the paradox that museums do still need to represent the tried and true “three legs” of the stool of museum practice: preservation, collection, and exhibition? How to convey to both staff, funders, and visitors alike that the values of creativity and experimentation are compatible aspirations with the charge to protect each museum’s own knowledge base founded in real objects from the worlds of art or history or science. How do museums re-group, re-solve, and indeed re-cognize and be recognized for the fourth leg of the stool -- without doing a disservice to the bodies of knowledge for which we are responsible? 10

Fortunately museums are at a moment in history when many of their audiences have come to expect to encounter something new when they enter a museum- space. Most of that expectation has in recent years been nurtured from the steady diet of changing exhibitions the general prosperity allowed. If, now, museums can transfer what they learned about presenting exciting temporary exhibitions to how they present their permanent collections, they will make great headway toward instilling a culture of creativity in their missions and in their visitors as well. Handled carefully, it can be clear that museums have no intention of abandoning their expected traditional duties in society, but rather that they are determined to become synonymous with the qualities of imagination and openness that, after all, were the basis of the human invention and accomplishment that each museum displays. So, rather than continuing to encourage their audiences to expect a museum’s permanent collections to never change, museum leaders can build the expectation that they will be re-hung/ re-displayed/re-considered/ and intellectually re-framed from time to time. But, unlike the madhouse of the blockbuster exhibition, permanent collections can be sites of calmer experimentation, sites of a more challenging

Making the Case for Creativity and Experimentation as a Continuing Value for Museums Selma Holo is director of the Fisher Museum of Art and International Museum Institute at the University of Southern California Mari-Tere Alvarez is project specialist at the J. Paul Getty Museum and serves as associate director of the International Museum Institute

tranquility and contemplation than they have heretofore normally been. Thus they can aspire to function as both respites from the hysteria of modern life and havens of invention and inspiration. The challenge will be, in any kind of museum, in finding the right balance between offerings of stimulation and consolation. Because some museums have concentrated their creativity on their temporary exhibitions they assume that creativity is synonymous with extravagance and devastating expense. Often these efforts have been tangential or even irrelevant to the museum’s mission. It has become apparent that such budget-breakers are unsustainable in difficult economic times. Although changing exhibitions will always be a part of what museums offer, museums need to re-balance now and experiment in favor of the permanent collection. These displays need to be compelling while offering a range of new opportunities for interpretation along with a variety of experiences with respect to the material for which the museum is responsible. This is not easy. It takes a creative and willing staff. It takes leadership.

Co-editors of Beyond the Turnstile: Making the Case for Museums and a Sustainable Future

Today’s audiences want to leave museums secure in that they or their children have learned something new; absorbed the meaning of something old but still of value; been exposed to another perspective than they had when they walked in; or that they have had the opportunity to revel in something aesthetically, historically or scientifically meaningful within an appropriate context and environment. They are not as easily seduced by interactivity as we might expect since it already infiltrates every part of their lives. More and more, people are entranced by an encounter with the “real” , a counter-experience to their world of virtual friends, stunning 3D reproductions, and cultural “encounters” by means of smaller and smaller devices and fewer and fewer syllables. By heralding the imperative for creative but relevant change – and by getting the word out and making the case for what they are doing -- museums will find themselves reinventing compelling paths that lead to fresh interpretations of their collections and exhibitions -- for old and new publics alike. 11

By allowing for a variety of encounters, their respective “realms of the real”, museums will guarantee their future as being niches of unique sites of learning and authenticity. In our book, Beyond the Turnstile, Making the Case for Museums and Sustainable Values, we highlight a few recent successes in the world of creativity and experimentation, even as we recognize achievements in the past such as, for example, The “People’s Show” in Walsall, England which initiated a phenomenon in the early 1990s when it broke the mold of museums as temples of high art. By encouraging the citizens of a smallish town to take ownership of their local museums and to participate, beginning with showing their own personal collections, the museum launched a wave of uniquely creative museum involvement throughout England, much of it by people who had not been museum goers before. We highlight also, in our book, in New York, Dia:Beacon, that immense showcase of the most ambitious modern and contemporary installations. Dia Beacon unabashedly conceives of artists as its primary stakeholders. The mostly huge artwork is presented generously with the implicit understanding that there is a place in the world where artists can think very big and that their work will speak for itself. Implicitly, the museum communicates the essential, sustaining value of creativity to anyone who takes time to make a visit. On the other hand, David Wilson, director of the tiny Museum of Jurassic Technology lives beyond the normal typology of museums, in a kind of parallel universe, Wilson forces us to consider the first element that characterizes a museum, an element beyond the object itself: the casework. He argues that this ostensibly humble foundation for display in a museum is, in the case of the Museum of Jurassic Technology, the tangible point of origin for its own enormous creativity—that the casework can be the opening to “the vast and oftentimes elusive potential of the object on display.” Wilson’s is a provocative essay is meant to prod us into looking at the smallest parts of our operations and giving them the respect they deserve as synechdoches of our institutions. We also dedicate an essay to Marco Bassols’s transformation of the Natural History Museum in Mexico from a drab conventional museum to a lively laboratory of creativity and 12

experimentation was nothing short of a revolution. Just to enter it was to grasp immediately that knowledge should not be contained in mere boxes or silos. It was palpable that learning could be a kind of respectful intellectual freefor-all. During his tenure, the museum became a thrilling destination for learning and playing in the sandbox of possibility. Nelly Robles García ends our chapter on creativity and experimentation by reminding us that an archaeological site is an open-air museum and can also profit by a dose of creativity. With a mind friendly to innovation in a very staid and bureaucratic part of the museum field, Robles García increased the sense of community ownership of Monte-Alban, a United Nations Educa-tional, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) world heritage site under threat of overuse and encroachment by the neighboring population. Her innovative involvement of the community that was actually potentially threatening the site resulted in them helping to protect the fragile site. For museums the overriding questions today are how to constructively use the uniquely real knowledge banks they manage and lead so as to stimulate and inspire original, critical and innovative thinking in their audiences? How do they maintain their audience’s interest and loyalty and understanding of what they are doing so that they are perceived as indispensable to the sustaining of a vital society? Museums must make the case for innovation in easy or in hard times. They must let it be known, loud and clear, that their museum in question is a key player in the betterment of society through the objects it collects and preserves and the meaningful and creative connections they make with those objects. Only through the constancy of fresh interpretation and the ongoing communication of a sense of the infinite possibilities our collections can inspire -- combined with respect for traditional inquiry -- will museums captivate the creative spirit of its visitors. And every museum must make the case that it is a catalyst to creativity— whether its mission is to celebrate the past or to usher in the future – if it is to survive from hard times into to better ones.

Beyond the Turnstile: Making the Case for Museums and a Sustainable Future (Published by Altamira Press in 2009)

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A Republic of Museums A shared approach to creating Social Change by Tim Desmond

With David Cameron’s announcement of the ‘Big Society’ comes an interesting challenge for the UK museum sector: How with the abolishment of the Museums Libraries and Archive Council (MLA) and a resulting reduction in funding can museums play their part? There is no doubt the potential is there. Museums have the infrastructure, the themes and the breadth of content to contribute greatly to society’s learning through its rich heritage. If the MLA is to be merged with the Arts Council museums can well claim to be more relevant to the Big Society than other cultural organisations such as theatres, opera or cinemas. Paraphrasing George Orwell - another old Etonian: ‘Who controls the past, controls the future’. These words help illustrate how great and powerful resource museums have in their buildings and collections - if it is used beyond the detachment of viewing. The challenge we now have is to prove to the new government that we can translate the Big Society idea into action. To do this we must first look beyond the status quo of measuring success as increased visitor numbers with its self 14

congratulation of bringing more minority groups to museums. Rather there is an opportunity to design exhibitions and activities that educate and galvanise all participants and aspire to bring about a change in society which segues with the bigger picture represented in social reform. Whilst museums can have an impact across the community, it is with the young that there is the most potential to engage the disengaged. Children visit museums as part of their school experience but it is those children who are lost from school through exclusion that would most benefit from the safe neutral space that museums provide. Young people who fit into the NEET category (Not currently engaged in Employment, Education or Training), aged between 16 and 18 and younger, desperately need nurturing and giving the opportunity to map out their future with new positive experiences and skills. Museums as institutions can fit the gap not only because they are used to providing learning but also supporting volunteers - one of the noted aspects of a Big Society which will have to form without the previous level of support from the public purse.

As a starting point museums can offer young people the chance to broaden their experience by understanding past lives and how they have been formulated. As organisations we provide a safe, stable environment with professionals who on the whole love their job and enjoy conserving and educating. What better place to be than a museum for a teenager who has spent his/her formative years learning about failure and beyond the prospect of basic work, having no sense of their surroundings beyond the small bubble that they live in. However with all its strengths as a positive environment for learning, like many other

This went on to add up to 4.8 million visitors in total in 2007 - a staggering foot fall by any standards. Further success is measured by the sector through the amount of funding for Renaissance which has received £149 million over the last five years. But should this additional funding be seen as a measure of a successful museums sector? Matthew Tanner, CEO of Brunel’s ss Great Britain in Bristol and vice Chariman of the Association of Independent Museums (AIM), has been quoted as saying “Renaissance has proved that investing large amounts of money in a small number of museums can increase audiences at

“Are museums perceived as institutions that can change people’s lives? it’s unlikely government registers the social function of museums - ironic as this is how museums best fit into their strategic thinking” public institutions such as schools and hospitals, museums are not very good at promoting their social purpose within our society. Museums tend to see their goal as sharing the secrets of their collections to the lucky visitor, but engaging the young outside the national curriculum will require finding out what young people need and what they are not getting. Bearing in mind the majority of young people pass through museums at some stage, we now need to illustrate to government and society that our organisations can teach young people about the past so they can construct their futures. Museums x Funding = Visitors Museums can in broad terms play a more active role in socialising young people, but this will only begin to truly happen if there is a radical change in the structure of museums and how they are perceived outside the sector. In recent years we have seen many of the larger national museums achieving record visitor numbers, for example the 35,000 visitors to the British Museum to take part in the Chinese New year day and view the Terracotta Army exhibition.

those museums.” What Renaissance has led to is increased levels of staffing - 188 new curatorial posts for example - and a rise in visitor numbers, particularly at the larger Hub museums. The difficulty is whether museums should see their criteria for success measured by visitor numbers and funding received. Significantly there is a need to understand that these measurements and evaluation do not translate outside the sector to organisations that are serious about learning and young people. Clearly the investment in Renaissance is not going to continue and museums need to have more measured outcomes as well as sourcing private funding to help deliver their work. Museums: Changing People’s Lives? Are museums changing people’s lives and, just as importantly, are they perceived as institutions that can change people’s lives? Although government recognises the importance of heritage it is unlikely that they register the social function of museums, ironic as this is how best museums fit into their strategic thinking. 15

Museums are now more accessible for people and particularly young people; however the measures of success i.e. increased visitor numbers have great limitations. Perhaps more important is the learning that takes place and the relationship that is created with the visitor or participant. In recent years the sector had MLA, Renaissance and Inspiring Learning for All. We will now need to go it alone and therefore political advocacy will be essential as will a commercial awareness to replace public subsidy. There is a desire and a focus on educating

a Georgian prison and an Edwardian police station. In 2002 the museum’s education department of five full time staff self-proclaimed itself as the National Centre for Citizenship and the Law (NCCL) with the strap line ‘Learn from the past, act in the present, change the future.’ The aim was to bring together the formal and informal learning programmes in the museum - including the History based day school visits and the community based social inclusion programmes. The social goal was Citizenship Learning so that all young people who worked with the museum

“There is a desire and focus on educating young people, but this message isn’t reaching young people or the agencies they are connected to. Within government cross department communication is not always fluid and museums do struggle to reach beyond the culture Department” young people, but this message is not reaching young people or the agencies they are connected to. Within government cross department communication is not always fluid and museums do struggle to reach beyond the Department of Culture, Media & Sport where their educational value is seen as more cultural than social. The challenge, and indeed opportunity, now is to look beyond visitor numbers and exhibition development to create a facility for social change and to do this a new way of thinking is required. A Case Study: NCCL and the Galleries of Justice Museum The Galleries of Justice Museum in Nottingham is a charitable trust which occupies the heritage sites of the Shire Hall with Victorian Court rooms, 16

would gain an understanding of legal literacy, community involvement and their rights and responsibilities. Organisationally NCCL was conceived both for philosophical reasons and practical business purposes. As the Education Manager at that time I saw the potential for us to develop our learning programmes through funding from sources outside the museum sector and use citizenship to look beyond a history market which was shrinking in the curriculum. The importance of teaching children emotional and social skills, and developing their creativity and critical thinking was self evident by my previous work as a Drama teacher. The museum I now worked in offered the perfect backdrop. Citizenship education in the former prison and courtrooms would have value within

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Primary and Secondary schools and could also be targeted at young people at risk of exclusion from mainstream education and involvement in crime. My experience of coming straight out of teaching in a very deprived inner city school was greatly contrasted with the environment I found myself in; a positive museum (capital funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund), rich in resources and well supported by well trained motivated staff. As Education Manager I was encouraged by the organisation to source funding and the education grew rapidly, allowing me to appoint dedicated staff and run programmes and projects both in the museum and through outreach across the East Midlands. The Galleries of Justice - with its courtrooms, police station, prison and its wealth of exhibition and activity spaces - offers a perfect setting for stimulating learning. Add this to a sympathetic core staffing and the ability to bring in specialists and you have a real opportunity to take children out of their environment and facilitate learning. The understanding we came to at the Galleries of Justice was that the word ‘museum’ counteracted our social purpose to deliver citizenship and crime prevention programmes and stopped us accessing the funding we needed. The solution we came to was to brand the National Centre of Citizenship and the Law as a separate entity from the Galleries of Justice. Whilst the NCCL was seen to deliver the education programmes at the museum, it also had a life of its own when delivering its crime prevention projects across the country. Having made the transition from Education Manager to Chief Executive I was able to steer the process to allow the NCCL to gain in status away from the museum and form the trustees into two sections to represent two sides of the business. Also within the culture of the organisation the role of education was changed to have a purpose beyond the collections. From a training perspective NCCL staff undergo specialist training which gives them the knowledge and skills they need to work with young people. With our wider staff in the museum we did need to provide in-house training particularly to deal with children with behavioural problems. In addition we encouraged a culture of greater 18

acceptance to the wider community and their different ways of interpretation and responses to the new programmes we offered. In 2010 the NCCL is on the verge of becoming a stand alone charity with bases at both the Galleries of Justice in Nottingham but also the Royal Courts of Justice in London. Over the last five years the NCCL has attracted over two million pounds in funding for citizenship and crime prevention programmes from a wide variety of funders including the Esmee Fairbairn Foundation, the Foyle Foundation, the Batty Trust, Lloyds TSB, Government Office for the East Midlands, New Deal for the Communities, The Treasury and CJIT. Whilst the NCCL has a number of partners outside the museum sector such as Crime Stoppers, the local youth justice board and the youth offending team, it also works with museums such as Imperial War Museum North and the Oxford Museum Service. The objective is to deliver projects rich in social outcomes and that have access points to young people which other organisations can fit into. It is unlikely that the NCCL would have made the progress it has over the last few years had it been branded as a Museum education department. Relationships would have been more tentative with other Crime Prevention and learning agencies such as the Citizenship Foundation and importantly funding bodies would have complained of mission drift. A Model for progression Using the Galleries of Justice/NCCL as a model I believe that museums now need to restructure themselves so that they have subsidiaries to deliver their education programmes and allow them access to funding and the prospect of cross domain and sector partnership work. My name for this concept is a ‘Republic of Museums’, whereby the sector focuses its shared skills on an educational output and shares resources to deliver it. The model I propose will replace Renaissance and look to different sources of funding. Its structure will be to create educational subsidiaries attached to museums which will deliver learning to local communities. Because the work will be standardised museums will benefit from the economies of scale and allow them to share resources across the sector.

The offer is that museums are rich in collections and facilities, tend to be stable organisations; are well managed with a range of high level skilled staff and volunteers which provides them with a good reputation in the community. By changing the dynamic of how education is structured within the sector there is also the opportunity to make museums stronger and more vocal in their engagement with government and local authorities. Museums invariably have education departments with their own suites which could

are transferred to modern day communities; learning technical and artistic skills of putting on exhibitions and constructing them; experiencing on at first hand the running of a visitor attraction including corporate hospitality and café and retail work. Museums offer all these routes to learning and employability. At the Galleries of Justice Museum, our subsidiary the NCCL is a chief provider of ‘interns’ who work within the museum. These interns are made up of volunteers, students and noticeably prisoners from HMP Sudbury, an open prison. The ‘925’ project offers placements to

“By changing the dynamic of how education is structured within the museums sector there is the opportunity to make museums stronger and more vocal in their engagement with government and local authorities” carry out a similar function of offering young people a neutral safe environment in which to learn. Beyond these units participants would be able to access and importantly use the exhibition areas as resource spaces to aid their development. Ideally museums would use the space they have within the museum but where this is impractical learning areas could be at other locations, as long as they were formally linked and managed by the museum. In terms of curriculum and subject matter managed by the museum education departments, the possibilities are endless and currently already in action across the sector. Museums can within their teaching cover a range of academic and vocational disciplines: understanding the collection and its historical significance can teach values which

prisoners and Young Offenders at the museum where they are engaged across the departments gaining training and work experience. In addition they are encouraged to feel very much part of the museum team and indeed the wider community by their public facing delivery. Whilst the sector currently offers positive action traineeships by providing ongoing internships, a far wider range of participation can be managed. The key element to creating education subsidiaries annexed to museums will be to standardise delivery and increase understanding of what is on offer to the community and draw in funding. These subsidiaries whilst linked to the museum (or a group of smaller museums) would need to source their own funding through philanthropic giving and income drawn from 19

statutory bodies who would commission them for tendered services. Like schools that now have applied for status as technology, performing arts etc. museums could also have their own specialist areas which would obviously be influenced by the content of their collections. This would of course provide choice and opportunity for learning from students, with opportunities to specialise in science, performing arts, leisure and tourism etc. Obviously museums operate in different ways and at different scales and there would be a

art design and citizenship, to name but a few. The objective though is not to bring young people to museums and put them in classrooms but to use the sites and collections to stimulate learning and enhance the communication of ideas. The subsidiaries would offer a menu of programmes which could be bought in by local authorities for example to serve the needs of young people be they excluded, or needing access courses to complement their studies. The central benefit is creating a mechanism for museums to offer a standard service which fits into youth education provision

â&#x20AC;&#x153;a republic of museums would commercialise the delivery of education in the sector. it would need private and public funding and would rely upon volunteers. it would allow museums to play a key role in the new Big Societyâ&#x20AC;? need to join some smaller institutions together in cluster groups where appropriate. Further to this as the model starts to take shape there could be development outside the sector to draw in partners such as libraries, theatres, art galleries and even sporting organisations. The key will be to standardise the offer through a shared national curriculum albeit one that allows room for interpretation, but culminates in the recognised qualifications which were transferable. One of the benefits is that this shared outlook would be translated to Local Authorities who would direct young people to those museums which best meet their learning or social needs. Museums have the breadth of collections and subject matter to cover a range of disciplines: from natural history through to 20

and fills a gap currently not served by schools and colleges. In conclusion the creation of a Republic of Museums would commercialise the delivery of education in the sector, it would need to achieve a blend of private and public funding and would rely upon a network of volunteers to run it. If this could be achieved it would allow museums to play a key role in the new Big Society and give us a purpose that can really change our country for the good. Tim Desmond Chief Executive of the Egalitarian Trust, with leadership responsibility for both the NCCL and the Galleries of Justice Museum

V & A CerAmiCs study GAlleries

O P e r A - A m s t e r dA m . N l 21

Museum Liaunig, Austria. Opened August 2008. Situated Neuhaus, Carinthia, Austria. Houses the industrialist and art collector Herbert W. Liaunigâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s collection of contemporary art. Note: The museum is accessible through guided tours by appointment only. Architect: Querkraft. Image ÂŠ Museum Liaunig

museum architeture retrospective part 01 Is the age of landmark museums coming to an end? We look at some of the most remarkable museum architecture from the past decade from iconic signature buildings to the sublime and restrained. Add your suggestions for part 2 at http://museum-id.ning.com/

National Museum of Australia. Opened 2001. Located Canberra, Australia. The architecture was a milestone for a building of its type, designed to reflect the diversity of the Museum’s collection and characterised by vivid colours, unexpected shapes, angles and textures. Architect: Howard Raggatt. Image © National Museum of Australia

MAXXI, the National Museum of XXI Century Arts, Italy. Opend May 2010. Located Rome, Italy. First Italian national institution devoted to contemporary creativity and conceived as a broad cultural campus. Architect: Zaha Hadid. Image © MAXXI Museum 24

Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Spain. Opened October 1997. Situated Bilbao, Basque Country, Spain. Built alongside the Nervion River in the industrial town of Bilbao on the Atlantic Coast, the Museum is credited with the economic regeneration of the area. A new phrase - the Bilbao effect - was coined and has since been used by many provincial museum directors to persuade potential funders to invest in new cultural projects. The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao is one of several museums belonging to US-based Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation. The museum features permanent and visiting exhibits of works by Spanish and international artists. A key signature style building by Frank Gehry the building was most frequently named as one of the most important works completed since 1980 in the 2010 World Architecture Survey. Architect: Frank Gehry. Image ÂŠ Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation

Museum of Modern Literature, Germany. Opened June 2006. Situated Marbach am Neckar, Germany. The Museum of Modern Literature (Literaturmuseum der Moderne) won the Stirling Prize in 2007. The museum stands on a rock plateau in Marbach’s scenic park, overlooking the valley of the Neckar River. It displays and archives 20th century literature. Notable original manuscripts include The Trial by Franz Kafka and Berlin Alexanderplatz by Alfred Döblin. Architect: David Chipperfield Architects. Image © Chritian Richters

Denver Art Museum, USA. Opened October 2006. Situated Denver, Colorado, USA. The 146,000-square-foot Frederic C. Hamilton Building increased the Denver Art Museum galleries by more than 40 percent. The project was Daniel Libeskind’s first completed building in North America. The Hamilton Building links to the Museum’s North Building, a 1971 castle-like structure designed by Gio Ponti, via the second-story Reiman Bridge. Architect: Daniel Libeskind. Image © Denver Art Museum

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Methodologies

for change

reflections on the practice of the District Six Museum, Cape Town by Bonita Bennett

An elderly couple are on their knees on the floor map in the District Six Museum, scrutinising the street names as they try to locate the site where their family home was situated before it was destroyed. The woman jumps to her feet and does a spontaneous dance of joy, celebrating the fact that they have found it. The man quietly marks the spot and remains kneeling, lost in thought and possibly in another time. A rowdy group of schoolchildren wearing tags identifying them as ‘white’, ‘coloured’, ‘black’ and ‘Indian’ whizz around the building trying to find information for a project they are working on. They are lost in the task assigned to them and oblivious to the quizzical stares from visitors. A group of people of all ages walk solemnly out of the Museum doors, through the city streets to the largely derelict site of District Six. Each one places a stone with a message on a growing pile. A respectful silence engulfs them. A group emerges from one of the few remaining buildings on the site of District Six, trailing kites which they have just constructed from scratch. This is one of the times when the Cape south easter is welcomed and they offer them excitedly to the wind. 28

What each of these seemingly disparate scenarios have in common, is that they all form part of the District Six Museum’s programme of working with memory and exploring, in community, the different ways that memory might be activated and stimulated to create new forms of engagement. The increasing challenge to modern museums to be places of dialogue has generally given rise to a number of conferences, debates and seminars. While some of this museum’s work has included these elements, one of our greatest challenges and strengths has been to think beyond these traditional forms and to explore other dialogic channels which are not discussion-based only. Creating the conditions for becoming a ‘marketplace of ideas’ expressed through different modalities - performance, music, inscription, games, writing, discussions – has emerged from a journey of exploration about how to retain and enhance that which makes the District Six Museum vibrant and unique. The description of ‘museum’ has not always been an easy one, but it has come to be one which we wear with increasing ease and confidence. Peggy Delport, a founder trustee of the Museum thinks back to the origins of the term in this context: Thinking back on this problematic notion of a ‘museum’, with all the connotations

of collections and displays, the term seems at odds with the intense six-year life of the museum project as a living space and place for working with memory. Recalling that time, I believe that the term ‘museum’ may have been evoked as something that suggested a solidity, a continuity and permanence that could withstand even the force of the bulldozer and the power of a regime committed to the erasure of place and community. The common impulse in the call, however, was for a place of memory, not a monument but a focus for the recovery and reconstruction of the social and historical existence of District Six. Looking back to this choice made in the late 80s, it was a powerful one and an assertion of our right to be a museum as we understood it. It has allowed us to trouble the boundaries of the definition and question, together with more traditional museums, how to be a museum in new, inspiring and inspired ways.

strengthening and enabling features. I refer now to a seeming contradiction: while the desire for permanence and presence is strong, equally strong is the desire to retain fluidity, open-endedness and movement as central to our methods of working. We actively embed these principles in all that we do and to a large extent it accounts for the Museum’s particular nature and impact. The broad community with whom we interact consists of ex-residents of District Six and other areas of forced removals, school children, scholars, researchers, tourists, other organisations and the general public at large. The District Six ex-residents are afforded a special place in the range of people with whom we interact and are at the centre of who we are and what we do. They drive our work and shape our programmes and are sometimes unrelenting in their demands to be heard through the channels

“while the desire for permanence is strong, equally strong is the desire to retain fluidity and movement as central to our work” Some broad principles There have been some attempts, I believe, to underplay the District Six Museum’s authority to speak with its museum voice. Some have tended to emphasise the categories of ‘site of conscience’, ‘place of remembering and healing’, ‘place of activism’, ‘site of education’, ‘tourist destination’ and ‘site of return’, for example. However, just as the above descriptions accurately describe various facets of the Museum’s character, the category of ‘museum’ is the one which captures the need of the founding community to be all of the above, and also a structure reflecting their need to assert permanence and solidity. The District Six Museum has also been spoken of as a community museum, tacitly implying this to be a lesser form, not a ‘real’ museum in some contexts. We embrace the description of ‘community museum’ as a powerful source of inspiration, and I propose to paint a picture of how the notions of being both community and museum have been

that we have created. Maintaining this relationship has not always been easy, but investment in its careful and respectful nurturing has contributed to a climate where we are able to comfortably present what we don’t know and what we have not been able to understand. Maintaining this dialogic relationship with ex District Sixers as co-researchers and co-producers of knowledge rather than informants and tellers of quaint stories of the past, has been as enriching as it has been hard. Digging deeper There are elements of the Museum which on the surface of it, are fairly standard in terms of what one can expect from a museum. There is an exhibition; there is a collection and there are archives. An education programme forms part of the offering. However, there are a number of methodological differences which continue to fuel the life of this Museum in a particular way. 29

To signify the unfinished business of representation, the permanent exhibition is called Digging Deeper, indicating a framework which allows for an always further uncovering of facts, meanings and perspectives. It requires visitors to be involved in its story. There is the physical drawing in; there is the first-person testimony by ex-resident narrators; and critically, there is the experience and orientation brought by the visitor. An intimate entering into the physical and metaphoric space is invited by the photographs, the fragments of people’s lives and homes, the voices - and as a visitor you are challenged to form an opinion. You are presented with the horror of the forced removal and you inevitably react to it. The central map on the floor of the Museum is one of its best known features and I would like to take a moment to reflect on its significance. Faded and worn after many years on the floor, the map continues to be a powerful tool

and how does it happen? How do we facilitate individual as well as collective learning? Enabling people to learn from and not only about history requires a particular orientation which invites them on a journey into the past. It requires creating the conditions for those engaging with its programmes to place themselves within that context – it may be bodily, it may be metaphorically through a series of questions or activities – and to make connections with other situations as well. We work from the premise that the past is not a past event only, and that it has an existence and a life in the present, one which speaks to the present-ness of those involved. Meanings may be arrived at in due course, but may never be concluded or finally settled. New future realities may speak differently to the same past, and may yield new insights and new lessons. Our memorialisation projects are thus designed not to freeze history but to open up the important discussions about how the past

“We work from the premise that the past has an existence and life in the present - one which speaks to those involved” which draws people physically and symbolically into the centre of the story. Like the ex-residents in the opening vignette, those who lived in District Six before its destruction, gravitate in the first instance to the street where their homes were situated. The family name is marked where the home had been, serving as a signifier for what once was and had been erased. At the same time, relational others are sought on the map: friends, neighbours, extended family members. On occasion they have even met in person on the map. Main routes are traced with hands and feet, and inevitably a story emerges. This inscription into the symbolic substitute for the land often stimulates an assertion of presence, a statement about the right ‘to be’ and for some marks the beginning of involvement in the ongoing work and storying of the Museum. A culture of learning So, what does the Museum teach about the past 30

continues to live with us and within us. The children described in the opening section, wearing tags identifying them according to racial classification, are school visitors to the Museum involved in an activity called Re-imagining the City. Through a process of immersion into an experiential role-play in which their assigned identities shape the nature of their access to or denial of privileges, they get to learn inductively about the experience and impact of racial classification. They are led into a process of questioning the past apartheid system and are required to make judgements about the present in terms of what similarities might be observable in their current lives. They get to think about and state what ‘nunca mas / never again’ means in their contexts. Roger Simon (et al) in an introduction to a collection of essays on trauma and remembrance, reflects: Remembrance is, then, a means for an ethical

Special Effects | Ex hi bitions

Textile and memory work takes places at the District Six Museum, Cape Town. Image © District Six Museum

learning that impels us into a confrontation and ‘reckoning’ not only with stories of the past but also with ‘ourselves’ as we ‘are’ (historically, existentially, ethically) in the present. Remembrance thus is a reckoning that beckons us to the possibilities of the future, showing the possibilities of our own learning.’ Research and archives The Museum has a large archive of ‘artefacts related to the everyday life of District Six, recipes from the kitchens of District Six, stories, street signs and music. It consists of traces of consciousness, inscriptions of visitors from every corner of the world on rolls of calico…it has sound recordings, video recordings… and it has oral histories… The archive that is underway is not defined entirely by the contents of its collection but by the shape it gives to community, to a democratic public sphere.’ The opening account of kite-flying emerges from our archive of people’s stories. Childhood memories of former residents are largely about how leisure time was spent, and how creative energy was channelled into entertainment. On Heritage Day in 2009, one of the activities which formed part of the intergenerational component of the programme was kite-making, where ex-residents - mostly in their seventies and eighties – taught young people how to make 32

kites. The activity in itself became an opportunity for storytelling, and many wonderful snippets emerged from this differently constructed session for recording narratives. Wishes, dreams and desires for the return process were etched onto the kites and these were released into the wind. The act of release symbolised the communal yearning to engulf the site with positivity and hope. Stories from the archive inspire the programmatic work of the Museum. The bearers of the narratives are involved in translating these into opportunities for others to engage with the content of their experiences in different ways. Tina Smith, Museum exhibitions manager and facilitator of a project called Huis Kombuis describes some of the methodological elements of this intervention: ‘…Huis Kombuis took elements of the collection to the participant group, encouraged memory stimulation and recorded these in their own hand through various media: interviews, drawing and writing. These were then handed back to the participants, privileging the narrator’s rights to edit and have ownership over their own stories, and then creatively to reconstruct whatever fragments of memory the participants wished to explore within a broad framework of food and memory. In a sense, the methodology of the Museum was the starting point for the project but the narrative ownership,

story construction and creative techniques shifted this project into reminiscence craft work.’ These examples serve to illustrate some of the ways that the Museum manages to keep its archive and research strategies, coherent and alive. Memory and voice Very closely linked to our approach to research and archives are the aspects of memory and voice. Formal research tends to enter into relationships with ‘the researched’ in ways that are unequal and often exploitative. In the current knowledge economy where the privatisation and ownership of knowledge – often knowledge extracted from others – is a contested sphere, information and interpretation thereof often ends up being packaged outside of the contexts of the people who were central to generating it. The example of the West African griot comes to mind. The griot as the storyteller is

relationships are defined by collaboration and contestation between storyteller and listenerinterviewer, and the form of public history that emerges is negotiated and nuanced. This contributes to a space which is able to hold multiple narratives – whether in the form of dialogue or contestation - and which is constantly on guard against developing a singular frozen narrative. And the land remembers… During the earlier phases of the Museum’s life, one of the main functions that it performed was as a support to the land restitution process. It became a space which vociferously asserted the rights of ex-residents and their descendants to submit a claim for their loss in land rights, and practical support was provided in terms of documentation for the verification of family claims. It also served as the backdrop to a number of land restitution meetings, affirming the Museum’s place as a

“The return of agency to the community closely engaged with the Museum’s work is an important part of our agenda” revered as the custodian of history. However, many research contexts have relegated the storyteller to the realm of being an informant, and the researcher or writer has come to be regarded as the historian or custodian of that history. One of the ways to mitigate the everpresent danger of usurping people’s voices and speaking on behalf of people, is through creating an internal culture of critical engagement and a practice which is consciously self-reflexive. The return of agency to the community closely engaged with the Museum’s work is an important part of our agenda. The Museum is well-known for its oral history practice. Its expertise, however, is not only located in its wisdom about ‘correct’ methods for story-telling gleaned over mane years of experience. Rather, it is the expertise gained from an increasingly robust discussion about the challenges of conducting oral histories and research that is co-operative. Our research

living centre of the movement geared towards redressing the displacement of the thousands of people who were forcibly removed to the barren wastelands of the Cape. A shift to ‘hands on’ District Six has initiated questions around the methodological integrity of the Museum’s practice in relation to work on the site i.e. how does the redevelopment of the site affect the ways in which memory work is practiced, and how do we redefine memory work in relation to a changing site? How do we ensure that the land restitution process continues to be a place for ongoing reflection and transformation? We continually explore these questions with exresidents on walking interviews through District Six, memory methodology workshops and by documenting both the joys and challenges of the return. Memory work in the latter context is both difficult and necessary as conflicting emotions and varying approaches to re-settling the site come to the fore. Ex-resident experiences of the 33

Placing stones on the memorial cairn of stones in Cape Town. Images © District Six Museum

site are often disorienting and alienating but also triumphal, and the re-mapping of the site through participatory forms of memorialisation needs to heed these experiences. A walk of remembrance takes place on 11 February each year, the day on which District Six was declared a White Group Area in 1966. The solemn laying down of stones brought from the areas to which people had been forced to live, constitutes the end of the walk. It is the scenario described in the opening paragraphs of the chapter. This act of memorialisation, re-enacted each year, keeps the displaced community connected to the land and keeps the process of memorialisation alive. Like individual memory walks undertaken from time to time and which the Museum documents, the unlocking of memory resulting from orienting the body physically on the land and in relation to significant landmarks on the vacant site, has resulted in powerful recovery of individual and collective memory. On the scarred landscape dotted with remnants of the built environment which once was the setting for a bustling community, people’s recollections are crucial to understanding what is absent. “… what is ‘physical and material’ is by a strange contradiction largely the ‘intangible’ – the empty remaining space and the memories that the people of Cape Town have of the former area.” In conclusion At this point we feel strengthened in our attempts to focus on democratic and critical citizenship based on a strengthened and robust civil society: one that is hope-filled, that recognises the strength of diversity and that is underpinned by a 34

strong sense of solidarity and care. What the District Six Museum has learnt through its own recent past, is that consciously breaking boundaries between disciplines and modalities can yield powerful engagements which give rise to new dialogues and critical debates. Creating the conditions under which these can be enriching, not polarising, has strengthened the Museum’s practice. It has required a degree of open-endedness and risk-taking in project planning and implementation. It has required individual staff and board members as well as practitioners in partnership, to channel their personal skills and expertises into processes which are collective and collaborative rather than individual. This has been hard. It has demanded a giving up of self, both in the individual and organisational sense. The Museum has demonstrated though, that, even in a competitive and threatening environment, it is viable to bring together creative and critical people from diverse disciplines and backgrounds, to work collaboratively and respectfully, on programmes and projects. Bonita Bennett Director, District Six Museum, Cape Town

Q: What is The Pinky Show? A: The Pinky Show is the original super lo-tech hand-drawn educational TV show. They focus on information and ideas that have been misrepresented, suppressed, ignored, or otherwise excluded from mainstream discussion. Pinky presents and analyzes the material in an informal, easy-to-understand way, with helpful illustrations that she draws herself. Episodes are available on the internet for free at www.PinkyShow.org

The Pinky Show Future Museum Report: Some notes on our time-travel expeditions, 2028-2098

Prepared by Pinky Compiled from notes by Bunny, Kim & Pinky Version 2.0 completed August 2010 Version 1.0 presented at the annual meeting of the American Association of Museums, Los Angeles, California, May 2010

The Pinky Show Copyright ÂŠ 2010 Associated Animals Inc. 36

Introduction: Museums / Cats / Time Travel We, three cats from The Pinky Show, went to the future. We brought back notes & stuff. As some of you may know, Kim is very interested in museums. She had been asking us for several months about the possibility of traveling through time to see how museums develop in the future - however we have been extremely busy and only lately has Bunny found the time to build a functional time-travel machine.

We are time travellers. From left to right: Kim, Bunny, and Pinky. Mimi was busy and could not come; Daisy could not fit in the vehicle. Below: Scale models of the Time Travel Machine and accompanying Luggage Pod, 1 inch = 1 foot scale. The models were made by Kim. Below right: Time Travel Machine v1.0 specifications. Capacity: 3 adult cats. Height: 9 feet (not including sensor). Total height: 11.25 feet (including sensor). Width: 5 feet. Leg span: 8.5 feet. Maximum speed: 4 years/second. Maximum temporal reach: +/- approx. 100 years. Luggage pod: yes. Coffee support: yes. Completed: March 29, 2010.

Since late March, Bunny, Kim, and I have made several brief expeditionary trips to various possible futures. However, the process of de- and re-materializing at the molecular level is filled with many hidden risks, some of which cannot be addressed even through the careful use of waxpaper. After only six trips our machine is already beginning to show dangerous signs of wear and it appears that we will not be doing any more time traveling until Bunny is able to build a new, less wobbly vehicle. Also, we lost our luggage on the last voyage. At any rate, although we werenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t able to understand the significance of everything we saw on our travels, overall it was a nice learning experience. Kim is satisfied for the moment and we were all very careful to take many notes. We were also able to bring back with us a few museum-related objects, some of which we present here for your amusement and contemplation. Pinky Cat May 20, 2010

I. Apparently many futures are possible One of the things we noticed when we first started time-traveling was that often there seemed to be no obvious connections between the various moments-in-time we visited. In fact, many of the futures we experienced seemed wildly different - sometimes even apparently ‘opposite’ - from each other, even when separated by only a few years. We later learned from Daisy (who has time-traveled before) that the reason for this is that the future, as it relates to the present, only exists as an infinite array of possibilities fanning outward. And since Bunny did not build a Linear Limiting Device into our time machine, basically we just ended up going all over the place in near-random fashion. Which is not necessarily a bad thing - perhaps the diversity of artifacts presented here will serve as a reminder that a positive future can only be what we are willing to desire and fight for.

2062: The Capitalism Memorial Museum The Capitalism Memorial Museum was one of our favorite museums we visited, partly because it was so exhilaratingly difficult to relate to. At one level it was very much like any ‘typical’ museum one might visit in the present - several buildings housing collections organized around specific themes, lots of artifacts in display cases, photographs and explanatory text everywhere. On the other hand, because the museum exists in a post-capitalist future, even though we consider ourselves not-big-fans of capitalism, we also found ourselves unprepared for the completely disorienting effect of seeing the world purged of capitalist logic and structure. Once capitalism was overturned, the way pretty much everything is done in society had to change - including how museums are run. For example, The Capitalism Memorial Museum had Indigenous leadership boards. Community media bureaus. Communal research collectives. What is all this stuff? And how does it all work? We’re not really sure - we could only stay in 2062 for 23.9 hours. Another thing that struck us as odd about this museum: it’s open 24/7, 365 days a year. It was quite amazing how many people were there, just hanging out, doing their own thing on the museum grounds at all hours. There always seemed to be people swimming or playing in the many swimming pools located throughout the museum campus. In fact, the Capitalism Memorial Museum has the second most swimming pools of any museum in the world (second only to the Museum of the Swimming Pool in Las Vegas don’t go there, it’s boring), the result of its origin as expropriated homes of the rich and famous in Beverly Hills. 38

Misc. Notes: Truly delicious coffee & sweets at the cafes. We didn’t see any security guards anywhere. Administrative meetings held at the cafes or even in the galleries. Not even one sign with the word “public” on it. Gift shops still mediocre.

Misc. Notes: This place hurt our ears! Annoying ‘interactive’ audio-visual media (mixed with LOTS of advertisements) was everywhere - even in the washrooms. Stupid expensive cafeteria with “fun” human genital-shaped pasta (*barf*). Kim: “This is the Met on Hustler-brand crack.”

2034: The Museum of Fucking, Los Angeles If the Capitalism Memorial Museum was one of the most inspiring places we visited on our journeys, the Museum of Fucking, Los Angeles (MoFLA) was probably the most not-inspiring. (And we are not just saying this because cats aren’t endlessly fascinated with human sexual reproduction... mieh...) Basically we just thought that aside from MoFLA’s pushing museum-bling to impressive new extremes, in the end the museum was actually kind of boring because in lots of ways it was basically just doing the same (albeit, more exaggerated) stuff that we’ve been watching some of the more well-known now-museums do for quite a few years: •eye-popping admission fees •oversize gift shop •museum spaces available for event rental •corporate ‘partnerships’, sponsorships, and tie- ins for everything •costly, market-driven advertisement campaigns •iconic-generic building designed by celebrity architect •over-abundance of safe, predictable programming capitalizing on pre-existing popular desires •extra charges required to visit ‘blockbuster’ exhibitions •vague, depoliticized commitment to ‘education’ •“edutainment” strategy oddly unentertaining & often not even particularly educational •zero interest in publicly examining the ideological orientation of the institution •zero interest in cultivating visitor reflexivity regarding narratological and pedagogical methods • zero attempts to self-implicate the museum’s own complicated relationships to power and capital • too many dinosaurs and giant insects (what are they doing in a sex museum?!) • the list goes on... We wandered around the massive gift shop for quite a while, looking for a ‘representative something’ to bring back to the present. As one would expect it was insanely crowded and seemed to be making lots of money. It was interesting to see future pornography next to Made in Heaven stuff next to miniature reproduction Étant donnés, all for sale of course. In the end Bunny just ended up ‘collecting’ an XLarge MoFLA t-shirt - obviously it’s too big for any of us to wear but perhaps we can use it later as a blanket. 39

2098: National Museum of The Sacred While the Museum of Fucking may have been uninspiring, our visit to the National Museum of The Sacred was just confusing-depressing. Especially the depressing part. The museum itself is situated in a future-world in which, insofar as we could tell, there’s no sacred anything. Granted, this was Los Angeles, but still, we were shocked. Of course there was the museum, presumably dedicated to “The Sacred” (whatever that means in such a context), but after being there for even just a few minutes it was clear that the so-called ‘sacred’ objects in the collection were more or less just dead-objects. They had no energy to speak of. All questions to people as to how things had come to be this way were met with slightly bewildered, vacant staring. Outside the museum, we saw people, jobs, apartments, trees, restaurants, schools, dogs, squirrels, parks - but nothing sacred. (I should mention that we also did not see any signs of deep culture or nature; we were even told that the ‘snow’ on the nearby San Gabriel mountains was painted on.) Anyway, seeing the world like that was just very sad. Back to the museum: The National Museum of The Sacred is an institution that is apparently almost exclusively focused on the conservation of artifacts. The galleries were filled with a fairly unattractive collection of mismatched display cases, which in turn contained a seemingly random mix of ‘old’ religious and secular objects. There were no interpretive or even minimally informational labels to be seen anywhere, just objects. There were also chairs placed throughout the galleries, upon which visitors would quietly sit on - some people would sit only for a few minutes while we observed others sitting for over an hour. The people we asked about the sitting gave a very limited range of bland replies: they like to be near the objects, they thought it’s “good” to sit among the objects, etc. We left the museum feeling dejected and more than slightly confused, but not before visiting the gift shop. The contents of the shop consisted of postcards (ugly photos of boring artifacts), a bucket of umbrellas with the museum’s ugly logo on it, and a small wire-rack labelled with a bizarre hand-written sign: “MUSEUM TOYS: THIS IS WHAT YOU WANT”. So we helped ourselves to a few of the ‘toys’ (we have not yet figured out exactly how we are supposed to ‘play’ with them) and left. 40

Top: For children: Playful Kitten psychoactive toy (front). From the National Museum of The Sacred gift shop. Above: Playful Kitten psychoactive toy (back).

Misc. Notes: Although we did see one unconverted church while we were there, by 2098 organized religion is no longer considered meaningful and we saw lots of churches that had been converted into schools or mini-shopping malls. Also, we looked for fruits at the supermarket but no one knew what we were talking about. And, 2098 had the worst coffee ever, almost undrinkable. Bunny: “Say good-bye, we’re never coming back.”

II. The Movement Towards Public Institutions

Street flier announcing public meeting. Scan of photograph by Zoe Margarita Cat, near West Olympic Blvd. & South Rimpau Blvd., 2052, Los Angeles.

2052: Public Museums Must Belong to Everyone We spent an evening in 2052 sitting in on a massive, contentious Institutional Foundations Areas Council (IFAC) meeting trying to understand the processes through which a new direction for elite-class institutions was carefully (painfully) being negotiated and charted. The main issues touched upon at this session: • What are the fundamental responsibilities of educational institutions in an egalitarian society? • How can elite institutional forms, largely the product of predatory practices such as capitalism & colonialism, be repurposed to benefit and serve the interests of all peoples? • How to reconcile a fundamentally hierarchical and classist 200 year-old institutional structure-culture with the values and practices of participatory democracy? • How to accomplish the complex task of reuniting contested ‘artifacts’ with their parent peoples? One of the statements I’ll always remember from that evening was spoken by an elder curator. She said the transitional process, in order to be respectful and avoid catastrophic consequences, should be expected to last at least three generations. We thought about this for a long time and decided that this kind of thinking makes a lot of sense.

Above: Time travel notebooks. 42

III. We find a book written by Kim in the library A compelling book, but should it be written? Imagine our surprise when we stumbled across a book authored by our very own Kim while browsing the Santa Monica Public Library in 2028. We literally stood there, stunned, staring at the cover for what must have been a good 60 seconds before Bunny finally picked it up and started flipping through it. We were all shocked - Kim included - because: 1) Kim has no plans to write a book; and 2) She generally spends about 50% of her day reading comic books and playing video games and the other 50% of her day napping. After some debate Bunny and I eventually decided to bring the book back to the present (not the library copy; we bought one at a bookstore) and read it. It turns out Kim is (will be?) a really excellent writer! Her book, Destroying the Illegitimate Institution, is a challenging, clearly articulated polemic, and it’s easy to see why it enjoyed six editions by 2028. According to the “About This Book” narrative on the back cover, Destroying began its influence soon after its first printing (2013), providing a theoretical framework which precipitated the formation of the Popular Revolutionary Services, a radical grassroots collective (of human beings) who between 2018 and 2026 carried out a series of occupations of several prominent cultural institutions in the U.S. and Europe. The foremost demand of the PRS was the transfer of public and private museum collections to New Society Trusts, an arrangement in which overlapping, trans-national, autonomous networks of community collectives would care for and administrate the holdings. As one might expect, these demands and actions produced deep divisions in the museum community as well as the public-at-large - political divisions which, as of 2028, remained unresolved. All of the above is actually very difficult for us to imagine - Kim is not only a huge fan of museums (she’s a member of LACE and the American Museum of Natural History in New York City), she’s also well-known around here to be completely repelled by all forms of stress and conflict.

Destroying the Illegitimate Institution: Eight essays on principled responses to hegemony. Kim Cat. Los Angeles: UoM Press, 2027 edition. Hardcover book, 146 pages.

So far, Kim has yet to decide whether or not she wants to read her book - let alone write it. And if she does eventually decide to read and write it, it is also unclear whether or not she should just copy it word for word (the easiest book ever written, we like to joke), or re-write it in an attempt to avoid all or at least some of the violence and repression the movement encountered at the hands of both State and corporate entities to maintain ruling-class control of Culturally-Significant Property. The decision is a terrible burden for a six-pound cat to bear but Bunny and I have total confidence in her. Contents A. Acknowledgements. B. Introduction. 1. Capitalism, Colonialism, and the Historical Development of Museums. 2. WWWWWH: The Function of Coercive Institutions. 3. Invisible Ideology / Neutral Culture. 4. Museums in the Service of Empire. 5. But is it justified?: Principled Responses to Injustice and Violence. 6. Some Notes on the Failures of Revolutions. 7. Uprising at the Lustrous Prison, Uprising in the Mind. 8. Radical Services for a Compassionate Society. C. Illustrations. D. Notes.

IV. Same Year, Different Future

2052, again: “In three days it was nearly all gone...”

5/14 Update: Kim finally decided to read the book and is now re-working it.

Have you ever unintentionally dialed a wrong telephone number using the “recent calls” feature on a telephone? Well, we did the time-traveling equivalent of that, accidentally visiting 2052 a second time when we actually wanted to visit 2076. This time, we visited the great-great-great-great-great grandniece of our present-friend, Teacup. We asked Teacup6 why so many of our favorite museums had been dismantled in the Spring/ Summer of 2046. Her reply: rapidly deteriorating economic and social conditions, coupled with longsimmering resentment over ruling-class institutions’ continued paternalistic attitude towards the citizenryat-large. Several-months of large-scale uprisings across the U.S. were the result. Teacup6: “I was there when [Museum X] was dismantled. I say dismantled and not destroyed because it was taken down for a good reason. Everyone was angry and desperate, but in an odd way it was fair... There’s a part of me that’s sad that the collection was dispersed. The councils broke apart the collections; sent it to wherever they thought it should go. In three days it was nearly all gone. Can you imagine? But that’s what the people thought they had to do to break free from the old ways of thinking - the thinking that had gotten us to this destructive, hurtful point in history. You have to understand that the suffering is immense, and this is a response to that. It doesn’t make sense to try to radically transform society but still retain all the old objects of worship. But that’s the privilege the museums had tried to keep for themselves, so... they had to go... The buildings themselves, they were ground up and made into roads. Except for this little piece - I saved this one because actually I loved that museum so much”. “Museum creation is not a natural species response like hunting for food, building shelter, nurturing the young. It is an add-on made possible by the presence of social and economic surplus.” - Neil Harris, p. 133, from Cultural Excursions: Marketing Appetites and Cultural Tastes in Modern America (1987).

“Museum X” fragment. Collected by Teacup6 Cat, May 8, 2046, New York City. 44

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V. 2028-2098: Voices from the Future Since we’ve managed to wear out our time-travel machine in just over a month of use, it appears that we are done with time-travel for the time being. Maybe in the near future we will sit down and try to create a more detailed summary of every important thing we saw on our trips, but until then, we will leave you with a few words from some of the future museum-cats we met. I hope you find their comments useful - they were spoken for your consideration, a gift from cats we will never meet again. ~ p.c. Question: If there was one thought or piece of advice that you’d like us to take back to the early 21st Century and communicate to museum-people, what would it be?

Margarita: You don’t have to be in a position of power in order to do good in this world. But you must be fearless...What does a fearless museum-worker look like? Alex: We here in the future are struggling to create a dignified existence in the world that you’ve left us. It’s very difficult, because of the cumulative effects of your selfish, careless actions. The challenges we face are immense beyond belief. If you have any love for us, your descendants, you must alter or reverse your course immediately. We are dying. And what I want to say to all the museum people is that all your educational programs multiplied by a thousand will do very little for us. Stop for a moment and ask yourself - is it absolutely true that the most profound thing that you can do to radically change the structure of your world is to make wonderful educational programs and exhibitions for visitors to look at? Is this the most essential kind of work to be done, or are you just doing it because you cannot think of something better to do with your museum-resources, your museum-culture? I think you would fight harder for our survival if you were somehow able to come face-to-face with the suffering in our world. The irony is that our world is not new - our situation is already present in your time, only out of your field of view. But I am telling you that what seems so far away for you now will be the fate of your children and your children’s children. Please keep this in mind as you go to work every day under the banner of educating the public.

Andrej: Greetings to you, museum worker! I have only one piece of advice, and that is to allow yourself to live your most positive, foundational values. We all know that the most wonderful things in life is to experience kindness, love, generosity, selflessness. In the not-too-distant future you will see that there is little room for the professional-minded individual! The days of capitalism culture are numbered and you don’t have to wait for the total system failure to start nice relationships in your museum, which is actually only a big community, right? Use your imagination and create something new, or maybe even something old! When we create the kind of relationships that we really desire, then our museums will have honest power, and everyone will love to come to our museums. That is real support! Much love from the future! 46

Ed: Well to be honest I don’t know too much about the history of museums, but I’m sure museums back then are experiencing all kinds of challenges and stresses, just as we have now. As far as I know there never has been and never will be an ideal museum for any particular historical moment. It’s always a struggle, probably nothing new about that. The important thing is to choose which side you’re on and do absolutely every last bit of your work from there, maintaining that perspective no matter what. And when I say to ‘choose a side’, I’m saying there’s so-called winners and so-called losers in any society. That’s class struggle, am I right? And a long time ago I decided that I’m always going to fight alongside all the losers. Now I’m happy to say that I work at a museum where everybody who works here, at the very least we all agree on this one thing, and that’s how we get things done. We’re not all fighting each other over which direction to go. We get criticized all the time as being biased or whatnot, but there’s absolutely nothing wrong with a museum trying to do everything it can 100% of the time for those who are struggling the most. The winners are already doing okay; it’s everybody else that needs more attention. Of course I’m oversimplifying but it’s dishonest for museums to operate under the guise of fairness. The fairness narrative is a cover for maintaining the status quo, that’s all. Museums are here to lift society up. So I guess that’s my advice: don’t be confused and don’t water down your efforts. Isidora: I don’t have any good advice, but I have a good, short story to tell. Once upon a time there was a society that had forgotten the meaning of sacred. But there were museums with lots of old objects in their collections, so people could go there and point and say, “That’s a sacred object.” Everybody thought everything was fine until one day, all the rivers and rocks couldn’t take it any more so they all flew up into the sky and dropped down on the museums, smashing through the ceilings so that the sacred objects could escape. And they all did. Every single last one of them. The end. Teacup6: Think of how simple an idea that was, the Universal Access Pass. How nice that anybody can go to any museum in the world, for free. That’s a good idea - learning should be free! But of course nothing is free - in order to achieve that very simple idea, we had to stop something negative in order to pay for something positive. And so museum people worldwide became political and were a key part of the movement that fought to dismantle the military industrial complex, so that we could all have ‘free’ learning, at museums and at other places. Do you think that’s a good lesson?

Happiness Can it renew museums? by Tony Butler

Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve worked in museums since 1997, which coincides with what could be described as the good times for culture in the UK. It was a time when expansion and growth were unprecedented. Our major towns and cities have a slew of new, beautifully designed and inspiring museums. These new museums and the policy of free admission have inspired increasing numbers of people to enjoy arts and heritage. The recent financial downturn and resulting austerity measures show the limits of inexorable growth. The habit of growth has skewed the way people who work in culture think. Before the Recession by proving our work contributes to the economic potential of a locality or the country as a whole, we got more money, with more money we got to do more stuff for more people. This was fine to a point but it has created a rigid, mechanistic mindset in the practice of museum people. Much time was spent trying to prove to the Treasury or to local funders, that culture contributed to objectives in a range of areas from reducing crime to improving educational attainment, to improving health and contributing to economic regeneration. Whilst this may have been be true, for me this approach took much of the joy out of my work. At present we may be culturally richer than ever before but are we happier. 48

This article suggests that future efforts be less geared to producing more cultural stuff, but should concentrate on the happiness and wellbeing of people, be they visitors, contributors, staff or volunteers. I believe such an approach would have a profound effect on museums, enabling them to be clearer about their purpose, be better placed to deepen their place in communities and to become organisations which are more sustainable. The use of the word happiness is loaded. At times it may appear trite, too insubstantial when set alongside other progressive and less transient notions such as social justice. Yet a preoccupation with economic growth has made real social justice more elusive. The gap between rich and poor is wider than ever, and in a range of other areas, access to services, health and the quality of environment, peoples experiences are still very unequal depending on their economic circumstances. To help people confront uncertainty rather than just equip them with skills to be more socially mobile or economically active, civil society (of which museums are an important part) should encourage individuals to co-operate and collaborate so that they become more resilient. The impetus for a change in emphasis is what the New Economics Foundation calls the

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Triple Crunch: a coming together of financial crisis, accelerating climate change and highly volatile energy prices underpinned by the approaching peak in global oil production. Many people in the UK are consuming well beyond our economic means and in patterns that – if replicated worldwide – would be well beyond the limits that the natural environment can sustain. At the same time, recent research in psychology has shed new light on the factors that lead people to feel their lives are fulfilling, meaningful and worthwhile. One important finding to emerge from this research is that material goods play considerably less of a role in determining well-being than our spending patterns might suggest. For many people, indeed, the pressure to “keep up” in consumption terms has been actively detrimental to real well-being and perhaps even a factor in increased risk of mental illness1. Or as psychologist Oliver James puts it, our society is suffering from Affluenza. Whilst many museums have risen to the challenge of lowering carbon use, the aspiration to become ‘high well-being’ organisations remains more elusive. Many museums have addressed carbon reduction through effectively re-using and recycling or by engineering their buildings so that they are energy efficient. Few have altered their understanding of what it means to do public good. Instrumental policies backed up Byzantine evaluative metrics have made it more desirable that participants of activity are more able to enter the labour market than become a good neighbour. I began to question these priorities precisely because my organisation had (with some justification) claimed that it had made a significant impact in tackling worklessness and improving the educational attainment of vulnerable people in our community. The Museum of East Anglian Life is an 80 acre open air museum situated in the market town of Stowmarket in the middle of rural Suffolk. It is embedded within the rhythms of local life use as venue for events such as a Gypsy Arts Festival and as a base for the East Anglian Traditional Music Trust. It has over 150 volunteers providing 30,000 volunteer hours a year. It is involved with valuable community projects such as training dementia carers in how to use museum objects to exercise

the memories of Alzheimer’s sufferers. It was one of the first museums in the UK to declare itself a Social Enterprise, meaning that its operations took an opportunistic and businesslike approach to doing social good. The purpose of the social enterprise approach was to embed participation, drawing on existing community networks at the museum and to be financially rewarded for it. Contracts were negotiated with local agencies to provide services to vulnerable people. This included providing therapeutic placements for people in receipt of individualised social care payments and a partnership with the Suffolk Community Mental Health Trust who managed walled garden on the site to augment clinical care. The museum’s most substantial activity in this area was a 10 week work based learning programme providing training and skills development for learning disabled adults, offenders and long-term unemployed. The programme exploited underdeveloped assets within the museum. A 1920 Fordson tractor was restored to working order by a group of young people who have previously left school with no qualifications. A Shepherds Hut is currently being conserved by a group from the YMCA. The public agencies involved want their referred clients to improve skills and confidence to enter the workforce or live more independently. There were palpable impacts on the community, the project has helped 40 people get jobs, provided certificated training for over 120 people in a rural area, who would have otherwise had to travel across the county for the service. The status of volunteering certainly motivates people, but, having observed the bonds built between people, I started to think differently about the purpose of the programmes: being at the museum clearly made volunteers happy. They became sociable and supported each other outside work. People who had previously led isolated lives found a new confidence, trust in others and status. The museum had become a springboard, not a refuge. Relationships developed between the most unlikely of people, such as John and Gordon (names changed). John was a prisoner on the resettlement programme from HMP Hollesley Bay, near to the

1. See, e.g. Jenkins R, Bhugra D, Bebbington P, Brugha T, Farrell M, Coid J, Fryers T, Weich S, Singleton N and Meltzer H (2008) ‘Debt, income and mental disorder in the general population’ Psychological Medicine 38, pp. 1485-1494. 50

end of a six year sentence for armed robbery. Every lunchtime he ate with Gordon, who has Down’s Syndrome and was part of the gardening team. During their time together at the museum, Gordon’s mother, his main carer, died. For Gordon, aged 41, this was a cataclysmic event and the friendship and support John offered an immense comfort. In his book No More Throw Away People, the American social activist, Edgar Kahn calls these social transactions, elements of the ‘core economy’ “Family, neighbourhood, community are the Core Economy. The Core Economy produces:

evaluating what people don’t do – they don’t claim benefits, because many are working, they don’t see their GP as much because they are more active and thus healthier. There is a need to find a new measure or at least a way of articulating that the quality of peoples relationships make them happy. Investment in deprived communities is often characterised by bodies such as the Carnegie Trust as ‘deficit funding’ – supporting something new in a community that others perceive it lacks rather than investing in existing under-developed networks. British sociologist Richard Layard in his book Happiness states that

“Whilst many museums have risen to the challenge of lowering carbon use, the aspiration to become ‘high well-being’ organisations remains more elusive” love and caring, coming to each other’s rescue, democracy and social justice. It is time now to invest in rebuilding the Core Economy.” Kahn called upon policy makers to measure the economic or social outcomes of investment not by economic but the human capital created by mutual acts of kindness and support enabled by strong relationships and ties. These strong networks help individuals to be more resilient to change and uncertainty. There is evidence that befriending schemes in the health sector are just as valuable as clinical aftercare for those recovering from surgery2. To promote happiness, museums (and their Funders) might start by re-examine the social purpose of their work. For example there are few ways of measuring the success beyond

“Public policy can more easily remove misery than augment happiness.” The strengthening of local social networks should be accompanied by encouraging individuals to participate in activity which might unlock an understanding of their own well-being. The American psychologist Martin Seligman wrote that we would be a far more successful society if we enabled mental wellness rather than concentrated our efforts on treating mental illness3. He talks of three stages of happiness. First, is the ‘Pleasant Life’, which comprises of having as many pleasures as possible with the skills to amplify the pleasures, ie the generation of ‘positive emotion’. Second, the ‘Good Life’ is about knowing

2. Edgar Cahn describes a hospital befriending scheme in New Jersey which reduced readmission rates by a third in No More Throw Away People London 2000 3. Seligman, M. 2003. Authentic Happiness. London: Nicholas Brealey 2003

your signature strengths, and then re-crafting your work, love, friendship, leisure and parenting to use those strengths to have more ‘eudaemonic flow’ in life4. Third, the ‘Meaningful Life’ is using your signature strengths to create Flow to in the service of something that you believe is greater than you are. In basic terms, one can derive ‘positive emotion’ from seeing a beautiful work of art or ‘eudemonic flow’ from engaging in an absorbing activity. Museum volunteers across the country. In defining, a Meaningful life some of the ambiguities around the notion of ‘happiness’ can be better articulated. Positive emotion is transient and selfish, Flow is attainable, primarily by selfactualisation. ‘Authentic’ happiness can be best realised in relation to others through active social networks which stimulate acts of kindness and support. Museums are well placed both to incubate those social networks and provide a place of reflection for individuals to consider their own position in the world. Museums as institutions are both valued and are trusted; able to raise difficult and challenging issues in a way that is perceived as unthreatening and honest. Museums, again almost uniquely, have the ability to link us in a very direct and visceral way with our own social histories, and in so doing offer new perspectives on the way that we live now. At MEAL we (very unscientifically) tried to test how far involvement in activity made our people feel better through a Happiness Survey. Results showed that volunteers made an average of four new friends, learnt five new things and were more physically active. More interestingly a number had been inspired to look at the world differently and become more involved within their home community. Encouraged by these responses we looked at whether it was possible to discern historic levels of happiness. We used a happiness index (taking into account biodiversity, time spent between work and family, strength of community organisations, life expectancy, education and economic wellbeing) developed by the University of Bhutan to compare life in four periods in time in Stowupland. We interviewed local people to ascertain the quality of their relationships with

friends, family and the environment, their wealth and social mobility. Through the web-based When Were We Happy exhibition we showed there were more clubs and societies in the village in 2009 than ever before and far fewer single parent families than in 1900. Most people we contacted saw their extended friends and family more than twice a week, so if there is a perception that stocks of social capital are low, the materials to build it clearly exist. Further work has included the Happy Days project curated with a rural primary school in Lavenham. We using some of the principles of positive psychology asking 7 and 8 year old to design two Happy Days (one for themselves and one a Victorian Child) based on activities in which they might be absorbed. Using objects from the museum’s collections and their own homes, they told their own stories in poetry and prose. To a child their happiest days involved spending times with their friends and families. Another small exhibition opened in the summer of 2010 entitled Trust which examined the reciprocal ties which bound communities together in rural East Anglia. It was questioned how the predictability of work and home life and the presence of the expended family in past can be reconciled with diverse, socially mobile and atomised lifestyles many people lead today. An emphasis on well-being does not refute the achievements of socially progressive activities which have taken place in British museums over the last 20 years. Free admission, a commitment to put learning and engagement at the heart of museums practice and a desire to combat exclusion by working with the dispossessed have contributed to a sea change in public attitudes to museums. However short-term projects hopping from one community group to another do not have the sustained impact necessary to enable social change. Museums need to renegotiate their relationship with the people they wish to engage, viewing them not as audiences but as participants, not as beneficiaries but citizens and active agents who nurture and pass on knowledge to their friends and neighbours. Tony Butler Director, Museum of East Anglian Life

4. See Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1997), Finding Flow Eudaemonic Flow is described as being fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus 52

The individuality and uniqueness of a museum and its collections can very much shape the emotional well-being of visitors and the value they place on their museum experience. The potential that collections have to strike a chord and make a personal connection to an individual is hugely powerful depending on how that person interprets what they engage with. However it is not the collections alone that define a museum’s uniqueness or identity, it is the overall holistic experience, be this the visitor welcome, educational message or participation, which makes one museum stand out over another. As in any personal relationship, a museum must work hard to build connections with audiences, and more importantly sustain them. To do this, museums must find a way to harness the initial spark of interest that has captured a visitor’s imagination and build on it to develop and most importantly nurture over time. Any social history museum, in fact any museum collection, has the potential to connect with its audience through the very collections it holds in trust. A museum collection is more often than not the result of a collector’s eccentricities, interests, peculiarities and individualities. The very identity of a museum is directly related to the origins of its collections. What takes a museum to another level is how these collections are used to tell a story and engage with all visitors, including the most marginalised and unconnected of audiences. Depending on the communities a museum serves, the identity of a museum can be multi faceted and at times misunderstood. National Museums Liverpool serves a region where the most deprived wards nationally are located. The city appears unusually highly across every index measuring social deprivation including; high unemployment, high mortality rates, high teenage pregnancy, low educational attainment, the list continues. As such, the perceived identity of a museum, in such a hot spot city, which can be both high culture for many local people and tourists who flock into Liverpool today, but also elitist and exclusive, needs to be redefined to truly reach out to all communities, including the many who have barriers when engaging with culture. It would appear presumptuous of us to think as a museum service, that the community needs a museum, when in fact engaging with culture is at the bottom of a very long list of priorities for 54

The potential collections have to make personal connections is hugely powerful. But it’s not collections alone that define a museum’s uniqueness or identity - it’s the holistic experience which makes a museum really stand out. Claire Benjamin, Head of Communities, National Museums Liverpool, on the importance of individuality... survival. Therefore, a museum must find a way to make itself relevant and more importantly, necessary to support an individual to find their inner happiness and well-being. Using a case study approach this essay will look at examples from National Museums Liverpool that explore the social impact of community engagement within museums, and how projects can help define a museum’s true meaning. Case Study: Mary Seacole House Project Funded through the Liverpool Primary Care Trust’s Gateways to Active Living programme, which works with organisations who particularly want to engage older adults in healthy, positive activity, National Museums Liverpool worked with the mental health drop in day centre, Mary Seacole House, to deliver arts based activity for their users. The aims of the project were to address and support positive health and well-being for audiences aged over fifty, and to capture potential creativity in people with mental illness. This engagement was encouraged through interesting, expressive and fulfilling creative art forms, including traditional craft techniques. Considering that some of the most socially excluded members of society are users of mental health services (Sandell, 2002), the resulting outcomes and independent evaluation was used to inform and educate health sector organisations and professionals of the benefits to mental health of creative activity. The project also

A Museum State of Mind idiosyncrasy, individuality and identity

wanted to capture evidence to demonstrate how a museum can impact on wellbeing and health through skills development, increased motivation and self esteem. Contextual information about the project participants is important to fully understand and appreciate the meaning and value they placed on the project. The group suffered a variety of mental illnesses including social phobia, depression and anxiety and were also from Black Minority Ethnic backgrounds. The primary motivation for the participants taking part was stimulation and enjoyment in seeing new things and going to places they had not experienced before. The members of the group participated in eight museum visits, and by the end of the project the therapeutic outcomes generated for the participants included feelings of well-being and happiness. These feelings enabled participants to experience a sense of escapism from their usual state of mind, and without doubt only possible through sustained relationship cultivated between museum staff and participants, where trust was nurtured and valued. The variety of objects that the participants were exposed to included artefacts of cultural significance which allowed for personal connections to be made. “Sometimes I would go there [the museum] depressed . . . but once I was in the museum and doing something . . . all the worry went.” (Anonymous - NML 2010)

“It was just something to look forward to which is a great help, getting involved just takes you out of your world.” (Anonymous - NML 2010) The project enabled the museum to create a special bond with the participants, a bond that could be so easily broken considering the unstable lives and mind set of individuals involved. Only when this trust was created could the museum begin to understand the complex motivations and expectations of the participants and the meaning they applied to their museum experience. The social aspect of the museum project heightened participants’ sense of enjoyment and taking part. Individual care and attention given to them by museum staff was highly important to the group, encouraging empowerment and a sense of real belonging and not isolation. This sense of connection and involvement was further developed with a shift in identity for some participants in terms of their relationship to the museum and their own sense of place in society: “I remember the museum years ago . . .it was all dickie bows and ties . . .what you are seeing now is ordinary people. Coming from the city and being Black, I’ve not been to a lot of places cause that’s the way it used to be. If I hadn’t come to [the project] I would still have been within myself. I still got those feelings but I intend to release it a bit more now.” (Anonymous - NML 2010)

In terms of tangible results directly involving communities in shaping the identity of a museum, two members of the group made such a personal connection with the gallery that they donated objects to the museum as a direct consequence of their experience there. This demonstrated shared values and meaning, with the individuals not only experiencing the museum but becoming part of it through the very core of its collections and existence. Case Study: Reaching High project Identity is very much at the forefront of contemporary museums, particularly those

marginalised young Black males with the International Slavery Museum through a twelve week programme of activities, exploring the history of Black music and African-Caribbean influences on contemporary music. The young men involved had pre-conceived ideas about museums, and where they sat in their hierarchy of priorities. Considering the current situation of Black male disaffection, underachievement and unemployment in Britain being untenable and destabilising in the long run (Majors et al, 2001), National Museums Liverpool decided to work with Aim Higher, a government inniative to widen participation in higher education through

â&#x20AC;&#x153;Identity is very much at the forefront of contemporary museums - particularly those tackling challenging subject matterâ&#x20AC;? tackling sensitive, challenging subject matter. The International Slavery Museum is one such museum that sets out from the very outset its distinct, strong identity, where its meaning and ethos is clear: campaigning, tolerance, respect and telling the untold story. As such, any community project that supports such a museum has to tackle head on the emotions aroused in exhibiting such sensitive history. Audience development and community engagement seeks to shift perceptions, change cultures and tackle prejudices, all of these being no easy task for a community, let alone a museum service. Connecting with audiences from diverse communities is particularly pertinent when discussing a museumâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s identity, especially for a museum that addresses and tells the story of certain cultures, heritage or ancestry. The Reaching High project set out to engage 56

aspirational activities, on this project to explore a more positive image of Liverpool as a city with the young men, and engage them with culture that is readily available to them. This took the museum along a challenging path, not only with the project seeking to engage at risk young men, but also to tread the fine line between museum based community work and youth work. The distinctive messages that the museum was attempting to get across was, at times, challenged by the values that the young men attached to the project. This was the inevitable buffer that the staff faced, in terms of connecting and defining a museum identity that was accessible and relevant to this younger, more challenging audience group. That said, through a combination of collaborative working with the agencies involved and dedicated time and commitment from key

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museum workers, it emerged that some of the young participants began to make individual personal connections to the story that was unfolding in front of them. The museum did in fact relate to their own ancestral history, and provided a stimulus for them to understand their own identity and heritage. This was possible as a direct consequence of the International Slavery Museum’s ability to connect with young men who may have felt they did not belong. The Legacy gallery of the museum, which brings the museum’s collections into a contemporary setting, also proved to be that much sought after ‘safe place’ for the young people to feel comfortable and positive: “[Doing it] in the museum made me feel more comfortable because it’s about what Black people are now achieving, like making a good name for your own people.” (Anonymous - NML 2010) At such a key stage in these young men’s development, it is fascinating to see how a museum can potentially shape an individual’s thoughts about oneself, and a sense of pride within a specific community. The uniqueness of the museum’s collections allowed this dialogue to begin, and perhaps in future years the young people who participated in the project will fully appreciate the value of this learning experience. Highly relevant indeed given the on-going low attainment of many Black boys at school. The museum project had gone some way in addressing what is commonly seen as a major barrier for young Black men in engaging with education and learning, a lack of representation. As outlined in a Home Office report looking into higher prevalence of Black young men in the criminal justice system (Young Black People and the Criminal Justice System 2007), educational institutions could make a difference to how young Black men perceive themselves and re-engage with society by ensuring history lessons are relevant to all young people . . . attention should be paid to ensuring reference is included to the contribution of Black communities. Case Study: Smithdown Road project In reference to earlier points made in relation to delivering museum based community engagement work in a city like Liverpool, we must understand the importance many local residents 58

and communities place on ‘branding’ what Liverpool means to them. One of the main goals of the Museum of Liverpool was to engage with representatives of the Liverpool and Merseyside communities so as to create a Museum that was reflective of these communities and had a unique identity. One of the most effective ways identified to accomplish this was through engagement with community and public organisations. The hope was, that by better understanding who the museum engaged with, we would be better prepared having true representative involvement from the Liverpool community. Emotional engagement was an important factor when beginning to build relationships with Liverpool communities in this project, supporting the theory that nurturing trust relationships with key stakeholders does create emotional value so museums maintain and sustain a position in the heart of the community (Suchy, 2006). The fiercely defended passions of many local residents had to be harnessed and channelled into creating museum content and display that began to map out both the museum’s identity and that of the city it served. The multiple meanings different individuals and communities applied to this new capital project were both challenging and exciting, triggering responses and contributions that collectively defined the very heart of the museum. The Smithdown Road Project was a community history project which set out to discover how local shop keepers and shops helped shape a particular area and road in Liverpool. As well as the creation of a community photography exhibition, the museum project team set up a ‘Facebook’ site to generate interest among local residents and be a place to share their own experiences of living and working in the area. It was interesting to note that, despite this project being at first only relevant to a niche audience those who were familiar with the particular street in Liverpool, the social networking aspect of the project was highly popular, triggering memories and responses from different generations, both local and those who had resided in the area and since moved on. The out-pouring of such personal emotions and the connections people made with the museum project contributed without doubt to a shared sense of belonging for all involved. If something as simple as a residential street can shape the identity of a project, the possibilities for a city museum to capitalise on

the characteristics and idiosyncrasies of its collections are endless. The saying ‘one person’s trash is another person’s treasure’ is quite apt here, what interests one visitor may certainly not interest the next, but having a museum collection that at least attempts to represent the diverse communities it serves, will certainly keep audiences interested and coming back for more. Conclusion That museums have their own identity goes without saying, but for a museum to have a lasting impact on the lives of visitors, this message must not be diluted or misinterpreted. The strength of

things that are not neutral i.e. slavery, militancy, community activism. Museums are excellent vehicles to ‘showcase’ different histories, heritages and cultures, whether past or present, and this opens up such interesting debate around the fundamental meaning of museums. As a museum service in Liverpool, we can only feel privileged to be able to take people on a journey of discovery, and have the potential to elicit such powerful emotions as wonder and happiness. Claire Benjamin, Head of Communities, National Museums Liverpool

“The strength of any museum is what makes it uniquely interesting - this may go some way in understanding why some museums win our hearts and others don’t” any museum is what makes it uniquely interesting, and for museum staff to be able to discover this may go some way in understanding why some museums win our hearts and others don’t (Suchy, 2006). It is no stretch of the imagination to understand the importance that some visitors and some communities put on defining themselves through a museum experience, as the case studies have shown. Flora Edouwaye S Kaplan explores this further by asking whether museums represent a collectivity or a multiplicity of competing ethnic, religious and/or ideological groups in a physical space (A Companion to Museum Studies, 2010). What is so interesting about this point, is whether a museum service like National Museums Liverpool can remain neutral, when engaging groups who at their very coming together as a defined ‘community’ represent all

References Richard Sandell, 2002, Museums, Society, Inequality, Published by Routledge National Museums Liverpool, 2010, Active Aging Evaluation report by Nadine Andrews National Museums Liverpool, 2010, Aim Higher/Reaching High Evaluation Report by Nadine Andrews Richard Majors, 2003, Educating our Black Children – New Directions and Radical approaches, Published by RoutledgeFalmer The Government’s Response to the House of Commons Home Affairs Select Committee Report: Young Black People and the Criminal Justice System 2007 Sherene Suchy, 2006, Museum Management: Emotional value and community, INTERCOM 2006 Conference Paper Sharon MacDonald, 2010, A Companion to Museum Studies – Making and Remaking National Identities by Flora Edouwaye S Kaplan

The question no-one wants to ask...

What Happens When Museums Start Closing? by Paul Fraser Webb

It is likely that, over the next five years, a number of museums will close. The Museums’ Associations recent ‘Renaissance Survey’ showed that if Renaissance funds alone were cut by 25%, a third of museums will be forced to close sites or parts of sites. Add to this any potential cuts to core funding from Local Authorities and the existence of many museums must be considered to be on a knife edge. And its not just Hub and Local Authority museums that are at risk. The direct or indirect trickle down of funds from Renaissance and Local Authorities (and Arts Council funds, which are also at risk) leaves even the most independent of independent museums facing at a certain level of danger. To say this is bad would be a remarkable understatement. Every museum that closes is a loss to the nation. But this must be balanced against that fact that, for the most part, there is no legal right for a museum as an institution to exist. Museums can, and do, fail, and we should be morally and ethically compelled to prepare for such failures. The very definition of a museum makes this clear, stating that “[museums] are institutions that collect, safeguard and make 60

accessible artefacts and specimens, which they hold in trust for society”. If a museum is to fulfill its obligation to safeguard those items that it holds in trust for society, then it is duty bound to ensure that the collections and access to them is preserved no matter what the future for the museum as an institution. Against this background, how many museums are actually prepared to face closure? Certainly the Forward Planning documents that I have seen when undertaking Accreditation assessments focus on organisational development, growth and sustainability. I cannot recall any plan taking account of collection (or heritage) sustainability should the museum fail. The implications for not planning for such a failure can be enormous, as seen in the case of Chatterley Whitfield Mining Museum. Chatterley Whitfield was an independent museum with a coal pit and extensive collection of mining objects. It started to get into financial trouble in the early 1990s when the grant from its local authority was reduced from £28,000 to £4,000. At the same time the local authority’s commitment to underwriting a loan made to the

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museum was withdrawn. The reduction in grant support was a result of the tightening financial situation for local authorities, although this situation was probably not as bad as the one local authorities will be facing soon. By the latter part of 1993, the museum trustees voted to go into voluntary liquidation and receivers were appointed. At this point the situation became what was later described in the Museums Journal as “a long anticipated disaster”. Rather than the hoped for redistribution of the objects to appropriate charitable institutions (as was hoped for under Charity Law) it was determined that Company Law over-rode Charity Law and the receivers took the view that the first call on the assets (that is, the collections) was to pay off the museums creditors. To this end a large part of the collection was sold at open auction in 1994. It was stated at the time that the liquidators had not understood the museum sectors point of view, especially with regard to the consideration that the objects were heritage assets rather than simple physical assets. Documentation and provenance were not considered to be of importance and became disassociated. Naturally, there was a postmortem on the case, with recommendations that Museum Studies courses delivering training on legal matters and a need for the Museums and Galleries Commission and the Association of Independent Museums issuing guidelines for museums facing bankruptcy. But perhaps the strongest recommendation was that museums themselves need to get their houses in order. To quote from Museums Journal “There is a widespread feeling that the liquidation underlines the vital need for charitable trust and local authority museums to know clearly the legal status of every object in their collections before disposal problems arise” and also to understand the relationship between Charity and Company Law. The statement is quite clear: there is a need to know the legal status BEFORE the disposal problems arise. Once receivers have been called in the situation can be too late. During a recent conversation with an insolvency expert, their approach was explained. Once receivers have been called in to any business they have a clear set of principles for dealing with the case. The niceties of museum ethics, knowledge management and collections management are largely of little interest. Furthermore, it is likely 62

that they would only be interested in the asset value of collections: documentation, databases, oral histories and the whole spectrum of material that we gather to provide engaging and evocative stories are likely to be of little interest to receivers unless they can augment the asset value of the collections that may be disposed. Whilst the role of receivers is most relevant to independent museums, the situation is not entirely different for other organisations such as Local Authority Museums. Should a council decide to close its museum, the actions that result may not be wildly different to those enacted by a receiver. For these reasons it is essential that a museum has a plans and guidance: the plan should cover what will happen to collections and information should a museum be faced with the prospect of closure; the guidance should state when the plan should come into effect. The plan must come into effect before receivers (or alternative) are called in, since, when they are involved, the museum will largely lose control of what happens. The guidance should refer to a series of triggers, which, when tripped, would start the process leading to a managed and ethical closure of the museum. Appropriate triggers could be financial (such as a minimum level of reserves, or continuation of a core grant) or associated with impact (such as falling visitor numbers, or reduced educational offer) or by specifically associated with the particular situation of a museum (changes to ferry routes, construction of by-passes, movement of a local market). Whatever. It should be the duty of a museum manager to consider what events may make the continued existence of a museum untenable, and that they should plan for such an eventuality. The concept of Living Wills is well known within medical ethics, but in more recent months the term has been used within business circles. Alistair Darling, when Chancellor of the Exchequer, was an advocate for them for banks. Put simply, it was suggested that all banks develop contingency plans for their break up in the event of insolvency. Through the development of such plans it was hoped that the type of crisis faced by the banking industry that lead to the UKs recession could be avoided. They would not stop banks from failing, but any failures would be proactively managed rather than reactively dealt with.

Developing this kind of Living Will within heritage and cultural organisations is not entirely new. Until a few years back, Norway’s Museum Registration policy stated that “The museum must have by-laws that defines the ownership of the collection, the organisational framework of the museum, and states what will happen to the collections if the museum ceases to exist” (This requirement was dropped During Norway’s museum reform in 2002 – 2009 after which the government has underlined that every museum which expects to get governmental funding has to have their own independent organizational model).

need to plan for this failure. We have got to see this coming. Do you manage decline, or do you react when it happens…when the museum goes bump?” Unfortunately, the manager interviewed for this piece did not want to be named. They felt that in considering of the possibility of a museum failing there might be a perceived criticism of that museum’s main funder. Others who I talked to considered that by planning for failure would be in some way accepting failure. But surely the opposite is true: when facing this crisis our efforts should be directed towards ensuring that those aspects of museums that are worth preserving

“If some museums fail then so be it – but this should not lead to a loss of what they do” There are also some measures being undertaken in this country. One museum, with a country-wide remit, has started to make approaches to smaller museums with which it has relationships. This museum considers itself to have a wide responsibility for supporting its smaller partner museums, and it is starting to consider what would happen if the smaller museums start to fail. The arrangements are very loose at the moment, but it is possible that plans will be put in place to provide rescue and storage facilities for those key objects in the failing museum that are seen as being integral to preserving the identity of the community that they represent. At the moment there is no formal plan, no list of key objects, or any formal or legal agreements in place between the museums. But as a senior manager at the museum said “We

are preserved. We need to ensure that collections are preserved, made accessible and they continue to teach and inspire all who see them. The institutions that we call museums are tools to facilitate collecting and engagement. If some museums fail then so be it – but this should not lead to a loss of what they do. Paul Fraser Webb

Augmented Reality Streetmuseum for the iPhone

Streetmuseum - an iPhone app designed for the Museum of London - generated a lot of media interest, public interest and helped launch a new set of galleries. Helen Kimber of BrothersandSisters explains why it was such a success...

Our brief was to create an online viral campaign to raise and maintain awareness of the new Galleries of Modern London at Museum of London. Museum of London is one of the world’s largest urban history museums and the lower galleries had recently undergone major redevelopment work. The new galleries tell the story of London and Londoners from 1666 to the present day, focusing on how the people of London shaped the development of a modern and diverse world city. The Museum of London had already created a branding concept for the new galleries through design agency NB: Studios. The concept was called “You are here” and used historical photographs, illustrations and paintings from the Museum’s collections to show how London has 64

changed over the years. The marketing campaign included press, poster and online advertising and launched with the appearance of large 3D installations in key locations across the city that recorded an event or past history attached to that particular place. The museums market in London is somewhat saturated and, in communications terms, is also pretty noisy. Therefore to support their print media campaign the Museum of London were looking for another way to cut through, beyond traditional media and specifically a way of hooking in Londoners and prompting them to visit to learn more about their city’s heritage. What they needed was a piece of digital content to engage and involve people, generate PR and further awareness of the new gallery openings.

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We were just wondering… The team at BrothersandSisters, like the majority of London’s population, had migrated to the city, either from elsewhere in the UK or the world. London was their adoptive city. They were naturally curious about the place and genuinely interested in the stories contained within the galleries. The team also knew that if anything would be a platform for viral activity in 2010 it would probably be an app for the iPhone, which was growing in popularity at an incredible rate. Putting two and two together, the team wondered whether it was possible to pillage the image archive of the museum and use the iPhone to take this content out onto the street so people could look at the past as they stood in the present. And so Streetmuseum was conceived. The app guides users to sites across London and allows the user to overlay images from the Museum of London’s fantastic archive over real street scenes. How it works, technically speaking The application works by anchoring images to a Google Map and displaying them as thumbnails. A master version of the application was created which used the iPhone 3GS compass to plot the pictures as accurately as possible. This meant someone had to literally visit each of the 250 destinations. This provided the accuracy needed to overlay the images of the past onto the camera’s view of the present and meant that a time tunnel effect at the location could be created, with the imagery sitting comfortably over its present day incarnation. 66

The reaction was incredible The app was launched with only a press release as support. Later a message was included on advertising posters. Then once the app had become popular iTunes picked it as a featured app and PR just evolved naturally. But initially all the attention it created was based purely on reaction to the product. In terms of results, against a target of 5000 downloads the app is, at time of writing, up to 95000 and still climbing. It was an iTunes featured new app, reaching #19 in the top free apps and #2 in the top free lifestyle apps. The story was covered by UK national press titles including The Guardian, The Sun, The Mirror, London’s Metro, numerous websites, blogs and magazines and it was featured on BBC London radio. Due to popular demand the app was made available worldwide leading to it being featured in press stories in a variety of countries, including Korea, Russian and Germany. For the Museum of London, all this attention translated itself into a 157% increase in footfall on the previous year. In short, Streetmuseum worked really well, exceeding download targets, delivering media attention and public interest and helping drive visitor numbers. It has been viewed as an all-round success. Once we knew it worked, we wanted to know why it worked While its great to know how it worked, also understanding why it worked means there is a chance we might be able to replicate its success. So, why did Streetmuseum perform so well?

• At a basic level it is free, so cost was not a barrier. While this was a factor, it doesn’t explain why it reached #19 in the apps table. • It is a relatively easy concept to grasp: it overlays old images over modern streets. You don’t need to be techhead to get your brain around that one. • It was also easy to use. In one touch it’s up and running without any need for a long-winded explanation of how to use it. It makes every technophobe feel like a pro. • It’s inconspicuous. To an observer the user looks like they’re taking a picture. (Actually, rather than taking a picture, in a way the user is returning an image, putting it back in it’s original place, where it belonged before it was ‘taken’ years before). • Conversely, Streetmuseum used the seductive symbol of the iPhone and all the cultural kudos that that lends to the user. The app only worked on the latest, 3GS version of the iPhone and for some owners this presented a show-off factor. • It’s a beautiful bit of design. It hasn’t reinvented anything. It uses all the functionality and layout cues you already use everyday, but takes you to whole new destination. • It is both useful and entertaining, which is the holy grail of app design. Many apps are entertaining but pretty useless. They are just engaging diversions. Others, like bus timetables, are useful but dull. Streetmuseum is both useful and great fun if you happen to be walking about London. • It’s quite addictive. The layering of the past over the present is instantly gratifying and provokes the joy of discovery, making you want to explore further. People seem to love the idea of standing in a spot where history happened. Seeing where you work or live are or even just visiting as it was 50, 100, 200 years ago is pretty incredible. It feels like the app gives us access to the past. • It makes for great images. Ideas spread virally when they catch the attention of the media and Streetmuseum had one especially important asset in this respect, it was photogenic. • Pictures of the old overlaid over the modern made for striking images that looked great in newspapers and magazines and print media love images because they are easy to digest, brighten a page and fill space. While we did get a bit of interest from TV news programmes and even radio, analysis of the coverage shows that it was in printed media and online that the story really took off.

It’s not about the tech, it’s about the content It is in understanding the power of these images that we can unlock the real reason for Streetmuseum’s success. Essentially, it’s all about the content. The app, like all media, is a means to an end. As fascinating as the AR technology may be to the geek-inclined, it is just a gimmick without the images. It is the content it delivers that makes the app useful and entertaining. People download the app for the content, not for the app itself. The content works by juxtaposing old and new and, in doing so, uniting opposites like past and present, modern and ancient, the existing and the lost. This is like a little bit of modern magic, taking the seemingly separate virtual world and putting it into the real world.

at the heart of the museum or gallery experience and Streetmuseum works because it can deliver that emotion outside of the museum itself. Indeed, creating this juxtaposition in-situ makes for an experience that a museum cannot deliver. In the museum the artefacts are in a space separate from the real world – the gallery itself. With Streetmuseum, the impact of the art is magnified by the smell and sounds and feel of the real city. Streetmuseum creates a sensoramic gallery experience. When we visit cities most of the art is locked away in galleries and most of a galleries art is in archive at any one time. Streetmuseum liberates art from the gallery and the storeroom. It sets images free to roam the city that gave birth to them.

“The content works by juxtaposing old and new - uniting past and present, the existing and the lost” A beautiful example of this is the painting by Abraham Hondius from 1677 of people playing on a frozen river Thames. It provides a startling contrast between then and now. It is hard to imagine the modern Thames frozen like this. At the same time, however different the people in the painting may look in terms of dress, they are doing exactly what we would do in the same circumstances – playing on the ice. Shots like this, with a human element, are the ones that seem to have been particularly successful. It is not simply the artefacts of the Museum of London that Streetmuseum transposes onto the street; it is also the emotional reaction one experiences in front of those artefacts in the gallery. Juxtaposing two images from different times creates a gap between the two. This gap delivers a powerful feeling of absence. We are there, but what we are most aware of is the fact that we can never actually be there. This tension between where we are and what we can see is 68

Alasdair Gray wrote in his novel Lanark that great art allows one to visit a city in the imagination before ever visiting it for real. All of us go to Paris and Florence and Rome a hundred times through great art before we ever visit them for real. We visit cities through art. With this app we can contrast the art of the city with our actual experience of the place. Rather than visiting the city through art, we visit art through the city. Where next? Streetmuseum has been upgraded and the number of sites doubled. An iPad version and a version with video capability are being looked at. At the moment, the team at BrothersandSisters are talking to other museums, galleries and broadcasters about developing variations on the core idea. Helen Kimber BrothersandSisters

On the same day that Tony Blair’s memoir, A Journey, was published in the UK to considerable media reaction and controversy, discussion of another topic entirely was topping the trend charts on Twitter. Remarkably, it was an initiative to stimulate dialogue between the public and museum curators ask a curator - that had become the hottest Twitter subject in the world by mid morning on 1 September... The one-day event, called Ask a Curator, was the brainchild of Jim Richardson, managing director of Sumo, a branding and design group which regularly works with museum and gallery clients. Frustrated that social media are usually used by such organisations to push out ‘bland marketing messages’, if they use them at all, Richardson wanted to harness Twitter’s networking power to drum up some direct engagement with curators across the globe. The idea was that a curious public would be able to question the keepers of cultural heritage about the objects in their care and what it is they do with them. ‘With Ask a Curator I wanted to do something which asked more of both the public and museums, something that could create dialogue and real engagement. I hoped the project 70

could give the public unprecedented access to the passionate and enthusiastic individuals who work in museums and galleries and also break down barriers within these institutions, where all too often social media is still the remit of the marketing department,’ says Richardson. The initiative comes at a time when many museums are just beginning to consider how online platforms and social media might dovetail with their on-site activities. Some institutions, such as the Brooklyn Museum in New York and the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney, have blazed a trail with their online services and an open attitude to dialogue with the public. But for some organisations, taking part in Ask a Curator was a foray into largely uncharted territory. According to Conxa Rodà, project

coordinator at the Museu Picasso in Barcelona, the event was the first time curators there had used Twitter. ‘[The event gave] museum professionals a real proof of the reach and influence of social media and it can awake an interest in what Twitter is all about,’ she says. So was Ask a Curator a success? In many ways, yes. Despite being promoted solely through Twitter, the idea eventually garnered participation from over 340 institutions, each offering a curator to take part in a question and answer session at some point during the day. What’s more, together these museums and galleries span the globe

department will now screen Twitter every day and pass relevant questions to our curators. We will keep on answering questions.’ Perhaps this is a first step towards breaking down the ‘barriers’ between curators and marketing departments that Richardson observes. And if volume of traffic is a measure of success, the event was barnstorming. The rapid rise of #askacurator – the ‘hashtag’ linking Twitter messages to the subject – led a range of media, including the BBC, to report on the activity. Although these reports largely focused on the social media phenomenon of a trending hashtag,

“taking part in Ask a Curator was a foray into largely uncharted territory” and cover a huge breadth of subject matter and collection material – from the Museum of East Anglian Life in the UK to the Museum of History of Medicine in Brasil. Questions ranged from the general – ‘Have you ever had a piece that you wanted to exhibit but was too large to get into the museum?’ – to the specific – ‘What is your vision for creating a participatory interactive experience with visitors using mobile guide technology? – to the analytical and academic – ‘Is a visual art exhibition a collaborative project between artist and curator? Is there a dominant player?’ ‘For us, Ask a Curator was the start of an ongoing conversation,’ says Wenke Mast, events and website assistant at the Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp. ‘Our communications

they also discussed the event’s principal idea of connecting museum curators and the public all over the world. The day’s activities also increased Twitter followers for the organisations which took part. ‘We received 403 extra followers from Tuesday 30 August,’ says Maryam Asghari, online and digital marketing manager at the Barbican. ‘The average is 443 extra followers per week, so to get this number in three days is good.’ In short, Ask a Curator generated lots of activity around a worthwhile objective, namely giving the global public ‘one-to-one’ access to curators of cultural heritage collections, many of which are publicly held. This huge response reveals genuine interest in the sector’s work, says Museums Sheffield marketing officer for 71

campaigns and digital Dominic Russell-Price. ‘When the calls for scrapping arts funding get ever louder it was heartening to know that the public want to engage and know more about how we work, particularly with questions being about collections, not just exhibitions.’ But there are also limitations to the Twitter platform and in many ways Ask a Curator was beset by problems of its own success. The popularity of the event and the fast trending of #askacurator swiftly led the hashtag to be hijacked by spam messages, polluting the stream of genuine messages with rubbish. Because #askacurator is the only identifier of relevant messages it becomes difficult to track associated questions and answers as they stream in from multiple sources. Additionally, many responses were made directly to questioners rather than ‘tweeted’ publicly, further obscuring the exchange. Another inherent limitation is Twitter’s short-form message format of no more than 140 characters. Does this preclude the meaningful and detailed conversation needed to discuss complex curatorial work? Is Twitter actually better suited to providing basic visitor information? ‘I think it all lies in the expectations of the Twitter audience,’ says Richardson. ‘Everyone enters Twitter knowing that the messages are 72

short and I think people expect short answers and a certain amount of chaos. Personally, I don’t equate depth of engagement with the length of the answer; the tone and speed of response are for me just as important as they can show that an institution is open and keen to engage with the public.’ Certainly, whichever online platform is used for engagement, it is not so much the mechanics that are important, but the content and intention. In this regard, Ask a Curator raised its own valid question: Is there an appetite for this kind of dialogue, from both sides of the exchange, and how can it can enrich the work, understanding and enjoyment of museums and galleries everywhere? Scott Billings

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VALENCE HOUSE NEW ARCHIVE STORE Valence House Museum, a Grade II listed manor house set in park and farmland in Dagenham, Essex, has created two state of the art archive storage facilities for the Boroughâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s museum and archive collections with mobile and static storage facilities by Bruynzeel Storage Systems. Having been a public museum since 1938, Valence House was in need of sensitive repair and appropriate refurbishment. The relationship between the house and its historic parkland had been compromised by a swathe of redundant industrial buildings. Following a ÂŁ2 million grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund, and support from the Borough of Barking and Dagenham, work to rejuvenate the museum, utilising two of the industrial buildings to create additional facilities and to build an archive store, began in November 2008. The storage areas comprise of an archive store for paper documents; a cold store for photographs and a third store for general museum exhibits and paintings. The archive and general museum storage areas have been designed as passive stores, only one of two archives in the UK that use passive environmental control, instead of the energy intensive, air conditioned solutions normally associated with the storage of sensitive materials.

The passive stores, which are heavily insulated to maintain the environment at a consistent temperature have warm pipe heating under the floor level, while the photographic archive, which requires a cooler temperature is fitted with a cooling unit. Working in conjunction with the main contractor, Bruynzeel fitted 50 mobile carriages in the stores together with a steel-mesh raised access floor which allows convected heat from the warm pipes to permeate around the shelves. The mobile shelving carriages are fitted with Bruynzeel’s reliable and easy-to-use Positive Drive mechanical-assistance and their latest ergonomic drive-handles. “ Bruynzeel was chosen as the company most able to provide a competitively priced, turnkey operation. In addition they have extensive archiving knowledge and Bruynzeel shelving is manufactured to ISO 14001”, says Judith Etherton, Museum Director. “We are extemely happy with the finished archives which we are sure will prove an asset to the Borough”. As well as the refurbishment of Valence House as a local museum, the project includes a new visitor centre, shop, café, education space and local studies library. In addition to local material, the archives also include documents of national interest, including letters from Sir Richard Fanshaw, a previous owner of the property, to King Charles II of Spain regading his marriage to Catherine of Braganza, the daughter of the King of Portugal. Other noteworthy items include photographs of the Dagenham Docks and the Ford Motor company who started producing cars in Dagenham in 1924.

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St Paul’s Cathedral

new handheld multimedia experience A new handheld multimedia experience is now available for all visitors to St Paul’s Cathedral. The innovative audiovisual guide uses the latest technology to bring the many fascinating stories and history of this iconic British landmark to life. Produced in collaboration with interpretation partners, Antenna Audio, the project is the largest of its kind in the world operating with a mass distribution of 2,000 players serving 4,000 visitors a day at peak times. The guides are included in the cost of admission. Traditional elements of a multimedia guide are combined with innovative use of the player’s range of functionality in a carefully designed experience. Images, contemporary and historical photography, videos and archive film footage provide additional context giving visitors a deeper understanding and connection with St Paul’s. High-resolution touchscreens allow visitors to watch fly-through videos of the cathedral’s upper galleries and enjoy fully zoomable close-ups of breathtaking ceiling mosaics, paintings and photography. Furthermore, thanks to intelligent use of the device’s wifi capability, Antenna’s technical team has achieved ground-breaking synchronisation with a series of short films presented in the brand new 270 degree immersive exhibition ‘Oculus: an eye into St Paul’s’, triggering audio playback automatically in the visitor’s pre-set language. The tour is available in eleven languages: English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Polish, Russian, Mandarin, Japanese and Korean, plus a version in British Sign Language and a specially created audio-only version for blind and partially sighted visitors. Antenna Audio | +44 (0)20 3365 8624 | matthew_vines@discovery.com | www.antennaaudio.com

Talking Guides for Smart Phones new apps and cloud technology

You may have noticed the huge increase in numbers of visitors of all ages carrying Smart Phones such as Apple iPhones, Android based phones or Blackberrys to your site. ATS Heritage have launched new ‘Talking Guides’ enabling their clients to quickly and easily deliver their content to many of these phones. Based on cloud technology, the huge benefit is that visitors (both on-site and virtual) will be able to download audio, videos, multimedia or interactive experiences. This can include map based tours with GPS for Gardens and Parks. Remember that you can also use Talking Guides for temporary exhibitions. ATS Heritage | +44 (0)2392 595000 enquiries@ats-heritage.co.uk www.ats-heritage.co.uk 76

Victoria & Albert Museum

the new ceramics galleries

The second phase of the new Ceramics Galleries celebrates the vast size and strength of the V&A ceramics collections. The London collection, one of the best in the world, is known not only for its quality, but also for its magnitude and scientific importance. The collection has been off-view at the museum since 2004. In 2007, OPERA Amsterdam won the commission to redesign the galleries. The objective being to house objects from myriad centuries and cultural origins within a permanent depository on view to the general public. The previous installation featured only a fraction of the collection with no more than 3000 objects on display. In contrast, the new configuration brings visitors face to face with more than 26,000 objects. The object date from 3000 B.C up to the twenty-first century. OPERA, in collaboration with V&A curators, developed an ordering system that is informative and cohesive, but doesnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t diminish the clear theatrical quality created by bringing all the objects together. The strength of the new installation undoubtedly lies in the scope and size of the collection, as well as the spatial density of the display. The complete depository, which until now has been virtually inaccessible to the public, is available for public viewing. OPERA Amsterdam designed four unique vitrines: two circular and two elongated measuring up to 30 metres long and more than 3.5 meters high. The new displays stand free in the space, distinguished by their simplicity and transparency. All technical detailing necessary to carry the extreme load of the collection is all but invisible. A unique characteristic of the long vitrines is the dedicated work area for Museum curators where they can carry out scientific work in view of the public. The vitrines are designed as a corridor with this purpose in mind, straddled by the fully restored original display vitrines. A study centre is adjacent to the galleries. The public is welcome by appointment to research from the collection - easily accessible from the nearby depository. Even without an appointment, the curious have the chance to study close-up the history of ceramics spanning five millennia. OPERA Amsterdam | +31 20 344.5355 ww.opera-amsterdam.nl 77

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Qubiqa are renowned for their ‘state-of-the-art’ Electronic and Mechanical storage systems and are proud to also offer a 2-Tier solution. The space saving 2-Tier system is especially suitable for Museum and Archive Out-Stores. This is not surprising because of the vast savings (both financial and space) to be made by storing off site. The 2-Tier system makes the best use of areas where the room height is 4.5m or more. Collections are easily accessible without the need for ladders. All the weight is taken by the Ground Floor slab and there is no need for planning permission, which would normally be required for a mezzanine floor, since the steel grid floor is mainly supported on the racking. Valuable items can be kept secure with Transponder Swipe Cards. The Electronic mobile units are also ideal for heavy and/or delicate/fragile collections such as ceramics, glassware or models. Qubiqa Storage Solutions | 01444-237220 | salesuk@qubiqa.com | www.qubiqa.com

Collections Online

Innovative, low-cost, web-based system for smaller museums Maintaining an online presence for the Deliberately Concealed Garments Project: When the Textile Conservation Centre closed in 2009, Vernon Systems offered a solution to enable The Deliberately Concealed Garments Project (DCGP) to continue on-line using eHive. eHive is the world’s first ‘software as a service’ (SaaS) collections management system, developed for small museums and individual collectors. It is an innovative, low-cost, web-based system 78

which allows you to catalogue and showcase your collections online. The new Deliberately Concealed Garments site is built using eHive’s Wordpress plugins. These allow eHive content to be displayed within a separate branded website, with object explore and search pages, and tagging and commenting. Their new site launches on October 1st on www.concealedgarments.org. Vernon Systems | info@vernonsystems.com www.vernonsystems.com

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MUSEUMS AND ME

kate craddy, director, galicia jewish museum, poland What made you want to work in museums? My background was academic Jewish and Holocaust Studies, but the more I learned the more I felt I should be doing something more practical with my knowledge. Several internships in subject-relevant museums confirmed this, and I was fortunately able to secure a full-time museum position that later led to my directorship. I’m very aware of the potential of non-formal education, and working in museums has meant that I’ve been able to help facilitate learning opportunities for diverse audience groups across the spectrum of age, ability and background. Are you optimistic about the future of museums? Certainly! Undoubtedly there are challenges ahead – particularly financially – but there is no lack of public support for museums, and the potential they offer as environments for educational, social and civil engagement continues to be tremendous. The current economic situation has meant that museums are having to learn how to become increasingly good advocates for their own work, as well as to increasingly apply business principals to their modes of operation, but balanced with a continued commitment to their own core aims these are no bad things. Museums do not need to be passive respondents to the society around them, but rather they are uniquely positioned to help lead change and bring about increased public participation in local, national and international affairs. What do you want your museum to achieve? The mission of the Museum is to both commemorate the victims of the Holocaust and to celebrate Polish-Jewish culture; located in a city with 800 years of Jewish heritage, and an hour

away from the former Nazi German death camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau where more than one million Jews were murdered during the Holocaust, this is a mission that cannot be taken lightly. If visitors leave the museum further informed about the Jewish past in Poland, in all its complexities, then we have provided an important service. Beyond this, we want our visitors, having learnt about some of history’s darkest times, to leave more engaged in the world around them: to become increasingly active participants in society, where they feel moved to challenge intolerance. What can other museums learn from you? When the museum first opened, over 95% of our visitors were international tourists to Kraków. But then the economic downturn affected tourism to the city significantly, and we watched visitor numbers crash overnight. The result though was a forced review of what we were doing, how we were doing it, and for whom: two years on, over a quarter of our visitors (and half of all education programme participants) are from the local Polish community, the vast majority of whom have had no prior contact with Jewish culture or history. I’d challenge other museums to think honestly, creatively and strategically about their traditional ways of doing things, and to be prepared for some surprising results!

In the next edition...

Would you like to contribute to Museum Identity magazine? Please get in touch with your ideas and suggestions for articles and features in the next edition. Email: subscribe today www.museum-id.com greg@museum-id.com

JUST LAUNCHED: www.lending-for-europe.eu Where you can find up to date information about the â&#x20AC;&#x153;mobilityâ&#x20AC;? of museum collections - the borrowing and lending of cultural objects - within the European Union. On this website you can find relevant information about aspects of: lending, borrowing, non-insurance, indemnity, insuance and immunity from seizure in general, as well as various guidelines, standards, publications, contract templates, legislation and more.

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MUSEUM FABRICATION, INSTALLATION & PROJECT MANAGEMENT SPECIALISTS VICTORY HOUSE, COX LANE, CHESSINGTON, SURREY, KT9 1SG +44 (0)20 8974 0500