In response to the increasing difficulties facing museums that attempt to work within a pluralist framework as a strategy for representing cultural diversity, this essay argues for the need to move beyond a characterisation of museum work as either progressive or conservative, pluralist or consensual. Central to my arguments is an attempt to extend our understanding of possible narrative structures in museums by focusing on questions of style as much as of content. I do this by looking back at two case studies in which questions around the political intent of narrative structures were determined as much by the form of the exhibition as by its content. This focus enables a recognition that fragmentary narrative styles are not by definition associated with a lack of strong narratives. Quite the contrary. An alternative approach to exhibition making might therefore lie in an approach that moves away from eclecticism but does so not by returning to progressive, chronological narratives but by privileging an understanding of ‘shared experience’. I attempt to open up what I mean by this term towards the end of the essay.
A 1950s complete kitchen display with mum in an apron on the wall – please, why do the curators think our mothers were a joke? (Goward 2001).
The NMA remains an unmitigated disaster, an obscenely extravagant monument to architectural ego, faddishness, misguided political correctness, parochial vanities, compromise and technomania (Schofield 2004).
It seems clear that the increasing political censorship of state-funded museums around the world marks a new moment in their history. If the last 25 years in museums were marked by an increasing desire and willingness to respond to changing constituencies by developing an exhibition culture that attempted to represent a plurality of voices and contested histories, the last 10 of these have been marked by a conservative backlash against such efforts. Public cultural controversies in the USA, Canada, New Zealand and, most recently, in Australia have all involved the State undermining the capacity of museums and galleries to produce and represent revisionist histories. It would appear that the ‘new museology’ as a political project is in trouble. This essay seeks to add to our understanding as to why this is so and what might be done about it by arguing that the difficulties cannot be reduced to a question of narrative content – whether an exhibition is structured by a pluralist vision or a consensual one. It is also a matter of form, since pluralist perspectives are often associated with a fragmentary narrative style that has its parallel in the aesthetics of contemporary exhibition design, which are dominated by the use of multimedia, the juxtaposition of unlikely materials and the creation of a ‘busy’ environment. A significant number of critics register a degree of restlessness with these aesthetics. The Review of the National Museum of Australia: Its exhibitions and public programs (Commonwealth of Australia 2003, 17; hereafter the Carroll Review) expresses this very well when it claims that the main weakness of the National Museum of Australia (NMA) is a lack of coherence. There is, the review argued, ‘little narrative thread connecting a staccato of images, and snapshots of people who deliver their own fragment of opinion’. In particular, it is the use of irony, humour and an eclectic style that appears to cause the most problems. Addressing the culture or history wars in museums would appear to be as much a matter of thinking about the style of exhibitions as about narrative structures and their political implications.1
As a movement, the new museology was an attempt to recognise the political nature of museum representations (Lumley 1988; Vergo 1989) – how, historically, museum practices ‘othered’ non-dominant groups (Ames 1992; Bal 1992; Bennett 1995; Clifford 1997; Riegel 1996), and how museums supported the interests of capitalism (Duncan 1995) and patriarchy (Porter 1988). As well as the role of critique, new museologists sought to change these practices by advancing the notion that museums might become forums rather than temples, that their proper social role might be to represent and foster cultural diversity (Bennett 1998; Karp et al. 1992; Sandell 2002). The most obvious context for this pluralist impetus was the ‘new social movements’ of the 1970s and 1980s. Also important, however, was the emergence of a new popular aesthetics influenced by electronic media and mainstream commercial culture. These developments have combined to project traditional public museums as ‘mausoleums’ (Witcomb 2003), at once oppressive and lifeless. For committed pluralists, the only way forward for museums was to embrace the politics of representation, to become places of cultural diversity committed to an aesthetics of eclecticism, narrative disruption and surprise.
These developments have, of course, been resisted. In the 1990s, northern American museums were racked by the culture wars. The Smithsonian Museum, in particular, was the target of conservative attacks on purportedly revisionist histories promoted in exhibitions such as Enola Gay and The West as America. The Royal Ontario Museum’s Into the Heart of Africa exhibition became a focus for similar attacks. Closer to home, the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa had its fair share of controversy. In Australia, the intense debate around the opening exhibitions of the NMA and the Carroll Review that followed was also a significant moment in the history wars (MacIntyre and Clark 2004).
The most obvious rationale for these attacks has again been political; museums have been charged with advocating for minority groups and undermining not only social cohesion but also fundamental social institutions. But disquiet with the new museology is more complex than it sometimes seems. While the most prominent critics of pluralism have been self-identified conservatives, there have also been increasing voices on the ‘left’ who lament the loss of an ability to imagine ‘common dreams’ (Gitlin 1995). Rather than dialogue, what we have is a cacophony of voices (Witcomb 2003). Furthermore, abstract political arguments intersect with aesthetic responses to actual museum spaces. Criticisms of pluralism have gained strength from evidence that a significant number of museum visitors are not so much ‘excited’ by narrative disruption and multiple sensory stimulation as confused and alienated. For example, Natalie Heinich (1988) suggested that many visitors did not have the cultural knowledge to cope with the new approaches to display developed by the Pompidou Centre in Paris.2 Ironically, the traditional masternarrative was seen as more accessible. Likewise, an audience study immediately after the opening of the Australian National Maritime Museum in Sydney found that the majority of visitors found the lack of a strong chronological framework disorienting (Witcomb 2003). For them, an accent on the plurality of voices equated with a lack of narrative. Still some audience studies have found that an accent on pluralism can be taken not as a representation of a democratic impulse but instead as an ideological critique that is against populist narratives of celebration. For example, Zahava Doering (2002) found that the majority of Americans expected American national institutions such as the Smithsonian to focus on unifying celebratory narratives. Pluralism, if focused too much on establishing and recognising difference within national communities, was seen as a negative. As she put it, ‘visitors don’t generally expect their national museums to be debating the significance or meaning of their contents or to embody a wide range of viewpoints’ (Doering 2002).
This evidence has been particularly damaging to new museologists as such responses appear most common among groups with relatively little formal education or other cultural capital. It has allowed critics to represent supposedly ‘democratic’ pluralism as the ideology of an educated, cosmopolitan elite insensitive to the feelings and aspirations of ‘ordinary people’ (see Foot 2003; Windshuttle 2001). In this context, a response to these debates that is framed as a battle between conservatives and progressives, between consensus and pluralism, seems rather limited. As Ian McShane (2004, 14), a former senior curator at the NMA put it, ‘how does a museum construct a coherent and compelling narrative that gives voice to competing perspectives? How can museum programs resist declaring themselves for either consensus or pluralism, as if a simple choice between the two existed, but draw productively on both impulses?’
Part of the problem may lie in the ready association we all tend to make between the fashion for a fragmentary narrative structure and the lack of a strong authoritative voice. For while this is a common assumption, both ends of the political spectrum also recognise that such narratives have a politics to them. When conservatives complain that critical and fragmented narratives fail to produce appropriate forms of collective identification, they locate the problem in the Marxist underpinnings of such work. The left, however, can sometimes criticise a fragmentary approach to narrative structure as not political enough. This contradiction can be brought to the fore if we follow two different moments in the history of the new museology in Australia. The first is the opening of the Museum of Sydney (MoS) in 1995; the second, the opening of the NMA in 2001.3 While many staff in each museum would see themselves as committed to pluralist practices of representation, the way their exhibits were read by both the left and the right are completely different. In that difference is a lesson about the importance of matters of style in thinking about narrative.
Should aesthetic impulses play a role in the interpretation of history? Is history so serious a business that it should be left in the hands of historically trained curators rather than offered as raw material for artists to play with? To a large extent, these were the kinds of questions that informed much of the museum profession’s response to the opening of the MoS in 1995. That their response should be framed by these questions is not surprising. The museum was indeed different in its approach to the representation of history, believing that historical understanding could be reached through forms of interpretation that worked through embodied, sensory experiences rather than the more traditional linear forms of historical narrative presentation, in which objects were illustrations of ideas. For its inaugural director, Peter Emmett, a museum space is ‘a spatial composition, a sensory and sensual experience, a place to enter, senses and body alive. Its meanings are revealed through the physical experience of moving through it’ (Emmett 1996, 115). Extensive use of multimedia resulted in a series of installations that played to these senses – auditory, visual and kinetic – as a means of calling forth imagination and eliciting emotional responses. Unlike traditional uses of multimedia, however, which are based on oral history or archival sound and visual grabs, these installations were artistic creations based on historical research but fictive in nature. The nature of the available evidence, which was itself fragmentary, was used not to anchor historical narratives but to set them adrift. The museum offered historical traces as a base from which to imagine the past rather than to know it, thus creating an ongoing presence in the present. The past came alive but only through the echoes of its traces. It was transitory and fleeting.
For example, in Paul Carter’s The calling to come, a soundscape installed into the liminal space of the entry, visitors heard voices ‘from the past’. What those voices said was not quite comprehensible – but that was the point. Set at a low volume, they were echoes of an attempt at translation between two very different worlds – those of the Eora people and their colonisers. Using the diary of William Dawes, an officer from the First Fleet who was also an astronomer and a linguist, the installation used the traces of his attempt to understand the Eora people documented in his diary where he recorded his conversations with Patyegarang, an Aboriginal woman with whom he had a relationship. The installation, which re-enacted their attempts to communicate with one another, was an attempt to recall a moment of cross-cultural encounter that was still full of potential for conversation and not yet tied to the pressures of colonisation. In attempting to recapture that moment the museum was, of course, also speaking to the present, which, back in 1995, appeared more open to the possibilities of reconciliation with Indigenous Australians than it does now.
Likewise, in the Bond store tales, archival research into early Sydney was used to construct a series of small narratives around the trope of encounters using the fact that Sydney was a port as a starting point.4 In this installation, which took place in a darkened gallery set up to resemble a bond store, the movement of visitors triggered a number of holograms representing convicts, servant girls, officers and their ladies, and traders from all over the Pacific. In this parade of motley characters, each told a story or had a dialogue with another character. The particular combination of dialogues and stories at any one time was determined by the movement of the visitors in the space rather than set by a predetermined loop. The result was not a re-creation of real conversations between real historical characters but an attempt at a rendition of conversations that might have occurred. As Ross Gibson, the curator of this installation, commented at the time, ‘suggestion and persuasion rather than unequivocal proof are now probably the best you can hope for when using imagistic and sonic “documentation” to present “truths” about the world’ (Gibson 1994, 64).
The use of multimedia to support this fragmentary approach to the production of historical narratives was replicated through other aestheticised presentations of ‘documentary’ evidence. There was, for example, the Kosuthian5 treatment of literary and archival quotations engraved or carved onto the walls as if they were objects in their own right, giving them a visual as well as a documentary status. There was also a ‘new’ cabinet of curiosities in Narelle Jubelin’s installation, which used juxtaposition to create imaginary narratives between different kinds of records. ‘Video walls’ created temporal narratives of continuous Indigenous presence in the Sydney area by bringing together old rock carvings and paintings with contemporary cultural expressions of indigeneity while the aesthetic treatment of archeological objects called them forth as ghosts from the past. These installations were striking for their aesthetic qualities and the effort to direct the senses to experiences that refused to tell ‘how it really was’. All the museum presented was a series of fleeting but powerful experiences about the relationship between the past and present in the Sydney area.6
This use of unconventional exhibitionary forms and the refusal to ‘tell a straight story’ sent a good number of leading museum practitioners into a frenzy of criticism. The masternarrative that these critics wanted to see in the MoS was that of the dispossession of Indigenous people. For them the museum was too positive and made too much of the moment of cross-cultural encounter. As a result, they argued, it did not pay sufficient attention to the effects of power. The suggestion was that a proper, professional use of existing historical evidence would have told the story as it should be told. In a now ironic piece, given his later role in the creation of the Nation gallery at the NMA,7 Guy Hansen (1996) accused the MoS of a lack of political commitment as a result of their ‘fear of the masternarrative’. Uncomfortable with the notion that history could only ever be interpretation, Hansen accused the museum of sitting on the fence in regard to the history of Aboriginal dispossession. Julie Marcus (1996) made a similar point. Even more caustic in her criticisms, Marcus accused the MoS of consciously and willingly marginalising zz Indigenous people. When put side by side with the equally emotionally charged critiques from the Friends of Government House group – who had pushed for the initial excavation of the site of old Government House on which the museum sits and for whom the museum should have been a representation of the birth of the nation, rather than a politically correct revisionist account of colonial experiences8 – it becomes clear that lack of narrative was not the museum’s main problem. The problem had more to do with how that narrative was expressed and what view of the nation it offered. Too revisionist for some, not sufficiently revisionist for others; not sufficiently appreciative of archaeological methodologies and finds, or too playful and arty with historical evidence. For critics from both positions, the museum’s sense of playfulness with the available evidence meant a lack of respect for the narratives that they saw as mattering. Playfulness and its association with a fragmentary approach to narrative was not seen as able to carry the weight of either the birth of the nation nor the dispossession of Indigenous people. The problem was that its political valence was not fixed.
It is somewhat ironic, therefore, to find the MoS critics practising and supporting the appropriateness of representing history as fragmentary and provisional as the only way to respond to the problem of how to represent diversity and difference in historical experience. It seems that in the years between the openings of the MoS and the NMA, Australian historians and curators became receptive to less linear forms of historical representation. A certain degree of playfulness and even irony became allied with a critical perspective, a perspective that also came to be associated with what it meant to be a ‘new museum’ (Message and Healy 2004). To side with the discourse of the ‘new’ meant to leave linear narratives behind and to make museums part of the contemporary mediascape. However, these developments were entirely out of step with the dramatic change in cultural tendencies between the Hawke/Keating and Howard governments. As Greg McCarthy (2004) has convincingly argued, the Howard government is resolutely modernist, rather than postmodernist, in its approach to both history and the representation of national identity. Inevitably, the two positions clashed, not least because, as Message and Healy (2004) point out, the NMA clearly announced that it wanted to be a player in the culture wars. The differences between the critical responses to the MoS and the NMA are instructive. Whereas the MoS was regarded as lacking ‘a politics’ because of its exhibitionary strategies, the NMA was regarded as too political because of very similar strategies. Nonsensical as this may seem, a fragmentary approach to the telling of history actually became understood as a form of masternarrative because of its association with a revisionist historiography.
The NMA opened in March 2001 amid a storm of political controversy, as various conservative elements in academia, in the media and on the museum’s own Board moved to attack what they perceived to be its ideological bias in favour of revisionist history.9 This bias turned out to be nothing more that the museum’s acceptance of the last 20–30 years of scholarship in the fields of history, anthropology, cultural studies and museology. What all of these disciplines have in common is a faith in the desirability and indeed the political necessity of paying attention to issues of class, race and gender; a questioning of claims to absolute knowledge; a consequent support for what are sometimes taken as relativist positions; and a deep awareness of postcolonial politics. Alive to the problems of representation, practitioners in these fields have developed methodologies appropriate to new objects of study and methodologies that can give voice to those not represented in traditional narratives. In a large part, the everyday – the ordinary, the quotidian, the popular, the non-canonic – has become their privileged space.
The NMA is but the latest manifestation of these practices and ideals. Thus, rather than the traditional masternarratives of Australian history (for example, that of pioneer history or exploration) or even a chronological approach, the NMA conceived of its brief to view the relationship between land, people and nation through a pluralist lens. It did this in the belief that the multicultural nature of Australian society and the presence of an Indigenous population demanded such an approach. In practice this meant not only being able to ‘tick’ all those on the long list that need to be included, but also to pay attention to questions of form, of presentation. Thus, much of the material is presented in the first-person voice through oral history as well as private documents, the material culture of everyday life permeates the museum, and popular mediums of communication are also used – such as multimedia, film, photography and sound.
The everyday and the figure of the ‘ordinary Australian’ have become central to the ways in which Australian national identity is expressed for both the left and the right. Given its central importance to contemporary expressions of national identity, it is not surprising that the mode of its display is at the centre of some of the bitterest animosity shown towards the NMA as well as some of the warmest receptions the museum has encountered. What I want to suggest is that some of the reasons for such different reactions to the inclusion of the everyday in the NMA have to do with questions of style. In particular, it is the use of irony in how the everyday is represented at the NMA that creates the opportunity for the different interpretations that emerge around it.
Figure 21.1 Victa lawnmower and Hills hoist demonstration model, in the Nation gallery, National Museum of Australia, 2003.
Photograph: George Serras. © National Museum of Australia 2001.
From the very first day the museum was opened, commentators were either for or against how the museum represented the everyday and the ordinary Australian. A considerable number of the positive reviews celebrated the museum precisely because they recognised the representation of diversity through the inclusion of the everyday as part of its attempt to be a museum for all Australians. For them, the theme-park allusions of the museum’s architecture, its shopping-centre-like Main Hall, the inclusion of the Hills hoist and the Victa lawnmower, the 1950s kitchen and icons of popular culture made the NMA a people’s museum. Exhibitions such as the Eternity gallery with its focus on a diverse range of individual life stories, some of them famous, some of them completely unknown, made the ordinary and the everyday part of national history. Thus in a promotional article published a few weeks before the museum opened, Alison Barclay (2001) from the Herald Sun focused on the material culture of everyday life as an indication of the likely popularity of this museum: ‘The “icons” show the way as do the legends’, she says. As well as quoting then director Dawn Casey who proudly pointed out that ‘we have the earliest Hill’s Hoist… and… the earliest Victa lawnmower’, Barclay also noted the less iconic detritus of everyday life: ‘There are cups and sauces salvaged from the Ash Wednesday fires, a dugout, the desk at which new immigrants were “processed” and a jeep with a robotic arm’ (Barclay 2001). For Linda Young, the Eternity gallery was an innovative contribution to museological practice, offering a ‘contemplation of the human condition’ that was ‘pungent’ and at times ‘poetic’ (Young 2001, 155).
The appreciation of the representation of the everyday at the NMA was about more than just simply its inclusion. It was also about the form that this inclusion took. Many ‘everyday items’ (both iconic and ordinary) were displayed with an explicit sense of humour that played on the iconic role of many of these items in popular culture. For quite a few critics, the ability to have a tongue-in-cheek representation of the everyday and its importance in popular culture represented a degree of comfortableness with Australian culture – a kind of fond, but also slightly critical, look at it. It was the museological parallel to Kath and Kim, the highly popular take on Australian suburban lifestyles produced by ABC TV. In the same way that the TV series plays with the audience’s uncertainty as to whether to laugh or cry at the representation of Australian suburban life, the representation of everyday life, including suburban life, at the NMA is tongue in cheek. As recorded by the designers (Anway and Guerin 2002, 163), the curatorial aim was to represent Australian humour and sense of irony in the form of the exhibitions as much as in the choice of content. For the curators, irony was a part of the national character. Exhibiting a Hills hoist as an Australian icon was thus not only a challenge to the traditional authority of the museum, but also a joke in itself and a comment on the way the Hills hoist had become part of popular culture, thanks also to its use in the opening ceremony of the 2000 Sydney Olympics. The resulting focus of this type of approach on everyday life produces, according to Message and Healy, an ‘eclectic ensemble that sabotages suburbia, history and the artefact all at once!’ (Message and Healy 2004, 3). The comment is not made as a criticism, although it is made with a high degree of awareness that such strategies are not unproblematic in the way they address the museum’s audiences.
The potential for misunderstanding is clear in the conservative reaction to the way in which the detritus of everyday life was included in the museum. For the conservatives, the focus on everyday life and popular culture was not a friendly celebration of the ordinariness of Australian identity. Instead, they saw it as an alienating and condescending take on the ‘ordinary’ Australian. In part this was a result of the way in which this material functioned as one half of the NMA’s pedagogical approach. If making the ordinary and the everyday into an expression of national identity was one of the main messages of the museum, then the other, as Message and Healy (2004) point out was that the past was alive in the present. This second message was largely communicated through the Gallery of First Australians, told from a postcolonial point of view. The result was that the issue of race became the bedrock for understanding Australian national identity leaving out the dominant group as not only a main player but as not having contributing anything of any real significance since the everyday implies its difference from the extraordinary.
But the problem was not limited to the fact that settler culture was largely defined by the representation of the everyday as central to Australian identity and that Indigenous communities were represented within ‘stronger’ masternarratives. That the inclusion of the everyday was read in this way was largely an effect of the way in which the items were displayed rather than that they were displayed at all. For some critics, the ironic manner in which the material culture of everyday life was treated spells not an attempt to use an Australian sense of humour in the form and content of the exhibition – as had been the intension – but rather a devaluing of traditional Anglo-Australian culture. Rob Foot, for example, one of the most strident and longstanding critics of the museum, claimed that ‘Their ideological rhetoric is condescendingly delivered, as if to an audience of none-too-intelligent schoolchildren, and brushed up with modish postmodernism – the intellectual vehicle of choice for Left idealogues following Marxism’s crisis of credibility. But the story the NMA tells is the radical’s own, not Australia’s’ (Foot 2003, 9). For him, as for almost all the conservative critics, the result is ‘disdain for mainstream Australia’ and its patterns of everyday life. Thus the 1950s kitchen, the Hills hoist and the Victa lawnmower, so proudly pointed to by the museum itself, become evidence not of pride in the everyday but its opposite. For Foot, ‘In its most prominent displays, the gallery (Nation) repackages the goldfields digger, the shearer, even the “Australian way of life” as merely artificial constructs – fabrications, as it were, for the gullible crowd, entirely emptied of their traditional values, meanings and emotional associations. We have no reason to care about them. One finds no trace of affection or respect in the National Museum’s ironic treatment of these elements of Australian culture’ (Foot 2003, 9).
The clash between such differing interpretations of the museum’s treatment of the everyday can be understood if we recall that irony works precisely because there are two audiences – one in the know and the other not. As Henrietta Riegel (1996) explored in relation to the Into the Heart of Africa exhibition at the Royal Ontario Museum, this doubled-edged nature of irony is made problematic in the museum context because historically, museums have tended to produce exhibitions in which there is no sense of a shared identity between the maker of the exhibition, the maker of the objects on display and the viewing audience. This distance between the various participants is particularly strong in ethnographic exhibitions, but it is also there in the notion that museums explain the world to their audiences. Implied is a distance between the viewer and the viewed. In the case of the Into the Heart of Africa exhibition, it was the attempt to be reflective about this lack of a shared space that caused problems because the attempt relied on a use of irony that effectively re-enacted the colonial gaze in the way it produced a difference in the viewing positions of two sectors of its audience. To progressive whites, the exhibition was an example of good museological practice, critiquing, as it did, past modes of ethnographic collection practices by Canadians in Africa using the museum’s own African collections. To them, the exhibition was a model of good reflective practice that recognised the inherently political nature of the act of representation. To the descendants of the colonised Africans now living in Canada as well as of the missionaries, however, the exhibition was offensive because its ambiguous use of irony – it was never quite clear when the museum was being critical and when it wasn’t – actually replicated the colonial gaze by not allowing for the fact that not all visitors have a rational, intellectual distance from the subject matter on display. And thus it became clear that in the museum context, emotional involvement in, let’s say slavery, may not be amenable to ironic handling.
Taken to the NMA, this insight shows how from the perspective of the conservatives, the NMA was actually othering the ‘ordinary’ Australian, rather than aligning itself with them. It would seem that its attempt to de-mythologise national identity by showing its constructed nature undermined its attempt at inclusivity. We are never quite sure whether the inclusion of the everyday has a ‘truth’ value whose aim is to connect the institution of the museum with ‘ordinary’ Australians, that is to validate through simulation its reality and value to the nation, or whether the playful mode in which this inclusiveness is achieved actually betrays a cultural distance from the cultural practices and identities on display.
The difficulties with how the everyday is represented at the NMA are also an effect of the lack of contextual information that accompanies the exhibitions. As the Carroll Review put it, the NMA’s approach to everyday objects does nothing to give such objects ‘numinosity’. The snapshot approach, which allowed an eclectic mix of objects to be presented in a confined space, became part of a chaotic environment in which objects, reproductions and multimedia stations competed for attention in a flattened out environment. The lack of an overall narrative meant the lack of both a visual and a discursive sense of drama, of hierarchies in which objects and stories are ordered into an interpretative framework that brings them together. With no sense of perspective there was no story and hence no sense of the relative importance of what these objects stood for. This was the problem of the Nation gallery, which, in using Benedict Anderson’s concept of ‘imagined communities’ (Anderson 1983) as the basis for dealing with the concept of national identity, was unable to link the various icons and myths it presented into an overall sense of what it was to be Australian. For the conservative critics, this fragmentary, decontextualised approach was made worse by the use of humour and irony, which, without a strong narrative context embedded in traditional narratives of national history, seemed to them to be demeaning of Australian values rather than celebratory.
For some critics, the problem was sufficient to almost claim that it would be better not to have those objects on display at all. Keith Windshuttle, one of the most prominent and vociferous critics of the museum commented that ‘The intelligentsia might find it witty to see the familiar objects of suburbia housed in a museum, but not those who still keep these things in their backyards. It is telling them that they are so out of date they have become objects of curiosity’ (Windshuttle 2001, 14). Miranda Devine, however, made the link between the way in which everyday objects are treated and the museum’s more serious interpretation of Indigenous culture, which was strong on narrative context. For her, the consequence of this difference is that the underlying message of the museum ‘is one of sneering ridicule for white Australia. It is as if all non Aboriginal culture is a joke’ (Devine 2001, 30).
As Windshuttle’s barbed comment on the intelligentsia indicates, this take on the museum’s agenda makes it easy for the right to represent the museum’s professional staff as part of a cultural elite, which does not have the interests or values of the ordinary Australia at heart. As Graeme Davison puts it, ‘The critics… portray the museum’s curators and historical advisors as members of the “new class”, pushing their own radical “post-modernist” political agenda against the will of the silent majority of Australians whose taxes they are spending’ (Davison 2003, 8; see also Marcus 2004, 135). While he attributes this hostility to the interpretation of contact history in the Gallery of First Australians I would also add that the museums’ approach to the representation of everyday life and popular culture is incompatible with the government’s agenda to take middle Australia with them by appropriating the language of the everyday to their own ends.
There is, of course, some discussion of the way in which Howard and his allies have attempted to take over the ground of the everyday in order to achieve Howard’s dream of a ‘relaxed and comfortable Australia’. As Don Watson pointed out, ‘John Howard’s language rarely steps far from the ordinary for the good reason that ordinary language is what people use’ (Watson 2003, 101). In addressing his audience as ‘My fellow Australians’ Howard places himself alongside the ordinary man or woman in the street, invoking the language of mateship and positioning himself in opposition to the ‘chattering classes’. Unlike the latter, he is interested in ‘the things that unite us, rather than divide us’.10 It is a form of language that, as Julie Marcus (2004, 135) points out, makes it very easy to promulgate an association between Howard’s notion of a comfortable Australia and a reinvented Australian legend as the basis for the Australian story. To support her argument Marcus points to the way in which the language of the Carroll Review privileges a version of Australian identity which rests on the identification of national character traits – traits that are found in the pioneer story, in the explorers, in the Gallipoli story, in mateship, larrikinism and so on. As the Carroll Review itself put it, the challenge to the museum is ‘to present the ordinary and the everyday in order to open up and reveal the national trait’ (Commonwealth of Australia 2003, 8). Rather than being used to represent cultural diversity, the everyday and the ordinary become the means to represent a unified national culture.
The Carroll Review makes a number of points and recommendations that implicitly speak to the range of issues raised by the way in which the everyday has been understood in relation to the museum. The recommendation which shocked the left and came as a complete surprise was that calling for a greater use of masternarratives. The museum, the review claims, is weak on strong narratives, on storytelling. Part of the reason for this weakness, the panel of reviewers argues, is that there are ‘too few focal objects, radiant and numinous enough to generate memorable vignettes, or to be drawn out into fundamental moments’ (Commonwealth of Australia 2003, 68). Items belonging to the field of the everyday do not, they imply, make either a good collection or a strong exhibition. More importantly, they do not enable the representation of the grand narratives of Australian history. This is in line with Windshuttle’s complaint that pluralism in the museum context results in lack of coherence: ‘By abandoning the traditional approach to history based on a narrative of major events and their causes, in favour of equal time for every identifiable sexual and ethnic group, history loses its explanatory power and degenerates into a tasteless blancmanage of worthy sentiment’ (Windshuttle 2001, 16).
Rather than being used as a political football, moving between the pluralist and consensus camps, I want to suggest that a focus on the everyday could be used instead to neutralise this opposition. For the meanings around the everyday are not exhausted by the two positions analysed so far. However, a first step in this process would have to be an attempt to disassociate a notion of shared histories from consensus. The first point that needs to be made is that there can be a plurality of experience at the heart of shared histories. To make this move would be to disagree with two of the strongest defenders of the museum’s pluralist approach – Bain Attwood and Graeme Davison – as well as with the authors of the Carroll Review. For them, the opposition between pluralism and consensus has been absolute and central to understanding the developments around the museum since its opening. Pluralism cannot include an understanding of shared experience and, by extension, difference cannot be found within shared experiences since these are taken to be, by definition, consensual in nature. It is an opposition that is clearly articulated in the way the Carroll Review summarises its differences from Davison’s understanding of appropriate narratives to represent the nation. For Davison,
Rather than suppressing difference by imposing a single authorial voice, or brokering an institutional consensus, the NMA might better begin with the assumption that the imagined community we call the nation is by its very nature plural and in flux. In practice the degree of difference should not be exaggerated; there are many topics of high interest on which there is a substantial consensus of opinion. A national museum might then expect to play host to several interpretations of the national past, stirringly patriotic as well as critical, educationally demanding as well as entertaining (Davison in Commonwealth of Australia 2003, 8).
Embedded in this submission to the review panel is an opposition between difference and consensus that is left unchallenged. It is taken as the ground upon which choices must be made. In its use of this submission to advance its own arguments, the review panel also assumes that this opposition and the intellectual frameworks that support it are a given: ‘While this view is forceful, the Panel is inclined to read more consensus than plurality at the core of the national collective conscience’ (Commonwealth of Australia 2003, 8).
Attwood too, makes this opposition a definite one by arguing that ‘The review panel apparently believes a nation must have a dominant, unitary historical narrative and all its peoples should “share” this history’ (Attwood 2004, 280). He then contrasts this approach with the pluralist approach of the museum in which ‘the nation is seen as a community heterogeneous in nature and a work in progress rather than as a singular, completed entity. History is treated as largely a matter of perspective, of interpretative stories, rather than as a single, consensual body of facts’ (280). For Attwood, the new museology pays respect to the notion of diversity by recognising the constructed nature of society.
If we were to move away from the notion of the construction of history, however, and pay more attention to the ways in which history was experienced by people through the fabric of everyday life, there may be ways in which it might be possible to develop stronger narratives that pay homage to traditional historiographical frames while also pointing to the diversity of those experiences. Attention to the differing experiences of class, race, gender and location would continue; but rather than using these categories separately, they would be in dialogue with one another by virtue of their place within a shared historiographical theme. Indeed, such an approach would illuminate the tensions generated by the very frameworks used to describe that history, eliminating the danger of essentialist approaches to the representation of experience.
A focus on the variety of ‘experience’ would require a continued focus on the everyday for the notion of experience demands a focus on lived lives. But the everyday nature of these lives would be contextualised by narratives that were greater than any one individual example. At the same time, careful selection of each example could ensure that the complexity of any one experience could be represented. Diversity would still be an important criterion, ensuring that the focus on experience would never become an essentialist one. With this approach to the representation of history, it would be possible to develop exhibitions that dealt with pastoralism, for example, from the point of view of the experiences of all those who had contact with the station. Embedded within this account of a major theme in Australian history would be an account of exploration, colonisation, settlement, cross-cultural encounters and immigration, all of which would be deepened by the focus on the daily lives of those involved. Comparison across the experiences of different states within this theme would also allow a focus on place to speak to differing experiences, offering a further layer of complexity. Such an approach, while pointing to shared themes or human experiences within the framework of the nation, could not be reduced to a progressive account of the nation or to an exclusionary one. What it would do is offer the advantage of a dialogue across the barriers of difference, thus offering an interpretation of shared contexts that have affected the daily lives of all. A focus on the experience of everyday life might make it possible to present a history that is held together by a strong sense of narrative but is nevertheless not presented as ‘the’ history – that is, a masternarrative. The narrative has an integrative element but it is not consensual. There are points of contact but their meanings may not be the same for everyone.
If complexity were to be explored not by thousands of micro stories but by exploding historical experiences from the inside out, attention would need to be paid not only to the content but also to the style of these narratives. Given that a chaotic, sensory-rich environment that allows for no hierarchies in visual presentation has been an important aspect of the way in which fragmentary approaches to history have been communicated, designers would also have to come up with a new visual language, one that provides for depth of context, drama and narrative without masses of didactic text on the walls. Hopefully, there would still be a space for imagination and emotion – for museums to reach out and touch.
1 I am very grateful to Mark Gibson and Mathew Trinca for the many conversations around the idea that we may be witnessing the end of ‘the politics of representation’ as we have come to know it. Mark and I gave a joint paper at the 2004 Crossroads Conference in Illinois on the theme titled ‘Beyond the politics of representation? The negotiation of cultural difference at the National Museum of Australia’. This chapter is a further development of the ideas we had then.
2 The Pompidou Centre is often taken as the first of the new museums that engaged in thematic and fragmentary narrative styles. See Kylie Message (2006).
3 Another possible entry point here would be the Bicentennary Travelling Exhibition in 1988, also curated by Peter Emmett. This exhibition too was critiqued on the basis of its narrative approach and the way in which this played to a postmodernist aesthetic style. See, for example, Cochrane and Goodman (1992).
4 It is interesting to note that the trope of encounters figured very highly in attempts to revisit Australia’s colonial history. It is there in the work of Greg Denning (1992), Henry Reynolds (Reynolds 1996a; Reynolds 1996b) and Nicholas Thomas (1997).
5 Joseph Kosuth is often taken as the first artist–curator to use text directly onto walls as if it were objects in his exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum. See David Freedberg (1992).
6 For a more detailed discussion of the place of aesthetic modes of interpretation at the MoS see Gregory (2006).
7 This gallery, under the leadership of Guy Hansen, based its interpretation of national identity on the work of Benedict Anderson (1983). In using this framework, the gallery proposed to the visitor that Australian national identities were constructed rather than a given and expressed through a variety of official icons as well as more popular expressions through mythologies, the media, our sense of place and space, mass cultural products and so on.
8 For a more detailed account of these debates see Andrea Witcomb (2003) as well as Museum of Sydney on the Site of First Government House (1996).
9 There are now a number of published accounts as to what occurred in the museum’s own board and attempts to explain and critique the political process that led to the Carroll Review in 2003. Detailed accounts can be found in MacIntyre and Clark (2004) and in Marcus (2004).
10 For another analysis of the way John Howard has used language to define a populist sense of ‘Australianness’ while suppressing a sense of diversity, see Carol Johnson (2000).
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Cite this chapter as: Witcomb, Andrea. 2006. ‘How style came to matter: Do we need to move beyond the politics of representation?’. South Pacific Museums, edited by Healy, Chris; Witcomb, Andrea. Monash University ePress: Melbourne. pp. 21.1–21.16.
© Copyright 2006 Andrea Witcomb
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