Growing recognition of the plural character of contemporary societies has underwritten significant changes in museum practice in recent years. Cultural institutions are now by and large sensitive to the differentiated nature of the communities in which they are located. In museums, a more nuanced and complex view of difference has led to improvements in outreach programs and public accessibility, and regard for the need to welcome groups formerly distant or disaffected from the museum. The collaborative, enduring partnerships between museums and Indigenous communities that have developed in recent decades are welcome examples of these changes.
In this paper, we explore how the ‘new museology’ has influenced the history of the National Museum of Australia and the consequences of a recent, well-publicised review of the museum’s exhibitions and public programs. We then consider how contemporary museums have used a concept of ‘multiple voices’ or ‘multi-vocality’ to represent pluralist societies and advance social inclusion, and suggest some of the problems in such an approach, especially for a museum charged with exploring national meaning. In thinking about alternative approaches, we consider the museum exhibition as a performative space and draw on the concept of the flâneur as we refocus attention on visitor behaviour in galleries. We then outline how this approach might inform development at the National Museum of Australia of a new permanent gallery representing a general history of the nation.
The word ‘national’ was invoked rhetorically by colonial museums and galleries in Australia long before Federation in 1901.1 Notwithstanding these semantic flourishes, calls for a national museum began in earnest toward the end of the nineteenth century, and were initially defined by interests in natural history and biological sciences (Robin 2003). In almost every decade after that, until the National Museum of Australia (NMA) was established by legislation in 1980, arguments for a national museum were made and remade. Variously, there were calls for national museums of zoology, ethnology, entomology, botany and history. Some of these – particularly the energy which surrounded Sir Colin MacKenzie’s foundation of the Australian Institute of Anatomy in the 1920s – were founded on the high regard for the nation-building value of scientific knowledges.
The National Museum of Australia may be the inheritor of MacKenzie’s collections, but its foundation is more concretely traced to the 1975 report of the Committee of Inquiry on Museums and National Collections, often known as the Pigott Report. The report – distinguished professors John Mulvaney and Geoffrey Blainey were key authors – called for the establishment of a Museum of Australia centred on three themes, loosely described as:
As well as a sense of mission and optimism, the Pigott Report was remarkably prescient about the debates within which the ‘national museum’ would one day find itself. It recognised that a national purview was not easily defined, nor would its responsibilities be simply discharged. Infused with a palpable sense of moment, the report argued that:
In defining the scope of a national museum we recommend that the phrase ‘national’ should be interpreted in a wide sense. The museum should portray, when appropriate, European and Asian and American influences on Australia’s human and natural history. Australia’s communications with the outside world should be an important theme in the museum (Committee of Inquiry on Museums and National Collections 1975, 73).
The committee was alert to the dangers of any narrow interpretation of the new museum’s role. Five years later enabling legislation – the National Museum of Australia Act 1980 – established the museum as an institutional entity, if not as a physical presence. Within the act, there was direction about the expected national ‘reach’ of the institution, and its responsibilities to reflect Australian history domestically and internationally. Specifically, the museum was also charged with building a collection of material culture to range over the breadth of national experience, which has become known formally as the National Historical Collection.
While the NMA began collecting actively in the early 1980s, successive governments dithered over the scale and site of its planned exhibition buildings. Imagined first at a western lakeside site and then at Yarramundi Reach, in Canberra, the museum’s main building was finally opened in 2001 on Acton Peninsula, closer to the city’s main civic centre. In the intervening years, however, the conceptual landscape for museums had shifted, with the academy and museum professionals defining new purpose and practice under the emerging rubric of the ‘new museology’.
There are clear difficulties in precisely defining this field, once famously described by Peter Vergo as ‘a state of widespread dissatisfaction with the “old” museology’ (Vergo 1989, 3). Vergo’s line is glib, but does at least represent the critical sense that has underpinned theorising of the contemporary museum in recent decades. Some characteristics of this movement have clearly informed museum developments in this country – in common with those in other parts of the world – not least the NMA. Tony Bennett’s influential book The birth of the museum deconstructed the cultural politics of the museum, revealing the authoritative, ideological intent springing from a sense of its social role. Bennett recognised that:
the division between the hidden space of the museum in which knowledge is produced and organized and the public spaces in which it is offered for passive consumption produces a monologic discourse dominated by the authoritative cultural voice of the museum. To break this discourse down, it is imperative that the role of the curator be shifted away from that of the source of an expertise whose function is to organize a representation claiming the status of knowledge and towards that of the possessor of a technical competence whose function is to assist groups outside the museum to use its resources to make authored statements within it (Bennett 1995, 103–4).
Bennett’s arguments helped sustain the ‘new’ democratic mood in the contemporary museum, even though he was himself aware of the internal contradictions this posed (103n). If the museum was an ‘exhibitionary complex’ that expressed a powerful will to mould ideal citizens, then the answer in part seemed to be that it should adopt modes of practice that decentred an insistent authoritative voice. Such practices included bringing a greater range of perspectives and interests to the museum’s exhibition making.
Following this lead, the NMA described its mission in terms that de-emphasised a singular authority, preferring instead to accent representational breadth, social inclusion and a textual reflexivity. Soon after opening the Acton building in 2001, then director Dawn Casey described the NMA as a ‘forum, a place for dialogue and debate… We intend the museum to speak with many voices, listen and respond to all, and promote debate and discussion about questions of diversity and identity’ (Casey 2001, 6, our emphasis).
The exhibitions at the Acton site tended to emphasise a complex narrative that embraced multi-vocality and representational breadth. This many-voiced exhibition practice was designed not only to represent the ways in which people might hold different views of the past, but also to encourage diverse groups to locate themselves in the national story. By representing a selection of opinion or views about an event or condition, the museum was also striving to be sensitive to the contingent nature of historical truth.
Soon after opening its doors at Acton in 2001, the NMA found itself caught in the crossfire of the history wars (Macintyre and Clark 2003). Largely fought over conflicting views of Australia’s frontier history, the combatants also raged over other themes in the broader historical record. In a sense, there was nothing new in this. From the nineteenth century, opposing interests have wrestled for the iconographic high ground in Australia – there have been intense debates between emancipists and exclusives, between labour and capital, between Irish and Anglo traditions, and between the left and right of Australian politics, among others. For many, it is this continuing contest for national meaning that itself exemplifies the nation’s healthy, robust civil society.
It was in this oppositional climate that a panel of review of the NMA was appointed in January 2003. Chaired by Professor John Carroll, of La Trobe University, the panel included museum anthropologist Philip Jones, paleontologist Patricia Vickers-Rich and businessman Richard Longes. After a series of meetings with museum staff and external interests, and review of written submissions, the panel released its report in July 2003: Review of the National Museum of Australia: Its exhibitions and public programs (the Carroll Review). While it opened with a broad statement praising the ‘extraordinary achievement’ of the museum, the report went on to make substantial criticisms of its curatorial and exhibition practices. In particular it said much about the need for clearer narratives and storylines in the museum, and for iconic – what it called ‘numinous’ – artefacts to be included in its galleries (Commonwealth of Australia 2003, 42).
The Carroll Review’s criticisms went to both the content and form of the NMA’s exhibitions. In terms of the museum’s representation of nation, it argued that the pre-eminent goal of the NMA was to tell the ‘Australian story’ by ‘means of generating consistent themes articulating objects, and thereby to inspire, to satisfy curiosity, to educate and to entertain’ (Commonwealth of Australia 2003, 12). It also made clear its concern that the museum should represent the ‘establishment of a notably stable, efficiently managed, prosperous democracy, with very low levels of institutional corruption, with relatively low social inequality and a largely inclusive ethos, which has integrated immigrant peoples from hundreds of other places with reasonable success’ (8).
At the same time, the panel was keen to emphasise its divergence from Graeme Davison’s views that ‘rather than suppressing difference by imposing a single authorial voice… 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’ (Commonwealth of Australia 2003, 8). Instead of Davison’s support for ‘interpretative pluralism’, the Carroll Review emphasised a view that saw ‘more consensus than plurality at the core of the national collective conscience’ (8). The panel therefore set the future of the NMA within a clearly divided rhetorical contest over the character of the nation. It contrived a division between a consensual and plural view of the national community, and by implication contested the inclusive politics that lay at the heart of the new museology.
Acknowledgment of the social role of museums dates back to the Enlightenment (Hooper-Greenhill 1989; Hooper-Greenhill 1992); what is different in the contemporary museum is the way in which that role has been construed. The new museology has tended to emphasise the capacity of museums to foster social inclusion through a specific representational politics (Karp et al. 1992; Newman and McLean 2002). By describing a representational breadth, commentators have argued, the museum creates opportunities for visitors to find themselves within a text, to feel a part – in the case of the NMA – of a national community.
In common with counterparts overseas, contemporary Australian museums have recently delineated a role for themselves in building civic capacity and promoting social inclusion. In the United Kingdom, the National strategy for neighbourhood renewal, PAT 10: Arts and sport (2001) identified social inclusion as a priority for museums and other cultural institutions (Department of Culture, Media and Sport 2001). The American Association of Museums’ 2002 report Mastering civic engagement established a similar argument (Archibald 2002, 3; see also Sandell 2002 and Gaither 2004, 111).
In the aftermath of the Carroll Review at the NMA in 2003, the profession’s peak body, Museums Australia, contended that:
policies of social inclusion have become the mandate for museums as we enter the 21st century… Fundamental to the realisation of social inclusion in museums is the presentation of stories highlighting the diversity of a nation’s population, a nation’s history from the multiple viewpoints of its citizens and the celebration of people from all walks of life, all stations, all creeds (Scott 2003).
This argument of an expanded social role, emphasising an inclusive representational frame achieved through the ‘multiple voices’ featured in exhibitions, underpinned professional practice at the NMA through the 1990s, and through the project development of its exhibition space at Acton. The museum’s permanent galleries included objects that ranged from the everyday to the iconic, and which attempted to represent the practical reality of Australia’s pluralist society. It also chose to avoid simplistic attempts to settle hoary questions of national identity, preferring to depict the nation as the sum of its parts through serried perspectives represented in its exhibitions. Furthermore, the museum adopted a playful tone, juxtaposing contrary views of historical events and consciously using irony and satire in its permanent galleries.
This approach, however, is not without its problems. Arguing the value of the NMA in such instrumental terms – as an agent of social cohesion – is based on problematic idealisations of what constitutes an inclusive community. After all, the discourse of social inclusion itself has critics: opponents on the left challenge that a socially inclusive society subsumes difference rather than respects it; while the right is sceptical about prospects for collective transformations of this kind. Both criticisms reveal the difficulty in abstracting community and civic values as social goods.
Moreover, the representation of difference in exhibitions cannot of itself discharge the museum’s responsibilities to a plural Australian community (Bennett 1995, 102–103). It tends to obscure the enduring reality of a conscious and insistent curatorial authority in exhibition making. The selection of perspectives represented in any exhibition – even those that include several voices – must ultimately be revealed as limited and partial. While this may be an understandable function of the museum’s spatial and textual constraints, it is still galling to visitors whose expectations are formed by institutional claims to representational breadth. An example of this was seen in the NMA’s gallery devoted to immigration, Horizons, in which the presentation of stories from several ethnic groups provoked complaints from others who felt they had been omitted. In these terms, the museum’s attempts to represent ethnic diversity through ‘multiple voices’ drew attention to its limited range, rather than promoting a sense of an inclusive society. Inevitably, the museum is forced to admit that it simply cannot mimic the differentiated nature of the national community in its exhibitions.
At the same time, there are problems with the museum abstracting multi-vocality to represent the deeper and far-reaching complexities of a plural, differentiated community. The presentation of different voices in a museum display may create a sense of textual equivalence that misrepresents the actual relations of power in a given historical moment. For example, displaying nineteenth-century English, Irish and Chinese experiences of religious practice may say something about the breadth of spiritual devotion in colonial Australia, but little about the differentiated quality of social relations between these groups. While it may be laudable to use these perspectives to represent religious diversity – and support a concomitant argument about a plural social realm – the precise historical conditions that gave rise to these experiences tend to fade from view. Untethered from precise historical conditions, such voices lose potency and communicative strength, and begin to appear as banal examples of a contemporary imperative, rather than as personal perspectives on the past.
This poses a dilemma for a museum facing community expectations to reflect, perhaps even define, national meaning or self-understanding. In relying on ‘multiple voices’ to represent the varied character of contemporary society, museums have sometimes obscured shared historical meanings or occluded the specificity of past conditions. The discursive tactic of defining the national community through many voices runs the risk of misrepresenting the record of experiences that are broadly felt, or sentiments that are expressed collectively, across the nation. Perhaps museums should heed Stephen Weil’s caution:
Museums might also be more modest about the extent to which they have the capability to remedy the ills of the communities in which they are embedded. We live, all of us, in a society of startling inequalities, a society that has badly failed to achieve community, and a society that seems determined to lay waste to the planet that is its sole source of support. Museums neither caused these ills nor – except by calling attention to them – have it within their power alone to do very much to cure them (Weil 1995, xvi).
The attempts of contemporary museums to address plural interests through including multiple voices in exhibitions have therefore brought us to something of an impasse. We can neither detail the representational range needed to truly reflect plural societies, nor escape the tendency for such exhibitions to reduce difference to an abstract signifier of nation. One way to respond to this might be to re-examine the particular environment of the museum exhibition and the subjective experience of visitors within it, and better understand the exhibition as a performative space.
In doing this, we can look to continuities in exhibition practice and visitor behaviour between the ‘old’ and ‘new’ museums. The durability of nineteenth-century museum forms and experiences in contemporary museums should be kept in mind as one considers the specific changes wrought by more recent theoretical perspectives (Witcomb 2003, 18–26). The nineteenth-century museum, and the display impulses that emerged from successive public exhibitions of the fruits of industrialism in the course of that century, was strongly informed by a deliberate, educative zeal (Bennett 1995, 59–88). The ‘new museology’ has striven to unpack and reveal this authoritative intent, and replace it with arguments for greater democracy and social inclusion in the museum. Both these perspectives reconfirm a vision of the museum exhibition as a rational mechanism charged with an important social role. Even the recent growth in visitor evaluation, part of the contemporary museum’s new-found interest in audiences, proceeds in similarly instrumental terms.
A journey through the galleries of the NMA instructs us in the chaotic sociality of exhibition spaces: school groups move as noisy packs harvesting information, older couples read labels intently, a cleaner pauses to gaze at a display, a father discusses the workings of a car with his son and young families chat with museum hosts over a touch trolley. There is little sense of ordered progression in the galleries. Visitors wander and talk, creating their own routes, generating meanings and narratives as they find ways through the exhibition spaces.
The fluidity and complexity of visitor behaviour in exhibition galleries reminds us of the continuities between museum exhibitions and other public arenas of display, such as international fairs, department stores and city streets. As Andrea Witcomb argues, the museum emerging in the nineteenth century developed a distinct institutional identity but was also part of a broader field of cultural practice that incorporated these more populist sites of representation and recreation. These institutions were joined in producing a modern urban cosmopolitanism – a sensibility centred on the crowded city street in which wanderers might discover and consume representations of the world in miniature (Witcomb 2003, 18n). This cosmopolitanism was largely grounded in popular culture, in experiences of pleasure and curiosity, rather than in higher culture values of rational and moral improvement.
This history of the museum emphasises the agency of ‘visitors’ in creating meanings as they walk through and between displays. From this perspective it may be more appropriate to think of the museum visitor not as a ‘reader’ consuming a text external to themselves, but rather as an embodied ‘performer’ who makes the museum text as he or she moves through an exhibition. We might consider the museum as an inhabited landscape, such as the city or the department store, and the museum visitor as a relative of the flâneur.2
The flâneur is a key figure in theorising modern urbanism. At first, as he is defined in the work of Charles Baudelaire and the later commentary of Walter Benjamin, the flâneur is tied to a specific time and place: nineteenth-century Paris. As Baudelaire described him, the flâneur was a gentleman of leisure, a solitary figure who wanders the city streets, taking up residence in the windows of coffee shops where he can watch the world go by.
The flâneur was both a detached observer of the complex world around him and a person looking for contact with and even immersion in the crowd. Baudelaire wrote:
The crowd is his domain, just as the air is the bird’s and water that of the fish. His passion and his profession is to merge with the crowd. For the perfect idler, for the passionate observer it becomes an immense source of enjoyment to establish his dwelling in the throng, in the ebb and flow, the bustle, the fleeting and the infinite. To be away at home and yet to feel at home anywhere (Baudelaire 1972, 399; cited in Solnit 2000, 199).
The flâneur seeks out contact with the city crowds in order to realise his own existential self, his identity defined and developed through his collection and interpretation of encounters with strangers and places in the street.
Later writers have considered the flâneur as a more abstract figure, an emblem for the experience of living in the city that may encompass people other than the white, upper-middle-class male of the nineteenth century.3 The flâneur emerges as a figure defined by practices of walking through inhabited public spaces, by activities of observing and deciphering the spatial environment, who produces narratives that explicate the world encountered in wandering (Frisby 1994, 82–83).
The flâneur, moreover, is defined by a certain attitude towards the world through which he or she moves. As Tester (1994a) argues, flânerie as described by Baudelaire and Benjamin is an idle activity, a considered strolling that delights in a lack of direction and an absence of destinations. The flâneur gazes around at a mysterious world, his or her curiosity stimulated by the possibility of discovering the unknown. In a sense, the flâneur is a private detective, but a detective who searches for experience to fuel his own sense of self (Frisby 1994, 83).
The figure of the flâneur does not map completely to the museum visitor – for one thing, the flâneur is essentially solitary while many visitors encounter the museum as part of a group – but the flâneur nevertheless powerfully suggests how subjecthood is produced as people move through, observe and engage with socialised spaces. The flâneur insists that we understand exhibitions not as texts to be read through analysis, but rather as environments in which meanings are made as visitors subjectively interpret what and who they encounter.
The exhibition as a space for wandering has long preoccupied museum professionals interested in understanding visitor behaviour and learning. As George Hein describes, the earliest known observation of visitors in a museum sought to categorise them according to how they moved through the exhibition. Hein cites an appealing French study of visitors to a natural history museum, which classified visitors as:
Ants, who moved methodically from object to object;
Butterflies, who moved back and forth among the exhibits, alighting on some displays;
Grasshoppers, who chose specific objects and ‘hopped’ from one to another; and
Fish, who glided in and out of the exhibition with few stops (Hein 1998, 105).
The highly individual nature of exhibition visitation has often been perceived as a problem, particularly by educators embracing behaviourist models of learning. If everybody is wandering about on their own path, how can the museum ensure visitors ‘receive’ the messages it is trying to communicate?
Anxiety about visitors’ propensity for wandering has often been expressed through debates over the kinds of historical narratives realised in museums. Exhibitions that don’t organise visitors to encounter displays in a certain order, that lack a linear narrative, are seen to confuse rather than enlighten and educate. This criticism was directly expressed by the Carroll Review, which described the museum’s displays as ‘fragmentary’ and argued that the distribution of themes across multiple galleries would mean that “all but the most conscientious visitor” would fail to connect them in a coherent narrative (Commonwealth of Australia 2003, 13). For the panel, visitors’ failure to share a single experience of the exhibits meant that the museum was failing in its educative role.4
If we think of museum visitors as related to the flâneur, however, the different paths they take through the museum become less a problem and more a possibility. The flâneur directs attention to how all museum visitors experience exhibitions as embodied encounters with ideas. Seeking greater awareness and understanding of personal subjectivity through encounters with others, the flâneur wanders the city. The flâneur wants to both recognise his or her own differences from and connections with others, seeking out encounters that address his or her own subjectivity.
In the same way, we can think of museum visitors moving through exhibitions, comparing and contrasting their own experience to that evoked or represented by what they see. Visitors make meaning as their own subjectivity is thrown into relief by their engagement with the exhibition. Hence, enabling visitors to determine the circumstances of their exhibition encounter – rather than simply representing multiple voices – opens up a suite of possible meanings that are literally ‘brought to life’ by them.
This encourages us to think of museum exhibitions as performative environments in which meaning or understanding is created through engagements between visitors, objects displayed and spatial environments. What is important in understanding how meaning is created in exhibitions is not so much an analysis of the ‘type’ of visitors, but rather the subjectivity they bring to the museum. Visitors are not external to the exhibition text in this conception of museological practice, but rather an integral part of it.
This concept of meaning making in the museum resonates with a number of areas of contemporary scholarship. Constructivist learning theory, as Eilean Hooper-Greenhill describes, emphasises that knowledge is produced in the museum through visitors’ active interpretations of their exhibition experiences. Meaning is constructed through relationships between the active interpreters, the objects they encounter, and their experience of them (Hooper-Greenhill 1999, 4). Hooper-Greenhill argues that the nature of these relationships depends on, first, the prior knowledge visitors bring to the museum that helps them make sense of an object, and, second, the cultural competencies or interpretive strategies they have at their disposal.
Researchers within this tradition have begun to describe museum visitors in terms of ‘interpretive communities’ whose members share ‘common frameworks of intelligibility, interpretive repertoires, knowledge and intellectual skills’ (Hooper-Greenhill 2000, 12). As Hooper-Greenhill states, the significance of the concept of interpretive communities comes from the way in which it acknowledges that ‘although each individual actively makes sense of their own experience, the interpretive strategies and repertoires they use emerge through prior social and cultural events’ (122).
Constructivist learning frameworks remind us that visitors are not atomistic individuals, but rather people who engage the museum through (partially) shared cultural understandings. The figure of the flâneur importantly reminds us that these shared understandings are not simply practices of reason. Constructivist theories tend to consider the museum visitor as a ‘learner’ – a seeker of rational enlightenment – and to characterise the museum visit as primarily a cognitive and intellectual encounter. In contrast, the flâneur – with his or her walking, wandering and interest in idleness and pleasure – powerfully invites us to understand museum visiting as an embodied, subjective experience.
Attending to the embodied quality of museum visiting opens up analyses of meaning making in exhibitions to respond to the roles of ‘feeling’ – in the senses of both emotional engagement and haptic and kinesthetic responses to the environment. Emotions constitute the means through which people evaluate sensory perceptions, identifying their relevance and shaping reactions appropriately (see Csordas 1994; Lyon and Barbalet 1994). They consequently play a crucial part in visitors’ experiences within exhibitions. As Kit Messham-Muir (2006) has recently pointed out, emotional response is closely tied to the spatial dynamics of exhibition spaces. Our perceptions of objects – for example, whether we observe them from above, or feel dwarfed by them, or have to peer inside a tiny, hidden case to see them – powerfully shape our understandings of those objects and consequently the meanings we make within exhibitions.
In museological scholarship, emotional, sensory and kinesthetic reactions have traditionally been understood as phenomena beyond analysis. They are seen to be highly individual, essentially different from the shared cultural frameworks visitors bring to exhibitions.5 Museum professionals have consequently tended to argue for their importance only in instrumental terms, seeing them as primarily provocations or catalysts for critical inquiry. As Messham-Muir argues, following art theorist Jill Bennett (2005), ‘When museums present their objects in ways that allow them to communicate not only cognitively, but affectively – that allow objects to be ‘felt’ as well as ‘read’ – they draw visitors to the conceptual and analytical via the sensory and experienced’ (Messham-Muir 2006, 5).
The figure of the flâneur insists, however, that we should see ‘feeling’ not simply as a means to an end, a mechanism to persuade visitors to rational learning, but as an end in itself. The flâneur suggests that ‘feeling’ – embodied engagement with the world – is itself a form of knowledge integral to the formation of the subject. For the flâneur gains knowledge and produces him or herself through the practice of flânerie – the acts of walking, of encountering others in the crowd, of finding a way through the city streets, of sitting on park benches and sheltering under trees, of, in short, gaining an embodied understanding of the material realities of others’ lives – as well as through the practice of reflecting on his or her walking, observing and collecting.
The complexity of flânerie reminds us that analytical inquiry and intellectual understanding are only two of many activities in which visitors may be engaging in exhibitions. Museum visitors, like the flâneur, may equally be searching for titillation, taking pleasure in seeing new people and in being seen by new people, seeking solitude and anonymity, enjoying the company of friends, avoiding work or pursuing the satisfaction of demonstrating known information. Museum visitors arguably engage exhibition displays through multiple contexts, and pleasure may be as important as intellectual profit to understanding how visitors produce meaning in museums. The figure of the flâneur reminds us that any account of the shared understandings visitors bring to the museum must be joined by a nuanced understanding of the processes through which individuals produce and reproduce their own subjectivities in encounters with the world.
Conceptualising museum exhibitions as performative environments prioritises the active meaning-making role of the visitor. This suggests that the question we should be asking, in regard to addressing pluralism, is how visitors are enabled to ‘perform’ difference through their encounter with objects and ideas in the museum, rather than relying exclusively on multiple voices in an exhibition. How can we build an exhibition that heightens visitors’ sense of the specificity and commonalities of their own experience and that of others? Put another way, how can we encourage visitors to be aware of their own subjectivity, and build an understanding of pluralism through comparing their experience with that of others?
Recent scholarship that examines histories of place and environment emphasises the ‘located’ character of Australian experience. The work of Tom Griffiths, Peter Read, Tim Bonyhady, Libby Robin and Jay Arthur, among others, encourages the NMA to describe a national reach through located histories, rather than defining or representing a national type or identity.
In a 2003 paper in the Griffith Review, Mark McKenna discussed inclusion of a reference to the nation’s territory, or ‘land’, in any new preamble to the Australian Constitution. He wrote that ‘By emphasizing the centrality of the land to any new constitutional preamble, perhaps non-Aboriginal Australians are also wishing to end the sense of alienation and exile that is embedded within their colonial experience. Home is no longer elsewhere. The mother country is here’ (McKenna 2003, 192). McKenna suggests a way in which cultural landscapes inform our self-understanding as a community. A focus on place also helps reveal the layered historical meanings of landscapes and acknowledges the museum’s obligation to include Indigenous and non-Indigenous histories in representing the past.
Integrating a focus on place with an ethnographic approach to historical events helps detail the circumstances of change and continuity in the historical record. Moreover, it reinserts place as an active presence, or ‘character’, in the past and acknowledges the temporal and geographical specificity of encounters between peoples, places and ideas. Ethnographic history encourages close examination of particular experiences in their time and place.6
This approach builds a complex relationship between the ‘ethnography of the historical moment’ set against the continuity of cultural landscapes. It can promote care and precision in representing the past, without losing a sense of historical continuities between experiences in different times and places. It also informs the practice of history in the contemporary museum, which depends on material culture to evoke people’s lives in the past. Ethnographic history’s emphasis on event and context resonates with the common curatorial practice of investigating an object’s specific meaning within a broader historical frame.
The suggestion then is for the new gallery at the NMA to describe a continental reach to the national story, exploring continuities in the historical record with a precision and care for particular experiences in the past. Such an approach allows for connections to be drawn between common experiences in different places, including those geographically distant from each other. We imagine that visitors will bring their own perspective to the precisely located histories in the gallery. They will be able to reflect on the differences between their own experiences and those represented in the exhibition. Rather than responding to an abstract concept of the national community, they may explore differentiated experience of common themes and draw their conclusions about what constitutes a national biography.
This approach offers alternative interpretive opportunities compared with that of describing the national community as the sum of multiple voices. In the latter approach, people’s stories can become dislocated from historical circumstances and abstracted to stand as emblems of nation. Further, such an approach describes an equivalence of difference in the nation’s life, which misrepresents actual social conditions. In contrast, we argue for connecting object and place to provoke visitors’ awareness of their own subjectivity in the physical and conceptual space of the exhibition, allowing pluralism to be ‘performed’ rather than represented.
The Carroll Review has stimulated thinking about how the museum might represent Australian history in its galleries. In response to both the review and visitor feedback, which suggests difficulties with a complex layering of voices in exhibitions, the museum is now looking at how exhibition practice might move beyond simple oppositions between pluralist and consensual views of nation. We have found that the new museology offers limited help in this regard, and argue here that the discourse has reached something of a cul-de-sac. The new museology emphasises breadth in representational practice – the inclusion of diverse peoples, perspectives and experiences – yet this asserts an ideal that is impossible for any museum to realise. Multi-vocal exhibitions also run the risk of reducing difference to an abstract signifier of a plural society or nation, rather than representing the actual relations of power in a given historical moment.
We want to look beyond this instrumentalism, with its roots deep in the early history of the museum, and consider instead the performative, subjective aspects of visitors making their own histories in space. In keeping with that, we have turned to an archetype of subjective experience, the flâneur, variously located in the nineteenth-century city and the public exhibition. Imagining the flâneur helps reposition the subject as an active, creative and self-conscious agent in the interpretive space of the museum. The self-consciousness of the flâneur, of the idling gaze that seeks to be seen as much as see, recalls the performance of the museum visit and a sense of the exhibition as a socialised space. While it is not a simple analogy of the museum visitor, the flâneur suggests the highly subjective and volatile nature of visitors in the spaces of the museum, and refocuses our efforts in trying to redetermine a more open, truly democratic – rather than demotic – exhibition practice. It also resists glib restatements of the museum’s mission as the socialising of idealised citizen-subjects.
We have also briefly outlined proposals for a new gallery at the NMA that seek to include histories that are more precisely located in place and time, rather than attempting to display the entire field of pluralist views. This is not to deny the virtues of properly articulating the reality that Australian nationhood is characterised by difference, but rather to describe opportunities for visitors to bring their own subjectivities to the performance of pluralism in the exhibition.
To that end, this paper suggests a series of questions for further research into understanding what might be called performative pluralism in historical exhibitions. First, we consider more work is needed to develop a phenomenology of visitor experience in exhibitions, drawing on ethnographic analyses of audiences. Second, we think that more detailed understanding of the life histories of objects, and the nature of objecthood, driven by the renaissance in material culture studies in recent years, will help develop a sense of the breadth of readings possible in the exhibition (Appadurai 1986). Third, investigation of the architectures of display, focusing on the relationships between physical elements that comprise the exhibition furniture and related installations will deepen our sense of the interpretive differences between the museum exhibition and other media of historical knowledges (MacLeod 2005).
Inasmuch as we have reached an impasse in understanding the relationship between the museum exhibition and cultural function, these studies seek to refocus this question in terms that are sensitive to the volatility of visitors’ agency in exhibitions. Taken altogether, they present the possibility that new exhibition practices may re-inform theorisations of the contemporary museum and its social role, and deepen an understanding of the museum and its relationship to public space.
1 The views expressed by the authors in this paper are their own and not necessarily those of the National Museum of Australia.
2 Similarities between the museum visitor and the flâneur are identified by Witcomb (2003, 20–21) and Storrie (2006, 18n).
3 See Tester (1994b) for a collection of essays exploring different constructions of the flâneur.
4 See Witcomb (2003, 144n) for a discussion of a similar debate over historical narrative in the exhibitions of the Australian National Maritime Museum.
5 This understanding is sharply contested by much recent scholarship in the anthropology, history and sociology of embodiment, emotion and the senses. This work emphasises the social construction of the body, subjectivity, emotional systems and sensoria, and seeks to describe how these vary across different cultures and historical periods. See Csordas (1990), Csordas (1994), Featherstone et al. (1991) and Howes (2003).
6 For examples of this approach see Dening (1992), Isaac (1982) and Clendinnen (2003).
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Cite this chapter as: Trinca, Mathew; Wehner, Kirsten. 2006. ‘Pluralism and exhibition practice at the National Museum of Australia’. South Pacific Museums, edited by Healy, Chris; Witcomb, Andrea. Monash University ePress: Melbourne. pp. 6.1–6.14.
© Copyright 2006 Matthew Trinca and Kirsten Wehner
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