TUNING THE MUSEUM

THE HARMONICS OF OFFICIAL CULTURE

National museums – especially national museums developed in the cultural environments created by neoliberal economics, proliferating virtuality and global social formations – are asked to mediate significantly tensioned and even conflicted remits. The state may expect them to put the best possible face on a marketable national identity within which commerce, culture and tourism converge; at the same time, they may be expected to report on and represent complex, contradictory, polysemic and polyvocal identities that resist the smoothing effects of statist emulsifiers. Museums may be asked to defer to the expectations of socially and politically influential lobbies, while remaining the custodians of minority, alternative or critical alterities. They may be expected to balance commerciality and good public programming. They will need to evolve while retaining critical success instruments. They need to be capable of taking risks without jeopardising high-level support, especially government support. The metaphors of tuning and of ‘loosely coupled’ systems are used in this essay to explore and critique the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa’s management of its organisational harmonics: the combination of social listening and directorial conducting that keeps the place in tune.

TUNE-UP

The metaphor of ‘tuning’ and by implication of orchestration suggests two converging kinds of effort – as well as results that are harmonious, dissonant or even discordant. One kind of effort is the activity of social listening; the other, the organisational activity of directing or conducting. Applied to large public sector, officially national institutions such as state-supported national museums or TV broadcasters, this metaphor of ‘tuning’ implies a tension between polyvocal communities (citizens, consumers, audiences), who expect or hope to be left to their chosen discords or differences, and the state, which will usually prefer national harmony.

This tensioned space between polyvocal communities and the state that would prefer them to get on the same song sheet has been deemed a space of debate: a democratic ‘forum for the nation’, as the mission statement of the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa (Te Papa) has it.1 This mission statement supposes that a state-subsidised, legislated institution may act as a mediator between the state and its citizens: a sound-proofed practice room in which citizens can make some noise without disrupting civil society or attracting the attention of the Sound Police. The political benefits of such debate are both democratic in appearance and regulatory in effect. The museum may be a place in which to stage debate rather than have it. The sometimes off-key vibration between regulation and democracy is also what we might expect of a centre-left, Labour-led political coalition in government, even one that has inherited much of the radical neo-liberalism of its famous predecessor, the fourth Labour government (1984–87) of David Lange.

The governance structure within which Te Papa is required to be ‘a forum for the nation’ is elaborately orchestrated, and the creative space it allows for the museum’s executive to improvise, shift registers or defy the sound of impatient baton-tapping will depend on the extent of the government’s wish to intervene – and on its levels of response to lobbies. The extent to which the state, in the form of the funding government, has oversight of and expectations for the civic outcomes – or ‘civic yields’, as Tony Bennett (2004) has it – is adumbrated in a summary statement above the museum’s Concept.2 The Concept (what the museum commits to being and doing) sits above the legislation that translates that commitment into a duty (what the museum is legislated to be and do).3 Statement of Intent targets contract the duties as performance measures against which the museum’s activity is measured. The museum’s Mission next mirrors and summarises the Statement of Intent; its Corporate Principles then describe the organisational culture to which its employees are expected to subscribe in order to deliver the mission to standards measured by the Statement of Intent and (re-ascending the scale) thus meet legislative duties and achieve the government’s goals in respect of national identity and the Treaty of Waitangi.

There are other ways in which the tuning metaphor is apt. In New Zealand, another contentious tuning gap opens up when a broadcaster or a museum is required by its stakeholding government to return both a commercial dividend on the state’s investment and a cultural result in terms of the public good. The double whammy of neo-liberal market forces and Reithian public service expectations does not produce a democratically tensioned space in which broadcasters or museums safely mediate public debate. Instead, it produces an internal organisational tension between pragmatic programmers and ‘content providers’ (curators, scriptwriters, researchers – ‘creatives’). Programmers take care of the institutional bottom line and look for content most likely to generate good ratings and sponsor benefits. In contrast, content providers are more interested in cultural value: the cultural value of representing low-rating, uncommercial minority interests; cultural production taking place away from or regardless of major capital flows; disreputable, casual, quirky or somehow uncoached activity; ephemeral, immaterial, transient stuff; strident, oppositional, angry stuff; the voices of the soft-spoken; alterity.

In this case, the tuning involves organisational structures, administrative delegations, management devolutions and the fit of business units within the ‘forum for the nation’, as well as degrees of creeping regulatory governmentality in respect of the state’s strategic orchestrations of its commercial and cultural remits. A keyword, ‘excellence’, has emerged in this tuning gap. Its origins in the mid to late 1990s coincided with the appearance of other key words including ‘innovation’, ‘creative’ and ‘knowledge’, prompted in varying degrees by Bourdieuian concepts of cultural capital. In March 1999, for example, the introduction to published proceedings of a ministerial Cultural Foresight seminar stated that ‘a nation’s cultural capital bears on its ability to deploy cultural resources within a global market, creating distinctiveness and competitive advantage’ (O’Brien 1999). An involuntarily Bourdieuian note was struck by Wellington’s local authority when it branded the city as the nation’s ‘Cultural Capital’. On song with the rhetoric of the ‘knowledge economy’, the ‘excellence’ keyword originated with high-end marketing and advertising but it has spread with viral success through governmental agencies for research, education and culture in the later, ‘fiscally responsible’ stages of neo-liberalism. ‘Centres of excellence’ are where contestable capital, and competitive economic and cultural brands converge. ‘Excellence’ allows the policy language of public agencies and of government to target (and reward) either commercial or cultural values, of course, preferably both at once. In New Zealand, for example, the Pacific hip-hop music industry may be deemed ‘excellent’ in terms of its economic contribution to gross national product, but may be culturally penalised through a politicised media beat-up over hip-hop opportunity-development grants awarded through the government’s Community Employment Group (CEG).4 ‘Excellence’ policy may be satisfied with the national museum’s production of a commercially successful exhibition about The lord of the rings films and may also find the project to be in harmony with statist agendas for economically driven national brands such as the ‘100% pure’ campaign featuring pristine mountain ranges. ‘Excellence’ was not, however, awarded to the national museum’s imbrication of icons of modernist New Zealand art, industrial design, Anglo-Oriental ceramics, TV commercials and town planning in its investigation of mid-century modernism in New Zealand. In the exhibition Parade, one of Te Papa’s opening projects in 1998, the ‘excellence’ of Colin McCahon’s celebrated painting The Northland panels was officially deemed incompatible with other contemporaneous aspects of New Zealand modernism, and the exhibition was eventually removed. Its riff on a local modernism was too dissonant for the ‘excellence’ terms of reference favoured by the art lobby, which was small but politically influential. In addition, the exhibition was quirky and local; it was seen to have little, if any, international brand leverage, although Colin McCahon has frequently been seen as New Zealand’s one chance for an international art profile.

As well as social listening and organisational activity, a third way in which the metaphor of tuning the museum may be apt involves how the museum produces meaning, most importantly, the ways in which it produces (and is even required by the state to produce) meanings germane to national identity. These may constitute a harmonious, even celebratory, national anthem, or a polyvocal cultural cacophony, or a battle hymn of revolt. This kind of harmony – or dissonance – is projected into spaces beyond and outside the institution; beyond the hum of internal organisation, the drone of statist statement of intent and key performance indicator objectives, the clamour of contained and managed public debate. The tuning of national identity reaches out to international tourism, to the nationalist branding of economic points-of-difference, and it involves the ability of politicians to successfully serenade their constituents. A post-liberal and even re-regulatory New Zealand anthem to the excellence of national unity was generated by the politically expedient convergence, in 2004, of international tourism leverage applied across the considerable fulcrum of Middle-earth, of the pasteurised sublimity of ‘100% pure’ natural products with brand names such as Untouched World, and of the leader of the National Party Don Brasch’s Orewa-speech appeal to what Labour’s Trevor Mallard would subsequently dub ‘Pakeha indigeneity’.5 There was little sound, in this barbershop trio of effects, of the discords inherent in viewing sublime landscapes as lebensraum for ethnically purified creatures out of Euromyth, of the legislated untouchability of the world of foreshore and seabed resources,6 or of critically led debate about what might constitute the probable histories, let alone the ontologies and epistemologies, of indigeneity.

Of course, none of these apparently dichotomous tune-ups – between the state and communities, between commercial and cultural, between programmers and creatives, between polyvocal and hegemonic national identities – involves anything like an absolute stand-off. The most important tunings of all might be described as harmonics: third-term effects (though perhaps not ‘ways’) are produced by the plays across and between these dichotomous elements. Keeping the tricky harmonics in play requires a good ear, patience, an ability to listen, tolerance of dissonance and even of discord, and above all a relish of and nerve for the risks of regular retuning. And the ear, the patience, the listening, the tolerance, the nerve and risk-taking all require combinations of leadership and collectivity – what biologists, software developers and systems theorists like to call ‘loosely coupled’ organisational structures. Think again the slidey, sly and eliding tunes, rhythms and harmonies of Pacific hip-hop – it doesn’t get any looser and more coupled than this. These are anthems to supple resources not overcapitalisation, to fluidity not stasis, to the reinventions of evolving cultures rather than to the retardations of material sustainability. These are anthems to renewal, reinvention, retuning; to the ability to prosper in one sector while another is threatened; to the ability to accept and manage risk.

LOOSELY COUPLED HARMONIES

During the Reinventing the Museum conference at the University of Melbourne in 2004, a number of loosely coupled terminologies were used. They almost became thematically conspicuous, as if the conference was disclosing a commonly held unease that had not been shared or discussed previously.

Tony Bennett talked about ‘the reconfiguration of social objects so that they match with appropriate social formations’ – a tuning directorial and conducted, or voluntary and opportunistic, or a harmonic of both. His comment struck a warning note, though. He spoke of the museum’s ‘civic yield’, which, likewise, might constitute a public good (such as national unity) designed by the state or produced by the actions of citizens – by the Gesellschaft of duty or the Gemeinschaft of empathy – or, again, created by a tensioned combination of both. Or this might be a warning. He made a provocative and probably crucial distinction between ‘statist museums’ and ‘eco-museums’: the fine tuning between these might resemble that between museums representing or reporting on culture or between museums shaping or containing it – again, a loosely coupled dichotomy (Bennett 2004).

We heard about ‘the bounds of forces in the political domain’ and we heard Paula Hamilton say that ‘[h]aving a culture has become essential to the idea of nationhood’ – not as self-evident as it might seem, given that before about 1987 and the sharemarket crisis of the deregulated economy in New Zealand, the emphasis was on having an economy rather than, or without regard to, having a culture. The conference’s undertone of anxiety about the increasing volume of the state’s voice in the choir, about its management of excellence and even of the terms of reference for authenticity, began to surface in a phrase, ‘the teleology of the nation’, and in John Macarthur noting that cultural franchise is analogous with political franchise (Hamilton 2004; Macarthur and Stead 2004).

A related scepticism about and wariness of the regulatory management of official culture emerged in James Clifford’s comparison of the Centre Culturel Tjibaou in Noumea, New Caledonia, and the Vanuatu Cultural Centre in Port Vila (Clifford 2004). Clifford was careful to describe rather than judge, to analyse discourse models rather than prefer them. Nonetheless, what emerged in his account was a kind of state-channelled ‘civic yield’ of postcolonial Gesellschaft in the case of the major tourist attraction in Noumea, and a communally activist Gemeinschaft in the case of the off-the-beaten-track centre in Port Vila. Clifford likes a Foucauldian articulation of power as subjectivisation with attendant effects of ambivalence in respect of identity politics: complex harmonies and shifts of register rather than monadic shouting. And he likes the contingency – the attentive retuning – of Gramscian history rather than the teleology of official, received history. The conference’s mood was with him. It seemed to be preferring a reinvention of the museum, a retuning of it, as more subjective than official, more contingent than teleological, more Gemeinschaft than Gesellschaft. The museum was envisaged as more loosely coupled Pacific hip-hop than state anthem, with national identity emerging somewhat subjectively from diverse, contingent histories, rather than getting configured as a national brand refined from state-administered contestations of excellence.7

RETUNING TE PAPA

The somewhat uneasy mood of the conference, and what I intuited as its wariness of statist conductings or orchestrations of public culture, matched my own at the end of a decade’s work with Te Papa. It was a privileged adventure to work there when I did, but at the time I left – the time of the conference in Melbourne, near enough – it was also clear that a tune-up was needed and should be welcomed as a reinvigorating challenge. As I suggested earlier, this process would require a good ear, patience, an ability to listen, tolerance of dissonance and even of discord, and above all a relish of and nerve for the risks of regular retuning. In 2004, in a climate of increased governmental jitters over the management of national identity, the kind of tune-up most likely at Te Papa appeared to have been determined at a high level.

What had begun to happen at the time I left, in January 2004, was a consolidation around ideological structures, a progressive simplifying or mainstreaming of cultural narratives, a re-professionalising of records and a re-disciplining of discourses. The official founding armature of biculturalism, customer focus and commercial positivity had developed the critical inflexibility of dogma, while also becoming subject to the selective evasions of ‘excellence’: for example, the politically powerful but minority art lobby had effectively achieved the sequestration of its collection resource to the upper storey of the museum. A self-funded architectural proposal by one wealthy patron of the arts had proposed an elevator up the outside of the building to the art galleries at the top: this would have allowed him to get there without wading through or sharing elevators with the crowds in the rest of the place.8 Increasingly autonomous (rather than ‘loosely coupled’) business units had begun to be formed. The cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural field of research enabled by the museum’s diverse collections and wide public support was being reorganised into discrete silos. The symbolic stand-off between programming pragmatists and curatorial idealists appeared to be approaching an actual crisis close to dysfunction.

What appeared to be happening was less a robust, critically strategic operational consolidation that retuned and moved ahead from the radical opening program of the new institution, and more a reactionary retrenchment of old museum benchmarks of excellence within an increasingly ill-fitting official armature. A similarly ill-tuned (or ill-fitting) situation was simultaneously unfolding within parallel institutions of public TV, with similar priority stand-offs between bottom-liners and culturists and similarly off-key management performances. In both sectors, the word ‘excellence’ could be heard veering promiscuously across economic and cultural bandwidths; it was consistent only in its desired target outcome of enhanced national identity. The statist desire to yolk national identity, excellence and cultural production together may have reached its crisis threshold in the government’s – the prime minister’s – vehement public objections to the decision to send the installation artist collective et al. to the Venice Biennale in June 2005. As was the case with the CEG fiasco in 2004, the government’s reaction appears to have been stimulated by a combination of extremely poor official advice, political face-slapping in the House of Representatives and voter-critical media derision stirred principally by TV1’s Holmes show. The curator of New Zealand’s 2005 Venice Biennale presence was Natasha Conland, who was seconded – appropriately, one would think – from her position as curator of contemporary art at Te Papa, the country’s national museum. The players in this public spat about the regulation and management of New Zealand’s identity at the Venice Biennale could hardly be described as operating in a ‘loosely coupled’ harmony. The discord between government, Creative New Zealand (the administrative agency responsible for the Biennale commission) and the national museum’s seconded curator was acute. It was also consistent with and symptomatic of government’s interventionist predilection in respect of culture.

A word of caution at this point: increasingly, national museums are expected to generate polysemic meanings and values, and to report on and represent the conditions of diverse cultures. The museum’s instrumentalities are diverse, the modes of reception it both generates and anticipates are complex, and many of its remits are conflicted or at best in tension. Contemporary communications, and data storage and retrieval technologies complicate the situation. The leisure, sporting and consumer environments taken for granted by most museum visitors extend such complications into the everyday. Even if it wished to – or even if government wished it to, which it does not in the case of New Zealand’s Te Papa – the museum cannot aspire to a monadic tuning. This is not about conspiracy theories.

What needs to be examined is the extent of tuning that might be possible: what are the limitations and what are the signs that they exist? This can be a fairly practical, disenchanted exercise. It doesn’t need to be paranoid; it should, however, be critical.

THE LIMITS TO A TUNE-UP

There will be political limits to a tune-up of the national museum. There have been many examples of the politicising of culture and of its institutions, of which the most notorious include the case of the Enola Gay exhibition in the USA in 1998, and the more recent action against Dawn Casey at the Australian National Museum in Canberra. A less highly visible stream of evidence increasingly shows culture as the vehicle of political vision in the twenty-first century, as economics was in the 1980s and ‘knowledge’ in the 1990s.

In July 2004 New Zealand’s Prime Minister and Minister of Arts, Culture and Heritage Helen Clark – known as a committed champion of the arts in New Zealand – had this to say about devolution and neo-liberalism:

We think that government in the 21st century needs to form partnerships beyond its ranks in order to succeed. While in many ways governments have fewer formal powers than ever before, only governments have the ability to lead at the national level. A large vacuum is left if governments fail to organise so that they can lead (Clark 2004).

This makes sense as a centre-left Labour critique of the neo-liberal economic policies that retired government regulation from social services. However, such proactivity may be more problematic in the cultural sector. This is because culture produces signs that are easily appropriated to the expedient branding of political values, much as corporate sponsors of culture will choose to cross-brand with cultural products that affirm their brand values. Such politically expedient cultural values are often, if not usually, going to be nationalist in intention and scope. They are also likely to be the ones that will return sufficient votes to keep a political party in power, as well as the ones that will drive major revenue engines, such as repatriated or international investment and international tourism.

‘Creative’ cultural agencies may find it hard to resist risk-averse pressure to conform to, and produce, smoothly marketable national brands. Such brands have the additional advantage of absorbing and muffling alterity, contradiction and change within monumentally sustainable products – products such as very long term, capital-heavy exhibitions excluding ephemeral or time-based components and focused on the major, canonical icons of cultural and social majorities. What might such an icon be? Sir Edmund Hillary – you can’t argue with Ed, and why would you want to? He’s a great guy and a classic example of the opportunity provided by a national icon for popular metonymy: Sir Ed is seen to embody a set of national virtues that no one wants to mess around with. Ed’s with the mountains.

A striking example of expediently political national branding appeared as a backdrop in a Dominion Post newspaper photograph on 26 August 2002, on the eve of the New Zealand delegation’s departure for the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg. New Zealand’s Prime Minister, Helen Clark, spoke before a banner depicting a sublime mountain-scape of snow-covered peaks, with no people in sight, not even Ed, and the slogan ‘100% pure’ emblazoned across it. The banner was part of a now-famous and award-winning national branding campaign, ‘100% pure New Zealand’, commissioned by Tourism New Zealand. It can be visited at www.newzealand.com where t-shirts are available.

Similarly overdetermined incongruities appeared following the success of the third of the Lord of the rings films at the Academy Awards in Los Angeles in March 2004. The day after the ceremonies, Tourism New Zealand placed full-page ads in the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times, showing a sublime, mountainous landscape, again entirely empty of people, with the slogan ‘Best supporting country in a motion picture’, an interesting neo-colonial riff. Master-Card, ‘proud partner of The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King’, also ran full-page colour ads on 3 March 2004, with the familiar backdrop of vast mountains and, in the foreground, a cavalcade of fair heroes out of Euromyth. MasterCard congratulated cast and crew ‘and Middle-earth itself, New Zealand’. Not an Orc or Uruk-hai in sight – ‘100% pure New Zealand’ had been cross-branded with a racially purified Middle-earth.

We may even be entertained by these instances of the expedient cross-pollination of national branding, cultural signing and political sloganeering. But then we shouldn’t be surprised when ‘culture’ is coopted or shaped to similarly expedient institutional ends. Nor should we be surprised at the spectacular success of an international touring exhibition about The lord of the rings originated by Te Papa at the centre of this nexus, nor by the exhibition’s apparently effortless reconciliation of the museum’s commercial and cultural remits within its Statement of Intent answerability to government.

There will be governance limits to retuning the museum. An example of these appeared in a newspaper article9 reporting the publication by Te Papa of a large, splendid coffee-table book about its collections, Icons Nga Taonga from the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa (Smith 2004). The article was based on an interview with the then chairman of the museum’s board, Dr Roderick Deane. Dr Deane was also chairman of Telecom’s board and as such arbiter, then, of about one third of the value of the New Zealand stock exchange, with commensurate (though, in 2006, rapidly waning) political leverage. He and his wife were well known and highly respected patrons of the arts and exerted substantial supportive influence on the activities of the Wellington City Gallery, a collection-free contemporary art gallery in Wellington’s Civic Square near Te Papa. Under the influence of Roderick Deane, Telecom was also ubiquitous as a sponsor of high-profile cultural events, for example major exhibitions of contemporary art and the International Film Festival.

As chairman of Te Papa’s board, Dr Deane’s key reporting line was to the minister responsible for the Ministry of Culture and Heritage, who is also the Prime Minister. The no-surprises clause in Dr Deane’s contract aligns directly with this reporting line; his governance responsibility requires him to scrutinise the national museum executive’s implementation of its Statement of Intent, which is its contract with the ministry whose officers report to the Prime Minister.

In this closely monitored environment, with its potential for both support and regulation, the newspaper article about the coffee-table book on Te Papa’s collections made interesting reading. ‘Even better than the real thing’, read the headline. It went on: ‘No tourists, no screaming kids, no rides, no sore feet – Te Papa’s virtual museum, Icons nga taonga, is better than the real thing. The newly published book is a whole museum on your coffee table, says Te Papa board chairman Roderick Deane.’ Further on in the article, Deane said, ‘I’ve been very keen to change the balance so that [the museum] continues to be popular, but to upgrade the scholarship and research functions. In a way, it’s like a university.’10

As a former advocate for research and scholarship at the museum, I’m delighted to hear of the chairman’s support and I look forward to evidence that the museum’s budgets and recruitment priorities now reflect his enthusiasm. But, alas, the book in question, while excellent, is an unlikely scholarly benchmark, consisting as it does of images with 250-word captions. The book may provide a less irritating and busy social environment than the museum with its tourists, screaming kids and sore feet, but it is not (let alone better than) a museum. And finally, while discussion about the nature of museum-based research and scholarship continues internationally, there is broad agreement that its terms of reference and field of dissemination differ significantly from those of the university.

If the chairman of the museum’s board, who answers to the policies of an avowedly proactive and interventionist government with strong cultural agendas, whose Minister for Arts, Culture and Heritage is also the Prime Minister; if Dr Deane is able to go public with the assertion that a book about the museum’s collections is better than the museum itself, and that the museum resembles, or should resemble, a university in respect of its scholarship; and if he takes seriously the no-surprises clause in his contract with the Prime Minister, then we may logically conclude that the Minister for Arts, Culture and Heritage would also prefer the national museum to be free of ‘screaming kids’, and to resemble a university.

There will be policy limits. In December 1993 I joined the concept team that was being assembled to move the new Museum of New Zealand across the threshold of its enabling legislation and institutional concept and into its yet-to-be-built premises. In January 2004 I left the museum to return to a life as an independent writer and curator. I did so with mixed feelings. The museum is an addictive cultural and social space.

I had joined the project on the strength of four aspirational planks in the institutional concept and I stayed because these planks remained challenging and in some respects tantalisingly unfulfilled. I left believing they remained unfulfilled, but also that they might always be so – that their instrumentality within the museum’s policy and performance are more about agency and on-going process than they are about result or closure, that they are about negotiable rather than conclusive actions. The four planks were the museum’s audience, the potential for polysemic narrations of its collections, the museum’s research and scholarship, and its commitment to exploring a meaningful implementation of biculturalism.

The museum made a commitment to winning a new, large socially and culturally diverse audience and this commitment formed the base of a pyramid of values. It meant, for example, that knowledge about the significance of collection items would be conveyed in exhibition narratives that were diverse in terms of narrative position, reading age, and cultural meaning and value. It meant that varieties of epistemology would be accepted and deployed in the museum’s scholarly research. And it meant that new modes of governance, new curatorial cultures, and new kinds of relationships with communities of interest would be developed within bicultural policy frameworks.

There were entry-level thresholds for these aspirations. Some would seem to fall short in the interests of getting started, as well as for reasons of operational capacity and capability. Inevitably, these commencement benchmarks would produce opportunities for strategic development and change, and especially for increased nuance – for fine tuning – in implementation. Thus, the large audience would in time become more intimately known and its different needs understood and addressed in niche rather than generalist interpretations. The amount and variety of narration, and the architectural and way-finding organisation of narrative within the museum’s spaces, would become clearer as start-up confusions were analysed. The nature and variety of the museum’s research and the modes and economies of its dissemination of knowledge would become better understood, while research planning, publishing and archiving activities would become more coherent, with better and more appropriate recording, reporting and peer-reviewing procedures. Understanding of the museum’s bicultural and indeed multicultural responsibilities would evolve through incremental stages of external relationship-building and internal training and capability. The architectural structure of the museum and the ways in which it locked in policy frameworks would be broken out in new spatial formations.

This bedding-in process required a fundamental commitment to on-going change and to strategic planning predicated on evolution not status-quo. This was always going to be a tough call when Te Papa’s most spectacular success occurred at the base of its aspirational policy pyramid: its winning of a large and diverse audience. It has become a place to just hang out. It’s a default destination for young families with not much dough at the weekends. During the school holidays, sadly, it’s where a lot of single working parents drop their kids for the day. It’s become a cruising destination. Such real popular, rather than merely populist, success generated an ‘If it ain’t broke don’t fix it’ policy attitude. A foundational and even monumental loyalty to Day One policy and structure did emerge.

Institutional stubbornness around foundational policy inevitably clashed with a culturally proactive government and with powerful lobbies. Vision, patience and nerve are required of the museum’s leadership: this leadership needs to be capable of implementing change at a considered rate. Patience and nerve are also required of stakeholder lobby groups who will, however, be impatient with the museum’s slowness to recognise their special needs – many of which will derive from a sense of disenfranchisement as a result of the museum’s popular success. And patience and nerve will also be required of the interventionist government, which may, however, be vulnerable to lobbies, and especially to the kinds of lobbies represented in Te Papa’s case by art patrons such as the chairman of the museum’s board.

An almost inevitable scenario unfolds at the national museum at this point: Day One loyalists determined to cement the status quo of the museum’s initial success, strategic revisionists determined to tune and recalibrate the museum’s functions, and impatient lobbyists and stakeholders (possibly including the government) will come into conflict. I suspect that the subtext of the remarks I quoted earlier in relation to the Icons nga taonga book of Te Papa’s collections is a tie breaker. The subtext’s unconcealed impatience, uttered by the board’s chair on the axis of his reporting line to the Prime Minister, appears symptomatic of a move not to retune or recalibrate the museum on the basis of its initial successes, but to place it at the disposal of a reactionary re-branding.

The impatience that wants to reconfigure the museum in this way is also the product of a fundamental confusion. The re-branders have, I suspect, confused the discords of a complex, elaborately tuned and therefore sometimes dissonant museum in the start-up stages of its development, with endemic operational and conceptual dysfunction. Those with patience, nerve and a long view will recognise the essential health and necessity of institutional dissonance, of loosely coupled harmony, of risk-taking and attendant failure, and of the empathetic learning achieved through deferring rather than forcing conclusions. But there will be governance limits to their patience, nerve and long view.

There will be epistemological and hermeneutic limits to the museum’s retuning. It is useful to think about this in terms of what we mean by the ‘esoteric’ – partly to demonstrate that the esoteric and the popular are not binary opposites, but more importantly to suggest that only a complex, loosely coupled suite of harmonies can deal with the proliferation of knowledges within a multidisciplinary, polysemic museum, and therefore, possibly, within a complex multicultural society. In discussions within the museum, and in ‘dumbing-down’ critiques from without, the esoteric was frequently conflated with ‘elitism’. This reflects a significant, and a significantly limiting, confusion.

The esoteric is that which is culturally opaque to those who are not initiates. At its simplest, this will include what Steven Pinker calls ‘accumulated local wisdom’ and in the same book ‘shared arbitrary practices’ (Pinker 2002, 63, 64): for example, which side of the road to drive on, currency, designated days of rest, and other ordinarily ‘normative’ cultural practices. At its more complex, the esoteric will include highly exclusive normative business, such as Masonic handshakes, the arcana of regatta laws, cricket, Aussie Rules, the Kabala, the encrypted references to a history of quotation in art, architecture, popular music, cuisine or whatever.

The chief function of the ordinarily normative esoteric is to produce broad social conformity and a sense of belonging. However, the chief function of the exclusively normative esoteric is to signal welcome to a community of initiates, while at the same time signalling unwelcome to non-initiates. One affect of the esoteric is therefore to make people feel either welcome or shut out. Another is to make them feel tantalised, intrigued and envious.

What is not esoteric? Simple information, available with ordinary effort, not designed to produce conformity or induce exclusive feelings of belonging. Information that is not culturally coded, dependant on ‘tone of voice’, nuance, inflection or historical context. And socially shared information (George W. Bush is the 43rd President of the USA) and facts about the natural world (the whale is a mammal) (Searle 1995).

Why would the museum seek to exclude such effects (and their attendant affects) from its cognitive environments? Why would it privilege one exclusively normative esoteric over another ordinarily normative one, or over simple information? Why would it wish to exclude feelings of belonging, tantalisation or envy? The cognitive displacements caused by the esoteric may be what stimulate audiences and rewire epistemologies. They will certainly confound any complacency in the museum’s hermeneutics, in its wish to herd or direct audiences along narrative tracks, its wish to generate homogeneous text hierarchies and ‘voices’. But in the end, the museum’s epistemological limits will tend to match the limits it places on audience segmentation and therefore on different knowledges and knowledge systems.

COMPLEX, LOOSELY COUPLED CASE STUDY

I will finish with a hypothetical research project whose civic yield might be tolerance, or rewired epistemologies, or rearticulated spatial practices in terms of the museum’s conceptual architecture. Such outcomes will only be produced in a museum willing to engage with complex and possibly dissonant narratives and to permit different epistemologies and knowledge value systems to be discordant, harmonious or harmonic. This possible project is based on entirely available, even modest resources: it does not require a large ensemble.

In Te Papa’s art collection are two watercolour paintings by Captain Richard Aldworth Oliver, who as commander of the HMS Fly carried out surveys in New Zealand and Pacific waters between 1847 and 1851. Both paintings are dated 1849. One is titled Neddie, a half-caste; the other, Feast in the Bay of Islands.

There’s a narrative connection between the giant hakiri (feast) platform with its ostentatious loads of food, and the ‘Neddie’ character with his high-quality firearm. Art historical research isn’t especially interested in the details of this narrative and will tend to move past it to discuss contexts of the painting’s mode of production. Social historical research will linger over the narrative and tell us about the 1849 hakiri, the scene of a sumptuous reconciliation between the warring Ngapuhi factions of the tribal leaders Tamati Waka Nene, and Hone Heke and Kawiti, and between Ngapuhi and the Crown. Discussion about the artwork will focus on the historical evidence provided by it. Military history will refine that scrutiny and draw in associated evidential images of strategic positions and fortifications.

Figure 14.1 Richard Aldworth Oliver Feast at the Bay of Islands, September 1849, 1850, watercolour

Collection of the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa

As the research moves towards whakapapa (genealogy) and matauranga Maori (Maori knowledge), it tells us about the identities and futures of ‘Neddie’ and his companions and about the mana (prestige and authority) of the key players at the hakiri. This information is hidden from Captain Oliver and the intended audience for his painting, but will suffuse the painting viewed through matauranga Maori. The painting will become an ancillary taonga (treasure), a gloss on the mana retained in taonga given by these men to others as marks of respect and obligation. Also in the collections at Te Papa is a Ngati Hao taiaha kura or spear decorated with scarlet feathers that belonged to Tamati Waka Nene. A substantial narrative attaches to this taonga, including Waka Nene gifting it to the Wesleyan missionary Gideon Smales.

The potent nature of this gift was conveyed by, among other signs, the red kaka or parrot feathers in the awe or decorated collar below the tongue of the taiaha. The narrative linking kaka kura (red parrot), Waka Nene, the taiaha and Reverend Smales would extend to the customary association between kaka kura as leaders of flocks and important ariki (hereditary leaders) such as Waka Nene as rangatira or chiefs of iwi (tribes). The rarity and significance of kakahu kura (kaka feather cloaks) would also be relevant.

Ornithological illustrations by J. G. Kuelemans will show us the chiefly kaka; the taonga store will release not only rare kakahu kura, but also mutu kaka (bird snares) and kaka poria (bird tether pendants). Now, it becomes noticeable how often red is displayed in Captain Oliver’s painting. And what about those crimson pennants flying in the air above the hakiri platform?

The advantage in the war in the north, which was concluded at Tamati Waka Nene’s hakiri in 1849, did not lie with outright military victory. It lay within the mana-sustaining contexts of manaakitanga (hospitality). The Ngapuhi of Kawiti and Hone Heke knew that victory lay not just in the military conquest of your enemy, but in the diplomatic skill with which you were hospitable to the futures that your victory had opened. Hone Heke now claimed a derisive rhetorical victory by presenting Governor George Grey, the Crown’s representative at the hakiri, with a pig as a token of peace. This mocking act of manaakitanga referenced Heke’s previous dismissal of Governor Fitzroy’s bounty on his head of £100, which Heke had likened to the base transaction of purchasing a pig rather than winning a victory. Oliver’s painting stresses the monumentality of the hakiri platform, which would in fact have been burned to cook the food on it. For Maori, what was monumental was the prestige of the hospitality. Its symbolic monumentality highlighted the material insignificance of Governor Grey’s presentation pig.

Diverse ‘esoteric’ knowledges will be found in cultural spaces that overlap the pictorial space of Captain Oliver’s paintings – though they may not be visible there, except to viewers of the painting for whom it becomes a mnemonic. Or except – to see the tuning metaphor through to a conclusion – to listeners whose ears have been opened to tantalising, loosely coupled harmonies.

ENDNOTES

1     Te Papa’s Mission, developed in 1992, states that:

‘The Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa (Te Papa) is a forum for the nation to present, explore, and preserve the heritage of its cultures and knowledge of the natural environment in order to better understand and treasure the past, enrich the present, and meet the challenges of the future.’

‘Ka tu Te Papa Tongarewa hei wananga mo te motu, ki te whakaara, ki te hopara, ki te whakapumau i nga tikanga maha, me nga mohiotanga mo te ao tuturu, kia whai mana ai enei mohiotanga, mai nehera, kia mau pakari ai mo inaianei, whai ki te wa kei mua.’

Available from: http://www.tepapa.govt.nz.

2     ‘Te Papa makes a significant contribution toward the key government goal – To Strengthen National Identity and Uphold the Principles of the Treaty of Waitangi.’ Available from: http://www.tepapa.govt.nz.

3     The Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa Act 1992 establishes a national museum with the following purpose:

‘To provide a forum in which the nation may present, explore, and preserve both the heritage of its cultures and knowledge of the natural environment in order to:

•   better understand and treasure the past

•   enrich the present

•   meet the challenges of the future.’

Available from: http://www.tepapa.govt.nz.

4     In March 2004, the MP Katherine Rich (National) asked a question in the House of Representatives about the award in June 2003 of a grant by the Community Employment Group (CEG – an agency of the Department of Labour) to Fuarosa and Saralia Tamati, of the Aiga Productions charitable trust in Christchurch, to ‘research and explore hip hop culture as a tool for further community development with Pacific youth’. The ensuing media frenzy uncovered significant ignorance in mainstream New Zealand about the scope, quality, ubiquity and relevance of hip-hop culture globally and in the Pacific. The Minister for Arts, Culture and Heritage, Helen Clark, described the grant as ‘loopy’ and others made by CEG as ‘stupid’ and ‘odd, to say the least’ on the Holmes show (TV1) on 26 March 2004. On 20 September 2004, Steve Maharey, the Minister for Social Development and Employment, announced the closure of the CEG.

The hip-hop melody lingers on: on 21 May 2006, the Sunday Star Times carried a post-budget, full-page ad placed by the Independent Financial Review in which Prime Minister Helen Clark appeared dressed as a hip-hop rapper on a page suggesting what else her government might have done with its surplus, including ‘more hip hop tours’.

5     Don Brasch, the newly elected leader of the National Party, galvanised public opinion with his ‘nationhood’ speech to the Rotary Club at Orewa on 27 January 2004. The ruling Labour-led coalition government swiftly appointed Trevor Mallard as its Minister of Race Relations and on 29 July 2004 he made a provocative speech in his home town of Wainuiomata on ‘Pakeha indigeneity’. On 18 August 2004, Don Brasch returned this serve with an opinion piece published in the Australian Financial Review foreseeing a future for New Zealand as ‘just another Pacific Island state’.

6     The Foreshore and Seabed Act 2004 and the Resource Management (Foreshore and Seabed) Amendment Act 2004 received royal assent on 24 November 2004. The legislation mediated complex public attitudes to ‘customary rights’ of Maori, commercial opportunity and the general public’s ‘traditional’ rights of access to the beach. It generated significant Maori protest and more than any other factor was responsible for the formation of the Maori Party in 2004. The party was registered by the Electoral Commission on 9 July 2004 and currently holds four seats in parliament following elections in September 2005.

7     Clifford 2004.

8     The noted arts patron and cultural philanthropist Denis Adams is well known for his support for chamber music and for several generous endowments, including the Adam Art Gallery at Victoria University, Wellington. In 2001 he contracted the celebrated firm of Athfield Architects to draw up a plan for the relocation of a national art gallery on the top floor of Te Papa.

9     ‘“Even Better than the Real Thing”, Wellington’, Capital Times, 19 May 2004: 9.

10     ‘“Even Better than the Real Thing”, Wellington’, Capital Times, 19 May 2004: 9.

REFERENCES

Bennett, Tony. 2004. ‘Civic laboratories: Museums/the fabrication of cultural objects/self-governance’. Keynote address at The Rebirth of the Museum? An International Symposium. July; University of Melbourne.

Clark, Helen. 2004. ‘Paterson Oration 2004’. A speech delivered to the Executive Master of Public Administration Programme, Australia/New Zealand School of Government. [Internet]. 28 June 2004; Victoria University, Wellington. Accessed 2 July 2006. Available from: http://www.beehive.govt.nz/ViewDocument.aspx?DocumentID=20149.

Clifford, James. 2004. ‘Translating museums, articulating heritage: Some pacific performances’, unpublished notes for keynote address at The Rebirth of the Museum? An International Symposium. July; University of Melbourne.

Hamilton, Paula. 2004. ‘Looking away: The politics of memory at the NMA’. Paper for The Rebirth of the Museum? An International Symposium. July; University of Melbourne.

Macarthur, John; Stead, Naomi. 2004. ‘Allegory and populism at the National Museum of Australia’. Paper for The Rebirth of the Museum? An International Symposium. July; University of Melbourne.

O’Brien, Louise. 1999. Introd. to ‘Seizing the future: Cultural value in the knowledge economy’. Proceedings of the Cultural Foresight Seminar Three. 9 March; Wellington, Turnbull House.

Smith, H. 2004. Icons nga taonga from the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa. Te Papa Press: Wellington.

Pinker, Steven. 2002. The blank slate: The denial of human nature. London: Allen Lane.

Searle, J. R. 1995. The construction of social reality. New York: Free Press.

 

Cite this chapter as: Wedde, Ian. 2006. ‘Tuning the museum: The harmonics of official culture’. South Pacific Museums, edited by Healy, Chris; Witcomb, Andrea. Monash University ePress: Melbourne. pp. 14.1–14.15.

© Copyright 2006 Ian Wedde
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