The last two decades have witnessed an explosion in the development of new public and private museums throughout the world. If this is surprising it is only because, for much of the last 50 years, museums have been regarded by many scholars and cultural critics as, if not extinct, then certainly archaic institutions far from the cutting edge of cultural innovation. This judgment is being proved wrong across the globe as innovative and distinctive museums are staking out new territory for themselves as vital, dynamic, public and civic cultural institutions. Nowhere is this most striking than in the South Pacific where large, new or significantly expanded public museums and cultural centres have opened since the 1990s, including the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, the National Museum of Australia, the Melbourne Museum, Australian Centre for the Moving Image, the Museum of Sydney, the Gab Titui Cultural Centre in the Torres Strait, the Centre Culturel Tjibaou and the Vanuatu Cultural Centre. Many more museums in that region have undertaken major renovations.
South Pacific Museums: Experiments in culture brings together a collection of outstanding analysis of these museums by cultural, museum and architectural critics, and historians. A series of snapshots introduces the reader to key museums in the region while the essays explore these museum developments in the broadest possible terms. The museums under analysis are part of the complex field of heritage, where national economies meet global tourism, where cities brand themselves, where indigeneity articulates with colonialism, where exhibitionary technologies and pedagogies meet entertainment, where histories are fought over, where local identities intersect with academic and popular knowledge, where objects and provenance are displayed and contested, where remembering and forgetting dance their endless dance.
Our key metaphor in this collection is to consider museums as experiments in culture. Many of our contributors have taken a lead from Tony Bennett’s essay here on museums as ‘civic laboratories’. Bennett suggests that museums can be thought of as cultural assemblages – institutions that bring together people and expertise, artefacts, texts and architecture, all of which are organised in particular ways. Thus museums place visitors in particular relationships to objects in ways that make real ‘prehistory’ or community or art. This perspective is particularly useful for analysing museums in a state of flux or museums as places in which ‘culture’ can be made and remade in different ways. So, for example, many of the contributions to this collection are interested in exploring how national or indigenous interests are experimenting with museum collections that were first put together for entirely different and often antithetical purposes. As Bennett has indicated elsewhere (Bennett 2004), it is an approach that can be taken to museums devoted to natural history, technology or art, but here, in the main, our focus is on historical and cultural museums.
The metaphor – museums as experiments in culture – is our way into how these museums can be understood as exemplars of what Chris Healy and Kylie Message (2004) call the ambiguous ‘new museum’ phenomenon. In other words, we want to make sense of these museums as self-consciously new institutions created in the midst of major political, economic and social transformations. Recent worldwide museum developments are, in part, local cultural responses to globalised markets and industries. Not unlike the ways in which a state will build or upgrade transport infrastructure, museums are being renovated so as to produce a better fit between national or city cultural infrastructure and emerging needs. States expect publicly funded museums to play their role in national or regional economies, whether as centrepieces in the reinvigoration of formerly industrial areas as tourist and leisure precincts, or as attempts to re-fashion entire regional or national economies (Witcomb 2003; Kirschenblatt-Gimblett 1998). From Albert Dock in Liverpool or the Guggenheim in Bilbao to the Powerhouse and Darling Harbour in Sydney, Federation Square in Melbourne, Te Papa in New Zealand or the Centre Culturel Tjibaou in New Caledonia, museums have become important icons of new and emerging consumer cultures. Rather than a repository for dinosaurs or archaically dinosaur-like, museums have actually become signs of ‘the new’. You need one if your nation is having a facelift or strutting the catwalk of the international tourist.
At the same time, a very different set of pressures have shaped these museums in the South Pacific. In particular, a half-century of decolonisation, the emergence of postcolonial nations and the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s have all contributed to new museological practices. Erstwhile handmaidens of colony or empire needed to be reborn as new demands were formulated by the politics of self-determination and identity. Museums needed to be attentive to a whole new class of social relationships, to recognise difference and the effects of power, to acknowledge the differing historical experiences of people according to their race, class and gender. Firmly embedded within the principles of the new museology, all of these museums model new approaches to the relations between museums and communities (Karp 1992), including reflexive curatorial strategies aware of the politics of identity, particularly those resulting from the colonial encounter. Informed by developments in the new humanities, museums began to produce a museological practice that was more theoretically and politically aware of itself. Museums began to recognise that there was a politics to their work and to make choices as to what they wanted those politics to be. As both Peter Vergo (1989) and Stephen Weil (1990) have put it, rather than asking how, museologists began to ask why.
These demands have placed extraordinary pressures on these museums: to engage with popular media, to represent the entirety of history and culture, to be socially inclusive, and to speak to all peoples at the same time while adequately representing both the diversity and singularity of a nation, region or city. The result was a museological practice that, in historical and cultural museums at least, attempted to contextualise objects differently, to address the legacies of history in the contemporary moment and to recognise the very different needs brought by different people to the museum. The difficulties of doing so have not gone undocumented. Sometimes, the tensions between these competing interests have resulted in cultural experiments that go to the heart of contemporary cultural and political debate. Throughout the late 1980s and 1990s there have been moments of deep contestation as major national institutions around the world have attempted to reinterpret the representation of the national past through their efforts at reinterpreting their collections. What these contestations indicate is something about the tension between the state and its desire for a consensual, celebratory representation of the nation and the notion that museums, as educational institutions, have a social and moral responsibility to help the public understand the contexts for cultural, social and political difference within the nation. Fracas such as those that erupted around the Enola Gay and The West as America exhibitions at the Smithsonian institutions, the Into the Heart of Africa exhibition at the Royal Ontario Museum and the new exhibitions at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich are all examples of this tension. What they show are the difficulties involved in maintaining museums as civic institutions removed from political society (Karp 1992).
All of these tensions are evident in new museums in the South Pacific, as they are in the rest of the world. But it is our contention that recent museological practices in this part of the world have a particular salience and relevance, which is both comparable with postcolonial nations such as Canada and the United States and unique. Some of these museums carry the weight of their institutional histories and the histories of their collections no less than their European or North American counterparts. Others, such as the Centre Culturel Tjibaou, carry different historical burdens. In other words, they were born as part of the new museology movement and represent the newer forms of investment by governments in museums. It is also here that the pressures of history are most keenly felt as the clashes between coloniser and colonised, indigenous and settler, reverberate continuously in the present. All museums in the South Pacific have had to engage with the past, particularly the colonial past. In Australia and New Zealand, museums have been charged with the task of representing late twentieth and early twenty-first century forms of nationhood and of creating organisational and exhibitionary forms that contribute to the political process known as ‘reconciliation’. In former colonies such as New Caledonia, Vanuatu and East Timor, there are the challenges of much more recent and violent decolonisation. With different museological histories behind them, these new nations are clearly and creatively experimenting with the museum form that might be appropriate to different needs. As a consequence, it is here perhaps that the new museology takes on its clearest contours. Museums in the South Pacific could perhaps be seen as the most advanced flowering of the new museology, taking risks others have not been prepared to take. They present an interesting moment in the history of the museum, representing not the moment of their birth (Bennett 1995) as perhaps their rebirth or their reinvention into something new.
The museums analysed in this book reflect all of these tensions and issues. While each contribution stands of its own, in many cases they unravel multiple issues manifest within the one museum. Nevertheless, we have sought to group them to give a sense of some of the key themes across the South Pacific region. The first grouping of essays in ‘New Museums’ introduces three different museums in distinctive national contexts – Te Papa, the Centre Culturel Tjibaou and the National Museum of Australia – and includes Bennett’s ‘Civic laboratories’ essay. All of these essays grapple with the role of the museum in the nation at particular historical moments under specific political pressures. The second grouping of essays, ‘New Knowledges’, document some of the practices and exhibitions at the point of tension between indigenous and non-indigenous interests in the museum. At the risk of sounding too confident, there is evidence that museums, in their attempt to accommodate to indigenous epistemologies and belief systems are themselves becoming indigenised – not only in terms of their architecture and the ways in which this reflects attempts to represent and enable indigenous cultural practices but also in their ways of working. In the third and final grouping, ‘New Experiences’, our authors take us to some of the key ways in which these museums are engaged in producing that most ineffable of cultural phenomena – experience. Whether through the particular design strategies discussed by Macarthur and Stead or the evocation or ‘spirits’ in Ross Gibson’s closing essay, these contributions get to the ways in which these museums are engaging audiences anew and become significant sites that place us in the world.
Finally, we need to be clear that in exploring what we’ve called ‘new museums’ as experiments in culture, we are not interested in rehearsing old clichés or disabling antinomies:
‘Look’, he would say, ‘at the museum of the future. The Russians are already stocking their museums, not with sculptures or ceramics, nor with copies in fibreglass or plaster, but with these constructions of light. Everything can be everywhere, our culture can be, is, world wide… with modern technology, mere possession of the relics of the past is of little importance’ (Byatt 1990, 386).
A few years ago, The New Yorker recently featured an article on Ellen Futter, the newly appointed president of the American Museum of Natural History (Traub 1995). Futter had been hired as the executive officer to prepare the museum for the millennium but, according to the journalist James Traub, her appointment and the ‘brave new museum’ she was proposing had generated some anxiety. Although the article is ostensibly a profile piece, it is the tension between a new museum and an old museum that gives the discussion a sense of drama. Traub begins the article by recalling Salinger’s elegy to the American Museum of Natural History as a place where Holden Caulfield would retreat from the confusion of the world:
The best thing… in that museum was that everything always stayed right where it was. Nobody’d move. You could go there a hundred thousand times, and that Eskimo would still be just finishing catching those two fish, the birds would still be on their way south, the deer would still be drinking out of that waterhole… The only thing that would be different would be you (Salinger 1958).
Traub uses this passage to evoke some of the ‘Proustian sort of feeling’, and the ‘persistence of the archaic that evokes nostalgia’, which he suggests are crucial aspects of why people love the museum. These evocations are important because Traub wants to capture some of the tension that attended Fuller’s efforts to transform the Museum of Natural History from an institution of ‘dowdy respectability’ into one directed to a mass public – ‘the kind of place… where Holden Caulfield would not feel at home’. To this end Traub draws a theatrical contrast between those who want the museum to function as an ‘engaged, vital place’ and those who regard the museum as a ‘cherished sepulchre’. Eventually, this tension is resolved. Futter seems certain to transform the museum – in part through a 90-million-dollar reconstruction of the Hayden Planetarium and the building of a Biodiversity Centre – into a museum without walls that mounts exhibitions on AIDS and designs computer software to explain fossils on cladistic principles. But the American Museum of Natural History will also continue to be a research institution upholding (some of) the virtues of traditions, virtues perhaps best characterised for both Futter and Traub by the lu luminous gorilla group on display in Arkeley Hall – an exhibit that the new chief executive has no intention of changing.
While the mock drama of this journalistic piece was precipitated by renovations at the American Museum of Natural History – renovations that seem minor in comparison to many of the new museums and redevelopments discussed here – readers familiar with museums will notice the use of a series of familiar tropes in relation to some of the antagonisms within their institutions over the last 50 years. Call the disputes what you will – between traditionalists and innovators, between those who are research-centred and those who are audience-centred, between modernisers and visionaries, between those who fetishise the object and those enamoured with the optical-fibre-delivered, virtual multimedia total-body experience. These characterisations are clichés, cartoon-like in their simplicity. Nevertheless there are many instances in which these stark alternatives have been mobilised in efforts to reform museum practices or resist their reformation (as indeed they have been used in relation to other institutions) – either you stand fixed and ossified or you join a journey to a brave new future. Read against the grain, this story suggests that in moments of transformation, such as the renovations at the American Museum of Natural History and the recent flowering of new museums in the South Pacific, museums are open-ended experiments in culture.
Bennett, Tony. 1995. The birth of the museum: History, theory, politics. London: Routledge.
Bennett, Tony. 2004. Pasts beyond memory: Evolution, museums, colonialism. London: Routledge.
Byatt, A. S. 1990. Possession. London: Chatto and Windus.
Karp, Ivan. 1992. ‘Introduction: Museums and communities; The politics of public culture’. In Museums and communities: The politics of public culture, edited by Karp, Ivan; Mullen Kreamer, Christine; Lavine, Steven D. Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press.
Kirschenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara. 1998. Destination culture: Tourism, museums, and heritage. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Message, Kylie; Healy, Chris. 2004. ‘A symptomatic museum: The new, the NMA and the culture wars’. Borderlands 3 (3). Available from: http://www.borderlandsejournal.adelaide.edu.au/ vol3no3_2004/messagehealy_ symptom.htm.
Salinger, J. D. 1958. The catcher in the rye. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Traub, James. 1995. ‘Shake them bones’. The New Yorker (13 March).
Vergo, Peter, editor. 1989. The new museology. London: Reaktion Books.
Weil, Stephen, E. 1990. ‘The proper business of the museum: Ideas or things?’ In Rethinking the museum and other meditations. Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press.
Witcomb, Andrea. 2003. Re-imagining the museum: Beyond the mausoleum. London: Routledge.
Cite this chapter as: Healy, Chris; Witcomb, Andrea. 2006. ‘Experiments in culture: An introduction’. South Pacific Museums, edited by Healy, Chris; Witcomb, Andrea. Monash University ePress: Melbourne. pp. 1.1–1.5.
© Copyright 2006 Chris Healy and Andrea Witcomb
All rights reserved. Apart from any uses permitted by Australia’s Copyright Act 1968, no part of this book may be reproduced by any process without prior written permission of the copyright owners. The fact that this book is published online does not mean that any part of it can be reproduced without first obtaining written permission: copyright laws do still apply. Inquiries should be directed to the publisher, Monash University ePress: http://www.epress.monash.edu/contacts.html.