What Is a Museum's Job?
S. B. Julian
Museums are part of the communications landscape, and deserve as much as other media to be zones of free expression. “Free” means unconstrained by ideological agendas. Museums have ancient heritage as homes of the nine classical Muses, and in our era Clio, Muse of History, is perhaps the most contentious. Clio is a storyteller, but people don’t agree about which stories she is telling. History scholars uncover stories in records, graves and buildings and museum technicians display them in exhibits, but ethnic groups increasingly wish to re-package their own back-stories.
This reduces public trust in museums, as impartial venues.
The theme of International Museums Day in 2022 was “The Future of Museums; Recover and Imagine”. To the general public outside of museum industry, that title is ambiguous. What are they aiming to recover from? The Canadian Museums Association conference 2022 took as its title “Dismantling Foundations”, which seems counterintuitive for a history museum. Is it appropriate to dismantle history in the name of the preoccupations of the present?
The job of a museum is to collect and display artifacts in a subject area. Can it best do that by presenting artifacts in a way that lets patrons draw their own conclusions about their significance, or should exhibits come freighted with interpretation? In other words, should they show, or tell?
Two museums located but a couple of miles apart in Winnipeg illustrate the difference in these approaches. One is “Dalnavert”, the home once lived in by Hugh Macdonald, son of Prime Minister John A. Macdonald, which has been saved from demolition and preserved as it looked in Hugh’s time. The other is the large and imposing Canadian Museum of Human Rights, founded in 2008.
Visitors to Dalnavert wander from room to room soaking up atmosphere and drawing their own conclusions about life in 19th century Manitoba. We see the functions which artifacts on display had in the lives of the inhabitants as if we had just dropped in for a cup of tea with the family.
By contrast, the Human Rights Museum in Winnipeg bristles with signage and instructional bullet points that announce what various events in history “mean”. The captions are prescriptive to the edge of propaganda.
The Canadian Museums Association intends, under the influence of Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, to disconnect itself from “the colonial project”. This plan was adopted by the provincial museum of BC when it decided to dismantle its well-loved life-sized colonial “Old Town”, to widespread protest from tourists and citizens who grew up imaginatively experiencing the past while wandering through it. (It has since, under public pressure, partially re-opened it. But damage is done: the public no longer trusts the museum.)
In the Fraser Valley there used to be a “Pioneer Village” preserved in situ, which consisted of original narrow dirt roads, log houses, stables and shops (the grocer, the ironmonger, the blacksmith and so on). Children visiting this site could run about on a summer day just as children must have done a hundred years earlier in that same spot, smelling the same scent of grass under native evergreens, kicking the same pebbles, hearing the same birdsong. It was an entrancing site to visit, a remnant of a vanished world. Visitors didn’t need anyone to tell them what to think about it. They felt what life had been like there. The BC Provincial Museum's "Old Town" offered something of the same feeling, but some groups didn’t approve of the history the display depicted. Others consider its removal an example of literal de-platforming -- of censorship. As soon as curators decide to re-tell stories in response to demands of an ethnic or interest group, Clio has left the building.
In his fascinating 2009 book Dry Storeroom No. 1, Richard Fortey describes various early eccentric curators at Britain’s Natural History Museum. These scholarly experts were amusingly obsessed with departmental secrecy and territoriality. By contrast, today’s curators seem more like bureaucrats than subject experts, and less interested in research than in pleasing the public, being ideologically correct, and keeping their funding. Unfortunately not all the public follow the same ideology, and revenue from visitor-ship is down in most museums.
A history museum can be hi-jacked by activists with little interest in disinterested scholarship. Groups want to see their own ethnic history presented where they feel it hasn’t been in the past, but shouldn’t best practices of presentation still apply: display, don’t preach? Don’t tell patrons what to think. Show them a maid’s room, not an empty plinth.
Canada’s Museum of Human Rights in Winnipeg falls short of that in a gallery of life-size statues of the heroes of various equal rights movements. These included Aung San Sun Kyi, jailed heroine of Myanmar’s democracy movement and later the de-facto leader of its government. After the last military coup when she was again arrested, the West abandoned her due to her response to the Rohingya refugee crisis. The Museum of Human Rights went beyond displaying information about this to passing judgment, by banishing Aung San Sun Kyi’s statue from the hall of heroes, literally de-platforming her.
A museum thus nudges visitors’ attitudes in a chosen direction. J. L. Granatstein (a former Director of the Canadian War Museum and head of its Advisory Council, 2001 - 2006) was already worrying about the trend toward “correct” thought in his 1998 book Who Killed Canadian History? Schools, he wrote then, “scarcely teach history, so busy are they fighting racism”, while the media “use history only to search for villainy”. Already in the 1990's the very study of History in Canadian universities was being called “harassment", and museums too launched war against wrong-thought.
The British Museum opened in 1759 for “all studious and curious persons”, but in 1865 also established a Secretum, a “Cabinet of Obscene Objects” which only some patrons were allowed to view. Are we today creating another “secretum” – a Cabinet of Obscene Ideas? Colonialism, mis-genderism, ablism, stigmatization and racism are, according to some, today’s obscenities.
Museums follow an International Council of Museums’ Code of Ethics (https://icom.museum). In the U.S., the National Coalition Against Censorship (https://ncac.org) guides museums in “Best Practices For Managing Controversy”, reminding them of the “museum’s mission as a forum for the exploration of diverse ideas”. Do most of the world's museums share that mission? Can they retain diversity while censoring perceived inequity?
One of the "recover and imagine" techniques the CMA favours is increased digitalization of display. This is meant to expand access but much research shows that the human brain receives digital and virtual information differently than it does print, and physical display. Immersive physical exhibits increase perspective, while virtual exhibits can shape and narrow patrons' viewpoints.
Are museums becoming distorted by Grievance Culture then, with a mission to “decolonize”? Is it their job to veil “discredited” history, or to reveal all history? The question is complicated by the fact that museums are considered commercial tourist attractions as much as arenas of knowledge. Some consider them only marginally relevant, even effete, their very existence “colonialist”. Even some working inside them see them that way, if the conference theme of "dismantling foundations" is any indication.
The world’s first museum was the storied Mouseion (“seat of the muses”) of Alexandria, founded in 323 BCE and burned down by Christian and then by Muslim zealots. Museum collections are still destroyed by zealotry and war, but maybe even more are suppressed by ideological warfare.
The museum-haunter who worries about it (and the volunteer or donor) can always voice concerns to a museum’s Board of Directors. Some institutions (such as the Canadian Human Rights Museum) display a visitors’ feedback board, but one senses a certain performativity in the consultation.
For patrons looking for Clio the Muse of History, she will be with the house-maid in the attic at Dalnavert. Like the late house-maid she is invisible, but the imaginative visitor intuits her presence. Let’s insist that even in these identitarian times, museum managers and technicians maintain the "show not tell" standard. It may help them reach their funding needs.
