Reflections on a visit to MONA

Visiting MONA was my birthday present. An odd choice maybe, but when I clocked up another year back in February I couldn’t think of anything I wanted. But a chance to visit (arguably) Australia’s most talked about museum? I couldn’t pass that up. So in lieu of a gift, my family helped fund a trip to Hobart, which I finally got around to doing earlier this month (I also saw the recently refurbished Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, more on which in a future post). 

So . . . what is there write about a place that has already attracted hundreds of column inches already (including some penned by yours truly)?

MONA’s owner/founder David Walsh on the cover of the February 2013 issue of The Monthly.

The problem with visiting such a well-known place is that the answer to the question “so what did you think of it??” is so often “pretty much as I was expecting”. You’ve heard so much, there’s not much room for surprises. That’s still better than when you visit a place and don’t think it lives up to the hype. For me this wasn’t the case, although what I saw vindicated my decision to visit solo (my partner is less than impressed by most contemporary art and I think the whole thing would have just infuriated him).

The other thing is that I think I’m getting really bad at being just a visitor and experiencing museums for what they are. My visits have become “meta-visits”: rather than being able to just be in the moment, part of me is always mentally standing back – observing how things are laid out, watching what others were doing, deconstructing my own responses. Occupational hazard I suppose.

To get to MONA I took the ferry, which I think is the usual way for tourists to get there. And this is where the MONA experience starts. There is a dedicated terminal and ferry, the MONA Roma, which is decked out in the sort of irreverent fashion you’d expect given MONA’s “brand”:

On board the MONA ferry. Graffiti art adorns the stairs while model cows and sheep (which double as seating) adorn the deck.
On board the MONA ferry. Graffiti art adorns the stairs while model cows and sheep (which double as seating) adorn the deck.

So the ferry doubles as a mode of transport and a (pre-) entrance statement – something akin to what Falk and Dierking would call an “advance organiser”. And while I didn’t realise it at the time, I think this pre-experience had an impact on how I approached the museum visit itself. But more on that later.

Upon arrival we were escorted up the stairs from the dock and into the museum, heading back down again to start the visit at B3 level (three levels underground). Here we were given our “O” devices to guide us on our visit (more on those below). In the distance I could hear some periodic pumping and hissing which added to a sense of anticipation / apprehension (it turned out to be Julius Popp’s Bit.Fall which spells out words in falling water droplets). I turned a corner and found myself heading down a long corridor, lined with red velvet drapes that made me feel like I was walking into a scene from Twin Peaks. Heading out of this area I went up some industrial-type steel stairs that intersect at odd angles across the void, exhibits in view in semi-darkness above and below. Here the feel is more like the video game Half-Life (pop-culture references came to mind readily for some reason!).

Mid-way along this level the corridor narrows, with small galleries off to each side. One of these works is Brigita Ozolins’ Kryptos – an eerie-feeling room-within-a-room-within-a room that you meander into like a labyrinth.

Brigita Ozolins work Kryptos

This work brought out the environmental psychologist in me – the darkness, confined space and the lighting effects creating the sense of a floating floor all worked together to give me a real sense of trepidation about walking in (even as my rational side was telling me there was no real reason to fear). It was interesting to see how this environment was able to elicit such a visceral response in me (there I go, meta-visiting again . . .) Shortly after leaving this space, the corridor opened out into a wide open space covering two levels. After such a sense of confinement, this sense of openness an relative light (it was still pretty dark) provided a sense of welcome relief. I wonder if it’s just me, or if this orchestration of emotion was a deliberate move on the part of the architect.

The open space featuring Sidney Nolan’s “snake” along the wall

From Driver to Passenger – going along for the ride

I’ve written a couple of times this year about how some visitors like to know where they are at in a museum’s spatial and content narrative, whereas others are happy to go with the flow. I’m usually in the former but at MONA, I was happy to surrender myself to the experience more than I usually do. That raises the question – why?

I had a chance to give this a bit of thought during a workshop held as part of the Museums Australia conference in Canberra last week. I’ll flesh this out in more detail in a later post, but I started to think about how we “cast” ourselves in a visitor experience – do we like to be in control (a driver) or surrender to the experience (a passenger)?*

Reflecting on my own experiences, I’ve decided that in most cases I like to drive. But in this instance, I decided to be a passenger. I think that was partly because of some specific circumstances, and partly because my expectations of MONA were different from those of a “typical” museum.

Although they have visitor maps, I didn’t actually pick one up upon entry (they escorted us, the first ferry arrivals of the day, in a way that we bypassed the main ticket desk which is where they are located). So I only had the “O” device to guide me, and while this does have a map function, I didn’t feel overly worried about using it. I only picked up a map towards the end of my visit, just to double-check there wasn’t anything I had inadvertently missed.

As I said before, I’m also wondering if the ferry ride had a role to play in all this, by providing a temporal separation between the first sense of arrival (embarking on the ferry) and getting into the museum experience proper. Once you were on the ferry, all the logistics of worrying about whether you were in the right place, had the right ticket, etc. etc were behind you and you were – literally – cast in the role of passenger. Did this make it easier for me to be a passenger during the visit itself?

The “O”

Anyone who has read anything about MONA will know that they have no labels. Instead, you are given a device called the “O”, which is essentially an ipod touch made location-aware by wifi transmitters installed around the museum. I already knew a bit about how this worked (having researched it for an article I wrote back in 2011), so it was interesting to have a go and see how it worked in practice. Generally speaking it worked quite well, and it does offer quite a different experience to that with standard labels.

As you move around the museum, the O lists works which are near to you and you can select them to read a standard label (these are titled “artwank”) or more atypical musings  (titled “gonzo” or “ideas”). You are also invited to “love” or “hate” works and when you do so, you find out how many other visitors felt the same way. Not all labels are accompanied by audio but some works were pieced with music which I thought was an interesting idea, and one which had me lingering longer at some works than I otherwise would have.

A couple of things about using the O though – while each work had an identifying thumbnail image, sometimes it took a while to find the corresponding piece of work because of scale – the work you were looking for might be a tiny thing in a peephole, or a giant installation hanging overhead. Also (and this might just be me) I found the O gave me an obsession with “collecting” all the works in a particular area before moving on – I wanted to mark everything as “seen” in a way I wouldn’t have worried about with just regular labels.

If you enter your email address, you get sent a summary of your visit as recorded by the O. This is what I was sent.
If you enter your email address, you get sent a summary of your visit as recorded by the O. This is a screengrab of mine, which shows my visit in impressive detail. It’s also interesting to see how the visit unfolded over time. Oh how I would love to get hold of all of MONA’s visitor data!!

Technically speaking, the O worked well overall – in some instances the location got a little confused, but this was easily fixed by pressing a reset button. The only thing is, I think my device didn’t record all of my visit. Going through the summary, I noticed a number of works that the website says I “missed”, when I know I did in fact visit it. Looking at what’s been missed, I wonder if I accidentally reset something when I nipped into the loo because it doesn’t seem to have recorded anything I visited after that. Oh well.

*Extending the metaphor, you might end up being a “backseat driver” when an experience affords you less control than you’d like.

Museum Moments: Toulouse-Lautrec and the Waitress

I was in Canberra for the weekend and had some free time late on Saturday morning. With no real fixed agenda, I found myself drifting towards the National Gallery of Australia carpark (mainly because I knew how to get there and it’s a convenient location for a few institutions). Almost on a whim I decided to buy a ticket for the Toulouse-Lautrec: Paris and the Moulin Rouge exhibition. While obvious in hindsight, I hadn’t thought about how crowded a blockbuster exhibition would be at 11.30am on a Saturday until I was in and amidst the throng. Crowds might not lend themselves to a contemplative experience, but they offer a ripe opportunity for people watching.

One of the first things I noticed was an interesting example in crowd “training”. In the first gallery, I leaned toward a painting to get a closer look and felt something brushing against my shin. I looked down to see a low barrier set about 50cm off the wall – the clear message was to keep my distance! So I stepped back and continued along the wall, maintaining that distance as I turned the corner. About halfway along the next wall, I noticed there was no longer a physical barrier at shin level, but I still instinctively had kept the same 50cm distance from the gallery wall. And here’s the interesting thing – everyone else had as well! I don’t know if this was a deliberate tactic by the gallery or just a coincidence, but I don’t remember seeing those barriers in the rest of the exhibit and nonetheless visitors kept a reasonably constant distance from the works throughout.

The exhibition was broadly chronological with some sub-themes exploring how Toulouse-Lautrec came to be interested in Parisian street life and brothels. The work that captured my attention the most was not the famous posters (they were as expected), but rather this work about halfway through the exhibition depicting Jeanne Wenz as a waitress:

At the Bastille, Jeanne Wenz, 1887, oil on canvas (National Gallery of Art, Washington DC)

I found this work totally captivating in the flesh (the online images don’t quite convey the light and texture of the original). It’s hard to put my finger on why – perhaps it’s her direct, piercing gaze or the slightly enigmatic expression. Nonetheless this work was the stand-out piece of the exhibition for me (giving my novice, untutored-in-art-history perspective). This triggered my curiosity regarding how other visitors perceived it. And as I was looking at it I overheard another woman discussing the work with her companion, speculating about the woman’s strange half-smile and the likelihood of her sore feet at the end of a hard shift. I made a mental note to come back and have another look once I saw the rest of the exhibition.

Coming back, I sat on a bench near the work and watched. It did appear to be a popular work, with most people stopping at it and reading the label, and some people seemingly drawn to it from across the room as I was. It was a brief and highly unsystematic study though, and I was not able to compare its relative attracting and holding power to the rest of the exhibition.

While I was watching visitors come and go, oblivious to this other visitor in their midst, I noticed that I too was being watched. I had obviously sparked the interest of the security guard positioned near the work and for whom my seat was in the direct line of view. He watched me with a look of slightly amused curiosity. I wonder what he thought I was up to? Did something about me give the game away that I somehow wasn’t an ‘ordinary’ visitor? I guess I’ll never know, but I shot him an enigmatic half smile of my own as I walked on.

 

 

US Museum App Review 3: History Museums

This series started off with art museums and then moved on to natural history. Now, for the third and final review of apps I used in the US, here are a couple of history museum apps.

New York Historical Society

This museum is only a block away from AMNH and offers a welcome relief from the throngs of holiday crowds there. It was one of the less high-profile museums on my itinerary, but one I made a point of visiting as I had the opportunity to meet someone from the Society at the VSA conference.

The app was designed to accompany the New York and the Nation Exhibition, a new permanent exhibition and the first space you encounter on the ground floor. I liked this exhibition, which covered the history of New York and its broader influence on the US. It combined historical/archaeological objects, art pieces and technology in a clean and simple (but not too minimalist) style. Unfortunately they did not allow photography so I won’t be able to share my favourites in any detail.

App home page
App home page

The app features additional content such as videos and interviews that added an extra layer to the experience. For instance, while the ceiling structure over the ticketing desk was unmistakably Haringesque*, the app revealed that it was an actual part of Haring’s Pop Shop from the 1980s (I’m not sure if this information was duplicated elsewhere – if it is I didn’t see it but then again I was using the app as my main guide through this exhibition).

The app lists exhibit by title and there also is a map (which something has happened to since I visited so I can’t put up a decent screen grab). I remember having a bit of trouble using the map at times, as the icons were quite large in relation to the map, so sometimes it was hard to tell if you were in the right place (that could be just my map reading skills). Besides that I thought the app worked well. It often had more detail than I wanted to read or look at but I think that’s OK so long as you can find what you want to look at easily enough.

Interpretation of a multi-part sculpture which is positioned right at the entrance. At first glance, it looks very much like a typical 'grand old men' sculpture with marble busts. Closer inspection reveals something more sinister, in the form of slave shackles and badges. The interview with the artist reveals the intent was to show two sides to 'heroic' figures such as Washington - as freedom fighters on the one hand, slave owners on the other.
Interpretation of a multi-part sculpture which is positioned right at the entrance. At first glance, it looks very much like a typical ‘grand old men’ sculpture with marble busts. Closer inspection reveals something more sinister, in the form of slave shackles and badges. The interview with the artist reveals the intent was to show two sides to ‘heroic’ figures such as Washington – as freedom fighters on the one hand, slave owners on the other. I wish I was able to take a picture to show in better detail.

 

Access American Stories

This app is an interesting idea, although I have to confess I really struggled with it in practice. It’s a bilingual (English and Spanish) “crowdsourced” companion to the American Stories exhibition at the Smithsonian Museum of American History. So it means you can contribute as well as hear the voices of others. It’s also intended to enhance the experience of visitors with low vision.

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You can choose whose voices you wish to listen to, and what they will be talking about:

Select or deselect the voices you wish to hear.
Select or deselect the voices you wish to hear.

You could then choose the gallery section:

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So far, so good. However I found that when you selected a particular setting, off it went, and there was no way of easily corresponding what you were listening to to what you were looking at (the gallery sections above all contain numerous exhibits).  It seems to leap straight into a description of something and you’re desperately looking around to see what it might correspond to. It felt a bit like listening to an audio guide that was stuck on shuffle play.

I might have got the hang of it had I persevered – but I was just trying to get my bearings of the exhibition in general and (like all my museum visits in DC) I was on a pretty tight schedule to see as much as possible. I think this exhibition was pretty new when I visited (late July this year) so I’d be interested to hear if there have been any evaluations of the exhibition and the app.

*Assuming you are familiar with Keith Haring of course. Visiting a Haring exhibition in the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, in 1996 was one of my foundational museum experiences. 

US Museum App Review 2: AMNH

Last month I posted about some of the art museum apps I used while in the US back in August. Now I’ll follow up with a couple of apps I used at the American Museum of Natural History.

AMNH Explorer

The AMNH is quite a labyrinth and I found it tricky to navigate. It spans five levels over a large historic building plus a more recent extension (Rose Center and Hayden Planetarium).

One of the three (very similar-looking) stairwells in the AMNH's main building. Signage directs visitors to the special exhibitions and is supplemented by adhesive floor graphics that guide visitors to special exhibits as well as the cafe.
One of the three (very similar-looking) stairwells in the AMNH’s main building. Signage directs visitors to the special exhibitions and is supplemented by adhesive floor graphics that guide visitors to special exhibits as well as the cafe.

Visitor routing around the planetarium means you can’t easily retrace your steps if you find you’ve missed something (it once took me a couple of attempts to re-locate a gallery as I could not find a way to get back down a floor once I’d gone ‘up’ an escalator with no apparent ‘down’ counterpart). The main building has three main stairways and sometimes special exhibitions (entered through pre-paid timed tickets only) blocked logical pathways if you were trying to tackle the museum fairly systematically floor-by-floor (as I was).

This is where the Explorer apps came in – I used both the paper map and the app to assist my navigation of the complex space, as well as to ensure I hadn’t missed anything noteworthy.

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Home page of the AMNH Explorer app

One feature I liked about the Explorer app was the selection of tailored tours:

Special-interest tours of AMNH. I didn't follow any of these specifically, but did use the 'highlights' tour to double check I hadn't missed any key exhibits.
Special-interest tours of AMNH. I didn’t follow any of these specifically, but did use the ‘highlights’ tour to double check I hadn’t missed any key exhibits.

You could also select specific exhibits:

Search for exhibits by popularity, location, or alphabetically.
Search for exhibits by popularity, location, or alphabetically.
Featured exhibits included brief information and the ability to share, bookmark or mark as 'visited'.
Featured exhibits included brief information and the ability to share, bookmark or mark as ‘visited’.

In theory, the app also had the capacity to give you directions to a highlighted exhibit from anywhere inside the museum.  I say “in theory” because I didn’t have much luck getting this to work in practice – the app struggled to find my location*, and so defaulted back to giving me directions from the main entrance. Sometimes it was tricky to relate these directions back to where you actually were, particularly in the higher/deeper reaches of the museum. But I like the idea, even if the execution was less than perfect.

Beyond Planet Earth

This app was an accompaniment to a specific special exhibition that was showing while I was at AMNH. It’s pitched as an Augmented Reality app, although I don’t think I really grasped that that was the point at the time. The idea seemed to be to find and scan the 11 icons scattered around the exhibition (a good tactic to encourage looking at everything!). You could collect the set and then share them via social media.

Instructions for the app were under four headings: Explore - Collect - Learn - Share
Instructions for the app were under four headings: Explore – Collect – Learn – Share

When you scanned an icon a little animation came up on your screen, but calling them Augmented Reality is drawing a bit of a long bow if you ask me. . . But then maybe I just missed the point? Also some of them were a bit hard to scan properly in the low exhibit lighting so I became preoccupied by the task itself rather than the outcome.

An example of one of the info screens
An example of one of the info screens.

I’m pretty sure I wasn’t part of the target audience for this app; it seemed to be a game designed for kids rather than for older visitors with pretty good existing knowledge of the subject matter^ (which is fair enough!). I still enjoyed the ‘collecting’ challenge even if there wasn’t really much of a pay off beyond that for me.

In any case, any app was bound to be upstaged by the hero of the hour: the Mars Curiosity Rover, whose safe landing had been announced only a couple of days before my visit.

A full scale model of Mars Curiosity. The people give a sense of scale - it was far bigger than I imagined.
A full scale model of Mars Curiosity. The people give a sense of scale – it was far bigger than I imagined.

 

* I wonder if this was a technical glitch because I was using wi-fi rather than 3G.

^ I have a fond attachment to space exhibits: my first major exhibition project was the National Space Centre in Leicester, and I worked on a couple of exhibitions for them subsequently.

US Museum App Review: Barnes and MoMA

I made a point of trying out different museum smartphone apps during my US trip this July-August, and I’ll post some general comments and reviews of my experience using them over the next few weeks, in no particular order.

But first, a big golden rule for museum apps: No wifi, no point. OK slight hyperbole there – but it’s essential for international tourists and a huge convenience for everyone else. I had mobile data well and truly disabled to avoid any nasty roaming charges upon my return. If there wasn’t reliable wifi to enable me to download and use the app easily, I wasn’t going to use it. Even locals may have concerns about exceeding their data limits, and I’m starting to think that free wifi is becoming one of those facilities that people will increasingly expect.

Barnes Collection, Philadelphia

The great thing about this free app is that it duplicated content that was in the audio guide (pre-loaded on an ipod touch that you could hire for $5). And an audioguide was essential as there was no other labelling besides printed catalogues in each room which just listed the titles and artist. (And these didn’t exactly advertise their presence as the picture below attests. But I digress . . . )

Catalogue guides were set in little wells in the seat in each gallery – but, being a very similar colour to the walls, it took me a while to realise these existed, particularly since the galleries were busy and seats often occupied.

Artworks at the Barnes are displayed as ‘ensembles’ – groupings of works that Barnes had used as a pedagogical tool, with juxtapositions intended to show similarities or contrasts in colour, line, form, etc.

Interpretation of individual ensembles, as well as an explanation of the ensemble concept.

There was also interpretation of individual works, colour coded by room to aid orientation.

Interpretation of individual works

The app also featured maps to aid orientation and there was a tailored tour for families.

The app offers a choice between Masterworks and a Family Tour. The Masterworks was available in English, French and Spanish.

The app was intuitive to use and had a good level of detail, although I didn’t always listen to the audio descriptions to the end (not that they’re overly long at about 1-2 minutes, but I was just trying to get a flavour and hadn’t planned to spend more than a couple of hours or so at the museum). There was nothing that was really innovative or remarkable about its features, but this no-gimmicks approach means it did what it said on the box. There is nothing wrong with a functional and straightforward guide app.

MoMA

The MoMA is more of a combination of a brochure and guide in app form. There is a calendar feature that shows what is on today or on a date of your choosing, which would be more useful for locals than one-off visitors like me.

The app offers a few different ways of exploring the collection – by location, by audioguide number, or by searching for a particular work alphabetically. Detailed visual descriptions are provided for the benefit visually impaired visitors (or those seeking an in-depth looking experience).
The app allows you to search the collection by artist, title, or keyword. There is also an alphabetical list of art terms (that I’ve only just discovered but is a great way of decoding some of the specialist language you see in art labels).

The MoMA app is also offered in an impressive range of languages:

The MoMA app had many more features than I had the time, need or inclination to use during my visit (including podcasts and links to YouTube and further iTunes content). To be honest I can’t recall how much I used this app during my visit (months on it’s all a bit of a blur) compared to the standard paper guide map – I suspect not much but just because I was pretty museumed out by this stage of my trip.

Viewed through a lens

It’s probably not hyperbole to say that digital photography has completely transformed our relationship with images. We are prodigious producers of visual imagery as much as we are voracious consumers of them. Today photos can be taken on a whim – no longer do we have to choose carefully what to photograph so we don’t run out of film. Nor do we have to wait to finish the roll and have the photos processed. Thanks to cameraphones, we pretty much have a camera handy at all times, and are able to share them online in an instant.

As a general rule, photography was not allowed in the special exhibitions at the American museums I visited (as opposed to the permanent galleries). The notable exception (which is where this was snapped) was at an Art of Video Games exhibition at the Smithsonian Museum of American Art. I would have thought IP and copyright (the standard rationale behind ‘no photographs’ rules) would have been a greater issue with game design than with most art exhibitions. Or perhaps this was a concession to the likely target audience of this exhibition? Make of it what you will . . .

The ubiquitous nature of photography has inevitably influenced museum visits and visitor behaviour. When I was in the US I noticed that most of the larger institutions permitted photography in most galleries, although there are still some seemingly arbitrary rules about this (as I have noted previously and in the image caption above).

Observing what visitors photograph is thus an expanding area of enquiry. It gives a different insight into what visitors think is interesting, important, or otherwise worth documenting about their visit (see Susan Cross’ blog post on holiday snappers). I know of at least one PhD project that is using visitor photography as a primary data source, and I’ve also heard of museums mining Flickr to see what pictures of their museum people are posting online.

People line up to photograph Dorothy’s red shoes from the 1939 Wizard of Oz movie at the Smithsonian Museum of American History.
The Hope Diamond attracts the camera-toting crowds at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History.
Sometimes the camera can go where the eyes cannot – notice the person on the right holding their camera aloft to get a glimpse of Van Gogh’s “Starry Night” through the crowds (at MoMA).

As well as noting what objects are the photographic ‘superstars’ in a museum, it’s also interesting to look at where (and how) people include themselves in the picture.

Two teenage girls take a ‘selfie’ at MoMA. As far as I can tell, they were posing in front of a window (presumably with an interesting view) rather than any specific object.
At first I thought it was odd that this woman was listening to an audiotour with her back to the artwork . . . until I realised she was posing for a photo!
People posing to be photographed next to the Moai at the American Museum of Natural History. I have since found out that the Moai was a character in the movie “Night at the Museum”. Whether the object’s popularity as a photo opp has changed as a result of this I can only speculate . . .

It seems that posing next to the objects is an important way for visitors to reaffirm to themselves and to others that yes, they were there.

A mother takes a photo of two very young children in front of the Egyptian tomb at the Met. They might be too young to remember this visit, but later they will be able to look back and see they were there. Will it help jog any early, formative memories in them I wonder?

Where it is permitted, photography clearly has a marked impact on visitor behaviour and the visitor experience. What are the implications? Does photographing the objects (and being photographed next to them) become more important than experiencing the object first hand? Do photographers get priority over non-photographers in getting unfettered visual access to objects? (Social norms dictate we get out of the way of a person lining up to take a photo in a way we don’t when someone is simply just looking.) What are the overall impacts and does it matter?

MASA2012 – it’s a wrap!

Last week was the Museums Australia National Conference in Adelaide. As one of the organisers, there is a sense of relief in being able to say that the week went off without any major hitches.

I have to say that I was pleased with the overall result – in particular we had put some considerable thought and care into the way that we combined the keynote speakers in the program, and from where I was standing this went well (even better than expected in some instances!). We also tried some different session formats, inevitably with some being more successful than others. You learn, you refine, you improve.

However, because I was so close to proceedings, it’s a little hard to give a critical reflection on the presentations and discussions that took place. So it’s a good thing there are plenty of other people who can do that for me! I was impressed by the number of delegates who contributed to the life of the conference through social media, particularly via the conference’s #masa2012 Twitter hashtag. Looking at how the Twitter activity has matured over the past three Museums Australia conferences is a good case study in how more and more people are starting to ‘get’ social media.

So rather than a comprehensive conference wrap from me, I’ll compile links to the tweets, blogs and photostreams of others. I hope this will give a good picture of the week’s proceedings. Here’s what I’ve found so far, and let me know if I’ve missed something out:

  • Tweets

There was good activity and conversations on Twitter. Suse Cairns (known in the twitterverse as @shineslike) kindly agreed to compile Storify of the tweets to the #masa2012 hashtag. It was great to see a lot of different people using twitter to contribute and converse (in previous years it has either been slow to get going, or otherwise dominated by a handful of accounts which may have discouraged newcomers from contributing).

  • Blogs

Thornypebble’s Pond: Day 1, Day 2, Day 3 and Conference Presentation UPDATE: this very interesting and thoughtful piece about the use of twitter at conferences.

Museum Geek: Dispatch and Initial Takeaways from MA National Conference

Digital Nico: Mobile Engagement and some other scribbles

Pete Hoban: Day 1 (am), Day 1 (pm), Day 2, Day 3 (plenary), Day 3 (workshops), Rural and Regional Plenary.

  •  Photos

Museums Australia SA Photostream of the Welcome Ceremony, Conference Day One, Day Two, Governor’s Reception, Day Three, Conference Dinner and Regional Remote and Community Museums day.

Photoset of the conference from Adelaide Archivist.

  • Presentation Slides

There are plans afoot to share as many conference slides as possible via a conference Slideshare page – I’ll update with further details as and when this takes shape. I also presented a paper (with Jenny Parsons), a snapshot (just me), and a workshop (with Katherine Sutcliffe) during the conference’s parallel sessions. These presentations have already been uploaded to Slideshare:

 

I was also interviewed by one of the delegates for a podcast, listening to which made me realise how fast I can talk sometimes! (I come in at about 1:30)

Compare and Contrast: Art and Anthropology

Both The Met and the American Museum of Natural History have displays of objects from the Pacific region. What I found interesting were the similarities and differences between the two display approaches – in one museum the objects are presented as works of ‘art’, whereas in the other they are presented as ‘artefacts’ of culture.

An overview of the Oceania gallery in The Met.
The Margaret Mead Hall of Pacific Peoples in AMNH

The AMNH exhibition looks considerably older than the display at the Met, and the one in the Met is definitely lighter, more airy and spacious – both in respect to the space itself and the density of objects on display. But there are similarities in the colour palette used in both with the dominance of a light, slightly grey blue (ignoring the red-earth inspired colour scheme of the Australian display to the right of the AMNH picture above).

AMNH display cases – a more traditional approach
Displays at the Met – more open and with a greater attention to the aesthetic.

Of the art museums I visited in the United States, The Met was the only one to have dedicated any appreciable space to art from the Pacific region. It turned out there was a reason for this. The Met had acquired the collection of the erstwhile “Museum of Primitive Art” that had been founded by Nelson Rockefeller in association with Rene d’Harnoncourt in 1957. (The museum closed in 1974). These items were part of this so-called “primitive art” collection, along with items from Africa and the Americas. This term betrays a cultural legacy that gave me pause to ponder.

Plaque on display at The Met
Coincidentally, I’ve been reading about Rene d’Harnoncourt’s influence on exhibition design in a recent article[1]. He was director of MoMA from 1949-1967, and in the 1940s was responsible for taking new approaches to display of art, in particular items from the Pacific. He introduced varied colour schemes, theatrical lighting and a decluttered approach to case layouts in a way that both borrowed from and influenced shop window displays. His work was influential in positioning such objects as works of art, rather than just ‘ethnographic curiosities’. He was also interested in creating a market for Pacific art.

Meanwhile, over on the other side of Central Park, the AMNH takes a more anthropological view of its collections. Rather than works of art, the same sorts of objects are shown as representative of a culture. In these displays, the purpose is more to show the ‘archetype’ objects rather than the more pure aesthetic approach of the art museum, even if the objects are pretty similar to untrained eyes such as mine.

AMNH grapples with its own historical legacies in the way that it depicts ‘other’ (i.e., non-Western) cultures. Some of the displays seemed anachronistic in their depictions and terminology. They are presumably products of their time and I can’t imagine displays such as these being conceived today.

A human diorama of ‘pygmies’ in the AMNH

There was something about this that range a vague bell at the time, and later I realised I was recalling Bal’s 1992 critique [2] of the AMNH’s ethnographic displays and the historic cultural assumptions upon which they were based. While that paper is now two decades old, it looks like many of the displays described in that paper haven’t changed radically in the intervening period. It was interesting to re-read the article, now having some knowledge of the spaces it describes.

[1]  Foster, R. J. (2012). Art/Artefact/Commodity: Installation design and the exhibition of Oceanic things at two New York museums in the 1940s. The Australian Journal of Anthropology, 23(2), 129–157. doi:10.1111/j.1757-6547.2012.00178.x

[2] Bal, M. (1992). Telling , Showing , Showing Off. Critical Inquiry, 18(3), 556–594.

Is your signage “crowd proof”?

Yes, yes, I know – I visited some of America’s most popular museums at the height of summer. If there was one thing I was going to have to contend with, it was crowds.

Crowds at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, attempt to catch a glimpse of ‘The Starry Night’ by Van Gogh

For those museums that are not at the top of every summer holidaymaker’s ‘must see’ list, the issue of too many people probably sounds like a happy problem to have. But not necessarily. The summer high season may well bring in valuable income, but all that crowding and queuing can lead to a less-than-satisfactory visitor experience – not to mention the maintenance costs associated with having hundreds of thousands of feet and fingers interacting with your building and your exhibits.

Now I should point out that I’m not very good with crowds and I’m an impatient queuer. Being short means I find it hard to navigate large numbers of people because my head is at shoulder height of many of the people around me. This physical characteristic combines with the psychological uncertainty that makes waiting in line torture at the best of times. In these circumstances I guess it was inevitable that some museums would have me in a twitching, toe tapping mess before I even crossed the lobby. At some point I decided to put this enforced waiting time to good use, and notice how well site signage was working under these very trying conditions.

Multiple desks, multiple lines, multiple signs

I arrived at the American Museum of Natural History just before opening time, and a fair few number of people had already begun to congregate on the front steps. The first bottleneck was having to clear security (In more or less every American museum there was security screening of some sort as you entered. An unfortunate sign of the times.). The next step was then to work out which ticket line was the right one to join. AMNH is one of the venues in the New York City Pass scheme (excellent value btw), which is meant to give you express entry although is sufficiently popular that in many cases it just means you get to join a shorter queue rather than walking right in. Security guards directed us to the right, and immediately to the right was a desk. But this wasn’t the right desk (still not quite sure what that desk was but the people behind it gave us vague onward directions), and it was a bit of a challenge to find where the right queue was and where it started.

The lobby of AMNH shortly after opening time. The green banner shows where the front of the line is, but where is the back?

As it turned out, the back of the queue was marked, clearly enough, by one of those standard signs you fit to tensabarriers. The problem is, there were sufficient number of people that this sign was obscured by people the majority of the time.

Ah – the back of the queue! It took a while for this sign to become visible among the throngs.

It really needed to be positioned a lot further back into the lobby than it was, or be reinforced by additional signage closer to the entrance. I encountered this issue on more than one occasion, where tensabarrier signs were positioned in such a way that they were obscured by people as the crowd overflowed beyond the anticipated area.

Now as I said at the outset, I was visiting in peak periods when visitor management strategies were being tested to their limit. So I don’t want to come across as too nit-picky about this (and I don’t mean to single out AMNH either). However, with that number of people arriving all at once, even the slightest bit of ambiguity or confusion is likely to make the bottlenecks even worse. So for me it was a reminder that our signage strategies and visitor sight lines should be tested under all circumstances – what makes sense in the relatively calm periods when we often plan signage may be far less obvious at peak times.

 

 

So many (more) museums!

I’m now back from my whirlwind tour of the US, sorting through hundreds of photos taken in around 30 museums in Raleigh, Washington DC, Philadelphia and New York. I visited an average of two museums a day so now have considerable first-hand experience in museum fatigue!

Over the coming weeks I’ll post about some of the general observations I made over the course of these visits, as well as some reviews of selected sites and exhibitions. In the meantime, the following is a list of the museums and heritage sites I visited in Philadelphia and New York (the Washington ones are here) – drop me a line if you have any questions about any of these sites in particular:

Philadelphia

New York