My final list of musings. . .
- Museum History: Museums Victoria Director J Patrick Greene presented a quick history of natural history exhibitions from the 19th century to the present day. Developments have reflected the times: in the 1960s, the advent of wildlife documentaries made people think that exhibitions would be soon redundant, and many collections were locked away and even destroyed. Then in the 1970s, increased environmental awareness gave natural history collections a new importance and social relevance. From the 1990s, advances in technology have transformed Natural History exhibitions (as with exhibitions in general).
Another thought-provoking history of exhibitions was presented by Eureka Henrich, who is currently looking at trends in exhibitions presenting migration history over the past 30 years. Exhibitions inevitably reflect the cultural context in which they are developed – they are a product of their time – and thus can themselves be used as a historical resource. I found this idea intriguing, and can see it as a fertile territory for further studies.
- Verbs versus nouns: Stephen Heppell from Heppell.net has already inspired a few post-conference blog posts, (see here and here) so I won’t repeat them here. But I did really like his idea of being defined more by our verbs (i.e. what we do) than our nouns (i.e. what we are).
- Design in all dimensions: Tim Rolfe from MV Studios (Museum Victoria’s exhibition design arm) described some of their newer exhibitions that allow visitors to get closer to objects and see them from different angles – from above and below as well as from beside. I liked this idea of making use of the full three-dimensions of an exhibition space – often in the design stages, we’re constantly looking at the spaces ‘in plan’ and it’s easy to forget about the possibilities of the vertical dimension.
I’ll close my series of MA2010 conference posts with a quotation from James Morton of the Scottish Transgender Alliance which came via Richard Sandell:
The boundaries need to be pushed . . . or they simply don’t move.
Also, a special thanks to MA Vic for staging the conference. It was great to see so many interesting presentations, catch up with colleagues and meet new people – either face to face or virtually via the Twitter stream. Let’s keep the conversation going . . .