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Inside Out

Last night was Museums Australia (SA)’s annual Panel event, which this year was on the theme Inside Out. The purpose of this theme was to look at how boundaries between the traditional “gatekeepers” of arts and culture were changing: bringing new types of art into museums; and taking museums’ collections into new types of settings and to new audiences. And of course, what are the implications of these changes?

Jaklyn Babington, the National Gallery’s Assistant Curator of International Prints and Drawings, talked about the new Space Invaders exhibition of street art. Street art encompasses a lot of different media beyond spray cans – there are stencils, paper cut-outs, stickers, even textiles. Jaklyn described how the boundaries between ‘street art’ and ‘public art’ are blurring, with many street artists working under two identities – their ‘street’ name when preserving their anonymity for legal reasons, and their real names when working in more conventional gallery settings. But this shifting of identities can cause problems with accessioning and crediting of work, particularly when street artists are used to staying under the radar for legal reasons. It can take a while to build trust.

Jaklyn and the Space Invaders exhibition (from the Australian)

Jaklyn also described how she has been working with street artists – whose work is inherently ephemeral – to translate their pieces into more robust media to meet the Gallery’s requirements (using archival paper, etc).

The process has had its challenges and detractors – the exhibition has polarised people, with some loving the fact the NGA has embraced this part of the arts culture, while others complaining that it is glorifying vandalism. There have also been some issues with the Gallery building being ‘tagged’ since the exhibition opened (supporting the Security Dept’s assertion that this kind of thing attracts the ‘wrong’ kind of people and will all end in tears), and some unconventional behaviour by artists (such as one getting naked and jumping into a water feature at the launch!).

Allison Russell, fresh from a Churchill Fellowship looking at Museums and Communities in the UK (documented in this excellent blog), spoke about Arts in Health: how museum collections are being used in healthcare settings. She spoke about how bringing collections into hospitals has a demonstrable impact on the recovery and wellbeing of patients. For instance the tactility of the objects, and the conversations around them, helps the memory of patients with dementia. Art can also help offset the cold and clinical nature of the surroundings.

Allison shared some poignant anecdotes: a patient who had suffered complete memory loss as the result of a nervous breakdown found the art on display at Flinders Medical Centre (Adelaide) helped her piece together her mind again. Allison also sat in on a session for Muslim women with profound disabilities at a museum in Leicester (UK).

While these types of interactions can prove utterly life-changing for some individuals, it can be hard to demonstrate and justify if the museum’s KPIs are based on attendance figures alone. Allison described the Generic Social Outcomes which have been developed in the UK to equip museums to measure these outcomes meaningfully. (These social outcomes are a companion to the Generic Learning Outcomes which were developed to embrace a more broad definition of learning than simply cognitive gain.)

Niki Vouis, Project Manager of Craftsouth, and Annalise Rees, artist in residence at SA Museum, gave their perspective on the partnerships between artists and the Museum which have been taking place for several years.

Niki Vouis talked about Inside SAM’s Place: the Laurosto collection which was staged at the Museum earlier this year. Inspired by the museum’s collection, local artists made a fictional collection of animals, artefacts and minerals of a 19th century explorer they called  “Sam Laurosto”. These objects were dispersed among the museum’s main collection, and visitors could follow the journey and exploits of the fictional Laurosto throughout the Museum’s permanent exhibitions.

One of the Laurosto collection's fictional creatures, by artists Tom Moore and Lauren Simeoni. Photo by Rachel Harris (from SA Museum Website)

Annalise spoke about the installation she has recently created: From my house to Antarctica. This work has drawn inspiration from the Museum’s Mawson collection and will involve students creating their own Antarctic adventure. Annalise hopes to be able to go to see Antarctica in the flesh sometime soon, to further advance her artistic inspiration.

Subsequent discussion was lively as the speakers and the audience explored some of the issues associated with unconventional collections and settings. How can we take museum staff and traditional audiences with us as we challenge conventions and boundaries? What are the implications for the cultural role of the museum as a source of “authority”? How do we balance depth of experience for a few, versus breadth of reach for the many?

I find the challenging of boundaries exciting, but even I’m still a bit conflicted. For instance I loved the concept of the Laurosto collection. In incorporating the art in with the main collections, I saw parallels with the Banksy vs the Bristol Museum exhibition, which took the UK by storm in the summer of 2009. But I’m also concerned about mixed messages – there is a lot of evidence to suggest that when people go to Natural History or Science museums, they aren’t expecting ‘art’ so therefore don’t really recognise it when they see it. Art in these settings tends to get taken literally, at face value. Does this matter if people don’t ‘get’ it? Maybe it doesn’t, but I do feel for the visitors that felt a bit cheated when they realised an object they were just marvelling at was fictional. And what of those visitors who didn’t realise at all? It makes me wonder if we need to make our intentions a bit clearer sometimes. Without, of course, resorting to big red arrows pointing at things saying ‘this is art’.

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Review: Beaconsfield Mine and Heritage Centre

Like many people, I doubt I would ever have heard of Beaconsfield had it not been for the mine collapse of Anzac Day 2006, which claimed the life of one miner and trapped another two underground. It took 14 days for rescuers to free the miners from nearly one kilometre below ground, while their families and the world’s media watched.

Brant Webb and Todd Russell emerge triumphunt after their rescue
Just another day at the 'office': the same shaft access on the day of my visit

Given the significance of this site in recent history, a trip to Beaconsfield was the field trip I chose to go on as part of the Interpretation Australia National Symposium. (I should say here that while I was aware of the Beaconsfield disaster at the time, I was living in the UK and it didn’t get the same blanket media coverage as it did locally. So I felt a sense of familiarity, but also a sense of distance compared to my fellow visitors who could recall a more immediate connection to the dramatic events as they unfolded.)

Beaconsfield Mine and Heritage Centre is distinctive in that there is both a historic and an operational gold mine right next to each other, separated only by high wire fences. While the Heritage Centre was operational before the infamous incident (as the Grubb Shaft Gold & Heritage Museum), in the wake of the tragedy a Federal grant was allocated to expand upon the site and rebrand the museum. Not surprisingly, visitor numbers have increased dramatically since the collapse due to the site’s notoriety (which probably counts as an example of Dark Tourism).

The old and the new: the head of the historic Grubb Shaft with the modern equivalent in the background

The Mine Rescue Exhibition

Not surprisingly, this is the drawcard of the site and the most powerful part of the visitor experience. There is a rich seam of content (pardon the pun): a dramatic storyline, emotionally compelling anecdotes and a narrative thread of human resilience and comraderie in the face of huge adversity.

The space is fairly dark and minimalist in design; greys punctuated by accents of yellow reminiscent of the colours of an industrial site. This bare-bones functional design works well with the content, letting the relatively few objects and sparse text come to the fore.

Overview of the Rescue exhibition area

For me the most memorable exhibit was the Interactive Tunnel. This is a crawlthrough which, part-way along, includes a section where you can stand up into a space reminiscent of the claustrophobic environment where the miners were trapped (the actual space they were trapped in was only about 1.5-2 cubic metres and too small to stand up in). The area is in semidarkness, surrounded by a cage holding back a mass of rocks. There is a soundscape of the creaking of rocks as the underground realm ‘breathes’. The thing that really completes it in my opinion is the fact that the hole you stand up through is just a little bit too small – feeling the sides of the hole pushing against your shoulders really enhances the sense of claustrophobia.

View of the interactive tunnel entrance from the mezzanine above

Interpretive text and images present the circumstances of the incident and a day-by-day account of the dramatic rescue, explaining the difficult circumstances of the rescue and how the men were finally reached. These people’s stories are presented minimally but powerfully:

This quote from Rex Johnson, the rescue co-ordinator, brought a tear to my eye

The other star objects are the overalls of the miners which show the tears from when they had to cut themselves free from rubble using stanley knives. (I hope those were the real overalls because I’d feel so cheated if they were mocked up!)

The thing that lets the exhibition down is that it seems a bit muddled in the way that it’s organised – several of us found ourselves reading panels titled “Day 6” without having seen anything about Days 1-5. Looking around the space again, I suspect that nearly all of us entered the exhibition backwards compared to what the designers presumably intended.

When you approach the exhibition entry, there are two possible points of entry to the space beyond. The one that looks the most direct and is the most visually attractive (it displays a colourful scarf over 2km long which was made by members of the public during the rescue vigil) is the one we went through, but looking back I think this was meant to be the conclusion to the experience. I’d contend that this is an example of a visitor flow which had a logic ‘in plan’ which didn’t quite translate to the physical reality and the other visual and spatial cues that visitors follow.*

The Entrance to the exhibition - the path on the left is the one we all took but I suspect this is the 'end' of the exhibition. (I don't think the agricultural machinery is usually there - another exhibit is having a refit - but this might have been another factor in our navigation)

I think the interpretive challenge with this exhibition is that it is actually telling two stories: that of the collapse and the subsequent ordeal of the trapped miners; and that of the rescue attempts and associated media frenzy above ground. I wonder if this exhibition might have worked better if these two stories were made more clearly separate, with visitors being told which ‘side’ of the story they were experiencing, perhaps with the two ‘meeting’ in the middle for the climactic story of the miners reaching the surface.

Another minor gripe – there was a wall of newspaper headlines showing press coverage of the rescue events. But I was disappointed that this seemed to include only Tasmanian papers, which to me felt a bit parochial. I would have liked to seen more about media coverage from further afield, given it was an event that attracted national and even international attention. However I appreciate that copyright constraints, project timescales, etc. might have made this a non-starter.

The Heritage Site

The rest of the site is dedicated to interpreting the ruins surrounding the old Grubb Shaft, and an area which is effectively a local history museum which doesn’t have a lot to do with the mine itself. It was interesting comparing notes on the level of detail of interpretation with some fellow field-trippers, many who were from national parks and so with little prior knowledge of industrial heritage.

A nice outdoor interactive where visitors can play 'workhorse'

Ideally, I think the non-mining content would be better presented at another site, to allow a more coherent storyline to come through and to preserve the sense of place of the actual mine.  But I can see on a practical level why the situation has arisen as it has (and there were some classics on display – such as a table of women’s magazines from the 1950s and 60s, as well as a typically 1960s documentary on the construction of the nearby Batman Bridge). I don’t think it helped that the first area you encounter after crossing the ‘paywall’ includes a lot of industrial equipment and collections which are not connected to mining (which confused a few of us at first).

The site is currently undergoing some further redevelopments, including a 3D immersive experience to interpret the gold mining process itself, which will fill an important gap in the current storyline of the site. I hope there is also the opportunity to address some of the ‘disconnects’ in the way the non-mining related spaces are presented as part of this process.

* The visual and spatial cues of an exhibition space, and how these affect the way people interact with exhibitions and their content, will be a major focus of my PhD research in Visitor Experience which I am starting in February next year. So expect more posts on topics such as this!

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Funding of Australian Museums & Heritage

I’m again having a closer look at the Australian Bureau of Statistics overview of Arts & Culture in Australia (which I initially referred to here).

Chapter 4 looks at funding of the Australian Cultural sector, which takes into account Government funding of inter alia, cultural heritage, performing arts, literature, broadcasting, multimedia.

I’ve looked in particular at the funding figures for “art museums”, “other museums and cultural heritage” and “environmental heritage”, which together would encompass museums, historic sites, national parks and so forth. The total amount of Government funding of these, across all three levels of Government, adds up to over $2.5 billion per annum:

Government funding of heritage (Source: ABS)

From FY2007-08 to 2008-09, total heritage funding at Federal level increased from $604.8 million to $729.8 million (a 21% increase), but this hasn’t been broken down by category (‘Heritage’ includes the categories listed above plus libraries and archives). They did say however, that it represented an 18% increase in funding per person for heritage.

The state-by-state breakdown of funding changes between 2007/08 and 2008/09 presents a far more complex picture:

Changes in state funding - figures from Table 4.3, ABS report

The ABS report shows figures from both years. I’ve re-resented the figures as a percentage change (percentages are based on the 2007/08 amount), and have coloured large (ie. >6%) increases in green, and large decreases in red. (Sorry this is all rather complicated!) But interesting – the rather modest changes in the bottom-line totals betray a far-from-uniform national picture.

In NSW (and to a lesser extent WA), it looks like significant funds have been taken from built heritage in order to fund increases to environmental heritage (which shows only a modest % increase because it’s a much larger pot to start with). Victoria, TAS and NT seem to have done more or less the opposite. And then in Qld and SA, there have been across-the-board increases.

Does anyone have the inside story of what’s going on here? I’m wondering whether large capital projects are skewing the figures in some instances, because they will artificially inflate the figures for a given year. Or are there other explanations?

Local government funding is similarly broken down, but there are several caveats associated with the data so I won’t elaborate here.

The final observation I’ll note about funding is the reported funding mix of museums:

Museums Income Sources (source: ABS)

Not surprisingly, some two thirds of income comes from Government sources, either Local, State or Federal. Although it’s not explicitly mentioned, the 24% figure is presumably income from ticket sales, retail, and so forth. Sponsorship and donations are a relatively minor part of the funding mix. No huge surprises there. The only cultural organisation to receive a significant amount of funding from sponsorship is ‘Performing arts festivals’, with this accounting for nearly one quarter of their total income.

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Who’s visiting?

I’ve just started having a look through Arts and Culture in Australia: a Statistical Overview, which has recently been put out by the Australian Bureau of Statistics. (Download PDF via this page). Now, the ABS is hardly known for its page-turners, but it’s got off to a promising start with some intriguing figures.

In the first section, there are some stats looking at attendance to cultural venues according to age group (% visiting in the past 12 months). I wanted to see if there were any patterns in these data, so I took the numbers and graphed them out:

Attendance rate by age, using figures from table 1.4 in ABS report

It’s a bit hard to see what’s going on here, besides the fact that the cinema is very popular with teens and declines steadily with age (and I don’t think I needed ABS data to tell me that!). So to get a closer look, I took the same data and graphed just the figures given for the cultural / heritage venues (Museums, Art Galleries, Zoos & Aquaria and Botanic Gardens):

Attendance by age, Cultural and Heritage sites only (source: ABS)

This graph is a little more illuminating. Interestingly, despite reports that their audiences have distinct differences, Museums and Art Galleries seem follow a very similar curve – i.e. roughly the same proportion and age of people are visiting. And both show fairly predictable dip in the 18-24 age range (a notoriously hard group to catch).

Zoos also show a similar-ish pattern, although at a higher level of visitation in the middle range. This peak at 25-34 & 35-44 age groups is also not surprising, given these would be the peak age of people taking their children to visit the zoo.

The one that does surprise me out of all of this is the curve for Botanic Gardens – from a similar baseline at age 15-17, the curve defies the 18-24 dip of the others, and reaches a steadier, more sustained plateau.

The meaning of this – who knows? I just made up these graphs with the figures given, and it may or may not be appropriate to re-present the raw figures in this way. So yes, I could be over simplifying, or on the other hand this could be an interesting pattern to investigate further. If the report sheds any further light on the question, I’ll let you know!

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MA 2010 Conference: Bits ‘n’ Pieces #3

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 . . .

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Re-presenting ‘The Lust Branch’

Don’t let the title fool you – this is yet another instalment in my series of posts from the MA National Conference. Allow me to explain . . .

The Conference was held at the University of Melbourne, which is also the site of the Grainger Museum. This museum, built in the 1930s, was established at the behest of Melbourne-born composer, arranger and pianist Percy Aldridge Grainger (1882 – 1961). Grainger created it as an autobiographical museum, documenting his life and influences through a collection of publications, correspondence, musical scores and a range of objects including experimental musical instruments.

There is a link to my current work here, hence the stand-alone post: while Grainger spent the vast majority of his life in Europe and the US, he was buried in Adelaide at West Terrace Cemetery, in the family plot of his Adelaide-born mother. Over the past few months I have been working on interpretive text for a self-guided heritage trail for the cemetery, and Grainger’s grave is one of the stops on the trail. His prolific, diverse and eccentric life have proved challenging to interpret in the context of a small interpretive sign comprising a mere 175 words!

The Grainger Museum has recently undergone a redevelopment, and I managed a quick look around during one of the conference lunch breaks. In addition, Brian Allison from the University presented a paper on the challenges presented by a particular section of the collection.

There was a box of items under lock and key, which Grainger had instructed was not to be opened until 10 years after his death. And so, in 1971, it was time for the curators to open the mysterious box to see what wisdom lay within. Brian said he would have liked to have been a fly on the wall that day. And how. What emerged was ‘The Lust Branch’ – a collection of writings, objects and photographs which graphically explored the darker aspects of Grainger’s sexuality.

To put it bluntly, Grainger was a sadomasochist. He photographed his flagellated body, set out detailed instructions for whipping, and left behind an extensive collection of whips, blood-soaked clothing and other home-made paraphernalia.

whips
A selection of whips from the Grainger museum

Grainger believed his sexual expression was inextricably linked with his artistic expression; thus his creative works could not be fully understood without exploring his darker passions. But this was not a story that early 1970s Melbourne was ready for. Consequently, the collection presented a curatorial headache and has been, in effect, ‘censored’ for the best part of 40 years.

As part of the museum redevelopment, the University decided it was high time to tackle this part of the collection. And while they initially set out to present it no-holds-barred, there were legitimate audience and legal concerns – some of the photographs are sufficiently graphic as to be illegal to put on public display; plus the University had to take into account their target audiences, not least the nearby Ladies’ College who use the museum as an important musical resource.

The resulting display consists of a graphic montage of some of the documents and photographs (not all of them are particularly confronting, but it’s by no means sugar-coated), opposite a case displaying a large collection of whips. It is presented discreetly without being hidden, and I think on balance it is well done and unlikely to cause a furore. Indeed, by 21st century standards, Grainger’s views on racial purity (also covered in the museum) are arguably more controversial than his sexual predilections!

But none of these more controversial elements are presented in a way that overshadows or detracts from Grainger’s talent and achievements in other fields. The majority of the museum is all about the music.

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MA 2010 Conference: Bits ‘n’ Pieces #2

A few more notes, comments and observations from the MA2010 conference (see the first chapter here):

  • Audiences are hungry for new perspectives: Kate Spinks from the Victoria Police Museum gave a presentation on their new exhibition “Ambush”, about the Kelly gang’s attack on a group of policemen at Stringybark Creek. This exhibition interprets the incident from the perspective of the police, drawing upon the recollections of the one policeman who survived the attack. Kate reported that visitors welcomed these new perspectives and points of view – they know that the romanticised tales of the Kelly gang are not the whole story, and are keen to hear the other side.
  • Customer service benchmarks are continually moving: Melbourne Museum has recently started selling tickets online for major exhibitions like Pompeii (2009) and Titanic (2010). The proportion of online presales is steadily increasing, as are customer expectations regarding the extent and quality of the online purchasing experience. Many people now view the ability to buy tickets online, etc. as a basic level of service, not an added extra.
  • Watch your language: when visitors use words like ‘interactive’, they don’t necessarily mean what we think. They might mean ‘immersive’ or the ability to get up close to an exhibit. We can’t assume we know the meaning of the terminology that visitors use in interviews. Drawing from her PhD research, Dr Tiina Roppola from the University of Canberra gave out some useful tips for interviewing visitors and drawing out from them what they mean in their own words.
  • Museum by popular demand: Lindsay Richardson from the 6th Floor Museum in Dallas, TX presented at the conference as part of the MA Historians’ network’s global curator exchange. The ‘6th Floor’ refers to the floor of the Texas Book Depository where Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated President Kennedy. A museum arose at the assassination site ‘by accident’ – originally the municipality wanted to gloss over this chapter of its history, but the public wouldn’t let that happen. Thus the museum opened in 1989, originally intended just as a temporary exhibition to placate the thousands of visitors who made the pilgrimage to the site. However a huge visitor spike (500,000 people) in the year after the ‘JFK’ movie (1990-1991) was the catalyst for the museum gradually gaining permanence and building up a collection pertaining to the assassination’s aftermath (items relating to the assassination itself are more problematic, given they are criminal evidence).
  • “Dumb blondes of the art world”: David McFadden, Director of the Museum of Art and Design, said this is how craft was often dismissed by the fine arts fraternity. But he described the ‘blur zone’, where the hierarchies and boundaries between art, craft and design are being blurred and eliminated. (Incidentally, David said that 48% of his museum’s collection is by female artists, in comparison to other art museums where the percentage barely gets above single figures . . .)

These tidbits just keep leaping out of my conference notebook – more to come in another installation . . .

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Exhibition Critique: “Screenworlds”

One of my favourite sessions from last week’s MA National Conference (see also here) was the ‘Exhibition Critique’ session. This was a thought-provoking peer review of an exhibition, bringing together designers, curators and a panel of expert reviewers to discuss the exhibition from the perspective of both the design challenges and the resulting visitor experience.

The subject of this year’s critique was Screenworlds, the permanent exhibition at ACMI which opened in September 2009.

"Emergence" section of Screenworlds (from ACMI's website)

I’d visited this exhibition not long after it opened, albeit a quick streak through at the tail end of a lightning trip to Melbourne. So I was familiar with the exhibition, but nearly 12 months down the track, was relying on the lasting impressions I had rather than any immediate recollections (probably not a bad starting point really).

The session kicked off with the ACMI team, led by Michael Parry, giving a brief overview of the exhibition’s history, processes and challenges, along with some visitor feedback they’d collected. (This bit was done while the exhibit reviewers were out of the room, so that it could not affect their critiques later in the session). Michael elaborated on some of this at a later conference session, and I’ll summarise the salient points from both sessions here:

  • ACMI had a difficult first few years, tied in with some of the early teething problems of Federation Square. ACMI hosted numerous temporary exhibitions, but there was no consistent offer. So Screenworlds was unusual in that it was an exhibition conceived to solve a problem.
  • The Design and Content Development processes were conducted in parallel. The initial intention of this was to save time, however this turned out not to be the case: it often entailed considerable design re-iterations, and sometimes design decisions made early in the process created unforeseen constraints in the way the emerging content could be presented. On the other hand, the parallel process created oppourtunities and exhibits that would not have emerged if all the content decisions had been made before the designers were called in. (This resonates with my experience of contractual tensions in exhibition development process – from a Project Manager’s point of view, the more certainty there is in the project at the outset, the better. You want to limit re-designs and the time, cost and hassle they entail. But on the other hand, steering too hard down that route can stifle creative opportunities.) As Michael said, the only way around this is for all team members (in-house and consultants) to enter the process with their eyes open and ready to navigate the bumps along the road (presumably with contractual and fee structures that allow this).
  • By definition, the content was overwhelmingly screen-based (there are apparently some 250 screens across the exhibition!). But they couldn’t use all the content they wanted, often due to format and copyright constraints.
  • The content and the slightly awkwardly-shaped angular cloverleaf exhibition space both lent themselves to the exhibition being divided into three parts:
    Emergence (history of the development of different screen based media);
    Voices (how the moving image shaped Australia, and how Australians shaped the moving image – from a cultural rather than a production-process perspective);
    Sensation (the most interactive and immersive area, looking at commonalities between media. I think this is also the bit that includes the games lab).
  • The low ceiling and hard surfaces were softened using curved surfaces; these were made of bamboo and other renewable materials.
  • In the year since opening, some 340,000 people have visited the exhibition, roughly half from outside Melbourne. 24% of these visitors spend longer than 1.5 hours in the exhibition and there is a fair bit of repeat visitation. From visitor surveys, the main complaints they have are density and audio tracks interfering with one another (9% of visitors). The team were aware that this was going to be an issue, but one which was somewhat inherent given the content. The design solution was a self-aware compromise on this front.

At this stage, our reviewers entered the room. They were: Bryon Cunningham (Cunningham Martyn Design), Bliss Jensen (Museum Victoria) and Tim Fisher (Curator at Victorian Arts Centre). They each presented their thoughts upon visiting the exhibition.

Bryon liked the simple graphic map which was handed at the entrance – it clearly set out the space and he thought he would have found navigation difficult without it. He found the opening section (Emergence) overwhelming – a cacophony of activity and noise. But he liked to escape from it into the microcinemas (the white domes in the pictures above). He also thought there was a lot of text. Design-wise, he liked the lighting and curved shapes which he said brought welcome relief from the ubiquitous angles of Federation Square. He made an analogy to a department store – with piles of content to choose from, and mirrors to create an illusion of space.

Bliss was less confronted by the noise – in fact it drew her in and kept her moving from post to post. She liked the Australian perspective in an international context (care had been taken by the curatorial to make this Australian content neither parochial nor jingoistic). She observed that there was so much to take in on a first visit, and it took a while to focus on one thing. She started off looking methodically at each section, but soon lost stamina. Bliss also commented on some of the exhibition’s ergonomics – some of the tabletop viewfinders were positioned very low, and she wondered if the target age of the content and the ergonomic range of the exhibit were compatible in all instances (e.g. more adult-targeted content in low-positioned viewfinders). Compared to Bryon, Bliss was less taken with the physical form of the design, not feeling it was all that consistent with the curatorial messages. (Bryon apparently took the forms at face value, whereas Bliss seemingly wanted them to represent something meaningful).

Tim started out by acknowledging that as a permanent exhibition, this was ‘crying out’ to be done. But again, his critique was in the sheer density of content – was there too much stuff in this exhibition? There was much well-researched and written content, but it was cluttered and he didn’t feel there was any clear direction about where to go first. For Tim, museum fatigue set in from the outset – the sheer overwhelming density causing his attention span to wane “against my will”.

All three reviewers also spent time observing other visitors to the exhibition (indeed, Bryon prefaced his review by asking whether as exhibition ‘experts’, we are in the right place to review an exhibition compared to the general public). They all noticed generational differences in the way visitors used the exhibition – younger visitors seemed more confident in negotiating the visual and aural density (children of the information age?), and in any case, bee-lined for the games area more or less straight away.

The session then broadened out into a more open discussion between the ACMI team, the reviewers and the rest of the audience. Apparently an earlier iteration of the ‘Emergence’ exhibition had even more content. There was colour-coding of different themes in the ‘Emergence’ area, although this detail seemed to be lost on some of the reviewers (I’m starting to have my suspicions about the effectiveness of colour-coding as a visual signpost for the majority of visitors).

Over the weekend, I had another quick trip through the exhibition (cut short as it was near closing time; plus I was already a bit exhibitioned-out, fresh from the Tim Burton exhibition). Again the visual density of ‘Emergence’ struck me, but it seemed less intimidating the second time round. I don’t think I went into the microcinemas the first time (maybe they were all busy) but found them to be useful respite and a good way of delving into more detailed content.

In one of the lower-hanging microcinemas, I observed a kid who was probably no older than three confidently navigating the touchscreen interface. I wonder if our understanding of visitors in exhibitions can keep pace with the ever-increasing savvy of said visitors?

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MA 2010 Conference: Bits ‘n’ Pieces #1

Last week was the 2010 Museums Australia National Conference – “Interesting times for Collections” – hosted by Museums Australia (Victoria) at the University of Melbourne.

About 600 delegates from across Australia, along with a few international visitors, came to hear from an impressive list of speakers including a considerable number of international keynotes.

My first instalment of highlights, notes and observations (which will be in no particular order):

  • Museums shouldn’t be afraid to have an opinion: Professor Richard Sandell from the University of Leicester opened proceedings with a keynote on the social role of museums from a human rights perspective. He drew upon case studies from the UK and USA showing how museums can play an important role in raising community awareness of marginalised perspectives including sensitive topics surrounding religion, sexuality and disability.

    One case study clearly demonstrated that there was no such thing as a ‘neutral’ position – a single text panel in the Walt Whitman interpretive center in USA attracted simultanous protests from both gay rights groups and the Christian community, on the one hand for ‘erasing history’ and on the other for ‘implied sinfulness’. Prof. Sandell said that such controversy was not something that museums should shy away from. He went further, arguing that it was inappropriate for museums to duck controversial issues by ‘presenting all sides and letting visitors make up their minds’. In this there was an interesting parallel to Amanda Lohrey’s criticism of a lack of curatorial courage in exhibition authorship (as mentioned in a previous post).

  • Does Australia need a museum diet? At the other end of the conference, during the closing plenaries, museum consultant Kylie Winkworth presented a challenging paper about the ‘political and policy vacuum’ which she believes is creating a sustainability crisis for smaller and regional museums. She argued that large scale capital developments in big cities are starving smaller museums of much-needed funds for improving care of and access to collections. She also warned that collections were being amassed haphazardly and unsustainably, with no serious discussion in the sector of deacessioning as the obvious corollary to sustainable collections development.

    The audience gasped when Ms Winkworth presented figures showing that Australia has 1 museum per 7,500 people, whereas in the UK and US it is 24,000 and US 17,500 respectively. There was some debate on the #ma2010conf Twitter feed as to whether such a per capita comparison was helpful, but nonetheless it was a brave and provocative presentation. I thought there was also a lot of truth to her assertion that political leaders tend to prefer something shiny and new, with all the associated ribbon-cutting and prestige, rather than adequately fund that which already exists – but then is hardly an exclusively Australian problem.

  • Exhibition ‘hardware’ vs ‘software’: observing a similar phenomenon, Susanna Siu from the Leisure and Cultural Services in Hong Kong confirmed that there is roughly 1 museum opening every 3 days in China at the moment. She described the current focus of museum development to be more on ‘hardware’ (i.e. statement buildings by celebrity architects) more than ‘software’ (which I took to mean collections, exhibitions and programs). I was reminded of the UK’s Millennium building boom in the late ’90s / early ’00s. How the China experience will pan out in the long run will be one to watch.

Over the coming few days I’ll go through my notes and add further posts – some sessions warrant a post all of their own so much more to come!

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Museums as "Unstable Organisations"

This is how Glenn Lowry, Director of New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), described his institution at a recent talk at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI).

Titled Museums in the 21st Century, Lowry presents some interesting ideas about what it means to be a modern art museum. That’s where the ‘unstable bit’ comes in. MoMA considers itself as an organisation under perpetual change: every 10-12 years or so, the building undergoes some major reconstruction, frequently in parallel with a total reconception of how the museum should operate.

To cease doing this, Lowry contends, would mean to cease being a Modern Art museum and begin being something else. They have to continually change and adapt in response to changes in the art that they collect, display and interpret.

One example: at some point in the past, the MoMA building was laid out as a linear sequence of joining galleries, like beads on a string. This works great for nice neat linear stories showing chronological developments in art history. But modern art often doesn’t fall very neatly into chronological or stylistic boxes, so the string of linear galleries was an uncomfortable fit. The current layout is more open, apparently allowing more organic juxtaposition of ideas and narratives.

There are also practical reasons to make radical changes to the building – some of the art that MoMA is procuring simply can’t fit in the current building, either due to scale or gallery configurations. But this doesn’t stop MoMA collecting what it thinks is important – it changes its building to accommodate (I marvel at an organisation that has the resources to do this!).

Lowry also made some interesting observations about how they have been changing the way that audiences interact with the art and each other in their spaces. He mentioned the MoMA’s PS1 site, an exhibitions and events space which attracts a far more youthful and diverse audience than the average MoMA audience. In fact, in recent years the overall audience demographic has changed from being 55+ and predominantly female, to around 40 with a nearly even gender split.

Yet another reason why I have to try and get to New York!