Museums - fact, fakes and fiction
Museums - facts, fakes and fiction
Julian Spalding has a few interesting things to say along the lines that museums pedal authenticity but looking into the history of many museum objects shows that they are on a continuum from - fact to fake
Julian Spalding 'The Poetic Museum: Reviving Historic Collections ' Prestel Publishing Ltd 2002
Take for example the Cutty Sark, it seems it sustains a major fire and still somehow remains genuine (because I believe it has a steel frame which is intact, while the timber work was and is often replaced). In the case of the Old Operating Theatre Museum, the Operating Theatre's shell is original, the standings are replicas, and the furniture is genuine but from other hospitals and are in a way set dressing.
So the idea that museum's embody true authenticity is not as clear cut as you might think. Despite this it is something that the Museum Curator cleaves too as the foundations upon which to repel all claims that money spent on a museum could better be spent elsewhere.
The debate on Fact v Fiction was warmed up when the Dennis Severs house in Spitalfields was opened up. Here was a genuine Georgian House which had been bedecked with a mixture of genuine, reproduction, fake and set dressing to look like a lived in Georgian House. It was visited only as part of a guided tour, in which the house keeper showed the visitor around as if the original Georgian inhabitants had just recently left the House - there was food still on plates, recently snuffed candles etc.
It was clearly a theatrical experience but how much of a museum experience was it? It partly depended upon the feeling that Severs must be a Georgian fanatic and so this spoke to an attempt to make the evening as authentic as possible. But I'm not sure everyone would have cared about that - they were there for the theatre.
Dennis Severs House became a forerunner of site specific theatre - Athena Vahla did a site specific Dance Project at the Old Operating Theatre Museum and Punchdrunk did their epic Masque of the Red Death in Battersea. The former a performance responding to an authentic space and the latter creating an entirely illusionary space where effect is of paramount importance and authenticity only one means towards that effect.
So fiction and Museum can go very well together. Fiction does not need the Museum to achieve the effect, as the Red Death shows, but fiction and theatricality can gain from being performed in an historical space. The advantage for the Museum is that it opens up another audience for the Museum. The 15 - 35 year olds are very difficult to get into museums and maybe fiction and theatre and opening in the evening is the way forward.
Recently, I visited the Sutton Hoo exhibition curated by the National Trust in Suffolk. The introductory film which explains the facts about Sutton hoo is combined with some rather stunning Anglo-Saxon poetry. I sat up and thought this stuff is marvellous why have I not been using it for my lectures. I asked and discovered it was pastiche - well done but written in the modern era for the exhibition. I was horrified, not by its inclusion but by its lack of attribution.
At the Museum of London in the Prehistoric Gallery there are short quotes saying something like
'we sat around the fireside, feeling the cold wind'
Underneath they are attributed to a named individual 'Fred Blogs' 1999. I happened to recognise one of the names as a London archaeologist and again I did not object to their use but my attitude to them was much changed when I realised they were just the idle fictional musings of the archaeologist, while somehow the bare date suggested to me a poet, or an anthropologist might have made them up.
But the point is fictions are made up and they have no place unattributed in a Muse
um. Clearly labelled fictions are fine.
Or are they - at the Museum of Docklands the Museum has commissioned short costume dramas to put in the Gallery to illustrate for example, the origins of Lloyds of London. Actors patrol Museums accosting the passerby with over-the-top performances of a life-time. This brings history to life - but what sort of life? Fiction, and theatre at this level often are cliched, the bad are baddies, and the good are paragons. The ship owners are filmed as fat complacent amoral people, while original documents might show them as good people, who gave generously to charity, who have this gaping hole in their moral compass as far as slavery is concerned. Fiction then as used in Museum displays can tend to present history as a finished artefact, rather than a complex and changing kaleidoscope of facts, theories, opinions, and prejudices.
So it is easy to reject bad fiction, bad drama for Museum displays, but good fiction, fiction that opens up debate can be positively beneficial as long as it is clearly signposted as simply one person's opinion and not actual history.
Julian Spalding has a few interesting things to say along the lines that museums pedal authenticity but looking into the history of many museum objects shows that they are on a continuum from - fact to fake
Julian Spalding 'The Poetic Museum: Reviving Historic Collections ' Prestel Publishing Ltd 2002
Take for example the Cutty Sark, it seems it sustains a major fire and still somehow remains genuine (because I believe it has a steel frame which is intact, while the timber work was and is often replaced). In the case of the Old Operating Theatre Museum, the Operating Theatre's shell is original, the standings are replicas, and the furniture is genuine but from other hospitals and are in a way set dressing.
So the idea that museum's embody true authenticity is not as clear cut as you might think. Despite this it is something that the Museum Curator cleaves too as the foundations upon which to repel all claims that money spent on a museum could better be spent elsewhere.
The debate on Fact v Fiction was warmed up when the Dennis Severs house in Spitalfields was opened up. Here was a genuine Georgian House which had been bedecked with a mixture of genuine, reproduction, fake and set dressing to look like a lived in Georgian House. It was visited only as part of a guided tour, in which the house keeper showed the visitor around as if the original Georgian inhabitants had just recently left the House - there was food still on plates, recently snuffed candles etc.
It was clearly a theatrical experience but how much of a museum experience was it? It partly depended upon the feeling that Severs must be a Georgian fanatic and so this spoke to an attempt to make the evening as authentic as possible. But I'm not sure everyone would have cared about that - they were there for the theatre.
Dennis Severs House became a forerunner of site specific theatre - Athena Vahla did a site specific Dance Project at the Old Operating Theatre Museum and Punchdrunk did their epic Masque of the Red Death in Battersea. The former a performance responding to an authentic space and the latter creating an entirely illusionary space where effect is of paramount importance and authenticity only one means towards that effect.
So fiction and Museum can go very well together. Fiction does not need the Museum to achieve the effect, as the Red Death shows, but fiction and theatricality can gain from being performed in an historical space. The advantage for the Museum is that it opens up another audience for the Museum. The 15 - 35 year olds are very difficult to get into museums and maybe fiction and theatre and opening in the evening is the way forward.
Recently, I visited the Sutton Hoo exhibition curated by the National Trust in Suffolk. The introductory film which explains the facts about Sutton hoo is combined with some rather stunning Anglo-Saxon poetry. I sat up and thought this stuff is marvellous why have I not been using it for my lectures. I asked and discovered it was pastiche - well done but written in the modern era for the exhibition. I was horrified, not by its inclusion but by its lack of attribution.
At the Museum of London in the Prehistoric Gallery there are short quotes saying something like
'we sat around the fireside, feeling the cold wind'
Underneath they are attributed to a named individual 'Fred Blogs' 1999. I happened to recognise one of the names as a London archaeologist and again I did not object to their use but my attitude to them was much changed when I realised they were just the idle fictional musings of the archaeologist, while somehow the bare date suggested to me a poet, or an anthropologist might have made them up.
But the point is fictions are made up and they have no place unattributed in a Muse
um. Clearly labelled fictions are fine.Or are they - at the Museum of Docklands the Museum has commissioned short costume dramas to put in the Gallery to illustrate for example, the origins of Lloyds of London. Actors patrol Museums accosting the passerby with over-the-top performances of a life-time. This brings history to life - but what sort of life? Fiction, and theatre at this level often are cliched, the bad are baddies, and the good are paragons. The ship owners are filmed as fat complacent amoral people, while original documents might show them as good people, who gave generously to charity, who have this gaping hole in their moral compass as far as slavery is concerned. Fiction then as used in Museum displays can tend to present history as a finished artefact, rather than a complex and changing kaleidoscope of facts, theories, opinions, and prejudices.
So it is easy to reject bad fiction, bad drama for Museum displays, but good fiction, fiction that opens up debate can be positively beneficial as long as it is clearly signposted as simply one person's opinion and not actual history.
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