Is the museum an accessible storage room for old curiosities? Is it a set of educational toys spaced evenly down long halls with which to simultaneously teach kids and get them tired with all the walking? Ought it be a mall of fun for dates and dull days? Do they exist solely for the cultured elite and the faithful? Are museums part of a grand project? What role does the museum play in mediating self-understanding? What are the questions that people ask about museums?

In a lecture at the ROM, Adam Gopnik outlined the three phases in the history of the modern museum that helped me form some of these questions. His three phases are:

1. The museum as mausoleum – a place where objects with certain associated rituals or meanings are positioned in an accessible space for new aesthetic encounters with the past.
2. The museum as machine – a tool for the education and the enrichment of human understanding.
3. Two potentialities:
   1. the museum as mall – where the smell of the restaurant travels down the halls; where museums in form and content appeal to our baser tastes or where one school of thought dominates the selection of works.
   2. the mindful museum – a place that has a sense of itself, where the better elements of museum as mausoleum and machine are refined to an end of potential aesthetic unity and not a certain aesthetic unity. Practically speaking this means emphasizing (or balancing) chronology over themes, because themes mean someone is mediating one’s encounter of history where chronologies are easier for people to understand and open up people to their own potential interpretations. It also means realizing the diversity rather than unity of social functions that the museum serves, for some it is a place to go on a date, for another it may be a place for meditative instruction on a subject.

Interspersed in his discussion on these three phases of the museum was some focus on the silence of museums. Although one can talk at a museum, prolonged conversation is unwelcomed socially and by the structure. Gopnik suspects that silence is major drawing point of the museum and that it may even have an erotic, mysterious quality to it.

Added to this was a discussion of the museum as a social metaphor – the museum and its parts are a representation of ourselves, presumably of our life together. Unto this idea of the museum as a social metaphor and as a location of silence among the signifiers to our collective memory, I start to wonder what a massive gathering of individuals to the museum would add. I’ve experienced the alarming numbers that roam single-mindedly down the winding halls of the Vatican museum toward the Sistine Chapel. It was brutal and oppressive. A ritual akin to that inhumanely filing cattle through chutes and on to trucks.

Considering that the objects in a museum were previously part of some work place or social ritual, or that the works of art in a gallery were an expression born of a particular context, ought not the new context of these artifices also be rituals bearing new memories and meanings? To some degree this is done – exhibition openings, lectures at museums, field trips in primary school – but these are the rituals of the few and generally not considered rituals. To borrow a comparison from Gopnik, museums are our cathedrals. As our cathedrals, they impose their belonging to all of us and not the few.

On the comparison of cathedrals to museums, the comparison is instructive. A cathedral is a place for national ceremony, such as coronations and funerals, but on the more local level, of say a church, the rituals that remain, maintaining the place of that institution in society, are christenings, weddings, and funerals. Rituals of naming.

Can the museum be a place of naming? A place where we come to know – standing against history, our short life juxtaposed with the era or deep time, who we are? A place poised on the silence of great halls, that by the objects of memory seduces our thirst for knowledge, desire for higher aesthetic pleasures, our confessions, and our struggle for certainty. That to me would be the mindful museum, the museum that truly is a social metaphor.

Two practical suggestions unto this end, and in the exploration of an end, include:

1. Figure computer mediated relationships into the equation that defines a museum. Cyberspace, as an actively computer mediated domain of human interaction, is on the whole disembodied. Museums, as a silent reflection of human interactions, is embodied in bricks and mortar. Projects such as … are a way to back up the sovereignty of the museum to the benefit of as many as possible in their own or collective quests for self-understanding. It is a way to step out of the noisy divide of cyberspace and meatspace into the silent message of it all that through the museum can resonate the present image of the person in our world.
2. Pursue museum literacy. This can be facilitated by fostering and experimenting with different rituals that through the objects, silence, and spaces extant in the museum could invoke new meaning.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 21st, 2007 at 8:40 am and is filed under KM, art, memory, museums. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.