Transgressing The Museum

The final session of the Cultural Experience Award took place at the British Museum in Bloomsbury, London. This beautiful building attracts around 6 million visitors each year who visit the sites 94 galleries containing objects and artefacts from around the world. Many of the exhibitions and rooms are free to enter, meaning it's a wonderful place to pass an afternoon (as I have done on a few occasions before!) immersing yourself in history.

 

The British Museum

This session was particularly interesting in light of a recent seminar session in which we discussed the place of the museum institution within society, and I thought afterwards about the ways in which museums are curated to tell stories. It is important to look beyond the tale as it is presented and question what is being told to us. This session provided practical examples of ways in which this questioning could take place.

In the Enlightenment Room we spent time learning how to work within, and outside of, the expectations of museum curation: beginning by encountering the exhibition as it was laid out, in numerical progressive order.

 

The Enlightenment Room

Each section was organised into categories; i.e. Shells, Sea-Creatures, and books on marine life and biology. This orderly organisation reflects the spirit of the Age of Enlightenment, as people began to make sense of the world through objects and anthropology rather than through god and religion. Wealthy travellers would collect interesting things from around the world and place them in, what became known as, Cabinets of Curiosity and the layout of this exhibition definitely reflects this history.

The beautiful architecture of the space lent a definite authority to the collections, and the other visitors moved around the room in much the same way as we did; walking past things with a glance, then stopping to peruse things which caught our interest. I particularly liked the Orrery and Astrolabe, as they represent a time when people were just beginning to make art, and artistic objects, out of science and scientific study: attempting to understand a beautiful universe through creating beautiful things.

Orrery in the Enlightenment Room

Next we looked at ways to transgress the given order, and were invited to reflect on the work of the surrealist artist Andre Breton: his art work created visual poems from the juxtaposing of seemingly unrelated objects. We were given a selection of images and descriptions, and in small groups worked on ways to rearrange the given exhibitions.

This enabled us to look beyond the curator's vision and envisage our own: finding ways to relate the different aspects of the exhibition in a different way. I enjoyed the challenge but I think, in the context of a museum visit, it might make things quite confusing to, for example, look at a stuffed bird while reading a description for an Egyptian statuette: although it would certainly fit with a surrealist sense of humour!

For the third challenge we were asked to reclaim the space: to wander. This is how I spend most of my time in museums anyway: when I enter a room I tend to gravitate to a particular object or collection, and then work my way around from there, rather than following the route from A to B. I felt very comfortable walking around the space on my own, as it allowed me time for personal reflection. I was able to be the flaneur, creating my own route through the exhibition and pausing over things that caught my eye rather than waiting on, or catching up with, other people.

  

A replica of the Rosetta Stone ** An Egyptian stela on the stairs ** A stone vase
Some of the beautiful things that caught my eye

As I was ambling through the room I overheard another visitor say that the space was very 'glamorous' and this intrigued me: the idea of 'glamour', or 'a' glamour, comes from spells that witches were supposed to have cast over themselves, transforming their appearance from an ugly old crone into a beautiful young girl. The modern understanding, and usurpation, of the word has always amused me in various contexts and here it caused me to think on these beautiful objects, displayed beautifully, in a beautiful building - they are often in place because of war, colonialism, stealing, empire-building, etc. These historical objects are part of an often dark history. Very few of the objects, in this room at least, are actually from Britain, despite being part of British history.

Finally we were encouraged to find a space and, reflecting back to our very first field trip, complete five minutes of reflective, automatic writing, in response to the space. I have used this technique since, and I find it a very calming yet constructive tool, especially in creative spaces such as museums and galleries. I think, this time, I was still thinking about my previous observation, as my text is quite existential and bleak!

Practising these three methods of encounter in a museum space (curation, associative/surrealist, and ownership) have helped me to reflect on the ways in which we explore cultural spaces: they are public spaces, housing private collections that have been organised in very specific ways. By transgressing the boundaries of the path as presented, we can form our own and look beyond, or beneath, the surface stories.