‘Meta-Exhibitions’ and the Limits of Institutional
Self-Critique
Re-evaluating authority and narratives of the British Museum, the
Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Whitworth Art Gallery
Written under supervision by Dr. Mirjam Hoijtink
Submitted in partial fulfilment of the Heritage Studies: Museum
Studies M.A. at the University of Amsterdam
Harry Bardell. Student Number 12194743
January 2021
23,459 words
Acknowledgments
I owe my gratitude to my supervisor, Dr. Mirjam Hoijtink, for her guidance, encouragement and continuous optimism not only throughout the thesis but throughout this Master’s programme. I would like to thank all the staff at the Department of Heritage Studies, particularly Dr. Dos Elshout and Dr. Ihab Saloul, and those who have taught me. Thank you also to the staff of the Manchester Art Gallery, where I completed my placement, who have helped me shape the topic of this research project, and who have helped me to see what a positive contemporary arts institution can look like. I also wish to express my gratitude to my parents and friends for their endless good humour, help and advice.
Abstract
Museums today are operating in a climate characterised by private market forces, political
polarisation, and where deeply contentious issues are no longer pushed to the margins. Moreover, faced with a growing consciousness towards their own position of cultural authority within the public sphere, in tangent with calls from critics to find new relevance in rapidly changing social circumstances, museums have critically looked inward to their own histories and contemporary practices, in order to reconsider what position they maintain within democratic societies. This thesis investigates the potentials and limits of a museum’s self-authored critique through the medium of the public exhibition whereby the institution of the museum, its histories, values and initiatives, all become the subject of exhibition themselves; in other words, a meta-representational exhibition, or ‘meta’-exhibition. By analysing the outcomes of three self-representational exhibitions at the British Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Whitworth Art Gallery, this thesis builds a case that the self-critique of institutions only possesses inherent value when the instigation of internal, positive reform is enacted; to actively address colonial legacies, historic exclusions and imbalances, and to create more convivial arts establishments for diverse publics. Until such change is enacted, this thesis argues the meta-exhibition performs merely as an act of self-rhetoric.
Key Words
meta-exhibition; institutional critique; self-reflexivity; cultural authority; public sphere; museum histories; institutional reform
Table of Contents
Introduction
Chapter One: Re-situating Cultural Authority
Museums and Authority: A History
Crises of Authority and Relevance
The Meta-Exhibition as a Renegotation of Authority
Chapter Two: Critiquing Institutional Narratives of Collecting
Legacies of Individuals
Engaging with Collections Histories
New Aquisitions, New Narratives
Chapter Three: The Meta-Exhibition and the Limits of Critique
Between Vision and Practice
Meaning-Making and Engagement
The Museum ‘Mentality’
Conclusion
Bibliography
List of Figures
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Introduction
“Our tour today is a collection tour - it’s called Museum Highlights - and we’ll be focusing on some of the rooms in the museum today, uh, the museum’s famed period rooms; dining rooms, coat rooms, etcetera, rest rooms, uh - can everyone hear me? If you can’t hear me, don’t feel shy; just tell me to speak up. That’s right. As I was saying, we’ll also be talking about the visitor reception areas, and
various service and support spaces, as well as this building, uh, this building, in which they are housed. And the museum itself, the museum itself, the ‘itself ’ itself being so compelling.” (Fraser, 1989,
emphasis added)
Such began the tour of the Philadelphia Museum of Art by the conceptual artist Andrea Fraser in 1989. Assuming the persona of a ‘typical’ museum docent named Jane Castleton, throughout the performance Museum Highlights, she questioned the perceived purity of the art museum, the very notion of the museum ‘itself ’ as the ultimate temple to high culture. Instead, her recurrent visions of the museum throughout her work identifies it chiefly as an authoritative symbol of dominant culture, anything but a neutral context for the display of art, which is her favoured outlook. Fraser’s work, in its exploration of the purposes of art institutions, the policies and unspoken assumptions that underlie their operations, and the different roles played by individuals and stakeholders within the art world, has seen her work closely associated with the school of Institutional Critique, alongside her contemporaries such as Marcel Broodthaers and Hans Haacke. The term ‘institutional critique’, however, is a clumsy one, since it may be misconstrued as the
institution which does the criticising. To the contrary, it consists of criticising institutional policies by
means of artistic interpretations espoused within the space of the museum or gallery. It challenges the position of the museum in creating the contexts of artworks, providing a critical lens to its cultural, economic and social structures, its apparent neutrality, the exclusivity of the museum audience, and the edifying function of the museum in solidifying aesthetic and cultural taste. Hence, while Andrea Fraser’s critique was not instigated by the Philadelphia Museum of Art, her work nonetheless raises the question: why would a museum choose to allow a performance that seemed so obviously critical of its own practices to take place within its walls?
Indeed, the site of the museum has, conventionally, been unchallenged as a site of institutional authority, one that is infallible with regard to its cultural practices. However, in postmodern neoliberal societies where common values and meanings, and institutional authorities are becoming increasingly contested, museums globally are facing challenges to re-evaluate their position in a public, diverse and deeply polarised world. New museum scholarship, arising in the late twentieth century, has increasingly pertained to the role museums may play surrounding contentious subjects, promoting wider civic debate and becoming re-thought as a dynamic discursive environment. Underlying this reconfiguration of the museum as an active discursive site is the museum’s growing awareness of its own purposes and positions – past, present and future – an awareness which must be visibly communicated to its visiting public. In other words, museums are increasingly seeking to redefine their institutional project, using exhibitions distinctive by their meta-representational
character where the true subject on display becomes the museum itself. Mieke Bal (1992) has advocated for a greater utilisation of this ‘meta-museal’ function, the function by which museums are able to represent their own positions in order to contextually situate the cultural knowledge they communicate to their audiences. She is perhaps the first to propose the notion of the ‘meta-exhibition’, as an exhibition that critiques the very act of exhibiting. However, as scholarship and activism has increasingly forced institutions to question their responsibilities and position of cultural authority, more museums are considering novel approaches to make both their histories and contemporary practices visible within the exhibition spaces themselves, thereby addressing not only their pasts but their current principles of action. This thesis intends to broaden the scope of the meta-exhibition to encompass all aspects of critique towards institutional history and practice. They may be permanent or temporary, and are chiefly characterised by the self-referential narratives that seek to orientate the visitor and frame the broader narrative of the museum visit. In recent years, such displays are becoming increasingly prevalent across Europe and North America, with recent high-profile examples including the Louvre Museum’s Pavillion de l’Horloge (2016) and the Belvedere Museum’s Geschichte des Belvedere (2018), which have charted the histories and future directions of these institutions.
Therefore, in light of this nascent phenomenon, this thesis asks the following research question: How
are cultural authority and self-critique negotiated in the museum narratives of current ‘meta’-exhibitions?
Theoretical Framework: The Inward-Looking Institution
As stated, the concept of ‘Institutional Critique’ is not a new one, and began its latent stage as an art movement in the mid-twentieth century that sought to interrogate the institution of the museum by reframing it as the art medium itself. Artists of the movement challenged the function of the institution and its relationships to the state, its funding streams and its audience . Despite these 1
interventions, until recently there has been little action taken by museums themselves that has sought to activate institutional critique from within the professional museum field. As museum education theorist Eilean Hooper-Greenhill observes (1992), museums have historically acted with insular practices, which have offered relatively little scope for self-reflection. Likewise, museum ethics scholar Janet Marstine has criticised museums for the fact that “They obscure their decision-making processes and refrain from scrutinizing their own histories” (2006: 26). More recently, “there is a consensus that older models of museum history, which told an uncomplicated story of institutional progress – often identified with a particular, charismatic curator, or a series of them – are too celebratory, and not critical or reflexive enough to help museums understand themselves” (Hill, 2012: 2). Despite these critiques, new museum theory and subsequent practice since the latter part of the twentieth century has offered hope towards the questioning of museums from within, seeking
Ironically, as an art movement which critiques the exclusivity of museums and their audiences, the movement of
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Institutional Critique and its reliance on privileged discourses such as art history and arts institutions, means that the movement itself has become aligned with the very exclusivity it sets out to challenge.
to provide greater transparency around notions of bias and neutrality, and how meaning is navigated through text and curatorial display. In the field, this has arguably become to the extent that, through an alternate view, “Reflexivity has become the new orthodoxy” (Basu & MacDonald, 2007: 20).
Indeed, museums have now increasingly recognised their cultural and intellectual authority, which has historically conferred upon them the prerogative to generate and communicate new knowledge. Furthermore, they have recognised a crisis in the urgent need to reform themselves, and to question their practice according to changing societal and cultural contexts, where issues of climate change, political polarisation, global terrorism and racial inequities have been brought to the fore. It is due to the urgency to reform that museums have now started to acknowledge and critique the limitations of their own histories and their contemporary values, and to re-think their future positions. Indeed, “in a world increasingly connected, museums have been subject to criticism and reassessment of their objectives, and Europeans in particular have gradually tried to reconfigure their collection and exhibition practices in a post-colonial context” (Françozo, 2013: 451). Perhaps most aptly, Kylie Message has advocated for nascent modes of self-reflective thinking, which has encouraged museums to redefine their institutional purpose. She argues that “Through mapping the transformations that (and the associated shift in levels of socio-political awareness) have occurred in museological thought between the early 1990s and the present day in these institutions, I argue that a new museum has emerged as a result of substantive changes in thinking, approach and development” (2006: 8). In light of these theoretical discourses, this thesis intends to build a case for how museums have adopted and defined their position of cultural authority in order to narrate their histories and practices in a self-critical way, and considers how self-critique via the meta-exhibition is negotiated amidst the tangible instigation of change.
Thus, the primary theoretical framework of this thesis concerns new self-critical practice in exhibition curation since the beginning of the 1990s. Here, one must highlight Peter Vergo’s (1989) influential critique of museum practices in the late twentieth century, and the need for increased questioning of the museum’s public role in a civic society. He starkly forewarned that “Unless a radical re-examination of the role of museums within society takes place, museums in [the UK], and possibly elsewhere, may likewise find themselves dubbed ‘living fossils’” (1989: 3-4). Indeed, in accordance with the move towards ‘new’ museological thinking, there was dissatisfaction towards conventional practices, which were stagnating and failed to recognise the broader influence of museums in both shaping and disseminating knowledge. Observing that “Some two decades of scholarship in museum theory have produced a new set of expectations for the museum, including greater accountability, sensitivity, and openness” (2006: 21), Message has suggested that museums in the twenty-first century have finally started to evolve into cross-disciplinary, self-reflexive institutions that look beyond their stakeholders and towards supporting diverse publics. Supporting this, Dewdney (2013) has argued that in the last decade, thinking and practice in the art museum has entered what he terms the ‘post-critical’ phase, wherein the focus has become the role of the public,
dismantling notions of curatorial expertise and devolving the museum’s power structure of knowledge transfer. More recently, Murawska-Muthesius (2015) has advocated for practical initiatives, developing museum-critique towards the ‘critical museum’, where the acknowledgment of an institution’s own fallibility is foregrounded and contextualised within all aspects of the museum presentation, and critique becomes not merely a rhetorical act but a precursor to internal reform. In contrast, some scholars such as Mieke Bal and Carol Duncan are sceptical of the self-critical practice within museums, for they state that museums still largely adhere to models of disciplinary power, exclusion and elitism. One must therefore question, in light of these contrasting interpretations that exist within recent scholarship, do the self-critical narratives of museums possess the capacity to actually instigate change, or do they merely voice museums’ self-rhetoric? This study uses these various frameworks to discuss how case study examples have activated new modes of institutional self-critique through meta-exhibitions, and the degree to which these critiques successfully manifest within their concurrent practice.
Several other aspects of museological scholarship are central to the study’s framework. While museum history has itself become an established field within museum scholarship, the recent trend in meta-historical displays suggests an emerging interest in institutional historiography, as well as institutional autobiography. Within the framework of this study, it is intended to tacitly adopt the reading of the exhibition as text, and the curator as author of the biography, both in a literal and notional sense. Bal’s (1992) consideration of the museum-as-text, and wider narrative theories have become central to exploring how museums create and shape meaning through the medium of the exhibition, where the institution itself becomes the framing device through which meaning is imposed. Therefore, one may question how narrative strategies undertaken within museum spaces relate to or differ from textual stories, where concepts of authorship and museum (auto)biographies (Rees Leahy, 2012) become pertinent. As such it is important for museums to reveal who, or what, is framing these ideas, thereby corroborating the fact that museums must adopt more transparent strategies in their curatorial practice, elaborated further in the final chapter of the thesis. However, it is essential to note here that this thesis will not conduct a full semiotic analysis of museum displays in the rigorous way of several museum scholars such as Mieke Bal.
Methodology
To begin, a comprehensive survey of relevant interdisciplinary literature concerning discourses around artistic institutional critique, collections histories, modes of communication and museum narratives has been undertaken. While the developing field of the self-representational exhibition offers new approaches and insights within museology, current academic research within museum scholarship has not kept up with the practice, which this thesis aims to address. In addition to an analysis of the secondary academic literature, primary research has been undertaken to fill any urgent gaps. Therefore, following the literature review, the UK-based case study institutions, detailed
below, have been visited in-person to make a critical evaluation of the exhibitions, with close consideration to both Marstine’s (2006) and Moser’s (2010) frameworks of critical display analysis. Questions such as the following were considered throughout these field visits: How is language used, are neutral or ‘innocent’ words used for the purpose of “reassuring self-justification” (Bal, 1992: 590), or are historically contextual matters clarified via the appropriate language? How does language relate to the display of objects and artworks? How are objects displayed together, and what stories do they seek to tell? Secondary to this, the research involves a critical evaluation of related primary literature and media (such as catalogues), asking such questions as: Which issues or perspectives are absent from the exhibition itself ? What perspectives and missions are clarified? How is language used compared to that of the exhibition, whose titles are typically interesting and full of self-confidence? Finally, archival research, such as museum Trustees’ Reports and policy documents, has been undertaken to gain further perspective on the formation of these exhibitions and of the institutions more broadly.
Case Studies
The case studies that this thesis investigates have been selected as a comparative study of national and local museums in the western world, across the United Kingdom and the United States. They have been chosen with the implications that their residual ‘mentalities’, a concept further outlined in the final chapter of this thesis, may have on how they choose to present themselves to their perceived public audience. Moreover, these case study exhibitions that this thesis addresses all coincide with anniversary years for the respective institutions. They all came at significant moments thereby offering opportunities to express a statement at a key point in their institutional life, with clear potentials to unlock a new ‘era’ for the museum in the future. Consequently, these case study exhibitions have navigated the tense dichotomy between institutional celebration and institutional critique. Likewise, these contemporary museums, and others, operate in a deeply divisive and polarised world, characterised by the neoliberal hegemony, with free-market capitalism and the dominance of the private sector. As its counterpart, the contemporary moment has been characterised by social and political activism, in addition to issues such as domestic and international terrorism, diversity issues and conflicts arising from differing cultural values. These remain unprecedented challenges for museums globally, and are key issues which these case study museums have also been forced to navigate in the first decades of the twenty-first century.
The first case study of this thesis interrogates the Enlightenment Gallery (opened 2003) of the British Museum, London, in addition to the more recent Collecting the World gallery (opened 2014). These permanent galleries occupy the east wing of the museum’s ground floor, and primarily seek to contextualise and celebrate the museum’s history of collecting. The Enlightenment Gallery loosely interprets how the museum’s collection would have been displayed at its founding, and alludes to Enlightenment rationalism and its influence on collection formation and taxonomic display. By contrast, Collecting the World, occupying the adjacent space of the former manuscript gallery, more
explicitly illustrates a historic development of the museum’s collection by celebrating significant donors from its founding to the present day. Indeed, it features “a few of the many individual collectors whose passion has shaped the collections of the Museum since its foundation. The gallery also features the individuals, support groups, organisations and international collaboration projects which continue to shape the Museum's future”, with a focus on donation, bequest and recent collaborative projects. The display is presented chiefly in a chronological order, revealing the socially constructed nature of scientific and historical understanding and its transformation throughout the lifetime of the institution. Significantly, this gallery is one of few in the museum to display objects from a variety of epochs and cultures. These two galleries of the British Museum bring to light many pertinent questions, such as: How self-critical is the museum of the history of its collection, particularly when there are still repatriation disputes and activist campaigns over many of its collections and artefacts? How do the Enlightenment and Collecting the World galleries complement or diverge from each other in telling a narrative of the museum’s origins? As a self-articulated ‘universal’ museum, a term which deserves critique throughout the thesis, how does Collecting the
World reflect the breadth and depth of the museum’s collection? Does it reflect the museum rhetoric
that there is no perceived hierarchy of specific cultures or periods, when in fact there is? How does the museum obscure or make explicit its past collecting practices? Does the museum glorify its collecting culture, without problematising its links to imperialism?
Likewise, this thesis examines the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, specifically focusing on the temporary exhibition Making the Met, 1870-2020 (opened 2020). This exhibition leads the Metropolitan Museum’s 150th anniversary celebrations, highlighting key historical developments in ten sections, ranging from the museum’s historic initiatives, acquisition practices and its configuration of a national narrative. Above all, it intends to examine the institution’s evolution from a founding concept to its place as a ‘universal’ art museum, inheriting the European framework of universal museums such as the British Museum. The exhibition includes a variety of 250 objects, both collections ‘highlights’ as well as lesser-known works to showcase the breadth of the collection. This case study provides a particularly dynamic counterpoint between the exhibition as a ‘celebration’ of the Metropolitan’s history, while being self-critical of its own institutional practices in the past and re-contextualising them through a contemporary lens. Moreover, the accompanying catalogue and its relationship to the exhibition deserves investigation, with particular attention paid to how both the exhibition and the catalogue invoke discussions concerning the expansion of the collection to both offer greater representation of the museum audience, and to re-configure a more global narrative of art in line with its self-recognised ‘universal’ tradition.
Finally, the Whitworth Art Gallery is the art museum of the University of Manchester, founded by the wealth of industrialist Joseph Whitworth in the late nineteenth century, undergoing a significant extension and comprehensive re-display in 2015. Standardisation and Deviation: The
Whitworth Story (a semi-permanent and evolving exhibition, anticipated between 2019-2021) seeks to
collection, whilst addressing its historic absences. It likewise acknowledges the gallery’s unconventional practices and policies, and indeed the exhibition states it intends to demonstrate “how the gallery has often deviated from standard models of practice, from its early collecting policies to its new vision; one that promotes the idea of the ‘Useful Museum’ and art as a tool for social change and education.” Likewise, a key part of the gallery’s curatorial practice is to interrogate the collection, identify gaps and to question the notion of ‘collection highlights’. The exhibition raises many questions: How are these various missions and practices communicated in the exhibition? As a municipal gallery, chiefly for its local constituents, what narrative does the exhibition tell for its visiting public, compared to the national status of the aforementioned institutions? Are multiple voices included and sustained, and if so, how? Moreover “[university museums] can become places for critical enquiry perhaps more comfortably than other kinds of museums, because they operate in an academic climate where the questioning of authority is encouraged” (King & Marstine: 268) and as a result, they become “ideal environments for exploring the value systems of display institutions” (ibid). It is therefore necessary consider the position of the Whitworth not merely as a local gallery but namely as a university gallery. This study will interrogate how the contrasting ‘mentality’ of the museum affects its institutional practices and its need to make these public, compared to the previous case studies.
Interrogating the Collection
The case study exhibitions seek to interrogate collecting, preserving and exhibiting, namely the ‘core’ functions of museum practice. The origins of collected objects, and the conditions of their collecting by the museums, are contextualised, relaying varying degrees of reflexivity about the museum enterprise. Peter Vergo has aptly argued that “The very act of collecting has a political or ideological or aesthetic dimension which cannot be overlooked” (1989: 2), and both at the birth of the public museums and today, collecting remains a fundamental practice of the museum. Therefore, as the scope of museum practice is too broad to investigate comprehensively, this study focusses chiefly on the origins of museum collections, often with contentious histories, with a comparative focus towards their contemporary and future acquisitions initiatives, and related ethics towards rectifying historic exclusions. Ultimately, this thesis will provide a comparative account of the degree these institutions have provided a critical account of their collecting origins, whether there is tension between contesting the museum collection, and maintaining certain ambiguities, and identifying the mechanisms which underlie these decisions.
In essence, underscored by the display strategies of the three case study institutions, the thesis sustains a theoretical unfolding of issues pertinent to self-critical narratives of the museum as both a public institution and a cultural authority. Chapter One of this thesis addresses the concurrent crises of cultural authority and societal relevance of museums in changing times, making reference to such issues as addressing a diverse audience, activism and declining trust in the historic edifying power of the museum. This chapter argues that the primary challenge that museums face today is to establish
new institutional positions with regard to articulating reformed narratives of their institutional selves, and to reassert their authority and relevance according to contemporary social standards. It examines the extent to which the meta-exhibition can re-negotiate museums’ cultural authority within the public sphere via the narrative it seeks to tell. But, of course, how may museums, which may owe the constitution of their collections to contested enterprise, via colonial pursuit or otherwise, rethink the their relationships to their collections within social new contexts and discourses? Therefore, Chapter Two focusses on the extent to which museums adopt a self-critical approach to the collection, both in historic and contemporary terms, and how this critique manifests in practice through the display strategies and interpretation adopted throughout the meta-exhibition. With regard to the rise of the meta-exhibition, Rees-Leahy has asked “To what extent is an institutional capacity for self-awareness and a capacity for critique activated by such projects?” (Rees-Leahy, 2012: 150). Therefore, the thesis culminates by evaluating the potentials and limits of self-critique, addressing such issues as rhetoric and institutional change, the temporality of exhibitions, self-authorship and the position of the curator(s), and the institutional ‘mentality’. It intends to address the mechanisms that make museums hesitant to be more explicit about contested histories and difficult discussions with their audiences. Concluding remarks assess the potentials for museums to become more attuned to the cultural and social urgencies of contemporary society, and further considers how they might provide viable steps for all institutions to holistically engage with their own histories and practices in wider scale public displays, with the crucial intent of enacting meaningful reform.
Chapter One: Re-situating Cultural Authority
Within the public imagination, as visitor numbers may attest to, the British and Metropolitan Museums remain regarded as key international authorities of art, culture and history. While the Whitworth Art Gallery is less renowned at an international level, it remains likely that few members of the visiting public will question its position as a legitimate space in which to encounter art. However, as the exclusions and biases of both universal and art museums have been criticised within the latter part of the twentieth century, the cultural authority claimed by museums has been “definitively compromised by postromantic critique, postcolonial protest, and postmodern disillusionment” (Bal, 1992: 561). This chapter therefore explores the relationship of the museum as a (contested) culturally authoritative institution to the contemporary public sphere. Beginning with a history of the museum as a cultural authority, it examines the ways the museum’s perceived authority since the time of the Enlightenment has been increasingly challenged in the postmodern, neoliberal era, across museological, activist and wider public discourses. It argues ways in which the meta-exhibition seeks to re-affirm the museum’s authority and societal relevance by its very nature of critique.
Museums and Authority: A History
Historically, the site of the museum has been perceived as one of cultural ‘authority’ and the legislator of culture and knowledge. Any substantial conceptualisation of authority may be traced to sociologist Max Weber who provided a seminal analytical framework of authority in relation to the state. For him, authority represents a possession of status to compel obedience and trust, and incorporates dependence and legitimacy as its two primary sources of control. Richard Sennett (1980) corroborates Weber’s observations but goes further by stressing that authority involves more than rules or laws. For him, authority necessarily includes defining reality or imposing value judgements, which are contingent on the perceived legitimacy of those making such judgements or definitions. Paul Starr (1982) is credited with coining the phrase ‘cultural authority’, alluding to the authority that affirms judgements of reality, the construction of which is determined as fact. By his understanding, such institutions as the church, the academy and the museum all make authoritative judgements about the world, and therefore possess cultural authority.
The authority that museums have historically been believed to hold is that which frames and determines what is intellectually and culturally significant, reinforcing notions of what is considered ‘valuable’, for reasons which are arbitrary or historically constituted. While the notional ‘museum’ may be traced back to the private collections formed in the Renaissance era, it is more chiefly the eighteenth century development of public collections that museum authority is attributed. According to Hooper-Greenhill, writing of the Enlightenment era, the contemporary epistemology created “the conditions of emergence for a new “truth”, a new rationality, out of which came a new functionality for a new institution, the public museum” (1989: 63), where the rational organisation of artefacts informed the purpose and systems of the first museums, chiefly as scholarly sites for learned members of society. The emergence of the museum’s scholarly status was precipitated by its meticulous systems of classification, and its exploration of the innate nature of the world in macrocosm, with all its seeming connections. Meanwhile, museum theorist and historian Tony Bennett observes that the emergence of the museum coincided with and presented new realms of disciplinary knowledge. These new sets of knowledge, such as biology, geology, art history, and their interrelations, “formed a totalising order of things and peoples that was historicised through and through” (1995: 96). The significance of this was that museums no longer displayed unique artefacts and eclectic collections, as in the early modern wunderkammers, but rather became concerned with the pursuit and display of knowledge within a rational, disciplinary framework that demarcated the arts from the sciences. Likewise, before Bennett, Duncan and Wallach have contended “Without the museum, the discipline of art history, as it has evolved over the last two hundred years, would be inconceivable. Viewed historically, art history appears as a necessary and inevitable component of the public museum” (1980: 456). Of course, this did not petain merely to the eighteenth century, but likewise later museums and galleries have been responsble for “establishing practices of cultural display and exchange, and, ultimately, forging new artistic canons and approaches” (Moore, 2018: 4). In this light, the institutionalisation of art has occurred within the museum setting, and its
propounded authority as a cultural and intellectual body has led museums to form a tacit cultural canon of what art was considered valuable, as ascribed through subjective judgments. These 2
canons still inform many museum displays today.
The eminent museums which emerged in the eighteenth century, namely the Louvre and the British Museum, held claim to a ‘universal’ collection, effectively worked out in an encyclopaedic though incomplete manner, holding artefacts from the whole of a very exclusive vision about ‘civilisation’ in its entirety. Writing on the 2003 Declaration on the Importance and Value of Universal
Museums, signed by 30 global institutions, O’Neille states “Being universal museums gives the
signatories the authority to represent all cultures” (2004: 190), a claim that is not true. Likewise, former director of the British Museum Neil MacGregor has offered an uncomfortable rhetoric that the museum is “truly the memory of mankind” (2004: 6). The concept of universality and its reliance on an exclusive ‘civilisation’ has been increasingly criticised in recent scholarship. With critiques toward the ordered chain of ‘historical’ civilisations derived from Hegel, one which derided non-scripture based cultures (Hoijtink, 2012: 83) and consolidated an aesthetic philosophy toward history “which can be seen in the museums to this day” (ibid), the concept of universality has also been criticised for it allows museums to bypass claims toward the repatriation of artefacts. Nonetheless, it remains that such museums were and are committed to universality as a means of exercising their position of authority, and likewise, as a representation of national power. Bennett’s work has been influential regarding the development of the museum in the latter half of the nineteenth century (1995), in which he argues that in this period the museum was informed by its symbolic utility to the emerging nation state, beginning with the Louvre Museum in France, which became a symbol of the fall of the ancien regime, and the rise of the new order. Carol Duncan (1995) further contends that the democratisation of the palace into a publicly accessible space evoked the state’s commitment to both equality and the concept of national identity. Therefore, the museums were used as both repositories and narrators of official nationalism. The Metropolitan Museum continued the legacy of the ‘universal’ museum, with its political itinerary being derived from Eurocentric intellectual and cultural structures. However, as a key departure, the Making the Met exhibition cites the authority of the museum in formulating a new, national narrative; a museum foremost of the United States. This was principally to create a unified vision of the nation due to a new influx of European immigrants in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. American art was therefore elevated, and as a result of the cultural cachet of the institution, artists such as Singer Sargent were risen to new prominence.
Moreover, the historic civilising and educational roles of the public museum cannot be overlooked. Indeed, it is noted that even modern “Universal survey museums such as the
Even in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, museums are still attributed with ascribing value to art and artefacts.
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The opening of the new Islamic galleries at the Metropolitan Museum in 1975 encouraged new interest in Islamic art in Western institutions, and museums and galleries of contemporary art are still attributed to propelling artists to the fore within the private market. Likewise, museums such as the V&A have also been responsible for trends in design.
Metropolitan claim the heritage of the classical tradition for contemporary society and equate that tradition with the very notion of civilisation itself. In this type of museum, the visitor moves through a programmed experience that casts him in the role of an ideal citizen — a member of an idealised ‘public’ and heir to an ideal, civilised past” (Duncan & Wallach, 1980: 451-452). In light of the claim, the museum therefore has the implication of engendering ‘good’ citizens, by instilling the visitor with the “state’s spiritual wealth” (ibid: 457) of ideal art, thus intensifying one’s attachment to the state. Taken in this way, it becomes the museum’s hegemonic function, for the role it plays in the experience and creation of citizenship . Bennett (1995), whose work has been greatly influenced by 3
Foucault’s own work on institutions, power and panopticism, further posits that opening the museum from learned and wealthy members to a wider public in this period was imperative to exposing the working classes to the pedagogic mores of middle class culture, thereby civilising them and creating the self-education of the masses in a “self-regulating citizenry” (1995: 63). This re-organisation of the museum as a public space occurred in tangent with the growth of the Habermasian bourgeois public sphere (1989), of which, in the nineteenth century the museum became a central aspect. The public museum, since its birth though likewise more so in the nineteenth century, pertained to an instructive purpose, and has been regarded as having both an educational as well as civilising significance, with education chiefly being used as a means to civilise. Indeed, it is written in the early Trustees’ Reports of the Metropolitan Museum that “In the chief countries of Europe it has not been difficult to obtain these sums [of revenue] from the government, which regards such institutions as important agents in the education of the people, and annually makes liberal grants for their support and maintenance” (1872: 24). As well as national, encyclopaedic museums, the Whitworth was likewise founded for an instructive purpose, in order to expose local students of engineering to ‘high’ art, thereby instilling them with ‘good taste’ in design. Largely, this was already due to Manchester’s position as the industrial capital, and industry had come to be seen as the absolute sign of progress, though at the same time this instructive mission taught workers how they proceeded within an age-old tradition . All of this has largely proceeded 4
until recently, where it is understood that the museum is not merely the legislator of good taste and ‘high culture’, but also signifies an elite cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1984) and proliferates social hierarchies. No doubt however, the understanding of the museum as a monolithic representative of
Of course, there is a disparity between the critical consensus of museum scholars such as Duncan and Wallach, and
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the typical museum experience of the public. Their thesis, which was influential to the development of museology, cited that the museum is a ceremonial, ritual space, whose primary ideological purpose is to instil upon its audience revered beliefs and values, where these messages are embedded within the museum architecture itself. They suggest the museum visit is a value-laden narrative that communicates its message effectively to all visitors, characterising them as susceptible to manipulation from such powerful institutions as museums. Following their example, subsequent museum critics have written on the production of knowledge without any significant analysis on its reception. Indeed, notwithstanding their failure to acknowledge the aforementioned critiques of the universal survey museum, Duncan and Wallach crucially overlook the fact that visitors often arrive with their own agenda and persuasions that contradict the didactic vision the institution may seek to communicate.
While present-day museums are recognised as part of the leisure econoy, the instructive function of museums similarly
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demonstrates a historic capitalist, economic purpose, for museums were actively involved in educating designers on art and taste. Similar examples of instilling good taste to students include the V&A Museum’s cast court galleries, so that students could copy famous classical sculpture without travelling to the Mediterranean, and the Rijksmuseum Drawing Academy.
elite taste and exclusivity is an uncritical view, and becomes increasingly difficult to rectify with many aspects of current practice, such as the growing assimilation between ‘high’ and ‘popular’ culture, likewise contested as concepts, in the art world and beyond.
As a result of this, it has been sustained that museums as institutions possess “overpowering cultural authority […] expressing ambitious and encyclopaedic claims to knowledge” (Karp & Kratz, 1991: 39). Ultimately, they are taken to contribute to education, civic ritual, aspects of nationhood, in addition to the hegemony of the western artistic canon. While national museums with ‘universal’ collections, even today the authorities of the British and Metropolitan Museums are questioned relatively little outside the bounds of museological scholarship . Naturally, the historicity 5
of these institutions plays a large role in this. As the most overt example, the British Museum still appropriates its architectural historicity as a means to convey its institutional superiority and to solidify its position in creating and conveying historical knowledge. The front facade, with its pediment sculpture The Progress of Civilisation (1851), though based on drawings from the 1820s-1830s, exemplifies the ideals of Enlightenment Rationalism and the principles of classical thought, anticipating the objects of an idealised ‘civilisation’ held inside the museum. More recently, the re-appropriation of the former King’s Library in the East Wing as the Enlightenment gallery further exemplifies the historicity of the museum visit (fig. 1.1). The gallery seeks to evoke the cultural classification and taxonomies of the late eighteenth century through a meticulous re-display of the museum’s collection, intentionally stylised in re-purposed wall and floor cabinets (fig. 1.2) to enact a continuation of the museum’s intellectual legacy. Though writing on art museums and their architectural history, Whitehead suggests that, through this stylisation “What emerges is a special kind of institutional biography in which the museum’s relationship to its own past is literally fabricated, negotiating tense connections and effecting considered disconnections between shifting values, ideals and social and intellectual projects over the different chapters of institutional and cultural life” (Whitehead, 2012: 157). Thus, while the Enlightenment gallery’s intentional discordance to the rest of the museum encourages understanding of how cultural knowledge was shaped at the museum’s founding, it likewise re-affirms that the intellectual ‘ideals’ of the Enlightenment remain deeply engrained to the museum ethos, and re-affirming its intellectual authority characterised through the ‘universal’ tradition, as indeed: “[The British Museum] has undergone many changes, but its founding ideals remain as valid today as in 1753: that every citizen should have free access to the sum of human understanding” (MacGregor, 2004: 6).
Though, likewise, the contestation of authority is not an insular problem that pertains merely to museums themselves.
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Indeed, the role of activism and political issues regarding, for instance the repatriation of artefacts relating to Greece, Ethiopia or Egypt are examples of this. However, within the imagination of the general public, there currently remains little interrogation of the role of museums in constructing and shaping knowledge.
Crises of Authority and Relevance
The cultural authority and educational capacity of the museum has historically been regarded as a fundamental component of its role as both an intellectual and cultural establishment. However, in the past 40 years, cultural authority of the museum has undergone intense scrutiny which has destabilised its legitimacy as an institution. While there is a broad recognition of this ‘legitimation crisis’, not only in museums but in its associated institutions, there is considerable debate over its causes and how it may be periodised. Broadly speaking, it is agreed that there is a ‘legitimacy deficit’ when previous avenues of justification become undermined or eroded (Habermas, 1989). As Barringer has argued, museums “stand in complex and sometimes tormented relation to the epistemologies which produced them” (2006: 133). Therefore, the perceived authority of the museum remains situated within past ideals and ideologies, with its roots stemming from the position of ‘truth’, curatorial expertise and the power over value judgments. However, overlapping social and intellectual shifts have led to significant questioning of these traditional justifications, thereby contributing to the decline of its cultural authority. Ultimately, while the purpose and credibility of museums have somewhat always been in flux (Moore, 2018), ongoing questioning of the foundational principles of the institution has come to a head, and the extent of the legitimation ‘crisis’ is only now being fully recognised . 6
Largely, the contestation of museum authority derives from strands of thought such as cultural relativism, postcolonial theory and postmodernism, which were assimilated in the 1980s and applied to museums as part of a new museological thinking. Such thinking demands that museum practices must adopt a greater degree of self-awareness and to question existing methods, as well as the overall purpose and context of these institutions. The concept of the ‘New Museology’, as titled by Peter Vergo (1989), exposed the fact that the museum and its values, organisation and collections are not founded on a stable set of parameters, neither are they politically or ideologically neutral. To the contrary, they conceal hierarchies and exclusionary practices, as well as the politics of the establishment and the power of the market . Further to this, the prevailing postmodern school of 7
thought has challenged the museum’s right to claim truth, as well as its position as an autonomous realm removed from social and political pressures. It is likewise sceptical of the key aspects of Enlightenment thinking, seeks to dismantle hierarchy and celebrate pluralism. Indeed, it is “the contemporary movement of thought which rejects totalities, universal values, grand historical
This is perhaps most acutely illustrated in recent contestation regarding of the ICOM re-definition of the museum at
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the 2019 Kyoto convention, which demonstrated how many scholars and practitioners remain divided over what a museum is and what it should do.
The literature of the late twentieth century by critical scholars of museums, such as Vergo, Hooper-Greenhill and
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Bennett, had much more influence upon museum education practitioners, rather than curators who largely remained adherent to their disciplines. As museum educators became more aware of these texts, changes to internal thinking within the museum largely pertained to rethinking education and engagement with the audience. It is only more recently since these texts that the curatorial field itself has become more critical, as demonstrated through today’s examples of the meta-exhibition.
narratives, solid foundations to human existence and the possibility of objective knowledge. Postmodernism […] tends towards cultural relativism, and celebrates pluralism, discontinuity and heterogeneity” (Eagleton, 2003: 13). Largely, museums remain in accordance with their conventional standards of practice, and within epistemologies not concurrent with prevailing intellectual and social attitudes. In a more pragmatic sense, these include keeping and controlling objects, communicating cultural understanding as ‘truth’, sustaining focus on the collection and not their audiences, or only thinking of an elite audience. In tangent with this, a surge in visitor studies has also led to renewed questioning of the museum’s authority in telling histories, especially with regard to the relationship between the museum as institution, the exhibition as medium, and the viewer as receiver. By and large within such studies, there has become a broad shift in the paradigm of the museum as the legislator — engaged in a unilateral communication with the visitor — to that of the interpreter, by which the audience is given greater autonomy to engage in dialogue and articulate their own responses. Stuart Hall and Eileen Hooper-Greenhill have both advocated that within new museum practice, the audience and its relation to the institution must be more active and open, should avoid passivity, and should engage more closely with diverse audiences and in particular with its local communities. The scholarship that has criticised the insularity of the museum has further challenged the undivided authority of the curator, and has exposed inequalities. Outside museum academics, the loss of state reliance on culture for the production of power, and the rise of private market forces has challenged the autonomy of intellectuals, and the rise of the market as the key legitimator of meaning in modern society has had a significant impact on the role of the museum within it. Most recently, the fiscal crisis of the 2008 recession has had lasting scarring on the cultural sector, and in the market-driven era, museums can no longer rely on the notion of ‘art for art’s sake’ to justify fiscal support, and have been obliged to find new utilitarian value with which to promote their work. Therefore, while the aesthetic and contemplative qualities of art have conventionally reigned supreme, this is slipping away as both the interests of sponsors and the museums’ own audience-building initiatives blur the criteria of acceptability within the institution. It is, therefore, within the hegemony of neoliberalism that aspects of fundraising and revenue have transformed the scholarly institution into an increasingly business-like organisation, thereby precipitating the decline of the museum’s original functions. As a result, criticisms of the museum cite that it is either not democratic enough, upholding exclusivity and elitism of its audience, or that it is too democratic, “reducing high culture to the lowest common denominator under the guise of postmodern populism” (McClellan, 2003: 34). Indeed, this may be seen in the advent of the ‘blockbuster’ exhibition supposedly replacing ‘high-minded’ vision with ‘low-brow’ entertainment, and in recent years both the Metropolitan and British Museums have become known for staging such widely-publicised exhibitions on ‘popular’ topics. The exhibition, therefore, has been reconfigured as a product to encourage more visitors, which has in turn triggered speculation
towards the museum's purpose and authenticity, and a divergence from serious scholarship . While 8
museums have faced scrutiny from the pressures and constraints arising from the market, it is a result of the paramount intellectual and societal shifts in the twentieth century that the dominant outlook of the conventional museum — and its values of modern reason, claims of truth, and legitimacy of value judgments — have been severely impaired, such that the cultural authority of the museum has been questioned unremittingly.
Concurrently, the factors which have led to a crisis of authority have also exacerbated and even caused recent concerns of museum relevance . It has been argued that: “In fact, helping people 9
think about past, present and future could be the special contribution of museums. But not many museums do that. Their concern with other times can make them aloof from the day to day. Looked at positively, they can be a haven — an escape from the trouble of the world. Less kindly, they can be seen as an ivory tower, isolated from earthly concerns” (Davies, 2012). While Davies’ remark depends upon the specific wants and needs of the visitor, Nielsen has more urgently forewarned, “Museums need to strive for relevance to justify their position politically, financially and socially” (2014: 365), amidst the lingering economic scarring that has transformed public and commercial funding models. Of course, the notion of relevance is one that is difficult to pinpoint, and therefore it is unsurprising that museums have grappled with this term to ensure their survival. In the most theoretical sense, the notion of relevance to the museum embodies “the introduction or establishment of new museological understandings in the creation of approaches and practices within the museum field” (Nielsen, 2014: 366), or, applied to the real world, museums must engage in new practices to fulfil both internal and external urgencies. As Barringer (2006) has rightly argued before her, there is too great a dichotomy between the museum, its systems of practice and its collections, and how the museum works for contemporary audiences whilst navigating its existing structures and frameworks.
For indeed, the concern of museum relevance in the twenty-first century is primarily derived from a growing acknowledgment of museums within the public sphere, and questioning what it means to be situated within a democratic landscape and how to respond to it. Barrett (2012), in her analytical study of museums and the public sphere, argues that museums have both recognised themselves as a site of public discourse and democracy, and have recognised a more sophisticated portrait of the public, how multiple publics are understood in the museum context and have
Some museums, such as the Rijksmuseum, have sought to counter this with serious scientific contributions, such as
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those related to technical restoration innovations. This led to the restoration before the public’s eye, such as the Rijksmuseum’s Operation Nightwatch, possibly to rationalise the museum as something of equal value to business.
Of course, these calls for museums to find new relevance in the wake of social developments is not a brand-new
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phenomenon, and indeed “in the wake of race riots, ant-war demonstrations and student activism” (McClellan, 2003: 29), in 1968, the Metropolitan Museum Director Thomas Hoving urged his colleagues that “In order to survive, to be relevant, we must continually re-examine what we are, continually ask ourselves how we can make ourselves
indispensable and relevant” (ibid). However, Hoving’s attempts to bring pressing issues and disenfranchised groups into the museum were often miscalculated, as his inaugural show Harlem on my Mind, representing a white man’s vision of black history, is testament to.
considered how to engage with their publics in more complex, convivial ways. While according to history, museums have catered to a specifically bourgeois public sphere in the Habermasian sense, they must now increasingly seek to accept and represent the multicultural pluralism that has come to represent the public sphere of the contemporary age. The revival of interest in the public sphere began in 1989 with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the fall of the Berlin Wall and democratic movements across Asia and Latin America. The subsequent ‘memory boom’ of the 1990s furthered a phenomenon of culture in the public sphere through memorialisation, opening up culture as a form of healing within the collective imagination. However, it was primarily after the September 11 2001 attacks in New York, where museums globally “were forced to rapidly re-form and reconsider the role they could play in relation to balancing their usual tasks with the immediate needs of their local environments and communities” (Message, 2006: 111). Museums were urgently forced to ask themselves whether they were representative of their visitors to be truly democratic, civic spaces. Arguably, the attacks also inspired interest in part of both the public and institutions to create more conducive connections between people of various cultures: within the 2002 Metropolitan Trustees’ Report, it is cited that in the wake of the attacks, two exhibitions curated by the department of Islamic art, opened cautiously with security concerns, were not only “acclaimed for their content and presentation, but the robust attendance figures indicated a desire on the part of the public to learn more about Islamic art and culture” (2002: 4). Therefore, museums faced an abrupt self-consciousness to be more inclusive of their audiences, especially in terms of how to address society as a whole. It is the mandate towards inclusiveness and a recognition of greater social accountability that has created a new urgency towards relevance of museums in the contemporary age.
Thus, similarly recent avenues of scholarship have shown an acute awareness surrounding social accountability and social responsibility in the museum, leading to suggestions that to remain ‘relevant’ institutions, museums must be considering ways that their positions of cultural power can be utilised in socially activistic ways to contribute to their communities and local citizens. There is currently a broad consensus that museum collections should be increasingly devoted to a social role, and less about the objects themselves in an academic or aesthetic capacity; in other words, the museum should seek to engage its audience in contemporary social issues via its collection. However, some argue that this does not go far enough to establish new relevant practice, for engaging with the collection without acknowledging external communities remains a passive practice, and instead putting collections to a social use by co-operating with communities may be considered their proper use. As Koster correctly notes, “As a unique sector in the infrastructure of society, the museum profession has the potential — and arguably also an ethical responsibility whenever public funds are involved — to transform its consciousness from self-interest to the greater good” (2012: 206). The consequence of such remarks are slowly beginning to manifest in public museum practice. Director of the Whitworth Art Gallery, Alistair Hudson, suggests that, with regard to the relevance of the museum, “What that means is you start to get involved in shaping and contributing to the infrastructure of society and how it works, not just creating a leisure resource or a tourist attraction” (2019). Hence for him, the role of the museum is not merely to reflect or educate on
modern urgencies, but rather it must actually confront issues and contribute in a socially positive way. Museums must be able to acknowledge their tacit status as cultural authorities and therefore socially engage their audience with urgent issues, which have, historically, been brought to the fore by activist groups. Most recently, activist groups such as Black Lives Matter and Extinction Rebellion concern ongoing racial violence, the climate crisis and global wealth inequality. Museums, it is argued, must increasingly play a role towards social activism, both internally as well as engaging with external activist groups. For the museum to merely reflect on its own histories is not enough to remain ‘relevant’ as an institution, if it continues to ignore the serious problems that are addressed by contemporary activist groups.
Therefore, museums have a responsibility to come to terms with shifting social standards and attitudes, and to keep attuned to global social urgencies such as climate change, migration, racial and gender inequity and wealth disparity. However, “The evolution of new outlooks in the museum field has continued to be considerably outpaced by new major issues that are shaping the future of humanity and the Earth” (Koster, 2012: 206) and museums are struggling to reposition them continuously to ensure their vitality. Overall, the dual crises of cultural authority and societal relevance has arguably resulted from the renewed “Progress in the perceived and real value of the museum field [which] hinges on institutions adapting to new external realities” (ibid, emphasis added). Such views are reflective of the wider state of museum scholarship, which regards the contestation of cultural authority and relevance as pertaining chiefly to external influences or individuals, for instance changing intellectual currents, changing governmental policy or the pressures of social movements and activism. While such external factors remain more crucial to museums than ever, institutional criticality and the contestation of authority must be balanced both externally and internally within the museum profession.
The Meta-Exhibition as a Renegotiation of Authority
In light of these changing perspectives, museums are, on the one hand, acknowledging that their intellectual legacies are not as legitimate as perhaps previously perceived, whilst simultaneously recognising that their gravitas as public institutions has the power to influence and enact change. It is the tension between the two that has problematised how museums re-situate their authority and legitimacy, and how this may be conveyed to their audiences. Stuart Hall (2001) suggests that the museum should no longer claim to be the legislator of cultural truth, or to consider itself benign as this is impossible. For him, museums ought to constantly challenge these ideas, to disturb them and to publicly draw attention to their own unreliability. Despite this, there remains much resistance to institutional change by many professionals, and “museums are still deeply enmeshed in systems of power and privilege” (Hall, 2001: 23), which deserve critical re-appraisal.
Janes acknowledges that a necessary function within contemporary museum practice is to fulfil an activist function, or at the very least one that is socially contributive . However, he argues that 10
“Museums have yet to find a way […] to see the development of personal, critical consciousness as a necessary precursor to empowerment and action for social change” (2012: 219). As such, internally there is required much greater self-reflexivity: “The key to a changing practice is in cultivating an ethical, self-consciousness […] - a museum transformation through reflexive practice that focuses on the relations between people, rather than the relations between people and a resource given out by the institution” (ibid: 222). Here, he further advocates for greater honesty of a museum’s own practice in order to corroborate public trust and to engender a shared authority and democratic exchange. Such honesty can only be achieved via a forensic examination of one’s own institutional development, allowing one to identify and understand the values which inadvertently permeate the work of the institution, thereby creating clear opportunities for change. In order to assume the active role of social commentators and to contribute to social change and improvement, museums must make their implicit positions visible such that change can be eventually be enacted.
As a result, the meta-exhibition offers museums the chance to acknowledge their authority, as well as to give chance to reconfigure authority with its visitors. Moreover, by configuring such displays at the beginning of the museum visit, such as those at the Whitworth and the British Museum, the reframed sense of authority of the institution and its implicit meta-narratives are, in theory, carried through by the visitor to inform the remainder of the visit. Of the three institutions, the Whitworth makes the authority of the museum the most explicit in its display, by acknowledging the power that museums and galleries have historically had in shaping the dominant canon of art, predominantly based upon western artists. The exhibition text subsequently acknowledges that the edifying power of the museum in solidifying this canon is ‘problematic’ and deserves questioning. Meanwhile, within the Enlightenment gallery, a more reticent interpretation questions the authority of the Enlightenment in shaping knowledge, stating that “This period, and its legacies, are now increasingly being reassessed from a range of critical perspectives”. Likewise, in light of the contested relevance of museums and their civic role as institutions, the meta-exhibition has provided a means by which museums can justify their purposes and future initiatives. The Whitworth is a key example of an institution that seeks to remain relevant for its audience, and this is made explicit in the Standardisation and Deviation display. Within the exhibition, the visitor is confronted with a display that acts as a manifesto for the future direction of the gallery, amidst shifting social concerns and transformations (fig. 1.3) The public is told that the primary mission of the gallery is to provide art
An interesting example of this in practice is the Manchester Art Gallery’s School of Integration (2019), a commission by
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Cuban artist and activist Tania Bruguera. Through a series of workshops, the commission sought to invert integration policies intended for migrants to the United Kingdom, instead creating a space within the gallery for people in Manchester to experience the idea of transculturation as an alternative to traditional assimilation migration policies. Local people originally from countries around the world gave free classes on a curriculum including languages, culture, ethics, politics and economics, resulting in a shared learning experience and fostering cultural understanding, especially when immigration is such a divisive topic in contemporary Britain. This demonstrates how museums and galleries can be utilised to instigate positive social change for local communities, and to expand their role as an institution to incite new relevance.
