6. Strategies of Museum Education

“...In the museum, the enterprise of historiography finds an opportunity to coalesce with that of contemporary social engineering....”

The concept of education encompasses a wide range of theories and practices that find expression in a diversity of forms. Some of the major strategies of delivering education include direct and explicit means as well as subtle and suggestive tactics. The goal of education may range from imparting specific knowledge to developing the powers of reasoning and judgment generally. A similar breadth of options faces collecting institutions as well as the curators who engage with them. The educative value of an institution or an exhibition overlaps considerably with its methods of display because the objects themselves as well as their arrangement convey a significant amount of information. This paper aims to outline two fundamental purposes of museum education, one dealing with social control, and the other focusing on the value of material culture itself.  Following an exploration into the development and social functions of the museum, three major curatorial strategies are identified and evaluated. The formulation treated here is 'the museum as archetype,' and thus it is argued that the institution acts as a repository for ideals, and for curating social, ideological, and aesthetic values. The museum is seen to function as a normative site, providing education about society, history, and how visual and material culture interact with and affect the trajectory of both. The essay concludes by reconsidering the educational responsibility of the museum, and by offering some synthetic pathways for further curatorial thought.

The gradual emergence of the art museum in the late eighteenth through the mid-nineteenth century occurred amidst the linked development of a range of public institutions of display and education such as history and natural science museums, national and international exhibitions, and more commercially, department stores, which taken together, form what Tony Bennett calls the 'exhibitionary complex' (59). The control of objects by these institutions engendered a new scale of public dependency on forums of mass display for access to specific types of knowledge. Yet despite the proprietary and exclusive action of the museum, it nonetheless facilitated access for a broader range of society than previous models. Private personal, royal, or purely academic collections concentrated power more anonymously and less systematically in the hands of the social elite (Bennett 59, 64). In the museum, the enterprise of historiography finds an opportunity to coalesce with that of contemporary social engineering.

The upper class was responsible for the inception of the exhibitionary complex aimed at the control not only of culturally valuable objects, but also of bodies. They sought to instruct the masses on their own prescribed sources and structures of order.  By granting a degree of access to the opposing side of the power dynamic, they intended to inspire a personal investment in self-regulation among the middle and working classes. Powerful still in today’s institutions, the continuous awareness of surveillance by the institutional gaze repeats a message about the dominance and the embedded nature of authority (whether of a private control system or of the state) that works to render visitors docile (Bennett 60-63). Through the enactment of this hegemonic cultural relationship, the crowd learns about the structures and tastes of “high society”, and the upper echelons study the actions and behaviours of the less privileged social strata (Foucault 216-17). It is because of this constellation of effects that Bennet claims “museums, galleries, and more intermittently, exhibitions, played a pivotal role in the formation of the modern state and are fundamental to its conception as, among other things, a set of educative and civilizing agencies” (66). Defining the 'educated' and the 'civilized' excludes, by necessity, certain groups whose alterity situates them as the 'other' in the us/other dichotomy and at the opposite pole in the spectrum of 'progress.' This binary opposition always exists in a dialectic tension, with the composition of both groups changing as new people are 'brought into the fold' (Fischer) while others maintain a separate identity that negotiates with museological practice.¹

Contemporarily, the International Council of Museums (ICOM) dictates the official role of museums with regard to education, stating that they “have an important duty to develop their educational role and attract wider audiences from the community, locality, or group they serve. Interaction with the constituent community and promotion of their heritage is an integral part of the educational role of the museum” (Code of Ethics, Article 4). However, the mandate of museums is not derived from the same kinds of ethical considerations as other professional fields such as medicine. The art institution may share with all other social entities the responsibility not to perpetuate socially damaging ideologies and not to harm patrons, yet the content and even form of some art specifically address these concerns.² In fact, these controversial attributes constitute the raison d’etre of many of these institutions in their contemporary guise. As Hans Haacke notes, both public and private museums are, by force of circumstance, political institutions on which pragmatic considerations exert substantial pressure. Even given contemporary efforts at creating the illusion of transparency and neutrality, these institutions wield the power to shape consciousness and should therefore sustain an ongoing dialogue of challenge and dissent. But because they are charged with preserving the canon of cultural values, these constructs are the most vulnerable to intolerance for critical inquiry.

Related to the conception of social regulation through identification with the canon of taste is a perceived responsibility for the stewardship of history. No matter how decontextualized, an object remains in some ways inextricable from the reality of its provenance. By virtue of connections evidenced by the construction and appearance of an object, the art museum as well as the natural history museum educates its audience about both the material culture itself and the historical discourse in which it participates. In addition to the somewhat more objective questions of 'who, what, where, and how' that a museum answers in different degrees of detail depending upon its purpose, exploration into the 'why' poses a challenge which often cannot find clear resolution through even the most precise investigatory measures. In consequence to a lack of knowledge regarding a given subject, there exists a potential to represent it through one’s culturally conventional – and therefore exclusive – lens. Even where a substantial knowledge base supports a particular characterization, the possibility remains that contemporary interpreters cannot conceptualize the worldview held by the creators of material culture. Accordingly, many contemporary structures of display, including those employed at art and material culture museums, conserve and present objects in a way that reinterprets their significance from an angle that was not necessarily relevant or extant in the periods in which they were produced (Meijers 19).³ As a result of attempting to understand objects through one’s own epistemological paradigm, much relevant information may be filtered out. Contemporary museological practice features a popular line of criticism against the sometimes prejudiced and manipulative nature of earlier structures of display as well as those present-day instances in which such bias is manifest. If one tries to understand the contemporary museum as a site to equip individuals with a knowledge base from which they can critically engage with broader themes, it becomes crucial to approximate an 'objective' characterization of context and history.

Museological modes of ordering and disseminating knowledge often align with three broadly recognizable patterns, which could be deemed relational, progressive taxonomic, and ahistorical.⁴ The relational mode has roots in the contextualizing endeavour of the early nineteenth century, where curators began to situate artifacts in an historical framework in museums as well as in history writing and the developing discipline of anthropology (Bennett 78). Tied closely with the progressive taxonomic, this trend began in France’s Musée des Monuments Français, where painting techniques were arranged by the eras to which they belonged, as well as the sequence of their historical development. Influenced by the British anthropological model of progress and Spencer’s social evolutionism, museums such as the Pitt-Rivers grouped all similar objects together, regardless of their origin or intended context, in a progression from simple to complex (Bennett 76).⁵ The pseudoscientific basis of this classification invested it with a sense of authority, ensuring solidity and permanence, albeit at the expense of ideological flexibility.⁶ Both techniques proved highly influential, to the extent that Stephen Bann takes the period room and the “progression” gallery (a display tactic meant to evoke the temporal development of some category of material culture) to constitute the distinctive aesthetic of the modern museum. Though it preserves the possibility of a more objective display, the relational mode actually stems from the original purpose of the gallery, which was meant to illustrate how contemporary work approached the classical canon of beauty. The progressive taxonomic organization carries the more explicitly pejorative implication of ethnocentrism, an issue which has received extensive treatment in anthropology as well as other cultural disciplines.⁷ Ahistoricism, conversely, abandons any semblance of chronological arrangement in favour of revealing the correspondences between works whose provenance may be spatiotemporally disparate (Meijers, 2). This arrangement allows a combination of styles without reducing them to one another by necessarily attributing their similarities to common sources, or situating them in a developmental scheme. In an exhibition like Peter Greenaway’s The Physical Self, ahistorical arrangement functions effectively to examine a specific subject of timeless and universal importance. Yet as Meijers describes, ahistoricism may be trapped in the modern concept of art inspired by Romanticism. In Harald Szeeman’s exhibition A-Historiche Klanken (Ahistorical Sounds), selective nostalgia drew superficial correspondences between objects that lacked a basis for further critical comparison. Thus, the emphasis on subjectivity and feeling in ahistorical arrangement renders the arbiters of taste inscrutable, risking discredit to the validity of their curatorial thesis.

While the aforementioned methods share certain commonalities, they may also be distinguished in some useful ways.  For instance, the relational model may take aspects of form, function, or origin as salient characteristics for grouping, while the ahistorical eschews contextual coincidences, and the progressive taxonomic approach defines a specific hierarchy based on functional or formal specialization. Specific implementations include textual devices such as labels, didactic panels, catalogues, ephemera, secondary literature in popular media outlets as well as scholarly publication; auditory content such as audio guides and docent-guided tours; and visual contextualizations such as dioramas, fully or partially interactive displays, and narrative arrangement.

There exists an extensive body of contemporary literature problematizing all manner of curatorial and educational strategies for their inability to comprehensively address the range of concerns that arise though engagement with such contentious constructs as society and culture. Sandy Nairne explores the alternative art context – the studio, the factory/warehouse, and the laboratory, emergent in the 1960s – as a method of discarding what Adrian Piper calls the “illusion of an isolateable situation and thus a prestandardized set of responses” (54). Fred Wilson explores the manipulation of gallery contexts and didactic information, reworking contemporary art to be read as ethnographic specimens and vice versa (258). James Cuno suggests removing the superfluity that distracts people from art, propounding a literal sense of objectivity that focuses on the object in itself (73). Yet, how sensible is the notion of objectivity in consideration of the fact that objects, like people, always exist as a node within patterns of relationships not as isolated independent units? Is context always important? The answer is variable. It could be 'yes,' if the curatorial mandate deals with history, and 'no,' if the mandate regards Cuno’s idea of 'unselfing' – transcending one’s normal position in order to experience the universal and fundamental qualities embodied in an object (50).

These considerations serve to illustrate that there can be no single educational strategy that satisfies all demands. Furthermore, if agreement existed about the particular content and delivery of museum education, then differentiation would become a desirable response to the inevitable criticism of sameness and rigidity stemming from institutional conservatism. Inevitably, the interests of the individuals maintaining museums shape them differently, and the prospect of offering a unique experience has value as an operating rationale as well as for the purpose of distinguishing an institution in bids for funding and audience. Among and within museums there must be a diversity of approaches, because only in synthesizing can institutions approach comprehensiveness and foster innovation. Yet in their broader purpose, museums are best bound by their specific mandate of collecting, studying, and displaying cultural production, since this situates them in a niche social role and provides a tenable focus. To be authentically useful, museums must enrich the cultural sphere by concentrating their resources on contributing a unique product among an expanding field of dubious commodities.

Bann, Stephen. The Clothing of Clio: A Study of the Representation of History in Nineteenth-century Britain and France. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984.

Bennett, Tony. The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics. London: Routledge, 1995.

Cuno, James. “The Object of Art Museums.” In Whose Muse? Art Museums and the Public Trust. Ed. James Cuno, 49-75. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004.

Ellenbogen, Kirsten, M. “The Museum as an Educational Institution: The Birth of Public Museums, The Museum after the War, a Shift in Education.” Education Encyclopedia. 27 Oct. 2007.
<http://education.stateuniversity.com/pages/2254/Museum-an-Educational-Institution.html>.

Fischer, Barbara. Lecture. Visitors in the Arts Speakers’ Series. University of Western Ontario, London, ON.  22 Nov. 2007.

Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. 2nd ed. New York: Random House, Inc., 1995.

Haacke, Hans. “Museums, Managers of Consciousness.” In Hans Haacke: Unfinished Business. Ed. Brian Wallis, 60-72. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986.

International Council of Museums. “Article 4.0.” Code of Ethics for Museums.  2006. 30 Oct. 2007. <http://icom.museum/ethics.html>.

Karp, Ivan and Fred Wilson. “Constructing the Spectacle of Culture in Museums.” In Thinking About Exhibitions. Ed. Reesa Greenberg, Bruce Ferguson, and Sandy Nairne, 251-267. London; New York: Routledge, 1996.

Meijers, Deborah J. “The Museum and the ‘Ahistorical’ Exhibition: The Latest Gimmick by the Arbiters of Taste, or an Important Cultural Phenomenon?” In Thinking About Exhibitions. Ed. Reesa Greenberg, Bruce Ferguson, and Sandy Nairne, 7-20. London; New York: Routledge, 1996.

Nairne, Sandy. “The Institutionalization of Dissent.” In Thinking About Exhibitions. Ed. Reesa Greenberg, Bruce Ferguson, and Sandy Nairne, 387-410. London; New York: Routledge, 1996.

Pearce, Susan. “Collecting Reconsidered.” In Museum Languages: Objects and Texts. Ed. Gaynor Kavanagh. Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1991.

Piper, Adrian. “Concretized Ideas I’ve Been Working Around.” In  Talking to Myself: The Ongoing Autobiography of an Art Object. Hamburg: Hossmann, 1974.

Tokyo National Museum. “Japanese Natural History: Birth of the Museum.” 2006. 12 Nov. 2007.
<http://www.tnm.go.jp/en/servlet/Con?pageId=D01&processed =02&event_id=2615&event_idx=1&initdate=2005/11/01&dispdate=2006/01/17>.

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