Imagine we could make tabula rasa on Exhibition Road and – one century passed since their official separation in 1909 – start over, using the collections of both the Victoria and Albert and of the Science Museum to build a new museum “of design”. How would we arrange collections? What would we keep under the same roof, and display in the same room? Which partitions, which kind of departments, which nomenclatures and labels would we adopt? What about the idea of bringing together design, from teakettles to prostheses, from automobiles to fashion?
Of course, this opportunity is quite far from reality. Yet, while the Victoria and Albert Museum is a well-established and renowned museum of design, it is interesting to note that in 2008-09 the Science Museum produced and hosted exhibitions which undoubtedly dealt with design stories and history (DanDare and the Birth of Hi-Tech Britain, JapanCar. Design for the Crowded World). It might be even more significant to learn that this year, 2009, the Science Museum included design in its new mission and strategy, along with science, technology, medicine and engineering.
Even if I doubt that design will become the field of an explicit contention between the two institutions, an eye should be kept onto Exhibition Road.
In the past months, these and other considerations I was doing in the context of my PhD research, were further stimulated by reading what Christopher Whitehead – Senior Lecturer in Museum Gallery and Heritage Studies at Newcastle University – wrote on how we can understand «what museums collect and display and why and how they do so as a form of boundary work» that contribute to shape and maintain divisions and boundaries of knowledge.
Establishing the Manifesto. Art Histories in the Nineteenth-century museum, the paper by Whitehead I just quoted, was published in 2007 in a book entitled Museum Revolutions (London-New York, Routledge), which brings together museum professionals and academics to investigate «how museums change and are changed» as the subtitle reads, i.e. «the way in which museums are shaped and configured and how they themselves attempt to shape and change the world around them» (ibid., p. i). The article by Whitehead (ibid., pp. 48-60) certainly is one of the most interesting – at best in my opinion. Drawing from some ideas already put forth by Donald Preziosi on the relathionships between art museums and the discipline of art history, and from studies on the construction of disciplines and knowledge, Establishing the Manifesto explores debates and museological proposals which were discussed in 1850s concerning the British Museum and the National Gallery, arguing that «the curatorial act of representing art history in museum display – situating collected objects three dimensionally, in relation to the transit and forms of engagement of imagined visitors – was actually constitutive of certain intellectual approaches and practices of art history as a discipline» (ibid., p. 48).
The opening of the article could not be of major impact:
«Imagine this scenario. The date is 1853. What if the institutional identities of the British Museum and the National Gallery, together with their accreted conventions of collecting and display, were somehow suddenly dissolved, leaving us with their collections alone? Given the opportunity of such a tabula rasa, would we choose to situate the British Museum’s Egyptian, classical or prehistoric ‘antiquities’ and the post-medieval paintings of the National Gallery together, or at least in relation to one another? If, after the hypothetical orphaning of the collections, we were tasked with their rehoming, what would we do? Would we seek to reorganise them, and, in so doing, potentially reorganise the knowledges they represent? What boundaries would we impose, what categories of material culture would we seek to identify and what stories of the past would we tell?»
Whitehead analyzed diverse museological proposals for the reorganization of national museums like the National Gallery and the British Museum – the ‘site question’ –, as they were advanced by intellectuals and scholars, archaeologists and curators (John Ruskin, among the others), in a period when it seemed that the two institutions could be relocated «potentially allowing for them and their collections to come into closer relationship» or be integrated. Particular attention was put by the author on the «conceptual and physical segregation of painting as a special category of material culture», and on how its dislocated position, in a separate kind of museum, might affect our «disciplinary practice» and historical understandings.
Using notions like ‘disciplinarity’ and ‘boundary work’ drawn from other scholars, and adapting them to the museological dimension, he concludes that
«it is possible to view museum display, notional or real, as a form of theorising, through the relations between ‘diverse parts’ one seeks to establish and the boundaries one sets. Crucially, however, this intellectual endeavour is politically and circumstantially contingent. It is also potentially divisive, for in bringing together some objects (physically, intellectually and territorially) it separates others; in enabling some kinds of knowledge relations, it disables others» (ibid., p. 57).
In 2009 Whitehead published Museums and the Construction of Disciplines. Art and Archeology in Nineteenth-Century Britain (London, Duckworth), a book where he widens and deepens issues and considerations he advanced in the article mentioned above.
The book is divided in two Parts.
In Part I, Museums, Knowledge and Disciplinarity, the author introduces the theoretical framework he adopts.
Chapter 1 is dedicated to the «discursive nature of the museum, examining the museum as one of the institutional agents which construct knowledge». He makes reference to a range of theories and epistemologies that in the past decades questioned the role of museums, highlighting their “authorship” and the knowledge they produce as «political, culturally located and contestable» (ibid., p. 19).
Basing on notions explored in the first chapter, chapter 2 proceeds to investigate how «museums divide knowledges», in their need to differentiate themselves from one another. Besides notions of “disciplinarity” and “boundary” work he already used in the paper, drawing from the volume Knowledges. Historical and Critical Studies in Disciplinarity, edited by Ellen Messer-Davidow, David R. Shumway and David J. Sylvan (University Press of Virginia, 1993), he enriches the set of conceptual tools adapting other aspects and notions from social constructionism. For instance, Howard Becker’s notion of “art worlds” (see Art Worlds) is adapted to talk of the “museum world” as «a network of people whose cooperative activity, organized via their joint knowledge of conventional means of doing things, produces the kind of representations that the museum world is noted for» (Museums and the Construction of Disciplines, p. 47). And he uses the concept of map and the notion of “cultural cartography” of Thomas Gieryn (see Cultural Boundaries of Science: Credibility on the Line), in order to depict the map of the museum world as «a map with many authors, not all of whom are attentive to what geographies others have drawn or are drawing, while others fiercely, competitively and territorially overdraw what others have drawn» (Museums and the Construction of Disciplines, p. 49). Moreover he sites the museum world in the perspective of Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of “field”, especially with reference to the issues of “permeation” and “struggle” within fields.
In Part I, Whitehead also adds examples to help the reader understand the use of those notions. As in the article, the British Museum and the National Gallery are in focus, but also Henry Cole’s South Kensington Museum is on the stage, proving itself «one of the most aggressive actors within the museum world of mid-nineteenth-century London» (ibid., p. 58).(1)
Part II, Art and Archeology in 1850s London, applies the framework constructed in the first part, to focus on debates on national museums in London and on the status of art and archeology in mid nineteenth Century, exploring the «use of objects to establish, transgress or connect boundaries» – where “objects” is meant both in the accepted sense and in the extensive meaning of «discrepant, bounded and connective objects», i.e. «epistemologically problematic bodies of material culture [...] moved around the map to test out categories, representations, practices and histories of the world» (ibid., pp. 78-79). While the first sense is exemplified by the case of the Parthenon marbles, the latter is explored through the debates concerning museums in London in 1850s – expanding and deepening what Whitehead already presented in the article in Museums Revolutions.
Concluding the book, Whitehead expresses his hope that
«this book prompts some reflection on, or at least confusion about, the stories which museums tell and do not tell, the disciplinary stories which we tell ourselves and the disciplinary groups within which we situate ourselves» (ibid., p. 138).
I do believe his hope will be fulfilled. As far as I am concerned, it definitely is. Indeed this text offers tools and insights on museums which might be interesting to test and adapt by scholars who aim at investigating how museums contributed in constructing design – the practice of design, the culture of design and the history of design –, and to reflect on the role museums play today and can have for the future of design culture.
(1) For those who are interested in the role of the South Kensington Museum and in the debates that surrounded its birth, preparing the ground for building “applied arts” and design as a discrete field, other recent books which should be considered are:
Joseph Bizup, Manufacturing Culture. Vindications of Early Victorian Industry, Charlottesville – London, University of Virginia Press, 2003; and Lara Kriegel, Grand Designs. Labor, Empire, and the Museum in Victorian Culture, Durham – London, Duke University Press, 2007. Beyond institutional policies and strategies, in her study, Kriegel also considers a broad range of characters, and the role played by working men and artisans in the debate on the location of the South Kensington Museum in London, challenging in some way the centralizing ambitions of Henry Cole and its circle.
