Curating the Global City
EM_slides_Curating the Global City
Introduction to the project
The Museum of London is the largest city museum in the world and staff there are currently working on its biggest project since the museum was founded. This, the Capital City project, involves the redisplay of all the museum’s galleries covering 1666 to the present day. My research looks at how the museum is working to represent the city, studying the processes and discussions behind the galleries.
The collaborative structure of the PhD has given me the chance to really get embedded in the work of the museum. As well as carrying out interviews with senior curators, I am able to observe meetings, attend museum events and carry out some work writing material for the electronic interactives at the museum. I have used these methodologies to explore what working on the Capital City project is like and to find out how the galleries are planned.
At the core of the project is the need to put the Museum of London’s work in context; both historic and international. Last term I was able to visit both Paris and New York’s city museums. The Musée Carnevalet in Paris is cited as influential on both the New York and the original London museums when they first opened in the 1920s. The museum still tells the story of Paris through its strong art collections, with some other exhibits. In New York I was able to meet with curators who talked about their difficulties in using their collections to tell the story of their city. The curators and director at the Museum of the City of New York were keen to hear about the new galleries at the Museum of London and it was fascinating to get an insight into a different way of responding to the challenge of representing a city.
Issues
The museum has been working on the galleries for some time: some staff at the museum have been working on Capital City for five years. At the moment there is a sense at the museum that the project is not finished, but that it’s at least starting to draw to its final phases. The galleries are being handed over from the builders to the contractors installing the cases and the set pieces of the immersive spaces – the trees in the Pleasure Gardens for example. Object lists and labels have been written, and future projects are being discussed more often. I’ve been interviewing staff about how the galleries took shape to get a timeline of Capital City’s progress before it starts to get too distant. This has been my priority whilst this work is fresh in people’s minds. Because my research is an AHRC funded collaborative project I have been working amongst and alongside a brief composed before I came to the university. This has enabled me to dive in to the research, without which beginning this project at this time would be very difficult.
Carrying out my research relies in some ways on developing relationships with the museum’s staff. I’ve tried to work at the museum a lot, so that I can get to know the place and the people and so that everyone can get used to me being around. The curatorial department I’m based in often takes in volunteers researching the collections and students on work experience. I have tried to gently distinguish myself from them, as the nature of my interaction with the museum and staff needs to be different from theirs and I think this is best approached honestly. By working at the museum often, when I am doing some readings or writing something up not only do I get to know people but that I can be present at more short-notice meetings and get a sense of how things change day to day.
The staff seem interested and supportive of my research, especially those working on the Capital City project itself. Sometimes in conversations around the offices voices are lowered in my presence, so there is still work to be done in reassuring staff that I’m only seeking to discuss the project faithfully and would only reflect their reasoning and arguments truthfully. On the whole my experience has been positive, and I am always touched when people suggest their favourite city museums for me to look at.
Being so embedded means that some things aren’t always straightforward. One potentially difficult area will be writing about my supervisor. So far this hasn’t been a challenge, although it would be naïvely hopeful to imagine that it will always be this simple.
Having supervisors at the university and the museum is a funny thing, and in the last few months it has worked in two ways. In my first term there were a couple of brief moments when I felt a bit lost, almost as though I’d slipped between the institutions. I found it tricky at first to get into a useful pattern of where to spend my days and where I fitted in. Although sometimes seminars and meetings still manage to clash, now I’ve found my feet a bit more it has been great to be part of the university and the museum. It is constantly refreshing to be able to go from one place to the other and get different perspectives, as well as the different opportunities the institutions afford. Carrying my student card and my staff pass means that I feel like I’ve got two sources of support, like I’m part of two places.
What next?
Although I will carry on my interviews, reading and observation at the Museum of London, I will begin to focus more on other approaches at city museums. As the technical work of installing the galleries takes over at the Museum of London in the coming months, I will look at other examples on researching the comparative, contextual side.
Currently two completely new city museums are being worked on, in Liverpool and Bristol, and I am keen to find out more about the approaches they are taking. Liverpool especially, seems to have taken a very bold, different approach. I am hoping to interview curators in Liverpool and Bristol, to find out about the challenges they face in starting city museums from scratch and their goals for representing cities.
As well as working on the contemporary comparisons I am also going to spend some time building up a picture of the way that modern London has been represented at the museum in past exhibitions, especially the recent ‘World City’ exhibition, which represented London very much in a global context.
In the lead up to the new galleries opening I’m also interested in researching how the museum uses the galleries to re-launch itself. The promotion of the museum and the new galleries will give another layer of context to the museum’s work and may be influential on the experience of visitors within the museum when it opens.
Further into the future another strand of work I’m excited about is to carry out some visitor evaluation when the galleries open, in spring next year. Finding out about visitors’ responses to the galleries will round off the research, enabling me to get a sense of the popularity of the approach. It’ll be fascinating to see whether the questions being asked now about the exhibition are in the visitors’ minds and to what extent the museum has been effective in managing the expectations of its visitors.
Emergent Themes
At this early stage there are some concepts that have started emerging. The first and most obvious is the challenge that city museums face in representing multicultural societies. This is something common to all the cities I have looked at and I think that the ways that this is addressed in museums is starting to change.
Tying in to this is the second theme: how city museums define the limits of their cities. In New York and London this can mean looking at what makes the city’s history distinct from national history, whilst simultaneously looking at identities and influences reaching around the world.
A third theme looks at the practicalities of display and the balance struck between displaying objects alongside technologies that provide electronic access to the museum’s collection. Whether city museums choose to present city histories thematically or chronologically will feed into this section.
Finally I’ve been thinking a lot about the museum as a palimpsest, somewhere that’s being re-built and re-written. The museum is re-coding its space, etching into the building and a history of its use. The new galleries will have a glass wall: a shop-window advertising the Lord Mayor’s coach to passers-by. As well as drawing attention to the museum, it will put the city behind glass, encasing it in echoes of familiar museum displays. The museum is becoming more transparent, in a very literal sense. This transparency is not just apparent through sheets of glass; my own research position is another new way of seeing into the museum.
