New Directions in Museum Ethics 9781315868585

Table of contents :
Cover
......Page 1
Half Title......Page 2
Title Page......Page 4
Copyright Page......Page 5
Dedication......Page 6
Table of Contents......Page 8
Citation information......Page 10
Acknowledgements......Page 12
Notes on contributors......Page 14
List of illustrations......Page 16
Preface......Page 18
1. Situated revelations: radical transparency in the museum......Page 24
Transparent houses and other illusions......Page 25
Transparency as an instrumental value......Page 26
Transparency as an ideal......Page 27
Museum transparency and community engagement......Page 28
Complexities and contradictions of museum transparency......Page 29
Transparency and museum ethics......Page 31
Transparency in a
flash......Page 32
The Indianapolis Museum of Art dashboard......Page 33
Critiquing the transactional......Page 36
Towards reciprocity......Page 37
Sharing the processes of value-based decision-making......Page 38
Empowering informed choice......Page 40
Creating internal and external alignments......Page 41
Boundary work: The limits of radical transparency......Page 42
Note......Page 43
References......Page 44
Introduction
......Page 47
Social media –
an explanation......Page 49
Ethics of social media......Page 50
Museum ethics......Page 51
Ethical challenges of social media at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum......Page 52
Conclusion......Page 58
Note......Page 59
References......Page 60
Ethics and professionalism......Page 63
Stakeholders......Page 65
Teaching professional ethics......Page 68
Sooreh Hera and the Municipal Museum of The Hague......Page 70
Reflection......Page 73
Conclusion......Page 76
References......Page 77
Introduction......Page 79
Context of the exhibition......Page 84
Methodology......Page 85
PMM exercise......Page 87
PMM analysis......Page 88
PMM dimension 2: range of understanding......Page 89
PMM dimension 3: grasp of concepts and subject areas......Page 91
PMM dimension 4: mastery of subject matter......Page 93
Conclusions......Page 94
Notes......Page 96
References......Page 97
Introduction......Page 99
Interventions of the new museology......Page 100
Arguments for a new cosmopolitanism......Page 102
A local case study......Page 104
Conclusions......Page 108
Notes......Page 110
References......Page 111
Introduction......Page 113
Why biennial?......Page 114
Prospect.1: a biennial for New Orleans......Page 117
Nari Ward, Diamond Gym: Action Network, 2008; from the exhibition Prospect.1......Page 119
Jorge Macchi and Edgardo Rudnitzky, Little Music, 2008; for the exhibition: Prospect.1......Page 121
Conclusion: a biennial we can believe in?......Page 123
Notes......Page 124
References......Page 125
Introduction......Page 126
Maison Tropicale at the Venice Biennale......Page 128
Mining Prouvé and celebrating modernism......Page 130
Conceptualizing
the missing......Page 133
Preserving urban references and identifying the void......Page 137
Responsibilities in reappropriating the missing......Page 139
Conclusion......Page 141
Notes......Page 142
References......Page 143
Index......Page 145

Citation preview

New Directions in Museum Ethics

This book considers key ethical questions in museum policy and practice, particularly those related to issues of collection, display and organizational change. What does a collection signify in the twenty-first century museum? How does an engagement with immateriality challenge museums’ concept of ownership, and how does that immateriality translate into the design of exhibitions and museum space? Are museums still about safeguarding objects, and what does safeguarding mean for diverse individuals and communities today? How does the notion of the museum as a performative space challenge our perceptions of the object? The scholarship represented in this volume is a testament to the range and significance of critical inquiry in museum ethics. Together, the chapters resist a legalistic interpretation, bound by codes and common practice, to advance an ethics discourse that is richly theorized, constantly changing and contingent on diverse external factors. Contributors take stock of innovative research to articulate a new museum ethics founded on the moral agency of museums, the concept that museums have both the capacity and the responsibility to create social change. This book is based on a special issue of Museum Management and Curatorship with an additional chapter by co-editor Janet Marstine. Janet Marstine is Lecturer and Programme Director of Art Museum and Gallery Studies at the University of Leicester, UK. Her research focuses on museum ethics in theory and practice. She is editor of The Routledge Companion to Museum Ethics (2011). Alexander A. Bauer is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Queens College and The Graduate Center, CUNY, USA, and an Associate of the UCL Center for Museums, Heritage, and Material Culture Studies. He conducts archaeological fieldwork in Turkey, and since 2005 has been Editor of the International Journal of Cultural Property. Chelsea Haines is an independent writer and curator based in Brooklyn, New York, USA. She is currently the Education & Public Programs Manager at Independent Curators International and Associate Editor of The Exhibitionist, a new journal devoted to exhibition-making.

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New Directions in Museum Ethics Edited by Janet Marstine, Alexander A. Bauer and Chelsea Haines

First published 2013 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2013 Taylor & Francis This book is a reproduction of Museum Management and Curatorship, volume 26, issue 2 with an additional chapter by co-editor Janet Marstine. The Publisher requests to those authors who may be citing this book to state, also, the bibliographical details of the special issue on which the book was based. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN13: 978-0-415-52287-8 Typeset in Times New Roman by Saxon Graphics Ltd., Derby Publisher’s Note The publisher would like to make readers aware that chapters two through seven in this book may be referred to as articles as they are identical to the articles published in the special issue. The publisher accepts responsibility for any inconsistencies that may have arisen in the course of preparing this volume for print.

To Richard Sandell, Stephen Urice, and Marita Sturken who inspired our interest in the issues raised here

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Contents

Citation information Acknowledgements Notes on contributors List of illustrations Preface

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

ix xi xiii xv xvii

Situated revelations: radical transparency in the museum Janet Marstine

1

Ethical issues of social media in museums: a case study Amelia S. Wong

24

New challenges, new priorities: analyzing ethical dilemmas from a stakeholder’s perspective in the Netherlands Léontine Meijer-van Mensch

40

Us and them: who benefits from experimental exhibition making? Pete Brown

56

Universalism and the new museology: impacts on the ethics of authority and ownership Joshua M. Gorman

76

A new state of the arts: developing the biennial model as ethical art practice Chelsea Haines

90

Museum ethics, missing voices and the case of the Tropical Houses Lydie Diakhaté

103

Index

122

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Citation Information

The following chapters were originally published in the journal Museum Management and Curatorship, volume 26, issue 2 (May 2011). When citing this material, please use the original page numbering for each article, as follows:

Chapter 2 Ethical issues of social media in museums: a case study Amelia S. Wong Museum Management and Curatorship, volume 26, issue 2 (May 2011) pp. 97-112

Chapter 3 New challenges, new priorities: Analyzing ethical dilemmas from a stakeholder’s perspective in the Netherlands Léontine Meijer-van Mensch Museum Management and Curatorship, volume 26, issue 2 (May 2011) pp. 113-128 Chapter 4 Us and them: Who benefits from experimental exhibition making? Pete Brown Museum Management and Curatorship, volume 26, issue 2 (May 2011) pp. 129-148 Chapter 5 Universalism and the new museology: Impacts on the ethics of authority and ownership Joshua M. Gorman Museum Management and Curatorship, volume 26, issue 2 (May 2011) pp. 149-162 Chapter 6 A new state of the arts: Developing the biennial model as ethical art practice Chelsea Haines Museum Management and Curatorship, volume 26, issue 2 (May 2011) pp. 163-175

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CITATION INFORMATION

Chapter 7 Museum ethics, missing voices and the case of the Tropical Houses Lydie Diakhaté Museum Management and Curatorship, volume 26, issue 2 (May 2011) pp. 177-195

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Acknowledgements

The editors thank the Institute of Museum and Library Services for its support of the 2009 conference ‘New Directions in Museum Ethics’ at Seton Hall University’s Institute of Museum Ethics from which chapters two through seven of this volume developed. We are grateful to Steven Lubar and Carlo Lamagna for helping to jury paper submissions to the conference. We also very much appreciate the help of Robert R. Janes and the anonymous peer reviewers who offered insightful comments on earlier versions of chapters two through seven, as originally published in the May 2011 special issue of Museum Management and Curatorship. Finally, we thank our Special Issues as Books Editor at Routledge, Emily Ross, who made this book possible, including the addition of a new and original chapter by Janet Marstine.

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Notes on Contributors

Alexander A. Bauer is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Queens College and The Graduate Center, CUNY, USA, and an Associate of the UCL Center for Museums, Heritage, and Material Culture Studies. He conducts archaeological fieldwork in Turkey, and since 2005 has been Editor of the International Journal of Cultural Property, an interdisciplinary journal on cultural heritage law and policy issues published by Cambridge University Press. His interests include archaeological ethics, material culture semiotics, and the archaeology of trade. Since Pete Brown’s first museum job at the Steinhart Aquarium in San Francisco, he has worked for a wide range of cultural organizations including The Manchester Museum, University of Manchester, UK, where he was Head of Learning & Interpretation for five years. His latest venture is a freelance museums consultancy: petebrbrown.co.uk. Pete’s research interest is exploring the potential of museums as ‘free choice’ learning environments through exhibitions and gallery design, programmes and social engagement. He completed a Master’s in Interpretive Studies from the University of Leicester in 2009. Lydie Diakhaté is a curator and independent producer specializing in the arts and cultures of Africa and its diaspora. She is the founder of K’a Yelema Productions in Paris and the cofounder and codirector of the Real Life Documentary Festival in Accra, Ghana (2006). She received her diploma from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris (Visual Anthropology Department) and her MA (Museum Studies) from The Graduate School of Arts and Science, New York University. Chelsea Haines is an independent writer and curator based in Brooklyn, New York, USA. She received an M.A. in Visual Culture Theory from New York University in 2009, where she wrote her thesis on the development of public art projects in post-Katrina New Orleans. She has written and presented widely on contemporary art and politics. She is currently the Education & Public Programs Manager at Independent Curators International and Associate Editor of The Exhibitionist, a new journal devoted to exhibition-making, published by Archive Books. Joshua M. Gorman recently completed a PhD in history from the University of Memphis. He is the Collections Manager at the Smithsonian Anacostia Community Museum, Washington, DC. His first book, Building a nation: Chickasaw museums and the construction of Chickasaw history and heritage is available from the University of Alabama Press. Gorman’s current research interests are the international development of community museums and topics in museum informatics.

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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Janet Marstine is Lecturer and Programme Director of Art Museum and Gallery Studies at the University of Leicester, UK. Her research focuses on museum ethics in theory and practice. She is the editor of The Routledge Companion to Museum Ethics: Redefining ethics for the twenty-first century museum (Routledge, 2011) and New museum theory and practice: An introduction (Blackwell, 2005). She is currently writing a book on institutional critique and museum ethics. Marstine is the founder and former director of the Institute of Museum Ethics (IME) at Seton Hall University, USA. Léontine Meijer-van Mensch is lecturer of heritage theory and professional ethics at the Reinwardt Academy in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. She is a member of the working group on the new permanent exhibition of the National Institute for the Study of Dutch Slavery and its Legacy (Amsterdam), board member of the International School of Museology in Celje (Slovenia), and chairperson of COMCOL, the ICOM International Committee for Collecting. As researcher she is currently working on a study of museology as a science in Central Europe and in particular the German Democratic Republic. Amelia Wong manages social media outreach at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. She holds a B.A. in History/Art History from the University of California, Los Angeles and a Ph.D. in American Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park. She has held several positions in humanities research in Los Angeles and the midAtlantic United States and was the inaugural Field Visiting Scholar at the National Building Museum.

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List of Illustrations

1.1 Toledo Museum of Art Glass Pavilion 1 Copyright Ralph Lieberman/photography sponsored by ARTstor 1.2 Indianapolis Museum of Art dashboard (as of 10 February 2012) 11 Courtesy of the Indianapolis Museum of Art 1.3 Revealing Histories: Myths about Race, 2007 16 The Manchester Museum, The University of Manchester 4.1 Discovering the body: section showing construction with object cases, applied interview quotes and ‘Find Out More’ shelf with seating. Lindow Man: A Body Bog Mystery, 2008-2009. 58 Manchester Museum. 4.2 Personal Meaning Map 43. Two colours show darker and lighter: text outside bubbles is the author’s. Lindow Man: A Body Bog Mystery, 2008-2009. 63 Manchester Museum 4.3 Personal Meaning Map 24. Lindow Man: A Body Bog Mystery, 2008-2009. 67 Manchester Museum 4.4 Value to visitors – Generic Learning Outcomes. Lindow Man: A Body Bog Mystery, 2008-2009. 69 Manchester Museum 4.5 Personal Meaning Map 73. Lindow Man: A Body Bog Mystery, 2008-2009. 70 Manchester Museum 6.1 Nari Ward, Diamond Gym: Action Network, 2008; from the exhibition Prospect 1, New Orleans 96 6.2 Jorge Macchi and Edgardo Rudnitzky, Little Music, 2008; for the exhibition Prospect 1, New Orleans 98 7.1 Angela Ferreira, Maison Tropicale, 2007. Installation view (detail), Portuguese Pavilion, 52nd Venice Biennale. 106 Photograph by Mário Valente 7.2 Angela Ferreira, Maison Tropicale (Brazzaville) no. 1, 2007. Light Jet print on aluminum. 120 cm x 150 cm. 111 Photograph by Angela Ferreira 7.3 Angela Ferreira, Maison Tropicale (Niamey) no. 3, 2007. Light Jet print on aluminum. 120 cm x 150 cm. 112 Photograph by Angela Ferreira

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Preface Janet Marstine, Alexander A. Bauer and Chelsea Haines

Traditional museum ethics is founded on an assumption of consensus amongst professionals (Edson 1997). While consensus may provide clarification and coherence to the museum decision-making process and professionalization of the field, it lacks the theoretical engagement, dynamism, and diversity to deal substantively with the complex and shifting terrain that museums face today. As a result, pockets of innovative thinking have emerged within specific, but overlapping areas of museum practice, such as digital heritage and the curating of contemporary art, and within distinct museum genres such as science and anthropology museums. This book is an attempt to recognize and make sense of these inchoate conversations and to suggest convergences among them. One specific strand that we argue may be particularly salient is situated in the slippage between the material and immaterial. This slippage concerns a tension in the museum sector in prioritizing objects, as opposed to ideas and relationships. As various stakeholders – descendent communities, transnational and ethnic minorities, and other disenfranchised groups, as well as the various “publics” museums seek to serve – demand that their interests be acknowledged, museums have developed new ways of dealing with the emotional, political, and sometimes legal contexts of the objects they curate and display. The blurring of boundaries between objects and ideas creates new ethical challenges that can make both museum professionals and stakeholders uneasy. Virtuality and alternative paradigms of engagement in new media have caused museums to grapple with common assumptions concerning the integrity of the object and have helped to provoke the decentering of institutional authority (Graham and Cook 2010). Participatory practices and social engagement in the realm of contemporary curating have prompted the museum to redefine itself as a performative space (Goldberg 2001). Museums are leveraging transparency as a mode of knowledge-sharing that empowers communities to make critically informed choices and to take action (Marstine 2012). Repatriation movements have prompted anthropology museums to recognize that the meaning of objects resides not in the physicality of the object itself, but rather in the web of relationships and values that are constituted through practice (Handler 2003). The experiential, participatory nature of institutions unencumbered by collections, such as science museums, has introduced new possibilities for community engagement through issues of contemporary concern (Bandelli and Konijn 2011). We present these conversations engaging the tensions between the material and immaterial not as an opposition to be reconciled, but as an opportunity to reimagine a more ethical museum that seeks out contestable, multivocal, and open-ended discourse.

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PREFACE

The significance and value of physical things such as objects and places cannot be considered apart from the cultural meanings and practices – the ‘immaterial’ or semiotic dimensions – that individuals and communities associate with them (Handler 2003). This slippage, or even interlinking, between the material and immaterial has been increasingly recognized among both academics and policymakers who deal with heritage and museum practice. Academically, material culture studies have developed over the past two decades to foreground the cultural practices involving objects, such as their consumption (Miller 1987, 2009), their transformations in value (Myers 2001), and their semiotic and communicative properties (Gell 1998; Keane 2006; Preucel and Bauer 2001). Rather than regard objects as significant in themselves, this perspective prefers to consider how objects act within a matrix of meanings and lived experiences of the individuals and social groups who create, use, and transform them. In the arenas of policy and practice, this view underlies the drafting of such recent heritage documents as NAGPRA1 (North American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act) in the US and the Burra Charter2 in Australia, both of which specifically recognize the need to understand objects as having significance in the present-day for reasons that may continue to change, rather than based on some ‘essential’ or inherent quality. At the same time, immaterial or ‘intangible’ practices, whether they be songs, local customs, or even linguistic expressions, are now understood as having significant material dimensions, in terms of both their spatiality and durability. Illustrating the difficulty in separating the material and immaterial, the first designee to UNESCO’s list of the world’s ‘masterpieces’ of the oral and intangible heritage was Jemaa el Fna Square in Marrakech, Morocco, a built space that would seem on the surface to be the exact opposite of ‘intangible’ heritage.3 But what gave the space its meaning and significance were the cultural practices - the lively storytelling and social gathering - performed there. This and similar designations have revealed the difficulties posed by separating ‘tangible’ from ‘intangible’ heritage and, in recent years, policy-makers and academics alike have sought to move beyond this and similar dualistic categories of nature-culture and propertyheritage (Bauer 2008; Munjeri 2004; Prott and O’Keefe 1992). Recognizing the slippage between the material and immaterial within the context of entrenched definitions and practices, heritage policy-makers and museum practitioners face problems about how to be sensitive to both dimensions when making preservation and curatorial decisions, and are now seeking new ways to think about and deal with both objects and the lived experiences of their various stakeholders (see, for example, Geismar 2008). The essays gathered here address this theoretical context of the material and immaterial by considering key ethical questions in museum policy and practice, particularly as related to issues of collection, display, and organizational change. What does a collection signify in the twenty-first century museum? How does the engagement with immateriality challenge museums’ concept of ownership? How can museums foster a sense of shared stewardship towards fuller and more sustained public participation? Are museums still about safeguarding objects? For whom and to what ends? What does safeguarding mean for diverse individuals and communities today? How does the notion of the museum as a performative space challenge our perceptions of the object? How can museums effectively represent people’s feelings about objects, rather than fetishize objects in of themselves? How does immateriality translate into the design of exhibitions and museum space? The contributions to this book come from a new and promising generation of practitioners and scholars. All of the contributors except Marstine are graduate students or recently matriculated emerging professionals and academics who delivered papers at the 2009 xviii

PREFACE

conference ‘New Directions in Museum Ethics: An International Conference of Graduate Research’ which Marstine organized at Seton Hall University’s Institute of Museum Ethics in South Orange, New Jersey, USA. The emerging professional authors come from diverse M.A. and Ph.D. programs - from museum studies and history, to American studies and visual culture theory. The interdisciplinarity of the group underscores the complexity of museum ethics and emphasizes its reach across all areas of museum activity. The contributors’ larger vision is a testament to the range and significance of critical inquiry in museum ethics within graduate study. Together, the papers resist a legalistic interpretation, bound by codes and common practice, to advance an ethics discourse that is richly theorized, constantly changing, and contingent on diverse external factors (Marstine 2011). This volume takes stock of innovative research to articulate a new museum ethics founded on the moral agency of museums, and the concept that museums have both the capacity and the responsibility to create a more just society (Hein 2000; Sandell 2011); the new ethics acknowledges the emancipatory potential of museums to subvert the binary relationship between self and other which continues to shape display institutions. All of the chapters here analyze and evaluate strategies that institutions have adopted in order to grapple with the diverse range of challenges and opportunities facing museum ethics today. A major concern running through these papers is the relationship between institutions’ moral agency and the display and dispersal of information and objects in and outside the museum. Janet Marstine’s chapter encapsulates this concern by examining the problematics and potential of museum transparency. Marstine asserts that transparency is not simply an act of unveiling but is instead a delicate dance between exposure and withholding. She shows how the ‘situated revelations’ of what she calls ‘radical’ transparency invite the productive critique and redistribution of museum power and resources. She argues that the situated revelations of radical transparency create porous boundaries between institutions and their publics which engender shared authority. Amelia Wong’s chapter deals with the timely ethical issues concerning the relationship between museums and social media, most particularly issues related to the dissemination of material and the relinquishment of institutional authority over images and information in the online spheres of Flickr and YouTube. Wong’s paper carefully weighs the new complex interactions between museums and social media, considering new possible guidelines for museums, with a particular emphasis on case studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, where she works in the department of Outreach Technology. Concerns over ownership, agency, and the growing voice of new stakeholders is also at play in Léontine Meijer-van Mensch’s chapter ‘New challenges, new priorities: analyzing ethical dilemmas from a stakeholder’s perspective in the Netherlands,’ which looks at a dispute over the display and subsequent removal of controversial work by artist Sooreh Hera at the Municipal Museum, The Hague, in 2007. Writing about the case study through a methodology developed by the Reinwardt Academy (Amsterdam), Meijer presents both the example and the rubric by which she analyzes it as tools for future museum professionals to think and learn about the potential of ethics discourse. Pete Brown’s contribution, ‘Us and Them: who benefits from experimental exhibition making?’ examines the controversial display of the exhibition Lindow Man: A Bog Body Mystery at the Manchester Museum (UK) in 2008. By gauging audience reaction to the exhibit through a multifaceted Personal Meaning Mapping (PMM) survey, Brown demonstrates that anti-spectacular or non-didactic displays of exhibitions often make for confusing or uncomfortable experiences for audiences who have particular expectations of xix

PREFACE

the traditional museum experience. Brown’s case study suggests not that museums abandon such risk-taking interpretative strategies, but that learning teams more effectively address visitor needs. Joshua Gorman’s chapter looks at the moral agency of museums through the example of Quawpaw artifacts facing potential repatriation from the Chucalissa Museum in Tennessee, USA. Analyzing the case with a critique of universalism and new cosmopolitanism (Appiah 2006), Gorman complicates the discourse over ownership of Native artifacts and repatriation. In ‘A new state of the arts: developing the biennial model as ethical art practice,’ Chelsea Haines takes up a different position by discussing social responsibility through the lens of new curatorial practices and the international contemporary art biennial. Examining ethics in relationships among art, art institutions, and local communities, the paper engages with Prospect.1, the city-wide biennial that took place in New Orleans, USA, in 2007. Haines explores issues of context-specificity and audience engagement that have become dominant in the realm of contemporary curating. In the final chapter, Lydie Diakhaté argues for a rethinking of Jean Prouvé’s prefabricated kit-house Maison Tropicale, looking at how these houses functioned historically within colonial Africa, and how they operate today in the Western contemporary art market. Tracing the history of these houses in tandem with an examination of Angela Ferreira’s installation inspired by the houses at the 2007 52nd Venice Biennale, Diakhaté’s essay ultimately questions the liminality between the material and immaterial and what happens when the object is moved across those lines and brought into the marketplace. Although this book provides only a representative sampling of the new museum ethics discourse, the contributions included demonstrate that ethics issues are embedded across all areas of the institution and that the new museum ethics is a defining characteristic of the twenty-first century museum. Conversations on materiality and immateriality, such as contained here, engage some of the most difficult but significant issues that museums face in the ongoing battle between democracy and control. What is clear is that change in the museum is dependent on a museum ethics of change (Marstine 2011). Providing rich and substantive ethics training, such as that which has inspired the collaborative efforts of the volume, will help to create a responsive and responsible museum of the future. Notes 1. http://www.nps.gov/nagpra/mandates/25usc3001etseq.htm 2. http://australia.icomos.org/wp-content/uploads/BURRA_CHARTER.pdf 3. http://www.unesco.org/culture/ich/index.php?lg_en&pg_00011&RL_00014

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References Appiah, K.A. 2006. Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a world of strangers. New York and London: W.W. Norton and Company. Bandelli, A., and Konijn, E. 2011. An experimental approach to strengthen the role of science centers in the governance of science. In Routledge companion to museum ethics: Redefining ethics for the twenty-first century museum, ed. J. Marstine, 164-73. London and New York: Routledge. Bauer, A.A. 2008. Heritage preservation in law and policy: handling the double-edged sword of development. In Cultural heritage and sustainable development in the Arab world, ed. F. Hassan, 253-67. Alexandria: Bibliotheca Alexandrina. Edson, G., ed. 1997. Museum ethics. London and New York: Routledge. Geismar, H. 2008. Cultural property, museums, and the Pacific: reframing the debates. International Journal of Cultural Property 15: 109-22. Gell, A. 1998. Art and agency: Towards a new anthropological theory. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Goldberg, R. 2001. Performance art: From futurism to the present. 2nd ed. London: Thames and Hudson, World of Art Series. Graham, B., and S. Cook. 2010. Rethinking curating: Art after new media. Cambridge and London: MIT Press. Handler, R. 2003. Cultural property and culture theory. Journal of Social Archaeology 3: 353-65. Hein, H. 2000. The museum in transition: A philosophical perspective. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Keane, W. 2006. Signs are not the garb of meaning: on the social analysis of material things. In Materiality, ed. D. Miller, 182-205. Durham: Duke University Press. Marstine, J. 2011. The contingent nature of museum ethics. In The Routledge companion to museum ethics: Redefining ethics for the twenty-first century museum, ed. J. Marstine, 3-25. London and New York: Routledge. Marstine, J. 2012. Situated revelations: radical transparency in the museum, this volume. Miller, D. 1987. Material culture and mass consumption. Oxford: Blackwell. Miller, D. 2009. Stuff. Cambridge: Polity Press. Munjeri, D. 2004. Tangible and intangible heritage: from difference to convergence. Museum International 56: 12-9. Myers, F., ed. 2001. The empire of things: Regimes of value and material culture. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press. Preucel, R.W., and A.A. Bauer. 2001. Archaeological Pragmatics. Norwegian Archaeological Review 34: 85-96. Prott, L.V., and P.J. O’Keefe. 1992. ‘Cultural heritage’ or ‘cultural property’? International Journal of Cultural Property 1: 307-20. Sandell, R. 2011. On ethics, activism and human rights. In The Routledge companion to museum ethics: Redefining ethics for the twenty-first century museum, ed. J. Marstine, 129-45. London and New York: Routledge.

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Chapter 1

Situated revelations: radical transparency in the museum Janet Marstine

This essay argues that the tensions between exposure and withholding warrant new approaches toward museum transparency. Citing diverse examples within a range of museum policies and practices, I examine both the problematics and potential of transparency within the context of twenty-first century museum ethics. The chapter acknowledges the advances made by ‘dashboard’’ transparency – transparency as demonstrated through statistics that benchmark performance outcomes – but calls for a strategy of radical transparency that empowers museum communities by acknowledging ‘situated revelations’. Situated revelations make the disclosure of data meaningful for constituents through contextualization, translation, and mediation as they identify the agendas of the ‘experts’ doing this framing work. Through equitable knowledge sharing, situated revelations provide a mode to critique and redistribute power and resources. They empower consumers of information to make critically informed choices and take action.

Figure 1.1 Toledo Museum of Art Glass Pavilion.

1

NEW DIRECTIONS IN MUSEUM ETHICS

Introduction Transparent houses and other illusions The elegant, sleekly minimalist Toledo Museum of Art Glass Pavilion (2004-2006) (Figure 1), designed by architects Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa of the Tokyobased firm SANAA, is a study in transparency (Frampton 2009). Interior and exterior walls are fabricated from curved glass with the exception of those needed for utilities. With dedicated space for glass exhibitions, glass artists’ studios and public programming, the Pavilion not only offers up an homage to glass as a defining element in the history of Toledo and of the Museum, it creates dynamic relationships between objects and experiences – between seeing glass and making glass (Toledo Museum of Art n.d.). Although SANAA is renowned for its innovative use of architectural glass and Toledo’s Glass Pavilion has won awards for its clever design, the building nevertheless demonstrates that transparency is not just a simple matter of ‘seeing through.’ A delicate dance takes place on the glass surfaces of the Pavilion between the transparent and the reflective (designbuild-network.com 2011). The Toledo Museum of Art Glass Pavilion is but one example of a larger trend of contemporary museum architecture that employs glass to convey a sense of transparency. Three distinct patterns emerge: Glass becomes a trope to communicate openness, inclusivity, and community engagement; it is a means to connect the museum, literally and metaphorically, with neighboring sites and a shared past through reflective surfaces; and it serves as a way to break down physical and psychological barriers between visitors and staff and acknowledge museological processes. As a whole, museum architecture concerned with transparency shows that glass functions as a means of communication between museums and communities. The transparency of glass offers a visual metaphor for a new collaborative relationship between institutions and their publics. Since the Enlightenment, transparency in architecture has been associated with transformational properties and utopian sentiments. In his concern over the gaps between appearance and reality during the ancien regime, Jean-Jacques Rousseau longed for an age of transparency and even dreamed of living in a transparent house which he imagined as a vehicle of truth, morality, and authenticity (Starobinski 1988). And while the ubiquitous use of glass today in corporate and consumer culture may suggest banality, in fact, new technologies have re-invigorated glass and its subversive potential (Bell 2009: 13-14). But transparency, even in the palpable context of building with glass, is never uncomplicated. It is not a mere act of unveiling but instead a constantly shifting tension between exposure and withholding, as Reinhold Martin asserts: There are things we are willing to see and things we are not willing to see, regardless of our technological capacity to do so. In its supposed transparency, glass both reveals and conceals, largely because we often have difficulty seeing anything but ourselves in it and through it. This is a special kind of narcissism. At one level it is metaphorical, like the association of optical or conceptual transparency with enlightenment and democracy, but at another level it is very real. Consider, for example, the travesty of enlightenment and democracy in the total vision of the security state – a travesty that is made simultaneously visible and invisible when we talk of such things as blast-resistant glass (Martin 2009: 39).

Transparency in museum architecture is rooted in the late eighteenth and early nineteenthcentury concept of the Panopticon as a means of social regulation (Bennett 1995: 63-69). This essay argues that the tensions between exposure and withholding warrant new approaches toward museum transparency that foster substantive and sustained community 2

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engagement. Citing diverse examples within a range of museum policies and practices, I examine both the problematics and potential of transparency within the context of twentyfirst century museum ethics. My argument is informed by interviews with six museum leaders from institutions in the UK, US, and Australia at the forefront of developments in transparency1 and from a literature on transparency in fields across the humanities and social sciences. The chapter acknowledges the advances made by ‘dashboard’ or ‘transactional’ transparency – transparency as demonstrated through statistics that benchmark performance outcomes – but calls for a strategy of radical transparency that empowers museum communities by acknowledging what Christina Garsten and Monica Lindh de Montoya refer to as ‘situated revelations’ (Garsten and Lindh de Montoya 2008a: 284). Situated revelations go beyond passive disclosure towards an active, self-reflective process of transparency that shares the framing of information, along with the information itself. Situated revelations make the disclosure of data meaningful for constituents through contextualization, translation, and mediation as they identify the agendas of the ‘experts’ doing this framing work. Through equitable knowledge sharing, situated revelations provide a mode to critique and redistribute power and resources. They empower consumers of information to make critically informed choices and take action. I will show that situated revelations make radical transparency a means towards fuller and more sustained public participation in museums. Transparency as an instrumental value Political scientists have argued persuasively that transparency is a human right central to the functioning of civil society as it enables public participation and democracy (Birkinshaw 2006). Not an end unto itself, transparency’s power lies in its instrumentality as a corrective to the inequalities of power (Heald 2006b: 27-29). In the museum context, the situated revelations of radical transparency deconstruct power inequalities to create trust and agency which engender shared authority. In museum studies, transparency or openness is often cited as a characteristic of best practice but has been little studied. When acknowledged in the literature, transparency is typically discussed as an asset to museums’ handling of difficult issues (Lankford and Scheffer 2004: 201-226; Cameron 2003). Recently, digital heritage scholars have focused on internet transparency with its abilities to reach diverse audiences in innovative ways (Simon 2010). Still, gaps between the technology that empowers transparency and effective strategies for communicating transparency have created an environment in which journalists and bloggers remain the primary drivers for museum transparency issues. The media too often skirts nuance and context in favor of polarizing exposés on volatile issues concerning repatriation, deaccessioning, executive compensation and conflicts of interest (Riding 2005; Kimmelman 2005; Rosenbaum 2010; The Guardian 2011). I complicate the discourse on museum transparency, arguing that a new, more assertive position of radical transparency is necessary, given museums’ increasingly diverse publics and complex responsibilities. I define radical transparency as a liberatory antidote to the assumed alignments and readability of knowledge; radical transparency not only describes but also analyzes behavior and considers its significance. (Marstine 2011a: 14-17). This chapter elucidates the concept of radical transparency in an effort to convey its instrumental value and its relevance to museums at a time of increased commitment to engaging communities. First, I examine the culture of transparency that has developed since the 1990s, situating museums within this culture. Then I consider the relationship 3

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between transparency and museum ethics. I discuss dashboard or transactional transparency as representative of a traditional concept of museum ethics that establishes and benchmarks professional practice. And I explore radical transparency as an emerging ethics strategy that has the potential to create a culture of civic engagement with museums. In so doing, I identify five major tenets that, together, show the complexity and sensitivity of radical transparency in forging new relationships between museums and communities. My larger aim is to show how the situated revelations of radical transparency create fruitful, porous boundaries between institutions and their publics. Museums in an age of transparency Transparency as an ideal We are living in what has come to be known as an ‘age of transparency’ (Sifry 2011); as we seemingly ‘see through’ transparent objects, we similarly read government, corporations, and non-profits today through transparent organization and administration. It is generally assumed that this ‘knowing’ is achieved through the dissemination of performance reports, organizational policies, and strategic planning documents. Garsten and Lindh de Montoya note that transparency: . . . suggests that visibility, information and openness are closely linked with organizing, and that what is visible can also be represented, objectified, measured and compared. One of the prerogatives of late capitalism, it seems, is making the world hospitable for translocal, universal forms of administration and governance and this entails making the world legible and transparent (Garsten and Lindh de Montoya 2008b: 1).

Transparency, so defined, has become a marker of honesty, fairness and integrity and a solution to the corruption that results from the amassing of power in the hands of a few. Transparency checks self-interest in decision-making processes. Sources from US President Barack Obama to the World Bank have called for improved auditing procedures to create a more transparent organizational culture (Obama 2009; Odugbemi 2010). Transparency is part of a larger trend towards corporate, government, and non-profit social responsibility, increasingly reflected in codes of conduct, performance indicators, financial information, and environmental policies made accessible on institutions’ websites (Garsten and Lindh de Montoya 2008c: 80). Transparency is also recognized as a social justice issue, based on access to information. Within the discourse of internationally accepted doctrines of human rights, the right to information is central, as it facilitates the actualization of other human rights, such as freedom of speech and civil rights (Birkinshaw 2006: 48). In its Resolution of the General Assembly of 14 December 1946, the United Nations made this point clear; it states, ‘Freedom of information is a fundamental human right and is the touchstone for all freedoms to which the United Nations is consecrated’ (United Nations 1946). The principle that government should function based on clear policy and procedure has a long history dating back to Han dynasty Chinese and ancient classical Greek political philosophy. The need for candor was advocated in the Enlightenment by voices as diverse as Immanuel Kant and Adam Smith. Great Britain first introduced disclosures laws in the mid-nineteenth century and the US followed fifty years later. The linkage between finance and transparency has roots in the Stock Market crash of 1929 which inspired the creation of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. As bureaucracies grew after World War II, so did the potential to secret information from stakeholders and Cold War politics 4

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inspired a climate of secrecy. The U.S. Freedom of Information Act, passed in 1966 and amended in 1974, marks a shift towards greater transparency. Transparency gained traction as a mode of audit and/or disclosure with the rise of corporate corruption in the 1980s. Its significance increased in the 1990s with the fall of the Berlin Wall, the spread of democracy, and the growth of civil society advocacy; by 2006 some 70 countries had freedom of information acts. (Hood 2006: 5-7, 17; Florini 2007: 7-8; Abram 2008). Today transparency is embedded in the rhetoric of good governance yet the need for government mandated modes of oversight, like the US Internal Revenue Service form 990 for tax-exempt institutions, including museums, demonstrates that practices of evading transparency remain common. Redesigned in 2008, IRS form 990 functions as transparency enforcement by calling for non-profits to identify whistleblower policies and document retention practices, compensation arrangements, and potential conflicts of interest, among other issues (Internal Revenue Service 2011). Museum transparency and community engagement In museums, increasing concern for engaging visitors in learning that is meaningful and relevant to them (American Association of Museums, 1992; Department for Culture, Media and Sport 2000) in the last two decades has motivated many institutions to embrace transparency as a strategy of connecting with diverse audiences. Thinking through who has the authority to speak for communities has helped museums to recognize the importance of transparency (Haworth 2011). The internet has opened up new possibilities for communication between museums and their publics. Through the internet, users can find and share information on institutional policy and practice and have begun to expect that such information be accessible. Most museums that employ strategies of online transparency have, to date, however, focused on sharing financial data and making collections searchable, operations defined by economic value and that can be readily quantified. But, in fact, transparency is equally relevant to a range of other domains of museum practice, including curatorial, exhibitions, and learning, that cannot be adequately represented by performance benchmarking (Lubar 2010). Qualitative analysis reveals processes and decision-making that inform representation; in so doing, it acknowledges the constructed nature of interpretation, opening up the museum to critique. Besterman asserts: In their eagerness to interpret material evidence, museums should be humble about their capacity to ‘represent’ peoples or environments, be they contemporary or from the past. From fragments that emerge into the public gaze through a typically capricious, arcane and opaque selection process, museums can at best provide splintered glimpses of art or nature, reflections of a particular set of ideas at a particular time. Yet, museums seldom disclose the sequence of chance events and calculated decisions that result in the display of a particular sculpture, picture, fossil, flint tool or jet engine. Nor is the source of authority of the voice in its interpretation discussed. In this most essential part of the museum’s relationship with society there is a conspicuous lack of transparency in museum presentation. Pepper’s ghost has its place, but the encouragement of a willing suspension of disbelief on the part of the observer belongs in the theatre, not the museum (Besterman 2011: 245).

While some institutions may be deterred by the vulnerability that such an open position implies, in fact, it remains the key to sustaining meaningful participation. What is the relationship between transparency and openness? In many contexts, these terms are used interchangeably and the boundaries between them are fluid. Some museum 5

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directors prefer the word ‘openness.’ For Queens Museum of Art Director Tom Finkelpearl and Manchester Museum Director Nick Merriman ‘transparency’ is too deeply implicated in a language of bureaucracy and can imply, by association, its opposite: that there are secrets to be hidden. Finkelpearl and Merriman assert that ‘openness’ is a positive, proactive and fitting term to signify community engagement (Finkelpearl 2011; Merriman 2011). And, indeed, embedded within the notion of transparency is the possibility of using shared information to critique the distribution of power and resources. David Heald argues that, for this reason, transparency is ultimately a more subversive and potentially transformative concept than openness as it assumes an active position of making information meaningful (Heald 2006a: 62-63). The UK’s Nolan principles, the ‘Seven Principles of Public Life’ which the Committee on Standards in Public Life, chaired by Lord Nolan, developed in 1995 to guide ethics in public service and to which UK museums subscribe, includes ‘openness’ as one of these principles (Committee on Standards in Public Life 1995). But Heald speculates that, if the Nolan committee had met ten years later, it would have reflected contemporary discourse and used the term transparency instead. (Heald 2006b: 25). Complexities and contradictions of museum transparency Transparency is employed in contradictory ways from a diverse range of political positions. Government regulation scholar Christopher Hood declares: Like many other notions of a quasi-religious nature, transparency is more often preached than practiced, more often invoked than defined, and indeed may ironically be said to be mystic in essence, at least to some extent (Hood 2006: 3).

Calls for greater transparency can lead, paradoxically, to increased control of information flow. From the age of transparency a culture of audit and surveillance has emerged, along with the technologies to enable it. An associated body of restrictions and privacy laws has resulted that competes with transparency efforts. In a post-September 11 world which privileges security, transparency has come to suggest a climate of mistrust (Fung, Graham, and Weil 2007: 16; Garsten and Lindh de Montoya 2008a: 287-89). Transparency is a complex and contested idea that warrants substantive analysis in its relevance to the museum sector. Clearly, as part of the non-profit and/or government sector responsible to the public trust, museums have been shaped by the age of transparency. Steven Lubar explains: Tax dollars support most museums, either directly or indirectly, and so there is a moral obligation to serve the public; part of that is letting them know what you’re doing. This has the advantage, too, of letting the public – the taxpayers – know what they’re getting for their tax dollars; they can see the work that goes on behind the scenes. It’s a good way to build support (Lubar 2010).

Access to information is central to the flourishing of democracy as representative government is shaped by the principle of informed consent (Florini 2007: 2-3). In the museum context, transparency is a mode of creating informed consent. In museums, transparency has become a device to signal organizational health. As a result, museums over the last two decades have undergone marked growth in crafting and making accessible mission statements, codes of ethics and conduct, strategic plans, annual reports, financial information, and other performance indicators. Museums’ use of the internet to share this information has extended their reach and efficacy. 6

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At the Smithsonian, for instance, when former president Lawrence Small was fired in 2007 for financial mismanagement, incoming president G. Wayne Clough responded through an ambitious, multi-pronged internal and external transparency initiative to establish a publicly engaged system of oversight. A centrepiece was a series of workshops on fostering staff/community collaboration; key ideas generated by the workshops were posted on a wiki dedicated to new media strategy that invited commentary (Kanter and Fine, 2010: 79-80; Smithsonian Institution 2011). But the Smithsonian’s self-censorship of David Wojnarowicz’ A Fire in my Belly at the National Portrait Gallery exhibition Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture (2010) clearly undercut its efforts to restore public trust at this most politically surveilled of US cultural institutions. A lack of transparency can create suspicion and distortions. This is particularly evident in the case of deaccession/disposal, where, because of museums’ attempted secrecy about this activity and the media’s role to disclose it as a breach of public trust, deaccession as responsible collections management is little understood. This problem led the Museums Association (MA), after a two-year research project on disposal, to conclude: Misunderstanding of the word and process of disposal is fundamental in creating public negativity. Museums can begin to solve communication problems by increasing transparency about what disposal means and how the process works (Museums Association 2007b: 4).

The research informed the MA Code of Ethics, revised in 2007, to recommend, ‘Openly communicate and document all disposals and the basis on which decisions to dispose were made’ (Museums Association 2007a: 17). As a human right, transparency should provide equal access to cultural heritage, from collections to learning, and to the museological decisions that shape policy and practice. Michael Pickering, Head: Curatorial and Research, National Museum of Australia (NMA), has stated, ‘Transparency breaks down barriers so museums are no longer the gatekeepers of culture’ (Pickering 2011). How this ideal is achieved is highly contested. Significant hurdles exist in embedding institutional transparency; many of those with ‘privileged’ information in organizations resist the sharing of it as they understand that sharing information can lead to the sharing of power (Florini 2007: 3). Nevertheless, as Nick Merriman asserts, transparency is a prerequisite for community engagement (Merriman 2011). Beth Takekawa, Director of the Wing Luke Museum of the Asian Pacific American Experience, endorses this notion; transparency creates trust which, in turn, nourishes an organizational culture with diverse, meaningful and sustained routes to public participation. Takekawa argues that transparency is no longer a choice; it is an imperative. She notes, ‘Maintaining the old culture of ownership of information today seems arcane in an environment in which people expect to express their opinions and engage in dialogue with others’ (Takekawa 2011). Pickering asserts that the activism of indigenous communities seeking rights to control their cultural heritage has helped to create a climate of transparency in Australian museums, in combination with government mandates of transparency (Pickering 2011). Because they are publically funded, museums in Australia undergo the same public scrutiny as other public agencies. Reports to Parliament are published on the Museum’s website, along with a host of strategic, policy, and financial documents and reports, both flattering and unflattering, that together capture the history, values, and activities of the institution and provide an important tool for revision (NMA 2011; NMA 2009; NMA Review Panel 2003). Pickering states that a high level of interrogation is central to public service culture in Australia but adds that effective transparency requires 7

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embedding it as an instrumental value within institutional culture. He remarks, ‘It’s our norm. Our staff have grown up (professionally speaking) in that culture. Embedding transparency is likely to require a cultural change in an institution, not just a policy or procedural change’ (Pickering 2011). Merriman anticipates that expectations of transparency in the museum will increase as a result of breaches of public trust outside the museum, for instance, in the UK, the News of the World journalists phone hacking scandal and revelations that members of Parliament were padding their expense accounts. According to Merriman, when an organization is not actively open to scrutiny, the public will likely assume that it must have something to hide (Merriman 2011). Transparency and museum ethics Lubar has remarked, ‘Whenever I’m confronted with a tricky ethical question – one for which the answer is uncertain, or for which there are good arguments on either side – my answer is always, “transparency”’ (Lubar 2010). Indeed, transparency is a linchpin of contemporary museum ethics (Marstine 2011a). Museum ethics today is recognized as a dynamic social practice contingent upon economic, political, social and technological factors. To develop a level of comfort with the contingencies of museum ethics – its uncertainties and dependencies, its capacity to ‘touch’ a range of other social concerns – is to accept the complexity and dynamism of the discourse that both reflects and shapes the real issues that museums encounter (Ibid: 20). This approach is based on the premise that conventional museum ethics thinking with its emphasis on skill mastery, standard setting, and compliance to establish professional practice served an important role during the last century in differentiating public service from personal interest but is an inadequate framework to guide museum professionals through the complex ethical landscape today. Traditional museum ethics employs a rigid and technical language created by like-minded individuals to maintain common practice and power structures. In this century the shifting terrain drives a critique of common practice to implement change that meets the current and future needs of society. New theories and methods are needed to take museums into the future (Ibid: 4-8). Twenty-first century museum ethics acknowledges the moral agency of museums, ‘the concept that museum ethics is more than the personal and professional ethics of individuals and concerns the capacity of institutions to create social change’ (Marstine 2011b: xxiii). It frames museum ethics as an opportunity for growth, rather than a duty of compliance. And it supports transparency in its efforts towards shared authority of museums (Marstine 2011c). Radical transparency is central to the shift away from a reliance on codes – as a reactive ethics of coersion – and towards a dynamic engagement with issues – as a proactive ethics of civic discourse. John Wetenhall, President of the Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh, asserts that transparency is not only an ethical issue but a leadership issue as well for it promises competitive advantage. He holds that organizations require more effort to keep quiet than to reveal information and that the short-term challenges of sharing difficult news are eclipsed by the long-term harm and inevitable failure of attempting to withhold it. Wetenhall asserts that donors respect and reward candor as they expect to be partners in fulfilling the mission of the institution. He argues that good leaders employ transparency to enfranchise boards, staff, and community leaders in all but the most sensitive legal or financial information. Wetenhall notes: 8

NEW DIRECTIONS IN MUSEUM ETHICS In times of crisis, opening lines of communication is the first step to solving problems; in times of strength, communication is the basis for institutional change. In either case, the message of transparency is a managerial directive: we have a challenge and we want you to help generate a solution (Wetenhall 2011).

Within the framework of twenty-first century museum ethics, good leadership and moral agency converge to appropriate transparency as an instrument to enfranchise diverse publics. What is the potential of transparency in the museum setting? Does transparency promise greater community engagement and public trust? Museum transparency can manifest itself in a variety of ways, from a transactional, ‘dashboard’ approach to the contextualized, situated revelations of radical transparency. Both strategies have value from the perspective of contemporary museum ethics because information sharing is a democratizing process. Florini asserts: The cliché is not quite right: information by itself is not power. But it is an essential first step in the exercise of political and economic power. Opening up flows of information changes who can do what. (Florini 2007: 1).

In recognition of its potential to democratize, transparency is sometimes mandated by Freedom of Information laws. Florida’s ‘Sunshine Law,’ enacted in 1967, is intended to foster open government in public agencies, including museums (Chance and Locke 2008). Transactions – from minutes of board meetings to emails between staff members – are considered part of the public record and can be accessed through this law. Formerly director of two Florida museums, Wetenhall found that the Sunshine Law elevates conversation; according to Wetenhall, museum staff and trustees behave more responsibly when such laws are in effect (Wetenhall 2011). But Freedom of Information laws are passive and reactive, rather than pro-active. As Wetenhall notes, the legal functions as the minimum requirement for best practice. The new museum ethics suggests such laws function best to support active strategies of creating transparency. Transactional and radical transparency have an inverse relationship when analyzed along a spectrum of efficacy and efficiency; generally, transactional transparency is efficient but may lack efficacy; radical transparency has the power of efficacy but presents challenges to efficiency. But it behooves museums to identify solutions to the problems of efficiency in radical transparency because the situated revelations that radical transparency illuminates prioritize process over product, thus acknowledging the contingent nature of museum ethics. Besterman argues, ‘As with all forms of public trust, transparency of process is the strongest guarantor of probity’ (Besterman 2011: 240). ‘Dashboard’ transparency Transparency in a flash Transactional transparency has come to be known as ‘dashboard’ transparency because organizations post and update relevant data on their web sites or search engines in a snapshot, like an instrument panel on a car, designed to be comprehended in a flash. In fact, many variations of this approach to transparency have arisen and not all organizations make data as readable as a dashboard. But institutions that practice dashboard transparency share a belief in numbers which represent performance outcomes in financial and other practices. This focus on quantitative measuring devices is an outgrowth of conceptualizing

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ethics as professional practice. Ethics is inscribed through the proactive sharing of data and through achieving benchmarks upheld as representative of best practice. Dashboard transparency assumes the neutrality and comparability of statistics (Garsten and Lindh de Montoya 2008b: 12). Museums typically use dashboard transparency to make accessible on the internet statistics and related documents concerning policy, procedure and finance. Some performance measures may be restricted to staff only; on this level, dashboard transparency functions as an internal mechanism to track outcomes and maintain accountability. Even when museums make performance measures accessible to the public, often this data is aimed at interested parties most likely to use the information, such as donors, the media, and public funding agencies (Kanter and Fine 2010: 73; Wetenhall 2011). A less readable dashboard, in which one has to drill down through multiple layers to locate key information, often indicates that an institution is targeting ‘expert’ stakeholders over a wider public. Implementing dashboard transparency is challenging for museums because it requires centralized communication systems and management structure in a sector where units often work as silos. Diverse museum departments commonly use incompatible systems of measurement. Leadership has the challenge of redefining what those measurements are (Wetenhall 2011). Posting key documents and data may seem like a straightforward mode of transparency but many scholars of transparency critique the dashboard approach as highly scripted; dashboard transparency often reflects the conflicting goals of sharing and controlling information. With its focus on the quantitative, it can lack the nuance and complexity to represent qualitative aims such as social responsibility (Hasselström 2008: 161). Its underlying assumption that statistics are politically neutral indicators, easy to evaluate and compare, masks a politically fraught process of negotiation and compromise. In a culture of audit, dashboard transparency can become a method of ‘ticking boxes’ without committing to the equitable and meaningful sharing of policy and practice. (Garsten and Lindh de Montoya 2008c: 86-87, 91). The kind of disclosure that dashboard transparency provides can require professional expertise to unpack. It can even conceal unethical practices and transfer liability to other parties (O’Neill 2006: 81-2, 87). Wetenhall argues that dashboard transparency is valuable as a kind of scoreboard that helps staff to assess the past and present of an institution and to chart pathways to improvement. He allows, however, that it is the questions generated by the data, rather than the data itself, that are most impactful. (Wetenhall 2011). Nick Merriman is more dubious; he likens the sharing of uninterpreted data to the recent trend for open storage, whereby collections in store are made visible to the public through glass walls or special ‘open days’. Merriman finds such efforts lacking in efficacy. He explains, ‘What generally has been found is that putting lots of uninterpreted material out there doesn’t empower people at all. Without the tools to interpret objects, or data, or understand decisions, transparency can be just more noise’ (Merriman 2012). The Indianapolis Museum of Art dashboard In the museum sector the Indianapolis Museum of Art (IMA) has pioneered dashboard transparency under the leadership of Director Maxwell Anderson in collaboration with Chief Information Officer Rob Stein. The IMA dashboard is a cleverly designed web page found under the ‘About’ tab on the Museum’s home page (Indianapolis Museum of Art 2010). A grid of nine bright squares pops up, each square with a performance statistic 10

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Figure 1.2 Indianapolis Museum of Art dashboard.

representing a key museum operation – from attendance to energy consumption (Figure 2). By clicking on the squares, a user can find out more on the Museum’s policies about those areas of activity. At the top of the grid tabs can take the user to statistics as far back as 2007. The dashboard reveals performance indicators the Museum is proud of, for example, on environmentally responsible energy consumption, and also that the IMA finds challenging, for instance, the instability of its endowment during the recession. Stein asserts: We went through some gut-churning moments putting those numbers up, but they are really just the proof of the pudding and demonstrate that the dashboard isn’t just a spin exercise for the museum’s PR department. On a positive note, sharing the negative statistics accurately gives us a great platform to talk to donors and funding agencies about the realities of the IMA’s financial situation. It’s great to let the facts make the case for you (Kantor and Fine 2010: 75).

For the IMA, it might be argued, the dashboard format reinforces the ‘truth’ of its data through the guise of statistical aggregator, as it disseminates these statistics. 11

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Anderson has showcased the dashboard at conferences and in museum publications (Anderson2010b; Anderson 2010a) as a model of best practice and the Museum has released open source software that enables other institutions to create their own dashboard (Stein 2009). The IMA dashboard is recognized in the sector as a significant innovation towards museum transparency (Janes 2009: 132). This is due, in part, to the deep layering of information so that, while the home page may seem strictly transactional, when the user clicks for greater detail, the revelations of performance over time implicitly direct users to consider the decision-making that shapes performance. As one user commented on the IMA blog, ‘The dashboard can be seen as the institutional thermometer. By gauging it, the community can jump in at rough times to administer the “medication’’’ (Alexander 2009). The efficacy of the dashboard for a more radical, embedded transparency depends, though, on supplementary web-based implementation of transparency including the posting of policy online and the use of social media to frame IMA data and policy. Under the tab ‘Art,’ for instance, on the IMA homepage, users can find the Museum’s deaccession policy as well as a searchable list of deaccessioned works, each detailing the price fetched and the rationale for disposal (Indianapolis Museum of Art 2011). This gesture is significant as it encourages forthright discourse about the sustainability of collections. As Lubar asserts: Acknowledging deaccessions at all is a good thing – by making clear that deaccessioning is a common, ongoing, and important part of the work of the museum, this website can remove the stigma that arises when deaccessions are, every so often discovered by the press as a museum scandal. (Lubar 2010).

Still, the statistical method of relaying deaccession activity does not admit the complexity of the ethics laden decision-making process. Lubar concludes: Only one object from the hundreds listed was transferred to another non-profit, a set of chairs that found a new home at the Cumberland County Historical Society. Why? And why aren’t we told the real reasons for deaccession: the reasons are reduced to a single phrase, almost always ‘Secondary example’ or ‘Not mission relevant.’  Presumably there’s a memorandum of deaccession behind each of these decisions: why not post that? (Ibid).

The IMA’s deaccession pages offer a place to post user comments but has sparked little public debate. Social media has the potential to frame dashboard transparency and make it relevant to diverse audiences. The IMA has an active social media programme and its efforts at transparency are most evident in its staff-authored blog. ‘Behind the scenes’ posts on the challenges and opportunities of creating exhibitions, making conservation decisions, engaging communities and other concerns offer meaningful insights on ethics-driven strategies and practices. But the blog contains few direct references to data on the dashboard, leaving the user to make their own connections. Nowhere do the IMA’s transparency initiatives acknowledge how its tools of measurement themselves are implicated in making meaning. As Janes notes, ‘Unfortunately, his [Anderson’s] framework does not recognize the aims, aspirations and issues teeming beyond the confines of the museum’ (Janes 2009: 132). Ultimately, as Stein acknowledges, the IMA dashboard is a mechanism of accountability that prioritizes informing key stakeholders whom they define as direct actors in evaluating Museum performance benchmarks and imagines the wider public as passive consumers of IMA data. Stein declares, ‘The dashboard is both a way to communicate to donors and the 12

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press the truth behind how we’re running the museum, but also a crucial tool for staff members to track their own performance over time, knowing that the world is potentially watching’ (Kantor and Fine 2010: 74). Radical transparency is invested in a world that is doing more than watching but instead impacting decision-making processes. Situating radical transparency I identify five distinct but overlapping tenets that, together, characterize radical transparency. Radical transparency is shaped by a critique of dashboard transparency; it is committed to working towards reciprocity in relations between museums and communities; it shares the processes of value-based decision-making; it empowers participants to make informed choices in their engagement with museums; and it is dependent on internal and external alignments. All five of these tenets acknowledge the notion of situated revelations. Garsten and Lindh de Montoya assert, ‘Transparency produces only “situated revelations;” data does not exist without its framing through an agenda of transparency and the transparency narrative impacts their interpretation’ (Garsten and Lindh de Montoya 2008b: 284). In the museum context, radical transparency offers audiences the freedom to make informed choices in order to experience what they wish and to participate as they’d like. It reveals to museum professionals choices and actions that can be assessed and amended. For all stakeholders it provides a means to think critically about museums and to engage in ethics discourse, thus leading to greater self-reflexivity (Marstine 2011a: 14). Radical transparency does, however, involve boundary work; negotiating the boundaries between what is shared and what is withheld and acknowledging the power relationships within those negotiations is integral to all transparency strategies. Moreover, radical transparency may have more efficacy than dashboard transparency but implementing it is never easy. As Merriman points out, not all citizens are equally invested in critically engaging with museums. He cites as evidence a Community Advisory Panel at the Manchester Museum with a diverse membership. Merriman explains: We found after years of trying that they didn’t want to radically critique us, or empower themselves, but that they simply wanted to have a relationship with the museum, where they wanted us to lead, and them to participate. We’re currently rethinking our approach to community engagement to try to move beyond this (Merriman 2012).

Radical transparency requires a long-term investment in understanding audiences and potential audiences and fostering a range of fruitful relationships with them. Critiquing the transactional Radical transparency emerges from a critique of conventional notions and delivery of transactional transparency as unable both to question common practice and to engage diverse publics. The rationalizing and regulatory aspects of transactional transparency preclude possibilities of revolutionary transformation. Garsten and Lindh de Montoya explain: Transparency is closely linked to a neoliberal ethos of governance that promotes individualism, entrepreneurship, voluntary forms of regulation and formalized types of accountability. It is powerful in that it is inscribed in political, financial and cultural documents, processes and

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NEW DIRECTIONS IN MUSEUM ETHICS policies that not only suggest, but push for, a certain normative order (Garsten and Lindh de Montoya 2008b: 3).

Public disclosure policies do not in and of themselves create a culture of transparency as they do not offer incentives for institutions to more effectively meet public needs and interests. Citing the ineffectiveness of the Bush administration’s color-coded ranking of terrorist threats as an example, Fung, Graham, and Weil assert that general openness is too passive a mechanism; driven by political compromise, it represents partial, and failing, transparency (Fung, Graham, and Weil 2007). In addition, dashboard or transactional transparency is not responsive to diverse audience needs and interests. O’Neill argues that transparency too often focuses on the simple transfer of information, rather than on effective and meaningful exchange (O’Neill 2006: 81). Without specialist knowledge to evaluate data communicated by transactional transparency, many citizens underestimate the significance of their potential advocacy and/or do not see the relevance of this data to their own welfare, so will not allocate time and resources towards greater engagement (Salmon and Wolfelsperger 2007: 11-35). Towards reciprocity Radical transparency is grounded in the human rights principle of equal access to information and equality of opportunity to act upon it. Radical transparency thus has the potential to inspire new modes of democratic participation in the museum. Political philosopher Iris Marion Young described a sweeping kind of participatory process – soliciting, rather than shying away from, divergent or transgressive voices – as democratic pluralism, a socially just corrective to the sometimes exclusive properties of conventional democratic systems in which the majority can silence dissent (Young 1990). Democratic pluralism is a way of challenging the binary relationship between self and other which continues to shape museum policy and practice (Marstine 2011a: 11). But how does this ideal translate into practice? Effective transparency is, according to O’Neill, ‘audiencesensitive:’ Those who seek to communicate effectively must still fashion their speech-acts with care, must still be sensitive to the actual capacities of their intended audiences, and must still meet a range of epistemic and ethical norms that are constitutive of adequate communication. Where those norms are met, transparency can indeed extend communication by ensuring that specific information reaches a wider audience (O’Neill 2006: 82-83).

For the Queens Museum of Art, transparency through ‘audience sensitivity’ is achieved by prioritizing community needs and interests over curatorial research. To Queens Museum Director Finkelpearl, flourishing community engagement demonstrates that effective communication is taking place (Finkelpearl 2011). To facilitate engagement, the Queens Museum offers specialist programs making long-term investments to recognize ‘expert’ participants. These targeted participants are involved in Museum councils and advisory groups and serve as a bridge between the Museum and its communities. Because they spend so much time in the museum, the expert participants, for instance, the Queens Teens group, learn how the Museum operates and how to effectively advocate for their interests within this system. Finkelpearl explains, ‘Museums becomes transparent through a longterm investment sharing with a relatively small number of diverse community members how you operate in your museum home’ (Ibid). Moreover, the Museum works to

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reconstitute the expert participants’ communities through programming so these participants can embrace the institution as part of the community. The relational sensibility of radical transparency between museums and communities, in which equity is achieved as both parties see (and recognize) the expertise and experience of one another, is founded on the ethics of reciprocity. As Bernadette Lynch applies the concept to the museum setting, reciprocity is dependent upon illuminating and deconstructing power relationships between institutions and their publics and unpacking how policy and practice have been shaped by these relationships. Only with reciprocity can democratic pluralism be realized. Lynch states, ‘To make use of invitations participants need to understand what is going on, what is at stake and over what it is possible to press demands’ (Lynch 2011: 148). And, Lynch asserts, as power relationships are analyzed, conflict will result, conflict as productive and necessary to participatory practice, ‘. . . conflict must be allowed to be central to democratic participation if museums are to view participants as actors rather than as beneficiaries.’ (Ibid: 160). The situated revelations of radical transparency expose and analyze power relationships to foster reciprocity and the productive conflict that makes reciprocity possible; unless museums are willing to open themselves to situating revelations through reciprocity, transparency remains an ultimately coercive strategy. Sharing the processes of value-based decision-making Recognizing museum publics as ‘actors rather than beneficiaries’ entails sharing institutional values and power relationships as well as decision-making processes grounded in those values and relationships. Actors know the rules so that they can consciously choose to work within the system or to change it. National Museums Liverpool demonstrates this strategy of radical transparency through identifying and posting on its website the beliefs that shape policy and practice; these beliefs establish Liverpool Museums’ commitment to social justice and social change (National Museums Liverpool 2011). Knowing a museum’s values helps individuals to make informed choices about if, how, and why they might become involved with the institution. This approach to transparency of sharing institutional values is shaped by a feminist ethics which recognizes the emancipatory potential of transparency but is skeptical of its claims to truth and authority. By declaring their institutional values, museums pursuing radical transparency acknowledge the political and social perspectives that shape their work, implicitly rejecting the patriarchal position of neutrality and omnipotence, as typically found in dashboard transparency. As Margaret Urban Walker explains, feminist ethics credits radical transparency with ‘making visible gendered arrangements that underlie existing moral understandings, and the gendered structures of authority that produce and circulate these understandings’ (Walker 1996: 286). In the museum setting, such situated revelations empower communities to participate in shaping and reshaping institutional values and agendas. Recognizing museum publics as partners in developing policy and practice also means taking a hard look together at institutional history and its legacies. To mark the bicentenary of the abolition of the Slave Trade Act in 2007, the Manchester Museum organized Myths about Race, an exhibition and related programming about slavery that examined the roles museums have played in perpetuating racism (Manchester Museum 2006) (Figure 3). Created through a collaboration amongst activists, collectors, academics, curators and archivists from both inside and outside the institution, this project reflects the Manchester 15

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Figure 1.3 Revealing Histories: Myths about Race.

Museum’s commitment to both acknowledging and deconstructing its colonialist past by sparking debate. To Nick Merriman, such efforts are at the heart of meaningful transparency (Merriman 2011). Some institutions commission artists to engage in institutional critique that helps the museum to become more transparent about the complexities and contradictions of its history and legacy. In 2005, the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College commissioned artist Fred Wilson to stage an intervention examining how its collections represent race and ethnicity. The project, So Much Trouble in the World: BELIEVE IT OR NOT!, sparked heightened concern for diversity and equity in museum representation and has translated into greater efforts at the Hood towards transparency in museological practice (Marstine 2012). Radical transparency also is employed to reveal museological processes, engendering trust to facilitate co-creation of projects on contested issues. Sharing decision-making processes facilitates public debate and empowers participants to take action. Lubar describes this system of radical transparency, ‘Draft documents, arguments for and against a proposal, the decisions about the decision-making process itself, and final decisions are all publicly accessible and remain publicly archived’ (Lubar 2010). Nonetheless, museums’ choices concerning what is made available are subject to all kinds of biases, given that not all documents can or should be recorded and shared. The National Museum of Australia offers a successful example of museums making accessible their decision-making processes to engender trust. It provides overviews on its website of the diverse functions of the museum, such as collections management, with links to specific areas, programs, case studies, and videos of relevant staff discussing their work (NMA 2010a). These overviews, in conjunction with strategic and policy documents, serve as situated revelations which inform co-creators and potential co-creators about 16

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NMA value-based decision-making. The Museum’s reliance on first-person voice in interpretation, for instance, in the highly sensitive 2011 exhibition and accompanying blog on Forgotten Australians, Inside: Life in Children’s Homes and Institutions (NMA 2010b), is indicative of successful co-creation founded on trust forged through radical transparency (Pickering 2011). Radical transparency is also a proactive strategy for decision-making, as opposed to transactional transparency with its stress on accountability to indicators that represent past decision-making. Lubar notes: Radical transparency is much more transparent than accountability. It requires decision making to be transparent right from the beginning of the decision making process, while accountability is a process of verifying the quality of decisions or actions after they have been taken. This difference implies that while accountability generally implements some sort of punishment mechanism against individuals or institutions judged to have taken poor quality decisions or actions, after those decisions have been taken or actions carried out, radical transparency encourages corrections and improvements to decisions to be made long before poor quality decisions have the chance to be enacted (Lubar 2010).

This open process of decision-making is necessary for democratic pluralism and is a defining element of reciprocity. Empowering informed choice In the museum context radical transparency also acknowledges the ethics of spectatorship (Perry and Marion 2010: 96-104) and empowers visitors to make informed decisions about whether and how they wish to engage with highly charged ideas and materials. The Manchester Museum notifies visitors upon entrance that human remains are on exhibit and offers alternate routes for those who prefer to avoid them. The National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) New York created wall text introducing the Ghost Dance dresses in its exhibition, Identity by Design (2008-2009), that, as Director John Haworth recounts, ‘asked visitors to make a conscious choice about looking at this culturally significant and politically sensitive material.’ (Haworth 2011). In the accompanying online exhibit, in which the Museum could not control the context for viewing, NMAI chose not to include the dresses and directly explained the decision to restrict the material (NMAI 2006). An emerging model of transparency in environmental governance is relevant to the museum context. As Ramkumar and Petkova explain, in this model, information is shared to empower citizens to impact environmental decision-making and its outcomes: The new environmental governance paradigm requires that citizens be empowered to influence environmental outcomes. The governance framework must enable citizens to have access to environmental information; decision-making processes and the opportunity to participate in them; and redress and legal remedy to contest the denial of opportunities to participate in decision-making. These three types of access are defined in most international documents and decisions as essential ‘principles’ of transparency in environmental governance (Ramkumar and Petkova 2007: 282).

Effective transparency in museums, likewise, is dependent upon access to information and decision-making processes and opportunities to participate, shape, and subvert these processes. Engaging the kind of democratic pluralism that radical transparency engenders is dependent upon institutions offering up meaningful frameworks by which diverse publics 17

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can critique decision-making and take action. Transparency, by its very nature, implies a filtering process and can only be understood by examining the values embedded in this filtering; transparency relies on the expertise of mediators evaluating what information is made transparent and how. Radical transparency acknowledges the unavoidable presence of mediation in representation (Haworth 2011). This is why some museums now declare the authorship of their exhibitions in the gallery space and/or online. NMAI New York, for instance, frequently displays biographies or statements and photographs of exhibition teams in the galleries and specifies authorship of interpretive texts on its website. The internet can be a powerful tool for embedding radical transparency through fostering informed choice. Pickering and Merriman agree that civic discourse through social media, when supported by the posting of relevant documentation, can encourage museum staff and their publics, inclusive of divergent voices, to reflect upon museological processes and institutional policies in a way that bolsters shared authority (Pickering 2011; Merriman 2011). Fung, Graham, and Weil (2007: 14-15) further argue that, as the internet develops novel ways for institutions and individuals to mine data, it will create new possibilities for ‘targeted’ transparency, customized to the user’s needs and interests; targeted transparency through the internet refutes the assumption that complex information can only be understood by experts and that diverse audiences should only receive simplified data through dashboard mechanisms. But while the practical challenges of delivering situated revelations in the physical space of museum galleries make social media particularly tantalizing as a solution, the effectiveness of radical transparency is founded on coherent and unified strategies for both the physical and virtual manifestations of museums. Creating internal and external alignments The effectiveness of radical transparency is based also on alignments between external and internal positions; outward-facing transparency towards communities draws inspiration from transparency that operates within the organization (Merriman 2011). To Wetenhall transparency is a management style that engenders trust by identifying obstacles, challenges, and agendas, even during times of hardship and concerning deeply contested issues, when museums are engaged in problem solving. Currently leading an alignment of the master plans of the four Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh, which were previously decentralized, Wetenhall says that internal transparency strengthens efficacy in community engagement: Internal transparency motivates staff to lower silo walls to ask ‘how are we serving visitors?’, to acknowledge that ‘we’re not as good as we thought we were’ and to seek strategic solutions to the question ‘what must we do to improve?’ (Wetenhall 2011).

Ultimately, through internal and external alignments of positions implementing radical transparency, museums can most effectively forge policy and practice responsive to the changing needs and interests of their communities. In the security sector, Alasdair Roberts reports that such alignments lead to better decision-making and improved coordination as it challenges inertia: ‘The public sphere is a more powerful analytic engine than even the largest public bureaucracy, but it cannot be harnessed to serve the decision-making needs of government leaders without transparency’ (Roberts 2007: 321). For the Wing Luke Museum, this means the willingness to join up with the ecology of local service organizations to serve as a site for community empowerment where participants take ownership in representing their own stories (Takekawa 2011). Harnessing the public 18

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sphere to shape the decision-making of museums lies at the center of twenty-first century museum ethics. Boundary work: The limits of radical transparency What are the risks of oversharing? The situated revelations of radical transparency evoke a complex dynamic of boundary-setting between what is shared and what is withheld and the control issues underlying these ongoing negotiations. Garsten and Lindh de Montoya declare, ‘Transparency is about boundary-work as well as about power’ (Garsten and Lindh de Montoya 2008b: 11). The boundaries are rarely clear and require a keen understanding of relationships between ethics and law. Information concerning institutional security and personal privacy is typically excluded from transparency agendas. Sometimes suppressing transparency, as with reference letters and peer review, is necessary to embed integrity in processes (Breton et al. 2007: 1). Lubar identifies some of the perils of pushing the boundaries of transparency: Consider the most famous of controversial exhibitions: the Enola Gay exhibition can be read as an example of too much openness; a draft script circulated to a small circle of advisors was leaked to a larger public, and all hell broke loose. Might more vetting, and a more polished draft, have meant a better final result? And consider the curator who spends years working on an exhibition, or a book; should that work be open before it’s complete, and published, in a form in which the curator is proud, and for which he or she receives credit? (Lubar 2010).

The internet transparency of WikiLeaks activists demonstrates that the international movement to expose unethical activity in business and government can cause undue harm (Sifry 2011). On the other hand, too many exemptions from disclosure constrain institutions from developing a culture of transparency. Sometimes transparency in retrospect – releasing information at intervals that acknowledge its time sensitivity – is most appropriate. Birkenshaw holds that when secrecy is called for, it must be justified (Birkenshaw 2006: 51). Merriman and Takekawa note that skilfully negotiating the boundaries of transparency is the mark of good leadership (Merriman 2011; Takekawa 2011). Negotiating the boundaries of radical transparency also involves assessing issues of efficiency. Florini asserts: Of course, it is costly to be informed. These communications channels demand time and thought from all parties. The challenges to efficiency of accumulating and evaluating information is part of what has made representative democracy, and its institutional offshoots with their boards of directors, so attractive (Florini 2007: 6).

But when transparency is seen as an instrumental value that engenders community engagement, rather than an end unto itself, the benefits become clearer. Exploring the boundaries of transparency evokes Foucault’s critique of surveillance as a mode of self-discipline in modern society (Foucault 1977) and feminist challenges to the gaze. Garsten and Lindh de Montoya perceive transparency as integral to the western patriarchal notion of prioritizing vision as a means of knowing but which has also been used to subjugate and to oppress (Garsten and Lindh de Montoya 2008b: 4). With its focus on agency, radical transparency is intended to be a corrective to transparency as oppression but it is important to be mindful of its ever-present potential to assert control. 19

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Transparency has clear limits in the context of restricted information or objects within source communities. But, as Pickering explains, a strategy of radical transparency focuses on museological strategies to communicate indigenous experience to a wider audience and protocols to restrict access are integral to that experience. For instance, the National Museum of Australia does not display human remains or images of human remains and has relied heavily on radical transparency to explain the processes of repatriation of human remains. The NMA has returned 1000 individuals without controversy (Pickering 2011). According to Haworth, the significant issue is that museums are transparent with indigenous communities as they come together to set appropriate boundaries and to convey to viewers the complexity of cultural protocols (Haworth 2011). Such boundary work is essential to the situated revelations of radical transparency. Conclusion: The future of radical transparency As a strategy of engagement, radical transparency has the capacity to create radical transformation. Radical transparency is an instrumental value that fosters shared ownership of museums. Through situated revelations, radical transparency is a clear route towards a more collaborative relationship between museums and their publics. But it is critical for museums to accept that, in enacting radical transparency, they cannot predetermine the outcome – nor should they wish to (Lynch 2011: 160). Radical transparency invites the productive critique and redistribution of museum power and resources. Museums committed to radical transparency look towards models of cocreation in which reciprocity elicits new ways of thinking as the result of a process that admits uncertainty and acknowledges the constantly shifting boundaries between exposure and withholding. It must be acknowledged that there is no fixed endpoint of ‘full’ transparency. Still, there are many strategies to develop meaningful situated revelations that have not yet been fully explored – from tapping audience research to insuring diverse community representation on decision-making committees and boards. As Garsten and Lindh de Montoya state, ‘Transparency can never be complete, but it moves us as a collective towards a higher state of deliberative democracy’ (Garsten and Lindh de Montoya 2008b: 14). Radical transparency promises to make the good work of museums the good work of everyone. Acknowledgements I am grateful to those who agreed to be interviewed for this essay: Tom Finkelpearl, John Haworth, Nick Merriman, Michael Pickering, Beth Takekawa, and John Wetenhall. Many thanks also to Christopher Megone, Nick Merriman and Richard Sandell for their insightful comments on earlier drafts.

Note 1. Interviewees include Tom Finkelpearl, Director, Queens Museum of Art; John Haworth, Director, National Museum of the American Indian, New York; Nick Merriman, Director, Manchester Museum; Michael Pickering, Head: Curatorial and Research, National Museum of Australia; Beth Takekawa, Director, Wing Luke Museum of the Asian Pacific American Experience; and John Wetenhall, President, Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh.

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References Abram, A. 2008. Transparency and participation: partnership and hierarchies in British urban regeneration. In A new global order: Unveiling organizational visions, ed. C. Garsten and M. Lindh de Montoya, 201-222. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Alexander, C. 2009. Response to weblog post. R. Stein. Transparency and museums (Part 1): walking the talk. Indianapolis Museum of Art weblog. 3 November. http://www.imamuseum. org/blog/2009/11/03/transparency-and-museums/ American Association of Museums. 1992. Excellence and equity: Education and the public dimension of museums, Washington, D.C: American Association of Museums. Anderson, M.L. 2010a. A clear view: the case for museum transparency. Museum (March-April): 48-53. Ibid. 2010b. Untitled talk in session Deaccession: new perspectives. American Association of Museums Annual Conference, Los Angeles, 24 May. Bell, M. 2009. Introduction. In Engineered transparency – The technical, visual, and spacial effects of glass, ed. M. Bell and J. Kim, 10-15. Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press. Bennett, T. 1995. The birth of the museum: History, theory, politics. London and New York: Routledge. Besterman, T. 2011. Cultural equity in the sustainable museum. In The Routledge companion to museum ethics: Redefining ethics for the twenty-first century museum, ed. J. Marstine, 239-255. London and New York: Routledge. Birkinshaw, P. 2006. Transparency as a human right. In Transparency: The key to better governance? eds. C. Hood and D. Heald, 47-57. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, Proceedings of the British Academy 135. Breton, A. et al. 2007. Introduction. In The economics of transparency in politics, eds. A. Breton et al., 1-8. Aldershot: Ashgate. Cameron, F. 2003. Transcending fear - engaging emotions and opinion – a case for museums in the 21st century. Open Museum Journal 6: New museum developments & the culture wars (September): 1-46. http://hosting.collectionsaustralia.net/omj/vol6/pdfs/cameron.pdf Chance, S.F. and C. Locke. 2008. The Government-in-the-Sunshine Law then and now: a model for implementing new technologies consistent with Florida’s position in open government. Florida State University Law Review 35 (Winter): 245-270. Committee on Standards in Public Life. 1995. The seven principles of public life. http://www. public-standards.gov.uk/index.html Department for Culture, Media and Sport. 2000. Centres for social change: Museums, galleries and archives for all. London: Department for Culture, Media and Sport. Designbuild-network.com. 2011. Toledo Museum of Art Glass Pavilion, United States of America. http://www.designbuild-network.com/projects/toledo/ Finkelpearl, Tom. 2011. Interview with author (8 August). Florini, A. 2007. Introduction: the battle over transparency. In The right to know: Transparency for an open world, ed. A. Florini, 1-18. New York: Columbia University Press. Frampton, K. 2009. Is glass still glass? In Engineered transparency – The technical, visual, and spacial effects of glass, eds. M. Bell and J. Kim, 88-89. Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press. Foucault, M. 1977. Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison, trans. A. Sheridan. New York: Pantheon Books. Fung, A., M. Graham, and D. Weil. 2007. Full disclosure: The perils and promise of transparency. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Garsten, C. and M. Lindh de Montoya. 2008a. In retrospect: the play of shadows. In A new global order: Unveiling organizational visions, eds. C. Garsten and M. Lindh de Montoya, 283-290. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Ibid. 2008b. Introduction: examining the politics of transparency. In A new global order: Unveiling organizational visions, eds. C. Garsten and M. Lindh de Montoya, 1-22. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. ——. 2008c. The naked corporation: visualization, veiling and the ethico-politics of organizational transparency. In A new global order: Unveiling organizational visions, eds. C. Garsten and M. Lindh de Montoya, 79-94. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.

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NEW DIRECTIONS IN MUSEUM ETHICS The Guardian. 2011. Top paid civil servants and quango chiefs: see who gets the most. Guardian Datablog. 3 August. http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2011/aug/03/civil-servantsquango-chiefs-paid-150000 Hasselström, A. 2008. . . . ‘What gets measured gets managed!’ sorting out ‘the social’ in socially responsible investing. In A New Global Order: Unveiling Organizational Visions, eds. C. Garsten and M. Lindh de Montoya, 160-177. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Haworth, J. 2011. Interview with author (8 February). Heald, D. 2006a. Transparency as an instrumental value. In Transparency: The key to better governance? eds. C. Hood and D. Heald, 59-73. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, Proceedings of the British Academy 135. Ibid. 2006b. Varieties of transparency. In Transparency: The key to better governance? eds. C. Hood and D. Heald, 25-43. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Proceedings of the British Academy 135. Hood, C. 2006. Transparency in historical perspective. In Transparency: The key to better governance? eds. C. Hood and D. Heald, 3-23. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Indianapolis Museum of Art. 2011. Deaccessioned artworks. http://www.imamuseum.org/explore/ deaccessions Ibid. 2010. Dashboard. http://dashboard.imamuseum.org/ Internal Revenue Service. 2011. Form 990 redesign for tax year 2008 (filed in 2009): enhancing transparency. 21 January. http://www.irs.gov/charities/article/0,,id=176679,00.html Janes, R.R. 2009. Museums in a troubled world: Renewal, irrelevance or collapse. London and New York: Routledge. Kanter, B. and A. H. Fine. 2010. The networked nonprofit: Connecting with social media to drive change, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Kimmelman, M. 2005. Civic treasure: a need for transparency, not secrecy. New York Times. 18 May. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/18/arts/design/18nypl.html Lankford, E. L. and K. Scheffer. 2004. Museum education and controversial art: living on a fault line. In Handbook of research and policy in art education, eds. E. W. Eisner and M. D. Day, 201-226. London and New York: Routledge. Lubar, S. 2010. Response, ‘Q &A: museums and the web.’ Institute of Museum Ethics, Seton Hall University. 1 February. http://www.museumethics.org/content/q-communities-and-culturalrepatriation-92109 Lynch. B. T. 2011. Collaboration, contestation and creative conflict: on the efficacy of museum/ community partnerships. In The Routledge companion to museum ethics: Redefining ethics for the twenty-first century museum, ed. J. Marstine, 146-163. London and New York: Routledge. Manchester Museum. 2006. Revealing histories: myths about race. http://www.museum.manchester. ac.uk/whatson/exhibitions/pastexhibitions/revealinghistoriesmythsaboutrace/ Marstine, J. 2012. Fred Wilson, good work, and the phenomenon of Freud’s mystic writing pad. In Museums, equality and social justice, eds. R. Sandell and E. Nightingale, 84-102. London and New York: Routledge. Ibid. 2011a. The contingent nature of museum ethics. In The Routledge companion to museum ethics: Redefining ethics for the twenty-first century museum, ed. J. Marstine, 3-25. London and New York: Routledge. ——. 2011b. Preface. In The Routledge companion to museum ethics: Redefining ethics for the twenty-first century museum, ed. J. Marstine, xxiii-xxv. London and New York: Routledge. ——. (ed.). 2011c. The Routledge companion to museum ethics: Redefining ethics for the twentyfirst century museum. London and New York: Routledge. Martin, R. 2009. Mirror glass (a fragment). In Engineered transparency – The technical, visual, and spacial effects of glass, eds. M. Bell and J. Kim, 39-44. Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press. Merriman, N. 2011. Interview with author (6 September). Ibid. 2012. Personal communication with author (22 February). The Museums Association. 2007a. Code of ethics for museums. http://www.museumsassociation. org/ethics/code-of-ethics Ibid. 2007b. A public consultation on museum disposal. http://www.museumsassociation.org/ news/13377 National Museum of Australia. 2011. Information publication scheme. 16 May. http://www.nma. gov.au/about_us/ips/

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NEW DIRECTIONS IN MUSEUM ETHICS Ibid. 2010a. Caring for the collection. http://www.nma.gov.au/collections/caring-for-the-collection ——. 2010b. Inside: Life in children’s homes and institutions. http://www.nma.gov.au/exhibitions/ inside_life_in_childrens_homes_and_institutions/home ——. 2009. Internal and external scrutiny. http://www.nma.gov.au/about_us/nma_corporate_ documents/annual_report/08_09/part_three/internal_and_external_scrutiny/ National Museum of Australia Review Committee. 2003. Review of exhibitions and public programs. http://www.nma.gov.au/about_us/ips/review-of-exhibitions-and-public-programs National Museum of the American Indian, New York, Smithsonian Institution. 2006. The Ghost Dance. http://www.nmai.si.edu/exhibitions/identity_by_design/IdentityByDesign.html National Museums Liverpool. 2011. About National Museums Liverpool. http://www. liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/about/ Obama, B. 2009. Transparency and open government: memorandum for the heads of executive departments and agencies http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/TransparencyandOpen Government/ Odugbemi, S. 2010. The transparency revolution reaches the World Bank. People, spaces, deliberation: Exploring the interactions among public opinion, governance and the public sphere. 17 March. http://blogs.worldbank.org/publicsphere/transparency-revolution-reachesworld-bank O’Neill, O. 2006. Transparency and the ethics of communication. In Transparency: The key to better governance? eds. C. Hood and D. Heald, 75-90. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Proceedings of the British Academy 135. Perry, S. and J.A. Marion. 2010. State of the ethics in visual anthropology. Visual Anthropology Review 26, no. 2: 96-104. Pickering, M. 2011. Interview with author (27 July). Ramkumar, V. and E. Petkova. 2007. Transparency and environmental governance. In The right to know: Transparency for an open world, ed. A. Florini, 279-308. New York: Columbia University Press. Riding. A. 2005. Museums grapple with transparency issues. New York Times. 25 November. http:// www.nytimes.com/2005/11/25/arts/25iht-museums.html Roberts, A. 2007. Transparency in the security sector. In The Right to Know: Transparency for an Open World, ed A. Florini, 279-308. New York: Columbia University Press. Rosenbaum, L. 2010. Transparency gap: Minneapolis Institute refuses to discuss Greek hot pot. CultureGrrl: ArtsJournal weblog. 20 December. http://www.artsjournal.com/culturegrrl/2010/12/ no_transparency_minneapolis_in.html Salmon, P. and A. Wolfelsperger. 2007. Acquiescence to opacity. In The Economics of Transparency in Politics, ed. A. Breton et al, 11-35. Aldershot: Ashgate. Sifry, M.L. 2011. Wikileaks and the age of transparency. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Simon, N. 2010. The participatory museum. Santa Cruz: Museum 2.0. Smithsonian Institution. 2011. Smithsonian’s web and new media strategy process. http:// smithsonian-webstrategy.wikispaces.com/ Stein, R. 2009. Transparency and museums (part 4): Transparency in practice. 24 November. Indianapolis Museum of Art weblog. http://www.imamuseum.org/blog/2009/11/24/transparencyand-museums-part-4-transparency-in-practice Takekawa, B. 2011. Interview with author (17 August). Toledo Museum of Art, Glass Pavillion. n.d. Architecture. http://www.toledomuseum.org/glasspavilion/architecture United Nations, 1946. G.A. Res 59 (1) at 95 UN Doc A/64. 14 December. http://www.un.org/ documents/ga/res/1/ares1.htm Walker, M.U. 1996. Feminist skepticism, authority, and transparency. In Moral knowledge? New readings in moral epistemology, eds. W. Sinnott-Armstrong and M. Timmons, 267-292. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wetenhall, J. 2011. Interview with author (4 August). Young, I.M. 1990. Justice and the politics of difference, Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press.

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Chapter 2

Ethical issues of social media in museums: a case study Amelia S. Wong Department of American Studies, University of Maryland, 1102 Holzapfel Hall, College Park MD 20742, USA

The emerging media landscape of the early twenty-first century is motivating the professionalization of ‘social media’ in museum work. Through a case study of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, this article explores the ethics of this work by considering how social media is both in tension and synergy with modern museum practice. The ethical questions raised about transparency, censorship, respect for constituencies, preservation, and privacy are not exactly new, but are asked in a different realm of publicness and persistence than that of physical museum space. It concludes with the admonition for museums to train their employees to understand the nature of the social media landscape in order to judiciously assess its limitations and opportunities.

Introduction ‘We can’t do that,’ whispered my colleague. We were sitting in a darkened conference room in a Washington, DC, hotel, listening to a presenter spout the advantages of using a historical icon’s voice in a Twitter feed. Through the voice of Abraham Lincoln one might provide historical tidbits about his life and times in 140 characters or less, or relay reflections and witticisms about modern times. The idea was that the real-time short messaging network might be used by a library or museum to put out bite-size pieces of education and intrigue, making history appealing by capitalizing on the casual tone and everyday nature of this new-fangled ‘social media’ tool. For old, stuffy museums fearing irrelevance, this sounds great, right? My colleague and I shook our heads. We knew our employer, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and many of its constituencies
not to mention ourselves
would look askance at an Anne Frank Twitter account because, as educational as it might be, it remains an open question as to how such activities honor her life and tragic death.1 What does ethical museum practice look like in the emergent social media landscape? The museum field faces this question as it begins to trade the last decade of haphazard experiments in social media engagement for more professionalized approaches. Where projects once emerged from almost every level and division of museum practice (Bethke 2007, 45
51), more and more museums are investing in positions dedicated to social media. They are preoccupied with articulating strategies and potential ‘best practices’ in internal meetings, through blogs and at conferences,

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as well as drafting internal policies that help guide the use of social media by museum employees. In light of this evidence, it seems prudent to begin to explore a defining issue of professionalism that has not yet been made entirely explicit: ethics (Edson 1997). To broach this discussion is to acknowledge that the current media landscape has irreversibly changed (Shirky 2009), and that the ‘social’ turn it has taken will likely only grow in significance for museums. While popular discourse tends to focus on how social media is proving extremely disruptive to established industries of information, knowledge, and creative content, this phenomenon is equally generative
prompting innovation. So it is for museums. Like Parry’s (2007) perspective on museums’ adoption of digital computing as both incompatible and compatible with traditional practice, this article considers the ethics of social media outreach for museums in terms of both tension and synergy. On the one hand, it allows museums to expand access, inclusiveness, responsiveness, collaboration, and transparency (Besterman 2006; Carr 2001). On the other, the particular nature of the public space of social media, as well as its persistence, raises concerns. This article illustrates that social media does not pose new questions about ethical museum practice, so much as it recasts enduring questions about control, authority, ownership, voice, and responsibility into a realm that is public in quite different ways than the physical one with which museums have centuries of experience. Discerning ethical behavior in this emerging media landscape means navigating uncertain terrain, experimenting so as to understand its opportunities and limitations, and assessing its value based on its unique conditions. While social media has its risks, museums are obligated to explore it since their ethics today might be understood as an ethics of dynamism and of collaboration (Carr 2001). The former regards ethics as a dynamic field of understanding that attends to mission goals, but adjusts them amidst fluid contexts and constituencies that influence the determination of just behavior. Because such dynamism requires deep engagement with audiences, it depends on responsiveness, respect, and collaboration so that museums are not making decisions in a void
to do otherwise is for ‘the remote and powerful museum [to risk] arrogance and false assumptions about its audience’ (Carr). Although no panacea, social media opens up new ways to be attentive to diverse audiences and draw them into a discussion as ethical actors themselves. Ethical museum practice must be determined according to a museum’s particular mission and circumstances. What makes ethical sense for an art museum may not for one devoted to children; what is possible for a well-funded, well-staffed institution may not be for less fortunate organizations. A comprehensive study encompassing the myriad ethical issues confronted by the various museums currently using social media would be illuminating, but as an initial foray into this subject, this article will not provide that. It offers a case study of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (Holocaust Museum) in Washington, DC, USA as a particular lens through which the profession can consider social media as an aspect of ethical museum practice. What this lens sacrifices in scope it strives to make up for in focus. As a museum that seeks to educate, memorialize, and foster critical thinking about the Holocaust, as well as to raise awareness about contemporary genocide and how to prevent it, engaging in social media has meant pursuing its goals amid the numerous concerns mentioned above and, not least, the respect and protection of victims of great trauma. While the Holocaust Museum’s experience is its own, the 25

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issues raised herein should be familiar to the museum community at-large, and therefore suggest profession-wide concerns even if here they are pronounced due to the sensitive nature of the subject. This article records a picture of the ethical museum in the early stages of acting within the social media landscape. In such a transitional period, it does not offer firm answers, but rather a context in which to assess without undue prejudice the opportunities and limitations of this media landscape for ethical museum work. Social media




an explanation

To move in this direction first requires an understanding of what is meant by the popular, but nebulous term, ‘social media,’ especially since its definition and usefulness are debated. Surely writing enabled social interaction, as did the telegraph and telephone, books (Rettberg 2008, 39
40), radio, movies, and television were all largely consumed, at least initially, in groups. Alongside terms like ‘Web 2.0’ and ‘social software,’ social media speaks to the spread of online tools that facilitate ubiquitous and mass, yet personalized, communication. But, while the concept is commonly associated with blogs, wikis, and social network sites, social media is more fruitfully acknowledged as the current cultural phenomenon in which people throughout the world are adapting to networked digital media and its capacity to affect society by changing how and when we communicate. ‘Social media’ is a phenomenon of ‘remediation.’ Defined by Bolter and Gromala (2003, 83) as ‘the making of new media forms out of older ones,’ remediation is a process prompted by the introduction of a new technology into a society. Its usefulness is understood at first in terms of how it mimics and exceeds previous technologies, until time and use expand perceptions and new conventions develop (Bolter and Grusin 1999). For instance, the introduction of the World Wide Web to mass popular use brought comparisons with the printing press and bulletin board. As we have adapted digital technology to our social needs, and adapted to its unique characteristics (e.g., made of numerical code, automated [Manovich 2001, 27
48]), our understanding of this technology has progressed beyond the limits of older formats and genres of information delivery. This expansion has entailed a collapse in the division of media formats and makers, and a convergence of media that undergirds the conceptualization of social media. Other than indicating the proliferation of similar functions among cell phones, televisions, and other devices, ‘convergence’ more usefully refers to a larger cultural shift in the ways people control and consume media (Jenkins 2006). Thanks to the hyperlinked nature of networked digital media, which creates an ‘intertextual’ environment that confuses the boundaries of texts and their authors (Barlow 2008, 25), vertical and horizontal ways of communicating are intertwined. The hierarchy of author-to-audience long maintained by traditional broadcasting is still evident but is challenged by intensive information exchange across decentralized and lateral networks. As Jenkins (2006) has argued, individuals’ inability to deal with this scope of information on their own promotes a participatory and collaborative culture (3
4), which blurs the lines between producers and consumers and favors projects that make it easy for a user to add his or her thoughts to a website, share it with associates, or absorb it into another project. Convergence is thus wedded to the idea 26

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of ‘collective intelligence’ that networked digital media lets us plug into the wealth of information possessed by people who are distributed across space and time and enables the building of knowledge on a global scale (Le´ vy 1997). For all these reasons, the convergent media landscape is idealized as an environment that democratizes information and knowledge creation, publication, and dissemination.

Ethics of social media To discuss the ethics of this new media landscape for museums requires a comprehension and appreciation for its culture, its developing sense of ethics, and how its public and persistent nature creates confusion and modification of behavior. Culture and ethics are mutually informing. Culture develops through group interactions and is learned through observation as well as more dramatic activities. A traditional definition of ethics would be ‘the science of conduct’ (Edson 1997, 5), where cultural consensus sanctions preferred behavior. With the recognition that cultural consensus is likely impossible and not necessarily desirable across multiple cultures, ethics may be redefined to be a constant discussion about just responses to situations in which a diversity of needs and goals are negotiated. The culture of social media owes itself largely to the culture that arose in the advent of networked computing, which championed openness, immediacy, creation, collaboration, and reciprocity (Kollock 1999). A discussion of its sense of ethics developed in the past few years as it has entered everyday life and been professionalized within various sectors. For instance, extreme cyberbullying provoked a heated debate about ethics and being accountable for one’s words within the blogging community in early 2007 (Barlow 2008, 37
38; O’Reilly 2007), while marketing professionals discussion of ethical concerns (Brogan 2008; Rubel 2008; Tchividjian 2009) includes conflicts of interest between their appreciation for social media culture and obligations to clients (Terpin Communications Group 2008). In each of these cases, the ethical quandaries were exacerbated by an issue specific to networked digital media: its heightened public nature. Writing about the ethical questions introduced by digital media and the Internet, Poster observes that they were often not concerned with ‘a particular act or statement [being] done or said but that it [was] so out there, so blatantly in one’s face, so terribly, unashamedly available, so public’ (2006, 147). Tying a technology that is persistent and searchable to a social ‘attitude’ (Boyd 2007, 17) that encourages the visible articulation of human interactions (Boyd and Ellison 2007), the current media landscape records and displays a vast amount of behavior that previously would have been confined to private moments and transient conversations. Whether ethical or not in those contexts, such behavior’s risk of offense increases in the social media landscape. Boyd’s explanation of ‘four key architectural properties of mediated sociality . . . persistence, searchability, replicability, and invisible audiences’ is salient here: When people speak online, their words are not ephemeral. Search engines make text, media, and people findable at the flick of a few keys. Hearsay is one thing, but online, you often can’t distinguish the original from the duplicate; likewise, it’s difficult to tell if the author is really the author. Finally, aside from the people who sneak around your back and hide behind trees whenever you turn around, most people have a sense of who can hear or see them when they navigate everyday life; online, no one knows when a dog

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Further, these sites often force the public display of social connections, but typically neglect to afford people ways to account for nuance and context among those connections (Donath and Boyd 2004). Engaging with people online destabilizes established norms for physical interaction and often demands that relationships and definitions be reworked (Boyd 2006). In the absence of codified laws to govern behavior, people initiate codes of ethics and their own judicial processes (Donath 1999), or they adjust their behaviors and expectations of environments. These limitations have ramifications for museums and their ability to control presentation and interaction with their content in social media space.

Museum ethics A central orientation to people and public service (Edson 1997; AAM; ICOM 2009) is the foundation for current discourse about museum ethics. As Besterman (2006, 431) states, ‘Developed from within the museum profession, museum ethics is an expression of the continuing debate about the responsibilities that museums owe to society.’ This focus is motivated by the recognition of museums as inherently political (Macdonald 1997), and that correcting legacies of oppression (Karp and Lavine 1991) requires the inclusion of diverse human experiences and the democratization of their appeal, access, and construction of knowledge. At the same time, preserving the high degree of public trust that museums have long enjoyed (Rosenzweig and Thelen 1998) and their reputations for presenting accurate information in responsible ways (Sandell 2005; Wylie and Brophy 2009) are also perceived as key ethical duties (Besterman 2006; AAM; ICOM 2009). Amid this evolving debate, social media conjoins longstanding challenges about museums’ roles in society and their struggle to adapt to digital media. From its introduction in the 1960s, this media provoked reactions ranging from anxious concerns about authenticity, reproduction, and the demotion of objects in museum practice, to appreciation for how it could streamline operations, expose new interpretations of objects, and revamp audience relations (Parry 2007; Thomas and Mintz 1998). In keeping with that history, social media works in both tension and synergy with museums. While the immateriality and reproducibility of digital media once caused anxiety about undermining the ‘authenticity’ of objects and rendering museums obsolete, now these characteristics are threatening for how they indicate a loss of control over content and context as digital information is dispersed and ‘remixed.’ Further, the role of the curator is questioned in a media landscape that values the ability to customize and personalize experiences. Finally, again, social media is simply challenging because museum staff and audience members alike are still learning to navigate in digital networks marked by an odd mix of anonymity and heightened visibility before an ambiguous audience. In spite of these concerns, museums are embracing social media for many reasons. While some create Facebook or YouTube profiles only for traditional broadcast and word-of-mouth promotion, others engage genuinely with social media for the same reasons they originally adopted computers and the Internet
to help meet their ethical responsibilities to gather and manage information about their 28

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collections, to increase access, and to represent museums as dynamic and relevant resources (Din 2007; Jones-Garmil 1997; Parry 2007; Thomas and Mintz 1998). Although it is important to be mindful of Parry’s observation that ‘to use the Web medium is not to reach out to the entire community’ (98), engaging in the social media landscape is in keeping with the values central to twentieth century New Museology and the ethics that grew out of it (Davis 1999, 55
58). Participation indicates awareness of current social practices. Social media channels allow museums to promote themselves as flexible and casual, and render their practices more transparent. These efforts often seek to include more viewpoints in museum practice, as well as to support research by inviting people to share information. Beyond increasing their general exposure, social media enables museums to develop more fluid structures of presenting and acquiring information
fostering ethics of dynamism and collaboration. Of course, alongside these opportunities are the ethical challenges of working within a tumultuous environment that tends to value a casual voice and tolerate a large degree of noise. It also allows people a degree of anonymity that seems to license asocial behavior (Donath 1999) and is experienced within spaces over which the museum has little influence. Although museums cannot control the responses of visitors in gallery space, architecture, exhibit design, and a concrete awareness of audience do much to influence behavior. Walls and lighting that direct movement and vision, signage, and the presence of guards, staff, and other visitors can encourage an attentive experience. Not so online. If the medium is part of the message, museums are limited in what messages they can relay especially by the architecture of external social media sites. Even when such platforms are built in-house, they are still confined to being experienced through rectangular screens in spaces that are public, private, and both. At the same time when a person watches a video from a museum, he or she may be simultaneously browsing other content, talking on the phone, etc. This is not to say that multiplicity is necessarily counter to a person engaging in a critical manner with museum content. It is only to express that the current media landscape constricts the ways museums can influence experiences with their content. Social media engagement offers much potential to museums for ethical practice, but in expanding access and inclusion, and exploring dynamism and collaboration, concerns about such things as transparency, censorship, respect for constituencies, how best to advance education and research, preservation, and privacy are raised. I will explicate these with a case study based on my work at the Holocaust Museum.

Ethical challenges of social media at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Discerning an ethical approach to social media for museums requires prudence and, as with any museum practice, heeding an institution’s specific circumstances and mission (Carr 2001; AAM; ICOM 2009). As stated on its website, the Holocaust Museum’s ‘primary mission’ is: to advance and disseminate knowledge about [the] unprecedented tragedy [of the Holocaust]; to preserve the memory of those who suffered; and to encourage its visitors to reflect upon the moral and spiritual questions raised by the events of the Holocaust as well as their own responsibilities as citizens of a democracy.

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These goals are carried out with attention to the museum’s own ethical code, which reminds employees to abide by that of the American Association of Museums (2000) and, as an ‘independent establishment of the United States government’ (United States Congress 2009), also to the Code of Ethics for Government Employees (US Office of Government Ethics). ‘The nature and mission of this organization make it particularly incumbent upon each employee to consider the ethical effects of their actions upon society, including their co-workers and themselves,’ reads the code. (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, ‘Code of Ethics’) Thinking about and fostering ethical behavior is at the heart of the Holocaust Museum’s practice, both online and off. Due largely to the enthusiasm and vision of a former chief information officer, social media engagement at the Holocaust Museum began roughly in 2006 and was concentrated in the division of Outreach Technology, which is responsible for the museum’s web presence. The education manager for technology and distance learning steered the museum’s efforts and championed the need for a full-time position devoted to this work. Since being hired in late 2008, I have managed social media at the museum with his help and that of a staff person in Communications. Our work is conducted at the intersection of the political spaces of Holocaust memory (Hirsch 2001; Young 1993) and of museums as institutions of public education
a tense nexus that produced ethical quandaries in the construction of the museum and its exhibits (Linenthal 2001) and continues to do so within the social media landscape. The ethical issues of social media faced by the Holocaust Museum inject enduring questions into conditions that activate ‘the fundamentally interactive, dialogical quality of every memorial space [of the Holocaust]’ (Young 1993, xii). They range in temper from the highly conflicted to the more subdued. For instance, the Holocaust Museum’s account on the micro-blogging service Twitter raises issues about transparency, a goal increasingly touted in museum ethics literature (Anderson 2004; Besterman 2006; Carr 2001), as well as by the current administration (Obama n.d.). The assumption is that decision-making that is open to public view translates to accountability and inclusion of more voices. Additionally, transparency in social media is tied up with the notion of immediacy. Its typical casual tone is thought to give a ‘human voice’ to corporations and institutions (Kent 2008) and conveys the impression of direct access to a person or entry into a bureaucracy. Twitter is particularly celebrated by museums as a tool that makes them more transparent, immediate, and accountable. In the discourse that circulates at conferences and in blogs, it is commonly considered ‘best practice’ for museums to identify by name the authors of the material put out on social media platforms. Just as museums today often open or close exhibitions with credits to counter the faceless and unquestionable museum voice of old, naming an author is meant to make the museum more approachable. While these values might make sense for art and history museums trying to overcome distance with their audiences, for the Holocaust Museum they must be balanced with other priorities, namely its memorial function. When I began writing the museum’s ‘tweets’ in January 2009, my supervisors and I decided we would not identify the voice behind the curtain. Our reasoning was rooted in two concerns. First, I was not hired to be an official spokesperson for the museum. Second, the museum’s core function as a memorial to genocide gives it a measure of gravity such that it seemed inappropriate to try to imbue the Twitter feed 30

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with the quirks of one personality. Nevertheless, this choice begs the question of whether this is another case of a museum claiming the faceless voice of authority, albeit in a friendlier tone than your average press release. It is the museum’s practice to credit authors of exhibits; why not do it on Twitter? The answer must consider that what may be appropriate in one context is not necessarily transferable to another. In the museum’s galleries, there is a high degree of control over how it presents information: it places credits on exit panels. Twitter’s web interface lacks the option to bracket information in such ways. Museums’ choices for identification are to make names part of a museum’s Twitter account (e.g., ‘NURFCjamie’), to list them in the ‘Name’ or small ‘Bio’ field or include them as part of a static, custom-designed background. Perhaps the inclusion of my name and that of my supervisor who approves the tweets would provide people with a point of connection and not ill-serve the museum’s mission, but the familiarity that Twitter still encourages means risking creating a persona for the institution where none seems appropriate. Another ethical ramification of this inability to adequately frame museum experiences is apparent in the Holocaust Museum’s engagement with YouTube, the Web’s most popular video-sharing platform (Parr 2009). The museum launched its YouTube channel in August 2006 to broadcast the videos it produces in-house, which include recordings of public programs, interviews with Holocaust survivors, and short videos that explore contemporary genocide. YouTube extends the potential reach of the videos to millions of people that do not visit the museum’s website. Yet, the videos are encountered within the site’s infamous culture of ‘hating,’ the practice of leaving highly antagonistic comments in the text fields below videos (Lange 2007). This practice is so rampant that ‘YouTubers,’ people who engage within the platform’s community of interest, craft videos that respond to ‘YouTube haters’ (generally by mocking them), or advise fellow users how to manage the harassment (such as by ignoring it or disallowing the comment feature). The museum’s channel currently allows comments to be published without moderation. These are usually positive, stating support for victims and survivors of genocide, and expressing gratitude for the people in the videos and for the museum, or are similarly innocuous. Sometimes, there are questions or statements of common historical inaccuracies that I address after consulting with staff historians. Yet, on almost a daily basis, the museum’s videos also receive virulent expressions of antiSemitism and racism, and/or attacks on staff and Holocaust survivors who appear in the videos. Based on a loose set of criteria (developed with colleagues) that bans vulgarity, derogatory language, outright abuse, Holocaust denial, and off-topic rants, I currently delete many comments in the interest of trying to prevent the spread of misinformation, hate, and inanity, as well as to shape a space for potential dialog that has a modicum of civility. For a museum that champions human dignity, confronting hatred, and thinking critically, it is difficult to know the most ethical ways to use YouTube. Access is certainly served, but is remembrance or education? Is the information shared in the videos enough to fulfill these aims, or must the format do so as well? Within its physical property, the museum has more leeway to deal with such affronts, but, on YouTube and other social media sites, the museum is a visitor. To disable the comment feature completely is possible, but then we limit the communicative aspects of the channel. Further, as an institution that asks people to ponder the workings of democratic societies and accepts federal support, our current censorship of 31

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comments raises questions about free speech. Can we selectively delete comments, feeling the museum’s memorial function affords the people lending their stories to these videos respectful treatment? Or should we allow any comment to stand in the name of free speech, even when it is hate speech? This is not just a matter of acknowledging people’s right to speak and hold different opinions, as it demands recalling that ‘free speech’ as a constitutional ideal was intended to encourage democratic citizenry by creating public forums that expose people to diverse individuals and arguments on which they can deliberate (Sunstein 2001, 23
50). After all, viewers of their own accord often counter loathsome comments with reference to historical evidence although, unfortunately, these responses sometimes devolve into name-calling and ranting. By not exposing people to the full spectrum of responses, are we undermining the museum’s aim to provoke critical thinking? Is it a draw as to whether the museum is allowing a platform for hate speech or entering a platform to combat it? Determining ethical ways to respond will require continued participation and experimentation in the space, especially as the interface
and possibly the culture
changes over time. The photo-sharing site Flickr reveals another challenge in balancing the Holocaust Museum’s memorial and educational functions within a specific social media culture. Flickr, as one of its core designers has described, is a ‘community . . . of over 20 million people’ that is ‘known for its supportive, intelligent, friendly nature’ (Oates 2008). Like YouTubers of the non-hating variety, Flickr members exhibit an appreciation for tapping into collective intelligence in order to receive constructive criticism for creative products, nurturing a ‘culture of reciprocity’ (Cox et al. 2008). Nevertheless, even this much less contentious culture still presents ethical quandaries for the Holocaust Museum. Early in 2009, a donor informed the museum’s photo archivist that several photos from the museum’s collections had been uploaded to Flickr. A teenager had copied them and their descriptions from our website, put them into her photostream, and falsely cited them as being ‘Courtesy of www.ushmm.org.’ This discovery sounded alarms because it was a violation of the museum’s copyright but, again, mostly because the photos appeared alongside comments that were, if not vile, often tactless. Championing thorough study of objects is an important component of standard museum ethics, especially as a corrective to museums’ historical privileging of Western and Caucasian-centric narratives (Perrot 1997; ICOM). For the Holocaust Museum, the importance of thorough study is central to its mission of preserving a history that is receding from living memory and stands as evidence against Holocaust denial. Considering that the museum’s website solicits identifications of people in photographs, making them available on Flickr seems in keeping with this ethical mandate. It greatly improves access to the photos in the interest of mining collective intelligence, an opportunity that the Flickr Commons project has already proven to be useful in augmenting institutions’ understanding of collections (Springer et al. 2008). This platform may enable the museum to enrich its photographs as historical evidence that speaks to the extent of the crimes of the Holocaust and the importance of confronting genocide. It also expands the possibility that people searching for loved ones may find them. However, the opportunities of Flickr collide with continuing questions in academic and popular discourse of how, or even if, the images of victims of genocide should be exhibited, whether in physical galleries (Hughes 2003), through 32

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electronic media (Hoskins 2003), or through social media sites (Beckerman 2010). Does an interface that allows one to comment on what Sontag (1990, 19) called the ‘photographic inventory of ultimate horror’, with the same alacrity they can on snapshots of last night’s happy hour, ultimately serve the museum’s mission? Does the ability of these photographs to be ‘testimonial objects’ (Hirsch and Spitzer 2006) that attest to the individual lives of Holocaust victims mean they should be removed from circulation in such spaces? The museum’s use agreement for photographs reserves the right to restrict users to ‘ensure that reproductions are used with respect and dignity.’ (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, ‘Use Agreement’) It logically follows that the museum must also abide by this restriction, but how can one ensure this in a space the museum has little control over? As with YouTube, is it appropriate to enter a social media platform and disable the features that enable dialog and the flourishing of collective intelligence? Or should allowances be made for how social media spaces enact the ‘fundamentally interactive’ and ‘dialogic’ nature of Holocaust memory? After all, in an age of image saturation, social media offers more learning moments for museums since there are so many channels through which to intervene. Yet, potentially exposing Holocaust victims to further abuse for the purpose of education remains a fundamental ethical question. Should not those who should have been protected decades ago be protected now? However a museum decides to engage on social media platforms, the choice to do so raises the ethical question about the preservation of the digital information such engagement produces. As stewards of cultural heritage, museums’ mandates of preservation are paramount and involve both their collections and contextualizing information. With the emergence of digital assets in the form of accessioned artifacts, online exhibits, and metadata, museums face difficult questions about what to preserve of this media and how to do it (Lavoie and Dempsey 2004). In choosing to keep open social media conduits like the Holocaust Museum’s website comment form, its Facebook profile, and others, the museum encourages its audiences to produce a lot of data, much of which appear to be idle chatter. A museum would never record for posterity (at least not without asking permission) the offhand comments and private conversations that happen in their physical galleries. Why do it online? One major reason museums have embraced social media is to open spaces for visitor feedback. Recent scholarship has shown that studying visitor books can be fruitful for research (Macdonald 2005; Nys 2009). The Library of Congress’ (2010) recent acceptance of the donation of Twitter’s archive illustrates the value in maintaining a gargantuan database of information about everyday life for what it tells current or future researchers (e.g., Bamman 2010). As museums seek more rigorous ways to pursue visitor research, it makes sense to consider how to preserve the wealth of information that people choose to relay about their museum experiences through social media channels. Over time, visitor research may be improved due to the sheer magnitude of information collected through social media outlets and allow a new level of longitudinal analysis. These concerns thus add another angle to the ethical question of deleting comments on the Holocaust Museum’s social media outlets. What might such collective information tell the Holocaust Museum and scholars about the impact of the museum and the nature of evolving Holocaust memory, Holocaust denial, and anti-Semitism? If we continue to delete comments, should we be archiving them for research purposes? Further, if it is deemed prudent to store and conserve such information, the museum’s ethical 33

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obligations should extend to figuring out how to make it useable for researchers by making it searchable. If museums’ solicitation of their publics to share their views is to be genuine in its application toward changing practice and general knowledge, and not dismissed through benign neglect, then the preservation of user-generated content raises the final ethical issue to be discussed here. Museums have yet to address user privacy in a standard fashion online. Social media opens new opportunities for connections between museums and audiences and between audience members, but in the process a great deal of personal information can be exchanged and not always with the awareness of those involved (Perez 2009). Data collected about visitors and/or about their experiences warrant some consideration as to what museums owe to visitors about disclosure over use of that information. If museums see fit to preserve the input of visitors indefinitely, then they must acknowledge how such data may be made available to internal and external research. Another aspect of privacy to be considered here is that museums’ engagement of social media places users into its practices of display. Social media represents a new twist on museums’ long habit of making audiences part of the spectacle of museumgoing (Bennett 1995). The ethical issues this raises are implicated in an exchange I had with a Holocaust Museum user through the social networking site, Facebook. We are experimenting with Facebook as a medium for inciting discussion about strategic initiatives, such as confronting anti-Semitism and hatred by posting on the museum’s Facebook ‘wall’ a link to relevant content along with a discussion prompt. A British woman’s response to a recent post stated her negative views of the appearance of an openly anti-Jewish organization on a popular evening program on British broadcast television. Shortly after noting the contribution, it disappeared from the wall. As we had reason to think the comment was accidentally deleted due to a bug in Facebook, I sent a private message to the woman encouraging her to repost her comment. It turned out that she had purposefully deleted it, having become wary about putting herself in the public eye and inviting attack. She did repost the comment with the feeling that one must stand up for one’s beliefs, but it left me wondering about what museums are asking their visitors to sacrifice in our drive to elicit their voices. Modern museums largely embrace the inclusion of visitors’ voices in museum space, yet we have done so often without asking about the cost to their privacy. Writing of the participatory art movement, Groys has observed that the invitation for audience participation is not exactly altruistic: When the viewer is involved in artistic practice from the outset, every piece of criticism he utters is self-criticism. The decision on the part of the artist to relinquish his exclusive authorship would seem primarily to empower the viewer. This sacrifice ultimately benefits the artist, however, for it frees him from the power that the cold eye of the uninvolved viewer exerts over the resulting artwork. (2009, 21)

Likewise, museums’ push to make people communicate in visible ways through social media (which benefits museums by producing something to measure) involves making audiences part of the museum experience and asking them to make public what they may prefer to keep private. There is good reason to think that making people uncomfortable in museum space and cognizant of their agency is beneficial for learning and for provoking social change (Clifford 1997; Crane 1997). But what, 34

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if any, ethical obligation do museums owe the public to support them when they make themselves bare to the public eye at our request? Conclusion As I noted in the Introduction, I have offered more questions to these ethical issues than answers, but I have also strived to create an understanding of the context in which museum professionals may begin to debate answers. As with the physical gallery, choices about what gets displayed, how it gets displayed, and what interactions might be encouraged must be considered on a case-by-case basis with regard to museum goals and their ethical obligations to constituencies (Peers and Brown 2003). Not engaging in social media may be appropriate in some instances, but to choose not to is itself an ethical question. Obligations of access demand that museums continue to make their collections and information available through networked digital media. And, if museum ethics is ultimately a discussion between interested parties about the just ways that museums can serve society, the attitude and tools of social media can advance museums as ‘platforms’ (O’Reilly 2005; Simon 2008) for sharing, expression, and dialog that activate both museums and audience members as ethical actors. In sharing authority, museums fulfill their ethical responsibilities to be responsive to audiences and society, enable the flow of knowledge that can enrich them as resources, and acknowledge the capabilities of their publics. Participating in this movement may also develop a sense of reciprocity for audience members, thereby deepening their investment in institutions and hopefully improving their comprehension of museum practice. If museums want to safeguard their reputations and social relevance, they cannot rely solely on traditional means in the age of networked digital media. To not participate in this evolving environment is to let others have control over how their content is presented and discussed in the vast archive of networked digital media. It is only through participating that museums can affect the culture and ethics of these spaces. At this moment of cultural transition, it is useful to remember that museum codes of ethics are intended to be living documents and involve training ‘to maintain an effective workforce’ (ICOM, 2). In this case, training means experimenting in social media space to comprehend its culture and ethics, and involving staff throughout an institution in those efforts. This is important so efforts can be mission-driven and integrated across an institution, as well as so expectations of physical museums are not transposed online. There is still a tendency to think that text on the web adheres to the traditions of printed text, including its bounded appearance and expectations of rigorous editing and determined copyright. Web text, however, owes much to a different tradition of communication
oral speech, which is performative and has looser conceptions and conventions of order, ownership, and revision (Barlow 2008, 25; Rettberg 2008, 31
56). Discerning the ethical behavior of museums in social media space requires considering how the merging of these traditions is creating something related, but also not confined to the conventions or expectations of either. Finally, the nature of social media as a landscape of intense information exchange should make museums think carefully about how in the twenty-first century we determine the contours of ethical practice. Social media engagement is meant to 35

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signal openness and transparency to audiences. But it often seems that those values are mostly apparent in sharing a process with audiences, and not goals. For instance, if resources for a social media project will be assessed in terms of how many comments express learning, museums may want to make engaged audience members aware of that, so they might contribute substantive comments to projects they want to see supported. Further, one might open the terms of evaluation to their critique, moving from outcome-based evaluation to participant-based evaluation that would allow social media projects to capitalize on the strengths of digital media to be changed quickly and frequently (Pekarik 2010). At the Holocaust Museum, we remain in the nascent stage of such discussion. Our small team is in the midst of working out a comprehensive strategy for social media engagement that is integrated with the museum’s current strategic plan, as well as with outreach efforts across divisions. Articulating such goals should help us decide what opportunities we want to pursue, what risks we are willing to absorb, and how we might better evaluate our efforts. We present our work to staff to spread awareness and solicit input. Reaching beyond staff in 2009, we organized an ‘unconference’ aimed at considering the promises and pitfalls of using social media to effect social transformation that attracted museum professionals, academics, activists, marketing consultants, and user experience designers (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum 2009). We have also periodically opened up questions of process to people who link to the museum through Facebook and Twitter, but we have yet to implement a systematic strategy for engaging social media to evaluate and affect change in the institution. Ultimately, we will have to move in that direction if we want to engage in the social media landscape for all its strengths. Considerations of what the Holocaust Museum can and cannot ethically do might be fruitfully expanded through social media to include more viewpoints, so that the museum is aware of how Holocaust memory is evolving outside its walls and what response might be suitable in accordance with its mission and resources. Acknowledgements This article evolved from a conference paper delivered on November 14, 2009, at Seton Hall University’s Institute of Museum Ethics’ graduate student conference, ‘New Directions in Museum Ethics: An International Conference of Graduate Student Research.’ The author is grateful to the conference organizers, editors of this issue and peer reviewers for their feedback. I also thank David Klevan and Lorna Miles of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, as well as former employee Christopher Testa, for their support to this publication.

Note 1. The assertions, opinions, and conclusions in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

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References American Association of Museums. 2000. Code of ethics for museums. American Association of Museums. http://www.aamus.org/museumresources/ethics/coe.cfm Anderson, M. 2004. Metrics of success in art museums. Getty. http://www.getty.edu/ leadership/compleat_leader/downloads/metrics.pdf Bamman, D. 2010. Mapping the demographics of American English with Twitter. Language Log. http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p 2334 Barlow, A. 2008. Blogging America: The new public sphere. Westport, CT: Praeger. Beckerman, G. 2010. Facebook now home to new kind of Holocaust remembrance. Forward. http://www.forward.com/articles/127268/ Bennett, T. 1995. The birth of the museum: History, theory, politics. London: Routledge. Besterman, T. 2006. Museum ethics. In A companion to museum studies, ed. S. Macdonald, 432
41. London: Blackwell. Bethke, L. 2007. Constructing connections: A museological approach to blogging. MA Thesis, University of Washington. Bolter, J.D., and D. Gromala. 2003. Windows and mirrors: Interaction design, digital art and the myth of transparency. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Bolter, J.D., and R. Grusin. 1999. Remediation: Understanding new media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Boyd, D. 2006. Friends, friendsters, and top 8: Writing community into being on social network sites. First Monday 11, no. 12. http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue11_12/boyd/ index.htm Boyd, D. 2007. The significance of social software. In BlogTalks reloaded: Social software research & cases, ed. T.N. Burg and J. Schmidt, 15
30. Norderstedt, Germany: Books on Demand. Boyd, D. 2008. How can qualitative Internet researchers define the boundaries of their projects: A response to Christine Hine. In Internet inquiry: Conversations about method, ed. Annette Markham and Nancy Baym, 26
32. Los Angeles: Sage. Boyd, D., and N. Ellison. 2007. Social network sites: Definition, history, and scholarship. Journal of computer-mediated communication 13, no. 1: Article 11. Brogan, C. 2008. The ethics imperative in social media. Chris Brogan. http://www.chrisbrogan. com/the-ethics-imperative-in-social-media/ Carr, D. 2001. Balancing act: Ethics, mission & the public trust. Museum News. http://www. aam-us.org/pubs/mn/MN_SO01_BalancingAct.cfm Clifford, J. 1997. Four Northwest coast museums: Travel reflections. In Routes: travel and translation in the late twentieth century, 107
46. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Cox, A.M., P.D. Clough, and J. Marlow. 2008. Flickr: A first look at user behaviour in the context of photography as serious leisure. Information Research 13, no. 1. http:// informationr.net/ir/13-1/paper336.html Crane, S. 1997. Memory, distortion and history in the museum. History and theory 36, no. 4: 44
63. Davis, P. 1999. Ecomuseums: A sense of place. London: Leicester University Press. Din, H. 2007. The digital museum: A think guide. Washington, DC: American Association of Museums. Donath, J.S. 1999. Identity and deception in the virtual community. In Communities in cyberspace, ed. M.A. Smith and P. Kollock, 29
58. London: Routledge. Donath, J., and D. Boyd. 2004. Public displays of connection. BT Technology Journal 22, no. 4: 71
82. Edson, G. ed. 1997. Museum ethics. London: Routledge. Groys, B. 2008. A genealogy of participatory art. In The art of participation: 1950 to now, ed. R. Frieling, 18
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NEW DIRECTIONS IN MUSEUM ETHICS Hirsch, M. 2001. Surviving images: Holocaust photographs and the work of postmemory. The Yale Journal of Criticism 14, no. 1: 5
37. Hirsch, M., and L. Spitzer. 2006. Testimonial objects: Memory, gender, and transmission. Poetics Today 27, no. 2: 354
383. Hoskins, A. 2003. Signs of the Holocaust: Exhibiting memory in a mediated age. Media. Culture & Society 25: 7
22. Hughes, R. 2003. The abject artefacts of memory: Photographs from Cambodia’s genocide. Media. Culture & Society 25: 23
44. International Council of Museums. 2009. ICOM code of ethics for museums. International Council of Museums. http://icom.museum/ethics.html Jenkins, H. 2006. Convergence culture: Where old and new media collide. New York: New York University Press. Jones-Garmil, K. 1997. The wired museum: Emerging technology and changing paradigms. Washington, DC: American Association of Museums. Karp, I., and S.D. Lavine. 1991. Exhibiting cultures: The poetics and politics of museum display. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution. Kent, M.L. 2008. Critical analysis of blogging in public relations. Public Relations Review 34: 32
40. Kollock, P. 1999. The economies of online cooperation: Gifts and public goods in cyberspace. In Communities in cyberspace, ed. M.A. Smith and P. Kollock, 220
239. London: Routledge. Lange, P.G. 2007. Commenting on comments: Investigating responses to antagonism on YouTube. Paper presented at the society for applied anthropology conference, March 31, in Tampa, Florida. Lavoie, B., and L. Dempsey. 2004. Thirteen ways of looking at . . . digital preservation. D-Lib Magazine, 10, no. 7/8. http://dlib.org/dlib/july04/lavoie/07lavoie.html Le´ vy, P. 1997. Collective intelligence: Mankind’s emerging world in cyberspace. Trans. R. Bononno. New York: Plenum Trade. Library of Congress. 2010. Twitter donates entire tweet archive to Library of Congress. http:// www.loc.gov/today/pr/2010/10-081.htm Linenthal, E.T. 2001. Preserving memory: The struggle to create America’s Holocaust museum. 2nd ed. New York: Columbia University Press. Macdonald, S. 1997. Exhibitions of power and powers of exhibition: An introduction to the politics of display. In The politics of display: Museums, science, culture, ed. S. Macdonald, 176
196. London: Routledge. Macdonald, S. 2005. Accessing audiences: Visiting visitor books. Museum and Society 3, no. 3: 119
136. Manovich, Lev. 2001. The language of new media. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Nys, L. 2009. The public’s signatures: visitors’ books in nineteenth-century museums. Museum History Journal 2, no. 2: 143
162. Oates, G. 2008. The Commons on Flickr: A primer. In Museums and the Web 2008: proceedings, ed. J. Trant and D. Bearman. Toronto: Archives & MuseumInformatics. Obama, B. n.d. Transparency and open government. White House. http://www.whitehouse. gov/the_press_office/TransparencyandOpenGovernment/ O’Reilly, T. 2005. What is Web 2.0: Design patterns and business models for the next generation of software. O’Reilly. http://oreilly.com/web2/archive/what-is-web-20.html O’Reilly, T. 2007. Call for a blogger’s code of conduct. O’Reilly Radar. O’Reilly.com. http:// radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/03/call-for-a-blog-1.html Parr, B. 2009. YouTube now has over 120 million U.S. viewers. Mashable. http://mashable.com/ 2009/08/29/youtube-viewers/ Parry, R. 2007. Recoding the museum: Digital heritage and the technologies of change. London; New York: Routledge. Peers, L., and A.K. Brown. 2003. Museums and source communities: A Routledge reader. London: Routledge. Pekarik, A.J. 2010. From knowing to not knowing: Moving beyond ‘‘outcomes.’’ Curator 53, no. 1: 105
15. Perez, S. 2009. What Facebook quizzes know about you. ReadWriteWeb. http://www. readwriteweb.com/archives/what_facebook_quizzes_know_about_you.php

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NEW DIRECTIONS IN MUSEUM ETHICS Perrot, Paul N. 1997. Museum ethics and collecting principles. In Edson, G., ed. Museum ethics. London: Routledge. 189
95. Poster, Mark. 2006. Information please: Culture and politics in the age of digital machines. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Rettberg, J.W. 2008. Blogging. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Rosenzweig, R., and D. Thelen. 1998. The presence of the past: Popular uses of history in American life. New York: Columbia University Press. Rubel, S. 2008. Ethical social media marketing. Micro Persuasion. http://www.micropersuasion. com/2008/10/ethical-social.html Sandell, R. 2005. Constructing and communicating equality: The social agency of museum space. In Reshaping museum space: Architecture, design, exhibitions, ed. S. Macleod, 185
200. London: Routledge. Shirky, C. 2009. How social media can make history. Talk delivered for TED. http:// www.ted.com/talks/clay_shirky_how_cellphones_twitter_facebook_can_make_history.html Simon, N. 2008. The future of authority: Platform power. Museum 2.0. http://museumtwo. blogspot.com/2008/10/future-of-authority-platform-power.html Sontag, S. 1990. On photography. New York: Picador. Springer, M., B. Dulabahn, P. Michel, B. Natanson, D. Reser, D. Woodward, and H. Zinham. 2008. For the common good: The Library of Congress Flickr project. Washington, DC: Library of Congress. Sunstein, C. 2001. Republic.com. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Tchividjian, E. 2009. Ethics and social media. Ethics Blog. Ruder Finn. http://www. ruderfinn.com/blogs/ethics/2009/07/ethics-and-social-media.html Terpin Communications Group. 2008. The ethics of social media. Social Media World. http:// socialmediaworld.com/?p  126 Thomas, S., and A. Mintz. 1998. The virtual and the real: Media in the museum. Washington, DC: American Association of Museums. United States Congress. 2009. 36 USC § 2301
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. 2009. The Conscience Un-Conference: Using Social Media for Good. http://www.ushmm.org/social/blog United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. n.d. Code of ethics. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. n.d. Use Agreement
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Reproductions. United States Office of Government Ethics. n.d. Code of Ethics for Government Employees. http://www.usoge.gov Wylie, E., and S.S. Brophy. 2009. The greener good: The enviro-active museum. Museum. American Association of Museums. http://www.aam-us.org/pubs/mn/green.cfm Young, James E. 1993. The texture of memory: Holocaust memorials and meaning. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

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Chapter 3

New challenges, new priorities: analyzing ethical dilemmas from a stakeholder’s perspective in the Netherlands Le´ontine Meijer-van Mensch Reinwardt Academie, Dapperstraat 315, 1093 BS Amsterdam, The Netherlands

This article aims to explore new directions in analyzing ethical problems as a subject of museological training. The regular updating of approaches toward applied theories and ethics should be an integral part of the professional selfdefinition of museum studies programs. This self-definition and its regular actualization serve as an answer to important changes that have been taking place in the heritage field and in society as a whole during the last decade. By using the controversy about the removal of some works of art by the Iranian born artist, Sooreh Hera, from an exhibition in the Municipal Museum of The Hague, the validity of an ethics model that is under construction at the Reinwardt Academy (Amsterdam) will be analyzed. The article emphasizes the position of the professional when confronted with controversies, rather than theorizing controversy as such. After a short introduction about ethics as a basis of professionalism, this article will develop an argument for a new professional ethics based on the new relationship between museums and society. The Sooreh Hera case study illustrates the complexity of this relationship and the need to apply adequate methods of analysis in the teaching of professional ethics.

Ethics and professionalism Reflection on professional ethics should be one of the key subjects of any professional training program
museum training programs not excepted. To some extent, ethical concerns lie at the basis of the very concept of professionalism. It can be argued that museum work had developed into a profession by the end of the nineteenth century. The creation of professional associations, the publication of professional journals and handbooks and the foundation of curatorial training courses provided the parameters of professionalism. Codes of professional ethics were also the result of this professionalization process. The German Museum Association was the first national organization to adopt a code of ethics. In 1918, it published a code of behavior toward art dealing and the public: Grundsaetze ueber das Verhalten der Mitglieder des Deutschen Museumsbundes gegenueber dem Kunsthandel und dem Publikum. A few years later in 1925, the American Association of Museums adopted its first Code of Ethics for Museum Workers. Both codes (and those which followed) can be seen as expressions of a tendency to look inward to techniques and professional behavior more than outward to service

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and society. This authority-based and hegemonic discourse has been described by Laurajane Smith as ‘authorized heritage discourse’ (Smith 2007, 5). The canonization of professional principles, as expressions of this authorized heritage discourse, was more or less completed by the publication of the proceedings of the Muse´ ographie conference, organized in 1934 by the International Office of Museums (Office International des Muse´ es 1934). Many of these principles are still considered to be cornerstones of professionalism. However, the authorized heritage discourse has increasingly been challenged in the last decades of the twentieth century, resulting in new concepts of professionalism involving new approaches to professional ethics. The 1970s witnessed a growing awareness of the social role of museums in many parts of the world. The UNESCO’s Recommendation on Participation by the People at Large in Cultural Life and their Contribution to it (1976) was an important milestone. According to the Recommendation, ‘participation by the greatest possible number of people and associations in a wide variety of cultural activities of their own free choice is essential to the development of the basic human values and dignity of the individual’ (UNESCO 1976, Preamble). The Recommendation reflects new demands created by, for example, policies on social inclusion (which brought the work of community development closer to traditional museums), by emancipation movements (such as the indigenous movements in New Zealand, Australia, the USA and Canada) and by the growing multiculturalism in European countries. In addition, changing museum policies regarding repatriation provided museums with new roles in the process of self-determination and cultural identity of communities and therefore helped reverse the ‘mechanisms of forgetfulness’ (Vrdoljak 2008, 259), thus contributing to the opening of a new chapter in the relations between museums and society. These developments resulted in the emergence of a new paradigm with a new sense of democracy in the museum and heritage field, as in the politically engaged grassroots initiatives in Latin countries, referred to as ‘community museology’ or ‘sociomuseology’ (Moutinho, Bruno, and Chagas 2007). Sociomuseology focuses on the role of heritage (tangible and intangible) in community development. It advocates an active and activist role of heritage institutions and heritage professionals. Following the ‘cultural turns’ in cultural studies (Bachmann-Medick 2007), many European and North American museum studies programs adopted a ‘reflexive museology’. Reflexive museology is ‘informed by the premise that exhibits of other cultures are neither neutral nor tropeless, despite claims otherwise. Rather, exhibits are informed by the cultural, historical, institutional, and political contexts of people who make them’ (Butler 2008, 22). The museum space is increasingly seen as ‘contact zone’ (Clifford 1997), a place for encounter and dialog. The ideal expression of the new paradigm is a museum that genuinely opens up its narrative for user-generated content and cocreation (Meijervan Mensch 2009, 24). This involves new definitions of authority, as well as new definitions of the relation between museums and stakeholders. The Internet has facilitated the emergence of ‘citizen curators’, which brings forth the dilemma of reconciling two seemingly contradictory intentions: to democratize control of, and access to, culture and to preserve and value the curator as subject expert (Proctor 2010, 40). A possible solution to this contradiction is redefining the role of the 41

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curator, emphasizing his or her key role in a community of interest, i.e., as facilitator (Waterton and Smith 2010, 11). The curriculum of the Reinwardt Academy represents an integrative approach to heritage and heritage institutions. Behind this approach lies the conviction that the process of attributing heritage values is not exclusively the responsibility of heritage professionals. It involves a whole range of stakeholders, including the crucial role of the source community. The role of the professional is perceived as facilitator, rather than authority. As future professionals, the students learn to be open to new definitions of heritage and new approaches for the care and communication of heritage, resulting from emerging types of interactions between heritage institutions and their stakeholders (Meijer and van Mensch 2008). In this context, the teaching of professional ethics is very much connected with developing an ability to recognize and identify the diversity of stakeholders and their interests. As a consequence, the teaching of professional ethics at the Reinwardt Academy does not only focus on the internal processes and procedures of heritage institutions but also looks at every decision-making process from a stakeholder perspective. This means that any discussion about the ethical dimensions of museum work (including collecting, conservation, restoration, documentation, registration, exhibiting, education, marketing, public relations and management) starts with the identification of actual and potential stakeholders and their actual and potential interests, including interactions among stakeholders. The bottom line is that the interests of all stakeholders are respected. Of course, interests will often conflict and ethics involves a complex process of carefully weighing the arguments. This article argues that stakeholders should be actively involved in the weighing process. In this context, the term negotiation will be used. To demonstrate this argument, the core of the article is the analysis of a recent problem with exhibiting some controversial works of art by the artist Sooreh Hera in the Municipal Museum of The Hague. Before focusing on the case study, it is necessary to discuss some of the parameters: stakeholders, participation and teaching professional ethics. Stakeholders The 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage identifies three main categories of stakeholders: source communities, national governments (the state parties) and professionals (UNESCO 2003). The identification of these three main categories of stakeholders is not without importance. ‘Each brings with them a different idea of community and a range of beliefs in the importance and contribution of heritage to their social, cultural or political project’ (Crooke 2010, 16). However, the complex dynamics among the three parties is often not recognized, and museum professionals dominate heritage discourse, claiming a natural and exclusive right to ‘pass objectified, informed and verifiable judgments upon the value of heritage’ (Schouten 2010, 36). In this authorized heritage discourse, heritage is the thing, rather than the cultural values or meanings that the material thing may symbolize. To Laurajane Smith, ‘all heritage is intangible, and may usefully be viewed as a cultural process of meaning and value production’ (Smith 2007, 4). As a consequence, Smith’s definition of heritage is ‘a cultural process or performance that is concerned with the production and negotiation of cultural identity, individual and collective memory, and social and cultural values’ (Smith 42

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2007, 2). By using the term ‘negotiation’, Smith refers to the conflicting interests of individuals and groups as stakeholders. Smith’s definition of heritage contextualizes contemporary practices of ‘liberating culture’ from the authorized heritage discourse (Kreps 2003). A ‘new heritage discourse’ advocates cocreation and cocuratorship and thus recognizes the role of stakeholders in the process generally referred to as musealization, i.e., the attributing of values in the process of creating heritage (Sturm 1991). ‘By identifying and naming the material and non-material elements that constitute their environment, people realize their right to their world and gain control over it’ (Kreps 2003, 10). Museum theory and practice should be ‘appropriate’ in the sense that they prioritize local concerns. Christina Kreps advocates an ‘appropriate museology’ as an approach to museum development and training that adapts museum practices and strategies for cultural heritage preservation to local cultural contexts and socioeconomic conditions. Ideally, it is a bottom-up, community-based approach that combines local knowledge and resources with those of professional museum work. (Kreps 2008, 26)

Museum professionals are increasingly prepared to let communities play a role in the making and interpreting of museum collections. The following three examples will illustrate some of the dilemmas involved in such projects. The case studies have been instrumental in generating new opinions on professionalism at the Reinwardt Academy. The ‘Memory of East’ Web site (www.geheugenvanoost.nl), initiated in 2003 by the Amsterdam Historical Museum, is a virtual collection of objects and stories amassed by the inhabitants of the eastern part of Amsterdam. The project is one of many in the early twenty-first century intended to give people the opportunity to share their stories and their heritage. In the case of the ‘Memory of East’ project, however, communities were initially not in complete control as there was still some curatorial intervention: contributors were invited, and their stories were collected, selected and formated by curators and curatorial-trained volunteers. Since the beginning of 2010, the site has been independent of the museum, facilitating more direct control by the contributors of their own stories. Another more recent example of participatory museum work is the ‘Give & Take’ project of the Zoetermeer City Museum (2009). In this project, the population of the Dutch city of Zoetermeer was invited to donate an object that symbolized the feeling of ‘being at home in Zoetermeer’. In the follow-up project, ‘Zoetermeer’s Room of Marvels’, the museum organized a series of workshops in which museum processes and procedures were discussed and deconstructed with the help of museum professionals, artists and philosophers (Van der Ploeg 2009). Thus, the museum became a center of civic dialog (Meijer 2009, 135), questioning basic issues such as identity, heritage and the problems of appropriation and manipulation. By giving the citizens of Zoetermeer a role in documentation, registration and conservation, the museum created a sense of shared responsibility in the process of ‘making heritage’. By doing so, a new transparency of museological processes was created. This transparency can be described with the help of Goffman’s well-known model of social interaction in which
like in theatrical performances
there is a front region where the ‘actors’ are onstage in front of the audiences and a back region where the ‘actors’ can be themselves (Goffman 1990). One could say that the importance of the Zoetermeer project is that participation and transparency were not limited to front 43

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stage but extended to back stage, i.e., extended to the region hitherto considered to be the refuge of the professionals. In a similar way, the source community was involved in documenting the collection of old topographical photographs in the Stadtmuseum Du¨sseldorf (Meijervan Mensch and Bartels 2010). In this documentation project (October 2009 through February 2010), the participants were not just ‘used’ as volunteers but accepted as cocreators of heritage. The key workers, with their specific knowledge on the history of the Du¨ sseldorf topographical landscape, were the ‘real’ specialists. Because of the bombings during the World War II and the grand-scale urban development programs in the 1960s, large parts of the city changed in appearance. The mostly older key workers had vital content-based knowledge about old Du¨ sseldorf which the museum staff relied on as essential to the museological process of attributing value. The museum professionals became facilitators providing a platform. The Du¨ sseldorf project showed that the ideas of what participation is, and should be, differed among the museum staff. For the director, ‘participation is when all people can work on an equal basis in the museum’; for the educator, ‘participation is an essential part of democracy’, while for the curator of the photo collection, ‘participation is the successful opening of the museum to an interested public’ (Meijer-van Mensch and Bartels 2010, 10). These three opinions reflect three forms of participation as described by Nina Simon (Simon 2010, 190
1). The curator’s view can be identified as ‘contributory’. The participants added information based on their personal expertise. According to the director, participation in the Du¨ sseldorf project was ‘collaborative’. In Simon’s words, to the director the museum is ‘a place dedicated to supporting and connecting with the community’, where participants develop ‘the ability to analyze, curate, design and deliver completed products’ although the museum ‘sets the rules of engagement’ (Simon 2010, 190). Finally, to the educator, participation is, or at least should be, ‘cocreative’. The museum should be ‘a community-driven place’ (Simon 2010, 190). Basically, these differences relate to the role of the source community in the decision-making process. The participation paradigm is about a fundamental democratization of museological tools and processes, as more parties become involved in different levels of decision-making regarding heritage, inside as well as outside museums. This democratization, however, offers no guarantee for equality in negotiations on museum affairs. On the contrary, the fields in which stakeholders establish relations with museums and among themselves are frequently characterized by conflict and contestation. In this sense, participation poses new challenges and priorities for museum ethics. The projects described above show that the participation paradigm, first institutionalized in the form of ecomuseums and neighborhood museums in the early 1970s, began to be adopted in more traditional museums by the first decade of this century (Van Mensch 2005). The new paradigm involves an increased social engagement of museums, and this social engagement has two directions. On the one hand, museums show an interest in an expanded series of stakeholders but, at the same time, accept that new stakeholders show on their part an interest in the policy of museums. The concept of stakeholder does not necessarily refer to a party that visits or acts directly in the museum, but may be a party that acts directly or indirectly upon the museum instead. The Sooreh Hera case study that will be described hereafter will show that this is not limited to participatory projects. Museums are increasingly 44

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forced to reflect on the mechanisms that possibly ensure ‘the continued misrecognition of a range of stakeholders’ (Waterton and Smith 2010, 5). Teaching professional ethics Because of growing social awareness in museums since the early 1970s, ethical conduct has been negotiated with the motivation that a museum performs its duties for the benefit and under the trust of society. Therefore the museum must be socially accountable for its actions. As the Institute of Museum Ethics at Seton Hall University (New Jersey, USA) very clearly states on its Web site: ‘Whether seen in terms of day-to-day decision-making or forging an overarching socially conscious mission, museum ethics is about an institution’s relationship with its public(s)’ (www.museumethics.org/content/about). This ‘mission statement’ became very clear during the institute’s inaugural conference, Defining Museum Ethics (2008), that brought together museum theorists, museum professionals and ethicists to discuss what the terms transparency, accountability and social responsibility mean in a museum ethics context. Keynote speaker Richard Sandell advocated an activist approach for museums and their ethical conduct. For Sandell, museums are ‘spaces where ideas can be challenged through discourse, visual and verbal’ (www. museumethics.org/content/2008-conference/profiles). The publication Re-Presenting Disability, edited by Richard Sandell, Jocelyn Dodd and Rosemarie GarlandThomson, explores the activist potential of museums to shift public perception of issues such as inequality and injustice as well as to stimulate further experimentation and practice (Sandell, Dodd, and Garland-Thompson 2010). The identification of a plurality of stakeholders as a core aspect of new directions in ethics can also be found in more generic, and perhaps less socially assertive, evidence. For instance, the latest version of the Code of Ethics for Museums of the International Council of Museums (2006) recognizes the influence of diverse voices in the work of museums and their interests. Article 6 of the present code is dedicated to the collaboration between museums and (source) communities, whereas the old 1986 code emphasizes collaboration among museums and between museums and local or national governments. The new code calls for ‘respect for the wishes of the community’ (art. 6.5) and the creation of a ‘favorable environment for community support’ (art. 6.8). For example, ‘acquisitions should only be made based on informed and mutual consent without exploitation of the owner or informants’ (art. 6.5). Other sections of the code solicit respect for objects and materials, ‘taking into account the interests and beliefs of members of the community, ethnic or religious groups from whom the objects originated’ (art. 4.3). However, by focusing on contemporary communities from which heritage has been derived, the code avoids the issue of the plurality of stakeholders. Making students aware of the social responsibility of museums and how this relates to relevant ethical issues is one of the priorities regarding the concept of professional development at the Reinwardt Academy. The Academy was founded in 1976 as a new style museum training program, offering a full-time 4-year bachelor’s degree program. By the mid-1970s, the role of the curator as the leading professional in a museum was increasingly being challenged by the so-called ‘new professionals’. The program responded to new needs of the profession. The profile of these new professionals reflected the professionalization of collections management, 45

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conservation, exhibition design and education. In the 1980s, the organizational structure of Dutch museums changed accordingly. Collections-based curatorial departments were replaced by a functions-oriented structure. Instead of collectionsbased departments managed by subject matter specialists, museums organized themselves around the care of collections (with departments of conservation and documentation) on the one hand and communication (with departments of exhibition and education) on the other. Thus the Reinwardt program did not focus on curatorial responsibilities, but offered specializations in the field of collections management, conservation, exhibition design and education. The curriculum is grounded in an overall concept of professionalism as the balance among theory, practice and ethics, aiming at training reflexive practitioners to be employed in the wider heritage field (Meijer and van Mensch 2008). The danger of a fragmenting profession requires a new and renewed interest in a museum-related theoretical framework, as well as a general ethical approach as a basis of the curriculum as a whole. The model being tested at the Reinwardt Academy proposes to deconstruct ethical cases by means of carrying out a stakeholder analysis and considering outcomes of museum action for, and with, these stakeholders. Basically, the professional identity of the museum worker and his or her core responsibility lies at the intersection of the (intangible) heritage that is entrusted to the care of the museum and the community (or communities) with an interest in this heritage. However, a model based on such simplistic dialectic is of limited utility for an analysis of the ethical responsibilities in the museological field. In reality, there is a multitude of stakeholders with diverse interests and interactions with the museum. Moreover, the analysis should include the actual and potential interaction among stakeholders. Of course, interests will often conflict. Ethics typically involves a complex process of carefully weighing arguments. The model as developed within the Reinwardt Academy is based on a review of old and new codes of ethics from national and international museum organizations. It starts from the recognition of seven basic responsibilities, i.e., seven entities to which the museum professional is accountable. Potentially, these responsibilities represent conflict zones where, on behalf of the museum institution, the interests of the museum professional have to be negotiated with the interests of other stakeholders. (1) Responsibility to the maker (and first users) of the object and his or her society. (2) Responsibility to the preservation of the information value (including the aesthetic and emotional values) of the object and its physical and intellectual accessibility. (3) Responsibility to the institute with which the professional is associated, regardless of whether this association is temporary or permanent, paid or unpaid, or whether they are employed by the institute or have volunteered their services. (4) Responsibility to those who made the activities possible by financial support. (5) Responsibility to colleagues inside and outside the institute concerned, including professionals associated with nonmuseum institutes such as academic researchers. 46

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(6) Responsibility to the visitors of permanent and temporary exhibitions and to participants in other activities. (7) Responsibility to the community as a whole, now and in the future. The objective of this model is to provide richer insight into ethical dilemmas identifying the core problem(s) and players. It is based on two assumptions. First, the perception of what makes conduct ethical is the result of an active negotiation of interests among stakeholders. That is to say, values and principles are, to a great extent, negotiable, and identifying a solution between involved parties also characterizes what is considered to be ethical. Many so-called best practices in ethical conduct are the result of a successful process of negotiation among stakeholders. Some of the most striking polemic ethical cases have been less successful in engaging in a process of negotiation of interests, meaning that stakeholders are not clearly identified or approached. The following case study is an example of the failure to negotiate between stakeholders. Second, outcomes might be as important as intention and results (outputs) in the perception of what is ethical and what is not. Perhaps more than that, the outcome might be, or become, the fundamental target of ethical decision-making. That is to say, intention is not good enough; a museum must be accountable for its outputs (that is, how intention becomes concrete) and, more than that, for the impact of its actions on society and the evolving relationships among the stakeholders involved. This dilemma between intention and actual outcome is also illustrated by the case study.

Sooreh Hera and the Municipal Museum of The Hague How the Reinwardt model is applied is shown in the following case study regarding the controversy involved in the inclusion and subsequent exclusion of three works of art by Iranian-born artist Sooreh Hera in a 2007 exhibition at the Gemeentemuseum Den Haag (Municipal Museum of The Hague). The case study illustrates the diverse and conflicting interests of a number of stakeholders, as well as the costs of failing to engage in negotiations. The dilemmas presented in the case study cannot be understood in isolation from contemporary sociopolitical realities in the Netherlands. These realities provide a new and barely recognized challenge in the public discourse about museums and the museum profession in the Netherlands. The image and self-identity of the Netherlands were for a long time that of a diverse and tolerant society. The second half of the twentieth century, however, witnessed a strongly felt social and political insecurity within large parts of the country vis-a`-vis the increasingly culturally diverse composition of society. This cultural and ethnic diversity is mainly the result of two developments. First, as a consequence of the decolonization process after the World War II, people from the former Dutch colonies (such as Indonesia and Surinam) settled in the Netherlands. Second, from the 1960s onwards, the needs of the labor force encouraged people from, for example, Morocco and Turkey to migrate to the Netherlands. According to Statistic Netherlands (www.cbs.nl), citizens with a migration background represent about 20% of the population of the Netherlands. This number is growing fast, in particular, the number of Muslim immigrants from countries such as Morocco, 47

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Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Somalia. Most of these immigrants settle in the major cities and are changing the urban demographic profile. For many critics, the idea of a multicultural society has proven to be a failure. In this atmosphere, new populist political parties have emerged: Leefbaar Nederland (Liveable Netherlands: 1999), Lijst Pim Fortuyn (Pim Fortuyn List: 2002), Partij voor de Vrijheid (Party for Freedom: 2005) and Trots op Nederland (Proud of the Netherlands: 2007). These political parties have created a distinct profile for themselves as part of a nationalist and populist right-wing political movement, emphasizing the assimilation of immigrants, especially Muslim, into Dutch society
thereby forcing them to give up their own cultural identity in favor of adopting Dutch norms and values. The populist political parties advocate a national identity based on so-called Dutch indigenous traditions. Thus the issue of national identity, and with it (intangible) heritage as the expression of these norms and values, has entered the political arena, a process boosted by events such as the attacks on the World Trade Center (New York, 11 September 2001), the assassination of film maker Theo van Gogh (Amsterdam, 2 November 2004), the Jyllands-Posten cartoons controversy in Denmark (2005) and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In this political debate, not just the political ideology (assumed) of the Muslim community in the Netherlands was at stake but also expressions of Muslim cultural and religious traditions. One of the most outspoken public figures representing strong anti-Islam sentiments in Dutch society is Geert Wilders, leader of the Partij voor de Vrijheid. He very much opposes cultural relativism and, according to him, the main problem in the Western society is that the elite tend to believe that all cultures are equal. He rejects the idea that Islamic values are equal to those of ‘the’ Dutch culture, which is based on Christian, Jewish and humanist traditions. According to Wilders, ‘Islam is a political, totalitarian ideology, with worldwide aspirations’. Islam, says Wilders, ‘wants to dominate and submit us all’. Wilders incites intolerance toward Islam in the Netherlands, exploiting a range of positions from the total rejection of Islam as a religious and cultural tradition alien to Dutch culture, to the fear of being dominated by Muslim norms and values and to the uneasiness about a rapidly changing ethnic makeup of the major cities, as well as respect for these ‘new’ traditions as expression of a long history of tolerance in Dutch society. It was in this political climate that in November 2007, the Director of the Gemeentemuseum Den Haag (Municipal Museum of The Hague), Wim van Krimpen, ordered two photographs and a video by the Iranian-born artist Sooreh Hera (b. 1973) to be removed from an upcoming exhibition shortly before the opening. The works of Hera were part of the exhibition 7-up, with works of recent graduates of the Vrije Academie (School for Fine Arts in The Hague). Every year the Municipal Museum of The Hague honors a selected group of recent graduates from the Vrije Academie and gives them the opportunity to exhibit their work in the museum. The removed photographs and film were part of a series of seven works called Adam & Ewald, de zevendedagsgeliefden [seventh-day lovers] (Hera 2008). The works show seven male homosexual couples, figuring as the male
male version of Adam and Eve (Ewald being a masculine given name) during the archetypical day of rest (the Seventh Day). Sooreh Hera got inspiration for her Adam en Ewald project from the statements of a Dutch politician from a small fundamentalist Christian party, 48

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who said that if God had allowed homosexuality, Adam and Ewald, not Adam and Eve, would have been in the Bible (quoted on Sooreh Hera’s Web site: www.soorehhera.com). The contested photographs show a male Iranian couple (Khosro & Farhad) in an intimate domestic context. Even though both males are stripped to the waist, there is no explicit sexual connotation. The other photographs from the series also show male couples in similar contexts, but in the Khosro & Farhad photographs the couple wears masks to hide their identity for fear of reprisal. The masks are based on old Iranian representations of the prophet Muhammad and his nephew and sonin-law, Ali. The following is a chronological overview of the events. During the mounting of the exhibition, the director conveyed a positive view toward the work of Hera. However, the situation changed after the artist gave an interview to a newspaper a few days before the opening. In this interview, she mentioned earlier problems with her work and expressed her admiration for the courage of the director and his decision to show it. This interview drew attention to the controversial nature of Hera’s work. The Islam Democrats, a political party represented in the city council of the Hague, informed the director that the masks of the Iranian gay couple bore images of Muhammad and Ali. They explained that this sort of imagery formed an unacceptable insult to the Muslim community (Zwagerman in Hera 2008). When asked for a reaction, the director said he did not know about the specific Muhammad and Ali connotation and meaning behind the usage of the masks. He said that he chose to include the work of Sooreh Hera because he thought that the works had a special artistic value. He also said that as a museum director he never used political criteria for exhibiting works of art (Maiburg 2009, 5). The day after the interview, the director decided to show the series but without the Kohsro and Farhad photographs. In a press release, the museum stated that this decision was made because the works might and could be offensive to specific groups in society. The director was more explicit in an interview to a daily newspaper by referring to the Muslim community. He explained that it was his choice not to use provocation as a means to discuss issues that are important in society (Maiburg 2009, 6). The key to the subsequent controversy was the conflicting interpretations of the director’s words by the various stakeholders. Was the director’s decision to censor the photograph motivated by fear or by respect? Hera did not accept the director’s compromise. She decided to withdraw the whole Adam & Ewald series from the exhibition. She accused the director of cowardice for caving in to Muslim extremists (Campbell 2008). In an interview with the daily newspaper NRC Handelsblad, the director replied that this was nonsense. ‘There have been no threats against the museum,’ he insisted. He mentioned his concern for the safety of his staff as a reason for removing the photographs, as he was afraid of terrorist actions. However, no mention was made of the opinion of the staff of the museum itself, some of the staff themselves being Muslim. Contrary to his earlier remarks, the director said that he was not impressed by the quality of the work (Hollak 2007). For Hera the case was clear. On national television she declared: ‘Of course he’s afraid, but he won’t admit it. He chose fear [. . .] an Islamist minority now decides what is and is not on display in a museum’. Hera herself received serious threats and was forced into hiding. ‘We’re going to burn 49

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you naked or put a bullet in your mouth’, she repeated to Sunday Times journalist, Matthew Campbell, referring to menacing emails (Campbell 2008). Mobilized by artist members, the arts community in the Netherlands published an open letter to the Dutch Minister of Culture in the national newspaper, NRC Handelsblad, harshly criticizing the museum director. The authors expressed concern about threats to the freedom of artistic expression in the Netherlands. At the same time, members of the gay community made a connection between the decision of the museum and their concern about the discrimination of homosexuals in Islamic countries, in particular Iran (Hera’s country of origin). Not long before the controversy around the photographs, a homosexual was sentenced to death by hanging by the Iranian regime. The word ‘censorship’ soon became a corollary in the case. Shortly after Sooreh Hera decided to withdraw all her work from the exhibition in the Hague, Ranti Tjan, director of the Municipal Museum of Gouda, offered to exhibit the controversial photographs and film in his museum. Tjan stated that the city of Gouda wanted to be a ‘free haven’ as Gouda had been for centuries. He attested that he valued the political dimension of Hera’s works and, in his opinion, precisely because of this political dimension the works must be shown in a museum (Hollak 2007). After Tjan’s invitation, the museum was criticized and even threatened by parts of the Muslim community of Gouda. The director had to hire bodyguards and the exhibition was postponed. Sooreh Hera again accused a museum of censorship. One year after the controversial photographs were first due to be exhibited, they were finally displayed by the museum of Gouda in a show about contested art from the sixteenth century to the present day (Maiburg 2009, 6). This time (October 2008), little protest was heard from the Muslim community. In fact, despite earlier commotion, there was no public debate at all. The exhibition context (contested art) probably neutralized the provocative nature of Hera’s works. Moreover, the photographs were printed in rather small size, thus reducing their impact. Reflection This article discusses three interconnected issues: ethics as the cornerstone of professionalism, ways of teaching professional ethics and community involvement in professional decision-making processes. The linking concept is the assumption that the professional needs to develop sensitivity for the different and often conflicting interests of stakeholders. This involves an understanding of the complexity of the relationship between the concepts of community and stakeholder, and this also involves an engagement with broader social
political contexts. In the case of the 7-up exhibition, the Municipal Museum of The Hague did not intend to involve any interest group apart from the artists. It was not considered as a participatory project. Nevertheless, in the cascade of events that followed, a growing number of communities raised their voices as stakeholders. The museum was not prepared to deal with the conflicting interests of the stakeholders and avoided engagement in a public debate with the conflicting parties. The controversy concerning the Sooreh Hera works can only be fully understood in the context of the polarization within Dutch society. The self-censorship of cultural institutions that resulted from the project initiated concern about the loss of 50

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intellectual and artistic freedom in Dutch society. The need to look at a broader social
political context to understand such ethical conflicts was also advocated by the late Cuyler Young, former director of the Royal Ontario Museum, in his reflection on the Into the Heart of Africa controversy (Cuyler Young 1993). In his opinion, that conflict would perhaps not have become so heated if earlier that year a ‘young black’ had not been shot by the police (Cuyler Young 1993, 174). In a similar way, the Sooreh Hera controversy is connected with the assassination of the filmmaker Theo van Gogh by a Muslim fundamentalist in 2004. In a traditional educational setting, a case study such as the one described above would be analyzed in a group discussion using information provided by the media. Ideally stakeholders are invited, but this is not always possible. An obvious compromise for an educational setting is role-playing. Students are required to identify with the position and interests of the different stakeholders. This identification is an important part of their developing professionalism. Key to the professionalism, as advocated by the Reinwardt Academy, is the participation paradigm as described above. Students are expected to learn how stakeholder perspectives can be combined with different forms of participation, starting from the notion that it is an ethical responsibility of museums to look for ways to involve as many stakeholders as possible in decision-making processes. The model introduced earlier in this essay is used to structure the analysis. The model, identifying seven responsibilities toward stakeholders, serves as a first inventory of interests. Most of the publications during and after the Sooreh Hera controversy focused on the relations between the director(s) as stakeholder(s), and the other stakeholders involved, with the director(s) as key actors. With the help of the model, during the class exercise the emphasis shifts to the interaction among the multitude of stakeholders, focusing on the participation of the diverse stakeholders as actors in the decision-making process. In analyzing the Sooreh Hera case at the Reinwardt Academy, the students identified the following points as relevant for further discussion. According to the model, they asserted, the first question to be answered is to what extent the opinion of the maker, i.e., Sooreh Hera, should play a role in the decision-making process. She was born in Iran and, as one of her supporters wrote, her work conveys ‘a woman’s anger at the fundaments of the male Islamic faith’ (Zwagerman in Hera 2008). On her Web site, the artist is explicit about the intentions of her work: Religion always wants to control human sexuality, most prominently with a compelling taboo on homosexuality. The three major religions always fiercely opposed any deviant form of sexual practice even today, within the Muslim world homosexuality is a capital offence. (www.soorehhera.com)

In an interview she added: ‘Works of art can be provocative. It is not an artist’s job to paint flowers. Art should shine a light on social issues’ (Campbell 2008). Actually, two dimensions of the integrity of the works of art are at stake, according to the students: the conceptual framework and the artistic integrity. The artistic integrity of the series as a whole was not respected when it was decided to exclude the Kohsro and Farhad photographs. In the Municipal Museum of Gouda, the series was shown complete but in small size, thus respecting the conceptual integrity of the series, but with little respect for the artistic expression of each work 51

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individually. The general thematic context of the exhibition neutralized the political message of Hera’s work. The Director of the Municipal Museum of The Hague mentioned both his responsibility toward the staff of his museum and his responsibility toward the Muslim community as key elements in his decision-making. In the public debate, however, the opinion of the staff was not heard. The interference of the Muslim party (Islam Democrats) obviously influenced the decision not to show the contested works. Only later were very strong opinions expressed by the Muslim community throughout the Netherlands about the exhibition, after the decision had already been made. On the other hand, artists, critics and other leaders of the art world rejected the decision of the Museum as censorship of artistic freedom of expression. The gay community in the Netherlands expressed strong opinions against the removal of the contested photographs, because they identified with the intention of the artist to expose the ‘hypocritical’ attitude toward homosexuality in countries such as Iran (Campbell 2008). The public reactions, as expressed in the media, were not reactions of visitors. The real controversy, as located by the students, was provoked not by exhibiting controversial works of art, but by not exhibiting them. Actually, many people, including members of the Muslim community, became aware of the possible controversial nature of some of the photographs only through the discussions and heated arguments that followed Hera’s first reactions to the decision of the museum. As the students acknowledged, in the debate, the art world, the gay community and, to some extent, the Muslim community profiled themselves as communities of interest, addressing social issues more fundamental than the exhibition itself. Through the learning process, the students came to understand that, although the museum did not seek community engagement, the exhibition unintentionally became a contact zone. ‘Different meanings of community, reflecting assorted assumptions and aspirations’ (Crooke 2010, 16) were expressed, without resulting in a new dynamic or synergy, however. The consensus that emerged from the discussion among the students is that the actions of museum professionals provoked conflict among stakeholders and, perhaps more importantly, failed to engage the conflicted parties in a process of negotiation. The latter created confusion and feelings of mutual distrust among the stakeholders as well as toward the museum agency. Students saw the arguments the museum director made during the public debate as evidence of an inability to engage in ethical negotiation. Provocation, worries for security of staff, low artistic quality of Hera’s work
these allegations were attempts to justify the choice of the museum to the different stakeholders involved. The media was a major site upon which conflict was enacted, but not negotiated, since not all involved parties were able to act to a similar degree. Students recognized that the refusal of the museum to give shape to a more explicit role as ‘contact zone’ reflects its refusal to adopt an activist stance. According to the director, the Municipal Museum of The Hague, as an art museum, is not the place to discuss inequality and injustice. Such rationales are not motivated merely by the fear of violent reactions, as they represent a more fundamental rejection of the role of (art) museums as political arenas, thus denying the sociopolitical intentions of artists as well as the potential of the museum to shift public perception on important social issues (Sandell, Dodd and Garland-Thompson 2010). 52

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The Sooreh Hera case study offers two important lessons for students learning at the Reinwardt Academy, and by extension for any museum or museum studies program. First, the lack of discourse and communication between the stakeholders hampers balanced decision-making. As future professionals, students need to learn that decision-making at all levels is, in fact, a delicate balancing act. Since very often stakeholder interests are mutually contradictory, balanced decision-making does not automatically mean that all interests can be equally satisfied. This requires sensitivity to the interests of stakeholders, but also the ability to engage in a process of negotiation. In this case study, the lack of ability and preparedness to negotiate left all responsibilities to the museum (director). The inability of the Hague museum (director) to communicate with the different stakeholders proved to be counterproductive. The director’s decision was based on negative considerations (fear), rather than on a clear view of the role of museums with regard to the increased complexity of its stakeholders. The challenges of the new participation paradigm remove from the museum the sole responsibility in mediating negotiations. Museums have a responsibility toward the impact of their acts. However, this responsibility does not depend only on the museum to foresee and control the consequences of its work in society, as ethical practice is a matter of shared responsibility with all parties involved. Museums, at least in the Netherlands, have little experience in engaging different groups of stakeholders in decision-making processes. Participation usually is limited to the interaction between staff and one group of stakeholders as was, for example, the case in the Zoetermeer and Du¨ sseldorf projects. Possible contradictions within such groups of stakeholders are veiled by using terms such as source community. The Sooreh Hera case is important because it makes contradictions explicit. The model presented above serves as a learning tool to explore and define the contradictions as well as a framework to develop policies for the future. Conclusion Ethical concerns lie at the basis of the very concept of professionalism. New demands created by, for example, social inclusion, emancipation and multiculturalism contributed to the opening of a new chapter in the relations between museums and society
involving new definitions of the relation between museums and stakeholders as well as new definitions of professional authority. New views on professional ethics connect with the concept of participation. The bottom line is that stakeholders are identified and their interests respected. The Sooreh Hera case is an example of an exhibition that de facto functioned as a contact zone. The museum did not seek participation, but the decision to show some controversial photographs
and afterward the decision not to show them
evoked strong reactions from various communities with different and conflicting interests. The museum did not relate to these communities, thus avoiding an active and activist role as a space where ideas can be discussed in an open and mutually respectful climate. Contemporary professionalism in the museum field tends to be based on functions-oriented organizational structures, rather than collections-based structures. Concepts of professional ethics serve as a binding force between professional 53

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specializations. At the same time, professional ethics should bring the participation paradigm into the decision-making processes in all functional areas of the museum. This is a major challenge in museum work and in museum training. The case study described here, and the method of analysis, will bring the student to the core of the ethical debate. The striving for more equality among stakeholders and the sharing of responsibility are important aspects of a new ethics based on social responsibility. Only when museums are able to develop an integrated policy in this respect can we truly speak of the cocreation of significance. In this context, the role of the future professional is one of facilitating mutual understanding and respect among different interest groups. Professional ethical conduct involves not only the capacity to identify stakeholders but also the sensitivity to their often conflicting interests, resulting in an active policy of negotiation. Acknowledgements This article is based on a paper presented at the Biennial Graduate Student Conference ‘New Directions in Museum Ethics’ on 14 November 2009 at Seton Hall University in South Orange, NJ, USA, together with my colleague Paula Assunc¸ a˜ o dos Santos. I thank her for her valuable input. I also thank the bachelor and master students of the Reinwardt Academy, who, by actively participating in ethics seminars, contributed to the refining of my ideas about the analysis model presented above. I especially thank Janneke Maiburg whose overview of the Sooreh Hera case was helpful in (re)constructing the controversy. Photographs of the contested works of art by Sooreh Hera can be found on her Web site: www.soorehhera.com/gallery.html

References Bachmann-Medick, D. 2007. Cultural Turns. Neuorientierungen in den Kulturwissenschaften. Hamburg: Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag. Butler, S.R. 2008. Contested representations: Revisiting ‘‘Into the Heart of Africa’’. Toronto: Broadview Press. Cambell, M. 2008. Woman artist gets death threats over gay Muslim photos. The Sunday Times, January 6. Clifford, J. 1997. Routes: Travel and translation in the late twentieth century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Crooke, E. 2010. The politics of community heritage: Motivations, authority and control. International Journal of Heritage Studies 16, nos. 1
2: 16
29. Cuyler Young, T. 1993. Into the Heart of Africa: The director’s perspective. Curator 36, no. 2: 174
88. Goffman, E. 1990. The presentation of self in everyday life. London: Penguin Books. Hera, S. 2008. Adam & Ewald zevendedagsgeliefden. Amsterdam: Uitgeverij Xtra. Hollak, R. 2007. Ik bang? Absolute onzin! Museumdirecteur staat niet stil bij veiligheidsrisico’s: waarde van werk is groter dan van mijn persoon. NRC Handelsblad, December 4.

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NEW DIRECTIONS IN MUSEUM ETHICS Kreps, C.F. 2003. Liberating culture: Cross-cultural perspectives on museums, curation, and heritage preservation. London: Routledge. Kreps, C.F. 2008. Appropriate museology in theory and practice. Museum Management and Curatorship 23, no. 1: 23
41. Maiburg, J. 2009. Ethische Aspecten bij het tentoonstellen van het kunstwerk Adam en Ewald, de zevendedagsgeliefden. Bachelor paper. Amsterdam: Reinwardt Academie. Meijer, L. and P. van Mensch. 2008. Teaching theory, practice and ethics of collecting at the Reinwardt Academie. Collectingnet, no. 4: 6
7. Meijer, M. 2009. Een ‘Wonderkamer’ in een New Town, overpeinzingen bij een museaal experiment. In 4289, Wisselwerking. De‘Wonderkamer’ van Zoetermeer, ed. A. Koch and J. van der Ploeg, 133
9. Zoetermeer: Stadsmuseum Zoetermeer. Meijer-van Mensch, L. 2009. Vom Besucher zum Benutzer. Museumskunde 74, no. 2: 20
26. Meijer-van Mensch, L. and H.P. Bartels. 2010. The City Museum Du¨ sseldorf and the participation paradigm. Collectingnet, no. 9: 9
11. Moutinho, M., C. Bruno, and M. Chagas, eds. 2007. Sociomuseology. Lisbon: Universidade Luso´ fona de Humanidades e Tecnologias. Office International des Muse´es. 1934. Muse´ ographie. Architecture et ame´ nagement des muse´ es d’art. Conference internationale d’e´ tudes. Madrid 1934. Paris: Office International des Muse´es. Proctor, N. 2010. Digital: Museums as platform, curator as champion, in the age of social media. Curator 53, no. 1: 35
43. Sandell, R., J. Dodd, and R. Garland-Thompson, eds. 2010. Re-presenting disability: activism and agency in the museum. London: Routledge. Schouten, F. 2010. Over het waarderen van erfgoed. Volkscultuur Magazine 5, no. 1: 35
37. Simon, N. 2010. The participatory museum. Santa Cruz, CA: Museum 2.0. Smith, L. 2007. General introduction. In Cultural heritage: Critical concepts in media and cultural studies, ed. L. Smith, 1
21. London: Routledge. Sturm, E. 1991. Konservierte Welt. Museum und Musealisierung. Berlin: Reimer. UNESCO. 1976. Recommendation on participation by the people at large in cultural life and their contribution to it. Paris: UNESCO. UNESCO. 2003. Convention for the safeguarding of the intangible cultural heritage. Paris: UNESCO. Van der Ploeg, J. 2009. Zoetermeer’s room of marvels: A follow-up. Collectingnet, no. 7: 2
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15.

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Chapter 4

Us and Them: who benefits from experimental exhibition making? Pete Brown Head of Learning & Access, Imperial War Museum North, The Quays, Trafford Wharf Road, Manchester M17 1TZ, UK

In order to attract new audiences and increase their relevance to contemporary society, some museums are questioning their traditional role as expert and ‘gatekeeper’ to the knowledge bound up in collections. Sharing authority and experimenting with the conventions of exhibition making may appear refreshing to some, but to others seems simply gratuitous and self-destructive. In 2008, the Manchester Museum (United Kingdom) staked its reputation on an open-ended, dialogic and pluralistic approach to an archaeological ‘treasure’
the 2000-yearold body of Lindow Man, on loan from the British Museum. The exhibition’s unorthodox concept, design and construction polarised opinion amongst staff and visitors, triggering a heated debate about the purpose of museums. Employing Personal Meaning Mapping methodology to measure the impact of the approach on visitors’ learning and enjoyment, this case study shows that challenging convention, though extremely unpopular in traditionalist quarters, can add new layers of meaning to the museum experience.

Introduction As a university museum, the Manchester Museum (United Kingdom) has a track record for developing collaborative and audience-focused projects and programmes, whilst simultaneously challenging staff to be experimental and innovative
to take risks rather than play safe. Examples include Alchemy, an Arts Council
funded project inviting artists (through research fellowships) to present new ways of interpreting the collection;1 Collective Conversations, an opportunity for a diverse range of people to respond to the collection and have the resulting dialogues filmed for others to view;2 and Myths About Race, a temporary exhibition focused on issues arising from the 2007 UK national Revealing Histories project commemorating the abolition of the British slave trade in 1807.3 This paper offers a glimpse into the effect of the museum exhibition as ‘museological laboratory’ on visitors’ learning and enjoyment. It demonstrates that, as long as it is backed by sound ethical principles, taking an unconventional and potentially controversial approach, though unpopular in some quarters, can provide an enlightening and rewarding experience for visitors and the institution. The context is a research project focused on a yearlong temporary exhibition (April 2008
April 2009) based on the loan of Lindow Man’s body from the British

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Museum. Lindow Man
a 2000-year-old ‘bog body’ uncovered during peat excavation near Manchester
had been on display at the Manchester Museum twice before, in 1987, just three years after his discovery, and again in 1991. The coroner’s decision to release the body to the British Museum on the grounds that the discovery was of national significance triggered a passionate, though unsuccessful, community campaign to bring Lindow Man ‘home’ to Manchester. The research project set out to examine the role of the university museum in challenging people’s habits, beliefs and perceptions. It aimed to test whether ‘provoking a debate’, which is a key element of the Manchester Museum’s mission statement, and part of its twin purpose of ‘promoting understanding between cultures’ and ‘developing a sustainable world’, is just an academic, post-modern indulgence that bewilders and alienates visitors, or whether it has real value for audiences. The research explored the tension within museums and the sector as a whole, between a cultural institution’s role as educator, activist or philosopher, and its function as a visitor attraction. The Lindow Man exhibition became a case study to assess the impact of the Museum’s unorthodox approach on visitors’ learning and enjoyment. A Bog Body Mystery offered an opportunity, over a sustained period, to learn how the Museum’s visitors make sense of this kind of presentation, whether the lack of definite ‘facts’ frustrated people seeking the authority of the museum voice, or liberated them to define and explore their own interpretations. There were a number of hazards inherent in the Museum’s 2008 treatment of Lindow Man: the first lay in the decision to raise issues around the ethics of collecting and displaying human remains, rather than simply taking an authoritative line; secondly, the exhibition team chose to depart from orthodox museum display techniques and materials, risking the wrath of the traditionalists; thirdly, the museum decided to share expertise and authority, acknowledging the lack of absolute facts and incorporating multiple perspectives and, finally, the approach was empathic rather than forensic
creating an emotional encounter unlike the ‘objective’ tone which many visitors are used to. Lindow Man: A Bog Body Mystery looked and felt quite unlike the previous two presentations of the archaeology, which were more conventional and authoritative displays. This exhibition was poly-vocal and involved an open, constructivist type of experience (Hein 2000) offering evidence, contextual information and hypotheses, as well as inviting visitors to make sense of it in their own way and in accordance with their individual experience, knowledge and beliefs. It used as its core structure interviews with seven people who have personal experience of Lindow Man, including the peat diggers who discovered the body, a local woman who was a child when Lindow Man was found and took part in the ‘repatriation’ campaign, a forensic scientist who examined the body, a Druid priest, a landscape archaeologist and two curators, one from the Manchester Museum and the other from the British Museum. Each person was invited to contribute to a ‘scrapbook’ of personal effects, ephemera, artefacts and specimens that contextualised and illustrated their connection with Lindow Man. Additional information was made available in ring binders labelled ‘Find out More’ and placed alongside relevant books on shelving (Figure 1). At the entrance (and the exit) there was a ‘welcome board’4 holding an introductory panel and a short gallery guide that visitors could take with them into the exhibition. Just inside the gallery, visitors encountered a graphic panel introducing the seven interviewees and their stories. Two temporary Visitor Service 57

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Figure 4.1 Discovering the body: section showing construction with object cases, applied interview quotes and ‘Find out More’ shelf with seating.

Assistants were hired specifically to engage with visitors in the exhibition. With such a departure from conventional archaeological presentation, the marketing campaign had to ‘sell’ the different approach so that people knew what to expect. The Museum decided to use a multi-pronged strategy, extracting four themes from the exhibition content: historical/archaeological, scientific, spiritual and nostalgic. These themes would appeal in different ways to different visitors, so four posters were produced, each with an image illustrating that aspect of the exhibition. The materials (mainly medium density fibreboard and chipboard) and colours selected for the exhibition construction were chosen to evoke the landscape of Lindow Moss, where the body was found, and to reflect the impermanent, unfinished and incomplete nature of the story. The construction was deliberately left rough and unfinished, recalling the shuttering used to line archaeological trenches. The horizontal, modular units were also reminiscent of library stacks.5 The key goal of the exhibition was to contextualise Lindow Man in a way that encouraged respectful reflection, inviting visitors to question the interpretation of archaeological evidence and the practice of displaying human remains in museums. The ‘post-modern’ concept sought to expose the process of development and construction, and to present various interpretations of what little evidence exists. A Bog Body Mystery also attempted to deconstruct the idea of ‘exhibition’, laying bare some of the machinations behind the ‘glossy museum show’. For example, British Museum objects were displayed conventionally in a case as a single object
a traditional mini-museum within the exhibition
that contrasted with the interviewees’ ‘scrapbooks’. The interpretation strategy was guided by a public consultation exercise with the terms of engagement clearly explained on the day
that no promise could be made to include all the consultees’ suggestions. The workshop was attended by a wide range of participants, including professionals and enthusiasts in archaeology, anthropology and local history, and people with pagan beliefs. Following a presentation by the Museum’s Curator of Archaeology, the attendees were divided 58

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into small groups and asked to share and discuss their priorities and suggestions for an exhibition centred on Lindow Man’s body. The process was surprisingly consensual, as you might expect pagans and forensic anthropologists to be at each others’ throats
but there was very little disagreement. What emerged was a set of principles and suggestions for approach and content that the exhibition team used as the foundation for the development process. The key points were as follows: Lindow Man should be presented as a person rather than as a museum object; he should be given a context that helps people to understand his world and ours; the exhibition should be a reflective, contemplative experience with opportunities to share ideas and feelings; the lack of factual information about him should be acknowledged and different perspectives explored and, if possible, Lindow Man should be situated away from any interpretation to allow visitors to choose whether to view his body or not. It quickly became clear that not all the suggestions could be included
in fact, some of them were contradictory
but the team strove to keep to the spirit of the consultation day, referring back frequently to the report and checking whether the ideas could be incorporated. The Museum reported back to consultees by e-mail, by post and through a second, all-day workshop. The fact that so little is known about Lindow Man
where he came from, his family background, his social status, his trade or profession, even his name
reinforced the exhibition team’s decision to present the evidence, together with a number of hypotheses about his life and death, and to invite visitors to consider (alongside experts such as archaeologists and museum curators) the relative merits of the different interpretations. Ironically, the 2008 approach, leaving the mystery of Lindow Man open, rather than proposing a definitive interpretation, presented him as less of a complete person than he seemed in previous exhibitions, which included imaginative recreations of his world and a facial ‘likeness’ constructed from scans of his skull. For some visitors (and staff), this was a serious omission and an abdication of the Museum’s responsibility to educate the public through expert testimony. For others, it felt more inclusive, validating their own thoughts and theories as part of the shared experience of ‘public history’. Some Manchester staff firmly believe that the exhibition approach was perverse, flying in the face of what we know visitors want. For them, leaving the interpretation open is taking the lazy way out
it is a museum’s job, as ‘expert’, to filter information and present the authorised version.6 Gurian (2006, 12) would disagree, noting: Fairness demands that we present our audiences with the broadest range of conflicting facts and opinions within the exhibition
or alternatively, having taken a single viewpoint, reveal ourselves (the authors) by name, bias, class, education and opinion. To do otherwise suggests that audiences are children unable to think for themselves.

Is provocation just a publicity stunt? Against a background of fundamental disagreement on human remains and public disputes about the value and role of museums, the Manchester Museum’s mission to ‘provoke a debate’7 might seem superfluous
it was likely to happen anyway with this subject matter
but there is a difference between creating the conditions for constructive argument and simply standing by while controversy rages around you. The Museum framed the exhibition within a year-long programme of events and activities, many designed to facilitate debate. Visitors were invited to share their views and opinions on comment cards in 59

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the exhibition and via the Museum’s website. Staff and volunteers were briefed and trained to engage visitors in discussion about the issues arising from the retention and display of human remains, and the interpretation of archaeological evidence. Since Lindow Man was first exhibited at the Manchester Museum, the widely accepted attitudes and procedures regarding the research, display and interpretation of human remains have been hotly contested both by academics and professionals, and in the public arena. The intervening 17 years saw a fierce debate erupting over questions of retention, repatriation and reburial, with diehard forensic archaeologists facing militant ‘source communities’ and other claimants, each side entrenched with no-man’s-land between. The language of the protagonists is often bellicose, expressing a deep conviction in all camps that there will be dire and lasting consequences if the battle is lost. During the same period, following notorious cases such as Alder Hey in Liverpool where children’s remains were retained by the pathology department for research without parents’ consent, public awareness of human remains issues, along with sensitivity and scepticism, had grown (Alberti et al. 2009). The second significant shift in context was within the museum sector. Many institutions had been following a gradual post-modern trajectory, moving away from their traditional authoritative position and acknowledging alternative interpretations and worldviews. In the two earlier exhibitions, Lindow Man was presented as an ‘archaeological treasure’, a ‘find’ and a piece of evidence, and this is how he is still described by traditionalists. In contrast, one of the aims of the 2008 exhibition, suggested through consultation with a broad range of interested parties, was to emphasise his humanity
casting him more as ‘one of us’ rather than a historical artefact. In A Bog Body Mystery, Lindow Man was consciously and consistently described as ‘he’ rather than ‘it’, and the case that contained the body was deliberately not given an ‘object label’. For some people, these measures accorded the man due respect. For others
Emma Restall Orr for example, one of the seven interviewees8
they were no more than window dressing: the very act of displaying the body turned him into a museum specimen. As the exhibition was taking shape, the subject of museums and human remains was developing a high profile in the Museum and beyond. Manchester staff members were playing a leading role in a national debate about the ethical treatment of human remains (Bienkowski 2009), while a panel of staff with consultees from outside the institution developed a human remains policy for the Museum. The policy states that human remains should be displayed only ‘in a culturally appropriate, sensitive and informative manner and always accompanied by explanatory and contextual interpretation’.9 In order to ensure consistency of practice, and in response to feedback from visitors who felt that displaying unwrapped bodies was disrespectful, Manchester’s human remains panel decided to gauge visitor reaction by conducting a test ‘cover up’ of the mummies in the Ancient Egypt galleries. The resulting outrage took the Museum by surprise and was reported by news media across the world.10 The Museum eventually contained the furore by producing a series of panels through the gallery, explaining what was happening, and directing them to an evaluation board inviting visitor feedback through comments cards. At the end of the consultation period, permanent panels were installed near the Museum entrance, alerting visitors to the presence of human remains in the galleries and describing routes avoiding 60

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those displays. During the same period, the Museum of Science & Industry in Manchester hosted Gunther von Hagens’ BODY WORLDS 4: The Original Exhibition of Real Human Bodies. Comparisons between the Manchester Museum’s personal approach and the anatomical engineering of BODY WORLDS added to the ‘human remains debate’ in the city and further afield (Alberti et al. 2009).

Context of the exhibition ‘Experimental’ and provocative exhibition-making practice in museums is viewed by some as self-indulgent navel gazing, a sop to political correctness, of no benefit to visitors and a waste of public money. It puts the museum’s hard-earned authority at risk and devalues curatorial expertise.11 For some time now, museum ethicists have questioned the power balance between museums and their audiences, weighing attributes such as transparency, accountability and social responsibility alongside academic authority and expertise. Yakel frames the debate in terms of power and possession (Yakel 2000, 278): ‘Who has the authority to interpret history to the public
indeed, who ‘‘owns’ history?’’ ’ To Walker Laird and Braden, the answer seems clear: no one and everyone. Braden believes that there could be serious consequences if museums do not deal with the question of ownership (Braden 1998, 489
98)
‘No one has a proprietary claim to history, yet if we do not participate in the process of examination, or worse yet, are forced into non-participation, we all lose.’ Walker Laird reminds us of how much is at stake (Walker Laird 1998, 474
82): ‘. . . public history engages public money, public treasures and public beliefs.’ Many people still trust museums more than other institutions, but audiences have been losing patience with the didactic approach. More than a decade ago, Boyd (1999, 185), wrote ‘Museums are no longer perceived as infallible; they can no longer presume the privilege of issuing unquestionable pronouncements.’ Neil Harris (1995, 1104) said, ‘Our very notion of museum truth is now questioned.’ Hood agreed, but put it more poetically (Hood 1994, 1011
19), ‘. . . the curatorial key is no longer the only one to fit the lock.’ Museums have never been apolitical or ‘objective’, however much they may have tried to maintain the ‘fallacy of authoritative neutrality’ (Janes 2009, 59). Gurian (2006, 69) asserts, ‘It is clear that no museum has ever been ‘‘value neutral’’ ’ and ‘There is no longer a belief that the object will tell its own story or that there are neutral or objective truths’ (Gurian 2006, 77). Collections, by the nature of the way they were acquired and have been interpreted, are provocative in many ways to different people. Today, audience consultation, involvement and engagement are as much a part of museum theory and practice as documentation and conservation. Collections in publicly funded museums belong to everyone, and each of us is an expert with regard to our own experience, opinions and reactions, whatever the origin of that understanding. Authorship ensures transparency and invites critical thinking, just as anonymity conceals and inhibits. As Janes (2009, 80) puts it, ‘The implication in maintaining this anonymity is that there is one perspective or interpretation, and the museum owns it.’ Acknowledging and validating diverse responses and encouraging a dialogue make collections more useful and relevant to a wider range of people. It shifts the balance from the institution to the individual and helps empower disadvantaged citizens. 61

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If museums shy away from controversy or allow funders and stakeholders to prevent them from engaging in contemporary debates, they may lose an opportunity to reinvigorate their purpose. Janes (2009, 17) is convinced that rising to that challenge is the only way forward for museums He maps out in stark terms the downward spiral in store for those institutions that fail to engage, from ‘privileged societal position of trust and respect’ to ‘incremental irrelevance at a time of increasing urgency’ (Janes 2009, 173
4). Janes acknowledges that it will not be easy and uses a term coined by Canadian essayist John Ralston Saul to discuss the uncomfortable consequences of reaching out (Janes 2009, 94). Saul describes the ‘psychic discomfort which inevitably accompanies active engagement in the public sphere’. It may be, however, as Lynch and Alberti suggest, that ‘discensus’ is a more powerful creative force than consensus (Lynch and Alberti 2010, 13
35). I argue that a more inclusive and equitable relationship enriches the museum experience rather than diluting it. The broadening or democratisation of interpretation may appear to be an attack on curatorship, as though pluralism necessarily leads to a decline in standards, but it need not be so. Sharing authority does involve a change of status, but does not have to mean redundancy, as diverse interpretations should enhance rather than replace the curator’s perspective. Gurian, in describing this tendency to frame the debate in terms of ‘either or’, reminds us of ‘the importance of ‘‘and’’ ’ when considering ‘excellence and equity’ (Gurian 2006). When these concepts are embodied in exhibition design and construction, ‘traditional’ museum visitors can feel disoriented, out of place and insecure. The exhibition space no longer feels like home, the structure is unfamiliar, the rules are unclear and their interests appear to be marginalized. If we are aware of this effect, is it ethical to disadvantage one group for the benefit of another, even if the former has had privileged access in the past? Methodology In order to assess how effective the Museum was in balancing the needs of visitors, with its desire to innovate and its mission to provoke, the research project aimed to compare feedback from visitors with the perceptions of staff and volunteers, and to set this in the context of media coverage and correspondence from interested parties outside the institution. As the Lindow Man exhibition was developed in consultation with external contributors, their views would also be considered. Visitor responses were captured using the Personal Meaning Mapping (PMM) method developed by Falk, Mousourri, and Coulson (1998) and contextualised through a brief questionnaire which people were asked to complete after they had finished the PMM exercise. The questionnaire was designed to assess
as far as possible within the parameters of the study
the participants’ prior experience, knowledge and understanding of museums in general and of Lindow Man specifically, as well as their motivation for visiting. Bearing in mind that people might make comparisons between this exhibition and others that they had attended, particularly the previous Lindow Man exhibitions, it would also be useful to find out what expectations they had, if any, about what they were going to see. A question about educational background and a request for the participant’s post-code was added to provide the option to test whether there was a link between socio-economic status and the response to the exhibition approach. The questionnaire also requested 62

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that the visitors rate individual elements of the exhibition on a 5-point Likert scale, according to how useful they felt these elements were in terms of ‘learning and enjoyment’. The PMM method involves a very open-ended ‘mind mapping’ exercise where participants are given a sheet of paper with a stimulus word or phrase in the centre (in this case ‘Lindow Man’), and then invited to share any knowledge, thoughts, ideas or feelings that they may have on the subject. They write their contributions using one colour pen before the visit and then add any new thoughts afterwards using a different colour pen (Figure 2). Analysis of the charts followed the process designed by Falk and Dierking (1998). The written responses were categorised and analysed according to four progressively more complex ‘dimensions’ that aim to identify the depth and breadth of an individual’s understanding. The purpose of the ‘random’ sample of adult visitors was to include a range, from first timers to regulars. This could provide insight into whether there is a difference in expectations between new visitors and those who have some experience of the particular Manchester Museum offer
in a sense, whether the Museum is ‘training’ visitors to expect, and hopefully welcome, a certain kind of interpretive approach. It was important to get an idea of what the subjects of the study anticipated before they entered the exhibition space, so people were approached before they entered the gallery and the experience was followed through with them when they came back out. The aim was also to use this front-end evaluation to explore some of the prevailing ‘myths’ around what visitors want. It is worth noting that there is a discrepancy between the number of PMM charts and questionnaires completed: 98 people filled in the questionnaire, but only 97 of them finished the PMM chart.

Figure 4.2 Personal Meaning Map 43. Two colours show darker and lighter: text outside bubbles is the author’s.

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Results and discussion Questionnaire data In summary, the vast majority of the participants (80%) were visiting with family or friends. Most of them visit museums between one and five times a year (64%) and are highly educated (43% completed their education after the age of 18).12 Considering the strong perception within the Museum that visitors had been shocked by the unorthodox approach, the answers concerning whether the exhibition was what they expected was surprising: 52% said it was what they expected; 48% said it was not. Forty-two per cent reported a special interest in Lindow Man, which is quite high, as most visitors usually report just a general interest in the Museum’s themes and content.13 In order to address the visitor aspect of the research question ‘Who benefits?’, it was important to understand what value these visitors placed on the experience and what motivated them to visit. The visitors were asked to rate different motivating factors on a rising scale of 0
10. Their conscious motivation for the visit was overwhelmingly education and entertainment, which is what one would expect, although the socio-cultural aspect of the experience should not be underestimated. Indeed, it is a key element of the constructivist model of museum learning, along with physical and psychological factors (Falk and Dierking 2000), and its influence was evident in some of the responses to the PMM exercise. People were aware of, and often interested in, the way others interacted with the exhibition. There was also a very positive response to the interventions of the handling station volunteers and certain Visitor Services staff
when the right people are in place, ‘live interpretation’ of whatever form can significantly enhance learning and enjoyment. Judging by the questionnaire responses, the drive for education and entertainment for most visitors was largely satisfied by all aspects of the exhibition. However, there were individual exceptions, including people who strongly objected to the design and construction and, interestingly, the handling station.14 It would clearly be necessary to probe more deeply in order to assess the accuracy of this initial impression.

PMM exercise The survey took place over 10 days during November and December 2008. In an effort to randomise sampling, each third person or fifth person entering the exhibition was approached, depending on how busy the Museum was. In some ways, it would have been easier and perhaps more productive in terms of the PMM methodology to work with a more ‘captive’ audience, such as organised groups or some of the Museum’s community partners who might have been willing to devote more time to the activity. For this study, however, the aim was to gather the experiences of visitors in as natural and unrehearsed a way as possible. Because people were unprepared, rather than being recruited as part of a longer and more formal activity, this project was able to capture only a snapshot of each participant’s meaning-making experience. It would require a more intensive longitudinal study, combining PMM with contact over a longer period (as Falk, Dierking, and Foutz suggest in their family learning research), in order to assess the way that visitors’ understanding of the exhibition experience changes over time 64

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(Falk, Dierking, and Foutz 2007). However, the spontaneous nature of this ‘brief encounter’ research may have the advantage of minimising the tendency that participants have to ‘over-think’ the exercise and attempt to provide what they think the researcher wants. Despite the introduction stressing that the activity was not a test of recall
that there were no right or wrong answers
some participants were definitely striving to remember facts from the exhibition as if playing a memory game. The number of completed samples totalled 97 out of 113 people approached (seven people declined to take part15 and nine either dropped out part way through the process or were found not to have completed the activity). Most of the participants were with other people who often asked if they could take part as well. The only criterion for refusal was if they had already visited the exhibition. After introductions, the project was described to the selected participants and the PMM process was explained. Bearing in mind that the process would eat into people’s scarce leisure time and that I was catching them unawares, the exercise was designed to last just a few minutes before and after the visit. I used my University of Leicester graduate student identity, rather than revealing my position at the Museum, which I felt might inhibit people’s ability to speak or write openly about their experience. It was made clear that they could opt out at any time, though fortunately almost all completed the exercise. All of the participants were happy to take part
in fact, many thanked me at the end for involving them in the research. All in all, I think the technique provided a more open approach to gathering feedback that stimulated a fuller, richer and more personal response than a conventional questionnaire format on its own would have done.

PMM analysis Firstly, in order to judge the general educational and emotional impact of the experience, the quantity of relevant vocabulary was logged. The next step was designed to chart the respondents’ range of understanding and the responses were sorted into different concepts or subject areas. Twenty separate categories emerged, all of which corresponded to the themes or aims of the exhibition: discovery, aesthetics of the body, preservation, forensics, speculation as to how Lindow Man died, different perspectives, other bodies, local links, repatriation, peat extraction, wetlands, archaeology, the Iron Age, recent history, pagans, ethics (human remains), design, construction and so on, personal connections, emotional response and curiosity. The third stage was to move more deeply into the language, assessing the profundity of each individual’s grasp of the concepts and subject areas. The PMM process ends with the fourth dimension, which brings together the previous three stages, rating each participant’s response in terms of its sophistication and expertise. A scale similar to that suggested by Alison James16 was employed to determine each participant’s mastery of the subject matter, ranging from ‘novice’ to ‘expert’. In addition to the PMM process, with the visitors’ prime motivation in mind (education and entertainment), the personal meaning maps were analysed using the Inspiring Learning for All Generic Learning Outcomes (GLOs) that were developed by the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council (MLA) in the United Kingdom to measure the learning impact of visitors’ experiences.17 65

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Clearly, there is a high level of subjectivity in this analysis, as it is the researcher who chooses the concept groupings and gauges the participants’ command of a subject. Had it been practical, it would have been prudent, as James did, to have different researchers cross check the results. However, the fact that three people in that case found a ‘high level of agreement’ suggests that this linguistic system can provide a robust measure of learning if thoughtfully applied. PMM dimension 1: quantity of relevant vocabulary The numerical analysis was entered into a Microsoft Excel database to enable comparative graphs to be created. The total number of words generated by the 97 PMM charts tripled after the visit (from 2167 before to 6614 after), which suggests that people were stimulated by the exhibition and prompted to share their new ideas and impressions through the research exercise. The most striking finding was that more than a third of these 6614 words related to one category: ‘design, construction and atmosphere of the exhibition’, which reveals what a strong impression the presentation method and materials had on visitors. The total number of individual comments classified under the 20 concept or subject categories increased from 299 before to 436 after visiting, but the change was even greater in the average length of discrete thoughts and ideas expressed. This more than doubled, from 7.3 words before the visit to 15.2 after. This increase in the length of responses correlated with comment card reports,18 which concluded that the exhibition triggered longer and more considered feedback than usual. Most participants referred to more than one category on their personal meaning maps, but the most ‘popular’ categories were not always predictable. Comparing the number of references per category before and after the visit is quite revealing: some of the increases are related to themes that visitors might not be expected to comment on before experiencing the exhibition, such as ‘different perspectives’ and ‘pagans’, while others are less obvious. Some themes highlighted in the exhibition, such as ‘forensics’ and the ‘repatriation campaign’, seem to have struck a chord, whereas ‘wetlands’ and ‘archaeology’ left people cold. There were fewer post-visit comments about other bodies or discoveries of this kind compared with pre-visit, but this is to be expected as the only references to other bodies were in the ‘Find out More’ folders. What is surprising is that the discovery of Lindow Man’s body and its preservation in the peat also provoked a lower response after the visit. Perhaps this was because people’s curiosity had been satisfied or maybe these aspects of the exhibition were not stimulating enough. One thing that is clear from the density of language on the personal meaning maps is that the exhibition approach prompted visitors to speculate about Lindow Man’s life and death; to consider different perspectives; to engage emotionally with the themes and to explore the ethics of displaying human remains. This may explain why so few of the comments relate to objects
most are to do with issues, ideas and concepts. PMM dimension 2: range of understanding As noted above, the categories that include the longest and most considered responses were those most closely identified with the exhibition’s unorthodox qualities: ‘different perspectives’, ‘ethics of displaying the dead’ and ‘design, 66

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construction and atmosphere’. Of these, ‘design, construction and atmosphere’ prompted by far the strongest response: 73% of the visitors included comments about it on their personal meaning maps. In addition, the comments in this category were much longer on average (33.4 words as opposed to 20.9 for its nearest rival: ‘ethics of displaying the dead’). When the personal meaning maps were analysed for the range of different subjects or concepts, there was a clear difference between pre-visit and post-visit responses. The personal meaning maps contained references that related to between 0 and 10 different categories.19 The results showed a definite shift towards a broader range of understanding following the exhibition experience. Over a quarter of the participants more than doubled the range of categories covered by their personal meaning maps, and a number increased the range of categories by much more than that. This indicates that the exhibition experience had prompted visitors to think about concepts or issues that did not occur to them before entering the gallery. However, that general picture does not tell the whole story. A few of the personal meaning map results showed the opposite. Three of the respondents (24, 33 and 41) had a significantly reduced range of categories after the visit. All of them were very knowledgeable about the subject and experienced museum-goers. Two of them critiqued the exhibition with an ‘expert’ eye, one from a negative standpoint and the other positive about the approach. The third was a local person with very strong opinions about Lindow Man and the environment where he was found. In order to ascertain why the post-visit responses of these three individuals were significantly less broad-ranging than before, it is worth looking at each personal meaning map in more detail and, following the Falk and Dierking model, consider the ‘personal, socio-cultural and physical’ aspects of their experience. Respondent 24’s personal meaning map referred to eight different categories before the visit, but only one (Design, construction and atmosphere) afterwards (Figure 3). She visited with her spouse (respondent 23). She identified herself on the

Figure 4.3 Personal Meaning Map 24.

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questionnaire as a ‘historian’ and ‘PG Library Dip.’ Both respondent 24 and her spouse were experienced visitors with very traditional expectations that appeared to be thwarted by the unorthodox approach of the exhibition. My impression on talking to respondent 24 after she had completed the exercise was that her experience of the exhibition had been so dominated by her extreme disappointment that this emotional reaction had unfortunately blocked any chance of learning or enjoyment. This ‘cognitive dissonance’, as N. James (2008, 770
7) calls it, may explain why respondent 24’s post-visit response took the form of an extended diatribe focused on the design and construction of the exhibition. With respondent 33 the difference was not quite so marked, as she referred to five categories before the visit and two afterwards. She revealed, through the personal meaning map and questionnaire, a very strong personal link to Lindow Man. Before the visit, respondent 33 used Lindow Man’s nickname (Pete Marsh), identified herself as a repatriation supporter and described Lindow Moss as ‘nice place’. She speculated about Lindow Man’s death being a sacrifice, calling him ‘Poor fella’ and wishing he could be ‘laid to rest once and for all’. Respondent 33 chose to add nothing to the personal meaning map after the visit, although she did reiterate her personal connection on the questionnaire, declaring ‘he be . . . semi-local to moi!’. She seemed generally satisfied with the exhibition but did not share any new thoughts or insights. Perhaps the experience of communing with her ‘neighbour’ was too private to divulge on the personal meaning map. The range of categories on respondent 41’s personal meaning map went down from 10 before the visit to 6 after the visit. Respondent 41 identified himself as having a ‘forensic archaeology background’ and felt disappointed that he could not recall many ‘facts’ before the visit. Several of his pre-visit thoughts were questions about Lindow Man’s death, the ethics of displaying him, the local connection, links to the Museum collections and about how other visitors might react to the body. These thoughts seemed to come together post-visit, addressing many of the questions and, although focused on fewer categories, the comments were profoundly reflective. In this case, the narrower range of subjects or concepts did not mean that respondent 41 was repelled like respondent 24. It was quite the reverse, as the language used suggests that the exhibition provoked some profound emotional and philosophical thought processes. And unlike respondent 33, respondent 41 felt able to share those thoughts on the personal meaning map. PMM dimension 3: grasp of concepts and subject areas Linguistic analysis of the personal meaning maps revealed the depth of visitors’ engagement with the exhibition and subject matter. The questionnaire results identified education and entertainment as the prime motivators for the visitors (therefore an effective measure of the value of the experience to them), so the GLOs were employed to identify evidence of learning impact. Applying the GLOs revealed that 91 out of 97 participants’ personal meaning maps showed clear evidence of learning and many of these demonstrated learning in more than one category (see Figure 4). A total of 225 comments could be directly linked to four out of the five GLOs. Of the six personal meaning maps where evidence of learning was questionable, all of the relevant comments related to ‘attitudes and values’. Only two, respondent 22 and 68

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83%

36%

0%

52%

Knowledge & understanding

Enjoyment, inspiration & creativity

Skills

Activity, behaviour & progression

Attitudes & values

Figure 4.4 Value to visitors
Generic Learning Outcomes.

respondent 32, both ‘experts’ (forensic anthropology and archaeology student, respectively), appeared to find nothing of value in the exhibition. They were looking for ‘the facts’ about Lindow Man’s period in history and were clearly not engaged by the multi-vocal, open-ended approach. They were unwilling or unable to use the unconventional facilities to uncover information that might have been of interest. Three others (respondents 23, 24 and 50
all very knowledgeable and articulate) were so incensed by the exhibition approach that the potential for learning appeared to be severely restricted. While conducting the GLO analysis, a question mark was placed against ‘attitudes and values’ for these three people because there may be a benefit in the provocative approach, serving to reinforce their strongly-held beliefs about the subject and museums in general
especially as it provided opportunities to ‘sound off’. The two most disturbing personal meaning maps (respondent 64 and respondent 73) revealed a very emotional encounter with Lindow Man that seemed to traumatise rather than enlighten the participants. On the evidence of their painful testimony (‘disgusting, ugly, freaky, weird’ and ‘awful death, terrible’, (Figure 5)), it is difficult to imagine what benefit they might have gained from the experience. From Figure 4, it is immediately evident that the ‘skills’ GLO does not appear in the analysis and this requires explanation. The exhibition did set out to encourage skills development in assessing and interpreting evidence, so the learning that was recorded as ‘knowledge and understanding’, or ‘attitudes and values’, could also have been placed under an ‘interpretive skills’ category. However, based on the available evidence, it is not possible to determine whether the participants already had those skills or had developed them through the exhibition. 69

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Figure 4.5 Personal Meaning Map 73.

The balance between ‘knowledge and understanding’ and ‘attitudes and values’ is interesting. Through an exhibition that, to some, seemed light on facts and dominated by opinion, the vast majority of participants reported picking up new knowledge and understanding. At the same time, more than half felt prompted to question and explore their own and others’ perspectives on issues such as the retention and display of human remains in museums. For most of the participants, it seems the exhibition approach enabled the traditional factual transmission of information whilst also facilitating a more philosophical kind of learning experience. It is also significant that more than half of the participants felt creatively engaged, inspired or encouraged to want to find out more about Lindow Man and the issues that surround his story. Many of these people felt moved to ask themselves quite profound questions while in the exhibition, and to explore them further through the PMM exercise. Some intended to carry out their own research and, in one case, to visit Lindow Moss where Lindow Man was found, and ‘drink in the history of it all’. PMM dimension 4: mastery of subject matter The scale used to determine the participants’ level of understanding or engagement ranged from ‘novice’ to ‘expert’. To begin with, four categories were used
(N) novice, (Q) quite knowledgeable, (V) very knowledgeable and (E) expert
but it soon became clear that intermediate categories would be needed to record the nuances that were appearing in the personal meaning maps. Participants’ language identified their level of understanding or engagement, and based on this evidence there appeared to be a progression from one phase of the exercise to the other. However, without further information from the participants, it was not possible to judge whether the experience had facilitated a shift along the spectrum or whether the person simply felt more able or willing to express his or her expertise after visiting the exhibition. 70

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The latter seems much more plausible, as brief engagement with a museum exhibition can increase knowledge and understanding but is unlikely to transform ‘novice’ to ‘expert’. Some of those who were clearly ‘expert’ wrote very little before entering the exhibition and much more afterwards. The research findings demonstrate that the exhibition, depending on an individual’s perspective, was seen as groundbreaking, experimental and challenging, or shoddy, lazy and unprofessional. The opinions that have been articulated in various ways about Lindow Man suggest that one person’s ‘innovative’ is another’s ‘rubbish’ and, by implication one person’s ‘traditional and reassuring’ is another’s ‘boring and irrelevant’. Furthermore, because every exhibition visit is a highly personal experience, getting it right for a particular individual may be more a matter of luck rather than judgement.

Conclusions The Manchester Museum’s unconventional approach to the third Lindow Man exhibition prompted strong reactions from visitors, staff, the museum profession and the media at large. A Bog Body Mystery gave rise to a huge increase in comment card feedback; divided opinion sharply within the Museum; prompted three measured critiques in academic and professional journals (Rees Leahy 2008; Burch 2008; James 2008), and triggered a blast of invective from media blog Manchester Confidential.20 Loathed by some, the exhibition was feted by others: it was listed by The Times as a top 5 attraction;21 was named in December 2008 by the Museums Journal as one of two outstanding exhibitions of the year outside London, and won the temporary exhibition category of the national Design Week awards 2009. Although, as Oscar Wilde remarked through the character of Dorian Gray, it may be better to be talked about than not,22 the museum’s purpose in staging Lindow Man in the way it did was not to court publicity. The aim, through a creative and multi-disciplinary approach, was to engage a wider range of people with Lindow Man’s story, and to encourage a debate about the appropriateness of the display and interpretation of human remains. In the context of this research project, the question is whether, on balance, this ‘experiment’ was of value to visitors or whether it benefited the museum at the expense of the learning and enjoyment of its audience. Was the approach self-indulgent? The museology behind the inclusion of exhibition features such as the ‘mini museum’ case passed most visitors by, so it could be argued that it was, and that the Museum was taking advantage of its benevolent university host to play academic games with visitors’ expectations. However, that argument would ignore the serious audience development work that has underpinned the Museum’s philosophy and its commitment to greater accessibility and inclusivity. Feedback, both positive and negative, is now an essential part of the relationship between any public organisation and its users. However, feedback is not always what it seems. Harris (1102
10), recalling people’s responses to publicly-funded contemporary art in the 1930s and 1940s in the USA, notes, ‘These angry reactions, remember, were not simply about art, they were about attitudes toward social reality, toward national character, official values, progress, and standards of life.’ Some visitors’ vehement criticism of what they called the ‘poor’ and ‘lazy’ design and 71

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structure of the Lindow Man exhibition may mask a broader plea to preserve the traditional place of the museum in their lives. Museums, like the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) and other publicly funded organisations, have to come to terms with the result of inviting users to ‘interact’. Following the BBC Radio 2 ‘Ross and Brand affair’ in 2008 (when presenter Jonathan Ross and comedian Russell Brand scandalised ‘Middle Britain’ by phoning and insulting the granddaughter of actor Andrew Sachs live on air), Emily Bell in The Guardian described a radical shift in the relationship with audiences. Thousands of people had contacted the BBC to demand punishment for the perpetrators, despite the fact that many of them had not heard the offending programme. The story itself prompted people to ‘press the red button’. Bell wrote: Interactivism is changing the terms of engagement for media organisations, politicians, companies and individuals . . . Complaint becomes a participation sport in a digital world, where totals are electronically tallied and regularly updated. Most importantly, by participating, the public expects to influence the outcome of events.23

This was certainly the case with A Bog Body Mystery
there were even calls for the people responsible to be sacked. Did the exhibition ‘bewilder and alienate’ people? There is evidence that the exhibition upset and angered some visitors (and staff), particularly those who are wedded to the tradition of museum as authority and expert. It did not seem to cross the minds of people incensed by what they saw as the ‘tackiness’ of the construction
that the choice of constituents and construction methods was intentional. The rough, everyday materials and finishes were particularly problematic for people who equate slick and polished with quality and professionalism. They saw no rationale behind it; for them it was merely a result of incompetence and idleness. There were many others, however, who appreciated the pared down presentation and dilution of the commanding museum voice. With hindsight, I think the Museum could have made the thinking behind its approach more overt, describing the complex challenge that faces archaeology when there is so little contextual evidence and explaining more clearly why there are so few ‘hard facts’. In addition, the lack of certainty or ‘closure’ about the death of a fellow human being may have been too emotionally or intellectually disturbing for some visitors. The Museum’s decision to present impartially several theories as to how Lindow Man died, reflecting the ongoing debate in academic and archaeological circles, was viewed as an abdication of responsibility by some people. This was the ‘politics of expertise’ in action (Janes, 159). Towards the end of a seminar that I led for the University of Manchester’s Art Gallery & Museum Studies Masters course, one of the students vented her frustration with the approach by saying ‘Somebody must know!’ It seems we have some way to go if we are, as Janes suggests, to ‘cultivate a respect for uncertainty’ in museums (Janes, 13). It is also possible that combining an open-ended, poly-vocal approach with the ‘incomplete’ raw-edged design was just too much and too soon for some people. I wonder whether either technique on its own would have triggered such a violent response from the quarters it did. One of the benefits to the Museum of the ‘provocative’ approach was the opportunity for the staff to practise their skills in facilitating debate through exhibitions and programmes, including the potential to learn from this by reflecting 72

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on their own responses to hostile feedback from some visitors and stakeholders. It is clear from the research that while staff may have understood and accepted the rationale behind the mission to provoke and the potential benefits for audiences and the institution, there are significant reservations about how prepared the Museum was for the consequences of challenging convention. Unless there are mechanisms clearly in place to facilitate a dialogue between the museum, its staff and visitors who find their ideas and values challenged (including policies and systems to support staff), criticism can leave people personally and professionally exposed. The ability to anticipate, absorb and learn from feedback, good and bad, will be a key skill for museums and their staff in the years to come. The team that created A Bog Body Mystery took the opportunity to flirt with conventions and explore creative ways of interpreting the themes and issues triggered by the discovery, study and display of Lindow Man. This definitely did not work for everyone, but it seems clear from the research that almost all the participating visitors learned something, were moved by the experience and felt able to contribute to the debate surrounding the ‘bog body mystery’. In his review of the Lindow Man exhibition, James (2008) both posed and answered the question, ‘Other than students, should a museum challenge its visitors?’ He responded, ‘Public life in Britain badly needs the imaginative quality of critique offered by Lindow Man.’ He concluded his review by throwing down his own challenge to the sector: ‘Despite decades of sociological research we still know little about how learning can grow from leisure. It is vital, for any museum, that challenges such as Lindow Man’s should be understood.’ Acknowledgements I thank The Manchester Museum, University of Manchester, for supporting this research and for granting permission to publish the results.

Notes 1. www.alchemy.manchester.museum/ (accessed 19 January 2011). 2. www.museum.manchester.ac.uk/community/collectiveconversations/ 3. www.museum.manchester.ac.uk/whatson/exhibitions/pastexhibitions/revealinghistories mythsaboutrace/ 4. This was re-designed following the post-opening evaluation meeting to assist with visitor orientation and understanding. 5. Some visitors instinctively seemed to recognise this and happily rooted through the books and folders. 6. Staff were invited through questionnaires to share their views on the exhibition. One senior person wrote: ‘Public consultation is good, debate is good, but in the end the museum has a role and a duty to present the facts as researched and integrated by specialists. This is a university museum, with an academic research, study & teaching role.’ 7. The Manchester Museum Strategic Plan 2007
2011. 8. Private correspondence, April 2008. 9. www.museum.manchester.ac.uk/aboutus/reportspolicies/fileuploadmax10mb,120796,en.pdf 10. For the Manchester Museum’s official statement: www.museum.manchester.ac.uk/ aboutus/pressreleases/pressreleasesarchive/fileuploadmax10mb,136438,en.doc 11. A letter from a visitor reads: ‘Was this the idea of a work experience kid? Or is there a professional (being paid a lot more money than I earn) coming up with inane ideas like this? It’s just awful. Shameful. . . . When I was there everyone was walking around just

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12. 13. 14. 15.

16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

looking at each other saying ‘this is absolute shit’. And it is; it’s just absolute shit.’ In addition, a member of staff wrote on a questionnaire for this study: ‘The museum needs to learn from the overwhelmingly negative comments that the public made. It cannot afford to put on poorly thought out exhibits and disguise them as ‘‘experimental’’ ’. Seventeen per cent left education at age 16 or under, which might suggest a broadening of the Museum’s visitor base, and 32% were still in full-time education, perhaps reflecting the Museum’s university status. Morris Hargreaves McIntyre (April 2008) Knowing your Visitors: Visitor Segments at North West Hub Venues, www.mla.gov.uk/what/programmes/renaissance/regions/north_ west/news//media/North_West/Files/2008/Newsletter_Oct_08.ashx Feedback suggests that certain people excluded themselves from this feature because they felt it was for children. To some degree the sample is self-selecting and therefore may not be representative of all visitors’ experiences. In this kind of research work, with people being approached and asked for their opinions by someone who looks ‘official’, those visitors who find such interactions intimidating will often opt out. Alison James, Visitors’ meaning maps at the Pitt Rivers Museum, www.alison-james.co.uk www.inspiringlearningforall.gov.uk Part of the Museum’s standard evaluation process. Zero was scored when the individual either reported that he or she knew nothing before the visit or had nothing to add afterwards. www.manchesterconfidential.com/index.asp?SessionxIpqiNwImNwIjIDY6IHqjNwB6IA November 22
28, 2008, timesonline.co.uk/theknowledge Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray: ‘There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.’ The Guardian, Saturday November 1, 2008.

References Alberti, S.J.M.M., P. Bienkowski, M. Chapman, and R. Drew. 2009. Should we display the dead? Museum and Society 7: 3. http://www.le.ac.uk/ms/museumsociety.html Bienkowski, P. 2009. Museum, authority, knowledge and conflict, Museum Identity 3. http:// www.museum-id.com/magazine-detail.asp?newsID71 Boyd, W.L. 1999. Museums as centers of controversy. Daedalus 128: 3. Braden, D.R. 1998. Whose history is it? Planning Henry Ford Museum’s ‘‘Clockwork’’ Exhibit. Technology and Culture 39, no. 3: 489
98. Burch, S. 2008. Lindow Man: A bog body mystery, Manchester Museum. Museums Journal 7: 50
1. Falk, J.H., and L.D. Dierking. 1995. Public institutions for personal learning: Establishing a research agenda. Washington, DC: American Association of Museums. Falk, J.H., and L.D. Dierking. 2000. Learning from museums: Visitor experiences and the making of meaning. Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press. Falk, J.H. L.D. Dierking, and S. Foutz. eds. 2007. In principle, In practice: Museums as learning institutions, 21
2. Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press. Falk, J.H. T. Mousourri, and D. Coulson. 1998. The effect of visitors’ agendas on museum learning. Curator, 41, no. 2: 107
20. Gurian, E.H. 2006. Civilizing the museum. London: Routledge.

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NEW DIRECTIONS IN MUSEUM ETHICS Harris, N. 1995. Museums and controversy: Some introductory reflections. The Journal of American History 82, no. 3: 1102
10. Hein, G.E. 2000. Learning in the museum. London: Routledge. Hood, Adrienne D. 1994. The practice of [American] history: A Canadian curator’s perspective. The Journal of American History 81, no. 3, The Practice of American History: A Special Issue, 1011
19. James, N. 2008. Repatriation, display and interpretation. Antiquity 82: 770
7. Janes, R.R. 2009. Museums in a troubled world. London: Routledge. Lynch, B.T., and S.J.M.M. Alberti. 2010. Legacies of prejudice: Racism, co-production and radical trust in the museum. Museum Management and Curatorship 25, no. 1: 13
35. Rees Leahy, H. 2008. Under the skin. Museum Practice 43: 36
40. Walker Laird, P. 1998. The public’s historians. Technology and Culture 39, no. 3: 474
82. Yakel, E. 2000. Museums, management, media, and memory: Lessons from the Enola Gay exhibition. Libraries & Culture 35, no. 2: 278
301.

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Chapter 5

Universalism and the new museology: impacts on the ethics of authority and ownership Joshua M. Gorman National Anthropological Archives, National Museum of Natural History, 4210 Silver Hill Road, Suitland, MD 20746, USA

The emergence of the new museum studies in the late twentieth century forged a rearticulation of museum ethics with respect to the prerogative of diverse stakeholders to claim authority and ownership of museum objects. Stemming in part from indigenous claims to collections, the incipient representational critique accepted (if critically) the ethical foundations of repatriation and shared authority. The recent Declaration of the Importance and Value of the Universal Museum, augmented by philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah’s discussions of cosmopolitanism, substantively contradicts this ethic by creating a divide between the universal and the local in the ownership of cultural property and the definition of knowledge. These ambiguities engender conflicting reactions in an author sympathetic to indigenous repatriation claims, but invested in museums as didactic and preservative sites. True to the claims of the universal museum, local claims to material culture do problematize the idea of the museum, but the ethical commitments to the representation of non-Western communities inherent to the new museum studies require it. This paper examines the intellectual foundations of this contradiction and the resulting impact upon the ethical collection and display of museum objects.

Introduction At the March 2006 meeting of the Network for Mississippian Heritage, a meeting of regional tribal representatives at the University of Memphis, a discussion emerged surrounding the availability of Native American material culture, possibly grave goods, for digital and mechanical reproduction by the Chucalissa Museum and its university affiliates. A technical partner of the museum exploring possibilities for object scanning and reproduction, and unfamiliar with the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990 (NAGPRA), much less its language and courtesies, persisted in asking how, if archaeological objects were returned to tribal authorities, could he learn about prehistoric communities and how might he teach his daughter about the people who made those items. The responses, particularly that of the tribal representative of the highest political stature, eventually became, ‘I don’t care if you know anything about me and my people. There are some things that can’t be known’.1

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In this one final, frustrated statement, this representative of a single tribal community of eminent importance to the museum expressed outright opposition to some of the fundamental assumptions I make about objects in my museum and the ways in which they can inform us about their makers: that we ought to collect objects in order to study them, we should provide access to these objects, we can increase our knowledge of them through contextualization with contingent communities but, most importantly, we do this because we can know them. The assertion by this tribal authority reveals the crux of the contest between the local and the universal expressed by the Declaration of the Importance and Value of the Universal Museum and other recent texts. While these documents are traditionally viewed as reactive to repatriation, an important and often overlooked matter for consideration is the construction of what constitutes knowledge and who has the authority to name it as such, control it and disseminate it. The authors of the declaration and like-minded apologists are in general opposition to those scholars of the new museum studies who, in their description of museums as sites that create and define western systems of knowledge, shaped a contemporary museum ethic for sharing authority and challenging traditional forms of collecting and ownership. Tomislav Sola in Gary Edson’s 1997 Museum Ethics noted, ‘The entire museological concept begins with two questions: ‘‘What?’’ and ‘‘For whom?’’’ (1997, 170). In this sense, the epistemological questions such as the one posed above are ethical considerations worthy of our concern. This paper examines some of the ways in which the new museum studies raise and answer these ethical questions in the production of a contemporary ethic for museum practice. It explores how the Declaration of the Importance and Value of the Universal Museum and other texts advocating universal culture and encyclopaedic museums contradict this ethic. The discussion then turns toward a case study examining this contradiction within the context of a local museum facing repatriation. This paper finally proposes some limited paths toward resolving these conflicts by honestly addressing the political, epistemological and practical aspects of repatriation faced by local, regional and national museums. Interventions of the new museology The ideas of the new museology, specifically those that engage and embrace community representation, transparency, inclusiveness and relevance, are built upon an idea that universal constructs from global context are rarely appropriate entries into the daily lives of people who visit, use and are represented within museums.2 The emergence of the new museology has attempted to establish that sharing of the museum’s authority is a worthwhile endeavor. The core of this project lies in uncovering the histories and contexts of museums as a means for understanding the manner in which cultures have been displayed, and meaning made, from their objects. Nineteenth- and twentieth-century ethnographic museums displayed the diversity of the globe as a way to create a normative view that described and defined primitive objects, habits and peoples
so as to define modernity. This definition of the other was inversed as native people were often described as the opposite of modern. Museums were generally understood as public spaces in which truth was described, and people visited museums to see material objects and to learn from scholars and curators who described the role of these objects in the world. 77

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Museum studies in the late twentieth century evolved from its earlier focus on the functions of the museum to a ‘representational critique’ that specifically questioned the role of the museum in choosing objects, shaping discourse and creating and legitimizing truth. Specifically, the new museum studies led to avenues of research that recognized the museum’s support of ‘regimes of power’ and the status quo (Macdonald 2006, 3). Museum exhibition programs began to reflect and understand the institution’s bias within exhibitionary practice. Museum scholars sought to identify the parties and voices that were represented in museums
and those that were excluded. This analysis of the presence and diversity of represented communities in museum exhibitions and practices led to increased scrutiny of the role of museums in the creation and sanctioning of identity and knowledge. Among the scholars who emerged as part of these new museum studies is Tony Bennett, who, in ‘The Exhibitionary Complex’, examined the role of late-nineteenthcentury museums and exhibitions in the creation of a national public consciousness (1988, 76). Bennett described the exhibitionary complex as a mechanism for creating citizens by demonstrating the role of the visiting public in the creation of power. Bennett identified anthropology and the displayed manifestations of anthropological research as the central ideological component of late-nineteenth-century imperialism. Bennett’s concept of the exhibitionary complex was particular to western European national collections but has become the foundation of a more general framework that examines the museum as part of a broader assemblage of heritage institutions that create ideas of nation and citizenship through public exhibition and the selective curation of objects (Kratz and Karp 2006, 23). Museum educator Eilean Hooper-Greenhill approached the construction of knowledge in her Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge, which makes an argument for museums as key sites for ordering the epistemological systems of the enlightenment and modernity. She argues that the organizational methods of museums shifted from a Renaissance model of a hoard to one that required hierarchy and contextual dimension. These are the same ordering models that are inherent in establishing colonial contacts and subsequent ideas of race, nation and gender (1992, 5). Hooper-Greenhill collocated the ordering impulses of the modern era in museums that publicly exhibited the legacies of the nation in the world. Besides shaping and defining what constitutes knowledge, museums became recognized as spaces that defined difference and made it visible. Consistent with gender, sexuality and postcolonial studies, museums became understood as sites that created difference from a controlling point of view in accordance with the contemporary definition of citizenship prevailing at different historical moments (Bennet 2006, 278).3 This historicization of museums and collections has diverged into several strands of the new museum studies. Stephen Weil’s famous note that museums shifted from being about something to being for somebody reflects the general postmodern incredulity with the museum as metanarrative and the resulting emphasis on sharing authority and shifting accountability (2002, 141
50). These studies introduced the idea that the Western concept of a museum, specifically the idea represented by the great national museums, was a central component of enlightenment and colonial epistemes (paradigms of knowledge). These museums are the spaces that created and maintained the idea that objects might be sources of knowledge and were capable of structuring ideas of community, culture and race. These led directly to standards of ethical introspection to understand how the museum created inequalities and might 78

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correct them (Galla 1997, 147). Within this ethical construction of the new museum studies, non-Western epistemologies
the core of some repatriation arguments
must be acknowledged and considered. Arguments for a new cosmopolitanism In 2003, the Bizot Group, consisting of a select number of museum directors and antiquities dealers, contributed to the Declaration of the Importance and Value of Universal Museums in which they justified their existence as encyclopaedic museums.4 They declared that their museums seek to represent the wholeness of humanity throughout history, with collections that exhibit and demonstrate the entirety of human creativity and effort. Their premise is that value in objects, acquired from peoples across the globe, lies in their reference to one another. These institutions, all located in large Western financial centers and capital cities, suggested their centrality facilitates access to the objects by all people. The declaration makes four basic arguments: it requires the contextualization of objects in the creation of knowledge; it recognizes the museum as the space where objects acquire context; it makes claims to the historic legality of collections practices and it problematizes the notion of a national cultural patrimony. The motivation for this declaration is the increasingly persistent and widespread demands by non-Western communities and governments that the signatory museums (and others) return objects representing their cultural patrimony. As the collectors of culture for imperial governments, the ‘universal’ museums frequently obtained their widespread collections from the non-Western world through colonial coercion and outright theft. Many nations and communities requesting the repatriation of objects do so by claiming their inability to materially represent their sovereignty, spirituality, identity and history without the appropriate objects. Many of these requests also seek to remove objects from the public view. Communities requesting repatriation are often asserting the authority to define what objects are and how they should be considered. This issue of cultural patrimony is far from just being about where objects are displayed; it is also about how they are displayed and the ability of those objects to inform. Objects, in the arguments of the declaration, find value in their juxtaposition with other objects. Insofar as the declaration describes the ways in which knowledge about museum objects is created, only by being surrounded by a universal depiction of difference and cross-cultural influence can the individual object be recognized for its brilliance and contribution to human culture. Moreover, it is within this context that the object finds value through the acquisition and application of knowledge. This is the core of the declaration’s justification: that the privileged position of non-Western objects and cultures within contemporary knowledge systems would not have been achieved were it not for the position of acquired objects within the great museum. The declaration’s treatment of historic laws is a pretty standard one
it claims that historic conditions are very different from our own and that the application of contemporary ethics, standards and laws to historic collections is inappropriate. Collections created in these incomparable times have contributed to the national heritage of the nations that amassed items and therefore cannot be conceived as belonging solely to the people or the geography from which the objects originated. Moreover, the declaration problematizes the idea of cultural patrimony as a modern 79

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construction without the longevity and tradition of the collecting museum within the intellectual history of the West. As a document, the declaration is a provocative one, though with little standing in the museum profession. Few colleagues have ever, to my knowledge, expressed support for the tenets espoused by the declaration and incisive critiques have been leveled against it in professional conferences and publications.5 Although they claim to represent concern within the ‘museum community’, the Bizot Group is a limited and exclusive group that features antiquities dealers as prominently as museum directors. Thus, the necessary defense of the universal museum has been famously assumed by Kwame Anthony Appiah in his article ‘Whose culture is it?’ published in the New York Review of Books and in his recent monograph (2006a, 2006b). Appiah’s interest in cosmopolitanism is his primary motivation for the rejection of a local cultural patrimony
he supports the universalism of human achievement and deplores an applied parochialism. Art and artists, in his estimation, are inherently cosmopolitan and cannot be contained by constructed nation states. Art, understood as those objects that might be claimed as cultural patrimony, is an expression of human achievement that offers context to a human condition that joins and separates across human history. This art should be known, and access to it should not be restricted in the name of constructing a national identity. Ironically, this cosmopolitan position is supported by the property laws constructed by Western colonial nations (and subsequently as a feature of the nation state) in which universal museums reside. The impulse and justification to retain contested objects then become the parochial interest of the Western city in which objects are currently held. While Appiah addresses repatriation, it is more relevant to focus on a core construct of his cosmopolitanism as it relates to the new museum studies
the construction of knowledge and the role of the museum in mediating that knowledge. In his arguments for universal culture, Appiah privileges knowledge over alternative priorities. He assumes that objects might contribute to a universal understanding and that pursuit of such knowledge takes prior claim to different value systems. While objects certainly contribute to knowledge and have a place in the description and demonstration of the diversity of global cultures, can this take priority over those who wish to use culturally created objects locally? Moreover, what should be done when local communities insist, as many indigenous communities have, that a collected object cannot contribute to knowledge that has any descriptive power of their lives and cultures? By normalizing the Western enlightenment-based epistemology, Appiah fails to consider that repatriation arguments might arise from fundamental epistemological differences held by non-Western peoples. As many writers have noted, there seems to be very little space between this cosmopolitanism and Western ideas of the world. James Cuno (2008), President and Director of the Art Institute of Chicago (USA), has also entered this debate, relying upon Appiah for philosophical grounding. Cuno locates the crux of repatriation and the universal museum with the invention of nation.6 He locates nations in the modern era as invented units of geographical, linguistic and cultural coherence that ought to be, and are being replaced with, a global consciousness of universalism and cosmopolitanism. In his telling, encyclopaedic museums exist in a rarified plane above national museums insofar as they seek to demonstrate the global context of human achievement through the contraposition of discontinuous objects.7 These museums rise above the 80

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baser, nationalist goals of national museums that seek only to promote their narrow and dangerous self-interests.8 In Cuno’s construction, knowledge remains something created in scientific and artistic centers and distributed to the uninformed periphery. Moreover, he fails to recognize that these museums were themselves founded to fulfill the missions of colonial nation states by demonstrating Western mastery of the natural and cultural worlds. This tradition of retention and control continues today within modern nation states and in the postcolonial world, where this ‘pathological internationalism’ is revealed through the illicit trade of looted objects in which some universal museums are notoriously complicit.9 Further discussions about the validity of the declaration and the ideals of a universal museum have taken place across the globe. The topic is invariably raised at UNESCO’s biannual meetings and specific discussions have taken place in Paris, London and New York, featuring many of the museum directors who wrote and promoted the original document. Much also has been written in the academic and popular press addressing this new universalism in the museum and its impacts on the art and archaeological worlds. Suffice it to say, both proponents of this new universalism and its detractors have found weaknesses in each other’s arguments.10 Among these, perhaps the most interesting has been Geismar’s article noting the separation of antiquities from indigenous cultural property, within the internationalist argument, as a way to create a category of object called cultural property that was less rather than more cultural (e.g., promoting objects that could be easily disconnected from their places of origin, and that were presented as having no special source community with claims prevailing over an other) and more property-like (e.g., promoting these objects as commodities that could be circulated and sold freely). (Geismar 2008, 110)

Geismar counteracts the construction of a more property-like cultural property through case studies that demonstrate the shifting and collaborative nature of ownership of objects in museums. Her examples are instructive and reflect broader trends that are, perhaps, the greatest good to come from the global repatriation movements
the collaborative ownership, definition and use of indigenous material culture in museums. Geismar’s example follows principally from the legal and ethical regulation of repatriation and cultural property in Pacific museums. Looking specifically to the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, she describes mechanisms for ethically preserving and promoting indigenous cultural heritage in museums that collect and exhibit indigenous art of the Pacific. Following Geismar’s example, below is a brief case study that further examines the internationalist perspective by studying its application in a local museum in the USA.

A local case study How, then, are we to reconcile internationalist categories and arguments within the local heritage space? While it is easy and tempting to view the Declaration of the Importance and Value of the Universal Museum as a strictly reactionary document that seeks to support traditional museum regimes so that they might continue to hold ill-gotten collections, is there value in the document’s arguments for the very existence of museums and collections? This simple and impassioned declaration of 81

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the value of museums and their authority to hold objects is comforting for those of us in the museum world, especially in a period when museums of all shapes and sizes are facing repatriation requests and a radical redefinition of the nature of objects and the meaning of their exhibits. In order to examine and question this connection, I look to the case of the Chucalissa Museum at the University of Memphis where I served as a Research Assistant and Interim Director from 2004 to 2008. Chucalissa is a traditional, three-mound Mississippian urban site sitting on the bluff overlooking the Mississippi River, south of Memphis, TN, USA. It was occupied from about 1000
1600 CE with the largest population, about a thousand people, living at the site around 1450. Mostly abandoned sometime after 1550, the site was officially rediscovered in 1938 by archaeologists working for the Civilian Conservation Corps under the direction of T.M.N. Lewis of the University of Tennessee. Briefly explored, the site remained largely unexcavated until an archaeological park was formed by local and state governments in 1955. Concurrent with archaeological excavations, an idealized Mississippian village was constructed replete with dioramic reenactments of shamanic rituals and exposed burials. In 1962, Chucalissa was put in the care of the Memphis State University under whose direction it became an archaeological training laboratory. In 1972, a new museum facility opened and Chucalissa became Memphis’s largest tourist attraction until Elvis Presley’s untimely death in 1977. Visitation at the site further declined with the closure of the exhibited burials in 1985 and the site’s exhibits and reconstructed village fell into disrepair into the early 2000s. Collections at Chucalissa consist of objects excavated at the site as well as the results of surface collections and preliminary archaeological surveys of thousands of archaeological sites around the region. Chucalissa achieved basic NAGPRA compliance through a notice of inventory completion submitted in 1996. Because of the age of the objects and human remains11 reported and the assumption that the gap in the historic record represents a gap in cultural continuity, the objects were reported as ‘culturally unidentifiable’. In 2005, coincident with increased discussions about the declaration within the broader museum community and among professional staff at Chucalissa, further NAGPRA claims were made of the museum. Representatives of the Quapaw tribe of Oklahoma contacted Chucalissa hoping to have the human remains and burial furniture from several sites held in our collection identified as Quapaw and, consistent with NAGPRA regulations and procedures, submitted a new ‘Notice of Inventory Completion’. The staff of the museum worked closely with the tribe’s NAGPRA coordinator in researching and verifying the claims. Through this process it became clear that the Quapaw tribe could possibly have a credible claim to the human remains and associated material culture at the Chucalissa Museum.12 Although the claim was never formally made, the staff of the museum realized the positive identification of Chucalissa’s archaeological objects and remains would make possible the repatriation of the bulk of the collection, including most objects on exhibit (Gorman 2008). Since its inception, the Chucalissa Museum has maintained close connections to local Native American communities. Working first with individual Choctaws in the early 1950s, and building to a majority of Indians on the professional staff in the 2000s, the museum has developed strong programmatic and operational ties with local indigenous communities throughout its existence. This emerging possibility of 82

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widespread repatriation of museum collections was therefore met less with alarm than with interest. While not intending to fight repatriation (though, of course, intending to explore it thoroughly with all due diligence), staff members turned to the declaration and its arguments against repatriation in its discussions. When combined with discussions at the Network for Mississippian Heritage meetings mentioned earlier, it became clear that the declaration and the new universalism lacked broad relevance to Chucalissa and its potential NAGPRA repatriations, because of the document’s position on how objects obtain meaning and its insistence on a universal epistemology defined in the museum space. As summarized earlier, in the view of the declaration and of its supporters, objects of cultural patrimony aspire to meaning and the contribution to knowledge within the museum. Objects, although not devoid of significance before they enter an institution’s collections, obtain greater importance through contextualization with other objects from around the globe. As an archaeological museum, Chucalissa sought to collect objects and learn from them through their contextualization with other local and regional sites. Detailed study was made by professional archaeologists in order to understand Chucalissa within the context of the broader Mississippian complex and to contribute new knowledge from this unique vantage point. Removal of the burial exhibit in 1985 highlighted the disconnect that emerged at Chucalissa and the separation of human remains from appropriate scientific inquiry. As an antecedent to NAGPRA, the move indicates not that human bodies are unable to contribute to human knowledge but that the knowledge so derived can have no descriptive power for the native peoples it seeks to investigate. Passed in 1990, NAGPRA resolved that museums and collections in the USA receiving federal funds were obligated to document all bodies in their collections, along with associated material culture and objects of cultural patrimony. These catalogs were then to be distributed to federally recognized Native American tribal communities, which could request repatriation of culturally identifiable objects and remains. In the case of the Chucalissa Museum and the objections to the recovery of objects and their display discussed in the Introduction, the connections between objects, traditions and people are inseparable. Interestingly, Appiah and the other proponents of this new international position seem to forget the very recent removal of human remains from the nomenclature of cultural property. Human bodies (notably those of other non-Western cultures) were collected as was the material culture that was buried with them. These bodies were (and often still are) displayed with the objects that were removed from their graves. Appiah, for example, seems to accept the repatriation of human remains and funerary objects, but the return of these objects and people were just as fiercely resisted by some museums and anthropologists early in the repatriation movement as the antiquities for which the internationalists now fight. These new internationalists are trying to create a category where none existed before, because the common description of remains and cultural heritage (and they were commonly described for centuries) lessens their cause. There can be very few ethical justifications for the continued collecting and hoarding of bodies, necessitating their current ontological separation by those who deny the legitimacy of repatriation requests for cultural heritage objects. Presently, the new internationalists write and act as though human bodies never figured into 83

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these discussions. They ignore the role of repatriating ancestral remains in the important repatriations of the last 30 years. Besides trying to invent a new category of cultural property, as Geismar documented, they conveniently forget how intrinsic the consideration of human remains is to the process and debates surrounding contemporary repatriation claims. Especially within the Western hemisphere, but also in Australian, Oceanic and in limited African contexts, much of the cultural property sought by local and national communities around the world was originally deposited as burial furniture and, in some instances, continues its association with human remains. Moreover, as Gurian has noted, NAGPRA represented an abrupt restructuring of how museums must think about archaeological objects. Previously considered specimens of sorts
one of a type that could be compared to others and analyzed on the basis of its similarity to known objects
archaeological objects after NAGPRA became unique things, with meanings, contexts and ways of informing completely separate from the scientific norm (2006, 194
9). This is reflected in some of the conversations surrounding the repatriation of human remains and burial furniture at Chucalissa. People associated with these discussions expressed the view that ceramics and human remains were not specimens for comparison with others, but unique products of someone’s life and death. These remains could not inform this life so long as they were so profoundly disrupted from the burial and its context. Appiah, in particular, bemoans this conflation of intellectual properties into cultural property and the consequent restriction on all thoughts, actions and products that might be reproduced from a cultural milieu (2006b, 128
9). He fails to take into account that in so many contexts, objects, stories and songs are connected to the people who created them
their ancestors, progeny, their neighbors and community. These connections are local and the genesis, intention and ownership remain local. In some cases, individuals might feel that the separation from the local context makes impossible the ability of the object to inform. Appiah refuses the possibility that cultural property may be owned collectively and compares indigenous communities seeking common ownership of intellectual cultural patrimony to the Walt Disney Corporation, which would, in his view, similarly restrict access and control. Much like the objects he would have dispersed for people in Western capital cities to enjoy, he mocks the assertions of authority by indigenous communities over sacred songs, dances, stories and imagery. Certainly, even among indigenous communities, authority and truth can be internally contested and one cannot expect museums and scholars to accept objects as sacred, simply because they have been declared so. Nevertheless, source communities must be recognized as legitimate agents in the description of meaning and use for objects dispersed around the globe. This new internationalist position also relies on the assumptions that encyclopaedic museums exist outside the corruptible world of biased authority and, most importantly, that Western constructs of what constitutes knowledge, and who may gain it, are sacrosanct. Even in a local context, dealing with contingent communities that have different relationships to national, educational and colonial regimes with which the museum is affiliated (however thinly) requires an acknowledgment of a diversity of opinion on discourse and an acceptance that the epistemological considerations of the museum may not represent the full meaning or may not speak to the meaning of objects held in the collections. The local museum, like museums everywhere, is a discourse-generating site for creating and sustaining authority. Even 84

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though that authority is local, there are competing discourses, as is certainly the case at Chucalissa. In this case, the application of universalism to the Chucalissa Museum on the basis of the declaration to preserve institutional authority would be out of step with the museum’s traditions of collaboration with indigenous communities and with the shifting emphasis of the museum’s narrative of itself in historical space. Decades of collaboration with Choctaw staff members and community organizations disrupted archaeological discourse at Chucalissa, enabling the removal of human remains from view. By removing human remains from exhibition, a clear disassociation between prehistoric and contemporary native communities emerged, which enabled the explicit critique of the roles of museum and archaeologist in defining and describing indigenous communities. Through the programs and events that focused on contemporary Choctaw heritage, the Choctaw staff assumed the role of defining indigenous heritage at the site. Moreover, descriptions of this heritage increasingly focused on events such as the Choctaw Festival as both the living expression and genesis of this heritage. The museum became one of the spaces through which one identified oneself as Choctaw. What seems to emerge from this example is a realization that the Chucalissa Museum, by virtue of its situation and collections, is obliged to acknowledge and negotiate claims to repatriate cultural heritage objects that the signatory museums of the Declaration of the Importance and Value of the Universal Museum are trying to avoid. By inventing a new category of cultural heritage that is somehow immune from legislation and seeking to apply strict market forces to objects (that they themselves would only be able to afford), the grand universal museums seek to inoculate themselves to repatriation pressures many local spaces are obliged to, and increasingly eager to, engage. While attractive as a rationale for the existence of universal museums, the declaration, instead, creates barriers to the collaborative approaches that are benefiting our understanding of objects as related to crosscultural meaning and identity. Conclusions The new museum studies, beyond its analysis of how museums, were established and how they created knowledge structures also requires the application of these ideas to museum practice. Among these applications is the increased facilitation by museum professionals of the fundamental role of indigenous peoples in coordinating the preservation and interpretation of relevant and contingent arts, culture and heritage (Galla 1997, 149). This is surely one of the courtesies that have emerged in American museums as a result of NAGPRA. Museums that once feared the dispossession of their collections to tribal governments and the ground, now embrace NAGPRA as creating a space for dialog and participation in the creation of the museum’s interpretive discourse. This, I believe, reflects the failure of the Declaration of the Importance and Value of the Universal Museum and Appiah’s cosmopolitanism to interact with the ethical constructions of the new museum studies. These writers consider interaction with non-Western and indigenous communities exclusively as one of repatriation that will fuel nationalism, rather than one of negotiating meaning and defining what constitutes knowledge and truth. Despite this critique of the declaration and of 85

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Appiah’s cosmopolitanism, however, I find myself broadly in sympathy with the intentions of the authors of the declaration, and I understand their objections to repatriation. As a trained historian and museum professional, I am invested in the accumulation of knowledge and the contextual analysis of artistic, cultural and historic objects and texts. I am committed to the ethical preservation and exhibition of these objects. But, at the same time, I am also committed to the ethics of the new museum studies that decentralizes Western epistemologies and provides the basis for repatriation and the sharing of authority in public heritage spaces. Gary Edson notes that: Museum ethics is about more than a code of ethics, it is primarily about selfunderstanding. It is also about responsible stewardship, honesty and ‘doing the right thing’. It is not about formulas or recipes for the ethical issues encountered in the everyday activities of the museum. (1997, xxii)

I believe any solutions to this apparent incommensurability, and ways to move forward, must include transparency and self-study about contemporary motivations and the historic situations of claims. First and foremost, museum professionals and theorists must engage in sensible discussions with respect to repatriation and the scope of claims. No nation or community is requesting the wholesale return of objects. Those objects that are sought are often limited examples that might be equally represented in exhibitions and collections with other objects. The collaborations that have resulted from repatriations around the globe have proven to be some of the most fruitful museum enterprises in memory. The museums and collections that have fallen under indigenous control have provided the impetus for much current innovation in interpretation, display and outreach in museum settings. Repatriations have benefited both museums and indigenous communities in ways that surpass the ‘loss’ of objects from collections. Second, these same parties must discuss and present open and clear articulations of how culture and heritage are rivalrous or nonrivalrous (Brown 2004). This speaks to the reproducibility of culture and the extent to which that reproduction harms that culture. This discussion requires better legal and ethical understandings of collective ownership and norms for considering and negotiating group ownership of cultural objects. Cultural property, both material and intangible, is often created through generations by many people in a community within regional and global contexts. Appiah paints a portrait of a compelling cosmopolitanism and it serves communities and museums well to be able to clearly articulate the role of cultural heritage in human exchange, its price and its consequences. Finally, we need among all parties clear discussions about the relationship between claims to knowledge and claims to sovereignty. Increasingly, indigenous communities worldwide are pursuing cultural heritage projects for the very same reason Western colonial powers did
in order to facilitate and justify the application of national sovereignty. Just as Western nations invented themselves using museums and other mechanisms, so do contemporary indigenous communities through the control over the display and disposition of cultural patrimony. However, museum professionals and theorists must also acknowledge that repatriation requests might be more than simply negotiations for indigenous and non-Western communities for political power, as these requests may represent fundamental distinctions over the 86

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nature of knowledge and how cultural heritage may inform. Requests to repatriate objects are in some cases meaningful epistemological stances. These suggestions do not ensure that disputes about the ownership of objects and knowledge will be resolved, but they could free the way toward resolution by establishing open and honest discussions about the foundations and motivations of arguments of interlocutors on both sides of the debate. Acknowledgements Special thanks to Janet Marstine, Alex Bauer and Chelsea Haines for their helpful and insightful comments and suggestions. I am also indebted to the many trenchant and useful comments provided by the anonymous referees who reviewed this paper for publication.

Notes 1. Author’s note: Network for Mississippian Heritage Conference, Memphis, TN, USA, March 2006. 2. The literature that represents the new museum studies is far too broad to list here. Beyond the citations below, the core of the new museum studies can be found in the footnotes and bibliography of Macdonald (2006) and Marstine (2005). 3. These museum studies principally located museums
the organizational idea and the institution
in the West. Both Hooper-Greenhill (1992) and Bennett (2006) articulate their critical analysis of museums as being uniquely situated in (modern) time and (European) space. While there are many examples of non-European collecting structures, our critical understanding of what a museum is and how it formed are strictly Western in nature (Simpson 1996, Witcomb 2003). Bennett even asks if because of the specific locations of museums as reflecting the ordering impulses of the enlightenment, expressing the evolutionary justifications for colonialism and racism, and acting as discourse within the public sphere (which Habermas located specifically in the early nineteenth century), can non-Western peoples use museums in the same exhibitionary, discourse-creating way as the West? 4. http://www.icom.museum/pdf/E_news2004/p4_2004-1.pdf 5. Certainly, human communities throughout time have been interconnected dynamic entities, and to consider them only in unchanging and unaffected local and national terms resembles the worst sort of synchronism that views communities as unchanging normative objects to be studied. See a further discussion in Bauer, Lindsay and Urice (2007, 53) and Bator (1982, 31
2) 6. In an era when Wikipedia and other collaborative projects severely challenge the authority and meaning of actual encyclopaedias, it seems bizarre that these museums would appeal to an ‘encyclopaedic authority’ as justification for comprehensive collections. 7. There is a strong literature considering the role of museums in the creation of support of nations. An introduction may be found in Boswell and Evans (1999) and Barkan and Bush (2002). 8. For an evenhanded approach addressing the strengths and weakness of both sides of this discussion, see Bauer (2008). 9. Special thanks to one of the anonymous reviewers for making this important point. 10. There has been much objection to the use of the term ‘human remains’ in indigenous studies and cultural heritage literature. This clinical, professional term seems, in the view of many, to obscure and disassociate the fact that the remains are human bodies
the remains of ancestors taken from their graves. While the author uses the term here, he does so because it has become the standard nomenclature within professional and legal discourse, and not to mask an acknowledgment that these remains were people whose progeny live today. 11. The uncertainty here lies not in the gap in the historic record that early archaeologists felt deemed all prehistoric objects culturally unidentifiable, but with genuine uncertainty about

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NEW DIRECTIONS IN MUSEUM ETHICS contemporary Native American connections to the site. The centuries-long occupation of Chucalissa was varied with somewhat different housing, burial and material culture morphologies emerging during the period 1000
1650 CE. The site lies in sight of the Mississippi River, which is often considered a border, but it is clearly not an impassible one. Finally, the early histories of the region demonstrate tremendous change and fluidity stemming from the shattering effect of European contact. Besides the Quapaw tribe, the Chickasaw Nation (with whom I have worked closely), and possibly some others, could have equally credible claims to cultural affiliation with Chucalissa. 12. In Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century, James Clifford (1997) advocates and describes the process through which these discussions operate in so-called contact zones. Clifford’s role among anthropologists in negotiating the intersection of indigenous and western epistemologies cannot be overstated and could be especially helpful as museums pursue a way forward.

References Appiah, K.A. 2006a. Whose culture is it? New York Review of Books 53: 2. Appiah, K.A. 2006b. Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a world of strangers. New York: Norton. Barkan, Elazar, and Ronald Bush, eds., 2002. Claiming the stones, naming the bones: Cultural property and the negotiation of national and ethnic identity. Los Angeles: Getty. Bator, P.M. 1982. The international trade in art. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bauer, Alexander. 2008. New ways of thinking about cultural property: A critical appraisal of the antiquities trade debates. Fordham International Law Journal 31: 690
724. Bauer, Alexander A., Shanel Lindsay, and Stephen Urice. 2007. When theory,practice and policy collide, or why do archaeologists support cultural property claims? In Archaeology and capitalism: From ethics to politics, ed. Y. Hamilakis and P. Duke, 45
58. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press. Bennett, T. 1988. The exhibitionary complex. New Formations 4: 73
102. Bennett, T. 2006. Civic seeing: Museums and the organization of vision. In A companion to museum studies, ed. S. Macdonald, 263
81. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Boswell, D., and J. Evans, eds., 1999. Representing the nation: A reader: Histories, heritage and museums. London: Routledge. Brown, M.F. 2004. Who owns native culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Clifford, J. 1997. Routes: Travel and translation in the late twentieth century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Cuno, J. 2008. Who owns antiquity? Museums and the battle over our ancient heritage. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Edson, G. 1997. Museum ethics. London: Routledge. Galla, A. 1997. Indigenous peoples, museums and ethics. In Museum ethics, ed. G. Edson, 142
55. London: Routledge. Geismar, H. 2008. Cultural property, museums, and the Pacific: Reframing the debates. International Journal of Cultural Property 15: 109
22. Gorman, J.M. 2008. Performing traditional culture: The emerging centrality of indigenous performance at an archaeological site. Paper presented at the Society for Applied Anthropology annual meeting, Memphis, TN. Gurian, E.H. 2006. Civilizing the museum. London: Routledge.

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NEW DIRECTIONS IN MUSEUM ETHICS Hooper-Greenhill, E. 1992. Museums and the shaping of knowledge. London: Routledge. Kratz, C.A., and I. Karp. 2006. Introduction: Museum frictions: Public cultures/global transformations. In Museum frictions: Public cultures/global transformations, ed. I. Karp, L. Szwaja, and T. Ybarra-Frausto with G. Buntinx, B. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, and C. Rassool, 1
31. Durham: Duke University Press. Macdonald, S., ed., 2006. A companion to museum studies. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Marstine, Janet, ed., 2005. New museum theory and practice: An introduction. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Simpson, Morira. 1996. Making representations: Museums in the post-colonial era. London: Routledge. Sola, T. 1997. Museums, museology and ethics. In Museum ethics, ed. G. Edson, 168
75. London: Routledge. Weil, S. 2002. Making museums matter. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Witcomb, Andrea. 2003. Re-imagining the museum: Beyond the mausoleum. London: Routledge.

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Chapter 6

A new state of the arts: developing the biennial model as ethical art practice Chelsea Haines Independent Curators International, 799 Broadway, Suite 205, New York, NY 10003, USA

The contemporary art biennial has proliferated internationally to the point of ubiquity in the past few decades. Of primary importance in understanding this phenomenon is the relationship between biennials and the disparate cultural contexts in which they exist. This paper examines the growth of the biennial as a responsive exhibition model that can be successfully adapted to connect and engage art, audiences, and local environments. Focusing specifically on Prospect.1, the biennial that took place in New Orleans from November 2008 to January 2009, this paper analyzes how the biennial model has become a platform for social engagement, signaling a shift toward the development of the biennial as ethical art practice.

Introduction Today there exist over 60 international biennials dedicated to the display and contextualization of contemporary art (Asia Art Archive 2010). There is no question that the biennial is a phenomenon central to global contemporary art systems, as well as an incubator for innovative curatorial and artistic practices. However, questions and debate remain about the purpose of biennials, their role in the urban environments in which they exist, and how other types of institutions may learn from their methods and strategies. Several biennials have developed over the past few decades that place a strong emphasis on the relationship between the biennial, the city, and social issues
forging new ideas about the art world’s ability to engage with current political and social realities through the biennial model. A recent and prominent example of this trend is Prospect New Orleans, the large-scale contemporary art biennial initiated in the aftermath of the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina. Prospect.1 took place from November 2008 to January 2009, with its second installment, Prospect.2, to open in November 2011. In this paper, I analyze Prospect.1 New Orleans as a case study in applied ethics, demonstrating how the biennial model can be used effectively to engage with diverse publics to construct new levels of meaning between audiences, art, and cities. Taking the cue from past groundbreaking biennials and adapting those successes, Prospect.1 managed to forge small public spaces of dialog, reflection, and entertainment that demonstrated a self-reflexive capacity to employ the biennial model in the wake of

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catastrophe. This paper illustrates the initial successes of Prospect.1 as a means to examine the socially responsive and responsible biennial as a model gaining prominence in various geopolitical contexts. If museum ethics today is largely governed by an acknowledgment and responsibility toward diverse stakeholders, the same is true of the biennial. In ‘Biennale Demand,’ Lee Weng Choy categorizes the following biennial stakeholders: those who organize biennials, including governments and funders; local populations; the art world, and audiences (Choy 2007). Believing that ‘we have run into a deadend asking ourselves, repeatedly, ‘‘what do we want from biennials?’’’, Weng Choy reverses the question to ask what biennials want from its audiences
those who attend, read or write about, or otherwise interact with biennials (Weng Choy). Weng Choy’s deceptively simple answer is, of course, attention. The biennial serves as a call to attention, a demand on time and energy, and a request to think about art, space, and the city in new ways. Often this attention is directed toward the geopolitical location in which the biennial exists, as well as its local population. Underlying this argument is that contemporary art loses its meaning without context in relation to the outside world, and hence Weng Choy states, ‘the global site of contemporary art is the biennial-type exhibition, and not the museum. The museum is, arguably, an irrevocably modernist thing. The biennale, in comparison, is best described as a global phenomenon. [. . .] Its goal is to present us with the latest in contemporary art, but what defines the ‘‘new’’ in international art is geographic representation (ibid).’ The geographic nature underpinning the biennial model can serve as its greatest strength or weakness. Both public art and the city-wide art biennial, as increasingly interrelated genres,1 have been theorized as spaces of capital and opportunities for urban branding, as well as sites of hope and community empowerment (Sheikh 2009, 79). However, a careful analysis of the ways these models operate in urban landscapes dispels reductive binaries that pit city developers and funders of international biennials against community activists and local art collectives. Simply put, biennials fit in neither category, but rather sit along a continuum with local politics and tourism enterprises on either side of the spectrum. Commissioned artworks and site-specific interventions, both within the walls of institutions, but more perceptively in the public landscape, function along a wide spectrum that takes into account both their gentrifying effects and their possibility to energize certain spaces. In other words, these projects often act as mixed blessings in their environments. The central issue in defining and appraising the ethical biennial then lies in examining what its motivation is behind existing in its particular space and how it functions within its local context. The motivations and methods behind biennials are as diverse as their geographies. However, over the past several decades a number of biennials have begun the process of self-reflexively addressing the role of the biennial and how it can productively assert itself in various social and political environments. Why biennial? It has been argued that curatorial practice today requires a precarious and constantly shifting power negotiation, as curators listen and respond to the needs of diverse stakeholders (funders, artists, tourists, locals, students, etc.), while also remaining committed to exhibiting and exploring pertinent, cutting-edge, and sometimes 91

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controversial work and ideas (Fowle 2007, 26). This balancing act requires an almost simultaneous relinquishing and grasping of control as curators ultimately determine how to select, display, and contextualize their exhibitions. While this process certainly rings true for curators working in museums in compliance with the AAM Code of Ethics for Museums, biennial curators, by the nature of their temporary, project-based positions, often grapple with different rubrics of obligation to the communities in which they work. The reasons for different concepts of engagement and responsibility are manifold. Biennials, while sometimes deeply connected to museums,2 are usually independent projects and typically move faster with a twoyear turnaround between the curatorial appointment and the vernissage. Since curatorial appointments are usually commission-based and temporary, the biennial curator frequently does not live or work in the city where the biennial takes place, and thus the relationship between the curator and the biennial city is almost always very terminal. Last, because biennials are typically generated as tourist attractions, curators often focus primarily on showcasing the latest and greatest in contemporary art to attract international visitors and press. Biennials are non-collecting institutions that infrequently develop programs in non-biennial years, and henceforth have no consistent or permanent, engaged audiences. Thus major shifts in the ways in which biennials have developed depended less on the needs of its audiences and focused instead on the art world’s increasing interest in international exchange, as well as social and political engagement with urban areas. The first biennial as a platform for contemporary art started in 1895 in Venice. A direct relation to the World Fairs, the Venice Biennale was conceived of as a largescale exhibition that included international artists by juried selection. In 1907, the Venice Biennial expanded to include city-wide pavilions, adopted by different nations who would select their best and brightest artists for representation. With the addition of the city-wide pavilion, the biennial model was truly born. Over the years, many other cities and institutions followed suit. Notable sites of major biennials include Sa˜ o Paulo, Brazil, in 1951; Documenta in Kassel, Germany, in 1955; Sydney, Australia, in 1973; Istanbul, Turkey, in 1987; Gwangju, South Korea, in 1995; Johannesburg, South Africa, in 1995, and Manifesta, the itinerant European biennial in 1996. The biennial has been deployed in different contexts for various ends. Arguably, contemporary art biennials have made their greatest impact in Asia, where they have served as catalysts for the development of art centers throughout the region. In Europe, biennials are typically state-funded affairs that serve as cultural attractions. In certain instances, the biennial has served as a curatorial intervention in devastated areas. This concept originated in 1955 in Kassel, a German city that was almost obliterated, politically, economically and structurally, during the course of World War II. The curatorial intervention, spearheaded by art historians Arnold Bolde and Werner Haftmann, materialized in an exhibition titled Documenta that offered a counter narrative in the war over images that attempted to redeem avantgarde modernist art against the Nazi condemnation of this art as entarte Kunst, or degenerate art. Critically and economically successful, the first Documenta reinvented Kassel as an art destination and contributed to the revitalization of the visual art communities in post-World War II Germany. Every five years a new Documenta exhibition opens in the city, and the exhibition and its related events has 92

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become, by now, one of the art world’s most respected institutions and a major art tourist destination. The unequivocal success of the Documenta series has spurred the creation of art exhibitions and biennials in other parts of the world that have been ravaged politically and economically, such as Gwangju, South Korea, and Johannesburg, South Africa. The first Johannesburg Biennial, opened in February 1995, expressed a desire for art to create dialog with the larger political issues in post-apartheid South Africa. Similarly, in the fall of 1995, the first Gwangju Biennial opened with the purported wish to reframe the city in a more positive context after its reputation had been badly damaged by a series of 1980 clashes between citizens and soldiers known as the Gwangju Massacre, as well as to bridge the gap and make connections between Euro-American and Asian contemporary art. Both exhibitions, like Documenta, emerged as a means to create dialog about larger socio-political issues through the alternative framework of visual art and also served as economic revitalization projects for areas in great economic need. These are only a few prominent examples and one could also turn to Sarajevo, Bosnia, and Herzegovina; Kosovo, and Dakar, Senegal, for other iterations of this same phenomenon. In many cities where political, social, economic or environmental upheaval occurs, so does the biennial, or so it seems. Historically in the United States, the influence of the biennial has been much more limited, typically confined to museums, and certainly less central to the development of American contemporary art and its related spaces of display than in Asia or Europe. The biennial had an alternate history in the United States, starting in 1896, the year after the launch of the Venice Biennial at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Under an edict from its benefactor Andrew Carnegie, the museum organized the first Carnegie International, heralding an exhibition for the ‘old masters of tomorrow.’ The Whitney Biennial in 1932 was founded two years after the creation of the Whitney Museum of American Art to showcase the best contemporary American art in keeping with the mission of that institution. Many regional American art museums hold biennial exhibitions to give exposure to local artists who are typically underrepresented in those museums’ collections. These exhibitions are generally confined to institutional walls. One notable exception to this description is the InSite San Diego/Tijuana biennial, which was founded in 1992 to explore the cultural and political tensions of the region. Prospect.1 was by far the largest biennial to take place in the United States and the most influential in terms of its relationship to the city of New Orleans. Prospect.1 employed many of the same practices of its international counterparts, including sitespecificity, employment of public sites, and representation of internationally recognized artists. However, Prospect.1 also committed itself to a long-term and deep-seated commitment to the people of New Orleans within a realistic timeframe and scale, integrating itself within already existing structures and institutions. Additionally, utilizing the unique time-space of the biennial model, Prospect.1 created a flexible environment in which the biennial can adapt to the changing circumstances of its audiences and environment over a longer period of time. While borrowing ideas and methods from some of the older biennials and other site-specific practices,3 in many ways Prospect.1 forged new territory in creating spaces for art amongst the rebuilding of New Orleans. 93

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Prospect.1: a biennial for New Orleans Prospect New Orleans, the largest contemporary art biennial in the United States, came into being through the efforts of Dan Cameron, the founder, curator, chief fundraiser, and architect of the project. Cameron, a prominent curator, worked for the New Museum in New York for almost a decade and organized biennials in Istanbul and Taipei, amongst other high-profile exhibitions. Early in 2007, he announced that he would direct and curate Prospect.1 New Orleans, a contemporary art biennial exhibiting the works of 81 artists in over two dozen venues, including 15 public projects. Impetus for the exhibition came emotionally, rather than rationally, for Cameron. Soon after Hurricane Katrina and, ‘moved by a panel discussion in which he participated, he decided something had to be done to aid the recovery [of New Orleans], but also to show people that the city was, in fact, picking itself up by its bootstraps
that things weren’t as bleak as they seemed’ (Douglas 2008). From the beginning, the aim of the biennial was to create a new type of tourism for the city by showcasing the work of acclaimed international artists, as well as call attention to a resilient and vibrant local visual arts community. The biennial, which took place in the fall of 2008, benefited from the general goodwill outsiders had to what was considered a charitable endeavor in a battered city, and many living in New Orleans, proud of the way their communities have rebounded after the storm, simply welcomed the chance to show off their neighborhoods and community centers to tourists. There are over 40 museums in New Orleans and Hurricane Katrina affected all of them to the extent that their resources, either collections or income and, in most cases both, were severely damaged. For example, in October 2005, one of the city’s largest museums, the New Orleans Museum of Art, was forced to lay off 70 of its 86 employees in order to stay in operation (Vogel 2005). While older, collecting museums were in the process of salvaging their institutions, Prospect.1 was able to harness the biennial’s nature as a start-up, flexible project with no building or collection to take care of, and develop innovative programming responding to the post-Katrina situation quickly and with few barriers. The biennial functioned in several ways to productively anchor itself within its physical surroundings. First, Prospect.1 took on a decidedly anti-spectacular and cross-institutional approach to the display and location of the exhibition, bending rules and working both inside and outside emerging and established institutions in order to better serve its audiences and the city itself. Cameron’s curatorial choices also focused strongly on sitespecificity and engagement with the history and culture of New Orleans. Importantly, Prospect.1 was first and foremost developed as responsive exhibition programming, reacting not just to the architecture and urban planning of the city, but also to the social construction of it. He crafted a careful balance between commissioning public works in the Lower 9th Ward and other battered neighborhoods in the city, with more traditional exhibition formats at the New Orleans Museum of Art and the Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans. He selected a broad range of both internationally recognized and New Orleans-based artists well known for their commitment to social engagement, organizing the visits of some artists to the city before they began creating new work. In his review of the exhibition, art critic Peter Schjeldahl noted that Prospect.1 attempted to fuse the local culture and landscape into the exhibition, unlike other international biennials 94

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like Manifesta, which celebrate the cities where they are held as exemplary subjects of internationalism. Instead, Prospect.1 favored the politics of locality and encouraged sincerity, even sentimentality, over cynical expectations (Schjeldahl 2008, 128). The sheer scale and scope of Prospect.1, with its interconnected web of local art communities and internationally recognized artists, spanning many institutions from the well-established New Orleans Museum of Art and Old US Mint Museum, to the start-up L9 Center for the Arts was unusual
it was the largest contemporary art exhibition ever held in the United States. And most importantly, unlike many other international art events, the biennial aimed to embed itself within the cultural landscape of New Orleans rather than parcel out a separate identity for itself. As a free exhibition throughout New Orleans, the biennial leveraged itself as a way for inhabitants and outsiders alike to explore neighborhoods and discover new ways of seeing the city. Prospect.1 also provided the opportunity for local artists and institutions, like the Lower 9th Ward Village, to respond to the exhibition by supplementing their programming and therefore extending the concept of biennial well beyond the confines of the official exhibition itself. Prospect.1 included works by some local artists interspersed within the exhibition itself, but more striking was the appearance of local non-Prospect.1 artworks alongside the official exhibition. In one of the many instances of the blurred boundaries between the Prospect.1 and local exhibitions, the L9 Center for the Arts concurrently featured the works of French artist Anne Deleporte, as well as photography of L9 founder Keith Calhoun. The visitor to Prospect.1 would have seen both works, adding to the exposure of the local artist and increasing his chances of selling artwork and sustaining himself through his creative practice. In this way, the distribution of Prospect.1 led the visitor on a discovery of not only neighborhoods throughout the city, but also local artists and communities
increasing the viability of a sustainable New Orleans visual arts community. Additionally, the flexibility of the biennial model ensures that future Prospect iterations will continue to be responsive to timely situations and practices in the city. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, New Orleanians experienced not only massive physical destruction and lives lost, but also a contentious and pervasive war over competing discourses of place, capital, and urban regeneration that have influenced the ways in which the city has been, or rather has not been, rebuilt. The mayor of New Orleans from 2002 to 2010, Ray Nagin, who spearheaded postKatrina reconstruction efforts, is a chief proponent of the laissez-faire approach to urban planning, in which every person (or investor) must fend for him or herself with minimal government assistance. As The Times-Picayune columnist Gordon Russell succinctly articulated, Ray Nagin’s ‘declaration that a laissez-faire ‘‘market forces’’ approach would drive New Orleans’ population higher than before the flood seems well off the mark’ (2008, 10). Recognizing the need to open up spaces in a city that has lost many of its public sites, the exhibition lent itself to public utility as a focal point and physical space for the nurturing of socio-political and cultural dialog. When Harlem-based artist Nari Ward decided to use the Battle Ground Baptist Church in the Lower 9th Ward as the site for his installation Diamond Gym: Action Network (Figure 1) for Prospect.1, he reactivated the abandoned church as a public site, community center, and tourist attraction. The Jamaica-born, Harlem-based artist has been a fixture of the international art biennial circuit in the past few years, most famous for integrating 95

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Figure 6.1 Nari Ward, Diamond Gym: Action Network, 2008; from the exhibition Prospect.1.

found and abandoned materials in his work to make comments on consumption, culture, and memory in urban environments. When Cameron invited Ward to create a site-specific work for Prospect.1, Ward knew he wanted to find a church to house the installation. In search of this church, the biennial’s curators took Ward on a tour of the Lower 9th Ward, the epicenter of the disaster of Hurricane Katrina and the verifiable ‘ground zero’ of the biennial, where he discovered the gutted and unoccupied Battle Ground Baptist Church (Wei 2009, 44). Moving beyond the devastation of the immediate environment and the Lower 9th’s most recent tragic history, Ward sought to create a work filled with an energy that was both inspirational and contemplative as well as a ‘space of social discourse’ (Ward 2009, personal communication). Nari Ward, Diamond Gym: Action Network, 2008; from the exhibition Prospect.1 Looking at the importance churches have had as community organizing sites in African-American history, as well as the specific history of the building, it is hardly surprising that Ward chose this site for his installation.4 After Katrina, churches, one of the only free public spaces in the city, became even more vital because of the destruction of other public spaces such as restaurants, bars, and grocery stores
most of which have not reopened in the Lower 9th since the storm. With many former congregants dispersed throughout the United States, and those who stayed attempting to pick up the pieces of their shattered world, ‘churches were a tangible marker of people’s ability to knit back together the torn fabrics of their lives’ (DeVore 2007). Inside the church sat a large, awkward, diamond-shaped sculpture made out of scrap metal that Ward found in the neighborhood. Citing that one of the tragedies of Katrina was that ‘there was a lot of junk’ (Ward 2008), trash, and other discarded materials littering the streets, Ward sought to turn the refuse of Katrina into a symbol of timelessness and strength
a diamond
beautiful and unbreakable. The floodwaters that hit the Lower 9th Ward destroyed everything in its wake and left only trash, destroyed homes, cars, fallen trees, and other materials that were 96

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slowly removed by government subcontractors and volunteers over a period of years. This trash became one of the preeminent media images of Katrina’s power and the devastation it wreaked in New Orleans. Very soon after the storm, local artists began using these materials as inspiration for their work and incorporating them, both on the street and in the gallery, in a variety of ways, from memorials to humorous or absurdist vignettes (Longman 2005). In Ward’s case, the discarded materials acted as both historic relics situated in the sanctified site of the church, and a means to turn the image of a discarded city on its head and reconstruct it as a place of courage and durability, a ‘diamond in the rough.’ While the diamond alluded to the destruction of Hurricane Katrina by using discarded scrap metals to encase the diamond’s exterior, resources provided by the neighborhood itself also forged the creation of the sculpture. The artist constructed outside walls of the diamond gym room, which consisted of rough plywood, made to serve as a bulletin board for visitors (especially those in the neighborhood) to post anything, including pictures, newspaper articles, maps, flyers for upcoming community events, and informational brochures. Ward told me he was ‘open to anything, including rejection,’ (2009, personal communication) from visitors. In terms of vandalism and free speech, Ward stated that originally he had only wanted to include postings by community organizers on the bulletin board, ‘but after seeing the work in the space I decided that the community itself needed to have a voice to record its process of rebuilding’ (ibid). People had the freedom to put up or tear down anything on the walls. Little groupings formed along the walls; Google map printouts of the neighborhood locating where a former community landmark or home once stood, newspaper clippings, hand-written notes, and small memorials to friends and family lost in the flood made up the bulk of the material, but pictures of parades, local musicians, including several pictures of Fats Domino, and movie posters also lined the walls. During my visit to the site in November 2008, a week after the presidential election, pictures of Barack Obama abounded-both on the bulletin board and throughout the city. Echoing through a sound system were recorded speeches by Martin Luther King, Jr., Marcus Garvey, and Malcolm X, overridden by the Buddhist chants of Tina Turner. This installation eluded the possibility for easy and narrow judgments in which art only functions in one particular way. The project acted as a site of public history, memory, dialog, exchange, and community ‘that [was], declaratively, more important than art’ (Schjeldahl 2008, 129), at least as bounded by the conventions of the art world. The project itself was quite open-ended by nature, and, while the use of visuals and the atmosphere of the installation certainly performed as a call to action, the type of action to be taken wholly depended on the visitor. Ward himself said that this project is ‘not about activism, but trying to use the energy of space and potentiality’ to inspire learning and change (2009, personal communication). Last, and perhaps most importantly, the exhibition coordinators and some of the biennial artists used their work to raise money or provide specific services, claiming social responsibility and participating in the idea of art as direct social intervention. In addition to Ward’s ad hoc community center, artists Jorge Macchi and Edgardo Rudnitzky built a series of paddleboats for use in the city park, similar to the ones destroyed in Hurricane Katrina. When in motion, the boat’s wheels hit up against a giant kalimba (African thumb piano) in the back of the vessel that created music as 97

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the users peddled around in the water
the music sped up, slowed down, and contorted depending on the speed and rhythm of the participants. Macchi told me that as he and Rudnitzky began working on the project, and they knew that their piece would comment on Katrina in some way, whether or not that was their intention as artists, because of the imprint the storm made on the urban landscape and the people who visit and live there. Taking note of one of the great cultural tragedies of Katrina, the exodus of many local musicians who have been unable to return to the city, Macchi and Rudnitzky decided to dedicate their work to them, New Orleans, and its musical culture.

Jorge Macchi and Edgardo Rudnitzky, Little Music, 2008; for the exhibition Prospect.1 The project’s title, Little Music (Figure 2), derived from a loose translation of the Bantu word kalimba, the percussion instrument attached to the back of the paddleboats. In describing the perceived public reaction of his work, Macchi noticed two types of audiences: People who were amused by the mechanism and by the idea of paddle boating for free, and people who went beyond that and made the connections that were important for us. The people who took part played a kind of very simple music with African resonances while floating on the water. It was a strong image
some people saw it, some not, like always. (2009, personal communication)

The work functioned on several different levels as gift to the neighborhood, reinvigorating an otherwise unused public space, providing free outdoor entertainment, and paying homage to the musical culture of the city and the musicians who have yet to return, all of which visitors may, or may not, have comprehended. The main purpose of the work was to bring a sense of joy for the visitor, as well as contribute to the underlying themes of participation that activate the work and the space, also echoed in Ward’s Diamond Gym: Action Network. While Macchi and Rudnitzky’s project functioned primarily as a personal-political statement, taking up

Figure 6.2 Jorge Macchi and Edgardo Rudnitzky, Little Music, 2008; for the exhibition Prospect.1.

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as an issue the loss of musicians who have left the city and relocated in the New Orleans diaspora, the piece was also simply a service for the city. These works, and the biennial at large, have operated as rebuilding efforts ‘doing something small but important for the city’ (Macchi 2009, personal communication). Some projects have even acted as direct philanthropy, working with individuals to rebuild their lives. Kenyan artist, Wangechi Mutu, used her presence as an artist in Prospect.1 to create a public installation and subsequent limited edition work to raise funds to rebuild the house of ‘a local woman, the widow of a great New Orleans jazz drummer, who not only saw her home washed away in the hurricane, but also had her funds for rebuilding stolen by a disreputable contractor’ (Robinson 2008). Since the closing of the exhibition in January 2009, Mutu has worked closely with the woman, Sarah Lastie, to rebuild the home, which will be completed and on view for Prospect.2 in November 2011 as a way of demonstrating the sustained connections that artists and the biennial have built with local communities. In a more conceptual overture, Dave McKenzie’s I’ll Be Back, 2008
2018, took the form of a personal promise to the city of New Orleans to return every year for a decade. These projects are just a few examples of the ways in which artists working under the auspices of Prospect.1 felt compelled to work above and beyond their given role as biennial artists to research, think about, personally commit, and surpass the traditional limitations of their work in the biennial context. While not all of the 81 artists were involved to the extent of Ward, Macchi and Rudnitzky, and Mutu, the way Prospect.1 unfolded through its commitment to social issues and history practically demanded the questioning of ethical artistic practice. The works examined in this paper demonstrate the most socially engaged works that emerged from Prospect.1, due to strong curatorial emphasis on the ethics of the contemporary art biennial in the post-Katrina context. Throughout the city, the exhibition and its artists have met the needs of particular individuals in ways that ‘involve acts of empathy and generosity that address very pragmatic needs’ (Ligon 2009, 170), in addition to their portended role as conceptual art projects. This philanthropic approach demonstrates that artists, and the biennials that exhibit their work in public spaces, have both rights and responsibilities with regard to the ways in which they impact communities. Additionally, the exhibition reacted less to the catastrophe of Katrina
although it acted as impetus for the biennial
but rather inserted itself as one of the many agents taking part in redefining New Orleans. Prospect.1 can serve as a case study for curators or institutions developing exhibitions (both within museums and in the public sphere), not only as they determine how best to develop their projects in relation to local context and audiences, but also as a more active and extended engagement with audiences and the urban environment through a larger sense of social responsibility that exceeds the boundaries of institutional thought. Through varied techniques, Prospect.1 and Cameron himself became larger players in the discourses surrounding the redevelopment of New Orleans than many other more established institutions in the city, due to a consistent and unrelenting drive to make the biennial work for the city by any means necessary, collaborating with anyone who would work with them
museums, artists, galleries, local activists, businesses, and the government
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Conclusion: a biennial we can believe in? This paper analyzed Prospect.1 New Orleans as characteristic of an increasingly accepted perspective on the art biennial, taking into account the biennial’s growing role as the art world’s version of direct social intervention. Prospect.1 fit within certain continuums and, importantly, also exceeded and broke away from conventional notions of the role of art in public places. I do not argue that biennials somehow alleviate the very real sufferings of those who have been adversely affected by politics and nature, nor am I claiming that these projects necessarily hinder the privatization of urban space. In an art world where, according to Peter Schjeldahl, ‘‘‘contextual’’ practice has proved, after sufficiently abundant experience, to be long on con and short on text’ (2008, 128), many critics seem unable to pinpoint exactly what has made Prospect.1 different from the rest of the biennials out there. However, through analysis of the biennial, including notable examples of projects in the exhibition, certain conclusions can be drawn regarding the particular salience of Prospect.1. The exhibition was not an all-consuming art world spectacle; nor did it see itself as existing outside of the sociocultural structures of the city. Steadfastly ethical in its intent and the pursuit of new ways to reach and challenge audiences, the exhibition focused on a rubric of engagement rather than spectacle in the flexible time-space of the biennial. Prospect.1 recognized that New Orleans does not need cultural improvement through some kind of arts dominated neocolonialism, but rather that it is a city that calls for defined discursive spaces in order for socio-political and cultural manifestations to be supported and nurtured, especially in the wake of current rebuilding efforts in which market capital is overpowering or attempting to eliminate neighborhoods. New Orleans, over the past 300 years, has fostered a culture in which artistic freedom is greatly valued. These artists, and in many ways the overall curatorial expression of Prospect.1 working in this tradition, have built creations that reflect history and encourage place-making, while also providing a glimpse into the future. Unlike artists who look at art as concrete spaces of social activism, these artists have attempted to reinvigorate spaces by developing sitespecific artworks that can spark a specific memory, perspective, or story on the part of the visitor. The role of both public art and the contemporary art biennial in urban life is both complex and contested, and they have been theorized and described as public meeting sites, beautification initiatives, gentrification vehicles, memorials, and radical educational sites. In reality, these projects, no matter the specific work, elude easy categorization and often act as either a synthesis of all these descriptions, or none at all. Complex links can be made between notions of art, place, space, and history when the issues revolving around the disaster of Hurricane Katrina and the contested history of New Orleans and its neighborhoods compound typical conversations around public art. Sometimes public art creates new modes of analysis, as well. If artists have social responsibilities and can be described as public intellectuals then, as Henry A. Giroux argues, they must go beyond analyzing or taking note of the discourses in which a cultural situation resides and respond to the core problems that spurred the social or cultural dilemma (1995, 5). Prospect.1 has taken a first step toward addressing and attempting to remedy some of these problems, and yet these artists represent only a small fraction of 100

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working public artists. While Prospect.1 New Orleans may not signal a paradigm shift, it both legitimizes and moves us closer towards new ethical curatorial practices with regard to the biennial model. While the restorative power of Prospect.1 as an exhibition is limited and fleeting, for the purposes of this paper, I appraise it through the framework that encourages discussion of responsibility, ethics, and sustainability in the art world. Prospect.1 did not ‘save’ New Orleans, but rather contributed in a productive way to current dialog over rebuilding efforts. Malcolm Jones and Cathleen McGuigan wrote ‘in the wake of Katrina, New Orleans is doing what it does best: making something extraordinary out of next to nothing’ (2008, 55), Similarly, Prospect.1 developed a biennial responsive to the needs of the city that can be viewed as a model for future Prospect New Orleans installments, as well as crossinstitutional and socially engaged exhibition practices in other cities. Acknowledgements Many thanks to Janet Marstine and Alexander Bauer for their continued advice, support, and encouragement in developing this paper for publication. Special thanks also go to the anonymous reviewers whose wisdom and insight helped shape this article.

Notes 1. City-wide biennials have rapidly become more ‘public’ in the past several years, by commissioning more artwork in open or non-traditional art spaces, leading visitors on selfguided tours of neighborhoods throughout biennial cities. An early example of this trend was the 2005 Istanbul Biennial, in which curators Vasif Kortun and Charles Esche used open-air markets, apartment buildings, and abandoned factories as exhibition spaces. 2. This is certainly the case with institutional biennials, such as the Whitney Biennial and the Carnegie International, but also rings true of city-wide biennials as well, in which biennial curators often hold other curatorial or directorial positions in the same city. Dan Cameron is the Director of Visual Arts at the Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans, in addition to acting as curator and director of Prospect. New Orleans though the two institutions are only loosely connected through his positions at each. 3. Mary Jane Jacob’s pioneering exhibition, Places with a Past: New Site-Specific Work in Charleston in 1991, was a Prospect.1 precursor to deep engagement with place via curatorial practice, albeit in the form of a terminal exhibition. 4. It is a widely held belief amongst residents of the Lower Ninth Ward that the government blew up the levee system protecting their neighborhood from the Industrial Canal to save wealthier areas of the city from being submerged during Hurricane Katrina. While this belief has little factual evidence to sustain itself, the story gives credence to the legitimate wariness and paranoia many citizens in that neighborhood feel towards the state. For testimonials from residents who heard the ‘levee explode,’ see Spike Lee’s When the Levees Broke, HBO Films, 2006.

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References Asia Art Archive. 2010. http://www.aaa.org.hk Choy, L. 2007. Biennial demand. Presented at ‘‘Cultural Events, Celebrity Curators and Creative Networking,’’ organized by the Department of Cultural and Religious Studies, Chinese University Hong Kong, in association with the Asia Art Archive and Para/Site Art Space, October 27, Hong Kong. DeVore, D.E. 2007. Water in sacred places: Rebuilding New Orleans black churches as sites of community empowerment. Journal of American History 94: 762
9. Douglas, S. 2008. Prospect.1: Looking back to go forward. Artinfo.com. http://www.artinfo. com/news/story/29880/prospect1-looking-back-to-go-forward/ Fowle, K. 2007. Who cares: Understanding the role of the curator today. In Cautionary tales: Critical curating, ed. S. Rand and H. Kouris, 26
35. New York: apexart. Giroux, H.A. 1995. Borderline artists, cultural workers, and the crisis of democracy. In The artist in society: Rights, roles and responsibilities, ed. C. Becker and A. Wiens, 4
14. Chicago: New Art Examiner Press. Jones, M., and C. McGuigan. 2008. Toward a new New Orleans. Newsweek, May 5: 50
5. Ligon, G. 2009. ‘‘To miss New Orleans.’’ ARTFORUM, January: 166
71. Longman, J. 2005. Art captures a city’s tumult and renewal. The New York Times. http:// www.nytimes.com/2005/12/05/national/nationalspecial/05visual.html Robinson, W. 2008. Bleeding-Heart Biennale. Artnet online. http://www.artnet.com/ magazineus/reviews/robinson/robinson11-7-08.asp Russell, G. 2008. Think small. The Times-Picayune. http://www.nola.com/news/index.ssf/2008/ 11/its_time_for_new_orleans_to_ad.html Schjeldahl, P. 2008. Come on down: The New Orleans Biennial Beckons. The New Yorker, November 24, 128
29. Sheikh, S. 2009. Marks of distinction, vectors of possibility: Questions for the biennial. Open: Cahier on Art and the Public Domain 16: 68
81. Vogel, C. 2005. New Orleans art museum reduces staff. The New York Times. http://www. nytimes.com/2005/10/18/arts/design/18layo.html Ward, N. 2008. Panel discussion on Prospect.1 New Orleans. Presented at the Cooper Union School of Art, May 15, New York, NY. Wei, L. 2009. Deliverance: The biennial. Art in America 97, no. 2: 43
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Chapter 7

Museum ethics, missing voices and the case of the Tropical Houses Lydie Diakhate´ Curator and Independent Producer, New York, USA; Paris, France

For years, Africa has been stripped of the treasures that framed its history and the marks and distinctive signs reflecting its role as supplier of modernity. At the same time, in the African urban landscape, colonial realizations are not always considered to have a direct impact on the evolution of the concept of urbanities and the construction of new societies. Following the story of the prefabricated Tropical Houses created by the famous French designer Jean Prouve´, sent to Africa in the late 1940s and repatriated to France in 2000, I will look at the discursive and ethical challenges in the field of postcolonial studies and the interpretation of historic spaces in shaping modern identities. Using the art installation Maison Tropicale by Angela Ferreira, I will focus on the question of modern heritage in Africa and the difficulties of recognizing the role played by sub-Saharan African countries in the integration of modernist movements during colonization. My argument is that Angela Ferreira’s conceptual work addresses the notion of shared cultural heritage
a notion which is controversial and does not often shape practice in Africa.

Introduction After a long trip from Africa, I finally arrived in Venice for the 52nd International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale from 10 June to 21 November 2007. Concerned with questions of patrimonial restoration and conservation in Africa, I was particularly looking forward to Angela Ferreira’s project at the Portuguese Pavilion, Maison Tropicale. I had spoken with Ferreira a few months previously in Paris about her intention to produce a sculptural representation of the historic prefabricated Tropical Houses created by the famous French designer Jean Prouve´ in the late 1940s, which were removed from Africa in 2000 by a French antique dealer, Eric Touchaleaume, in order to ‘rescue’ them from deterioration. During our conversation, Angela Ferreira stated that she made her postmodern Maison Tropicale as a way to give back Prouve´’s Tropical Houses, metaphorically, to Africa. Ferreira explained that one of the most basic intentions of the project was precisely to give Prouve´ back to Niamey and Brazzaville and to search through the debris left by the removal of the houses for what still remained of the presence of Prouve´ in Africa. Obviously this commitment is purely symbolic and metaphorical. On the other hand, Ferreira’s project provides insight into the ways that the spaces made

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vacant by the removal were invaded by a new social, economic and real life in the cities, specifically in Brazzaville. We are therefore in a state of adaptation and transmutation of Prouve´ ’s structures. In Ferreira’s view, the Tropical Houses existed because of the environment they were built for and, in this sense, they clearly belong to the African countries where they were originally set up. Colonial realizations have a direct impact on the evolution of the concept of urbanities. Ferreira’s work articulates a notion of shared cultural heritage and property that is controversial and not often put into practice in Africa. It underlines the question of modern heritage in Africa and the construction of new societies and complicates issues regarding preservation, restitution and property crucial to modern identities. Angela Ferreira’s conceptual installation acknowledges the difficult but important task of recognizing the roles played by subSaharan African countries in the appropriation of modernist design1 during and after colonization. The history of the Tropical Houses is particularly important because it sheds light not only on the complicity between modernism, architecture and colonialism but also on French imperialist ambitions to impose French culture through education, literature and the other arts. The Tropical Houses were designed to be flown out to house French colonials in Africa. French colonial territories were considered French regional playgrounds and experimental laboratories. Colonial architectural vocabularies became the symbols of French modernity and the vitality of its designers and creators. As the historian Arnauld Le Brusq (2005, 113) has stated, French architects working in different parts of Africa were developing a distinct French ‘regionalist architecture style (. . .)’.2 The necessity to build on foreign lands, to use new materials and to respond to diverse climate constraints stimulated the minds of architects and engineers. This was also the time when aluminum was considered as a pioneering new material for French industry and identity in the colonies. Thus, Jean Prouve´ ’s aluminum designs were in demand by prominent architects such as Robert Mallet-Stevens, Le Corbusier,3 Pierre Jeanneret, Charlotte Perriand and others.4 Huppatz (2010, 34) explains: While Le Corbusier’s famous dictum reimagined the house as a ‘machine for living;’ Prouve´ regularly argued for ‘industrializing the habitat.’ For Prouve´, the habitat could be industrialized through prefabricated structures constructed from standardized, factory-fabricated components that could be assembled in any geographical location.

In fact, Prouve´ ’s Maxeville factory in Nancy was asked by industrialists and government administrators in Metropolitan France and Africa to provide equipment for their overseas locations and offices. However, most of these commissions remained at an experimental stage as they were not as popular with users as expected.5 The project for the Tropical Houses began in the late 1940s when Pechinet Aluminum Company asked Prouve´ to design aluminum houses for the French colonial territories in West Africa (Diawara 2007a, 42; Huppatz 2010, 35). In July 1949, one of Prouve´ ’s Tropical Houses (260 m2 including the terraces) was shipped to Niamey in Niger to serve as housing for the director of a college and his family. Before being flown overseas, one section of the house was exhibited in Paris in 104

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October 1949, at the Exhibition for the Equipment of the French Union near the River Seine under the Alexandre III Bridge. In 1951, two other aluminum and steel houses (140 and 180 m2 including the terraces) were sent to Brazzaville in Congo to serve as an information office for the French Aluminum Company and as accommodation for French administrators. Even if they did not reach all their objectives, the Tropical Houses commissioned by the French Overseas Ministry were conceived as the answer to the shortage of infrastructure in the African colonies. The aim was to respond to the local climatic condition and to enable easy assemblage of houses on site. It took approximately two weeks to erect one of Prouve´ ’s prefabricated houses, as opposed to the average 18 months with traditional building materials. Although Prouve´ originally designed the house as a prototype for a large-scale project in the French African colonies, in fact, only three houses were actually built and sent to Africa
to Niger in 1949 and to the Congo in 1951. The project was abandoned because of its high cost as ‘it took a long time to produce, they were expensive, unsuited to the climate
and people quite simply did not like living in them’, explains Gertrud Sandqvist (2007, 23). After being forgotten for more than 50 years, Prouve´ ’s houses have been recently refurbished and exhibited in Paris, Los Angeles, New York and London as contemporary art objects. By analyzing the story of Prouve´ ’s prefabricated Tropical Houses
from their status as a prototype of shelter to an oeuvre d’art reified through a postmodern lens
I will elucidate the process of their valorization. I will identify and discuss ethical challenges in the field of postcolonial heritage and the interpretation of historical artifacts brought to bear upon the Tropical Houses. I will also consider the ways in which museums play a key role in the cultural politics that influence the reuse and valorization of architectural patrimony. Nowadays, the museum is not simply a place that imposes its gaze through the display of objects; it is becoming a site of critical self-reflective discourse engaging the local environment and the world. Maison Tropicale at the Venice Biennale The Portuguese exhibition at the Venice Biennale was held at the Fondac¸ ao Marcello, a high-profile venue located on the banks of the Grand Canal, between the Academia and Rialto bridges. The way to the pavilion was signposted by green arrow stickers reminiscent of a paper chase game on the ground, walls and street lamps. Anybody driven by curiosity could easily follow the small signs. The exotic French title of the exhibition, Maison Tropicale (Figure 1), suggested to viewers that they might expect to see an atypical house. Surprisingly, instead, viewers found an assemblage by Ferreira which they had to walk through to get into the gallery: a sculpture made of wooden lamina, aluminum panels and blue portholes that represented Prouve´ ’s kit for the Tropical House. This assemblage, as part of the artist’s installation, provided an entry point to the exhibition by destabilizing the viewer’s expectation of an exotic Africa and opening up a new space of encounter for the show and the visitor. When audiences reached the gallery, they discovered a series of photographs of the Niamey and Brazzaville sites hanging on the walls. These works illustrated the void left behind after the houses were dismantled and taken back to France. Through juxtaposition, Ferreira put the photograph installation in relation to the assemblage with its architectural 105

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Figure 7.1 Angela Ferreira, Maison Tropicale, 2007. Installation view (detail) Portuguese Pavilion, 52nd Venice Biennale. Photograph by Ma´ rio Valente. Note: The exhibition consisted of an installation that put a series of photographs of the Niamey and Brazzaville sites, illustrating the void left after the houses were removed to France in relation to a sculpture made of aluminum and wood, built with the identifiable ‘forks’ supports, sun-breakers and porthole doors used by Prouve´.

vocabulary, like that of the containers used to ship the Prouve´ houses. Through Angela Ferreira’s work, the Venice Biennale became a starting point in the venture to discover the story of the prefabricated Tropical Houses and to understand how the past can be reread through the lens of a contemporary, conceptual art installation. Born in 1958 in Maputo (formerly Lourenc¸ o Marques), capital of Mozambique, Angela Ferreira spent her childhood there until 1973, just before the liberation of the country from Portuguese colonial rule in 1974.6 She moved with her family to Lisbon as the Carnation Revolution7 was occurring. In 1976, she attended the University of Cape Town in South Africa to study visual arts. Since these early student years, Ferreira has been concerned with issues of cultural consciousness, identity politics, citizenship and belonging. Her insights are shaped by her own complex and shifting identity as white, African-born and of Portuguese origins. Her work has been driven by such topics as modernity, decolonization, apartheid and their impact on contemporary Africa. Ferreira is considered one of Portugal’s most engaging conceptual artists today. With her sculptural installation Maison Tropicale, Ferreira references the legacy of colonial history and the uneasy relationship between Africa and Europe, a relationship still driven by power struggles and imbued with the stigma of a painful past. The case of the Tropical Houses illustrates this difficulty for Africa to be recognized as a contributor to modernism and, moreover, to contemporaneity. Ferreira uses deconstructivist practice to document and reframe issues of cultural patrimony. She also brings the viewer to reflect on the irony presented by a conceptual art installation about a historic house. For years, Africa has been expropriated of the treasures8 that frame its history and the marks reflecting its role as supplier of modernity. Concurrently, in the 106

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African urban landscape, colonial realizations do not always directly impact the evolution of the concept of urbanities and the construction of new societies. As Annarita Lamberti has observed, ‘projects of preservation or regeneration of Modern Colonial Heritage seem to express a re-narration of colonial history, from the perspectives of colonized people and of those who have inherited their memories’ (2008). Some international institutions, associations and committees concerned with the protection, conservation, management and presentation of nineteenth- and twentieth-century worldwide cultural heritage have recently initiated self-reflective discussions on these issues.9 The Tropical Houses are a fascinating case study illuminating these challenging matters of modernist heritage in Africa that are not yet well explored. By positioning the Maison Tropicale in Venice, one of the most beautiful and visited historic cities in the world, and, at the same time, the site of the most famous international contemporary art event, Angela Ferreira has sparked renewed interest in Prouve´ ’s Tropical Houses. Robert Rubin recognized that Ferreira’s work has been ‘the most complex and elaborate engagement with the Tropical House to date’ (2009, 128). Nonetheless, Ferreira’s installation has ironically and unwittingly contributed to the celebrity status of Prouve´ ’s houses as art, instead of as dwelling places imbued with social meaning. Although Ferreira makes a strong statement denouncing the lack of an African context in the interpretation of the Tropical Houses and asserting the failure of a modernist colonial dream, her skillfully executed and aesthetically appealing modernist sculpture sustains the recognition of Prouve´ ’s modernist vision by the art market.

The Tropical Houses on the art market Mining Prouve´ and celebrating modernism The modernization of societies in colonized countries has gradually taken place through the appropriation and assimilation of Western cultures with African traditions in the construction of national patrimony. Museums, like train stations, hotels, administrative buildings and many other monuments, were imposed upon indigenous societies and became new identity signposts in the cities. In the early part of the twentieth century, colonial territories were the first centers of globalization. Colonial territories were grounds for experimentation and expansion in modernist cultural expression, from architecture to fashion and from visual art to cooking. As the French sociologist Marc Auge´ has stated, ‘We could say that the colonized people were on the ‘‘avant-garde’’ of the world because they were the first to be confronted by the globalization of the planet and its history’ (Le Brusq 2005, 107). In Paris in 1931, the International Colonial Exhibition, using the methodology of rationalism as justification, aimed to celebrate the current accomplishments and future promise of colonialism. The purpose of the exhibition, as stated by Mare´ chal Hubert Lyautey in Patricia A. Morton’s essay (2000, 4), was to demonstrate that ‘colonial action, so long misunderstood, deformed, sometimes shackled, is a constructive and beneficial action’. Edmond Du Vivier de Streel, Director of the Congresses at the Colonial Exhibition, declared that ‘in a virgin land, where everything has to be created, it is natural to ‘‘create the new’’, to establish audacious plans, and realize wider ideas related to the immense territories and unlimited 107

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perspectives of a future without past’ (Guilloux 2005, 72). The ideas promoted by the 1931 Exhibition
the necessity to build on foreign lands, to use new materials and to respond to diverse climate constraints
stimulated the minds of architects and engineers. While most of Prouve´ ’s commissions for the French colonies remained at the prototype stage and were not mass-produced, the solutions found outre-mer nourished contemporaneous architectural projects in France, particularly those from the early 1960s engaging problems of urbanization. Simultaneously, under preservation measures in place during the colonial period, architectural campaigns took place in diverse regions of Africa, including the conversion of some magnificent buildings to museums.10 In the process, local patrimony was redefined and reconstituted under the regalia of empire. From the mid-1980s, as Bernard Toulier (2005, 11) underscores, various studies by French researchers on colonial spaces have been commissioned by institutions such as the Office de la recherche scientifique et technique outre-mer,11 Center national de la recherche scientifique and the ministries of Equipment and Culture. Such scholarship has transformed the buildings into canonical scientific and cultural objects and given this patrimony a new status. The development of tourism has reinforced this valorization (Sinou 2005, 146). For example, old cities such as Djenne´ or Timbuktu, and historical buildings such as the House of Slaves in Gore´ e in Senegal and Elmina Castle in Ghana, have become economic resources for their nations. The Tropical Houses were designed as a series of sophisticated domestic spaces that could be mass-produced and give communities access to high-quality architecture and design based on prefabricated aluminum modules. From the beginning, Prouve´ ’s Tropical Houses were recognized by his peers as a significant contribution to modernist architecture. The design was praised as the finest and highest achievement in modernist architecture in the twentieth century. In 1954, Le Corbusier acclaimed Prouve´ ’s work, stating that ‘everything he touches and designs immediately acquires an elegant plastic shape while brilliantly providing solutions for resilience and fabrication. (. . .) His post-war works have left decisive testimonies everywhere’ (Touchaleaume 2006, 5). Robert Rubin (2009, 118) points out that ‘[t]he Tropical Houses are at once iconic, inspirational, and cautionary. Ingenious ‘‘green’’ designs before the concept existed, they have become paradigms of minimalist architecture’. Fifty years after their fabrication, located in the former ‘white area’ of the colonial cities, the three houses were dismantled, placed in containers and transported back to France by French art dealer Eric Touchaleaume. The house from Brazzaville, situated next to the main post office, was bought by the French art dealer from Mireille N’Gatse, after long discussions for Mireille to be recognized as the lawful owner of the house.12 She had lived for several years in the Tropical House in Brazzaville after she inherited the house from her father. She was living in one section of the house in very rudimentary conditions.13 With the proceeds of the sale, Mireille opened some small shops in the same neighborhood. The house in Niamey, located in a residential neighborhood not far from the presidential palace, was abandoned. One former neighbor, a professor at the university ‘complained against the officials in Niger who let the house go so easily’ (Diawara 2007b, 47). At the Venice Biennale, looking at Angela Ferreira’s photographs on the walls, filmmaker Manthia Diawara commented in his documentary film14: ‘The Niamey space is very quiet . . . . There’s nothing there, it’s almost sacred, it’s like an African burrier [sic] 108

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ground. Whereas Brazzaville people came and improvised and adapted themselves, building their houses exactly where the Prouve´ house was’. The houses were restored and received the status of oeuvre d’art as they entered the art market and have been displayed at diverse universities and museums. The small house from Brazzaville was purchased by Robert Rubin. If transportation was tricky, restoration was even more fraught. In Amelia Gentleman’s article in the Guardian,15 Rubin ‘admits that the project has been extremely expensive, costing him as much as $1.5m to acquire, remove and restore the building’. But for him, the Tropical Houses ‘are part of the Prouve´ myth’. Rubin worked with an architect who knew Prouve´, Christian Enjolras and a construction firm based in Presles, outside Paris. ‘The original plans for the building were missing, so they had to imagine how the parts would have fitted together’ precises Gentleman. The house was exhibited between 2002 and 2006 in the architecture departments of universities in the USA
Columbia, Yale and University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)
to celebrate Prouve´ ’s achievements. At Yale University, along with the public exhibition, a Web site allowed thousands of viewers around the world (including architects, designers, students and curious people) to watch the montage in real time. The display at the Hammer Museum16 at UCLA engaged an interactive discussion with those in the contemporary art field and commissioned art works inspired by Prouve´ ’s Tropical Houses by conceptual artists including Rirkrit Tiravanija, Christopher Williams and Rachel Kushner. The resulting works were exhibited at the Sao Paulo Biennale and in Los Angeles. In 2005, Rubin donated the house to the Georges Pompidou Art & Culture Foundation and, since 2007, it has been on display on the top floor of the Museum in Paris in the collections of the Muse´ e National d’Art Moderne. It took approximately one year and a team of 10 people to restore the bigger house from Brazzaville. Eric Touchaleaume (2006, 122) explains in his catalog how ‘they had opted for long-term conservation that respects the structural integrity of the house’. The restoration was performed under the vigilant eyes of Ge´ rard Panne´ trat, the project manager. His intimate knowledge of each piece of the puzzle helped to avoid many errors. The house was then exhibited in Paris in 2006 on the bank of the Seine before it was sent to New York and displayed by the East River the following year. It was subsequently auctioned at Christie’s and purchased for almost $5 million by hotel tycoon Andre´ Balatz.17 Balatz loaned it to the Tate Modern/ Design Museum for an exhibition on Prouve´ ’s work in 2008, where it was erected in front of Tate. The house is currently due to be shipped to an ‘exotic’ location to associate it with the luxury market of consumption. The third house from Niamey is part of Touchaleaume’s project to open an art gallery in the south of France or to create a traveling museum. In their original settings in Africa, the Tropical Houses were not recognized as objects of patrimonial value by cultural workers, academics or politicians. Once they arrived in France, the USA and the UK, they were lauded by influential art critics, dealers and collectors and exhibited at canonical auction houses, biennales and museums. For example, Olivier Cinqualbre (2009, 33) declares: It was not their grief to be nomadic or moveable, which might be suggested by their new status, since they were demounted, fifty years after being put up. But they are once more

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By recognizing the ingenuity and aesthetic of Prouve´ ’s work, the art market also celebrated as modernism the ‘glorious face’ of colonialism, thus avoiding its failure and the African valuation of the houses. Instead of reevaluating and providing new interpretations of modernism, the art field simply appropriated it, thus freezing the dynamics of art history.

Conceptualizing the missing Angela Ferreira’s Maison Tropicale installation was not exactly a house, but consisted of a container made of wooden lamina, panels and portholes to suggest the idea of a kit house and was displayed at the entrance of the exhibition space. The sculptural installation echoes the vocabulary of the containers in which the Tropical Houses were shipped back and forth between France and the African continent. To enter the exhibition, the viewer had to first walk through Ferreira’s sculpture. Upon entering, the viewer discovered a very sophisticated design, which, in reference to Prouve´ ’s work, can be considered a neomodernist conception. Ferreira adapts Prouve´ ’s characteristic uncluttered and refined design. Through direct and intimate contact with the installation, the viewer is thus challenged to suspend stereotypes of the ‘primitive’ and to associate African culture with modernist aesthetics. In the display, there was no image or drawing illustrating the Tropical Houses. The viewer could find images of the Tropical Houses only at the exit of the exhibition, along with some catalogs and drawings that Ferreira made to conceptualize her project. Instead, as part of the exhibition, seven large color photographs of Niamey and Brazzaville hung on walls, surrounding the kit-house installation. The photographs capture vast unoccupied areas, covered with earth, dust and stones and bordered by trees, walls and old stiff houses. They reveal the spaces left by the Tropical Houses after being dismantled and repatriated to France (Figures 2 and 3). No wall texts contextualized the installation or its parts, except short labels identifying the location where each photograph was taken. The intention of the artist was to bring the viewer to another level of consciousness and even to imagine rejecting his or her ‘cliche´ s’ of the exotic, which are still strong in Westerners’ view of Africa. Although Ferreira is concerned with what is at stake for Africa and its people, the installation addresses Western markets and audiences. Her reconceptualization of a historical house is not just a showcase of historical events, heroes and aesthetic references but is also a political act. By appropriating elements of Prouve´ ’s prototype in her installation, Ferreira stresses the ingenuity of neomodernism in his work. She also questions the concept of sculpture
its interaction with the viewer and space and its convergence with and/or divergence from modernism and contemporary art. Her Tropical House as a sculptural kit, in relation to her photographs on the walls, demonstrates that she creates a space for dialog. With the photographs, she produces a narrative engaging aesthetics, in conversation with an urban and social environment. The photographs show how the two spaces left after the removal of the houses interact with their environment and inhabitants. For Angela Ferreira, ‘in Brazzaville, there’s an enormous amount of readaptation of the leftovers of the Prouve´ ’s structures in order to create new architecture where people could inhabit’ (Diawara 2007b). 110

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Figure 7.2 Angela Ferreira, Maison Tropicale (Brazzaville) #1, 2007. Light Jet print on aluminum. 120 cm  150 cm. Photograph by Angela Ferreira. Note: The photograph from Angela Ferreira’s installation at the Venice Biennale shows the space left after the removal of the Tropical House in Brazzaville.

Figure 7.3 Angela Ferreira, Maison Tropicale (Niamey) #3, 2007 Light Jet print on ˆ ngela Ferreira. aluminum. 120 cm  150 cm. Photograph by A Note: The photograph from Angela Ferreira’s installation at the Venice Biennale shows the space left after the removal of the Tropical House in Niamey.

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She explains that the collectors removed what was valuable and resaleable. They left the concrete structures designed by Prouve´ to host the Tropical House. Now the social, economic and real life in the city invades the space. For example, one of the walls is shared by a restaurant. And the two roofs built over the structure are employed by the inhabitants around to protect themselves from the weather. The foundations of the Tropical House left behind operate as a skeleton for new improvised constructions. Meanwhile Niamey is almost the opposite. There has been no occupation of the platform where the house was erected. It is almost as if people did not want to touch what was left. The photographs intensify the contrast between the very sophisticated sculpture made by Ferreira and the poverty and low construction in the area in Niamey and Brazzaville. Angela Ferreira’s work questions the notion of patrimony through what is missing. The Tropical Houses exist because of the environment for which they were built and to whom they belonged. The photographs in the installation bring to the surface the African urban landscape, its environment and even the spectator position of African audiences, whose presence is not visible through devices such as silhouettes or portraits, but suggested only through their absence. This choice brings to mind the void and the silence to which Africans have been reduced in the construction of their own history and patrimonial heritage. During the colonial period and since, Africa has been systematically stripped of the treasures that frame its history and the marks that reflect its role as supplier of modernity. In Maison Tropicale, Angela Ferreira produced a spatial environment in which the viewer could feel and imagine, without possessing detailed information, the contrast between the dream of Prouve´, with all the beauty and efficiency of his architecture, and the bareness of the neighborhood signifying the powerlessness of its citizens. It is crucial to note on a theoretical level that Ferreira’s Venice Biennale installation has placed Africa on a new stage. This is the case, not because of a direct entry
African pavilion or artist
but because of the discourse that it interjects, subverting the longstanding and distorted power relations between Africa and Europe. While the 2007 Venice Biennale did celebrate two artists from Africa
Malick Sidibe, the Malian photographer and recipient of the Golden Lion, and El Anatsui, the Ghanaian sculptor
the representation of Africa has long been contested at the Venice Biennale. In fact, curatorial decisions about African art have frequently been the center of notorious disputes as, for example, the 2007 debate between Robert Storr, Biennial curator and African art specialists Okwi Enwezor and Salah Hassan. In the same year, the first time that the Venice Biennale included an African Pavilion, controversy erupted concerning the choice to represent Africa through an exhibition, ‘Check ListLuanda Pop’, selected from the private collection belonging to a Congolese-born, Luanda-based collector Sindika Dokolo. Claims about the unethical origins of the collector’s fortune dampened enthusiasm about the exhibition. Angela Ferreira’s artistic statement at the Portuguese pavilion is an original contribution in this context because it not only breaks the taboo of representing Africa in its own voice at the Biennale but also reckons with Portugal’s relation to its colonial past. In terms of positioning Africa as a discursive partner, the Portuguese pavilion with Ferreira’s work constitutes an important moment in the history of art, the history of Portugal and world history. 112

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An additional perspective on the sense of loss sparked by the removal of Prouve´ ’s Tropical Houses from their African context is offered by the film Maison Tropicale, directed by Manthia Diawara, who had been asked by Ferreira to write an essay for the exhibition catalog. Drawn to the subject, he decided also to make a documentary about the Tropical Houses and accompanied Ferreira to Congo and Niger with the curator Ju¨ rgen Bock to investigate the Tropical Houses and meet with their African neighbors. The film is independent and not part of the exhibition of Angela Ferreira’s Maison Tropicale, although it can be screened on demand along with the exhibition. The film has not been screened at the Venice Biennale but, for example, was continuously played in a small room beside the display of Maison Tropicale at the Fundac¸ a˜ o de Arte Moderna e Contemporaˆ nea
Colecc¸ a˜ o Berardo in Lisbon. The film thus allows us to hear the African voices absent from the decision-making process. It is clear that as the filmmaker collects oral histories from the people of Niamey and Brazzaville, everyone has a story to tell or an opinion to share: “ “

“

‘Next to it there was one of these houses, but smaller, in aluminum. It was a dance hall!’ Amadou Ousmane in Niamey, neighbor, car collector. ‘I saw the house you’re talking about somewhere in the city center. The house drew the attention of the young children we were back then . . . . I would like to know why that house was taken away’. Ge´ rard Bitsindou in Brazzaville, President of the Constitutional Court of the Republic of Congo. ‘We didn’t think it was important as we only saw Shenge (homeless children) sleeping there. So we didn’t really care. Only later did I realize that a settler had brought it. (. . .) When I see those photos, they got the house and took it to Paris, and turned it into a show, into a spectacle. You see? This makes me think’. Besongo in Brazzaville, Congolese visual artist. (Diawara 2007b)

These voices help to fill the void created by the emptiness in Ferreira’s installation. In the film, Artonnor Ibriahine, former Tuareg neighbor to the house in Niamey (her husband has been the gardener for the Tropical House for 30 years) explains: Even if I am not happy about what happened, what could I do? It was beyond me and I couldn’t do anything. I was sad, but I came back to my hut. How could I have an opinion? The poor doesn’t [sic] have rights. (Diawara 2007b)

Artannor is also wondering about her future and how long she and the other squatters will be allowed to stay in the yard with their nomadic round hunts displayed all around the empty platform originally constructed to support the Tropical House. The woman who owned the house in Brazzaville said that it was her dwelling place. In the film, she states, ‘This house was my refuge. That’s where I cried, where I talked to myself. I liked the blue lookout. I was in the middle of the ocean. It was cool. The shape of the house was scary so I was secure’ (Diawara 2007b). In his documentary, Manthia Diawara emphasizes the ways in which African cultural and social contexts are erased from the decision to deterritorialize patrimonial architecture and the subsequent aesthetic canonization. Few people in Africa had been aware of the existence of the Tropical Houses in Niamey and Brazzaville before they were removed, including their amazing ‘second life’, except for those who saw reports on cable TV channels. The most significant issues in the 113

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story of the Tropical Houses are clearly connected to what is missing in terms of local urban politics and colonial historical memory, but also in regard to the high stakes of the local and international art market.

Ethical challenges and the interpretation of historic architecture in shaping modern identities Preserving urban references and identifying the void Over time in Niger and Congo, inhabitants of the Tropical Houses tried to adapt them to their own needs and concepts of occupying space. Most of the elites, the politicians and the mainstream population did not pay attention to these old houses, which they considered as symbols of a painful past under colonialism. In general, Africans prefer to invest and live in new buildings, which represent modernity for them. However, the question of patrimony and its transmission is a crucial one here. According to the rules of territoriality, the colonial houses belonged to the country in which they were erected. As cultural patrimony, the houses participated in and contributed to the construction of the identity of the territory where they were originally located. As Charles B. Hosmer (1965, 261) has underlined, ‘any building seriously considered for preservation should have outstanding historical and cultural significance in the nation or in the state, region or community in which it exists’. The question for us, therefore, is: How should this colonial patrimony be considered as a way to introduce new references to the modern urban landscape and the social development of the nation in which it is sited? To whom do the Tropical Houses belong? For a long time, professionals, academics, institutions and governments from many parts of the world have applied themselves to the promotion and sharing of knowledge associated with cultural patrimony. An impressive international network and legal framework have developed that encourage communities to preserve their past and reconstitute their cultural heritage. Alice Thomine (2005, 103) notes that since the 1990s in France, research on architecture and colonial patrimony18 has led to cataloging, preservation and scholarship in this area. These endeavors have culminated in a reconsideration of the notion of shared colonial heritage and its role in local urban social and cultural developments.19 In the case of the Tropical Houses, it seems that in both Europe and Africa, administrations and people involved in cultural policy did not take into account the complex dynamic between colonial heritage and the notion of shared patrimony. How can urban references be authenticated in order to identify what we have referred to as the missing and to consider the ways that museums can play a key role in the cultural politics of architectural patrimony? If we take into account the point made by Salah Hassan20 in the film Maison Tropicale, the houses belong to the people of Niger and Congo. This argument is supported by the definition of patrimony as outlined above and by the UNESCO World Heritage Convention of the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage (1972). Thus, the Tropical Houses would be an essential part of those objects inherited from ancestors, both from Europe and from Africa, with ongoing historical, traditional or cultural significance to the community or cultural group. Unfortunately, as we can see with the case of the Tropical Houses, the benefit of cultural heritage belongs to Western countries, their museums and audiences, as well 114

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as the international art market. International corporations and wealthy private individuals in the West provide financial support and control most of the debates regarding the conservation and artistic recognition of patrimonial inheritance. In Africa, in fact, there does not yet exist a coherent politics of the preservation of modern patrimony. At the 2005 Paris conference ‘Rethinking temporal boundaries: History of architecture and the challenge of modern heritage’ (organized by the Institut National de l’Histoire de l’Art), Lazare Eloundou reveals that currently very few architects, engineers, preservationists and scholars are interested by modernist movements and an African vision in Sub-Saharan Africa. Without policies on preserving the recent past, prejudices go unchallenged and Western colonial attitudes and actions continue to operate. Western institutions appropriate the relics of their own and others’ past and continue to emphasize their cultural influence in formal colonial territories, whereas Africans are not able to reappropriate their patrimony and incorporate the traces of external influences in their own national history and contemporary identities. Without the financial capacity or theoretical emphasis on preservation that Westerners share, Africans are denied the benefit of knowing the complexity of their identities through the full diversity of objects that have shaped their cultures. In terms of preserving objects of urban references, it is important to call attention to certain choices made in the process of the Houses’ conservation and display. For example, Robert Rubin (2009, 121) defends ‘the choice to keep a number of bullet holes in the sun-shutters, to leave intact witness marks of the structure’s age that could be discerned through its apparent ‘‘newness’’; and at the same time to be particularly provocative’. It is true that civil war raged in Congo from 1993 to 2002. But there is a danger of falling into a trap by assuming that the preservation of bullet holes underscores a statement of ‘authenticity’ about the continent. My point here is that it leads to an essentialist depiction of Africa only as a land of insecurity and disasters. In other words, bullet holes are the only African sign left after the restoration process. The display of Angela Ferreira’s installation toured in different locations (Venice, Lisbon and Rennes) and offered the viewer an interactive experience with the Tropical Houses. While traveling in the world capitals of contemporary art, the refurbished Prouve´ ’s Tropical Houses and Ferreira’s work have become objects of covetousness far from Africa and its viewers. This approach also highlights the fact that the world is divided into two different viewerships: the African audience, which does not have the opportunity to absorb many of its own cultural inheritances such as the Prouve´ houses, and Western audiences, which have the privilege to attend exhibitions, to appreciate and evaluate the work of artists such as Prouve´ and Ferreira, and to purchase, through museums or private ownership, objects of cultural significance. Lyndel Prott, among others, corroborates this point when she writes (2005, 231): Truth for many does not reside only in contextual information but in the community’s continued re-endorsement of value by use within that community. Scholars and the general public from wealthy countries can now have access to virtually any country in the world. Access to the universal museums of the West is denied simply on economic grounds to many communities distant from them. Private collections are, of course, not accessible to them at all.

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Angela Ferreira’s work is significant in the way it rebalances history by identifying loss. The photographs in her installation convey her message in concrete language and support her artistic concept. When Ferreira identifies the missing house in the photographs, she forces the viewer to visualize it in his or her own mind. On the one hand, with the dialog she creates between the sculptural installation and the photographs, she provides the viewer with the tools to help him or her reappropriate the design of the house by reframing it in relation to personal experience or desire. On the other hand, she enables the viewer to feel and refill the empty spaces by questioning colonial relations between Africa and the West. By representing the Tropical House, a ‘container of history’ as the curator Ju¨ rgen Bock referred to it, Angela Ferreira reinscribes this object in a contemporary context with its African value and questions the ‘official’ narrative. She explores the interstices of the relations between colonizers and colonized. She also puts into motion a dialog between Africa and the West in the struggle for recognition of modernity, and the right to self-definition in the global setting. In her interpretation of the historical house within a contemporary conceptual art installation, Ferreira has kept the history alive in a mode apart from conventional solutions of conservation. Ferreira’s work is a movement toward reconciliation of the two worlds, Western and African, rather than setting them on a collision course, as did the auctioning of the Prouve´ house at Christie’s and its display in the different locations. Today, African cities follow their own grids, struggling between planned and unplanned configurations. Some historical buildings still play a significant role in the city, while others are abandoned to squatters or dismissed by communities. But whatever uses these architectures are put to, their situation brings to attention a social, political and cultural point of view that generates new identities. We, therefore, need to consider them as elements for the legitimization of local modernity. Because they have been removed from their local contexts, Prouve´ ’s houses neither help us to understand African history nor provide insight into contemporaneous African identities. The Tropical Houses were built for colonizers for specific purposes and implementation; then they became dwelling places for Congolese and people from Niger. But they were also spaces of exclusion during colonization, as well as in the present time, in the sense that people from Brazzaville and Niamey had no appreciation of their value or, after the houses were sent back to France, of their preservation and recontextualization. Western art dealers stigmatized the role of Africa and displayed the superiority of their own vision in the way they assigned value to the Tropical Houses. In their works on the Tropical Houses, Angela Ferreira and Manthia Diawara try to fill in the gap of what is missing when Western art dealers silenced and rendered invisible the role of Africa in the valorization of the Tropical Houses. Hence, the preoccupation of the installation and the film with a critique of the contemporary art market for excising political, social and cultural patrimony. Responsibilities in reappropriating the missing Societies create, develop and invent their own living spaces. Local resonances and appropriations are reconstituted in terms of values in order to insure the promotion 116

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of social and cultural developments of communities. Thus, people are able to construct their own environments and oppose unilateralist visions imposed upon them by global forces. Societies can no longer be perceived as simply passive. Even though we welcome the goals of postcolonialism to deconstruct the discourse of logocentrism in the West and promote understanding through multiple points of view, we must also be aware that the vestiges of colonialism
including its architecture
frequently involve a vernacular African history. This is the story that the postcolonial discourse does not take into account. The patrimonial promotion of Prouve´ ’s houses has been produced unilaterally. When museums display the Tropical Houses, they should be fully involved in the discourses that shape identities, define patrimonial valorization and set preservation policies. On the contrary, they focus only on modernist architecture and the singularity of Prouve´ as a designer. The curators framed their exhibitions through a romanticized ideal of ‘priceless memory’, and they did not consider the political causes and consequences of their repatriation, nor their social impact on the African environment. As Michel Foucault stated in his introduction to The Archaeology of Knowledge (1972), we only know and see the spaces that the mental structure of our time allows us to conceptualize. The work of art needs the participation of observers, curators and scholars in order to be conceptualized and it is the role of museums to initiate these conversations (Bourdieu 1998; Clifford 1988). The African contribution could reveal the complexity of the Tropical Houses through me´ tissage which, to paraphrase Jean-Loup Amselle (1990), is a continuing process of interactions and exchanges between two or more cultures that modifies the cultures in situ. Historical monuments and buildings in the city, just like the concept of me´ tissage, are constitutive of palimpsestic elements. This process does not appear in the interpretation of the Tropical Houses. On the one hand, the case of the Tropical Houses is not unique as, for diverse reasons, many objects and buildings have been displaced all over the world. On the other hand, it is a unique case because it highlights important issues of ‘me´ tis territories’ and the way people appropriate their own stories to write a contemporaneous urban vernacular language. It is important to place Africa in the context of world historical developments such as colonialism and globalization in order to understand how geographies of loss continue to structure contemporary urbanisms. I agree with Achille Mbembe, who, along with other scholars, has argued that it is the West that invents Africa: ‘The native offers him/herself to the colonist as if not him/herself’ as a shadow, or double of him/herself (Mbembe 2001, 237). Mbembe (2003) reveals the complicity of African leaders in the silencing of African voices; he also denounces the usual unilateral leadership of the West over African countries. Museums in Africa must be part of these thought processes that strengthen bilateral dialogues. While no museum in Africa had the opportunity to display the refurbished Tropical House or Ferriera’s installation, it would have been relevant, for example, to have Internet discussions on the issues involving museum professionals, scholars and artists from African and Western countries. These discussions could have generated new displays, or conceptual works, of the Tropical Houses
engaging a shared interpretation and a richer and more complex approach to the colonial period. In addition, the Tropical Houses could have been restored and kept in Africa to operate as cultural centers or public spaces. African audience could then have been able to integrate the houses into their cultural heritage as part of the history of colonialism 117

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and urbanization. Unfortunately, the historical trail of the Tropical Houses has followed the frontiers set up by colonial history, instead of opening up bilateral dialogues between the different territories of contemporary thought and creativity.

Conclusion During the colonial period, as this study of Prouve´ ’s Tropical Houses shows, diverse African locales became incubation sites for ‘avant-gardist’ art, architecture and culture. Today, in a transnational process at the dawn of the twenty-first century, what I have termed here as a missing African history has the potential to highlight both the difficulties African countries face in their attempt to assert their national and cultural political identities on the international stage as well as the challenges Westerners face when they do not recognize the failures of postcolonialism. In that sense, Angela Ferreira’s Maison Tropicale installation provides a noteworthy criticism about postcolonialism and the African voiceless in the promotion of modernity. On a larger scale, Ferreira questions the role of art within the new Web of relationships driven by globalization and creolization. In a recent interview Edouard Glissant stated: I believe that Relation is made up of all the differences in the world and that we should not forget a single one of them, even the smallest. If you forget the tiniest difference in the world, well, Relation is no longer Relation. (. . .) Relation is total; otherwise it’s not Relation. So that’s why I prefer the notion of Relation to the notion of the universal. (Diawara 2010, 62)

I believe that we can use Glissant’s concept of ‘Relation’ (Glissant 1997; Glissant and Chamoiseau 2008) to better understand the process of patrimonial valuation of the Tropical Houses. We should take into account all the components that have shaped the Tropical Houses as patrimonial heritage. These will include the following: Prouve´ ’s visionary contribution to modernist architecture, the legacy of the French dream of empire in Africa, the me´ tis cultures born out of the encounters between the colonizers and the colonized, the African voices of the postcolonial era, the politics of patrimonial inheritance and the local and global art markets. Together, these considerations call into question the ethics of contemporary art galleries, biennales and museums in defining and valorizing cultural patrimony. Most of the time in the West, Africa is a continent out of focus except in negative terms (illness, wars and poverty) or the exotic (beautiful landscapes, ongoing traditions). Africa has been in motion with numerous migrations, a growing Diaspora, and the commerce of its treasures. Accordingly, Africa has been central to the history of globalization for centuries and must contribute to the global conversation and the narration of contemporary history. Africans must be respected in advocating their own perspectives and implementations. In fact, a half century after African countries have achieved independence, the main point here is not to question the past but to recognize the syncretic pattern of the new African urban content in order to understand the contemporary puzzle of the urban landscape and envision the creative endowment of its inhabitants. As long as voices are missing, these components and mutations will be indistinguishable and invaluable in writing history. Renewal within societies or artistic practice usually 118

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comes from what you reject or cannot
or do not want to
see. Museums can play a key role in the cultural politics that influence the reuse and valorization of modern architectural patrimony. It is one of the goals of museum professionals to use the past to address the present and to challenge constructions of the other to create meaning within art in order to bring to light a richer and more accurate history of people. The role of museums in Africa and Western countries is to connect different perspectives of creativity and preservation, to construct meaning within art, to get rid of colonial dependency and to bring to light a more creative and visionary history of people. Acknowledgements I deeply thank Janet C. Marstine, Alexander Bauer and Chelsea Haines for their great support. They were generous for their time and challenging in their questions. Many thanks to Manthia Diawara for his continuous support, and to Angela Ferreira and Jurgen Bock for permission to reprint stills from Maison Tropicale.

Notes 1. At the turn of the twentieth century, modernists rejected traditional values and practices in art, looking instead for new modes of expressions. The term modernism here applies to architects and designers who preferred to emphasize the materials used and pure geometrical forms. 2. See also Tristan Guilloux’s works about colonial architecture in Brazzaville and the Tropical Houses. 3. Le Corbusier (1887
1965) is the pseudonym for Charles E´ douard Jeanneret-Gris, a Swiss/ French architect, city planner, painter and writer, who was one of the most influential architects of the twentieth century. 4. D.J. Huppatz (2010, 33) explains: ‘Prouve´ expanded into furniture design and joined the modernist dissidents from the Socie´ te´ des Artistes De´ corateurs who formed their own association, the Union des Artistes Modernes (UAM) in 1930. Participants included leading modernist architects such as Le Corbusier, Jeanneret, Mallet-Stevens, as well as furniture designers such as Prouve´, Charlotte Perriand and Rene´ Herbst’. Also see this article for further insights into Prouve´ ’s architectural innovations. 5. See the catalog of the exhibition Jean Prouve´ # Tropical Houses. Large Brazzaville Tropical House. Edition Eric Touchaleaume
Galerie 54, Paris, 2006. 6. In 1974 the government of Portugal was overthrown by the military. The new regime (which favored self-determination for all of Portugal’s colonies) made an effort to resolve the conflict in Mozambique. Talks with Frelimo resulted in a mutual cease-fire and an agreement for Mozambique to become independent in June 1975. 7. The Carnation Revolution changed the Portuguese regime from an authoritarian dictatorship to a democracy after two years of a transitional period known as PREC (Processo Revoluciona´ rio Em Curso). 8. Alain Godonou, Director of the School of African Heritage in Porto Novo, Benin, reminds us that ‘90% of the African patrimony is outside the continent’ (Public debate on Memory and Universality: New Challenges Facing Museums, UNESCO, February 5, 2007. http://portal.unesco.org/culture/en/ev.phpURL_ID32653&URL_DODO_TOPIC &URL_SECTION201.html/). The School for African Heritage (EPA) is located in Porto-Novo, Benin. It is a postgraduate university institution, specialized in the preservation and promotion of both tangible and intangible cultural heritage. 9. See, for example, the different works initiated by DOCOMOMO (Working Party for the Documentation and Conservation of buildings, sites and neighborhoods of the Modern Movement; http://www.docomomo.com/; by ICOMOS-UNESCO-ICCROM) and in particular by the seminars held in 1994 in Helsinki and in 1996 in Mexico City; by the Montreal Action plan, 2001; and also the essay by R. van Oers and S. Haraguchi, eds.

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10. 11. 12.

13.

14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

19.

20.

2003. Identification and documentation of modern heritage, World Heritage Papers 5. http:// whc.unesco.org/en/series/5/ For example, the Alaoui museum opened in the Beylical Palace in Tunis,Tunisia; the Craft Museum in the residence of the sultan Rabah/Morocco; and the Abomey Historical Museum on the palatial site in Abomey, Benin. Named today IRD (Institut de recherche pour le de´ veloppement). Eric Touchaleaume explains in The Guardian that ‘(. . .) it took six months to get them out. Congo had been through civil war and a succession of governments; negotiations ensued between ministers, tribal factions and two families that both claimed to own the houses’. Steve Rose. 2008. House hunting. The Guardian. http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/ February 7. William L. Hamilton in The New York Times specifies that ‘the Maison, occupied by squatters, was sold twice to Mr. Touchaleaume, he said, by two parties who each claimed ownership. Mr. Touchaleaume added that he also paid the government, which raised patrimonial claims, and waited five months for the railroad to reopen before shipping the house out. In the same article we learn that it cost nearly $2 million for Touchaleaume to restore the big house from Brazzaville’. Hamilton, W.L. 2007. From Africa to Queens, modernist gem, fully assembled. New York Times, May 16. Maison Tropicale, documentary film directed by M. Diawara (52 min, Portugal/USA, 2008). Bullet holes extra by Amelia Gentleman, The Guardian, Tuesday 31 August 2004. www. guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2004/aug/31/architecture.regeneration#history-link-box/ http://hammer.ucla.edu/exhibitions/detail/exhibition_id/105/ Balatz is the owner of some of the most glamorous and stylish hotels in the world as the Mercer Hotel in Soho, New York. The book Architecture Franc¸ aise d’outre mer, initiated by Maurice Culot and Jean-Marie Thiveaud, published by Pierre Mardaga/Lie`ge and the Institut Franc¸ ais d’Architecture/ Paris in 1992, is referred to as the pioneer in the field of architecture and French colonial patrimony. The objective was to save the memory of the buildings realized by French architects in diverse former colonies. See, for example, the joint program for the identification, documentation and promotion of the built heritage of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries labeled Modern Heritage Program launched in 2001 with the UNESCO World Heritage Center, ICOMOS (International Council on Monuments and Sites) and DOCOMOMO (Working Party for the Documentation and Conservation of buildings, sites and neighborhoods of the Modern Movement); the Euromed Heritage regional program for the Mediterranean region (http://whc.unesco.org/en/activities/); and essays by J. Lagae and L. Eloundou presented at the conference ‘Rethinking Temporal Boundaries: History of Architecture and the Challenge of Modern Heritage’, Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art, Paris, 2005. http://inha.revues.org/ In an interview at the Venice Biennale, extract from the film Maison Tropicale.

References Amselle, J. 1990. Logiques me´ tisses, Anthropologie en Afrique et ailleurs. Paris: Payot. ´ ditions du Bourdieu, P. 1998. Les re`gles de l’art. Gene`se et structure du champ litte´ raire. Paris: E Seuil. (Orig. pub. 1992.)

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NEW DIRECTIONS IN MUSEUM ETHICS Cinqualbre, O. 2009. The Tropical House. In Jean Prouve´ La Maison Tropicale [The Tropical House]. Paris: Editions du Centre Georges Pompidou. Clifford, J. 1988. The predicament of culture: Twentieth-century ethnography, literature, and art. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Diawara, M. 2007a. Architecture as Colonial Discourse Angela Ferreira: On Jean Prouve’s Maisons Tropicales. In Maison Tropicale. Angela Ferreira, ed. Jurgen Bock, 38
53. Catalogue of the exhibition. Lisbon: Instituto das Artes, Ministerio da Cultura. Diawara, M. 2007b. Maison Tropicale. Documentary film directed by Manthia Diawara. Lisbon: Maumaus. Diawara, M. 2010. Conversation with Edouard Glissant aboard the Queen Mary II. In Afro Modern: Journey through the Black Atlantic, Ed. Tanya Barson and Peter Gorschluter, 58
63. Liverpool: Tate Publishing. Foucault, M. 1972. The archaeology of knowledge. London: Tavistock. (Org. pub. Paris: Gallimard, 1969.) Glissant, E. 1997. The poetics of relation. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan. (Org. pub. Paris: Gallimard, 1990.) Glissant, E., and P. Chamoiseau. 2008. L’intraitable beaute´ du monde. Adresse a` Barack Obama. Paris: Editions Galaade. Guilloux, T. 2005. Le climat dans l’architecture moderne. In Architecture coloniale et Patrimoine. Paris: Somogy edition d’Art, Institut National du Patrimoine. Hosmer, C.B. 1965. Criteria for selecting buildings worthy of preservation. In Presence of the past: A history of the preservation movement in the United States before Williamsburg. New York: G.P. Putnam & Sons. Huppatz, D.J. 2010. Jean Prouve´ ’s Maison Tropicale: The poetics of the colonial object. Design Issues l26, no. 4: 32
44. Lamberti, A. 2008. Modern heritage documentation for conservation and cultural development in the Mediterranean Region
An interdisciplinary approach and postcolonial perspective. e-conservation magazine, no. 3, 96
107. http://www.e-conservationline.com/ content/view/604/ Le Brusq, A. 2005. From colonial museum to the invention of a crossed patrimony. In Architecture Coloniale et Patrimoine. Paris: Somogy edition d’Art, Institut National du Patrimoine. Mbembe, A. 2001. On the postcolony. Berkeley: University of California Press. Mbembe, A. 2003. Necropolitics. Public Culture 15. no. 1: 11
40. Morton, P.A. 2000. Hybrid modernities: Architecture and representation at the 1931 colonial exposition, Paris. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Prott, L.V. 2005. The international movement of cultural objects. International Journal of Cultural Property 12, no. 2: 225
48. Rubin, R. 2009. From Brazzaville to Paris. In Jean Prouve´ La Maison Tropicale/The Tropical House. Paris: Editions du Centre Georges Pompidou. Sandqvist, G. 2007. Sculpture revisited. In Maison Tropicale. Angela Ferreira, 20
34. Catalogue of the exhibition. Lisbon: The Instituto das Artes, Ministerio da Cultura. Sinou, A. 2005. The process of patrimonization of colonial area in Western Africa. In Architecture Coloniale et Patrimoine, 135
47. Paris: Somogy edition d’Art, Institut National du Patrimoine. Thomine, A. 2005. L’Etat des connaisances sur l’architecture et le patrimoine colonial Franc¸ ais. Architecture Coloniale et Patrimoine, 103
5. Paris: Somogy edition d’Art, Institut National du Patrimoine. Touchaleaume, E. 2006. Jean Prouve´ # The Tropical Houses. Large Brazzaville Tropical House. Catalogue d’exposition. Paris: Editions Eric Touchaleaume
Galerie 54. Toulier, B. 2005. Introduction to Architecture Coloniale et Patrimoine, 11
23. Paris: Somogy edition d’Art, Institut National du Patrimoine.

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Index

Page numbers in Bold represent figures. Cameron, Dan 94, 101n.2 Carnegie, Andrew 93 Carnegie International (biennial) 93 Carnegie Museums, Pittsburgh 18 case studies: Chucalissa Museum 76, 82–5, 87–8n.11; Manchester Museum 56–75; Prospect.1 New Orleans (art biennial) 90– 1, 93, 94–9, 96, 98; social media 24–39; Soorah Hera case 47–53; Tropical Houses 103–21 Choy, Lee Weng 91 Chucalissa Museum, Memphis 76, 82–5, 87– 8n.11 Cinqualbre, Olivier 109–10 Clifford, James 88n.12 Clough, G. Wayne 7 Code of Ethics for Government Employees (US) 30 Code of Ethics for Museums (International Council of Museums) 45 colonialism 107–8, 110, 114–15, 117–18 community advisory panels 13 community engagement 5–6, 7, 14–15, 45; Soorah Hera case 47–53; see also participatory museum work Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage (2003) 42 cosmopolitanism 80, 85–6 Cuno, James 80–2 curators: biennials 92, 101n.2; role of 41–2

Adam & Ewald, de zevendedaagsgeliefden (Hera) 48–53 Africa: access to cultural heritage 115; representation at Venice Biennale 112; Western colonial attitudes 115, 117, 118; see also Tropical Houses American Association of Museums 40 Amsterdam Historical Museum 43 Anderson, Maxwell 10, 12 Appiah, Kwame Anthony 76, 80, 83, 84, 85–6 Archaeology of Knowledge, The (Foucault) 117 architectural heritage, cultural ownership of 114–16, 118 art biennials, see biennials Augé, Marc 107 Australia: National Museum of Australia 16– 17; public scrutiny of museums 7–8 author creditation 30–1, 61 Bell, Emily 72 Bennett, Tony 78, 87n.3 Besterman, T. 5, 9, 28 ‘Bienniale Demand’ (Choy) 91 biennials: Carnegie International 93; curatorial aspects 92, 101n.2; devastated areas 92–3; Documenta (Kassel) 92–3; geographic nature of 91, 101n.1; Gwangju Biennial 93; influence on United States 93; Johannesburg Biennial 93; Prospect.1 New Orleans 93, 94–9, 96, 98, 100–1; purpose and role of 90–1, 100–1; Venice Biennale 92, 105; Whitney Biennial 93 Bizot Group 79, 80 BODY WORLDS 4: The Original Exhibition of Real Human Bodies 61 Bolter, J.D. 26 Boyd, D. 27–8 Boyd, W.L. 61 Braden, D.R. 61 British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) 72 Brown, Pete 56–75

dashboard transparency: criticism of 13–14; Indianapolis Museum of Art dashboard 10–13, 11; uses of 9–10 deaccession/disposal activities 7, 12 Declaration of the Importance and Value of the Universal Museum 76, 77, 79–80, 81, 85 Defining Museum Ethics (2008) 45 Diakhaté, Lydie 103–21 Diamond Gym: Action Network 95–7, 96 Diawara, Manthia 112 digital media 28 Documenta (Kassel biennial) 92–3

122

INDEX Groys, B. 34 Gurian, E.H. 59, 61, 62 Gwangju Biennial 93

Düsseldorf 44 Du Vivier de Streel, Edmond 107–8 Edson, Gary 86 Eloundou, Lazare 115 ethics: codes of 40–1, 45; and professionalism 40–2, 53–4; stakeholders 42–5, 46–7; teaching professional ethics 42, 45–7; and transparency 8–10 ‘Exhibitionary Complex, The’ (Bennett) 78 exhibition making case study, Manchester Museum 56–75; background and purpose of exhibition 56–7; description 57–8, 58; exhibition making practice 61–2; feedback 71–3, 73–4n11; human remains, attitudes to display of 60–1; key goals 58; Personal Meaning Mapping (PMM) research methodology 62–3, 63; PMM analysis explanation 65–6; PMM dimension 1: quantity of relevant vocabulary 66; PMM dimension 2: range of visitors' understanding 66–8, 67; PMM dimension 3: visitors' grasp of concepts and subject areas 68–70, 69, 70; PMM dimension 4: mastery of subject matter 70–1; PMM exercise 64–5; public consultation exercise 58–60; public debate 59–60; questionnaire data 64

Haines, Chelsea 90–102 Harris, Neil 61 Hassan, Salah 114 Haworth, John 17, 20 Hera, Sooreh 47–53 heritage 42–3 Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture 7 Holocaust Museum, Washington 25–6; ethical challenges of social media 29–35 Hood, Adrienne D. 61 Hood, Christopher 6 Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College 16 Hooper-Greenhill, Eileen 78, 87n.3 Hosmer, Charles B. 114 human remains 17, 20, 82, 83–4, 85, 87n.10: see also Lindow Man: A Bog Body Mystery, exhibition, Manchester Museum Huppatz, D.J. 104, 119n.4 Hurricane Katrina 94: see also Prospect.1 New Orleans (art biennial) Identity by Design 17 I'll Be Back, 2008–18 99 Indianapolis Museum of Art, dashboard 10– 13, 11 indigenous peoples 82–5, 86–7 information, rights to 4–5; informed consent 6 Inside: Life in Children's Homes and Institutions 17 Inspiring Learning for All Generic Learning Outcomes (GLOs) 65, 68–70, 69, 70 Institute of Museum Ethics, Seton Hall University 45 Internal Revenue Service form 990 (US) 5 International Colonial Exhibition (1931) 107– 8 International Council of Museums 45 International Office of Museums 41 internet 5, 18, 19, 41; see also social media Islam 48 Islam Democrats 49

Facebook 28, 34–5 feminism 15 Ferreira, Angela 103–4, 105–7, 106, 110–12, 111, 116, 118 Finkelpearl, Tim 6, 14–15 Fire in my Belly, A 7 Flickr 32–3 Florida 9 Florini, A. 9, 19 Foucault, Michel 117 Freedom of Information Act (US) 5 Freedom of Information laws 5, 9 Fung, A. 18 Garsten, Christina 3, 4, 13–14, 19, 20 Geismar, H 81, 84 Gentleman, Amelia 109 German Museum Association 40 Giroux, Henry A. 100 ‘Give and Take’ project 43 glass, use in architecture 2 Glissant, Edouard 118 Goffman, E. 43 Gogh, Theo van 51 Gorman, Joshua M. 76–89 Gouda 50, 51 Graham, M. 18 Gromala, D. 26

James, Alison 65 James, N. 73 Janes, R.R. 12, 61, 62 Jeanneret-Gris, Charles-Édouard, see Le Corbusier Jenkins, H. 26 Johannesburg Biennial 93 Jones, Malcolm 101

123

INDEX Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa 81 museums: and accessible information 6–7, 10; deaccession/disposal activities 7, 12; and indigenous peoples 82–5; participatory museum work 43–5; performance indicators 11; public scrutiny of 7–8; sharing of values 15; social role of 41; training 42, 45–7, 51; see also museum studies; transparency Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge (Hooper-Greenhill) 78 Museums Association (MA) 7 museum studies: ethical constructions of 85– 6; knowledge construction and mediation 80; new museology concepts 77–9 Mutu, Wangechi 99 Myths about Race 15–16, 16

Kassel 92–3 Kreps, Christina 43 Krimpen, Wim van 48 L9 Center for the Arts, New Orleans 95 Lamberti, Annarita 107 Le Brusq, Arnauld 104 Le Corbusier 108, 119n.3, 124 Lee Weng Choy, see Choy, Lee Weng Library of Congress 33 Lindh de Montoya, Monica 3, 4, 13–14, 19, 20 Lindow Man: A Bog Body Mystery, exhibition, Manchester Museum: background and purpose of exhibition 56– 7; description 57–8, 58; exhibition making practice 61–2; feedback 71–3, 73–4n11; human remains, attitudes to display of 60– 1; key goals 58; Personal Meaning Mapping (PMM) research methodology 62–3, 63; PMM analysis explanation 65–6; PMM dimension 1: quantity of relevant vocabulary 66; PMM dimension 2: range of visitors' understanding 66–8, 67; PMM dimension 3: visitors' grasp of concepts and subject areas 68–70, 69, 70; PMM dimension 4: mastery of subject matter 70– 1; PMM exercise 64–5; public consultation exercise 58–60; public debate 59–60; questionnaire data 64 Little Music 97–9, 98 Liverpool 15 Lubar, Steven 6, 8, 12, 16, 17, 19 Lyautey, Hubert 107 Lynch, Bernadette 15

Nagin, Ray 95 National Museum of Australia 16–17, 20 National Museum of the American Indian (MNAI) New York 17, 18 National Museums, Liverpool 15 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) 1990 (US) 76, 82, 83, 84, 85 Netherlands: cultural identity problems 47–8; Municipal Museum of Gouda 50, 51; organizational structure of museums 46; Soorah Hera and the Municipal Museum of the Hague 48–53; Zoetermeer City Museum 43–4 Network for Mississippian Heritage 76 new museology, see museology New Orleans, see Prospect.1 New Orleans (art biennial) New York Review of Books 80 Nishizawa, Ryue 2 Nolan, Michael, Baron Nolan 6

Macchi, Jorge 97–9, 98 McGuigan, Cathleen 101 McKenzie, Dave 99 Maison Tropicale (exhibition) 103–4, 105–7, 106, 109–12, 111, 116, 118 Maison Tropicale (film) 113–14, 116 Manchester Museum 13, 15–16, 16, 17; exhibitions 56; Lindow Man: A Bog Body Exhibition 56–75; mission statement 57 Marstine, Janet 1–23 Martin, Reinhold 2 Mbembe, Achille 117 Meijer-van Mensch, Léontine 40–55 ‘Memory of East’ (website) 43 Merriman, Nick 6, 7, 8, 10, 13, 18 métisage 117 Municipal Museum of Gouda 50, 51 Municipal Museum of the Hague 48–53 Muséographie conference (1934) 41 museology 29, 41, 43, 77–9 Museum Ethics (Edson) 77

Obama, Barack 4 objects: connections to creators 84; contextualization of 79–80, 83; ownership 84, 86; repatriation requests 79, 81, 82, 83– 4, 85–7 O'Neill, O. 14 openness 5–6 Orr, Emma Restall 60 Parry, R. 25 participatory museum work 43–5: see also community engagement performance indicators 11 Personal Meaning Mapping (PMM) research method 62–71, 63, 67, 69, 70 Petkova, E. 17

124

INDEX photographs, ethical use of 32–3 Pickering, Michael 7, 18, 20 Poster, Mark 27 professionalism: and ethics 40–2, 53–4; stakeholders 42–5, 46–7; teaching professional ethics 42; 45–7 Prospect.1 New Orleans (art biennial) 90–1, 93, 94–9, 100–1; Diamond Gym: Action Network 95–7, 96; I'll Be Back, 2008–18 99; Little Music 97–9, 98 Prott, Lyndel 115 Prouvé, Jean 103–5, 108, 110

photographs, ethical use of 32–3; Twitter 30–1, 33; user privacy 34–5; visitor feedback 33–4; YouTube 28, 31–2 sociomuseology 41 Sola, Tomislav 77 So Much Trouble in the World: BELIEVE IT OR NOT! 16 sovereignty 86–7 Stadtmuseum Düsseldorf 44 stakeholders 42–5, 46–7 Stein, Rob 10, 11, 12–13 ‘Sunshine Law’ (Florida) 9

Queens Museum of Art 14

Takekawa, Beth 7 Thomine, Alice 114 Tjan, Ranti 50 Toledo Museum of Art Glass Pavilion 1, 2 Touchaleaume, Eric 109, 120n.12, n.13 Toulier, Bernard 108 training 42, 45–7; lessons from Soora Hera case 51, 52–3 transactional transparency, see dashboard transparency transparency: in architecture 2–3; evasion of 5; as an ideal 4–5; as an instrumental value 3–4; links with finance 4–5; and museum ethics 8–10; museum transparency 5–8; online transparency 5; relationship with openness 5–6; targeted transparency 18; see also dashboard transparency; museum transparency; radical transparency Tropical Houses 103–5, 108–10; African museums, lack of influence 117–18; cultural ownership of 114–16, 118; Maison Tropicale (exhibition) 103–4, 105–7, 106, 109–12, 111; Maison Tropicale (film) 113– 14, 116; museum display of 109, 117 Twitter 30–1, 33

radical transparency 3–4, 8, 9; advantages of 13; and democratic participation 14–15; empowering informed choice 17–18; future of 20; internal and external alignments 18– 19; limits of 19–20; and value-based decision-making 15–17; see also transparency Ramkumar, V. 17 reciprocity 15 Recommendation on Participation by the People at Large in Cultural Life and their Contribution to it (UNESCO) 41 reflexive museology 41 Reinwardt Academy 42, 45–7, 51 repatriation requests 79, 81, 82, 83–4, 85–7 Re-Presenting Disability (Sandell) 45 Roberts, Alasdair 18 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 2 Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (James) 88n.12 Rubin, Robert 107, 108, 109, 115 Rudnitzky, Edgardo 97–9, 98 Russell, Gordon 95

UNESCO 41, 42, 81, 114 United Kingdom, ‘Seven Principles of Public Life’ 6 United Nations 4 United States: biennials, influence of 93; Code of Ethics for Government Employees 30; Freedom of Information Act (1966) 5; Internal Revenue Service form 990 5; Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) 1990 76, 82, 83, 84, 85; see also Prospect.1 New Orleans (art biennial) universalism 79–81, 85

SANAA 2 Sandell, Richard 45 Saul, John Ralston 62 Schjeldahl, Peter 94–5, 100 Sejima, Kazuyo 2 ‘Seven Principles of Public Life’ 6 Simon, Nina 44 situated revelations 1, 3–4, 13, 15, 18, 20 Small, Lawrence 7 Smith, Laurajane 41, 42–3 Smithsonian Institution 7 social media 12, 18; definition of 26–7; digital information, preservation of 33–4; ethical challenges of use by Holocaust Museum, Washington 29–35; and ethical practice 25– 6, 27–8; Facebook 28, 34–5; Flickr 32–3; hate culture 31–2; and museum ethics 28–9; museums' use of 24–5, 28–9, 35–6;

value-based decision making 15–17 Venice Biennale 92, 105 Walker Laird, P. 61

125

INDEX Walker, Margaret Urban 15 Ward, Nari 95–7, 96 Weil, D. 18 Weil, Stephen 78 Wetenhall, John 8–9, 10, 18 Whitney Biennial 93 Whitney Museum of American Art 93 ‘Whose culture is it?’ (Appiah) 80 WikiLeaks 19 Wilders, Geert 48 Wing Luke Museum 18 Wojnarowicz, David 7

Wong, Amelia S. 24–39 World Bank 4 Yakel, E. 61 Young, Culyer 51 Young, Iris Marion 14 YouTube 28, 31–2 Zoetermeer City Museum 43–4

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Other titles from Routledge Repackaging Libraries for Survival Climbing out of the Box Edited by Sul H. Lee Research libraries face many challenges in today’s declining economy. The essays in this book explore these challenges and were originally delivered at a conference entitled "Climbing Out of the Box: Repackaging Libraries for Survival," sponsored by the University of Oklahoma Libraries and held March 4-5, 2010, in Oklahoma City. The authors, recognized leaders in academic librarianship, broach sensitive, but necessary, discussions in how academic libraries provide services and resources today while planning for the future. As academic libraries continue to transform, each of the cases included provide specific examples of strategies used to place libraries in a position of competitive values for future research, teaching, and learning in higher education. Each situation is unique to the culture and economic conditions of particular institutions. However, the research cases provide all academic librarians with examples of how our libraries can repackage roles and content in order to survive in the twentyfirst century. This book was originally published as a special issue in the Journal of Library Administration. October 2011: 246 x 174: 168pp Hb: 978-0-415-69743-9 £85 / $135

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Other titles from Routledge Heritage and Community Engagement Collaboration or Contestation? Edited by Emma Waterton and Steve Watson This book is about the way that professionals in archaeology and in other sectors of heritage interact with a range of stakeholder groups, communities and the wider public. However, this book questions not so much the motivations of heritage professionals but the nature of the engagement itself, the extent to which this is collaborative or contested and the implications this has for the communities concerned. In exploring these issues in a variety of contexts around the world, it recognises that heritage provides a source of engagement within communities that is separate from professional discourse and can thus enable them to find voices of their own in the political processes that concern them and affect their development, identity and well-being. This book was published as a special issue of the International Journal of Heritage Studies. August 2010: 246 x 174: 192pp Hb: 978-0-415-58362-6 £80 / $125 For more information and to order a copy visit www.routledge.com/9780415583626

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