A Museum of a Museum?
Or the subversive power of labels
Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford. Photo © Eithne Owens
I ‘discovered’ the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford in my early twenties. It was fashionable then (I think it still is) to be both amazed and amused by it, preserved like a perfect specimen of 19th century museology, with collections displayed to illustrate ‘progress’ (which seems to have been Augustus Pitt Rivers’ own interpretation of evolution X the march of civilisation and a heavy seasoning of imperialist ideas). As recently as 2023, Adam Kuper, writing in The Museum of Other People, calls the Pitt Rivers, ‘perhaps the most perfect example of a museum that belongs in a museum’. Joe Rohde, veteran of Disney Imagineering, described it in a 2023 Instagram post as, ‘an unreformed 19th century style mathom-house of stuff collected from absolutely everywhere. More like a Wunderkammer than a modern museum.’
Yes, but. I also know that the Museum has been working (and researching and publishing) on a long-term decolonisation process: unpicking and unpacking the structures that support the displays. So, on a recent trip to Oxford, I went to the Pitt Rivers, curious to see what it would say to me now.
The first thing to note is that the Museum still has a strong capacity to charm. The main entrance is at the back of the Oxford University Museum of Natural History: you pass from one, bright, light space to an altogether darker and more visually cluttered one. And while the OUMNH is not exactly spare or low on objects, the object-density of the Pitt Rivers is next level. There is no question that there is a wonder from the initial feeling of having entered a different (museum) world. Few of the trappings of contemporary exhibition design are in immediate evidence: a few graphic panels near the entrance, a few screens on the margins, discreet QR codes that link to further information. The main ingredients are still the objects, the vitrines and the labels.
The second thing to note is that despite the above comments (or because of them), or what my 20 year old self would glibly have said, the Pitt Rivers declares very firmly that it is not a ‘museum of a museum’. ‘The Museum has always adapted and changed over time, by updating displays, adding to the collections and consciously working to keep it relevant.’ My now self doesn’t think that the Pitt Rivers is a museum of a museum, a display preserved for posterity. I think it’s something much more interesting than that. It’s a museum that can uniquely show its own evolution: not at all ossified but rather with something new to say about how we ‘do’ museums.
What is perhaps most fascinating about the Museum is how it does this. Despite a plan for a new building in the 1960s (I was at a conference a while ago when someone showed images of the proposed new building and layout … you’ve never heard such a collective sharp intake of breath) the Museum still mostly inhabits the original footprint agreed by Pitt Rivers with the University in 1884. A clause in Pitt Rivers’ will (variously interpreted) stipulates that:
The general mode of arrangement at present adopted in the said Collection shall be maintained and no changes shall be made in details during the lifetime of the said Augustus Henry Lane Fox Pitt Rivers without his consent and any changes in details which may be made after the death of the said Augustus Henry Lane Fox Pitt Rivers shall be such only as shall be necessitated by the advance of knowledge and as shall not affect the general principle originated by the said Augustus Henry Lane Fox Pitt Rivers.
The sleight of hand the Museum achieves is in making it seem as though nothing has changed, while making it clear that things are constantly changing.
Two things can be true. Whatever Pitt Rivers’ original rationale for organising the collections, the irony is that now the thematic groupings are both immediate and effective. Joe Rohde’s take is that:
The groupings are, for the most part, thematic … like … Animal Stuff! … Human faces!! … How people make fire everywhere!! … Amulets!! … Here’s some boat models!! Modern curators just cringe at this but there is emotional power in this bundling. It’s purpose is not so much to reveal facts as to create wonder, which is vastly more liberating than receiving established wisdom.
I don’t believe modern curators do cringe at this, necessarily, but agree about the emotional power. It speaks to us on some deep level because it’s how we instinctively organise stuff or connect new things to our lives.
But alongside the thematic groupings that speak to our curiosity and evoke wonder – even a playfulness that ‘seems’ to break the boundaries of contemporary curatorial practice – there is a very active curation at work, in one of the simplest (and oldest) media a museum can employ: the labels.
Within each vitrine you can see families of labels, some handwritten (some written directly on to the objects), some typewritten, some printed. They represent layers of museology, changing ideas. The most recent layer (introduced in a dedicated panel by the entrance) decodes the colonial messages within older labels. There is something about the proximity of the labels to the objects and their subjectivity that appeals to me. In a way they are helpless to hide their authorship – partly because the addition of later labels makes it so clear that another person (curator, writer) has entered the space. They are, in their low-key, low-tech way, one of the most subversive ways I have seen of decolonising a museum. And they achieve this because it’s all there, hiding in plain sight.
Food For Thought
I wanted to highlight the research section of the Pitt Rivers’ website. Not only are they actively researching the collections but also the practice of the museum - including a ‘labelling matters’ project.
If you’re on Instagram and interested in experience design / experience architecture, Joe Rohde @joerohde frequently posts about the history of experience design … all the way back to Ancient Rome (echoing one of my favourite books on the design of spectacle, From the Vatican to Vegas.)
This piece by Dan Hicks features a model of Pier Luigi Nervi’s 1960s concept for a new Pitt Rivers Museum (crazy!); I also like how Hicks contextualises the recent wave of museum renovations and new buildings.