An Archaeologist, an Art Historian and a Museologist Walk into a Museum…
Or, the difficulty of the follow through
Photo © Eithne Owens
I was very excited to visit the Sainsbury Centre in Norwich. So excited that it was offered to me as a birthday treat. And then I went and … well, it’s not the story I expected to tell, but it’s a useful learning nonetheless.
A few months ago I read about the Sainsbury Centre’s approach to Living Art. According to its website: it is not a museum to only learn more about artists, cultures or movements like Francis Bacon, the Tang Dynasty or Modernism, it is a place of experience, where collections are animate, and visitors are emotionally connected.
Animate objects? Sign me up! Plus a friend of my sister’s who’d been raved about it. All signs pointed to something special.
The map given on arrival includes a welcome from the director. You’re invited to go on an emotional journey at the Sainsbury Centre. Fall in love with artworks; reconnect with others like old friends; feel confronted by paint and comforted by stone sculptures.
But the three of us who visited experienced none of this. Some of this was because we singularly failed to read all the text on the map we were given and so did not download the app that would have helped us discover new ways to interact with our living art. Apparently we would have been invited to touch an artwork, listen to it, move with it, and forge relationships with it which transcend time.
I’m not quoting so extensively from the website and handout to be snarky. I’m quoting because, again, it sounds like a great premise. The problem is that if by failing to read the small print (literally!) we missed this fundamental way of engaging then, well, there is a problem.
The Sainsbury Centre is based at the University of East Anglia in a big, open plan, Norman Foster-designed building. The main display is the Living Area where a field of works is displayed (it reminded me a bit of the Louvre Lens) that does create interesting vistas and the possibility of unexpected visual connections. The text is deliberately minimal. I liked the fact that research and work areas (for the Museum Studies and History of Art departments, for example) are within the same space.
What the space does successfully is present itself as a kind of library of objects (I mean that in a good way, I love libraries!) available for research, study, engagement. The temporary exhibitions were interesting.
But my main thought on leaving was, what did we miss? And it points to a really interesting learning. If the means of engagement that defines your vision (in this case, the idea of living, animate art that is open to a human relationship) is introduced as either an ephemeral layer (an audio or media tour) or relies on facilitation / programming to invite you to engage … then what happens if you miss it? Where are the physical cues to create this sense of exploration and the invitation to connect?
You could take away from this the fact that the three of us were just a bit dumb and not very good at reading the guide … but the irony is that we are all three supposedly museum-literate people. A museologist, an archaeologist and an art historian walk into a museum and fail to decode the experience.
The follow through is really hard.
I have worked on projects, and tracked many more, where there was a really exciting vision, a great concept … that didn’t always translate, or not in every facet, to the physical experience. One of the hardest lessons I’ve learnt (and am still learning) is how to take the bold concept into a meaningful reality. It’s a Goldilocks exercise of wanting to be innovative and create something exciting and engaging … without being ‘too clever’ or abstract on the one hand … and not being too bleedin’ obvious either.
Twenty years as a museum maker and my advice is this. First, I think it’s ok to introduce a new kind of engagement to people. I say ok, I mean great! Because without this then we’ll never try new things and museums will stagnate. But if you do introduce new ways of engaging, then you have to work very hard to provide bullet proof scaffolding to the experience—meaning nobody can miss the, for want of a better term, terms of engagement or the ‘how this place works’ introduction. Second, with that said, sometimes we have to realise that if an idea can’t be translated into the physical space, then maybe—however painful—it’s time to go back to the drawing board.
There’s a kind of funny coda to the Norwich visit. For dinner after the museum we went to Delia’s, the Delia Smith restaurant at Norwich City FC. (For anyone reading this who doesn’t know who Delia Smith is, she taught a generation of people to cook with her insanely popular books and TV programmes in the 1980s and 1990s.)
The restaurant is a singular experience. It’s like walking into the pages of one of Delia’s iconic books. The menu is full of classics any Delia fan will recognise. The service is highly professional but at the same time has the warmth of being at someone’s house for dinner (yes, ok, the house of someone who can cook really well). This is not a cheffy restaurant. This is home cooking— dinner party cooking, if you like—at its best. It works on multiple levels, but every aspect of the experience, to the smallest detail, speaks of Delia’s vision.
What I’m trying to say is … it nails the follow through.
Food for Thought
If you’re getting mixed messages from this review then you’re not wrong. Like I said, other people I know have absolutely raved about the Sainsbury Centre, so I would be inclined to go again. Not least because there is some absolutely wonderful art on display in a lovely campus setting. Put it this way, if I were a student at the UEA I’d be delighted to have this museum on my doorstep.
One of my favourite university museums is, of course, the Pitt Rivers, which I wrote about a few months ago.
But another is the extraordinary Glass Flowers Museum at Harvard (or to give it its proper name Ware Collection of Blaschka Glass Models of Plants)
And then there’s the great University Museum in Tartu, Estonia, which was reimagined a few years ago. It manages to combine being a kind of shrine to learning (fair enough) with a playfulness and a tip of the hat to the social side of the university experience.