Permission to Break the Rules
Or, getting ready for change
Photo © Eithne Owens
This theme of why so many projects start to blend into each other (or, 50 shades of beige: the museum story) and the fear of behaving differently, is clearly one that has been on my mind for a while. As I wrote about here, it’s scary to try something different or new. Much easier to copy or adhere to a norm.
At the same time, I don’t want to make light of the bravery required to follow your own path. Or not just bravery, but also the skills and resources you need.
This was all swirling around in my mind, when I heard a presentation by the director of the Villa Freischütz museum in Merano. This is a historic house museum that treats you as though you were a guest of the family. You can sit on the (historic) furniture and handle the collection. You enter into a feeling of intimacy which is, I suspect, what a lot of historic spaces would like to create, but not many achieve. This is partly helped by the scale of the house, the fact that the relatively small visitor groups are all escorted by a guide (or host, I suppose) and the fact that they have chosen to focus in on this very particular kind of experience.
But my ears pricked up when the director mentioned feeling as though they needed permission to do things differently, and finding that permission in a text: Anarchist’s Guide to Historic House Museums.
A quick summary of the book, which came out in 2016 and is well worth your time. It’s written by Franklin Vagnone and Deborah Ryan, both architects by training, who worked in a variety of planning, design and preservation contexts. The scope is largely US-based, but the issue is, I think, global: that a vast number of historic houses are fundamentally disconnected from their audiences. Their manifesto is based on the idea of moving away from a very inward-looking (navel-gazing, really) mode, and reconnecting with the people beyond the four walls of your museum. They have five areas of activity: community, communication, experience, collections / environment and shelter. A recurring theme is the idea of breaking down barriers (including the barriers of preconceptions), being honest and open.
In each chapter, there’s a simple formula: rant … evidence … therefore. The ‘rant’ is a pithy summary of a problem—often the kind of ‘everybody knows this, nobody wants to talk about it’ problem. The ‘evidence’ is a deeper dive into the research that helps unpack the problem. The ‘therefore’ is connecting the dots between the problem, the evidence and the avenues to address the issue.
In a similar way, I often do an ‘if … then’ exercise on projects. It seems really simple, and it is, in a way. The idea is to break down a wish or an aspiration or, sometimes, a challenge, into its consequences. IF you want to do X, then you need to do Y. It helps to take quite nebulous ideas and turn them into actions.
If you take a step back from the contents of the Anarchist’s Guide for a moment, and look at it as a whole, what it represents is a reminder of the elements that need to be in place to initiate change.
You need research. You need to know what audiences want and need, who they are, why they’re coming and not coming. You need to know what’s happening with other organisations; not so you can replicate, but so you can learn lessons about what has and hasn’t worked and why. You need to understand wider social and demographic trends.
You need a manifesto. You can call it something else, but you need to articulate who you are, what you’re for. You need to limit your options: no, you cannot be all things to all people. And you need to have some sense of energy, ambition and a point of difference. (I read a so-called manifesto the other day, and it was all very worthy—in fact there was almost nothing I didn’t agree with—but it was also very snooze-worthy. There wasn’t a single idea that really made me sit up and pay attention.)
And you need a network. Friends, peers, mentors. Other organisations or individuals who share some of your goals and challenges, or who’ve been where you’ve been. People to support you on the way. People you can run things by, who will be honest but understanding.
(All of this, by the way, is just about starting down the new path. There’s about 10,000 more posts I could write on how you implement and manage change.)
I will say how anarchic you find the book it depends very much on the context you’re working in. A lot of the things the authors espouse seem like common sense (mind you, recognising it as common sense still require the ability to look outside your immediate experience) and some of their ideas have become more mainstream, nearly a decade after the book was written.
Vergnone and Ryan write, ‘We believe that merely tweaking the pervasive Historic Museum experience will not accomplish much. It is why we title our work as Anarchist. Our intent is not to be sensational, but to acknowledge the depth needed to address and correct pervasive problems. Instead of using the term ‘Anarchist’, we could have used the word parrhesia which simply means frank speech. As Foucault wrote, it infers a position that is ‘not concerned with absolutes; it does not seek to find ‘the truth.’’ Rather, it is about ‘having the courage and ability to speak up against a dominant or commonly held opinion … contesting what is often taken for granted or what has become sedimented and routinised.’
But back to the idea of permission and I do see a value to framing ideas as anarchic. First, I think museum-y people—working in a sector not exactly a byword for radicalism—secretly like the idea of being seen as anarchists. But on a more serious level, I think this framing can help to embolden, certainly to bolster one’s nerve, preparatory to making the decision to change the Way Things Are Done.
And make no mistake, this does require nerve. So if framing it as anarchy helps, then we should all be anarchists.
Food for Thought
A few museum-y manifestos I’ve gathered: Kids in Museums, The Happy Museum, Orhan Pamuk’s Modest Manifesto for Museums, Hayao Miyazaki’s manifesto for the Ghibli Museum. And really interesting, museologist and exhibition expert Kathleen McLean published an article with her manifesto in AAM’s Exhibitionist - alongside a selection of the negative critique it received.
I’m listening to the brilliantly titled Shows that Go On podcast. Each episode is an in-depth discussion of a landmark art exhibition, including The Destruction of the Country House Show at the V&A in 1974.
I’m a big fan of the Garden Museum in London - kinda / sorta my ‘local’ museum. I was looking at their events programme and spotted this gem coming up in August: Festival of Fairytales