ARTS

Museums

Pay and display

James Hamilton on the revamping of the Natural History Museum

Ayear after its corporate plan split the scientific and museum worlds, the Natural History Museum in South Kensington is a lively place. 'We're as busy now as we ever were,' says the director, Dr Neil Chalmers, who is managing the most radical and con- troversial change that the Museum has experienced. Parties of schoolchildren eagerly rush to the designer exhibits, Human Biology (opened in 1977), Creepy- Crawlies (1989) and the new Ecology exhi- bition. Conjuring tricks with mirrors beckon visitors to Ecology from the main entrance by forming an apparently vast globe from a bank of 20 video screens. Twinkling music in the manner of the theme from Close Encounters rams home the point that the Museum sees itself as being in competition with the entertain- ment business, and has had both to learn and to use its language to survive.

The corporate plan is written in another kind of language which the Museum man- agement has been taught. This is the business-speak that the Treasury finds so sexy. The plan's opening summary states that 'the Museum has taken the opportuni- ty to reappraise and redefine its role and position in the market-place'. It promises 'a reduction in fixed costs mainly by reducing the number of permanent staff; and increasing self-generated income to 30 per cent of the total budget by 1994-95'.

The distressing thing about these clever displays of the half-learnt language of other worlds is that in attempting them the Museum begins to forget its own language, and to forget that what it and no other kind of organisation can offer is the unique dia- logue between visitor and object. A mus- eum is about material, not about the fris- son of special and ephemeral effects, and about the conveyance of knowledge and ideas through the objects in its collections.

Neil Chalmers asserts that the Natural History Museum has problems that are unique. 'Our collections are unrivalled in the world — 67 million objects — and we are intensely proud of them. The display of even a measurable fraction in their present form would be very unattractive to the vast majority of our visitors. Many of the objects are preserved in spirit and they don't look very attractive. What we do is to select our objects for display very carefully indeed so that they will be as informative as possible to our visitors, over half of whom are families. Simply presenting a dead animal is not enough, particularly now that there is a very high standard of natural history on television. People expect more.'

The Natural History Museum was found- ed as a branch of the British Museum after many years of campaigning from the 1850s by Dr Richard Owen, the comparative anatomist and superintendent of the natu- ral history departments in Bloomsbury. Owen needed more space, not only for the display and storage of the collections which grew ceaselessly but also to emphasise their separateness from the man-made objects in the British Museum. He wanted to make them more readily available for research, for teaching and for enjoyment by all sec- tions of the general public, from the informed and the uninformed amateur to the specialist. The decision to build the Museum in South Kensington was taken in 1860, and 21 years later the great cathedral to the glory of the natural world designed by Alfred Waterhouse was opened. It is now a Grade One listed building, and is as magnificent and as important as the collec- tion it houses. The Museum's directive, from its inception, was the study of evolu- tionary patterns and processes.

The astonishing diversity of the collec-

tions as originally displayed and the massed wonders of the natural world as perceived and shown to the public by the Victorian and Edwardian collectors and educational- ists are, however, curtly dismissed in the Museum's current guide-book. 'Visitors were expected to educate themselves,' the guide-book reads, 'and, as one scientist wrote at the time, if they left with "nothing but sore feet, a bad headache and a general idea that the animal kingdom is a mighty maze" then it was not considered to be the fault of the displays.' The clear suggestion here is that it was the fault of the displays, and so, starting from this dubious premise, which subtly rubbishes the achievements of generations of people who did manage to educate themselves, the present manage- ment is continuing a programme begun in 1972 of revamping the Museum.

The focusing of research away from tra- ditional areas such as Hymenoptera (bees and wasps) and Hemiptera (bugs) and the reduction in number of its permanent staff was an integral part of the Natural History Museum's corporate plan. Over the past year 100 jobs have been lost through early and voluntary retirements across the whole range of the Museum staff. The job losses have caused uproar in the scientific world and have brought forth accusations that for science the corporate plan is a nonsense. The Senate of Scientists at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington have been uncompromising in their view. In a letter to the then Minister for the Arts, Richard Luce, the Senate described the corporate plan as a 'nebulous document' written in `pseudo-corporate language [which] obscures any clear statement of the intend- ed overall effect of the recommendations . . . The plan implies that from now on the public will direct the content and presenta- tion of the Museum's exhibits .. . The incontrovertible message of these phrases is that the Museum is to follow rather than lead — usually a recipe for descent into the lowest common denominator'.

The training of artists, too, will suffer under the new plan. John Norris-Wood, head of natural history illustration at the Royal College of Art, deplores the changes in display policy and believes that they rep- resent 'a tremendous deprivation for the public, the artist and the natural historian. I hate the turning of the Museum into a kind of funfair'.

The Science Defence Committee, com- posed of senior Natural History Museum scientists, has put its knife into the corpo- rate plan in the critical paper Corporately Planned Damage to Science. The plan, they say, 'takes us away from systematics [the identification, naming and classifying of

extinct and living species], which is what we do best. It destroys the traditional organi- sation of the Museum by systematic groups . . . [and] draws a rigid, false and perni- cious distinction between curation and research without regard for the morale of staff and without consulting them.'

Dr Chalmers refutes this charge. 'We are focusing our research upon those areas of systematics where we are at our strongest,' he says. 'The problem before is that we spread ourselves too thinly and tried to do too much and be all things to all people. We have looked at our research and con- centrated on those areas either where we and the outside world see the greatest pure scientific importance, such as what is popu- larly called biodiversity — the understand- ing of the patterns of the richness of life, what the scale of that richness is and why it is as it is. That is a profoundly important scientific question which many people in the world recognise and we are particularly well placed to address. This is pure research and is not market-led.'

Opposition to Chalmers's policy centres on the fact that even if research was not in the past carried out in all fields, the scien- tific staff did represent all fields of knowl- edge across the Museum's collections. Now, however, having lost distinguished senior scientists, this is no longer the case, and there is no going back. 'Biology is about particulars,' says Dr Colin Patterson, a research palaeontologist at the Museum and chairman of the Science Defence Committee. 'Everything has to be qualified by names, and this place is the ultimate dic- tionary where the name should be found. Closing down departments is like taking a dictionary and tearing pages out of it. Lexicography can't be market-led but should be funded at a much more altruistic level.'

The Museum augments its government grant-in-aid with self-generated income that includes money earned from commer- cially sponsored research projects. If a gen- erous sum of money were to be offered to the Museum from the commercial sector to carry out scientific research to combat dis- ease, Dr Chalmers would consider it care- fully. 'We would look at it on its merits, and if we saw the work was of a high quali- ty in an area which we thought would be a priority, then we would do it. What we would not do is low-quality hack work because we are a high-quality institution. We are at the top end of the market, and so we should be.'

The Museum is now part of an interna- tional network in its remaining areas of sci- entific work. One is nematode and polychaete research, an undramatic but important study of microscopic marine creatures whose numbers and activity can be used as pollution indicators. Research in this area, led by Dr John Lambshead, con- tributes to a programme orchestrated through the EC and supported by EC money and anticipates questions that politicians have yet to ask. 'Microscopic animals are now the main area of interest in marine research,' says Dr Lambshead. `Though it may not be dramatic, the taxo- nomic challenge lies there.'

The Natural History Museum is now effectively two institutions: one consists of the research scientists who have little or no influence on what is displayed in the public galleries and the other is the Museum with its themed displays that the public sees. By the end of the decade this trend will be even more marked. Chalmers wants to see systematics at the Natural History Museum `back centre stage in modern biology, and for people to say yes, the Natural History Museum in London is the place to be because that's where the great science is being done'. In exhibitions and education he wants 'the whole Museum — not just part of it — to be filled with great and attractive exhibitions which bring the natu- ral world to our visiting public'.

If its science is at the top end of the mar- ket, both literally and figuratively, the Museum's public displays are slipping down into the realm of educative entertain- ment, towards the Smithsonian scientists' prediction of 'a gradual transition to super- ficial exhibits that impress visually but fail to challenge the intellect'.

One by one, the pre-1972 displays will disappear. Already the bird galleries have been dismantled and their contents put temporarily into store. They will be replaced by Dinosaurs in 1992. The mineral and marine invertebrate galleries, too, will be dismantled in due course. The trend, then, is away from the encyclopaedic, the serious presentation of specimens labelled, explained and put into context, towards themed exhibitions which try to beat televi- sion and theme parks at their own game.

One of the causes of this tragic realign- ment of a great institution is so deeply rooted in museum management in Britain that it requires an Act of Parliament now to outlaw it. This is the policy of museum admission charges, an uncivilised practice that tends to turn every museum visit from one of discovery and enjoyment at the visi- tor's own pace into one in which money's- worth is demanded, and entertainment part of the deal. Entrance charges contributed less than five per cent to the Natural History Museum's budget in the 1990/91 financial year, a petty amount which has been raised at the price of altering the pub- lic attitude to the Museum and distorting its function. Dr Chalmers, however, believes that 'if you charge your customers, your visitors, they become more demand- ing. We have to provide a better service than if we didn't charge'.

Another cause is the Government's mean and restricted attitude to the funding of museums, which forces them to perform circus tricks to generate additional funds. Dr Roger Miles, the Museum's director of public services, says, 'We are fighting to earn income to do a good job of work in the building.' Asked how he manages to install complicated exhibitions which have to withstand heavy visitor traffic in a listed building, he replies: 'How do you walk on eggs?' Miles quotes figures that show that the average time a person spends at an exhibit in an art gallery or museum is gen- erally less than 30 seconds, and the average length of a visit is two hours, 'so they'll be pretty much on the move all the time'. Well, they would be — their time in the Museum is limited, and having paid the hefty entrance charge (adults £3.50; chil- dren £1.75) they will want to see as much as they can in the time available. Thus the Ecology exhibition, clever though it may be, is not one to linger in. The crowds coming through prevent it and the background noise from excited visitors and competing loudspeakers give one little cause to. To benefit thoroughly from displays of this sort visitors have to concentrate, and not be distracted by pressure to move quickly from one goody to another. The technolo- gy, the squawking noise and flickering lights encourage an excitement that destroys concentration.

Pressure of space on the South Kensing- ton building has forced the Museum to store part of its vast collection elsewhere. A new building is now required to replace the old warehouse, and the money for it has already been earmarked. The time has come for the Museum to acknowledge pub- licly the depth of the split between its research responsibilities and its public activities. Dr Chalmers has already expressed his view that the Waterhouse building has been functionally obsolete as a museum for many years. So let the twinkly theme exhibitions be put into the proposed new building, and site it near an out-of- town shopping centre with a swimming pool, multiscreen cinema and other 'leisure facilities', good road and rail provision and a big car park. Properly marketed and with plenty of self-generated income, it should pay its way handsomely and inform and entertain hundreds of thousands of people every year. The whole natural history col- lection can then be brought back to South Kensington, where it can be shown in part again in didactic displays (free) and where the remaining scientists and their succes- sors can work in reasonable tranquillity.