Dead or alive?
JOHN HAYES
The Sacred Grove Dillon Ripley (Gollancz 32s)
Quite a lot of talk is going on these days about the purpose of museums: it forms the subject of conferences, colloquia, university courses and reports. There is even a new science called 'Museology'. Which means, I suspect, that people are worried about
museums, and that museums are worried about themselves. In the nineteenth century
museums stood serene, encased within their beaux arts architecture, protected by their regulations, exhibiting a jumble of objects which there was no call to justify, even to explain. But their complacency was their undoing. The curious, that indefatigable class upon whom the eighteenth century foundations had so depended, gradually be-
came the listless; and Geoffrey Scott, in his classic The Architecture of Humanism,
sharply criticised government for failing to save Regent Street while yet providing 'doles for the maintenance of museums and other cemeteries'. Few curators of museums may ever have read his remark, but it represented an attitude from which their profession has never properly recovered. Now it is Mr Ripley, a distinguished curator himself, who challenges them in this volume of essays. 'Can museums collect dead things,' he asks, 'and remain alive?'
His most effective answer lies in his de- lightful description of his visits, at the age of ten, to that most exciting of mediaeval museums, the Musee de Cluny. There, he says, he first became fascinated by the reality of history. Now I think we have to admit that many of the museums which really engage our attention, or arouse our wonder- ment, are among the strangest, certainly
among those that bear the impress of a powerful personality: the Soane, the Gard-
ner, the Guggenheim. Conversely, there is nothing more weary to the senses, let alone the feet, than to visit a series of museums and find exactly the same treatment. Yet seemingly curators replanning their museums, who might profitably have gone almost anywhere for inspiration (I don't say technical information), must go looking at other people's museums. There is no univer- sal panacea anyway. Every museum will have to work out its salvation in its own way, by reference to its own objectives, its own prob- lems, its own public. One thing only should be held in mind, and Mr Ripley states it as his innermost conviction, 'that a museum is indeed a university.'
He does not mean a school: a timely warning to those who are trying to hitch museums to the educational band-wagon. No, he means a place which will awaken interests, refresh and enlarge the mind. A museum can only do this if it is initially wel- coming, informal, pleasant, a natural exten- sion of ordinary life: in other words, a place which it seems as obvious and enjoyable to visit as the theatre or the seaside. Regula- tions and administrative procedures must be as unobtrusive but as quietly efficient as the waiter in a good restaurant; curators should have maximum freedom from desk-work, their essential qualifications an inquiring mind and a desire to communicate excite- ment. If museums are to flourish, they must be places for ideas, experiment and change. In the true sense, a university.
Mr Ripley has pertinent things to say about labelling, study-storage, travelling exhibits and branch museums in suburbs and rundown urban areas. But his most shattering concept is the semi-permanent museum, the building which would be linked to such essential utilities as light, heat, water and air-conditioning, but in which 'the whole exterior skin could be stripped off or changed around if new developments in twenty years made the original circulation pattern and space allocations obsolete.'
Obsolescence within twenty years! Does this strike chill to the curatorial heart? I
seem to feel it. And of course there is not only technological change to consider, im- provements in design and communication. Mass-attendance at museums is just at its beginning: the growth rate, in this country, at the more popular museums and historic monuments, has been 50 per cent in three years. Museums have a tremendous future, if only they have the will to adapt. What a challenge to a profession that looks after dead things—but should also look after live people!
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