ARTS
History with attitude
Museums mean different things to dif- ferent people. To some, they are an agree- able morning's entertainment, with an undemanding veneer of education. To the planner or developer, they might represent the cultural cherry to render a new propos- al more palatable. To the politician they are a potential tourist magnet. But, to a growing number of professional curators, the very word conjures up images of arid, colourless mausolea, of serried ranks of flints and shards. And so a new generation of museums is emerging which avoids the `M' world altogether. Instead we get punchy, one-word names, like 'Catalyst', `SEARCH', or 'Eureka!' (respectively, the museum of the chemical industry in Widnes; Hampshire Museums' outpost in Gosport; and the children's science muse- um in Halifax).
There is something happening behind the scenes at the museum. A revolution has taken place in its philosophy, which would like to see the glass cases smashed. Today's museum aims to be genuinely populist. It welcomes — indeed actively seeks out all sectors of the community, and eschews anything that smacks of elitism. Explanato- ry material (preferably using state-of-the- art technology) is pitched at the simplest possible level. And, above all, the new museum seeks to pull its head out of the historical sand to address issues in the con- temporary world. The buzzwords are `access' and 'relevance'. This is what they call `the new museology'.
If you visit museums at all regularly, you will probably have noticed some of these changes in approach — the technical inno- vations, perhaps even the dumbed-down interpretation. You may have been less aware of the broader aspects of the revolu- tion. There is only the occasional isolated incident to stir up a flurry of controversy: the acquisition last year by the Museum of London, for example, of a painting showing heroic poll-tax protesters in full riot in Trafalgar Square; or the decision of the St Mungo Museum of Religious Life and Art in Glasgow to present female circumcision, uncritically, as a simple coming-of-age ritu- al. The underlying policies are overlooked. Policies, however, there are. When the Prehistoric Gallery of the Museum of Lon- don was revamped not long ago, it was with the stated aim of giving `greater promi- nence to green and gender issues'. At the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford — a muse- um whose whole raison d'être is the integri- ty of a 19th-century collection — there is now a programme of modifying displays and alternating original labels to suit mod- ern multicultural sensibilities. The director of Tyne & Wear Museums has opined that museums should play `a proactive role in contemporary societal issues ... [and] act as an agent of social change'.
If this approach has not yet changed public perceptions of museums, it is mainly because of practical constraints. Most museums are restricted by the range of their existing collections, by their own insti- tutional history and above all by their finances from making more than a few ges- tures towards the new orthodoxy. Only rarely does a museum find itself in the happy position of having a sufficiently free hand and a big enough budget to invent itself from scratch. Which is why the acknowledged flagship of the new museolo- gy in this country is to be found in the unlikely setting of Croydon.
Croydon, South London, is the archety- pal edge city, all monolithic office blocks and torturous traffic systems. It is not `Look — primates!' known for its historical attractions, and for many years it had no museum. Towards the end of the Eighties, however, Croydon Council committed itself to a major pro- gramme of urban regeneration, including £30 million towards a new cultural centre.
Some £4 million of this was earmarked for a new local history museum, which finally opened its doors in 1995. As measured by official plaudits, it has been a great success: it won an Interpret Britain Award in the year it opened, and the National Heritage Multimedia Award the next.
It also bears all the signs of the new museology. It has the hip name: 'Life- times'. It has the technology: there are objects on display, but no labels — expla- nation and interpretation are entirely by computer. And it has the populism: publici- ty has included large banners in the town's shopping centre bearing teasing soundbites — `And all he bought was a chocolate willy What has particularly incensed local his- torians, who should have been the muse- um's staunchest supporters, is that Lifetimes' interests begin only in 1830, and are predominantly given over to the period since 1939. There is nothing in the displays about Croydon's putative origins as a Roman staging post; nothing about its thousand-odd years of growth around a manor and palace of the Archbishops of Canterbury; nothing about its early indus- trial history. There was no room for any of the remarkable swords, shield-bosses, brooches and other items excavated from the early Saxon cemetery. Room has been found instead for a Hell's Angel's jacket, a plastic condom demonstrator, and an Ann Summers posing pouch. A drug addict's syringes jostle for space with the blanket and bag of a homeless man named Kash.
Museum staff respond to criticism by pointing out that they commissioned mar- ket research, which showed that Lifetimes was the type of museum, relevant to mod- ern life, that the people of Croydon really wanted. They do not mention that the research (at £12,000) was a very conscious attempt to court non-museum users. The interviewees were chosen explicitly for their lack of educational qualifications, and for their agreement with the statement that they 'wouldn't be seen dead in a museum'.
Lifetimes has a political agenda. The dis- plays are dominated by 15 life-size man- nequins, all modelled on real people. Every effort has been made to achieve an equi- table reflection of the modern Croydon population, in terms of sexual and racial mix and age range. There is even a repre- sentative person-in-a-wheelchair. So far, so politically correct. What is odder is the way the ethnic-minority figures have been spaced evenly through the chronological sections. So, one of the figures represent- ing the turn-of-the-century period is a black pony-driver named Jimmy. He exist- ed all right, but absolutely nothing is known about him — not even his surname — which rather seems to defeat the point of showing real personalities. In the inter- war tableau, one of the figures is a prize- winning young aviator named Aspy Merwan Engineer, who was later to become Air Chief Marshal of India. He vis- ited Croydon precisely twice, to make use of its airport. Presumably the point being made is that there have been members of ethnic minorities in Croydon for a long time. But the elevation of these isolated examples to representatives of their eras has struck many as unjustifiable manipula- tion of facts.
The museum's main foray into publishing is a series of glossy leaflets on local minori- ty groups. There is one on Black Lifetimes and one on South Asian Lifetimes. The third, Irish Lifetimes, is no longer available. It had to be withdrawn after complaints from David Trimble, of the Ulster Unionist Party, about its pro-Republican sentiments.
This is history with attitude. And the atti- tude is set by the museum professionals, not the politicians. Lifetimes was conceived under a Tory administration, opened under Labour, and enjoyed cross-party support throughout its development: the elected councillors seem to have been quite oblivi- ous to any political dimension. From the other side of the fence, Gaynor Kavanagh, a prominent lecturer in Museum Studies at Leicester University and doyenne of the new museology, has lavished high praise on the displays. 'After decades of striving for exhibitions that work against the grain of a male, white, middle-class view of history, it is both refreshing and empowering to find an exhibition which is confident, uninhibit- ed yet sensitive in its handling of the plu- rality of life.'
Public museums emerged in the 19th- century as a means of giving an unsophisti- cated audience a glimpse, across time and space, ctf other ages and other lands. The problem- is that this role of popular educa- tor has been increasingly overtaken by technological advances — by photogravure, by cinema, by cheap travel, and by the Internet. Through no fault of their own, museums are losing their way in the mod- em world. At the same time, they are under increasing pressure from funding bodies to justify their existence. The new museologists acknowledge the problems, and have sought to give the museum a new role, that of social and political propagan- dist. The past is a foreign country; but, they argue, it is a country that should be pressed into the service of our own.
The spin-doctors of Nineteen Eighty-Four had a slogan for it. 'Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the pre- sent controls the past.'
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