Thinking about what I do

I have been reading a very interesting book called Friends of Interpretable Objects, by Miguel Tamen, Professor of Literary Theory at University of Lisbon.

It is a small book, brimming with Portuguese flair and a taste for aesthetics – hence it felt very warm and inviting and triggered many memories of red-wine-fuelled philosophical conversations while writing my dissertation.

Tamen’s most exciting claim is that:

something becomes interpretable, and describable in an intentional way, only in the context of a specific “society of friends".

I am in the middle of dealing with a Friends group at a museum I am helping redevelop, and thankfully the society of friends he refers to is more a spiritual community, united by language and meaning making, than the technical definition comprising these wonderful – and voluntary – supporters of museums all over the world who have such a huge part to play in the renaissance of our sector.

Reading this book has provoked a shift in my perceptions of what I do. I understand all visitors (and possibly even non visitors) as constituting the society of friends that I work with. As an interpretative planner my job is to reflect on the process of meaning making, on how and around what do museum friends come together? In what way do they share meaning making? In Tamen’s terms: how can I help to “characterise language, interpretation and intention-attributing activities” so that messages and experiences that inhabit our museums are shared?

Of course, my answer cannot find expression in a paragraph on this blog. (Not only do I not own the language, I don't actually have the answer yet!) It emerges every day in working creatively around the challenges of an interpretative project. Every project team reveals different understandings and approaches. Even language itself is a cultural barrier in meaning making, as I discovered – for the upteenth time – recently, in my dealings with the Italian Ministry of Culture. My discovery was one of increased self awareness – little to do with professional capability, and lots to do with the need to re-align myself to a different culture of meaning making.

So my thought for this day: each society of friends impacts most profoundly on the interpretative plan that their museum adopts. But... how can we avoid self referentiality? And how does an interpretative planner deal with that? Suggestions?

Meeting Michelangelo

My time in Volterra was all too short. But time in Italy is a relative concept, and I found myself slowing down a little. A whole day was taken up by lecturing on to postgraduate students studing Museology in the Scuola Normale di Pisa – a very select institution among Italian universities.

On the way out from the lecture theatre, I caught sight of a poster on a church door (Volterra has thirteen churches inside its city walls) which stated in quaint English:

You are welcome, deer tourist guest. Enjoy nature’s beauty and human achievements, and we pray you return home physically rested and spiritually strengthened.

Signed, the Bishop

Spiritually strengthened but physically exhausted, I stepped inside a small alabaster studio where Pupo mastro alabastriere works. A friend had suggested to me that I go and visit this endearing, ancient Volterrano gentleman who works in a studio the size of a large table. Everything here is covered in fine white dust – so fine, in fact, that you don’t really see it: it just seems that a patina of ‘pale’ covers everything, including Pupo – who is very appropriately wearing beige and grey. The dust is of such fine texture that it just seems to make everything a shade paler, rather like looking at a faded photograph or at a landscape through a misty lens.

Slightly selfconsciously, I started to chat to Pupo, whose strong Tuscan accent with its c aspirate is a joy to my ears – it’s a bit like hearing Dante speaking to you.

Pupo described starting work in the family business at age 7, having decided school was boring. He talked about his mother, whose pale picture hung on the side – a birthday picture, wishing her many happy returns for her 103^rd birthday (in 2003 if I remember rightly). He talked about working in Milan producing cast models from which castings would be taken, and about the dying art of alabaster. He talked about the figures he makes – many of animals, horse heads and dogs, of birds and turtles, some on commission.

I asked him about his art – what his favourite part of the process was. He looked at me with a twinkle in his eye and said “this” patting the large-ish boulder in front of him sitting atop a swivelling stand on his hand made work bench. Weighing in at about 70 kilos, the bulky shape looked like nothing much, but he explained that he was carving a family of elephants – the small one leading, the mother behind it and the father, the largest form, taking up the rear. He looked up at me, and said “I see them in there”. And so I remembered Michelangelo’s sonnet

Every block of stone has a statue inside it and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it.

Yes, he agreed, it is about taking away what is extra. And do you know the hardest thing? What I still haven’t learned to do? To stop myself before ruining the piece, to listen to my gut when it tells me it will not get any closer to what I have in my mind’s eye, that I should lay aside my tools, and call it a day.

I asked him whether he thought of himself as an artist or an artisan, and he replied that he is neither. “Io sono alabastriere”. Being an artist of alabaster is like nothing else, he said seriously – and paused, looking at me intently. It is a way of life, a way of thinking, a way of passing the time. It keeps me company, he said, and it’s good fun. With these new tools, I don’t have to make any effort at all – he points to a rudimentary drill head attached to a scalpel.

Momentarily, I was lost for words. Here was a man in his 80s, with basic literacy skills, who had single handedly expressed what I had spent 6 hours trying to get my students to understand. The concept that what we learn in life – and in museums – is far less about knowledge than it is about being human. At the heart of this, is the idea of proclaiming a life worth living that has nothing to do with our capacity for intellectual understanding. I had repeated to my students that GLO (generic learning outcomes) indicators used in British museums place knowledge on a par with skills acquisitions and sociality, that analytical capacity goes hand in hand with emotional sensitivity. And that a visit to a museum – or a day in one’s life – spent nurturing our emotional being is worth the time spent poring over a million books.

Volterra Etruscan heart of Italy

I returned yesterday from Volterra in Tuscany – for Etruscan specialists, this is the stoney medieval town Velathri founded by the Etruscans in the 8th c BC. For others among you (including some of my close friends – you know who you are) the location of Stephanie Meyers’ recent bestselling Twilight series.

The city is a vivacious, beautifully intricate medieval town - although 7 kms of the wall walk was laid out by the Etruscans - perched atop a hill, surrounded by the most beautiful rolling hills as far as the eye can see, right down to the sea. The ancient stone walls (la cinta muraria) that embrace the town – and apparently also define whether you are a posh Volterrano or not, ie whether you live entro le mura o fuori le mura – are a feat of stonemasonry and anti-instrusion planning tactics. (Very aptly they also house an imposing prison which still functions today.) They are also used by local kids to engage in sassaiole - or throwing stones onto your friends below the walls.

During one morning run I found it incredibly difficult to find a way back into the city, once I had passed a gate or arch in the ramparts – the walls and routes relentlessly chucked me outwards. This was frustrating at first, and then it made me smile. Any footsoldier in the service of Florentine powers led by Lorenzo il Magnifico who braved the scramble up the steep hill and the hot oil and the enemy snipers would, had he had the misfortune of breaking through without a map, have probably been churned out as soon as he had broken through. Result!

(Volterra did however eventually succumb to Lorenzo's armies in 1472.)