On the meaning of archaeology

As a museum professional, I have never had any doubt that museums are collective memories - that they have a public role, a responsibility to their community, and a duty to exist and communicate for future generations. As well as that, they represent some of our most precious treasures. They collect and present objects and stories that provide fuel for our wildest imagination and our most vivid scientific analysis. 

Nor have I ever had second thoughts about the public domain of archaeology - and the fact that finders are not keepers.

Last week I was chatting - as one does - with a bagnino (lifeguard) on the beach in Campania, southern Italy. And in speaking about ways of life we came onto the subject of underwater finds - archaeological remains that he has dug up over the last few years while fishing. He has held onto these, which are displayed in his home, and he told me of others who sell them on to interested foreigners for a small profit. 

I was shocked and appalled. Trafficking is of course illegal! Immoral, even! By holding on to something like a Roman amphora you are depriving somebody else from enjoying it, you are keeping part of our joint heritage to yourself! Surely surely he could see that! And selling it on... well, Italy along with Greece and Bulgaria are at the head of the illegal trafficking trade of archaeological heritage. 

But he spoke to me of his wonder in holding a terracotta fragment, in tracing the writing on it, in handling the jug as his ancestor would have done - and something was niggling at me.

Paolo - we shall call him Paolo - has probably never set foot inside his local museum. Nor has his local museum ever made any attempt to lure him in. Ne'er the twain shall meet - unfortunate, but true. And if he had never gone fishing, he wouldn't really care about his past, the archaeological heritage of Campania. He wouldn't - in the sense that he would probably be ignoring museums entirely. 

Even in a region so rich in heritage that it includes the stunningly well preserved remains of Poseidonia - today called Paestum - a city founded in the 7th century BC by colonists from Sybaris in mainland Greece. 

He would never know the touchingly beautiful tomb paintings found here - one of a diver in the act of flying through the air from a man made scaffold structure, into the deep blue sea of a summer's day in Campania. A sea that our bagnino knows so well. These most lovely pieces are presented in the most uninspiring way imaginable, behind a rope. It's as if the heritage that Italian museums protect for all to enjoy is all too much for those noble institutions to actually care for - care for in the way that Paolo cares for his amphora fragment. 

Ecosustainable tourism

This is where I have been spending the last week - not specifically on this tarmac road - in the deep south of Italy, in the region of the National Park of Cilento in Campania, on the Tyrrhenian Sea. A place of blue seas, dry heat, lizards and cicadas, olive groves, rosemary thickets,  fresh figs and the world's primary producer of mozzarella di bufala. 

The resort is very pleasant but it borders onto another, and this is the road that divides the two. 

On the one side, the macchia meditarranea - a natural vegetation of centennial olive trees, fichi d'India (in the name a clue - these are prickly pears), cacti, carob bean trees, pitosphorus, rosemary - sturdy thickets and bushes and plants that require next to little water. 

On the other, the following. 

Freshly mowed lawn - LAWN??? With a swimming pool. A swimming pool?? With the warm sea just a stone's throw away? 

Fresh water fountains spilling onto the grass. Irrigation systems providing tourists with the feeling they are in luscious vegetation... as green as a Wimbledon court. And...

...brick and glass structures - in this climate, the only way to keep your brain from frying in one of these is to have enough aircon to cool the entire regione of Campania. The traditional way, the sustainable way, the environmentally friendly way, of keeping cool in these climates is to slow down and ventilate using the land's own thermal currents. That, and sleeping in the heat of the afternoon - it will be 39 degrees Celsius tomorrow. The resort I am staying in ventilates its communal areas such as restaurants etc with the use of ancient things (called open windows) that create a breeze within the spaces. 

Olive trees all around provide a speckled but dense shade and the most wonderful smell. 

Happy holidays everyone. 

BP Summer Big Screens

Picnics in this country are an art form, no less. The Brits will contentedly bring along their picnics - sometimes improvised at the supermarket - and sit on (gradually dampening) grass, each on a tiny spot of about 50cm2 for the duration of an opera that lasts about 3 and a half hours.

 

Tuesday evening The Royal Opera’s live performance of Verdi’s La Traviata was played on big screens across the UK - I was watching, equipped with food, wine and friends from the park in Canary Wharf. The temptation to raise glasses at the chorus Libiamo libiamo ne’ lieti calici, which reminded me of my dad’s singing, was too much to resist. Let us drink, let us toast with these happy flutes.

 

The story of La Traviata (the fallen woman) is one of partying, decadence, love and prostitution, jealousy, parental control, money, sickness and death. A 19th century bestseller, page turner and musical triumph (although at its first performance in Venice in 1853 the public hated it). Thank you to one of my friends who actually shed some tears at the finale - opera still tugs at our heartstrings in the 21st century.

The Jeff Koons Craze

Yesterday evening I was invited to attend the opening of the Jeff Koons: 
Popeye Series exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery in Hyde Park. The queues stretched around the block – which happens to be the entirety of one side of Kensington Gardens. And this was for the pulsed entry VIP visit, which I was luckily on time for. Inside the white gallery spaces, I could not believe the number of people – and these were not ordinary people! High flying artiste types, great American collectors (or so I was told) the fashionistas of the art world, lots of them young and beautiful. It struck me that for a world that presumes to commentate on the state of society, in some ways it is truly conventional.

Truth be told, I enjoyed myself - watching people people watch, drinking champagne, being obnoxious and over the top. It is a truism that you have to be part of that world to be part of it.

The art itself is quite surprising. Once you get over the thrill of the vibrant colours of the swimming pool inflatables and the Grosfillex chairs, the provocation of the vivid plastics (which are actually made of polychromed aluminium), the sexuality of the pin up airbrushed porn models, the superficial sense of banal fun – I found it deeply disturbing. In truly postmodern sense, the more garish it is, the more unsettling.

Take the 2D work Elvis - an oil on canvas depicting the same blonde female nude in two provocative poses. It resembles a diptych, with the famous lobster in the foreground between the two bodies. It is an attractive image, uneasily turning you into a voyeur, making you respond to the sexual come on (picture on http://www.jeffkoons.com search under Popeye and Elvis). And the more you look, the more you see. Very few words in the illustration-style grey and yellow background appear as you stare: Dance of Death.

I think this was the highlight of the evening – and the single thing that told me I needed to leave. 

Concept Milano

Milan strikes me as the Italian capital of all that is fashionable, sophisticated and decadent, abstract, conceptual - and where image is all important. 

The ECSITE farewell party last night, held in the chic and newly opened spaces of the Fondazione Pomodoro, is a case in point. We were welcomed by music and conceptual performance art, woven amidst the sculptures of Magdalena Abakanowicz. (The works shown below are Abakan Red and Bambini.) There was nothing to aid understanding - sculpture and performance staged in a goldfish bowl of perfection, remote from the outside world, devoid of other substance that was not simply projection of image, an aesthetic category of perfection.

The spaces are extremely powerful, and the performance was staged to invite voyeurism. The building itself, on 3 levels punctuated with mezzanine suspended platforms, invites you to view things from above, below, through steps and cast beams - to invent and appropriate your own vista, to surprise yourself watching others watch. 

This young performer sat in the corner of the Embryology installation for the duration of the evening. 

Female. Male. Black. White. Semi nudity. Slow, controlled movement against the sculptural stillness of the works on show. The monumentalism of the works contrasting with the fragility of the human body - the perfect human body. The dancers could have been fashion models, and indeed their movement resembled at times a catwalk. I was reminded, in this bizarre and incredibly powerful space, that Milan is full of models - it breathes fashion design style flair - it is the citta' della moda, even when presuming to "do" art.

ECSITE one month on

ECSITE this year - the annual conference of the European Network of Science Centres and Museums - was held in the Museo Nazionale della Scienza e della Tecnica in Milano, the most important national science museum in Italy, located a few steps away from the beautiful Romanesque church of Sant'Ambrogio. The amazing thing was that the Museum remained closed to the general public because of the conference - what a weird strategy, to isolate museum professionals from museum audiences! 

Having grown up in Milan, I remember the Museum from my childhood. It hasn't changed much, still priding itself on an amazing 1950s collection of wooden models of Leonardo machines - but I have. And returning to see it as an adult, and a museum professional, I couldn't but compare how these detailed - and aesthetically beautiful - models stand very little chance of making impact with any modern audience - even visitors to the extraordinary 2006 exhibition at the V&A entitled Leonardo da Vinci: Experience, Experiment and Design. 

There - a celebration of genius, a translation of a technical mind well ahead of his time into contemporary sophisticated computer animations centred on the Codex Forster, the manuscripts revealing the workings of his mind - truly his ideas and the contamination of languages. Here - a slightly dusty, self indulgent corridor of silent wooden models, accompanied by graphic panels. Little sense of the eye of the mind, of the man's curiosity, of his imaginative capacity. 

* * * * * * * *

While the Museo della Scienza's marketing campaign is highly visible, this image made me think about how the museum actually thinks of its visiting public on site - don't come through! no access! far from a welcome, the spaces seem shut, inaccessible, closed off. Mixed messages if ever I saw them. The banner, in Italian, says: How on earth can we claim to be open? Indeed - and I don't mean that just for the redevelopment phase.

Consider the following two images: both positioned on two station concourses, both illustrative - not truly interpretative, but giving the space a mood, communicating with visitors/travellers, enhancing the journey for passersby.

The question, obviously, is - which one do you prefer? The first one, glossy, quite fun - or the second one, placed behind a protective banner?

The first one makes me smile every morning during my commute through London Bridge railway station - especially the guy who has just been lobotomised, and the crying screaming kids.

This second one graces the solemn corridor concourse of the Padiglione Ferroviario (the Railway Pavilion) in the Museo della Scienza.  

Kind of desperate - impersonal, and once again - ALL VISITORS TO STAY BEHIND THE BARRIER!!! Do not approach the... graphic panels? Also - beware the risk of electrocution!

Oh dear. If museums are about communication, which I truly believe, the Museo della Scienza has still a long way to go. Even train companies are better. 

Milano text

I am spending the weekend in my home town of Milan. The city hosted this year's ECSITE conference - the European Network of Science Centres and Museums. 

Coffee this morning with a friend in a trendy bar in town - this quote is Oscar Wilde's "The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it". It's different, drinking espresso and spremuta (freshly squeezed orange juice) and eating a brioche (light croissant) while staring up at this quote! It's not so much the quality of the espresso or the croissant... so much as the fact that it is a temptation - and one must yield! 

Goethe in Frankfurt

A couple of weeks ago I visited Frankfurt - my first time. I decided that I would take an experimental walk through the city, on the traces of the famous Book Fair. That idea didn't quite take shape as I wanted it to! The fair seems pretty invisible when it's not on, apart from one installation I came across - by artist Franz Mon, 2008 - carrying the text "The Frankfurt Book Fair originated in the Buchgasse".

However, I stepped inside Goethe's Haus in search of one of Germany's most important writers, on the 260th anniversary of his birth.

This was an interesting experience, in a disappointing sense. I walked in, a la recherche du Goethe, and I found his home, his mother's linen cupboards, his sister's bedroom, his writing desk, a vertical piano, his father's Library, the family painting collections, the kitchen pantry, traditional heating stoves, a grand central staircase, the secret window from which his father watched warily over his children...the 19th century home of a successful pro-Prussian Councillor. There is a contemporary annex too, which houses an art gallery - the making of the myth of Goethe, the origins of Sturm und Drang, the fascination of German Romanticism.

But...where was Goethe, the writer? Where his words? Where his poetry? 

It felt like the sociological side of the now trendy "behind the scenes" approach to interpretation has overridden and taken over the primary purpose of having a Goethe Haus Museum in the first place: meeting Goethe! 

What a shame! What a shame that nowhere does the power, resonance, verbal strength, romantic sensibility of his great works seep through! What a shame that such an amazing opportunity has been passed by! 

In talking with the very kind gentleman on reception, I asked him about access to the Library - and of course, where opening times allow, it is publicly accessible. But the problem with that is that it is a study centre for German speaking academics. Who surely know lots about Goethe anyway!

The curious traveller, the language lover, the teenager empathising with Werther's troubles, the international visitor who may not know enough German to read Goethe in the original - well, obviously these people are not the primary audiences. 

Goethe lost.

Cycling and strange sights in London

Jenny, Alex and Lucy - my some time cycling companions. Needless to say, in the 24.5 seconds we stopped to take this photo on Friday, it chucked down! 

A few months ago on my regular cycle into town, I was overwhelmed by the smell of manure in close proximity to an industrial warehouse...and on an uphill stretch, which meant I was inhaling deeply. Fellow cyclists and I eventually made this extraordinary discovery: a real horse, in a field, in a (urban) park just off the Old Kent Road. It's a remarkable sight. And makes me think of the working horses that worked this canal since the early 18th century. The Grand Surrey Canal - of which the Peckham branch was opened in 1826 - was used to transport coal and timber using tugs and barges, and horses of course!

I don't know why - it could have been the rain - but the sight of this flag hanging forlorn from the arches of the Old Canal bridge was quite touching. I wonder who put it there, and - why?

Peckham Library is a Will Alsop design - Will being the weird and always surprising architectural genius of a few of my favourite buildings in London and elsewhere, including the Palestra building in Southwark, the flexural covers of the airconditioning system at Guy's Hospital in London Bridge and the Ontario College of Art and Design. Finally, spaces that we can play with - the Library is a friendly orange and multicoloured beacon on those cold dark nights in winter. 

This is another extraordinary sight - a book installation cut through the glass front of this house. I discovered it a few years ago when first moving into the area, when it was inhabited as a 'normal' house. It has intrigued me ever since. I have never seen anything like it anywhere else. I discovered on Friday that this is the home of the John Letham Foundation (of which more at http://www.flattimeho.org.uk/project/16/) I had a chat with the Foundation's friendly archivist on Friday, admiring his hard work - I was cycling home after a long week, he was about to go into the office! I look forward to attending some of their events and reporting on them.

I caught this gentleman cleaning the wall of this bunker art space in close proximity to the Library - of what appeared a Banksy-like poster of a tank with the name of a major supermarket on it. The guy seemed to be wearing full soldier's outfit, complete with hood, and brandishing a semiautomatic gun - which was only to blast the fresco off the wall. The paper and glue dissolved under my eyes. 

A final note on this garden fence, made in what looks like grey steel...reeds. It's quite beautiful. I hope to be eating my own tomatoes soon - thanks to Alex, who gave me my very first tomato plant... which I carried home marsupial like, on my bike. 

London Text

I walk and cycle past this strange doorway very often - every few months some poetic soul must climb a ladder and change the writing on the blackboard. Soeren Keierkegaard's reflection on life and history "We live life forward but understand it backwards" was in place for about a year.

A personal thank you to this unknown, hardcore, blogger. This is my personal tribute to the Text Festival which launched in Bury, Lancashire, last week while I was in Bursa, under the inspiring eye of Tony Trehy http://tony-trehy.blogspot.com/search?updated-max=2009-05-05T07%3A31%3A00Z.

Museums and Heritage Awards 2009

 

The Bursa experience was followed on Wednesday night by the British Museums and Heritage Award ceremony, held in Church House in Westminster, very close to the Houses of Parliament. Church House is located in Dean's Yard – the Dean referred to here being the Dean of Westminster School, whose students were playing cricket on the green when we arrived.

 

I love this place. It is a quiet, secret location upheld by exclusive traditions in the heart of trafficky Westminster. The last time I had visited the school was for Easter Service a few years ago, with a very good friend of mine who walked in and simply asked the porter if we could stroll around. I pay homage to Nigel’s charm. More recently, I was here to support the London Marathoners reaching their grand finale in St James’ Park.

 

The bustle of tourists traipsing to (through?) the Abbey, peers walking to Parliament, police patrolling along the security fencing, protestors (currently it is Tamil protestors camping out against the Sri Lankan government) on Parliament Square, the circling traffic of buses and cars, the noise from the bridge, Nelson Mandela’s statue, Cromwell on horseback… the grounds are a haven of tranquility in the middle of the city. I loved the evening walk in the cool quiet of the night - this is a picture of the Cenotaph on Whitehall, with a couple of black cabs.

The evening was surprising. A small museum in Luton – which I think of as an airport destination, a mix of low cost late night flights and bleary eyed early morning buses – reaped the main award. This is the Stockwood Discovery Centre. I cannot comment on the museum experience, apart from noting the new museum opened to the public in July 2008, having received about £5m from main funders HLF and the EU. What strikes me, though, and is relevant to this blog, is that it is managed by the Luton Cultural Services Trust.

 

I have had a few conversations with European colleagues recently who express interest in the Trust form of governance – a recent addition to British management structures for the sector. The Trust model is an appealing one. It allows local councils to download the resource intensive cultural assets they own, to partners who are established as a company limited by guarantee with exclusively charitable purposes. This is the most common case, as adopted by Luton. Since sustainability is the key word, Trusts are often coupled with a trading arm, established for the purpose of all the services that are not part of the Trust’s charitable objects, ie profit making.

 

The transition is never easy – amongst senior professionals present yesterday evening, the new Herbert in Coventry and the Rotunda Museum in Scarborough both sought Trust status (or the local councils did), and both lost their CEOs, the drivers behind the museum redevelopments. Change requires sacrificial victims – but does this also mean that museum experts feel so uncomfortable within a new Trust scenario that they leave / feel forced to leave their jobs?

 

Here I am, muttering and mumbling…

VFDB (very frustrating duplicate blogs)

Dear friends and strangers - I have no idea how I have got myself into this scenario, but I seem to have inadvertently created two separate blogs. It is the ether that seems to decide which I contribute to... I am convinced I do the same thing, log on with the same password and username every time, but sometimes post are uploaded onto this blog, http://bt-museumconsultancy.blogspot.com/...and sometimes onto my other blog http://btmuseumconsultancy.blogspot.com/- which had momentarily disappeared after being created and was the reason why I created this second one. Confused dot com! I apologies to the gods of the ether! (And will try and sort it out) Meantime, the official EMYA winners post is at http://btmuseumconsultancy.blogspot.com/.

This could be a new challenge - tangoing with blogs.

Thank you for your patience... and if anyone has any bright ideas, then do let me know. The ether gods will reward you.

European museums on show - my personal bests 2

Stuck in Istanbul airport, I have a few battery hours before leaving this extremely hospitable country. The drive to Istanbul from Bursa this morning was through luscious countryside, mad traffic, a farmer on a tractor pulling a cart containing empty wooden boxes and a wife, olive groves, industrial areas, acres of garden centres displaying potted plants and full grown trees,a patchwork of small road side shops, people walking along the motorway to random bus stops under bridges, over the Bosphorus Bridge, on a feribot across the Marmara Denizi. It was made enjoyable by my two travelling companions - Regina from Zurich and Wolfgang from Dortmund.

Back to museums. My choice for best in design was Ljubljana's City Museum in Slovenia. I must confess to some partiality here, having worked on the interpretation for this museum with Event Communications, a museum design company based in London. Not much photographic material on the web, but you can check out the website for the exhibition, entitled Faces of Ljubljana http://www.obraziljubljane.si/en/. The exciting thing about this museum, however, is not so much the treasures it displays but its innovative display philosophy. Each era in the city's history is seen through the lens of a human typology - the most touching one (and one of the most poetic of the installations designed by Frenchman Arnaud Dechelle working at Event) is that of the Child, used to tell the story of WWII. A contemplative white space wrapped in barbed wire - Ljubljana was the only city to be completely surrounded by barbed wire during the war, effectively turning it into a ghetto and disrupting its lifeline to the countryside. Children became temporary orphans, separated from a parent working in the Resistance in the countryside, adopted by foster families, unsure of their future and their identity, called to be brave and stoic in the face of German and Italian occupation .

My best in commitment award goes to the Sa Bassa Blanca Museum in Mallorca, Spain, founded, funded and managed by the artists Ben Jakober and Yannick Vu, both of whom are delightful people. Their 30 acre property - including a sculpture park, an exhibition of 16th-19th century portraits of children, contemporary works from Vu Cao Dam, Rebecca Horn and Domenico Gnoli, as well as an underground exhibition area - is open to the public exclusively through their own efforts. To think of their dedication and passion and to set that against the total lack of public support is a sobering lesson in what is achievable. www.fundacionjakober.org

My last mention before I comment on the judges's selection goes to a museum that many would disagree is a museum at all - in the traditional sense. The Museum of Life Stories in Speicher in the Swiss Canton Appenzell is housed in the town's senior citizen's care home. It boasts a Gault Millau restaurant and a Remem-Bar, making me think of my own grandfather's life philosophy - once a gourmet, always a gourmet. The subjects of the displays, their authors, donors of the collections and storytellers are residents of the care home. Their first person accounts do what documentaries, museums and history books so often fail to do - give a taste of real life in the past. Leaving aside the right to privacy that we should continue to exercise in our faltering years, I thought this a touching tribute to lives lived and an emotional opportunity for each visitor to virtually 'adopt' a grandfather or grandmother. 

European museums on show - my personal bests 1

The format if the EMYA conference is a series of 10 minute interviews with the shortlisted candidates, conducted by members of the Judging Committee. Slides are shown as background to the one on one discussion, and all candidates are required to bring an object that encapsulates their museum. 

Before I comment on the judges' final decisions in a future blog, I'd like to share my personal 'bests'. 

I was intrigued by the Hilversun Sound and Vision Experience in the Netherlands. The building puts on show 700,000 hours' worth - or 90 years - of Dutch television broadcasting. Visitors - which Director Pieter van der Heijden calls 'viewers' - can choose to log onto 94 locations in the course of their visit, which on average lasts 4.5 hours. In Pieter's words, the secret of its success is that the institution builds on content that is already part of the public's prior knowledge. I admired the way the museum deals with its fundamental premise: that content gleaned from the media forms the (often non-critical) backbone of all our perceptions. If visitors truly come away, as claimed, with a slightly increased understanding of the complete mundanity of the subject along with its terrific influence, this museum has much to say to the world of media/moving images/film and television. This is the first 'museum' I have come across where we grapple with the cultural effects of media rather than with its technological and material evolution. Hurray! (http://portal.beeldengeluid.nl Not that given the naturally Dutch character of this institution, its website is entirely in Dutch) 

Best storyteller among the candidates was Jimmy Moncrieff of the Shetland Museum and Archives in Lerwick who opened proceedings on Thursday. Jimmy's Norman surname gives his Viking roots away - he is a big man, with as big a personality and a wonderful accent. He brought a 'feral' scarf to show us, as his representative object. (I thought at first the object would, when liberated from its acid-free tissue paper, up and bite delegates sitting in the front row. I have since discovered that 'feral' is derived from Fair Isle, the tiny island lying half way between Orkney and Shetland - apologies, Jimmy!) 

The scarf boasts a beautiful red and blue design which doesn't seem to fit at all with any contemporary styles. Jimmy recounted the tale of a few 17th century Spanish sailors shipwrecked off the coast who walked ashore - like Martians, in their finery of (wet) lace, collars, doublets, plumes (this may be a bit of an exaggeration, but give me some leeway). They stayed on the island for 3 months, speaking I don't know what language, and obviously captivated the local inhabitants, the knitters and weavers amongst them. The scarf is testament to the narrative hold that objects can have on our imagination, and Jimmy living proof that key messages ("the Shetland islands are and have been a crossroads between the North Sea and the Atlantic") are most effectively communicated through stories. 

More personal bests anon.

European Museum of the Year Award, 2009

A week ago, I travelled to join 200 delegates at the European Museum of the Year Award 2009. The same day, I set up my first blog. Which subsequently disappeared into the ether. So bear with me while I copy my first memorable entry from that day. 

I started this trip at 4.30 this morning in Peckham, south east London. It is now 11.45 pm local time (London +2) I am in Asia Minor. So far today I have taken three taxis, one ferry, one plane, one train and one minibus. I have crossed the River Thames by car, the English Channel by plane and the Bosphorus by ferry. I am not sure how environmentally friendly that makes me, but it is a pleasure to be here for the opening of this year's European Museum of the Year conference and ceremony. 

This annual celebration of the best in European museums is an occasion I look forward to every year, and this one promises to be an interesting one, with museums on the shortlist ranging from the Museum of Brittany in Rennes to the City Museum of Ljubljana in Slovenia to the St Petersburg Avant-Garde Museum to the Hilversum Sound and Vision Experience in the Netherlands. As the conference gets under way, I shall be able to report on some of the more exciting ideas in the sector.

For now, I bid you good night, having tasted two glasses of Turkish raki - an aniseed cloudy aperitif of which I dare not ask the exact alcoholic content - with an excellent dinner of grilled seabass...