Museum Practice. Группа авторов
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of radical social practice in museums (Goodnow and Skartveit 2010; Sandell and Nightingale 2013), or what museums should be doing, a trend that Carbonell has referred to, somewhat skeptically, as the “prescriptive turn” in museum studies (2012, 11). We do not yet know how far these interventions have gone beyond the front-of-house areas where they are usually found, though other International Handbook volumes suggest that inroads have been made in transforming museums as a whole.
The best coverage to date of museum practice as such can be found in Gail Anderson’s collection Reinventing the Museum (2004; see also Anderson 2012), which includes shorter pieces from experienced professionals covering a wide range of subjects. Literature with a more practical focus includes a useful survey by Kavanagh (1994), handbooks by Edson and Dean (1994), and by Ambrose and Paine (2012), and the manuals of Barry Lord and Gail Lord and colleagues (2002; 2007; 2009). Then there is the “gray” literature made up of unpublished internal induction materials, and a few published guidelines and manuals, which give a step-by-step account of particular technical tasks such as registration and conservation (Thompson 1984; Buck and Gilmore 2011). This small body of writing on museum practice falls somewhere between the practical material that is produced and used within the sector, and academic museum studies. As I explain below, Museum Practice is positioned alongside this literature, but with a critical edge; it aims for a synthesis of museum studies and practice, what Rice calls the “useful middle-ground” between theory and experience resulting in “more nuanced theory and a more thoughtful practice” (Rice 2003, 77). As examples in this volume the chapters by Barry Lord on governance (Chapter 2), Ted Silberberg and Gail Lord (Chapter 7) on museum economics, and David Dean on exhibition project management draw on this kind of material and bring it into the frame of museum studies.
In this book I set out to bring together the two strands of writing about museums: academic museum studies and writing about museum practice. Museum Practice is therefore an academic project that reaches out to the museum sector. My goal is to avoid a hypertheorized critique of museums from the outside, aiming instead for an informed internal account from professionals, academics, and critics in touch with the realities of everyday work in museums. In her Introduction to the Companion to Museum Studies, the inspiration for this volume and series, Sharon Macdonald describes an expanded museum studies that brings together the academy and the museum and combines the new museology’s emphasis on theory with the old muse- ology’s practical concerns (2006, 8). She calls for both “expansion and specificity,” and a “reconnecting of the critical study of the museum with some of the ‘how to’ concerns that the new museology saw itself as having superseded” (2006, 8). Likewise Rhiannon Mason in the same book argues that we need an integrated “theoretical museology” (Mason 2006, 29). Research located “at the intersection of theory and practice, as opposed to a mode of critique which stands outside looking inward,” she argues, “is best suited to the complexity of museums as cultural phenomena” (Mason 2006, 29). Theory and practice are “anything but separate spheres,” Mason continues, but are “mutually informing and intimately connected.” She adds: “Recognition of the importance of research to practice and vice versa will only enrich both academics’ and practitioners’ understanding of museums” (Mason 2006, 30). It is the aim of Museum Practice to provide such enrichment.
Understanding practice
The bringing together of theory and practice in order to enrich and understand the latter, requires attention to both analytical models and also to modes of knowledge transmission. In museum studies, there has been a discernible movement toward integrated models for the study of museum processes (Corsane 2005, 3). In one of the most successful readers of museum studies, which reaches across the divide between academics and professionals, and between museums, galleries, and heritage, Gerard Corsane provides a model of museum work as an overall process which I employ in this book (2005, 3). Corsane proposes that museum work can be thought of as a process of communication moving from resources at one end (objects, collections, information) to outputs at the other (exhibitions, programs, publications), with the central flow of decisions and activities performed as processes of meaning making and interpretation. The value of this model is not only its simplicity, but also the way it brings together different areas of the institution into a public-facing continuum. Heritage, museum, and gallery studies, writes Corsane, are not just cross-disciplinary but postdisciplinary (Corsane 2005, xiii). This fruitfully suggests that the study of, and work in, museums needs to be focused on the institutions themselves as a site of analysis, and not simply applied from university to museums in the old theory/practice dualism.
Other scholars have taken up the challenge to return to empirical research on and in the museum. The authors of Post-critical Museology argue that “museum professionals are rightfully wary of academic researchers who often know little of the practical pressures and exigencies of making an art museum ‘work’ successfully” (Dewdney, Dibosa, and Walsh 2013, 16). This leads to an “epistemic fault line between the museum and the academy” where the museum is seen merely as a “concrete operational sphere considered as the object of abstract reflection by the academy” (2013, 221). According to them, museum staff are often anti theory because it seems that academic theory only produces more theory, but professionals are equally locked into a “reproduction of professional operational practices without end” which lacks “criticality and reflexivity.” For Dewdney, Dibosa, and Walsh, the solution to this impasse is a radical one. Museum studies is limited, they argue, because the insights offered by the critique of the museum and the politics of representation are now “exhausted.” Critical museology is “problematic” because it emerged from a “distanced elaboration of theory rather than from an embedded working through of museum practices” (2013, 224). In contrast, their research project at Tate, London was situated in the “space between the production of knowledge about the museum produced by the academy and the reproduction of knowledge in the practices of the museum” (2013, 16), including the “know-how of operational practices and know-why of strategic knowledge” (2013, 221).
Developing a postcritical museum studies for the twenty-first century, one that incorporates practice as an integral element in the study of museums, involves not only (re)fashioning theoretical frameworks, and particularly the social and cultural dimensions of theory, but also taking account of the diversity of current practice. Alongside the theorizing of museum work, in this volume scholars attempt to take current practice seriously as an object of analysis in its own right and produce work that reflects the inside view of practitioners.
Also important for developing a new museum studies is the training of museum practitioners in partnership with academic museum studies. As Lois Silverman and Mark O’Neill (2012, 195) point out, some traditionalists working in museums do not appreciate the value of theory at all, seeing it as the abstract product of ivory-tower academics with little relevance to the demands of their working day. Yet, because museum work often leaves little opportunity for reflection on practice, the challenge is for academia to help provide this in order to produce a “deeper and more complex understanding of the museum experience” (2012, 193–194). Part of the problem is how and where the learning takes place – is it best configured as training located in the museum or scholarship in the university? John E. Simmons (2006) writes that in the United States museum studies has matured as a form of university-based training, but there is still a need for standards in professional training that are endorsed by professional museum organizations – a point demonstrated by his chapter in this volume, which sketches out the history, theory, and practice of collection care and management. Simmons believes this problem can be overcome by implementing Suzanne MacLeod’s conceptual model which combines these elements (Simmons 2006, 124, figure 2). This model has been visualized in a diagram below (see Figure 0.1).
The longstanding tension between theory and practice has therefore been partially resolved by an “integrated understanding of museum studies as training, education, research, and practice … in relation to the profession as a