Being Reflective

I’d like to take Jeremy’s challenge and reflect on our Museum London exhibit (and build some excitement about the exhibit's opening with some pictures of what's up-coming).

We’ve certainly made great strides this week in becoming much more intentional, by means of nailing down our ‘Big Idea’ – what the exhibit’s all about: Londoners have embraced innovation, resulting in the city’s spirit of ingenuity. [Somehow ‘Big Idea’ has stuck and Nicks’ ‘Core Idea’ terminology has been forgotten, not that it matters as they both convey the same idea.]

Ironically our reading from Beverley Serrell’s Exhibit Labels was entitled “Behind it All: A Big Idea;” [1] but our exhibit has been more, “In the Middle of it All: A Big Idea.” However, that’s not to say that we haven’t operated from the beginning with a series of larger ideas and buzz words: from the get-go we’ve spoken of themes (from the wiki: how did Londoners receive and use 19th/20th/21st century inventions?....how did it affect their lives? ...what innovation has emerged from London? and from what context did these inventions emerge from?), and words like automation, mechanization, ingenuity, and social impact have arisen continuously.

Our situation has been different from the typical job of a curator in an exhibit, as Serrell describes that exhibit developers use their big idea to decide what to include and what to exclude in their exhibit. As a class, instead we’ve adapted to a situation in which we’ve been given the artefacts, a url, and early proposals of the exhibit to decide the ‘big idea’ from. So, perhaps it’s fair that our big idea has really been ‘in the middle of it all’, (although it’s still unfortunately closer to the ‘end of it all’).

Serrell lists some flawed big ideas: big ideas that are too detailed, too many big ideas for one exhibit, and a big idea that’s too big. As a class I think we’ve all felt at times that we’re facing an exhibit that was conceptually too big: a range of artefacts from quite old (Kris’ daguerrotypes from the 1840s) and quite new (modern inventions coming out of 3M, Lac-Mac, TMI), and on top of that, artefacts that were invented here in London, and artefacts that are difficult to attach to a solid London connection. This was an issue that made focusing a ‘big idea’ difficult and in that sense our big idea has to encompass 2 themes within the artefacts – new and old, London and not London. The decision to highlight in the large panels the London connection of each group of artefacts (sound, print, visual) seems like the optimum way to deal with these challenges. In a sense our exhibit is a collection of stories about how London has interact/ed with inventions.

When I was thinking of title ideas, I proposed “Invention and Innovation: Alive in London, Then and Now” and it’s the ‘alive in London’ part that I like the most and thinks works the best, because it is a term that’s so broad. While the title doesn’t explicitly convey our big idea, I think it comes as close as we may get taking into account that we’re somewhat stuck with the ‘Innovation to Invention’ phrase and we have such broad themes. A concern that I have with ‘invention to innovation’ is that our artefacts represent both innovation and invention across a broad spectrum of time, and not showing a chronological progression from innovations to inventions. My other concern is more of a reflection: that this too was backward, I jumped right to brain-storming exhibit titles before ‘big ideas’ and I know this is the result of which thought process I find more fun.

Kelly and I spend yesterday afternoon, creative juices flowing, working on the introductory panels [one to go at each entrance] for the exhibit. Our goal was to convey early on what our ‘take home message’ is, what they’re going to be seeing and how it fits, and as they explore our exhibit, (building on Lauren’s ideas about prompting our visitors to do some thinking) some questions to ask to themselves. After reviewing Serrell’s guidelines on ‘introductory labels’, to introduce the exhibit’s theme she recommends a 20-300 word count and I think it may be wise to edit some of ours down (and I’d like to invite the class to edit and improve what we’ve posted to the wiki).

I feel much more optimistic, and hope that Jeremy does too, that now that we have a strong big idea, and our efforts, as Serrell describes, will be unified and are arguments decreased [2], although it’s late in the game. The next challenge facing the class will be interpretive labels (panels)– telling our stories [3]. Their purpose, as described by Serrell, is to contribute to the overall visitor experience in a provocative, positive, meaningful and enlightening way.

Our decision to focus on the London connection in our interpretive labels hits on these ideas; I’ve been fortunate that working on the labels for the Bovie electro-surgery unit, the London connection is strong and easy to convey, as I know it isn’t always so for my classmates. As we’re composing our labels, lets all keep in mind Tilden’s 6 principle’s from Interpreting our Heritage: relate to what’s being displayed (or else it’s sterile!); information isn’t interpretation, but all interpretation contains information; interpretation is an art; the chief aim of interpretation is provocation; present a whole not a part; interpretation for children shouldn’t be a dumb-ed down version but follow a different approach.

John Nicks, in Curatorship in the Exhibit Planning Process outlines 2 types of curatorial research that we’re undertaking: thematic research (providing a base of contextual information and develops the framework and substance of the exhibit) and object research (documenting the artefacts in the exhibit). We’ve already determined to use our thematic research for the larger panels and tell how the artefacts are connected to London and [and our artefact labels obviously are the object research]. I raised this question in our Thursday meeting, but for artefacts where the researcher is having exceeding difficulty establishing the London connection (thematic research) is it within our curatorial power to remove the artefact from the exhibit? As it was decided, it’s best to wait until we’ve laid out a tentative floor-plan before making those decisions, but it’s certainly a relatively small space for so many artefacts, in addition to so much show-case by London companies, so it looks like we may end up removing artefacts anyway.

(On the note of the floor-plan: thanks to Bryan I’ve had a fun-time building a 3-D model of our exhibit space to plot our layout on; what better way to illustrate and sell our concept?).

[1] Beverley Serrell, selections from Exhibit Labels (Lanham, MD: Altamira Press, 1996), 1
[2] Ibid, 7
[3] Ibid, 9
[4] John Nicks, “Curatorship in the Exhbiition Planning Process,” The Manual of Museum Exhibitions, Barry Lord and Gail Dexter Lord, eds. (Lanham, MD: Altamira Press, 2002), pp.347