Museum Association Conference 2014

I spent today (my birthday) in Cardiff, first meeting with contributors for the Art Researchers’ Guide to Cardiff and South Wales, then I attended at the Museum Association conference.

What I really like about going to conferences, especially this one, is that it is very intellectually stimulating. So many people you listen to can articulate such great ideas and I had lots of engaging conversations with people. The only thing I do complain about is that the sessions could easily have gone on for 2 hours rather than 1.5 hours. But oh well, you do have to fit some any sessions in I suppose. I also met a couple of other PhD students and it was pleased that I could summarise my topic and when I was done, complete strangers seemed genuinely interested and asked me follow-up questions. Questions that I don’t completely know the answers to yet. There was very much a positive feedback-loop here, which is something I’d been missing from my work at Leeds for some time. In one of the books I’m reading for background information, there is a section about oral culture and print culture and how some people say that over the past five hundred years we’ve been moving from one culture to another. Others say that we inhabit an oral culture with our families and friends, but as we go through our life, school, work etc in modern society we are immersed with print culture. But as I sat in the conference, it occurred to me at the experience was more akin to oral culture, the speakers are performers and between sessions we go around talking with others and in the process you build/add to the professional community (network). The talk that I think has stayed with me the longest was co-presented by a novelist, Rachel Morris, and a philosopher, Martyn Evans, called “Collections in the clouds.” Richard Yeo wrote that encyclopaedials are like museums, in the sense that they are heavily curated and present a specific world-view within its pages. I was thinking about that at this session.

The main thoughts were: that a museum is more than the sum of its parts. A museum should be an immersive world saturated with story and memory. They should not just be a collection of objects, but also must tell some kind of narrative. The novelist talked about made up museums such as the museum of Jurrasic Technology as well as a museum that she “made up” herself. The Museum of Marco Polo. The philosopher talked about wonder. Wonder is something we go to museums to experience, but wonder is also something we have within ourselves. that we take with us wherever we go. Museums, galleries, and theatre are places where we have to suspend our belief and become participants in a performance. What makes good museums, they asked in their talks. Imagination and wonder. Imagination of the curator and imagination of the visitors. Very wonderful and thought provoking sessions.