The Exploded Museum 24 PETER SAMIS HE NA TECHNOLOGICAL WORLD, the museum visit no longer begins when a person enters the building, nor need it end when she or he leaves. The museum's physical space is but one site-albeit a privileged one—in the continuum of the visitor's imaginative universe. Contemporary artist Olafur Eliasson challenges the traditional model of the museum encounter: The very basic belief behind my work is that objecthood, or objects as such, don't have a place in the world if there's no subjectivity, if there's not an individual person making some use of that object. This even goes for gold and diamonds ... [and] within art, it's even more mystifying, it's more mystical, it's even more alienating. The objecthood is money in the bank, regardless of whether people look at it or use it or have it around them or not. Because this is very counterproductive to what I think is essentially important: namely, that individuality and the nature of indi- viduality ... has to be reconsidered constantly, as a model, in order to sustain itself in the world today, in order to have an impact on the world today. If the object becomes prescriptive of the individual, of the subject, then we don't integrate time as time passes along. .. I think there is a paradox, looking at the history of museums... collecting objects from reality, preserving them in a container somewhat outside of reality. Muse- ums today, in my view at least, should be a part of the world, a part of the times in which we live. Even if they have historical collections, they still need to emphasize the fact that you are looking at them from where we are today. 2 Back in 1966, Bob Dylan wrote, Inside the museums, Infinity goes up on trial Voices echo this is what salvation must be like after a while3 Moded Museum" appeared in Digital Technologies and the Museum Experience: Handheld Guides and Other Media 988), Loic Tallon and Kevin Walker, eds., pp. 3–17, published by AltaMira Press. It is reprinted here by permis- Peter Samis is the associate curator of interpretation at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. "The Ex- son of the publisher. All rights reserved. 303 THE EXPLODED MUSEUM 304 CHAPTER 24 305 idea of frontloading all the essential concepts for the appreciation of a long and complex exhibition before a visitor has seen a single object is inherently flawed, and yet many museums continue to do so. 10 Next came extended object labels, in which basic artist/title/date info was augmented by a paragraph of text, and with them an acknowledgment that visitors might require additional information "just-in-time, as they stand in front of an object. (Believe it or not, even today, many exhibitions still do not include them.) Both wall texts and object labels have typically been monovocal, written in an anonymous and authoritative “museum voice." Corresponding to these typeset texts was the linear audio tour, which had the virtue of channeling the museum voice into your ears as you stood in front of an object, thereby liberating your eyes to actually see it. The "empty vessel” model of knowledge acquisition was alive and well, and our ears were the apertures best fitted for filling Dylan's line was a prescient observation, a precursor to the plethora of publications that, starting in the late 1980s, critiqued the museum field's absolutist stance and protection of Western cultural norms. Indeed, in the intervening decades most museums have continued to rely on the authority of their presentations, as if there were one set of objective truths to be gleaned from the objects in their custody, and the visiting public was an undifferentiated set of empty vessels to be ignored or filled with la science infuse. Meanwhile, some artists, curators, and educators did try to poke at the sac- rosanct boundaries of museum practice, from both inside and outside the field Howard Gardner's “multiple intelligences” theory exploded the “one size fits all model of education, while constructivist learning models emphasized that no one comes to museums as a clean slate, an empty vessel waiting to be filled. In addition to learning styles and aptitudes, each person brings with them a personal history, a psychobiography, and engages the museum within a social context, visiting alone, with friends or associates, or with family.? Taken together with increasingly granular audience segmentation research, the visitor-studies literature on museums has boomed over the past ten years, and we are coming to know our "guests” in an increasingly sophisticated way. In fact, more and more museums are professing an interest in what that cipher like pres- ence, the once-anonymous visitor, has to say. So while Dylan's next line—“But Mona Lisa must a had the highway blues / You can tell by the way she smiles”— would not have been out of place as a subjective visitor observation in the past, and might have found its way into an inquiry-based docent tour, now it might be published on a museum blog! Eliasson's emphasis on the perceiving subject echoes the contemporary pre- occupation with the varieties of individual experience. The museum as a com- modifying factor, a temple on high, is dethroned, and the visitor, with whom all experience must finally succeed or fail, thrive or fall on barren ground, is deemed the final arbiter. The museum is the sum not of the objects it contains but rather of the experiences it triggers. To quote San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) senior curator of painting and sculpture Madeleine Grynsztejn, We don't do our best when we simply instruct. We do our best when we answer questions alongside the visitor, and ask questions alongside the visitor. And when we create a kind of conversation. We don't do our best when we create a one- way dialogue that is assertive and one-dimensional. We do our best when we offer multiple avenues of interpretation, and when we keep a lot of room for audience response. In the late 1980s to early 1990s, two innovations occurred—one due to a change in the audio tour business, the other to the advent of new technologies. The first innovation was philosophical: the master narrative as promulgated by a single authoritative museum voice gave way to a polyphony of voices, and with them the admission of more than one perspective in evoking the value and mean- ings of a work of art." The second innovation was digital: the ability to randomly access as much or as little information as you wanted about an object in the gallery, and to pick and choose your way through an exhibition without the museum de- termining your course. (Exhibitions, of course, remained linear, unfolding in space, but which objects you chose to commune with, and which tour stops to consult, suddenly became your call.) Taken together, these changes were big: the monopoly of the expert was chal- lenged. Not that people didn't want to hear an expert; by most accounts they do. But the multiplication of points of view pointed to the “many meanings all hap- pening at once" nature of the world, and showed that museum objects are no ex- ception. It meant that multiple entry points could be equally valid for experiencing art and artifacts, meshing with the learning styles and entrance narratives of a variety of visitors."? And it turns out that that is one of the things Web 2.0 is all about. Talking and Tagging Exploding Interpretation, in Practice So how has the use of interpretive technologies paralleled this shift? We all know: in the beginning was the wall text. And whether it was On May 28, 2005, the New York Times reported in a front-page story that a pro- fessor and his students at Marymount College in Manhattan, dubbing themselves "Art Mobs," had brought their digital recorders into the galleries of New York's Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and created a set of guerrilla podcasts-alterna- tive audio perspectives on some of the major works in MOMA's permanent col- lection. These commentaries were available as free downloads on the Web.13 The news rippled like shock waves from an earth tremor in the museum world. For the first time (or rather the first time again-as artists have a long-standing tradition good or not, it was all visitors had, and we came to depend on it. I use the word "we" advisedly, to include both professional museum staff and our visiting public. The CHAPTER 24 THE EXPLODED MUSEUM 307 galleries and how they connect art access to-museum collections. 306 of undermining museum authority going back at least as far as Marcel Duchamp), someone had publicly usurped the museum voice from an esteemed, authoritative institution and substituted a set of opinionated, perceptive, and irreverent alter- natives. Canonical works were no longer hallowed; in fact, some were actively ridiculed. The critics had taken to the airwaves and invited listeners to take their voices along on their next visit to the museum. MP3 players and the advent of podcasting empowered members of the public to publish their own perspectives and stories on subjects as far flung as anime and politics. Museums were but one of thousands of potential topics, but we weren't used to having anyone else occupy our territory. We weren't used to having to share our space. MoMA replied by posting their entire audio tour online for free download (in fact, the museum had coincidentally just secured outside funding to make this pos- sible) and by inviting potential visitors to create their own audio programs at home for personal use on their next visit-arguably a rather labor-intensive proposition for a limited audience of one or two. They did not actively solicit public submis- sions, nor did they exclude the possibility of considering them.'4 But all things considered, their response was rather enlightened: most museums still charge for their audio tours and do not yet post them to their websites. The net effect: free distribution of the master narrative beyond the museum's walls, which, when paired with an increasingly complete online representation of the collection, makes for an informative virtual visit. Other museums took different approaches with their podcasts. At the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, we created "SFMOMA Artcasts,” an online, illustrated audio zine designed to project a variety of art concepts and voices out into the community, and to invite the community back into the museum. The voices on the Artcasts include the artists themselves (one of the distinct advantages of being a museum of modern and contemporary art), curators, “Guest Takes” where poets, composers, and musicians are invited to respond in their own art form to works on view, and “Vox Pop," where nonexpert members of the vis- iting public are asked to reflect on what they're seeing in the galleries . The mix of voices and genres creates a lively dialogue, while our collaboration with Antenna Audio preserved the production values traditionally associated with the museum. Many other museums now also produce podcasts for various constituencies and with varying degrees of finish. Younger audiences are often targeted, as with Tate Modern's "Raw Canvas” and MoMA's “Red Studio" podcasts, produced by and for teens in collaboration with professional sound designers/engineers. In all cases, the museum retains final editorial control over what it publishes, even as it expands the array of voices and perspectives it presents. 16 Is there a line museums will not or should not-cross? How far will we go be the frontier du jour, and it is playing itself out on multiple museum horizons as in accepting visitor contributions to our officially published content? This seems to of this writing. How willing are we to break the proverbial fourth wall and listen in as our visitors describe what they see in our to their lives-or fail to do so? Do we really want to know? The steve project (www.steve.museum) is one such test case. A research col- laboration developed by an alliance of North American museums and funded by the Institute for Museum and Library Services, it aims to test a number of hypoth- eses about how user-generated tags might aid in the description of- and facilitate An example will suffice to illustrate the discrepancy between official museum cataloging and the cultural literacy of everyday visitors: one of the historical impe- tuses for the Steve project was the realization that a Web search for "Impression- ism" on the Metropolitan Museum of Art's collections site would have omitted most of the institution's holdings. All of the paintings corresponding to that term were listed in the Met's collections management database as “French," **19th cen- tury," and “oil on canvas” --but there was no field for “art movement," and hence there were only scattered returns on the word most educated visitors would use to find them. The simple theory behind steve and other efforts at cataloging by crowds is that, if museums use terms submitted by visitors to tag their artworks, other visitors will have an easier time finding them." 17 Of course, the terms supplied by visitors about an artwork will not all be art re- lated. Many will be subject based, describing the image content of representational artworks, another frequent lacuna in collections management databases. They will be at the intersection of those artworks and the viewers' vision, and inevitably pre- conditioned by the viewers' lives (personal context” in Falk & Dierking parlance.) So, among other questions the steve project will address are the following: What kinds of terms are useful to others? What kinds of terms are not? Useful to whom? . How will these terms be validated? . Will statistical agreement among taggers about a given term be enough to ensure its validity? Or does each term need to be reviewed by museum staff? • Is such a scenario practical or even possible? How will subjective responses-for example, to abstract art—be treated? · Are they helpful to others? All of these questions and more apply as museums enable tagging or commenting on their exhibitions and collections via mobile devices. A case in point: at the beginning of this chapter we referred to Olafur Elias- son and his critique of the commodifying aspects of museum experience. Eliasson warns of museums' tendency to “package” their messages in a reductive set of bul- In fact, he takes his argument a step further, emphasizing as key to his project the lets fit for public consumption, preempting the visitors' direct perception of the art. definitive or authoritative experience of an artwork or exhibition. nature of each visitor's response, and the lack of any one 15 unique and nonrepeatable THE EXPLODED MUSEUM 308 CHAPTER 24 309 son's terms, take their own time. Perhaps we will find that the instant dispatches provided by cell phones are antithetical to such consideration, Who has the responsibility for seeing what we see? ... The qualitative potential, engagement. ... Does it have a potential that adds something to you that you could let's say, of a work of art lays within the generosity or the sustainability of your use in a different context?... I would emphasize the importance of looking at the picture as a way of looking at yourself looking at a picture; seeing yourself sensing, about the spectator. . . . So there's something quite generous here, in my view ... or seeing yourself seeing, if you want. . . . So it's not, again, about the museum but the fact that the museum gives time back to the spectator. 18 Making Connections In this context, interpretation can only be an accumulation and juxtaposition of different experiences, none definitive but each building a case for what is com monly held or individually specific. Admittedly, Eliasson's project is an extreme example, focused as it is on ensur- ing that each visitor gain a sense of “criticality"--or perspective—on their own experience in the galleries . Furthermore, his works themselves are immersive en vironments-not so much "on view" as "encompassing you." So we may ask: D. the points Eliasson makes about perception apply equally to paintings hung on a wall , ancient Egyptian statuary, medieval liturgical censers, and Persian calligraphy? Is the dose of dialogue between what the museum and visitor bring to bear a con- stant, or a sliding scale? What is the proper titration between expert knowledge and visitor inquiry or response? What is to be gained by facilitating such inquiry, both for the individual and the museum, which stands to increase its knowledge of its visitors and its holdings? To take this line of thought one step further, what might be gained by publishing a range of visitor responses for other visitors, both virtual and physical? How should such responses be organized, so as not to be overwhelming in an in- formation economy already characterized by infoglut?19 Museums are just beginning to explore these questions, which, on one level, can be seen as taking the informal conversations that have always taken place be- tween visitors to the galleries, and the more structured dialogues that take place on docent tours, and giving them a published and searchable status on the Web, for public or private consumption. In this light, as technology evolves, new possibili- ties emerge. For example, as audio tours are delivered over cell phones, the new devices offer visitors the chance to both listen and talk back. In the United States, a number of museums are beginning to avail themselves of this feature. At the San Jose Museum of Art, visitors were asked to leave comments about the artworks on view in a “Conversation Gallery." While the responses were not as numerous or well considered as they had been in their “Collecting Our Thoughts" exhibition in 2001—where visitors were invited to write wall labels for the artworks with the promise that the best ones would be posted on the gallery walls--there was still sufficient feedback to merit redesigning and repeating the experiment.20 It and that part of our task is to encourage visitors to slow down enough to, in Elias- may be that our culture as a whole is becoming more fast paced and oral, In 1974, Los Angeles artist John Baldessari famously said that, "for there to be progress in TV, the medium must be as neutral as a pencil. Just one more tool in the artists' toolbox, by which we can implement our ideas, our visions, our con- cerns. "21 It may be said that with the advent of simple editing tools like iMovie and the phenomenal rise of YouTube and other video-sharing websites, Baldessari's prophecy is finally coming true. However, even before YouTube became a house- hold name, museums such as the American Visionary Art Museum and the Denver Art Museum joined places like Grand Central Station in using video booths and storytelling kiosks where visitors could come in, sit down, comment on exhibi- tions, or add their own memories to the exhibition content. For the most part, these have so far been used in history, children’s, and discovery/science museums, and it is perhaps just a matter of time before such video annotation penetrates more art museums as well.22 One can imagine digital representations of artworks turned into image maps, which can be tagged by multiple viewer users as a common plat- form for discussion and experience. Such tags could take text or video form, lead to extended annotations, and even include Web links to other far-flung but related sites. In this way, an artwork (or other museum object) can exist both on its own terms and as a hub or focal point for complex interactions—a veritable knowledge interface enabling visitor explorations, associations, and conversations. Both Kevin Walker and Rudman et al. describe early work using visitor learn- ing trails and social learning sites such as myartspace.org.uk (now renamed ookl. org.uk). Students visiting museums were given cell phones to photo-document and audio-annotate their personal itinerary through the museum and respond to a structured set of questions. Once they returned to their classroom, they logged onto the My Art Space site, where they were able to retrieve and reflect more fully on their experience.23 A similar experiment was recently conducted at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, where visitors to an exhibition featuring Iranian photographer and filmmaker Ab- bas Kiarostami and Spanish filmmaker Victor Erice were able to annotate not only their path through the show but also the entire image track of a film, using sophis- ticated software called Lignes de temps (Timelines).* These efforts to facilitate visitor content creation and publishing represent constructivist learning exercises par excellence. As such, they are probably better suited to the needs and focused time span of a school visit than the harried life of the average museum visitor. Perhaps the "connectivist” paradigm proposed by George Siemens, in which knowing where to find information is as important as having personally made it your own, is more on target for this networked, mul- tiperspectival age in which, in the words of David Weinberger, “Everything is captured data 310 CHAPTER 24 THE EXPLODED MUSEUM 311 uploading nodes/sources of meaning; miscellaneous. "25 After all, not everyone is an alpha blogger. In fact, a Forrester Research report suggests that as of April 2007 only 13 percent of those using the a video. The vast majority of Web users fall in the less active rungs of this “Hier- Web actively participated by either publishing a blog or a Web page or archy of Social Participation": 19 percent comment on blogs (the next most active role); 15 percent use Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds and tag Web pages; 19 percent use social networking sites; 33 percent read blogs, listen to podcasts, or watch peer-generated video; and 52 percent are listed as "inactives," participating in none of these activities. These figures echo observation of visitor behavior a SFMOMA during the 2006 Matthew Barney: Drawing Restraint exhibition (Table 24.1). The sweet spot was clearly on the passive, linear media side—not in the in- teractive zone. That said, appreciation levels rose most dramatically among those who availed themselves of multiple interpretive resources, including the FAQ wall graphics, artist video, digital audio tour, and interactive kiosk/website. 27 These levels map nicely to Siemens' first three levels of connectivist engagement: • Awareness and Receptivity: Learner becomes conscious of new informational • Connection-forming: Learner begins to form connections and uses resources to deepen their knowledge; and • Contribution and Involvement: Learner contributes to the network, actively gets involved, and becomes visible.29 As the visitor progresses in their art experience, the museum promotes personal interpretations over established understandings. In fact, commonly accepted un- derstandings are articulated precisely to open the door to personal responses rather than seal the object in art historical authority. "We are thrown back on the question of the museum-visitor experience and the role of the museum in the visitor's life. Here we are back at Eliasson! We might ask, Is there a continuum of art experience, and where do the museum walls fit The promise of these new technologies, then, is dual: if they can be made ef- fortless and transparent enough, they can help art ideas to penetrate more effort- lessly into visitors' lives, to aid visitors in processing and digesting these ideas and images in their own personal terms. Conversely, new technologies can also open museums to the multiplicity of meanings that our objects trigger in the community of viewers-meanings we haven't yet dreamed of and which stand to be richer and far more diverse than the art historical discourse that is our stock-in-trade. within it? Table 24.1. Percentage of Barney Exhibition Interpretive Offerings Used by Visitors (n = 251) Exhibition introduction wall text 78 Exhibition brochure 55 Learning Lounge wall text photos 44 Learning Lounge video 38 Antenna audio guide headset tour 21 Cell phone tour 19 Learning Lounge catalogs 17 Drawing Restraint 9 film 18 Exhibition website 15 Learning Lounge computers 12 Podcast/downloadable tour 7 SFMOMA docent-led public tour 2 Recent research at the Dallas Museum of Art has led to a new model for un- derstanding visitor participation in the art museum. Findings there indicate that, regardless of age, educational level, socioeconomic standing, or ethnic background, visitors fall into one of the following categories: • Aware: Visitors with little or no experience who are not really comfortable looking at or describing art. They may have been brought to the museum by someone else. - Curious: Visitors who "like art but are not in love with it.” They enjoy the social dimension of museum experience and connections that can be made between art and other parts of their lives. • Committed: Either educated art consumers who want to be left alone or art enthusiasts who "love art as much as sex and religion" and can't get enough of it, not to mention programs around it.28 Notes 1. This essay is dedicated to the memory of Xavier Perrot, friend and museum colleague extraordinaire. 2. Olafur Eliasson, interview with author, Berlin, June 18, 2007. 3. Bob Dylan, "Visions of Johanna,” Copyright ©1966; renewed 1994 Dwarf Music. All rights reserved. International Copyright secured. Reprinted by permission. 4. Among them, Ivan Karp and Steven D. Lavine, eds., Exhibiting Cultures: The Poeties and Politics of Museum Display (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991); E1- lean Hooper-Greenhill, Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge (London: Routledge , 1992); Init Rogoff, Museum Culture: Histories, Discourses, Spectacles (London: Routledge , 1994); Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (London: Routledge, 1995). 5. A French expression connoting inherent and in some cases inherited knowledge. See Pierre Bourdieu's sociological studies of the connection between training in the appre- ciation of the arts and access to elite social status, most notably, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1984). 6. Howard Gardner, Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences (New York: Basic and Lynn D. Dierking, Learning from Museums: Visitor Experiences and the Making of Meaning 7. George E. Hein, Learning in the Museum (London: Routledge, 1998); John H. Falk Books, 1983). (Walnut Creek, Calif.: AltaMira, 2000).
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