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(Museums Introductory Essay)
Catching up with Now: temporality and contemporality in museums

Naomi Stead, University of Technology, Sydney

Perhaps there is always an unspoken, hidden question at the heart of any call for papers, and certainly there was in this one. The original call was necessarily broad. It began with the general observation that the museum institution has been marked by constantly changing emphasis throughout its history. From there it moved to a brief enumeration of some of the museum’s functions – as an archive for research, a place of education and edification, a site for the ritual performance of citizenship, and as a space of entertainment, amongst other things. While these functions have most often overlapped and interacted, each has carried different implications for the museum object, both at the level of artefact and of architecture. More particularly, each has implied a different relationship between inanimate museum object and animate museum subject – that is, the museum visitor.

A Chronicle of the Museum as an Empty Machine: isotropy, flexibility and the museum for contemporary art

Wouter Davidts

The development of the museum of contemporary art signaled a programmatic shift of the museum from a static repository to a dynamic workshop. This shift has had both ideological and practical consequences for any further thinking about museum space. The museum aspires to be up to date, and expects its architecture to do the same: to house the ever changing and unpredictable demands of the contemporary arts, its space needs to 'flexible.'

This paper deals with the architectural response to this institutional call for flexibility. It will demonstrate how the Centre Pompidou (Piano & Rogers, 1972-77), considered as the paradigm of the flexible museum, can be read as a combination of the programmatic flexibility of a well-serviced structure (Fun Palace, Cedric Price, 1961) with the spatial flexibility of an empty container (Neue Nationalgalerie, Mies Van der Rohe, 1962-68). The Centre Pompidou promises to deliver both the flexibility of a machine and that of an empty box, and can therefore be considered as a prime example of the late-modern typology of the isotropic space. Finally the paper will not only question the isotropic space as a valid answer to the institutional demand for flexibility, but also the problematic character of the demand itself, which may explain the rather paradoxical remark that the Centre Pompidou delivers 'too much flexibility.'

A Day out at the Hyper-Museum: a comparison of a nineteenth century and digital museum

Hannah Lewi, Curtin University of Technology

At the time of Australian Federation, provision for the display and collection of artefacts, art and books was seen as a necessary aide memoir to the representation of local and imperial historical identities. Accordingly, the Western Australian Museum, Library and Gallery was completed during this period. Some hundred years later, as part of national Centenary of Federation celebrations, a CD-Rom virtual museum has been created through manipulation of imagery from the original WA Museum to fulfill similar intentions of re-presenting local historical and architectural identities from the Federation period.

This paper discusses the museum institution past and present, through a comparison between the late colonial museum and its virtual counterpart. Using this comparison, issues of museology raised by Tony Bennett's The Birth of the Museum and other commentators are addressed. The possibility of a virtual museum is expanded in terms of Bennett's argument that 'exhibitionary techniques' are one of the 'assemblages of mind and body techniques' which are formative of the self and are facilitated through society's 'cultural institutions, or technologies'. Neither traditional historical text, nor conventional museum, the new digital form of exhibitionary technique is visually and spatially organized and driven by the viewer, yet distils from the museum experience only the visual and pedagogical functions.

Museums, Objects, Context: buildings and projects by Sverre Fehn

Helen Norrie, The University of Tasmania

Norwegian architect Sverre Fehn suggests that: “museums have become a favourable field of architectural expression, because objects are gaining more and more significance in this materialistic world. ….. The religion of the present day is the denial of death. So objects are not allowed to die either, but are preserved.”

Over a period of 50 years Norwegian architect Sverre Fehn has explored a number of architectural ideas that interface with the museum programme, through a series of built works and speculative projects. Fehn approaches the museum not just as a shell to house precious objects, but considers how the building arrangement and the display of artifacts can contribute to the communication of ideas and events that the museum seeks to preserve, present and interpret. Most of these museums are of small to medium scale and all are located in regional centers. The undulating Norwegian landscape of mountains and fjords presents a dramatic context for these buildings and Fehn articulates a specific relationship to this environment by creating a strong connection between the building and the landscape.

This paper will discuss how Sverre Fehn’s ideas for museums involve establishing a context for the object in both a physical and philosophical sense, which extends the boundaries of the museum to embrace the external environment as part of the exhibitionary narrative.

The National Museum of Australia

Andrew Hutson, Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning, The University of Melbourne

The National Museum of Australia (NMA) by Ashton Raggatt McDougal (ARM) has been the subject of a range of commentary and interpretation since its recent opening. The range and depth of the discussion on this project partly stem from the explicit and implicit layers of representation and symbolism offered by the architects. Within the architectural noise of overlapping dialogues with the visitor are a series of architectural motifs or tactics that have been explored in previous projects of ARM, the earlier manifestation of Ashton Raggatt and early work of Howard Raggatt. These techniques of composition have been remarkably resilient and while attracting differing meaning or motives have a consistent lineage. This paper is a work in progress exploring the recent history of selected composition and representational tactics manifest in the NMA.

The investigation will analyse previous projects designed by ARM, AR and Howard Raggatt. These projects include, completed buildings, competition entries and art installations. The threads of consistent design tactics are evident through the range of work and have been woven into this building. This paper will in part document the genesis of these tactics.

The Performance of Art in the City: Mies van der Rohe’s museum for a small city and Cullinan Hall

Scott Colman, The University of Sydney

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s design of Cullinan Hall for the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, played an important role in Mies’ formal conciliation of art and modernity in the context of burgeoning twentieth-century urbanism. Cullinan Hall (1954-58) was designed after the Museum for a Small City project (1940-43), where art was preserved in a natural setting, and before the New National Gallery in Berlin (1962-68), where art was framed by the metropolis. The building constitutes an important and little-discussed response to the increasingly multi-functional museum and the desire to preserve the aura of art in mass-society. Central to Mies’ method was the provision of an ample environment for the enjoyment of art through ambiguous, disjunctive, and collage-like effects, and the strict separation of spaces categorised as ‘serving’ and ‘served.’ These strategies were developed from Mies’ longstanding engagement with the modern task of integrating life and art. Mies’ conception of the museum, as developed in his previous projects and experimental collages, benefited from his design’s forced negotiation with the urban context and existing Beaux-Arts museum building in Houston, and the exhibition installations of his friend, the curator James Johnson Sweeney, in Cullinan Hall, during the nineteen-sixties.

Sunday Opening: modes of citizenship in colonial museums

Paul Walker, The University of Melbourne

In The Birth of the Museum (1995), Tony Bennett argues a strong connection between the 19th century museum and the promotion of modes of public comportment appropriate to the generalisation of citizenship. The museum is a key site for this because it induced self-surveillance in the manner of the closed institutions of clinic and prison while nevertheless continually opening itself to address wider audiences. Bennett argues this against Douglas Crimp, who suggests in his book The Museum’s Ruins (1993) that the museum is a strict analogue to the closed institutions that Foucault studied. Crimp’s view points to the role of the museum in the increasing specialisation of an art discourse alienated from the public, an argument that applies also to natural history or ethnology museums and the development of physical and social sciences.

The paper examines Bennett’s position in relation to the museum in colonial locations, where questions of citizenship and appropriate comportment entailed anxieties. The examples of the Canterbury Museum in Christchurch, and the Queensland Museum in Brisbane are investigated. Soon after the completion of the first part of its buildings in 1872, the Canterbury Museum became embroiled in an argument about Sunday opening in which the roles of the museum in education and entertainment were thoroughly rehearsed. The Queensland Museum’s home from 1899 in a building made for agricultural exhibitions and adjacent to ‘show grounds’ facilitates a consideration of a wider ‘exhibitionary complex’. While the positions of Bennett and Crimp assist in the explication of the architecture of these museums, the architectural analysis in turn enables the development of more nuanced general understanding.

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