Three words
on Museums:
1. Challenging
2. Open
3. Facilitating
When you
have posted your three words, consider the following:
- Do they refer to museums as
buildings, exhibition spaces, or to museum objects/artefacts? All of
these? Something else?
They
refer to a wishful notion of the experience a museum might offer but they also
carry with them a secondary expectation that, in my own past, museums could be experienced
as having quite the opposite effect in every way – as spaces that might be too
self-contained, forbidding and closed (mentally & emotionally). In fact, the
three words are the obverse of the words that I FIRST thought in response to
the exercise. My final words were the result of forcing myself to be more
positive.
- Do they best describe your
view of museums of the past, museums of today, or the possibilities of
museums in the future?
In the
light of the above, very much the future. But that future is predicated on
interesting and diverse experiences in places like Yorkshire Sculpture Park,
the Hepworth Gallery or even the Bishop Auckland Mining Art Gallery.
- Can you identify a time in
your life when you may have formed those associations?
As for the
positives, only recently and as a result of becoming interested again through
positive experiences that have excited me. My thoughts about the worst
experience of museums would be in buildings and organisation and exhibition
spaces that remain locked in with symbols of exclusion – the key example being
the Bowes Musuem (although I see that even here changes are beginning to be
made).
