Strange tales

how curiosity (almost) killed the curator

presented at Communicating the Museum Conference 2013

curator
one having a cure of souls xiv (PPl.); guardian of a minor, lunatic, etc., XV (Lydg.); manager, governor, spec. as member of an academic body XVII-AN. curatour=(O)F. curateur, or the source L. curator, orem, agent-noun f. curare;

see CURE,-ATOR
In considering a near death experience it was thought best to consider Who Really Is The Curator? and in doing so we turned to the etymology of the term. We know that curators collect, conserve and convey ideas about collections. They hold the keys to the vaults in part via their hold on the truth of the object.

cure
preserve for keeping XVII.-(O)F. curer take care of, clean=Pr., Sp. curar, It. curare:-L. curare care for cure, f. cura. The same base is repr. in

accurate, curious, procure, secure

Being accurate, caretaking and collecting are all part of the curator role. But what of the curious? What if untruths could equally open doors onto the collection via tapping into the curious rather than the accurate base of the role. Significant benefits have flowed to museums through the convention of making defensible and scholarly claims to exclusively adult audiences. Yet, the surfeit of care in selecting and writing about collections can result institutional inertia.

The museum has what I call the god voice. The museum speaks and you dont know who is speaking Its like the aggregation of sensibilities
(Myers, H. 2010: 83)

The projects we are about to show you demonstrate an alternate approach, to both audiences and curatorship. We will share with you the surprising outcomes when we invited artists and authors to make up museum labels in exhibitions where the objects were selected by neither an academic nor a curator. And where we invited our visitors to write and publish their labels in the same space.

And where this interweaving of artist collaboration, fictional narratives, social and participatory elements embraced the family audience- captured here in its messy complexity in an illustration by Shaun Tan. Rather than the death of the curator we present the case that these projects have the potential to liberate those caught in the headlights of deity expectations not simply via the creative use of lies but through forging new relationships with the collection and our visitors.

Whilst Sydneys weather is heavenly most of the time, our institution is Earthbound and we are not gods. We are not high caste in the museum panoply rather we speak to you from public programs and the family audience. As you will see this plays a significant role in our story.

Our Museum is the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney, Australia. It holds a fascinating and idiosyncratic collection of over 500,000 objects, built up over 130 years, spanning history, science, technology, design, industry, decorative arts, music, transport and space exploration. The Museum at one time sought to interpret the wonders of the Industrial Age. As a twenty first century museum, we seek to enable visitors to discover and be inspired by human ingenuity. Our brief is broad, and our intention is to be an 'open' Museum open to rich engagement, to new conversations about the collection These delightful projects fulfill both the brief and the intention yet came off the back of years of organisational and cultural change in the creative use of our permanent collectionchange that is ongoing.

Late last century when writing books about the collection for very young children about shoes. I selected this one not for its uncoupled status but because it was handmade and woven. The external publisher and its early childhood literacy advisor insisted we photoshop in another shoe to make it a pair as every other page started with These shoes .We intended to point out the fake shoe in the backpages with the object descriptionsthe curator felt it necessary that I seek permission from the head of collections to temporarily make them a pair. This entailed a written submission, a meeting and some discomfort. So how did we get from the errant photoshopped shoe to even consider making up labelsand what were the deeper issues and implications of this journey. Four key principles provided a framework for these successful literary interventions.

1
TAP INTO THE CURIOUS
Firstly, its certainly is not a directive to write nonsense for no one but a careful strategy of artists and object selection. Take the objects.

Curious things beget curiosity, feed the imagination and can connect to great, small, smart and deeply personal stories. Conventional exhibitions require supplementation, scholarly research and a curatorial structure for visitors to decode the selected museum story. Yet any object can be ripe for display and enrichment especially when its to be a springboard for imaginative thinking rather than purely a mnemonic.

2
CATCH YOUR MASTER STORYTELLER
Collaborate with a master storyteller, giving them open artistic license, within a specific brief, and then maintain an active creative dialogue.

Shaun Tan was our first storyteller: a renowned author , animator (2011 Oscar, Animated Short film) and more importantly for this Swedish setting the 2011 Astrid Lindgren Prize for childrens literature. Collaborations with three other leading artists followed, connecting the collection with the creativity of both children and adults alike. Lets first look Shaun Tans The Odditoreum.

The playful outcome was a small exhibition (book, program, website and travelling show). Shauns brief was to concoct stories behind 11 especially unusual Museum objects. Shauns response was to not to simply write the fantastical but to ornament the possible in a kind of bricolage (described as a way of combining and recombining a closed set of materials to come up with new ideas). The very popular media mash-ups fit this description and so too does Shaun Tans approach to writing for the Museum. He sought information about each object from our records and undertook his own research to combine two concepts into a new idea.

Guide dog testing device number 6 This enormous liquorice all-sorts shoe is one of several outlandish objects used to test young guide dogs for their susceptibility to distract

Guide dog testing device number 6 This enormous liquorice all-sorts shoe is one of several outlandish objects used to test young guide dogs for their susceptibility to distraction while on duty. A tricycle inside the shoe allows a rider to manoeuvre this colourful vehicle while prospective guide dogs are put through their paces.

3
MAKE CONNECTIONS OBJECT, TEXT & VISITOR EXPERIENCE
Finding a creative point of connection between object, text and the visitor is the key, rather than object significance. The artists we selected created narratives that were subtle, plausible and multi-layered, with strange and humorous twists. There was no dumbing down for family visitors. For The Odditoreum seven labels were written by young children as part of our practice of visitor collaboration and treated with the same production values as were those written by Shaun Tan. Visitors in all projects were given the opportunity to make their own creative response using writing stations where they could self-publish labels . Visitors responded in kind writing thousands of labels with many penned by children. These constantly changing displays became one of the most popular aspects of all the exhibitions featuring fictional narratives.

We then went onto The Tinytoreum which featured an inventive goanna and illustrated labels

We couldnt resist this shot of a visitor who brought his own binoculars in.

Reveal was a departure from the previous oreum projects in that it was a small collection based tour illuminating 20 objects already on display. The program was a series of texts, written in invisible ink in dimly lit places adjacent to a featured object only be revealed by a black light torch. Our collaborator was Morris Gleitzman another successful Australian writer reviewed as an author that can write for children and young adults with optimism about the power of story to inform and guide. Morris wanted the response to each narrative to be This could be true.

He was an unusual neighbour, seemed nice, but we didnt see much of him. Kept to himself. Bit noisy. Always in his shed hammering and sawing and drilling. I think he was a bit shy. Took him eight years to actually speak to me. And then all he said was, Excuse me, have you got the time?

Mum always made us sit up straight. Thats why she loved this chair. I didnt. Each time I sat on it there were two sad mouths. I bet Mr Mackintosh didnt even want to design such an uncomfortable chair. I bet his mum made him.

Its a celebration of what museums are really repositories of the human imagination. Every made object is the distillation of at least some imagining, and good museums use this to light up the imaginations of their visitors
(Morris Gleitzman, 2011)

4
SHIFT THE INSTITUTIONAL CULTURE SUPPORT A VISITOR-CENTRIC EXPERIENCE
The Oopsatoreum is the third in the Museums oreum series and reprises our successful collaboration with Shaun Tan. Already a book, the exhibition opens in November 2013. The Oopsatoreum: the inventions of Henry Mintox exhibition will connect visitors to the collection and their own creativity whilst unraveling some important truths about the process of innovation.

To quote Shaun: While the Odditoreum wandered randomly from medieval cannonballs to genetically engineered moths, the Oopsatoreum involved more of an overarching narrative, with some emphasis on mechanical objects and accidents. I responded with the character of an imaginary inventor, Henry A. Mintox: spectacularly unsuccessful and therefore largely unknown, at least until this museum 'retrospective'. Many of the actual objects, from a hearingaids to a mechanical dog, are recast as failed innovations. In some cases being too far ahead of their time, such as an early attempt to introduce mobile text-messaging using pre-electronic technology. Beneath the silliness of the project there is actually an important observation: all invention begins as a daring act of imagination, and beings with a play of outlandish ideas. For every success that filters into daily use, there are countless failures that are as important a testament to creative spirit.

Aimed at anyone who has ever made a mistake The Oopsatoreum will have very broad appeal.

Love trumpet, 1899 The invention of early hearing aids or ear trumpets both fascinated and frustrated Henry Mintox in equal measure. Mere amplification is of little interest to me, he wrote, when so much of the world remains unheard in the first instance. ..

This ball was used to decode secret messages from Russia. The messages were entered into the ball using the same principles of the telephone. Each letter was a series of numbers, and the spaces were made by pressing the large round button on top. Once decoded, letters came out of the slots in the base on small arms, spelling out the message. This invention was abandoned after it continually spelt out the recipe for Borscht.
Owen MacNamara, Amelia Smiles and Helena Kertesz, ages 12, 15 and 15

The character of Henry didnt trust the patent system so he took to recording his inventions on postcards which he mailed to himself. Each of the postcards is from the museums collection over printed with Shauns illustrations.

Programming, not specialist curatorial, staff led these exhibition teams. In our museum, programs play an increasingly important role in audience development. Nevertheless, balancing scholarship with creative engagement was challenging for many departments and remains a tension for curators and programmers. Steadfast, friendly team communication was as important as senior management support for a more open, participatory and accessible Museum. Key in shifting our Museums organisational culture, was this role of public programming staff, with their particular experience and expertise in building creative collaborations with creatives (performers, writers, groups and alliances). This capacity provided another direction for the curators, who typically connect and feel at home with, scholars and collectors. Understanding and embracing the family audience, and the audience runs on the board, helped to underpin the shift of these programs or installations from being supplementary elements to major exhibitions, to becoming commissioning authors and destination audience drivers for family based exhibitions.

We are now at our conclusion where we reflect on our learnings. Fictional narratives are a new window into reality, a new avenue for curatorial practices and full of humour, a quality rarely intentionally at play in a Museum label. A seminar recently held in Sydney explored what happens when objects cut loose from their disciplinary moorings: when things formerly known as decorative, scientific, natural, ethnographic, artistic, domestic, technological or fictional come together to form new allegiances and break old dogmas. The host commenting that when you allow curiosity to be your curatorial guide objects start curating themselves. Objects force their way into exhibitions and resonances seem to spring up. The challenge is how to capture that spirit for the audience

in conclusion
It is vital to validate the curious mind rather than simply providing another platform to support the museum message/interpretation. Our museum now continually seeks modes and mediums for the public to participate online or in the museum space. Adults as much as children can be equally engaged by the unconventional approach of invented narratives and stories. Visitors have been inspired by a well-known author as well as the much lesser known child authors and illustrators. Objects can be more than a mnemonic(memory device)-they can be activated as thinking devices. Acknowledge that just because a project is not from the curatorial area that traditionally drives content doesnt necessarily mean that it isnt thoughtful. Possibly it isnt scholarly but it is as theoretically framed and grounded. Fictional narratives are not a revolution but an example of change.

In this era of the participatory museum, where this term is most often connected with social media interactivity, these exhibitions demonstrate that meaningful content can also be generated from multiple voices in a low-tech, low-cost, manner that is genuinely creative in outcome.