World War One Museum Commemorations

Simon Jenkins made his name as a journalist, most recently with the Guardian, but in heritage circles we know him as a highly successful chairman of the English National Trust from 2008 until earlier this year, and also as a 21st century Pevsner with his great books on English architecture, most notably England's Thousand Best Churches.

So when Jenkins writes in the Guardian saying 1914: the Great War has become a nightly pornography of violence, it is worth reading. He goes onto say 'Britain's commemoration of the Great War has lost all sense of proportion. It has become a media theme park, an indigestible cross between Downton Abbey and a horror movie'.

Great stuff, and blogging this from the UK , there is certainly no escaping the commemorations (not to mention the 'stay calm and carry on' World War Two slogan which is in serious danger of being completely overused). So I was keen to see the highly acclaimed new World War One gallery at the Imperial War Museum in London.

Firstly, whatever Jenkins may think, there is no escaping the public interest. I had a four hour wait for timed entry into the exhibition, and the Museum was heaving with people. 

Secondly, it is a great exhibition on a subject I thought I knew a lot about, but came away knowing a great deal more. For instance, I didn't know that prior to the War the UK was producing nearly 80% of the world 's battleships, or that when Kitchener called for volunteers in 1915, he hoped for 100,000 and got 750,000, or that the Germans very nearly won the war in early 1918.

Thirdly, it is well designed with clear graphics and text, with content often repeated on other panels in slightly different ways, so one does not feel one has to read everything (impossible anyway given the crowds).

And finally, it has some really great objects. As often happens the mundane ones are the most powerful, a particularly striking one being an infantry officer's jacket with the left arm blown off. Explore the rest of that great museum if you make it there, the jacket having a parallel with a backpack that a soldier placed over a home made bomb in Afghanistan three years ago, when he hurled himself and said backpack on the bomb to save his comrades. Amazingly he escaped with bruising as his flack jacket was inside. He was awarded the Victoria Cross, but his back pack did not fare so well.

November 2014 sees the opening of the World War One galleries at the Australian War Memorial. From what I hear, they will rival those in London.

Curators, curation and opinions

I have been intrigued this week by an article entitled ‘Why curation is important to the Future of Journalism”. Check it out here. It refers to the rise of a new role: the journalistic curator.

For us museum bods, a curator refers to the person holding that critical position of looking after a collection. Indeed the word is derived from the Latin ‘cura’ meaning ‘care’. In Australia it is also used for one who cares for a sports ground, e.g. the curator of the Sydney Cricket Ground. And just to confuse us all, the French term for curator is conservator, e.g. conservateurs du patrimoine or heritage curators.

I have blogged before about the increasingly marginalised role that curators have in museums, and it occurred to me that this article might provide some guidance on what the future for museum curators might look like. I quote:

• “Curation (not a term we often use) gathers … fragmented pieces of information to one location, allowing people to get access to more specialized content”.
• "Good curators know where to find interesting things, because they know the paths and can provide a knowledgeable voice to make things a little easier to parse”
• “Curators help navigate readers through the vast ocean of content, and while doing so create a following based on several factors; trust, taste and tools”.
• “Part of the appeal of good curation is that it carries the person’s footprint. Opinion isn’t really a bad thing, and in fact gives the content shape in this context.

It was the last point that particularly caught my attention. I recently enjoyed the excellent Annie Leibovitz exhibition at the MCA in Sydney. I had only thought of Leibovitz as a portrait and landscape photographer, so I was particularly interested in her work in Sarajevo during the Balkan war. As she said she went there as a journalist, but became frustrated by having to be impartial, and chose to take sides as a photographer (i.e. have an opinion) and document Serbian atrocities.

Should museum curators have opinions? Should their curation reflect a particular viewpoint or expect to provide a balanced and impartial view? I am reminded of the National Museum of Australia controversy over their Australia post-1788 exhibition, which espoused the so-called black armband view, that eventually resulted in the non-renewal of the director’s contract. The NMA clearly had an opinion but was it necessarily a bad thing? John Howard’s advisers thought so.

I turned to the latest edition of the UK Museums Journal to check out their exhibition reviews section. In the first review (“Extraordinary Heroes” at the Imperial War Museum, London) the curator does not even rate a mention (and this at a major national museum), the exhibition designer holding pride of place. However both the next two exhibition reviews list the curator above the exhibition designer, the latter being an exhibition on the Chartism movement at the Newport Museum. It praises the exhibition as ‘treading delicately, balancing the exposition of an important piece of social history…succeeding in producing a display that is both respectful and thoughtful in equal measure”.

So it seems that the mark of a good curator in the modern museum exhibition is a) either to be so impartial as to disappear from the name board, or b) to provide a balanced view. It sounds as though the journalistic curator is a different breed. A pity in my view, and perhaps indicative of why the museum curator is a dying breed.

Julian Bickersteth
Managing Director
internationalconservationservices