Crystal time at the Australian Museum

The Australian Museum has a new entrance, built in double quick time by its dynamic new director Kim McKay.

Named the 'Crystal Hall' for reasons of both its design and its ability to house the Museum's outstanding collection of crystals, it was opened last week by the Premier of NSW. Interestingly, this is where the entrance was always meant to be, instead of the slightly awkward entrance from College Street, which has been the way in for the last 150 years. And to emphasize this, the Museum has changed its street address to No 1 William Street - neat marketing.

The Australian Museum's new Crystal Hall entrance

The closure of the College Street entrance has allowed the realisation of the original concept for the entrance area, namely as a major gallery. And the result is spectacular, with truly one of the great internal public spaces in Sydney revealed as it was originally intended. For years this space has been a mixture of cafe, shop and entrance way, dominated by the blue whale skeleton to remind visitors this is predominantly a natural history museum.

The blue whale remains but now beneath it is the new 'Wild Planet' exhibition displaying the Museum's taxidermy collection with specimens large and small. My favourite exhibition on this theme is the Paris Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle's 'Gallery of Evolution', which first kicked off the concept of using stuffed animals in an artistic rather than wholly naturalistic way, though I also love the Melbourne Museum's 'Amazing Animals'. 

This is however a beautifully presented exhibition and space helped by two spectacular vault ceilinged glass cases (vitrines for the initiated) made by the doyen of such creations, Goppion of Milan. 

Take a walk on the wild side and enjoy a buzzing museum.

Environmental Guidelines for museums - an update

I helped convene a seminar at the Australian Museum ten days ago entitled “ Sustainable Buildings for Sustainable Collections – we talk the talk, but can we walk the walk? The impetus for the event came from Morten Rhyl –Svendsen being in Sydney. Morten is from the Danish National Museum, an organisation which has led the way over the last decade in researching and more importantly publishing findings on the optimum method to store museum collections when combining the needs of the objects with energy saving opportunities. Tim Padfield established the Research Centre in the 1970s and Morten is part of the next generation of researchers who are taking the lead in this important area, so it was great to hear where that research is heading.

This is now about not just relaxed temperature and relative humidity parameters, but also about the number of air exchanges, the amount of recycled as against fresh air and isoperms - the rate of decay of objects as determined by the temperature and RH in which they are stored, e.g an object that will last 100 years at an average storage temperature of 22C will last 1000 years at a  temp of 15C. Check out a rather complicated explanation of isoperms here.  

Morten’s keynote was followed by a series of short talks on the science of sustainable environments for museums and the interaction that is required between conservators (determining what climate variance objects can cope with), building managers (advising what climate controls the museum's HVAC system can deliver), and visitor services staff (stating what climate variances visitors will put up with).  

What became clear to me is that the conservator/building manager relationship, where it works well, can deliver some real wins in this area. But the big decisions on the carbon footprint of the institution have to be made at executive level, and the good news is that whilst the debate to date may only have had passing resonance with this level, now that energy cost increases are really beginning to bite, they are sitting up and being prepared to listen. The work that the State Library of Victoria has been undertaking quietly but progressively in very substantially reducing the reliance on HVAC systems to maintain an appropriate environment for the Library's book storage areas has finally gained the attention of the Library's Governing Council.

However the question that I continue to be asked is when are the new relaxed parameters for temperature and RH going to be released. It's a fair call as the AICCM Task force for Guidelines for Museums and Galleries, which I chair, is long overdue in delivering these. As I pointed out in a previous blog this is partly due to the position the National Gallery in the UK is taking by if anything hardening their position. But the reality as I always now spell out is that we have now moved beyond dictating prescriptive blanket conditions and into an era of making evidence-based decisions on what is right for a collection or museum. This means that we have got to understand the particular vulnerabilities and risks of our collections  and the environmental performance capabilities of our buildings and HVAC plant.

That's a daunting task if you are a small regional museum or gallery, but the good news is that there is an increasing amount of literature available to guide you through the process, and the outcome will mean you have a much more in-depth knowledge of the physical state of your collections and the capabilities of your buildings.

Julian Bickersteth

Managing Director

internationalconservationservices

Vale Thomas Hoving and the role of museum director

I see Thomas Hoving the director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York from 1967 to 1977 has died (SMH 29th December 2009). I still consider his book about those years at the Met (“Making the Mummies Dance”) to be the best yarn about life at the top of a great museum, particularly as it was written at a time when the Met was flush with money for acquisitions and also coining the term blockbuster exhibitions. It reads like a good detective novel as Hoving jets around Europe tracking down acquisitions and exhibitions with all the related intrigue.

Interestingly he indulged in a fair bit of deacquisitioning (see my previous blogs on this here and here) to fund these, no doubt in the days before the Met had a policy on such being largely at his personal whim. As the SMH Obituary points out he almost lost his job in the process, selling off important modern paintings to fund the purchase of a Velazquez painting.

It’s got me thinking about the role of directors of museums – should they be showmen or scholars? Hoving was a showman, as was largely his recently retired successor Philippe de Montebello. However his successor is an English scholar and sculpture specialist Thomas Campbell. Michael Brand, the Australian director of the Getty is in the same mould of scholar, now overseeing a 25% reduction in the Getty’s operations - not of his own making I hasten to add. Across the Atlantic, the new director of the National Gallery, Nicholas Penny is a scholar, who succeeded a more publicity conscious (if not actual showman) director Charles Saumarez Smith.

In Australia we see a slightly different type of director in the form of bureaucrat – for instance Dawn Casey at the Powerhouse Museum, Frank Howarth at the Australian Museum and Craddock Morton at the National Museum – all public servants in government departments in former lives. But we also have the showman in the form of the odd sock wearing Edmund Capon at the AGNSW (though he is an Asian scholar of some note), and the scholars with Christopher Menz at the Art Gallery of SA, and Stefano Carboni at the Art Gallery of WA.

Carboni incidentally just to take us back to where we started, came from the Met where he was curator of Islamic Art.

Showman or scholar (or bureaucrat)? Not sure what makes a great director, but probably a mix of all three. What is clear is that great museum/gallery directors are very few and far between.

Salzburg Declaration on Conservation

There has been a meeting of the great and good in the world of conservation in Salzburg over last week end. This has been a one off forum sponsored by the US based IMLS (Institute of Museum and Library Services) and it has included in its 60 participants from 37 countries three Australian conservators, Vinod Daniel, from the Australian Museum, who was a co-chair, Ian Cook, former director of Artlab Australia in Adelaide and Marcelle Scott from Melbourne University. I ought to state up front that I tried to get an invite myself, but was told that they wanted more people from developing nations and not particularly anyone from the world of private conservation. Fair call, I suppose, when the big conservation challenges are less and less in the developed world!

They met in the stunning setting of Schloss Leopoldskron, better known as a backdrop to memorable scenes in the Sound of Music, which is the home of the Salzburg Global Forum. Check out the programs this place is running. It appears to have been a great success, resulting in the ‘Salzburg Declaration on the Conservation and Preservation of Cultural Heritage’. Whilst this on first reading appears to be full of worthy generalisations about working together to save the world’s cultural heritage, it does on closer inspection reveal some genuinely new thinking on how to achieve a global approach to conservation.

And it has got me thinking that we do need to see cultural heritage as a universal asset and to approach its conservation with universal cooperation. I am reminded of the 18th century concept of wealthy Englishmen undertaking the grand tour and returning with trunks full of 'universal heritage' with which they then proceeded to create cabinets of curiosities, with no delineation between type (e.g. paintings or stuffed animals) or origin (Iceland or Africa).

The International Institute for Conservation has been running a blog throughout the weekend written by Richard McCoy from the Indianapolis Museum of Art. The blog has been informative, but it is the response from one Dale Kronkright that sums up beautifully the issue of universality and diversity of conservation work:

Conservation of cultural heritage materials takes place in so many places worldwide and on so many different levels today: in the hands of the preservation practitioner, on the shelves of a museum storage room, in the policies of a collecting institution, in the aims and goals of an organization’s board and philanthropic supporters, in the analytical investigations of a conservation science laboratory, in the public engagement created in an exhibition. I frequently now get the feeling that there is now one worldwide heritage collection, investigated, managed, documented, stored, cared for and exhibited at diverse and unique museums all over the world. Some have stable funding and edifices and exist in secure locations. Some are more threatened. Few actively and meaningfully collaborate for a common purpose. The challenge appears increasingly to be one of creating a global platform onto which any of us can pose questions, carry on preservation dialogues that develop ideas, methods, materials and marshal resources where and when they are needed, while continuing to execute our daily responsibilities and institutional objectives.

It’s a powerful thought of which we who live in the micro world of individual conservation decisions need to be constantly reminded.

The future of museums according to the ABC

It’s good to see the subject of the future of museums getting some airtime on the ABC on 3rd September.

Frank Howarth, director of the Australian Museum, Louise Douglas from the National Museum of Australia and Angelina Russo from Swinburne University form a forum to discuss where museums are at and going to. It’s all good stuff, mainly talking about the close interaction between real and virtual audiences these days. It’s something that Frank has been an advocate for some time, and given he is a highly articulate speaker, he has become a bit of an international star on this front. Certainly the Australian Museum is looking good virtually (21 million visits of at least 4 minutes to their web site last year) compared to over 300,000 live visits. The ongoing question is how you link the virtual visitor to the real experience.

Louise started life at the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney where I worked with her in the 1980s. It was a fabulous time to be there as the project was well funded, all sorts of new ways were being developed for planning exhibitions, there was an exciting new building going up, and we all felt the world was our oyster. In reality the Powerhouse project was truly a catalyst in the redevelopment of a number of major museums in the region – I think particularly of the Melbourne Museum and Te Papa in Wellington - and Powerhouse employees are to be found in almost every major museum in the land. However the building is now seen to suffer from some significant design faults, the most obvious being the lack of a major temporary exhibition space and an entrance that faces the wrong way, i.e. it needs a Darling Harbour front door.

Angelina is Associate Professor in the Design faculty at Swinburne specializing in museum communication. She pops up regularly in anything to do with social media and the web, and was a significant player at this year’s Museums and the Web 2009 conference in Indianapolis. I always find her contribution to be articulate and to the point. So whilst I don’t think much new comes up in the program, it is a useful summary of where a major aspect of museology thinking is at, and I suspect a bit of a revelation to wider audiences.

Understanding climate change – the museum view

With Earth Hour upon us for another year (and what a fantastic ‘ground up’ project that is proving to be), all eyes are on Copenhagen, and whether the world can pull us back from the brink. I liked Prince Charles’ identification of the 100 months that we have to sort this out or it will be too late, as it makes it all very here and now

The role museums can play in educating the public on the issues of climate change is major, both because they are seen as trusted providers of information, and because by their very nature they can draw on years of research knowledge to set current data in context. The Australian Museum continues to lead debate on the issues from the effect of climate change on the Barrier Reef to how species are adapting to changes in heat. One of the most pressing issues is how low lying Pacific islands cope with rising sea levels, one immediate example being Kiribati (pronounced Kiribas). On the basis that it is inevitable that such a country whose average height above sea level is 3 metres, will succumb to the waves, and that therefore the entire population (c100,000 people) will need to be relocated, it is vital that museums take a role to document an entire society and culture, before it literally dies out. There are various cultural mapping projects being considered by bodies such as the Australian Museum to allow this to happen.
But at the end of the day, these so called ‘primitive’ societies are proving to be so much more in tune with the planet than our developed world. Kirk Huffman, writing in the latest edition of the Australian Museum’s members Explore Magazine reminds us of how had we listened to these traditional cultures we might not be in the mess we are in. He cites the North American Cree tribal elder, Wolf Robe, speaking in 1909 , ‘Only when the last tree has died and the last river poisoned, and the last fish been caught will we realise we cannot eat money”.

With the joint mess of human induced climate change and financial melt down upon us, never has a truer word been spoken.

What financial crisis?

There was a great piece in the Sydney Morning Herald recently by my friend Kirk Huffman on how the good citizens of Vanuatu are happily continuing their traditional lives un affected by the financial turmoil sweeping the world.

Kirk is a fascinating person who works both at the Australian Museum and that little gem of Sydney University’s, the Macleay Museum. Kirk introduced me to the world of Vanuatu and its extraordinary culture, which partly results from the unique occurrence of being a dual colony of both Britain and France for almost a hundred years. This not only resulted in a mad arrangement of dual everything (currency, postal system, prisons, courts etc) but left the inhabitants so bemused that they just got on with their lives as per normal and left the colonial powers to squabble amongst themselves. The result was that when independence came, they still had in tact almost all of their ancient culture.

What is so interesting is that they have undertaken a program of capturing that culture on tape and video through an intensive program of using local volunteers armed with tape recorders before it is lost due to modernisation. These 7000 tapes are all kept at the Vanuatu Cultural Centre in Port Vila. But in a world where we are talking of making culture truly universally accessible through the web, the people of Vanuatu have drawn a line and decided that these tapes are for internal access only. That is they have led the world in getting their culture captured in a recorded form, but are now also leading the world in saying what makes us unique does not to need to be shared with the world, but rather only with its own citizens to ensure it is not lost or forgotten.

An interesting perspective as we hurtle down the open access highway.