Context and Cragside

A constant challenge for house museum interpretation is contextualising the building and its contents. We all know how stories bring places alive, and the reality is that some house museums have more going for them in this space than others.

Cragside near Morpeth in Northumberland is one such house, and a recent visit confirmed what a sterling job the National Trust are doing with it. And what a story it has to tell. The owner, Sir William, later 1st Lord, Armstrong (1810 - 1900) was one of those great Victorian industrialists and engineers who brought Britain to world pre-eminence by the end of the 19th century. Famous for an ability to so immerse himself in solving a problem that his colleagues would wonder if he was still alive (note to self: must remember to try this in boring meetings), he would emerge from his trance with another mechanical solution.

Generally this was applied, as far as I could see, to building battleships for the Japanese at his shipyard in Newcastle. But with the fortune this provided him with, he set to in a remote part of Northumberland to build Cragside with the architect Richard Norman Shaw.

There he included every gadget he could think of to invent, from running hot and cold water (unheard of at the time!), to an hydraulic lift, an automatic spit for meat in front of the fire (every home should have one) to electric light powered by a hydro-electric power plant, the first in the world.

He even convinced the Prince and Princess of Wales to come and stay to savour these delights, building onto the house to accommodate their visit including the most humongous fireplace known to man.

The National Trust have done a great job of making the house feel as if Lord Armstrong has not long departed in an unfussy but well explained way. Well worth a visit as a model of how to tell a good story.

Harnessing technology to add to the museum visitor experience

Despite being quiet on the issue for a few months, I remain fascinated by where technological developments will aid the museum visitor, as in my previous blogs (see links at end of blog).

I am in no doubt that we are drawing closer to each visitor's own smartphone being able to provide:

• location specific content at whatever level and in whatever language the visitor chooses.
• dynamic way-finding that guides the visitor wherever they want to go, suggesting objects of interest tailored to the visitor's viewing patterns along the route.
• rich data to the museum on visitor patterns, and dwell times.

At the moment despite a great deal of noise in this area over the last five years, visitors to museums are still relying on good old labels and storyboards, along with that stalwart supplier of extra information, the audio guide, albeit vastly advanced from the old cassette tape days.

We can visit MONA and see what the world looks like in a label-less museum, and we can test a great array of apps, and NFC technologies (RFIDs and QR codes being the dominant). And though I have yet to experience it, the Cleveland Museum of Art's Gallery One project does seem to be hitting the mark in providing a value-add to visitors  - check out the New York Times article 'Technology that serves to enhance not distract' for a good summary.

We can ruminate on how Google Glass is going to change our world. The latest edition of the UK Museum Association's on line journal looks at the potential for Google Glass to 'recognise' artworks and provide additional text on the wearer's screen along with audio feedback. To learn more on this, check out GuidiGo.com who have partnered with Google's 'Glass at Work' program to develop mobile guides  for museums. However Google Glass is currently far too expensive in terms of hardware and content development cost to be a serious tool in museum interpretation.

If you want to spend a day on line at a webinar, tune into the New Media Consortium's Virtual Symposium on the future of museums on 23rd July.  It will be looking at advances in both BYOD (bring your own device) and location based services.

My take on all this? The process is taking far longer than we all thought for these technologies to move into mainstream use, as they all currently have limitations. A fundamental reason is that the user cannot see much added value, so until the content gets substantially richer and the experience of viewing the artwork or object that much greater, visitors are going to quickly switch off.  And this richer content requires a heap more work from curators, at a time when curators remain a somewhat  threatened species within museums and certainly not well resourced to produce this extra overlay of information.

In the year when the number of active mobile phones is due to overtake the planet's population, we need to be ready to work out how the visitor experience can be maximised in an all pervasive mobile world.

Previous relevant blog posts:

• QR codes and visual recognition
• QR codes - the discussion continues
• Mobiles and museums - the next stage
• The real via the virtual - Google Art expands
• Mobile connectivity and museums
• New technologies in the museum sector
• Providing rich media content
• QR codes, RFIDs and Goggles
• Museums mobiles and apps

Mammoth Yarns

My recent blog talked about the impact of climate change on heritage sites in Greenland, but of course permafrost melting is not limited to this country alone. In Siberia the problem in many ways is even bigger as the land mass is so huge, and it is leading to some interesting threats to historic objects. I wrote a while ago about the trade in rhino horn. The trade in mammoth tusks seems to be much bigger. It is not a new one, as although mammoths died out 10,000 years ago there are instances of mammoth ivory being traded from as early as 1611, and it ended up in the nineteenth century being so commonly found that it was used for piano keys. Estimates put the number of mammoths found over the last 250 years at almost 500,000.

Now however, with the trade in  ivory so tightly controlled under the CITES convention, the search for and trade in mammoth tusks are very much back on the agenda, as they are not subject to CITES.

That in itself is not such a problem, but as one of our papers at the recent International Polar Heritage Committee's conference showed, the searchers tend to look for concentrations of mammoth ivory. With almost 100% probability, any concentration typically means it is an archaeological site, as human activity has led to  a mass accumulation of bones.

And the searchers are not remotely interested in what the sites can tell us. The Siberian Berelekh 'mammoth graveyard' does not exist anymore after the bone bearing deposits were washed out by mammoth ivory hunters, and the Yana site which contains the oldest evidence of human habitation in the Arctic dating to 25,500 - 26,000 BC  has already been seriously damaged by the mammoth hunters. The process followed uses high pressure water pumps to wash out the frozen river bank, including tunnelling into the bank and causing mass collapse, erosion and loss of critical parts of the site. Take a look at these photos of the process in operation - not exactly best archaeological practice!

Conservators en masse

I'm just back from the biggest meeting of conservators that I have ever been to - an impressive 1,250 of them meeting under the auspices of the annual conference of AIC, the American Institute for Conservation, in San Francisco.

A well organised event with a good mix of plenary sessions, specialist working groups, a social program and a bit of fun with the big debate.

The theme of the conference was Conscientious Conservation - Sustainable Choices in Collection Care, which was a great setting for my paper reporting on the survey ICOM-CC and IIC have been undertaking into environmental standards around the world. US conservators get the sustainability need for relaxing the tight temperature and relative humidity standards that museums operate under, and are doing great work in strengthening  the scientific case for safely doing so. The view from the UK, when the push for broadening the standards began a few years ago, was that the US would be reluctant to do so, but ironically it is now elements in the UK that are wanting to stick to the current paradigm along with the German, Austrian and Swiss conservation groups. My view remains that we will reach international consensus on the issue based around agreement on evidence based information, but that evidence is at present too limited, so the work by US  conservators in showing us that what happens in the field is hugely useful.

The main reception was in the stunning de Young Museum, opened in its current building in 2012, which was designed by Swiss architects Herzog and de Meuron. I can't say I like the exterior with its brutalist facade and prison-like watch tower, but inside it is stunning, including the fab view from the tower. Herzog and de Meuron are the go to architects in the museum space at present having picked up the new contemporary art museum M+ in Hong Kong's West Kowloon Cultural District, the world's biggest cultural development site, and recently the new Vancouver Art Gallery.  Coincidentally, they are also the architects for the redevelopment of Flinders Street Station in Melbourne, which will be a totally stunning transformation of the site when it proceeds.

 

 

 

The next big moment on the conservation horizon comes in September, when for die hard conservation conference groupies, nirvana arrives with the ICOM Committee for Conservation Conference in Melbourne from 15th - 19th, followed by the IIC Congress in Hong Kong from 22nd - 26th.

 

Cultural heritage in Greenland - What you may not know

That rather overused phrase 'the things we know we don't know, as against the things we don't know we don't know' came into sharp focus this last week for me at the ICOMOS International Polar Heritage Committee Conference in Copenhagen. As President of IPHC, I had conceived of the idea of getting together scientists and polar heritage specialists under the title The Future of Polar Heritage: Environmental challenges in the face of climate change,  in the hope that each could help inform the other. The National Museum of Denmark kindly agreed to host the conference and we looped in the Polar Archaeology Network to join the party.

All was promising well, when the National Museum suggested we also link the Greenland National Museum as co hosts, principally because our contacts at the Museum were undertaking research in Greenland. We said yes, they said yes, and things were looking even more interesting.  But I had no idea what a revelation the Greenlanders involvement was going to bring.

Firstly, let me run through what I (mostly) didn't know about Greenland. It's a vast country almost the same size as India, but populated by only 56,000 hardy souls (ever met a Greenlander?) half of whom live in the capital Nuuk. That makes it the least populated country on earth by a margin of ten times over its nearest rival (the Falklands). A former colony of Denmark it is now semi-autonomous with an economy that exists off fishing, tourism and increasingly mining royalties. Despite its small size it still manages to run a National Museum and support paid staff in no less than 17 regional museums.

What is fascinating about its history is how climate change has caused successive waves of occupation and abandonment. There was prehistoric occupation until abandonment c. 500 BC. Then Norse immigrants settled in Southern Greenland around  AD 985 and managed to create a farming community during the Medieval Warm Period, but vanished after c. 500 years of existence probably due to  sea level rises, and an increase in sea ice and storm activity. Occupation then began again in the late nineteenth century initially with trapper activity followed by military installations and weather stations in the Second World War, post war mining activity and Cold War Arctic bases.

Now this rich heritage is under considerable threat once again from climate change. Global warming is happening 2.4 times faster in the region due to the albedo effect, a measure of reflectivity of the sun rays, and with that the permafrost is melting at an alarming rate. This combined with coastal erosion caused by increased storm activity and reduction in sea ice (which normally protects the coast from damage) is causing the accelerated destruction of heritage sites, the majority of which are on the coast. A compounding problem is that there at least 1700 sites which are known about that have never been surveyed, which suggests that there are many more that will be lost before they are ever discovered in the first place.

All rather depressing, as it is difficult to see where the resources are going to come from to do much about capturing this rich history, but at least knowing about it is a starting  point.

Coincidentally, I am writing this whilst directly above this extraordinary country en route to the American Institute for Conservation Conference in San Francisco, where I am giving a paper on the complex  issue of environmental standards in museums. More on the latter soon.

And my final bit of unknown (but now known) information is 'isostatic rebound', a phenomenon particularly found in Greenland. This is the process by which the earth's crust literally rebounds when the weight of ice is taken off it, often by many metres, when it has had some kilometres of ice on top of it melt away. Great stuff!

Monuments Men

It is not often that a conservator appears in a movie – we are one of those professions that tend to operate under the radar, hidden away in the back of museums. But when we do hit the limelight we like to do it in style, so it is great to see a conservator playing a lead role in the recently released Monuments Men, played by none other than George Clooney.

George plays the central character of George Stout (called Frank Stokes in the film) who was a key player in the Monuments Men, or to give them their full title, the Monuments, Fine Art and Archives (MFA&A) section. Set up by the Allied Forces in World War II, they were entrusted with the mission of locating and protecting works taken by the Nazi Regime. The film is based on the book of the same name by Robert Edsel, and tells their remarkable story, based around a simple job description: to save as much of the culture of Europe as they could during combat.

 

Stout packing Michelangelo's Madonna of Bruges in the mines at Altaussee, Austria, July 1945

There are many angles that could be followed off the back of the story, from Hitler’s grand plans for the museum to outdo all other museums, the FuhrerMuseum in his birthplace, Linz, Austria to the recent discovery of 1378 looted works of art in the Munich home of Cornelius Gurlitt.

However, warming to our theme, let us return to George Stout and the conservation component of the Monuments Men story. Stout studied art history at Harvard and was then drawn to the Fogg Museum (part of Harvard) for its unique approach of applying science to the study and preservation of art, at a time when art restoration was the preserve of art historian or artists. In 1928, the Fogg director, Edward W. Forbes established the Fogg’s Department for Technical Studies and named Stout as the museum’s first conservator. In 1932 they launched 'Technical Studies in the Field of the Fine Arts', the first journal dedicated to conservation related research. Partnering with the chemist John Gettens, Stout then went on to produce 'Paintings Materials, A Short Encyclopaedia', which remains today a standard reference for conservators.

As the attack on Pearl Harbour in 1941 increased fears that the war would reach America, Stout began work on a ‘cultural first aid’ manual for  the armed forces called 'Notes on Safeguarding and Conserving Cultural Material in the Field'. So he was an obvious choice to be one of the first to join the Monuments Men when it was formed in 1942. After the war he continued to have a distinguished career, becoming director of the Worcester Art Museum and the Isabella Stewart Gardener Museum in Boston. More importantly, as a result of his Monuments Men experience and his appreciation of how international conservation professionals can work so well together, he was the driving force and one of the founding members of the International Institute for the Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works (IIC) of which I am privileged to be currently Vice President.

Enjoy the film, but do also read the book as it tells an astonishing story about some truly passionate men who in the end saved some 2.5 million items including 468,000 works of art.