Into the Archive: Part 1
“There’s some order here — there are boxes with labels — but its not an order we ’ re used to seeing. Is it aesthetic? Phylogenetic? By location? Is there a clear line between human and animal, natural and artificial?”
Musei Wormiani, 1655
Back in September 2023 I began a mammoth task, creating an entire website for an entirely imaginary museum of my own creation. This was based on a guidebook conceived for an MA project on museum intervention, for which I had tremendous fun devising over 40 pages of information and inside jokes (I got a First for this). This website would expand the original concept, following through into a fully usable customer interface where you could peruse events, exhibitions and an up-to-date blog. I even created a menu for the cafe! Everything that can be clicked leads somewhere (except the book tickets buttons, I know. I’m working on it!).
This is a bit of fun, of course, but the creation of redactedmuseum.com wasn’t just a whim. Upon leaving university after my MA in 2021 I was employed briefly at Watts Gallery - Artists’ Village in Surrey as marketing assistant, (and had a fab time!), but since moving to Manchester at the end of August last year I have been working full time as a receptionist and part time as a museum assistant. I wanted my website to keep my hand in, and keep me involved in the arts when I couldn’t be employed in them. Getting into the arts sucks, it's highly competitive at the best of times, and between the Cost of Living, Brexit and the Conservative Party among a myriad of horrors, it's basically impossible because no institution has any bloody money. It sucks to feel like you’re not doing what you want to do, and indeed what you spent many thousands getting a degree and an MA in. People are very rude to receptionists.
But I love history, and many of my weekends are spent travelling to various heritage sites with any friend who is willing and able, or by myself, so I can explore new sites and take in new curation techniques and observe museum practices in situ. I write my thoughts out through my blog reviews, allowing me to engage in the history of the sites and sharpen my observation and writing skills (reviews are not easy!), and when it's slow at work (shhh, don’t tell!), I research individuals and points of history that interest me, reshaping them into engaging and light-hearted narratives. My real passion is how we as individuals and as a society view our heritage, and how this is shaped by museum practices and biassed through influences like national pride and the desire to preserve. These history blogs let me explore these concepts while engaging in current thinking and long-held historic theories. They're worth a read, if I do say so myself. The bulk of redactedmuseum.com was based largely on my experience creating the (very swish) Watts Gallery website, concepts like customer journeys on a digital platform and accessibility features like alt text are not taught in BA History of Art, but they can be learnt when you are a marketing assistant at a gallery in Surrey with a name that sounds a bit like a commune.
So why am I yapping on? Well. The Wunderkammer website is now 8 months old, but to me it feels hollow and static. The blog is the only thing that gets updated with any regularity. There’s something missing. I want the Wunderkammer to be a space to explore museum convention and then parody, circumvent and improve it. This is a learning space for me, in lieu of a real museum to work in, I must create my own experience and facilitate my own learning. I also want others to derive joy from it, and eventually interact with the site, adding their own unique perspectives and biases to the mix. But how?
I’m making an archive, or collections page. But I guess you knew that, it’s in the title.
What do I mean by this? To answer your pertinent question, here is a quote I got off Google:
The functions of a museum are collection, exhibition, conservation, research, and education. Museums collect artifacts and documents to display and research. They hold both temporary and permanent exhibitions to educate the public about culture, art, science and more.
They spelt artefacts wrong, but we move.
A museum’s collection is its beating heart. It is what any organisation bases its identity, branding, ethos and aims off of. Three years ago, I left the collection of the Wunderkammer intentionally vague. Though any keen eyed observer might spot it’s inspired by the Natural History Museum and the British Museum in London, two of the UK’s largest and oldest institutions, with a dash of Pitt-Rivers, an eclectic collection built by one of the first official archaeologists, in Oxford. I chose these places for three reasons:
The Wunderkammer is based, unsurprisingly, on a Wunderkammer, or Cabinet of Curiosity, a forefather of the modern universal museum. They were a collection of artefacts, fauna and flora that mostly existed to show off the travels, wealth or education of their owners. One famous characteristic of these early museums was the dubious categorisation methods they employed, accidentally and sometimes purposefully mislabelling objects to suit a narrative. I wanted my museum to ape this, as a commentary on museum practice, and choosing well-known institutions was an easy target; the Pitt-Rivers Museum has particular similarities.
These three museums are some of the oldest and largest, with their fair share of controversies and centuries-old traditions. They all face the challenge of modernising with the times, something museums can find difficult to achieve. They are also some of the most traditional-looking museums, making comparison pertinent, and their pedigree, with roots in an often problematic past, makes them ripe for re-examination, though let’s be real, I’m hardly the first to attempt that!
These places have collections, and I don’t.
So you see, this isn’t a sorting, categorisation type of challenge because there is nothing to organise, I don’t have any objects. Instead I am creating an archive based on my own research, imagination, and to be frank, whatever media I might have consumed that week. This is a unique pleasure, but it’s also a huge undertaking. I need to teach myself museum categorisation and standard practise, and apply it to the fictional.
The method to the madness:
I need objects:
For ease I will use the website, the guidebook and my channels on the social media platforms Instagram and Twitter as guides for which objects to include. This has the added bonus that these objects encapsulate the absurdity of the Wunderkammer concept already. It will be interesting to see what I associate with certain subjects, and I am looking forward to examining my own worldview and perhaps deconstructing it. I will use these finding to construct a framework for my archive.
Following this, I will choose objects I have encountered in my own life, through visiting heritage sites or by just stepping outside my own front door. What do I have at home which would make a legitimate museum object? What is a legitimate museum object? Is there such a thing? For example, the V&A has a Rapid Response collection where they snap up objects embroiled in the zeitgeist of the moment, including anything from used Extinction Rebellion stickers, to a phone that still has the Flappy Bird app.
Tools and technology:
A spanner in the works. I don't have access to my own CMS (collections management system), and to be frank it’s too expensive and many are custom-built for a specific museum collection. So instead I will use the tools I already have at my disposal. I have a Squarespace website, so I’ll be using this to build a collection of webpages that successfully (?) mimic that of a more professional collections management database. Luckily I do have experience in this area, I have worked with Smartify while creating a museum tour for Gairloch Museum, and of course I helped create the website for Watts Gallery, specifically the Collections and Learning pages (check them out!).
To successfully ape the aesthetic of a collections CMS will require a not insignificant amount of jerryrigging, but we’ll get to that later. This is how I know the first thing I have to do is take a look at how other, more prestigious and definitely realer museums organise their collections, and present them to the public. What is the visitor journey? I need to familiarise myself with the museum's standard practice digitally and imitate it, perhaps even improve on it? Let’s not get ahead of ourselves though.
Research:
Apart from unravelling and examining the ways in which larger institutions choose to display their collections online, I need to familiarise myself with the history of the practice. Luckily I have a head start generously provided by the University of Leeds degree in my back pocket; categorisation grew from the 18th century desire to organise the world according to ‘rational principles’. This technique remains largely unchanged to this day. I aim to discover how much this has influenced the digitisation of objects and the visitor journey through an online archive. Who explores the collections online, and why? What do they hope to discover and what does the museum leave for them to find?
So there we have it, the barest sketch of a plan. To be frank, this technique may change in nature. To quote Bill Bryson: ‘history of any kind tends to sprawl’, and I fully expect that this process will reveal new avenues that beg exploration and render some of the stipulations I have listed here null and void. How exciting!
In the meantime, I have to work full time, keep writing blogs and maybe update the museum’s not exactly thriving social media, then fit in time to get in shape and also eat properly and maybe even go see friends and visit the pub at least sometimes. No big deal. So, follow me through this journey, I’m no good at diaries but who’s to say you can't break the habit of a lifetime!
Best,
L