The trend of ‘immersive’ exhibition programming fails visitors
The populist approach to museum design invites visitors into a passive experience from which they learn very little.
“Not sharks again!” – a friend exclaimed as we walked past the Australian Museum. “Wasn’t it dinosaurs last time?” Alas yes, and the promotional line on the website urges “submerge yourself in Sydney’s newest hands-on family exhibition”.
We will return to the idea of submerging yourself, but the really fatal word here is “family”, which is code for children.
The trouble with most of Australia’s museums is that they seem bogged down in the assumption that museums are places you take children, either as a family during the holidays or as school groups in term time. Much of their programming is accordingly childish and exhibitions, as I pointed out many years ago, often seem to be designed and set up by the junior education team rather than by scientists or scholars.
Even when museums are centres of scholarship and carry out serious research programs, these seldom seem to end up producing exhibitions of substance.
It’s as though the research activities were completely separate from the exhibition program, the former having no public face while the latter is designed as a kind of low-brow, populist and semi-educational entertainment.
Some of the best museum exhibitions we have had in recent years – in various capital cities – have been touring shows from the British Museum, and it should be possible to attract similar loans from other great museums around the world. There are countless institutions in Italy alone, great and small, with which connections could be made. This is also true of our art galleries, which have made little or no effort to build international networks beyond the most obvious and laziest options.
It would also be particularly valuable to develop relations with Asian museums. We have had loan exhibitions from China, Japan and other countries, but much more could be done. The Powerhouse’s 500 Arhats exhibition from Korea last year was a fine example. This is the kind of thing the Australian Museum needs to aim for if it is ever to escape the dreary shark-dinosaur cycle.
Ultimately, however, the problem also lies with the collection itself. As archaeology is mainly at the Nicholson (now part of the combined Chau Chak Wing Museum at the University of Sydney) and applied arts are at the Powerhouse, the museum is left essentially with natural history and ethnology, although it is reopening an Egyptian gallery and indeed has announced a blockbuster Egyptian exhibition about Ramses the Great in November this year, unfortunately with the compulsory populist subtitle “gold of the Pharaohs”.
I wrote about the museum’s origins and longer-term plans in January 2021, just two years ago, after a first stage of renovations had fallen far short of the plans first conceived in 2016. Notably, the hideous suspended mezzanine in the central courtyard (known as the Still Addition) between the historic wings had still not been demolished. This could not be removed until further space was made available, and that would mean building a new wing on the corner of William and Yurong streets.
The plan, as I understand it, was for the new building to house the ethnology collection while natural history would occupy the older complex. But two years later nothing seems to have happened and the state government, which has poured money into the Art Gallery of NSW’s dubious expansion, seems to have forgotten the museum, which is by rights part of an axis of fundamental institutions that are all within a few minutes’ walk in the cultural heart of Sydney, together with the AGNSW and the State Library.
Perhaps, sharks notwithstanding, it has been hard to make a natural history museum seem exciting or urgent, although one would have thought that in an age of unprecedented environmental awareness that should have been possible. But there could be a greater difficulty with the idea of an ethnology museum today, even though the AM has an extremely rich collection not only of Australian Indigenous material, but of the cultures of the South Pacific.
The problem, however, is one that faces cultural institutions of all kinds today, and that is an increasing demand that Indigenous peoples have control over how their cultures are studied and how artefacts are collected, displayed and explained.
To some extent this is just common sense; it would be absurd for an institution not to avail itself of advice and information that could be acquired from members or even descendants of an ethnic or linguistic or social group, when that is useful and relevant.
But the idea that any group should be permitted to dictate how their story is told is unacceptable and must be firmly resisted. We would not countenance, for example, the suggestion that the Germans, or for that matter the French, the Russians, even the English or Americans, should set the rules for what historical and cultural materials we collect about them, how we undertake research on them and how we publish or exhibit the results of that research.
Imagine if the Catholic Church sought to control how historians or journalists investigated and reported on its activities. And in fact churches, political parties and other organisations have long sought, as far as they could, to restrict and control information in their own interests. In an open society, however, scholars, journalists and others are free to investigate and comment on these groups, limited only, and quite rightly, by laws of defamation and incitement to violence.
But there is the difficulty: how can you have a real museum of ethnology when the overriding message is already mandated: that Indigenous cultures are good and admirable. How can you look with any objectivity at their various customs, rituals and beliefs, some of which may indeed be admirable or impressive, while others may be odd or repugnant, like various forms of ritual mutilation in initiation ceremonies? How can you even talk about the origins and migrations of populations when these facts contradict various creation myths?
The same kinds of difficulties help to explain most of the peculiarities of the new Great Southern Land gallery at the National Museum of Australia in Canberra. This begins in a way that is visually impressive but of questionable scientific value, as we walk through an entrance corridor of giant kauri tree trunks, multiplied into a forest by mirrors on either side. Then we encounter a display about Aboriginal people collecting and eating the nuts from the trees’ giant cones. This is interesting enough, but it is not the beginning of the story of the Australian continent, in whose immemorial chronology the activities of any humans at all represent a mere instant.
The style of the opening is a foretaste of the whole exhibition design, which brings us back to the Australian Museum’s invitation to submerge ourselves with their sharks. That is to say that it is conceived, in a word that has become popular in large-scale contemporary art of the Biennale kind, as an “immersive” experience.
One display follows another, or rather blends into it in a continuous flow in which it is often hard to know whether you have moved from one topic to another or are still floating in the immersion or submersion of the previous thematic pond.
Immersion is a populist approach to museum design because it invites visitors into an essentially passive and boundless experience in which they feel by turns surprised, impressed, touched or amused – or indeed guilty or fearful about the future of the environment – but from which they emerge again without having really learnt anything, because learning requires a degree of distance, articulation and critical detachment.
This is not to say that the exhibition does not try to convey certain messages. Various Aboriginal myths are presented as though they were equivalent to scientific knowledge, when of course, like all myths, they represent very different ways of thinking. A passage like this from one of the didactic boards gives an idea of the level of confusion: “Mighty movements of earth, water, air and fire – in rocks and rivers, storms and bushfire. Spirits and ancestral beings who create and renew country. Plants, algae and bacteria making the oxygen in the air we breathe.”
The approach is impressionistic, and each broad theme is represented by large-scale visual effects, videos, projections, etc., as well as boards with photographs and commentary, and display cases with various artefacts. The choice of themes is both vague and arbitrary – thus “rhythms, flows and connections”, and “life, home and kin” – and the objects hanging or on shelves in glass cases are presented with very little explanation, so that even for someone who has a general familiarity with the material, it is almost impossible to make sense of the displays.
This kind of approach, especially when the themes are so gratuitous and even tendentious, makes it impossible to tell the story that the gallery should be presenting, which is that of the formation of Australia, the forces that shaped its environment before the arrival of man, and then the impact of human presence here. We want to see where the Indigenous people came from, how they arrived in the continent, how they spread and divided into different cultural and linguistic groups.
We want to learn what impact they had on the environment, including the hunting of the early megafauna into extinction and the effect that practices of burning had on the natural environment. I think it was Tim Flannery who pointed out that repeated burning favoured the spread of the eucalypts over conifers that recovered less well from fire. What effect did land clearing by fire and the changes in prevailing flora have on the soil?
We want to know how these peoples learned to cope with their difficult environment and why they settled into a particular accommodation with it and did not discover any other technologies. Why was there no neolithic revolution in Australia? Was it because the environment was unfavourable to this development, or simply because the Indigenous people were cut off from the stimulation of outside influences?
And then of course we want to see what happened in the course of settlement; how fast did colonial society spread, how quickly did bush turn into farmland? What were the pressure points where conflict between the communities broke out? How has land occupation expanded, but also changed, over the past couple of centuries, when perhaps more land is occupied, but the population lives in massive cities rather than in the country?
How has our mismanagement of particular parts of the environment, like our river systems, interacted with the more general crisis of greenhouse gases?
The only way to tell a story like this effectively is through a chronological sequence of topics. The general picture of “country” and its successive inhabitants might be less flattering to all of us, but visitors would come out with a much clearer understanding of the factors that today threaten our environment and way of life.
Great Southern Land
National Museum of Australia
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