The Art of Collecting

I was thinking of writing about the new Mayan exhibit at the Royal Ontario Museum, which I got to see last night. I found myself much more interested, however, in writing about two smaller exhibits I saw in the past few days, which gave interesting glimpses into museum collections.

I went to the ROM earlier in the day yesterday to see The Art of Collecting, a small temporary exhibit from the European department. Taking up only one room (but fitting in over one hundred artefacts), the exhibit highlights recent acquisitions from the past fifteen years in stand-alone glass cases. I wandered past a Tiffany lamp, Georg Jenson silver teasets, Royal Worcester porcelain figures, 19th century bouquet holders, and early 20th century rocking chairs, among other things.

Unlike most exhibits I've seen that highlight objects in this way, the text panels on the wall went beyond explaining why the museum focuses on certain areas of collection. They first explained why the department was set up in the first place - to collect masterpiece decorative art objects that students could learn from and observe. The panels then explained how the museum acquires its artefacts - fortunately mostly by donation with some purchases. It then explained how they got the money for purchases - through deaccessioning other objects. Surprisingly, it then explained the rules for deaccessioning objects that museums follow. It even finished with a paragraph about the Canadian Cultural Property Export Review Board!

I loved the transparency of it all - museums aren't exactly secretive but most people probably don't think about how and why certain objects turn up in museum collections. I understand what the ROM is doing, of course - explaining clearly to collectors that they can get tax receipts for donating objects to museums instead of keeping or selling them, and reassuring the public that their tax money, for the most part, is not being spent to buy these lovely objects. But it's also a great lesson about how museums build collections - something a little different from the usual decorative arts history lesson/timeline.

The Art Gallery of Ontario too has a small, temporary highlight exhibition. It's called Shift, and also encompasses a small space - one and a half rooms on the first floor. It features highlights from the Modern collection and despite its small size, it's quickly becoming a favourite - among my fellow employees, anyway. It definitely packs a punch - Picasso, Georgia O'Keeffe, Chuck Close and Andy Warhol (among others) are all featured.

These highlight exhibits can serve different purposes - an older post of mine also talks about this. They can allow museums and galleries to show off new objects without the time and effort to re-do permanent displays (or while waiting for funding to do so!) or without organizing a larger, more comprehensive exhibition. For the ROM, most of their decorative arts collection is in furnished period rooms, with very few objects received post-1990s on display. It can also show the breadth of a museum's collection. For the ROM, the European department collects pieces from the medieval period to the 20th century, obviously a huge timeframe. As for the AGO, most visitors know about the Thompson collections (Group of Seven, European art, etc) but may not know that the gallery does hold some interesting modern pieces. It's also fun to see objects out of a linear context - viewers can see each independently or find connections between different objects. These objects are meant to be seen, and anything that gets them out of storage is fine with me.

Recent Exhibit: Grace Kelly: From Movie Star to Princess

Anyone who attended the Toronto International Film Festival would have seen the trailer for the TIFF Bell Lighbox fall exhibition about Grace Kelly. The swelling music, the comparisons to Diana and Kate Middleton, the promise of showing her dresses and "yes, even her Oscar".

Now would I have normally paid 15$ to see this (let's admit, fluffy) exhibit? Well, no, but after recently purchasing a discounted TIFF staff membership, I had free admission. And I have always liked Grace Kelly. I actually read a biography of her back in my younger days, and I very rarely read Hollywood biographies. I had seen a good handful of her movies. So really, why not wander over and see what they have?

This was my second time in the exhibit space at the Lightbox and again I hated it. You enter the exhibit through an awkwardly large glass door that looks like an exit. Inside there is one large room, and it's never clear which way to go through - last year I walked through their Tim Burton exhibit backwards. For this exhibit, you walk into a large introductory room, but then are given a choice of paths - and I again took the wrong one. It didn't make too much difference, but I can't imagine it's just me who finds it very unclear.

There is also a separate room off to the side, again with large glass doors that are always closed. It worked well for this exhibit, as it featured one of their prized possessions - a recreation of Kelly's wedding dress. But again, it's not very welcoming and interrupts the flow of the exhibit.

In general, I had two complaints about the exhibit. The first isn't too surprising, once it's clear that one of the organizers is the Grimaldi Forum in Monaco. The point of the exhibit is to celebrate Grace Kelly, and how wonderful she was. It is to marvel at her transformation from upper-class all-American girl to Hollywood leading lady to actual royalty. The exhibit is possible because the archives in Monaco lent her personal items - we see telegrams she received early on in her acting career, clothing she wore, letters she received from close friends such as Alfred Hitchcock, and even home movies she shot of her young family in the 1960s. These are all wonderful artifacts, but it also means that anyone looking for a hint of scandal will leave disappointed. Not that there was ever much gossip about Grace Kelly (she left Hollywood quite young, at the age of 26), but there was nothing negative about her at all. We are meant believe she was the epitome of style and grace, and never made a mistake or had a difficult moment in her life.

There is one letter that stands out among all the others on display. Most are congratulatory, discussing film roles or her Oscar nomination and win in 1955. One, however, is from her father. He writes what he describes as a painful letter, telling her that he and her mother are very disappointed about her relationship at the time with fashion designer Oleg Cassini. This British Vogue article mentions a 2003 biography of Kelly that argues she and Cassini never married because her parents disapproved (he was older, foreign and divorced). Her father, for that matter, was never supportive of his daughter's acting career either. While the exhibit briefly mentions she dated Cassini, it basically discusses how it affected her personal style. And while it describes in great detail her first meeting with Prince Rainier of Monaco (She wasn't wearing a designer dress! The power was out at the hotel so she couldn't blow-dry her hair!), it glosses over how their relationship grew, how they kept in touch, and why they got engaged so quickly - only about six months after meeting.

My second complaint was a complete lack of Kelly's own voice in the exhibit. The only words from Kelly's own mouth were a few quotes on the walls of the exhibit. Everything else - the telegrams, the letters - are written to her. The exhibit does a fine job of taking us through her early days in show business (modeling photographs, magazine covers) to her days as a top actress (movie posters, shooting scripts, film clips) to her days as a royal princess (archival footage of her arrival in Monaco, her clothing) but nothing gives the audience the sense that they know this woman more than any other fan would have in the 1950s. As the TIFF website states, the exhibit wants to celebrate "a figure sure in her own self-creation, fully aware of her consecutive, iconic roles as movie star, bride and Princess of Monaco." And that's what we see throughout the exhibit - the glossy creation known as Grace Kelly, superstar. The young woman who went through these transformations might have been more interesting.

In which I think of new forms of exhibits

This week in museology we've been reading about exhibits - who is listening and looking (students? the upper class? the 'public'?), who is talking (curators? designers? educators?), the problems with interpretation, the concerns with 'blockbusters', the ethical questions that need to be thought through. "Museums are not museums without exhibitions", writes Kathleen McLean, and they are "the soul of a museum experience". I thought I would share with you, readers, a very interesting exhibit I saw recently: the Met's The Philippe de Montebello Years: Curators Celebrate Three Decades of Acquisitions.

This was a very strange exhibit for me, especially as a public history student. Traditionally exhibits are thought of as visually appealing, 3-D versions of an academic paper, in the way that there is a thesis, and objects are used to illustrate this idea. We are used to exhibits talking about one historical subject, perhaps two; but this exhibit was very different.

Philippe de Montebello was the director of the Met until his recent retirement. His 30+ year influence, as well as the respect given to him by his colleagues, is obvious. The show really is a celebration of his time at the museum, and it was well-advertised; the Met's Special Exhibition podcast had been doing shows about the objects featured in the exhibit for months.

This exhibit was not on one historical topic, nor did it centre on one historical era or country, and it didn't talk about a certain art movement. Th exhibit featured the Met's most important acquisitions over the past thirty years, most important being defined in this case as the most transformative to its collections. As the exhibit website describes, it is a celebration of the diversity of the museum's collection. Three hundred objects were placed in the gallery's largest exhibition space, and in it was created "an explosive kaleidoscope of works in various materials representing artistic traditions that range across the globe and across time".

The show was organized in a completely different way than a usual art gallery. The objects were organized solely by acquisition date, meaning that a visitor moved from an 18th century French dress, to a 4th century BC Egyptian figure, to a 14th century Burgundian deck of cards, to a 5th century Indian Buddha, to a Sienese medieval painting, to a picture of Marilyn Monroe. The artifacts spanned thousands of years, hundreds of countries (even Easter Island), and included everything from famous painters (Rembrandt, Picasso, van Gogh) to little-known 19th century photography, from clothing to quilts, from pistols to armour.

Walking through the exhibit was slightly overwhelming. I'd never seen an exhibit that literally centred around acquisitions and ignored any sort of thematic organization. But I, as well as my father who was with me, both agreed it was a new and wonderful way to see the objects. There was no attempt to relate the objects to one another; the accompanying text panels spoke only of the individual artifact. The exhibit let the visitors make their own connections between the objects, between styles, between countries, between eras. It also did a great job at illustrating the sheer size of a world-class art museum like the Met, whose collections mandate must be very long indeed.

While it might seem counterintuitive for curators to put together a large exhibit without a historical (or artistic) theme and which had no prescribed learned message for visitors, this sort of exhibit still worked. It let visitors see objects that had never been displayed together in the same room, allowing for new meanings to come out of the objects. It broke traditional museum rules and moved some of the interpretation from the curators to the visitors. Overall it celebrated the efforts of a single man, who helped the Met become one of the most important art museums in the world.

In which I look at a museum blog

Eric Espig, one of the creators of F Blog, had sent out an e-mail on a Museum listserv asking for comments on his work. He and his partner, both museum studies graduates, were organizing an exhibit called Cold War Berlin: Life at the Breaking Point for the Diefenbunker in Ottawa, to open May 2009. And they are documenting the entire installation.

The first question is, why? Why go to all the trouble to create a blog and post about the everyday issues that come up while installing a museum exhibit? My first thought would be that they were first and foremost posting this information for themselves, as a keepsake of a large project they had put months of work into - maybe their first large self-designed exhibit. Reading through the posts, however, makes it clear that this blog contains great advice on the practicalities of physically transforming a space into an historical exhibit. It shows the background work that most visitors don't even think about. It shows that those wanting to work in museums must have a lot of extra knowledge, and special skills, that they may not have thought about before.

Did you know that most masking tape will only stay sticky for 7-8 days? Or that you should use a low V.O.C. acrylic paint in a museum environment? These two bloggers let the public know the best tips to create a maquette, how to write a curatorial essay, and where to get cheap exhibit cases (and what tools you'll need to disassemble them). They show how they created their title panel in Photoshop, how they changed their design for maximum visitor flow and how they created stencils for the walls.

Blogs like this can showcase one's skill and even passion in creating something for the public. Comments from blog visitors could add different ideas and advice to the new museum worker. And of course, all publicity is good publicity. The power of the internet has proven itself once again, and thankfully young museum fanatics are taking full advantage.