Kylie Message

Museums and the Utility of Culture: The Politics of Liberal Democracy and Cultural Well-Being

Contemporary museums exist as variously configured sets of institutional coordinates that aspire to function as popular, demotic spaces dedicated to representing a variety of experiences and modes of citizenship. In some cases, they can be seen as gesturing toward Yúdices formulation, whereby recognizing the value of culture as a resource may facilitate or enable a new episteme that is ‘posthegemonic’ (from the ‘purview of the national proscenium’) and predicated on the withdrawal of the state from the public sphere (which also redefines the parameters of social agency). This post-Habermasian take on publicity has real implications for museums, which are, by and large, still functioning within what is, according to Yúdice, an exhausted model of citizenship. This paper examines whether, in aiming to provide a much-publicized social advocacy role for indigenous peoples and source communities, the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington DC and the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa might be seen as producing open and inclusive public spaces that encourage debate about what constitutes citizenship in postcolonial multicultural societies. I argue that a neo-Habermasian realm of association and interaction may be provided by cultural centre-like museums. However, I qualify this point by adding that this suitability also reveals the double-edged role of culture at the NMAI and Te Papa—where it is unclear whether culture provides a key resource for the states social management discourses, or whether it is connected to discourses of development produced by—or in consultation with—communities.

Slipping through the cracks: museums and social inclusion in Australian cultural policy development 2007-2010

This article explores the actions taken by the Australian Government during the period of 2007–2010 in regard to its proposal to develop a new national cultural policy. Despite its stated commitment to the creation of opportunities for the re-articulation of existing publics and the formation of new ones, the newly elected federal government’s social inclusion and productivity policies did not, at any stage, seek to draw a positive or causal association between museums and social change. This was despite the museum sector’s numerous attempts to communicate its value in precisely these terms to government. It was also despite the precedents for this policy initiative that existed internationally, particularly in the UK. This article explores the actions taken by the Australian Government during the period of 2007–2010, the international context within which these occurred, and the reactions generated by the museum and collections sector in response to the events.

The New Museum

Benjamin, W. (1999) The Arcades Project. Cambridge, MA: Harvard/Belknap. Bennett, T. (1995) The Birth of the Museum. London: Routledge. Berman, M. (1982) All that is Solid Melts into Air. London: Verso. Blanchot, M. (1997a) ‘The Museum, Art and Time’, pp. 12–40 in Friendship. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Blanchot, M. (1997b) ‘Museum Sickness’, pp. 41–49 in Friendship. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Blanchot, M. (1997c) ‘Translating’, pp. 57–61 in Friendship. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Clark, T.J. (1984) The Painting of Modern Life. London: Thames and Hudson Crimp, D. (1997) On the Museum’s Ruins. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press Cronin, A. (forthcoming) ‘Advertising and the Metabolism of the City: Urban Space, Commodity Rhythms’, Environment & Planning D: Society and Space. Duncan, C. and A. Wallach (1980) ‘The Universal Survey Museum’, Art History 3: 447–69. Foucault, M. (1974) The Archaeology of Knowledge. London: Tavistock. Frisby, D. (1985) Fragments of Modernity. Cambridge: Polity. Fyfe, G. (2000) Art, Power and Modernity. Leicester: Leicester University Press. Hetherington, K. (1999) ‘From Blindness to Blindness: Museums, Heterogeneity and the Subject’, pp. 51–73 in J. Law and J. Hassard (eds) Actor-Network Theory and After. Oxford: Blackwell. Hooper-Greenhill, E. (1992) Museums and the Construction of Knowledge. Leicester: Leicester University Press. Huyssen, A. (1995) Twilight Memories. New York: Routledge. Huyssen, A. (2003) Present Pasts. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Koselleck, R. (2004) Futures Past. New York: Columbia University Press. Maleuvre, D. (1999) Museum Memories. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Malraux, A. (1978) ‘Museum without Walls’, pp. 13–130 in The Voices of Silence. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

New directions for civil renewal in Britain: Social capital and culture for all?

• As with most migration-related issues, it is cities that are on the front lines of the social cohesion debate. Museums — important as sites that represent nations and cities and their populations — have been positioned by national governments as strategic players in the debate, with the result that they are increasingly held accountable to claims that they are, or have the potential to become, central to the wellbeing of community life. This article explores the reasons that the public policy initiatives of cultural diversity, cultural cohesion, cultural capital and cultural industries have come to rely on museums as institutions that collect and create culture, in all its diverse forms, experiences and understandings. •

Reflecting on the New Museum Through an Antipodean Lens: The Museum of Sydney and ‘The Imaginary Museum’

Concepts of liminality and malleability and themes of dialogical flow and exchange have become ubiquitous in museum practice in the last fifteen years or so. They have been employed as strategies integral to the production of museological spaces, exhibitions and public programmes globally, and form a plank that is central to the development of the ‘new museology’ over that period. 2 Rather than attempting to evaluate the impact of the new museology on museums in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand per se, or the compulsion for newness that can be seen to attend this, I want to examine my impression that Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand were quick to adopt the principles and practices and ideals of the new museology because its language and various modes of expression and articulation closely reflected a language that was already embedded within the cultural landscape of the Antipodean imagination. In this paper I examine the convergence of the theories and practices pertaining to the new museology and those surrounding an ‘antipodean optic’ in relation to the Museum of Sydney and an audiovisual installation project made in 2001 by New Zealand artist David Clegg that manifests many of the most central and popular features of the new museum as deployed within the diverse field of writing on this subject. 3

Representing cultural diversity in a global context : The Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa and The National Museum of Australia

In Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand, the cultural diversity project has its roots in the multiculturalism and biculturalism of the 1970s, the political and civil, ethnic unrest experienced in the 1980s, and the pedagogical shift in the 1990s that saw a rejection of the more traditional museum and its historical commitment toward an array of singular or non-compromising representations of identity. Connected to a movement toward a new, possibly hybrid, and definitely transcultural globalization that has been driven by an increased understanding of the interplays between nation and region, the past 10 years have been especially important in regard to recentralizing identity politics; and where, on the one hand, we have seen debate over the interrelationships governing culture, politics, sovereignty and the museum, there has also been a concurrent shift in cultural policy to embrace localized models and examples of the cultural centre or eco-museum. In this article, I consider the ways that the National Museum of Australia (2001) and the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa (1998) have attempted at some level to both maintain the representational authority of multiculturalism and biculturalism as their respective governing policies, and yet also integrate or facilitate the potentially competing concept of globalization that is projected by the UNESCO Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity(2001).

The Museum of Australian Democracy: A House for the People?

Abstract One of the things that I think is missing, and in fact people have talked about this since the 1920s, is a counterpoint to Parliament House, a house for the people, if you want, where you can have civic engagement in democratic dialogue.1 1Peter Shergold quoted in Kate Evans, ‘“Missing” national institution proposed for Canberra’, ABC News Online, 26 March 2010, http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/03/26/2857655.htm

The International Handbooks of Museum Studies

An edited collection of nearly 30 essays by international scholars, curators and designers on the role of media in museums and the relationship between museums and different kinds of media.

Media and materiality: extending the boundaries of object research

Articles included in this volume focus on the social role of “things” to examine the relationships between material and media artefacts, the construction of social identities, and the production and use of culture. As a collection, the articles reiterate a shift in contemporary object-based research which sees the study of things as an expanded discourse in which the thing itself is neither tethered to its material properties or a sole narrative. Faced with the challenge of contemplating the object as a virtual moving target, contributors have produced a collection of articles that extend “the object” beyond any singular or delimited site of investigation. In many cases the “artefact” explored is both media and material, and where this is the case, contributors argue that expressions of cultural production can be effectively analysed in relation to other empirical cultural dynamics as well as social and historical structures. Each contributor employs a case-study approach that raises “questions of precedent and futurity, of canons of contextualization” in order to challenge disciplinary norms and boundaries. The resulting volume seeks, in the final instance, to make a contribution to the ongoing processes of formation and reflection that characterise interdisciplinary culture studies.

Introduction: museum theory, an expanded field

An edited collection of nearly 30 essays by international scholars, curators and designers on the role of media in museums and the relationship between museums and different kinds of media.