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   Civilizing the Museum: The Collected Writings of Elaine Heumann Gurian Paperback 217 pages (February 14, 2006)
What if they all choose baskets?
For any of us who have had the good fortune to work with Elaine Heumann Gurian, there comes a moment that has all of the qualities of an epiphany. Not as a bolt of light, but much more flannel-like: surprising, thoughtful, conversational, and laid back with a slight prickly edge.
In 1991, Elaine and I traveled to New York to talk with the staff of the newly formed National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) about a shift in the core principles of the opening suite of exhibitions for the museum at the U.S. Custom House in New York. Our conversation had started several weeks earlier with the rhetorical question, “Doesn’t who gets to pick the stuff determine the exhibition outcome?” The answer was to shift the authority of the museum to Native people by inviting 23 Native selectors from all walks of Native life to look at, select, and talk about whatever interested them. Only one had ever been a curator. They were artists, architects, musicians, educators, object makers, and politicians. In one step, the rules were changed.
The meeting with the staff occurred in the break room amid bagels and anxiety. After laying out the premise for the show, there was silence among the staff. It was a good staff, a well-intentioned staff, but this was over the edge. Finally, one of the curators said, “What if they all choose baskets?” She wanted a balanced show that reflected what she knew to be the diversity of Native people. She missed the patronizing overtones. Without missing a beat, Elaine said, “We will have a very nice basket show.”
When you change the rules, you are free to chart a new path. Ultimately, this work resulted in the important exhibition, All Roads are Good, one of the inaugural exhibitions for the George Gustav Heye Center of the National Museum of the American Indian, an exhibition that proved significant in charting the direction of that museum and others.
Perhaps the proper term for this experience is epiphin-ette. Throughout Civilizing the Museum: The Collected Works of Elaine Heumann Gurian, there are little moments, moments of revelation, moments of mothering, moments of realization that “they” are “us”.
Gurian has chosen to organize the essays thematically in the broad definitional categories of: civic responsibilities and social service; architectural spaces; exhibitions; spirituality and rationality. They also seem to settle by decade. Much like popular music swings from Disco to Grunge to Hip Hop, each ten-year period in museums reflects larger swirling cycles.
Just as it is hard to believe we wore large collars and leisure suits, it is hard to remember that we argued over providing a contextual surround for exhibitions. Through these essays we are reminded of our past conversations during various eras by Gurian’s own straightforward statements.
The 1980’s – our era of Passionate Perspective “I am sure we can all agree that no exhibition is the unvarnished truth, because we now admit that someone has varnished everything.” The 1990’s – our era of Energetic Optimism- “We must, quite simply, do everything and all at once.” The 2000’s –our era of Sighs of Realism - “I despair more often now, 35 years later, than I did when I began writing these essays.” One could be completely satisfied by only reading the Introduction where, unlike many authors, she places her conceptions squarely in front of us:
“All ‘truth’ (even the seemingly immutable fact) is synthesized in the eye of the beholder and is therefore subject to changing interpretation.” “Humans can, and do, hold more than one worldview simultaneously and have the ability to differentiate among them.” “The generic museum does not have boundaries it can call its own. On every border, there are abutting, even overlapping institutions.” “I believe in the importance of pushing for change and that everyone, no matter where they fit within the organizational hierarchy, has the power to alter their collective situation.” “I think hand-crafted logical next steps beat ideological dogma.” “I remain persuaded of the importance of multiple answers over the victory of the single response.” Reading this book is like watching a time-lapse film, probably animated, of museums as seen from the inside. Gurian has collected her essays and past speeches into five broad discussions, each spanning many years and each revealing, not just philosophy, but practical actions.
She begins with The Concept of Fairness (1990), where she asks if there is an immutable canon forming an objective standard for aesthetic judgments. As she is wont, she lays it out as she leans back in her chair and sips a Diet Coke … she is a relativist.
“All exhibitions and public programs should encourage viewers to evaluate, perhaps even with skepticism, the content presented in order to make use of it within their own personal frameworks.” “All producers should overtly reveal their personal identities, backgrounds, and points of view and place them publicly for all to see.” “At the edges of this argument we must remain conciliatory and not fundamentalist.” In The Molting of Children’s Museums (1998), she develops both a thorough history of this hybrid museum type and records its blossoming in the late 1960’s where its offering of experimental exhibition environments and open-ended problem solving forever changed the public expression of museums. “The history of children’s museums is the history of making visible the contemporary yearnings of adults, on behalf of children, and offering a physical venue that expressed those aspirations.”
I first learned of Elaine Gurian while I oversaw the exhibitions at the Barnsdall Junior Arts Center, one of the three institutions at the molten core of this movement. These places were the public expression of our play. Not so much to explore “hands-on”, the current, tired phrase, but to explore the implications of “participatory”. We reveled in a joyful exploration in a safe environment full of wit. As she said, it was a time for “More belly laughs, less accomplishment testing, and more rolling around.”
Each essay follows a professorial pattern of beginning with the intent. “This essay will also postulate that the definition of the museum object and the associated practices … have always been fluid.” [What is the Object of This Exercise, 1999]. But it is her seemingly simple questions that she drops on the table that generate the conversation.
“What is an object?” “Is the experience the object?” “Does cultural context make the object?” “Who owns the collections? Does stolen material need to be returned?” It is not ownership, portability, unique qualities, “realness”, or quality that defines objects in museums, but the changing landscape of stories. She concludes “it is the ownership of the story, rather than the object itself, that the dispute has been all about.”
At the same time, she recognizes the powerful hold objects have had on institutional psyches. “I would be remiss if I did not also acknowledge the power of some objects to speak directly to the visitors, for example, in the sensual pleasure brought about by viewing unique original objects of spectacular beauty. But the notion that objects, per se, can communicate directly and meaningfully is under much scrutiny. The academicians of material culture, anthropology, history and other fields are engaged in parsing the ways in which humans decode objects in order to figure out what information is intrinsic to the object itself, what requires associated knowledge gleaned from another source, and what information is embedded in cultural tradition.”
This is why experts like museums. They are confirmed in what they already know. Art historians, Native people, train buffs, thimble collectors can all find confirmation in museums. In some ways, the real question becomes, if the previously disenfranchised are now speaking on behalf of their material in a museum, have we simply substituted one group of experts for another?
Gurian is not afraid to look beyond our white sheetrock walls for examples. In “A Savings Bank for the Soul” (1996), she welcomes the instructive quality of other social venues; shopping malls, front porches, and coffee bars as a way to understand “peaceful congregant behavior. It is the afterword in this chapter that is significant with a single ringing statement that speaks to the current regressive behavior of museums.
“This paper was originally written prior to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Thereafter, the preoccupying concern of social conservatives (who held the levers of much of the political power in the United States) moved from excessive individualism to a kind of fearful patriotism that allowed for very little deviation from compliance and conformity.” While each essay raises potent questions worthy of discussion, now so necessary in our museums, I will call your attention to two essays that are rich in their implications. In “Blurring of Boundaries” (1994) she raises some of the ambiguities with which we must live.
“Museums will become more comfortable with presentations that contain a multiplicity of viewpoints and with the interweaving of scientific fact and what is considered by some, but not others, to be myth.” Can the examples of working with Native people to determine exhibition outcomes carry over to other arenas? How do “science” and “myth” sit together? Or as Gurian asks, “Does the displaying of both with equal weight open the door to the Flat Earth Society and the Creationists? Do we care?”
“A Jew Among Indians” (1993) was originally, as I recall, a thoughtful response to a simple question from the NMAI’s director, “How are things going?” Pay particular attention to Elaine’s worries. They are the other side of the play and should be part of every museum’s self-examination.
Three important institutions are often cited in the essays; Te Papa, the United States Memorial Holocaust Museum, and the National Museum of the American Indian. All have been effective in moving the dialog forward and all have been shaped by Gurian’s philosophy, wit and intuitive precision. “Almost right and almost wrong are so close together.”
In the end, the book is best read with an individual session for each chapter, like sitting with a friend every Friday afternoon. Then the conversation can circle back on itself in the way conversations with friends do. It becomes more like wandering at a party where you can circle through the kitchen and pick up the same conversation in the dining room. And we forgive friends for repeating themselves as they re-tell the iconic stories, because it is the iconic story that shapes us, and it is how we remember and celebrate our friendship. And she is a friend of ours and she would be there every Friday afternoon.
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