Know Your Own Bone

Photo from okaygreat.com

This installation, designed by Scott Reinhard, uses the front staircase at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago to relay an important message that really got me thinking these last few days. I’ll start with my conclusion: museums are right now and museums are right for now.

I recently wrote a blog post highlighting ten reasons to visit a museum. Reasons included items such as: museums make you smarter, museums inspire, and museums help bring change and development to communities. After a bit of deliberation, I decided that if I wrote the post again, my final reason might simply be something along the lines of Reinhard’s powerful message: Museums are now.

It may seem counter-intuitive to regard a museum as a place-of-NOW, as museums often house treasures of the past and generally aim to educate the community in aspects of history, the evolution of ideas, or the study of things already-created– But museums evolve as well, and often with the community. Though you may be looking at ancient items in a museum, the context of your visit, interactions that take place, and your personal understanding of items is richly painted with the glitter of a one-of-a-kind NOW.

One hundred years ago, during the early twentieth century, D.H. Lawrence was noted for saying famously,

Museums, museums, museums, object-lessons rigged out to illustrate the unsound theories of archaeologists, crazy attempts to co-ordinate and get into a fixed order that which has no fixed order and will not be co-coordinated! It is sickening! Why must all experience be systematized? A museum is not a first-hand contact: it is an illustrated lecture. And what one wants is the actual vital touch.”

While their attempt to illustrate “unsound theories of archaeologists” may still be true, a quick Google search reveals the incredible evolutionary power of museums. They are playing active roles in the community and providing first-hand contact with now; that “actual vital touch” that Lawrence advocates.

“Museums are now being seen by refugee agencies as a neutral space for debate and discussion about integration.”

“Museums are now beginning to address the global as their audiences become increasingly culturally diverse.”

“Museums are now creating richer and more meaningful experiences and relationships online.”

“Museums are now engaging with community development issues.”

“Museums are now being shaken from their long-standing complacency and are being galvanized into action.”

“Museums are now found in nearly every city in the state.”

“Museums are now being expected not only to preserve the material culture of vanishing communities, but also to preserve those communities.”

It’s clear by these verbs (beginning, creating, engaging, preserving) that museums– once easily regarded as static monuments to the past– are kicking and squirming, if not entirely breaking out of their shells and redefining the concept of a museum. Perhaps what captures my attention about Reinhard’s piece (aside from it’s obvious unavoidability on the museum staircase) is the fact that it may make a visitor stop for one moment to think about those (perhaps opposing) concepts of a museum and of now. For museum professionals, the connections I’ve been speaking of are apparent. Museum visitors, on the other hand, may make different and valuable connections between the concepts. They may think:

• Museums are now, in that they evolve to meet the changing needs of the community (as I have discussed)
• I am at the museum now.
• Because I am going to the museum today, it is my now. Perhaps when I return, the situation will be different and I will have more life experience so I will understand the museum in a different way.
• Museums utilize cutting-edge technology in a way that is indicative of this point in time.
• Museums are…..(something else: failing, captivating, engaging, going broke, serving as connectors) now.

There are several other interpretations connected to identity, technology, history, and museum function, I’m sure, but the installation’s confrontational connection between museums and now serves to do one thing that I think encompasses nearly every reason to visit a museum: it ties the museum to something relevant (like the immediacy of now). Thus, I would like to share my eleventh (deeply rooted and often complex, but overall easy-to-digest) reason to visit a museum:

Museums are relevant.

(if even for just this moment as you read this blog post).