Chapter 1. The idea, or how a journey starts on  

 

It is ridiculous, isn’t it? You go to all these museums thinking how fearfully dull you can be there,

but then when you the least expect it you find yourself incredibly absorbed in all these thing you see there,

things that you can use for yourself and for your life

Somerset Maugham

 

When you truly strive for something,

you’ll obtain it!

P. Coelho

 

The objective of the project “The Art of Travel” was designated as examination and presentation of museum collections relating to journeys within a framework of a new socially topical interpretation.

 

What did it mean for us?

Short summary

The research is based on the M. Bakhtin’s dialogue concept of culture. It implies that exposure to cultural legacy is a dialogue between cultures, societies, people of the past and the present. Applied to museum research it means openness and multidimensionality of museum artifacts and texts interpretation, opportunities to read the past in a different manner and to add significance to it taking into account modern contexts, semantics and practices.

In this respect the project was aimed at resolving the problem of a “closed” museum working mainly in the mode of a monologue. We tried to think through how to change the situation when the range of exhibition themes do not meet public needs, have nothing to do with their life and hobbies, areas of their concern, when adult audience does not perceive historical museum as a meaningful place and is used to going to cinemas, theaters or concerts to experience “co-being”. 

We found the way out in building up a sort of a bridge between the present and the past, allowing us to search for specific aspects in cultural heritage that can be of vital importance and interest to the present.

We did not want to dedicate our exhibition to tourism evolution in the Urals or history and geography of trips to other countries. Such exhibitions could attract museum experts or a narrow segment of public. When it happened, 500 or 5 years ago also made no difference to us. A passion for opening new worlds and a sensation of being on one’s way do not have time constraint. We wanted to be aware of how our collections and materials could answer modern man’s needs; we looked for such an interpretation that could appear to be urgent for today’s travelers.

Our starting point was to investigate travel as a certain culture – a set of notions, meanings, emotions, practices and styles. It made it possible to represent history of travel not in the past but in the current time as something enticing for juxtaposing and reflecting upon one’s touristic experience. The final exposition had to give visitors the opportunity, in the first place, to understand themselves, realize what has been on their mind for a long time, to learn how they could be more fulfilled by travelling differently, to think of travel as the art. All this conveyed that a visitor could find a museum to be not only a place to gain knowledge but also meaning.

 It was important for us to make a museum a stage where journeys might begin.

Detailed summary

In the goal set of our project there is one fragment that requires explicitation – “in the framework of a novel, relevant to the society interpretation”[1].

For us "relevant to the society interpretation” is the notion similar to “heritage actualization”. The latter is defined in the recent dictionary of relevant museum terms: “Actualization of heritage is an activity aimed at preservation and the inclusion of cultural and natural heritage in contemporary culture through activating a socio-cultural role of its objects and their construal”[2].

We find this definition quite acceptable though it seems to be  a bit incomplete and operational, i.e. unable to provide instruments and criteria for actualization to be implemented. Two questions need answering prior to the research directed to the inclusion of heritage in modern culture:

• How can socio-cultural roles of heritage objects (in our case – museum pieces) be actualized)?
• Which interpretation is actualization?

The first question implies that socio-cultural roles of heritage [at present?] are inactive, and there exist some instruments and techniques appropriate for such activation.

Unequivocally, not all the heritage corpus requires activating. Some part of the past is embedded in modern culture thanks to living traditions and “natural” memory. We can still feel this bondage based on face to face contact, recollections, tradition. However, nowadays an “alive” portion of heritage is becoming progressively smaller. The post industrialized society builds up its own relationships with history. Man of the late XX – early XXI centuries tends to break free of history, his ties of continuity are being dissolved, and the past is more likely to be perceived as another (alien) country[3].

Pierre Nora who conducted a depth-in research on the cultural memory of the French nation describes this as follows:

“…we moved from the surefooted past to a past we experience as a break, from history that used to look for itself in memory perseverance, to memory that had projected itself onto history discontinuity. Little has been said today about the “roots”, we talk of “inception”.

“The past is given to us as somewhat radically new, it is the world we have been cut off from forever”… “We do not live in it any longer, it speaks to us through traces – mysterious traces which we have to make sense of…”.

“We do not have common grounds with the past. We could only find it via reconstruction”. As a result, ties to the past today is “the background, and memory is decoding of what we are in the light of what we have not been any longer”.

“Memory is so much talked about only because there is not any”, “if we went on inhabiting our memory, we would not have to devote special sites to it”[4].

In France he dates this new epoch from the 1970s.

Heritage-associated institutions are to construct bridges capable of connecting the past and the present, embedding man in history, giving him an opportunity to perceive the significance and value of the past to his own life.

It should be noted that a lot was done in the XX century to substantiate how and what these bridges should be built for.

In the early XX century representatives of hermeneutic were the first to conceive this problem. Owing to them it was found out that objective past does not exist, there exist different ways of its reading and interpreting. Certainly, such an attitude blurs, deconstructs the concept of Artifact, it personalizes and makes the very attitude to the past problematic, raises a question whether   the past as it is (the one than can be described and illustrated as a museum exposition)    exists.

M.M. Bakhtin’s works, where he rationalized an active, dialogic character of cultural memory, deserve special mentioning. He argues that memory is neither knowledge, nor preservation of the past but a process of its repeated reading every time allowing one a novel comprehension of both the past and the present. In this respect we can name it memory-dialogue.   M. Bakhtin also made it possible to relieve the problem of cultural divide that used to be considered the loss of the key to the past, disconnection with it. In M. Bakhtin view, in the realm of culture it is “odd presence” that becomes the most powerful level for understanding[5].

In spite of the weight of these research efforts the museum often appears to get stuck in the past ignoring contemporary culture, reality, and modern man needs.

It is easier and simpler for a museum to represent a static picture of the culture gone than to work with the relevant culture. Those who try to actualize culture have to formulate and stand up for this approach.

It seems here relevant to quote N.I. Popova, director of the Akhmatova museum in St.-Petersburg: “…in fact, a museum is an open site. This definition is very important. It is commonly believed that the museum is looking backwards. This is like a Lot’s wife: to have a final glimpse, to see and to preserve. No, it is not! The museum is a “Janus” state. If you do not see anything right away, if you do not look forwards, then it is useless looking back. Or just keep your neck twisted and sit still in this stupid posture if there’s nothing you want. Openness is the main thing in a museum life. Any museum. In principal. As there is nothing more boring than the situation when it becomes motionless, addressing the past”[6].

It is surprising that even in historical science itself which has always been the basis for museums of history previously it took considerable efforts to substantiate this dialogical standpoint for studying the past.  

So, M. Bloch and other Annales School’s scholars who had greatly influenced historiography in the XX century claimed that a historian did not have to erect an ivory tower where, away from the din of modernity, he could “objectively” examine the past. On the contrary, he should be interested in questions to address his contemporaries concerns and pose these questions to the epoch under examination, act as an interpreter in the dialogue between the past and the present enabling people to better understand themselves:

“There is only one science about human beings through the prism of time, the science where one should necessarily tie the study of the alive with the study of the dead”[7].

 

 As a result, most works belonging to co-thinkers of Annales reinvented history as a social science. It was their reaction to urgent issues of the society they lived in, and they greatly contributed to their discussion and settlement.  

Thus, a bestseller by Le Roy Ladurie entitled “Montaillou, village occitan” was a study resulted from an acute desire to address a dramatic disappearance of the French peasantry and the answer to activists struggling for autonomy of the southern regions of the country.

The debate on Philippe Ariès’s book devoted to children and the perception of children under the Old Order tuned into arguments concerning the issue of voting age lowering to 18 (Don’t we place France fate in children’s hands? At what age can a child be considered grown up? Etc.).

Disputes of historians on contraception practices and sexual life of the French medieval peasants were parallel to the Left and the Right polemic related to free sale of anti-baby pills[8].

As practice shows, such “topical” research is much sought after among the public. The book “Montaillou” was unexpectedly a success and a bestseller, historians more and more often found themselves to be TV presenters and indeed effected at least the assessment of what was going on in actual social space.

Being in demand interests history museums, too. Using their potential, tying up collective experience they are designed to cherish with the present day situations they could become “agents of impact” and specific “sites of power” in modern society.

However, in practical terms, history museums often choose another way creating exposition in the genre of chronological narrative of events, historic figures and reforms of the past. A simple text which can define such an approach is the question “What is this exhibition about?”, “What is its keynote message?” Well, you could hardly get a reply. Nowadays the same approach dominates in the Russian school system setting at that expectations of a will-be museum visitor.

A masterfully rendered story, undoubtedly, has the right to exist but it has some restrictions in terms of audience perception and impact:

а) focus on audiences with a well pronounced interest in certain historic theme or items (technically, this group involves all schoolchildren since they have to develop interest to be well-educated and intelligent);

б) taking into consideration a divide between the past and modernity (which is, as a rule, emphasized by exposition chronology) as well as the selection of artifacts based on their attractiveness and uniqueness; historical items on display are often taken as a sort of odditorium, or a cabinet of curiosities able to overwhelm, surprise, entertain, amuse the viewers by their being so peculiar and exotic.

в) visits to exhibitions is of cognitive character and normally does not claim to settle an attendee’s and society urgent issues (the exception is patriotism-shaping exhibitions which, as such, do not work this way).

 

 

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