Årets tema er medborgerskab — dvs. hvordan museerne kan bidrage til deltagelse i og udvikling af det nationale fællesskab. Det er en gammel, god højskoletraver. Det klinger ikke bare af nationalisme, men også af kulturkristen tænkemåde, og det har selvfølgelig ikke et spor med international formidling at gøre.

Men lad nu det ligge.

Today — when reading about the recent publication of a paper that has identified parts of the proteome of a fossil animal — I was overwhelmed by a whole array of nostalgic memories and reflections stemming from my short career as a paleoprotein chemist in Stockholm in the early 1970s.

I had studied chemistry, including biochemistry, before turning to zoology and what triggered my move into paleoproteins was a guest lecture by Harry Mutvei, expaining that the calciferous shells of marine organisms contain not only calcium crystals, but also organic material, including proteins. Mutvei tried to convince me to work with his favoured organisms, fossil cephalopoeds, but I wanted of course to work on something else. It so happened that one of my best birder friends, the late Krister Brood (bless his memory), had begun his dissertation studies at the Department of Historical Geology, making a conventional classification of Cretaceous cyclostome bryozooans, a fairly common group of fossils in many mesozoic strata, based on the appearance of their shells.

Maybe I could add some interesting aspects to the classification of these small creatures if I could used taxonomic data derived from proteins, which are closer to the genotype? The career strategy was simple: I enrolled in the paleontology classes and having passed the first exam I convinced the professsor, Ivar Hessland, to let me use a small room in his huge department to try find remains of proteins in fossils. Hessland hired my as a teaching instructor, generously bought me some equipmentm, and let me loose (that was the preferred method of research supervision 40 years ago, which I think, in many respects, is much better than the close surveillance postgrad students are exposed to today).

In the paper (published in Journal of Proteome Research) a group of protein scientists and natural history museum scientists here at the University of Copenhagen have identified a number of protein sequences in a bone from a woolly mammoth bone preserved in Siberian permafrost.

As they say, the methodology (mass spectrometry-based protein sequencing) “offers new perspectives for future molecular phylogenetic inference and physiological studies on samples not amenable to ancient DNA investigation”, and the approach therefore represents “a further step into the ongoing integration of different high-throughput technologies for identification of ancient biomolecules, unleashing the field of paleoproteomics.”

In an earlier post, I suggested that the current enthusiasm for narrativity in exhibitions risks blocking for a more sophisticated understanding of how other modes of exhibition making (based on expository, descriptive and argumentatative rhetorical modes) can mobilised in a frutiful way.

But there are also other problems involved with the current fashion for narrativity, having to do with the way narration is actually entering the exhibition experience.

It is pretty difficult to turn label and wall texts into narratives. Also, single exhibition rooms cannot easily be made in narrative form, if if you would like to. In fact, the only way you can usually introduce a narrative dimension in a three-dimensional space during the build-up of the exhibition is to lay out a row of rooms in a narrative sequence so that visitors are forced to walk the gallery as if it were a story, with a beginning and an end.

However, where narrative can really become part of the exhibition experience (as our Swedish Exhibition Agency and Te Papa colleagues want it to) is when the visitor meets the exhbit. Here’s where the Stanly Fish pun comes in. The narrative moment might be brought into picture together with the visitor – when the non-narrative exhibition is presented to the public in forms of guided tours, either with a human guide or through some smartphone application. They may help the public to ‘read’ narratives into the exhibition.

And that’s a strong factor. Our student guides love it. They seem to be born story-tellers. And I understand why. When you stand with an audience of 5-15 people (and it doesn’t matter whether the audience is school children or seasoned academics like you), you almost by default go into a narrative mode of presentation. I’m no exception, as you will see in a few minutes. I easily transmogrify into a teller of anecdotes in a split of a second.

This sounds fun, and it is. It’s a lot of fun to tell stories and anecdotes. You really get the visitors’ attention – both to the story and (as a nice sideeffect) to yourself. You beam in the limelight of the narrative. You’re a master of a universe of stories for a while.

Now, the downside to bringing attention to the story and the story-teller is that the stuff gets no attention. The stuff becoms invisible. A narrative ‘reading’ of exhibitions blocks the attention to what, in my view, is the differentia specifica of museums and the exhibitions – the images and the material things.

In other words, the downside is that the images and things turn into props and occasions for stories. And then we loose sight of them. That, in my view, is the major problem with narrativity in exhibitions – when you introduce a narrative dimension in the way you present the exhibition, you almost automatically draw attention away from the material things.

Now, why is that a bad thing? What’s so great about material things in museums? Why shouldn’t they be reduced to props for stories?

Now comes the moment in my talk when I’m running out of time. But in the article that will hopefully grow out of this paper, I will underpin the argument against narrativity in exhibitions with reference to three theoretical frames:

1) One frame reference is to the now pretty famous argument against narrativity made by Galen Strawson some five years ago – shortly made that the focus of narrativity eclipses a focus on what he calls episodicity.

2) The other reference is to Sepp Gumbrecht and his distinction between presence and meaning.

3) And the third is the moral argument made by the late British philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch, particularly in The Sovereignty of Good that the road to epistemic virtue is not to focus on yourself, but to focus on the real world outside you – whether this real world is constituted of material things or the grammar of a difficult foreign language.

*

Now, I want to use the rest of my allotted time here to demonstrate for you how some of these exhibition modes in practice.

We will do a tour through selected parts of our exhibition area and we will start here on the first floor – in the reception room, and then we’ll take a look at our latest gallery, called Balance and Metabolism, and then we’re going downstair to take a look at the installations.

Please be observant, look around, and ask yourself – what modes of discourse can you see in these galleries and installations?

(round-trip)

One thing I have never really got to terms with in the current academic climats is careerism, i.e., the pursuit of advancement as the main aim of being in académie.

In my humble view careerism is one of the major threats to knowledge institutions like universities and museums.

Pursuit of professional advancement as one’s chief or sole aim

have become institutions for making individual careers. The career is probably more important for most university and museum employees than any other aim

Jag är mycket obekväm med rollen som ”någon”. Jag trivs bra med att vara ”ingen”, men så är det alltid någon som vill ha mer. Men nu har jag upplevt hur det är att vara ”någon”. Då är det också mycket lättare att göra avkall på det.
Karl Ove Knausgård
http://www.nrk.no/programmer/radio/radiodokumentaren/1.7873434

Kammeradvokaten har Titlen på dokumentet (Emma Gad KU.pdf) fik mig umiddelbart til at tro, at det drejer sig om takt og tone på KU (etiketteregler). Men det viser sig altså at dokumentet handler om strafbare forhold i og uden for stillingen. Så kælenavnet “Emma Gad” er lidt misvisende.

Men da det er sagt, så ville det faktisk være meget interessant at studere de mere eller mindre eksplicitte etiketteregler, der findes på universitetet, og i forlængelse heraf at udvikle et sæt vejledende etikette-regler for et dansk universitet i 2010-tallet.

Penkowa-sagen, som drejede sig om strafbare forhold, er bare toppen på et isbjerg af manglende fornemmelse af takt og tone. Man kan fx. spørge sig om følgende Emma Gad-etiketteregel stadigvæk er aktuel i dag:

“Vær ikke snobbet, vær ikke vigtig, vær ikke underdanig. Vær fordringsfuld overfor Dem selv – ikke overfor andre.”

Den deskriptive del af opgaven ville passende kunne lægges ud som en opgave for en PhD-afhandling i sociologi, antropologi eller etnologi — men den normative del af opgaven er en kollektiv process, som vil tage år af bevidste samtaler på universitetet.

Jeg tror jeg kan se kimen til et interessant forskningsprojekt her!