Resolutions for my Imaginary Museum

I imagine that when I retire I will volunteer in a museum and try to make things interesting.  I’m motivated in that direction by a little section of the patchwork-quilt-song-lyric, “Mississippi,” by Bob Dylan. 

Stick with me, baby,
Stick with me anyhow,
Things are gonna start to get interesting
Right about now. 

We’ve got to stick with our local museums, anyhow.  My imaginary museum wishes there were more volunteers.  It wishes that visitors were more in evidence.  It wishes things were in better order, that the place looked less cluttered, better lit, cleaner, more interactive, and…there are so many ways to say this…more like the product of a lively mind.  There are any number of museums that are already delightful, but it will be just my luck to retire in a place where the museum faces a world of challenge. 

So I’m putting myself into the situation of the people I visit, cheer on, and admire and I’m assigning myself an imaginary retirement in their shoes, with only two months to go before the doors open again.  Here is a list of resolutions about what to attempt in those two months.  There is no chance I can accomplish all of these, but I’ll see what I can do to make a difference.

• I will create an interesting activity at the museum entrance, which I will clear of all distracting clutter so that the visitor’s first impression is that of being welcomed into an “introductory” space that feels “hospitable.”
  
  The activity will involve the visitor and also launch the visit.  The Blackworld History Museum in St. Louis “launches” each visit with a handout.  It’s a list of things to find in the displays.  The visit becomes some kind of scavenger hunt.  People love having that list to focus their attention.
  
  The activity will be germane to the museum’s mission.  If the museum is in Missouri’s prairie region, and if there are farm implements on display, maybe I’ll create some kind of hands-on experience involving sod, soil, and plows of several designs.  Much of Missouri was once tallgrass prairie.  I have not yet seen a museum in Missouri that conjures up the appearance of tallgrass prairie or the special technology (a plow of specific design) that made agriculture possible.  I can’t remember seeing a county museum that oriented the visitor to the interesting features of The Earth at this county’s location.  Was the county a buffalo range, an ancient sea bed?
  
  
• I will look at the old photographs in the collection and gather a set of them together in a little display about “how to read a photograph.”  I won’t need more than a handful of pictures.  I’ll find one that is superb as a grayscale print and use it to teach about the range of tones in a fine print.  (I saw one such picture in the museum in Unionville, and it was arranged with other objects so that they all made more sense of each other.) Then I’ll state a few facts about what one sees in the image and pose a question or two.
  
  I’ll find another one that serves a purely documentary purpose.
  
  I’ll find a third one that’s a standard business portrait in color from the 1960s or 70s and compare the portrait style from that era with the earlier era.
  
  
• I will make a little display called “Hand Made, Tailor Made, and Catalogue” for ways of obtaining clothes.  (Hmm.  I could add “hand-me-down” and Army to that list.) There’s a doll in the Clay County Museum with a label from the doll’s donor saying, “Whenever I made a dress for myself I also made one for my doll.”  There are several “feed sack shirts” in the museum in Unionville.  There’s a 1920s fashion catalogue in the Morgan County Museum in Versailles.  It belonged to one of many traveling salesmen who came through town on the railroad and stayed in the hotel that is now the museum.  There’s a tailor-made suit in a small historic house in Chamois; it was made in that town for the wedding of the donor’s husband.  I’ll find a few examples and pose questions about remembering home-made clothing, tailors, seamstresses, or catalogue shopping.
  
  
• I’ll organize one small display area to look like it’s lived in.  I saw such an idea at the Bates County Museum last summer.
  
  
• I’ll have an interactive military display where people can polish brass and spit-shine a black shoe, hopefully with experienced instruction.  If possible, I’ll have some complete military outfits available for kids to put on and “fall out for inspection,” again with someone experienced.
  
  
• I’ll see what I can do with color in the museum.  The Harlin Museum in West Plains has a small workbench of a local sign painter.  My eye always goes to it, when I’m not wishing I could play that Porter Wagoner guitar.  I’d try to do something about the skill of sign-painting or lettering people’s names on glass office doors.  I’ve always wanted to know how painters of those doors really steadied their hand with the stick they use.  I’ve wished for a museum that would let me try that out.  Now that I’m making resolutions, maybe I can figure out how to schedule such an experience one Saturday morning a month, for the kids primarily, but also for the parents as a “benefit” for people who drop a donation in the cigar box.
  
  
• I will subtract objects from the displays one at a time for as long as I can get away with it or until the entire museum looks appealing, whichever comes first.  (Never underestimate the value you can add by subtracting something that competes for attention.)
  
  
• I will pull various things that are currently displayed with other things just like them into new relationships.  I will try to create expectations that displays in my museum stimulate thought.
  
  
• I will think of the other volunteers whose friendship is essential to the success of our museum and I will bake cupcakes for them, or go visit them, or take them out to tea, or invite them to go visit and evaluate another interesting museum with me.  I will remind myself every day of the off-season that people volunteer for positive social interaction and fulfillment of some kind.  I will create positive social interaction with the other volunteers this winter.  I will mend fences and build bridges and make friends.

Giving Full Value to Something

I’ve recently been inside a couple of museums where a lot of imagination is evident. This is not the exception, mind you. I think most of the small museums I enter these days are showcases of imagination. They might all look pretty much the same to the casual observer, but to the “collector of museum experiences,” which is what I have become, they are distinct from each other in terms of what I hear the guides tell me when I ask for a tour.

I always ask people to “show me what you really like in here, or what you think is special.” That question often starts a conversation, and if there would have been a memorized narrative on the entire collection, it can’t find a launching pad in a conversation based on personal admiration.

The really odd thing, and the point of this blog, is that you’d never know the special thing was special from the way the museum treats it! Its special qualities are hidden from the visitor.

Hiding special qualities from the visitor is like administering a sedative. If everything has equal value, and there are a thousand things in the room, then the experience is a growing need for a nap. It’s when we elevate something and assign it more importance than its neighbors, that we help the visitor remain alert, or at least awake. The museum experience needs contours.

For instance, consider the presence of a bugle in a glass case containing other military items. Every museum displays military items. I’ve seen bugles in several of the displays. But in none of the displays have I been invited to make sound on the bugle, though a bugle is indestructible, and in none of the displays has there been an audio station where I could hear someone play a bugle. There is no explanation of how bugle sound is produced, or why bugles are used instead of trumpets or cornets or harmonicas. There are no audios of oral history interviews with soldiers recounting the feelings of hearing taps while in a war zone or at a funeral. Lacking these, the actual bugle in the case is merely filling empty space. It’s just a “metal thing” among “cloth things” and “paper things,” and the sum of the experience is only slightly above zero.

Consider the presence of one of Porter Wagoner’s guitars in a glass display case in the Harlin Museum in West Plains. Porter Wagoner is a West Plains native and a living memory for the Baby Boomers and their parents. He died a year ago. There are any number of gifted guitar-players in West Plains and nearby. The guitar in the museum is not the big, booming Gibson you see in some of his pictures. He used a variety of guitars and he had a collection of them.

I was once a guitar player, so I have questions.

I suggested to the museum's board President, Kathy Wofford, that they upgrade the display of the Wagoner guitar with regular live demos of how it sounds. I imagined inviting someone like the folklorist, Matt Meacham, who knows his way around a guitar, to play the Wagoner guitar and try to ascertain when Wagoner used it, and in what settings. Maybe he only used it at home when doodling around. Maybe it was his “songwriting” guitar. Maybe there is nothing very appealing about its tone. I would want someone skilled to play that guitar as well as a few other guitars, demonstrating the way some models emphasize a rumbling bass while others emphasize a sweetness and lyricism in the treble, and still others are made to penetrate through competing sounds. If we’ve got a celebrity’s guitar, let’s play it well and put it into the service of beautiful thinking until there are no more people who remember Porter Wagoner or care to know what sort of entertainer he was. By that time there will be other guitars, or there won’t, but maybe there will be a bugle player in town who can bring tears to visitors’ eyes by playing taps in honor of honor itself, and in recognition of the pity of war and the fleetness of youth.

My advice on this subject is: pick something, anything, in the museum and let your imagination have a festival of new ideas, and then try them all.