Musingplaces, Placedness And Collecting

A musingplace, properly speaking, should not 'believe' in itself. Any ethical researcher will tell you that our histories are littered with stories to do with doubt and mistakes and accidental discoveries. Musingplaces hold within them histories of doubt and mistakes and accidental discoveries. 

In the 21st Century as much as any time before what is not required is faith in people with prestigious degrees. Sadly, they are just as likely to be evil and corrupt as anyone else. Rather, we should be investing our trust in critical thinking, which, by the way, is at the core of the scientific method – indeed research methodology per se. 

Specifically, what is currently required, and more than ever, is the ability to follow the threads of ideas back to their sources. After that, we need the ability to ask who benefits and who loses when a certain idea wins out. That’s a skill that can be learned by anyone, and one that is effectively suppressed in our current educational economy. It’s also the only possible way out of the current impasse that surrounds the sciences, information technologies, the diversity current cultural production and the feedback loops created by the crisis of authority. 

Musingplaces –public museums, public art galleries, monuments, public gardens and parks (botanical, zoological, environmental, industrial etc.), publicly owned buildings (heritage sites, industrial sites, civic buildings, etc.) – typically hold collections that have a range of belief systems and cultural understandings invested in them. Typically, all this is defined by the collections’ ‘placedness’ – put another way ... its sense of place ... the narratives attached to place, ... etc. In its turn all this has a part to play in determining how places are understood and by whom. 

When it comes to a musingplace like Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum (PHM) its ‘placedness’ is far from being insignificant. Indeed the PHM's history and ts specific location within what is in fact an evolving cultural landscape has been a defining factor in the development of its collections and consequently its Community of Ownership and Interest (COI).

Arguably, it is the Powerhouse Museum’s collections in concert with the institution’s geography that lends the institution its ‘placedness’. In turn it is all this that defines the institution’s COI being:
• Its funding agencies, donors and sponsors over time;
• The institution’s trustees, administrators, staff, et al;
• The people, organisations, institutions, with intellectual and cultural property invested in the institution and its collections;
• The people understood to be ‘the audiences’ for PHM projects and programs;
• The people who have developed various relationships with the institution – research, business, social, research, et al;
• The people who have a pecuniary interest in the institution and its collections;
• Kindred institutions and collection in the non-government sphere … et al.

COIs members are multilayered and it’s not unusual for members to have multiple ‘ownerships’ some of which might well be in conflict another. Nonetheless, once acknowledged such conflicts are not by necessity problematic. However, acknowledgement tends to defuse potentially explosive and disruptive tensions. It is especially so when there is acknowledgement of not only COI members’ individual rights but also their inherent obligations. Leaving a class of membership aside because it might invite conflict to include them is a denial of these obligations and problematic.

There is often a temptation to rank these COI relationships but doing so puts in place an administration that routinely sets out to privilege one group over another and in ways that in the end are counterproductive. Such privileging of one group of people can only be subjective even if based on 'law and regulations'. The ownerships and interests to be invoked here are founded in 'lore' rather than 'law' and typically with greater levels of acceptance and compliance.

With this in mind, the cultural landscape that such an institution exists within is loaded with complex and rich narratives along with the complexity of ownerships. That is the narratives:
• That intersect and equally those that are divergent and oppositional; and
• Those that are founded in a multiplicity of histories; and
• Those that draw upon myths and allegories; and
• In fact all that which lends richness to a collection and the networks of communities that belong to it.

Given the advances in technology, the extraordinary growth in data storage capacities and the increased capacities of communication infrastructures in the 21st Century, all of the above is in a state of flux. It is often not considered in any depth that cultural landscapes are dynamic and that they evolve in response to human activity. Yet undeniably they do! Moreover, they may even develop in ways that do not place humanity at the centre of the template cum eco-system and/or even revert to something more reflective of a past era or dynamic.

Pared right back musingplace collections contain within them raw data and information that when considered together, and within a 21st C framework, they can facilitate new knowledge and/or new understandings – wisdom also as often as not.

Taking Sydney’s PHM as an exemplar for a musingplace in a cultural landscape it needs to be acknowledged that both its cultural and physical geographies have undergone dynamic change. Some of it relatively recent.

What appears to be virtually unacknowledged in the PHM collections is the recognition of the Eora cultural landscape that endured for millennia on the PHM/MAAS site and beyond it.

That landscape, as is now widely recognised, was not empty and ownerless at the time of colonisation. Eora placedness, and the Eora placescaping that shaped it, was and has been subsequently ignored and it has been displaced. Eora placedness was enveloped by the subsequent colonial, post colonial, industrial and post industrial cultural landscapes that the PHM is currently, embedded within. As yet its a largely unrelated narrative. .

Nonetheless, the PHM collections do proactively acknowledge and explore Australia’s enduring Aboriginal cultural realities and their outputs. It is just the case that there is much yet to be achieved within changing sensibilities and in the context of current cultural understandings.

Indeed, the acknowledgement of the PHM’s cultural landscape, the narratives that belong to it – and the PHM’s COI as well – appears to be at best subliminal currently. However, this is unsurprising given that the institution is reflective of its time and the social sensibilities in play.

Given musingplaces’ embeddedness in ‘place’ they need to be understood as both ‘placemakers’ and ‘placemakers’. While their collections might well have relevance beyond the places to which they belong, and belong in, their relevance is nonetheless deeply rooted in their placedness. They may be plundered and removed but their narratives tend to go with them albeit subliminally and also that their meanings can shift.

And then there are musingplaces’ collections and their Community of Ownership and Interest (COI). Given that each belong to each other almost inextricably in ‘lore’ separating them is ever likely to be contentious.

The institutions that hold, manage and care for the collections and their COI are charged with a range of obligations that come with the rights. All too often this aspect of ‘collection management’ is downplayed for bureaucratic convenience, because of funding implication, etc.

In the end in order to have substance and meaning collections need to belong in and to places. A musingplace without a purposeful collection is no musingplace at all and a collection without a COI is but a meaningless assemblage of ‘things’.

‘Place’ plays the defining role in collecting the stories, the chattels, the understandings, the wisdoms, that lend meaning and substance to musingplaces and the collections entrusted to them – and that their COIs have invested in them.

Ray Norman – Artist, Metalsmith, Networker, Independent Researcher, Currently a Launcestonian, Cultural Theorist, Cultural Geographer and a hunter of Deep Histories ... Ray is Co-Director of zingHOUSEunlimited, a lifestyle design enterprise and network offering a range of services linked to contemporary cultural production and cultural research. Ray is also engaged with the nudgelbah institute as a cultural geographer. That institute's purpose is to be network of research networks and to be a diverse vehicle through which place oriented scholarship and cultural endeavours can be acknowledged, honoured and promoted.... LINK