| International Association of Libraries and Museums of the Performing Arts Société Internationale des Bibliothèques et des Musées des Arts du Spectacle |  |
"Hamlet" on view in 2020A vision of the futureLisbet Grandjean Documents et Temoignages des Arts du Spectacle: Pourquoi et Comment? / Collecting and Recording the Performing Arts: Why and How? Société Internationale des Bibliothèques et des Musées des Arts du Spectacle / International Association of Libraries and Museums of the Performing Arts 20ème Congrès International / 20th International Congress Antwerp 4-7 September 1994. Acta. Antwerp : 1995, pp. 39-40 For the coming generation the objects of our museums' collections and the documentation will be the same as today: the theatre and the performing arts. The purpose will be the same: documentation of the past and the present for the future. Our users will probably also belong to the same categories: museumgoers between the age of 5 and 90, researchers, artists and people connected with the different medias. But our financial means will presumably be much different from those in the seventies and eighties. This fact, I think will be one of the backgrounds for a reinterpretation of the museumconcept up till now. Another reason for a change is the very rapid technological development. It is interesting to note that without regard to this development, the museums are still working according to a concept, which came into existence by the turn of the century. A museum is in accordance with general understanding a spatial place, which houses knowledge of one or several special topics; necessarily not only of the past, more likely of a combination of the past and the present, rarely of the future. During late years, however, the present and the future have been housed in other ways: in science centres, media centres and in eco centres. For many years it has been universally accepted to collect all that could illustrate a topic, an object or a period, and also to exhibit as many things as possible. In those days you were easily surfeited with impressions of the many original objects, normally exhibited chronologically. Nowadays the financial basis of many museums has been reduced and so has the permanent staff. The museums don't have the same possibilities to buy anything they want, to register great collections, or to keep out-of-date exhibitions in good order. Consequently many museums have been working up for a new structure: we contribute to large common databases; some of us have interactive machines where the museumgoers can see many of our objects on a screen only by pressing buttons (the original objects are stored away); we have learnt from the art galleries to exhibit highlights rather than progresses; and we are working against big conspicuous separate exhibitions financed by sponsors and therefore often in advance regarded as good strokes. But irrespective of the fact that the theatre as such, the scenography and the dramatic art have changed very much during the last 50 years, we still use the old museumconcept. In my opinion it will be very difficult to abide by that concept in the next century and at a time, when the idea of museums begins to disintegrate. First, as I mentioned it before, we see new forms of museums; second, museum-material is often exhibited outside the museums for instance in libraries, warehouses, banks and theatres; and third the museums conversely offer many forms of entertainment different from the museumconcept. My vision on an exhibition in the year of 2020 on performances of Shakespeare's HAMLET during a certain period will go like this: In a dialog between a research-centre and an exhibition-centre it will be decided on this HAMLET-exhibition, and the outlines will be worked out. In these centres the staff is experts responsible for buying and collecting material. Through databases the same staff will find the relevant objects, study them on interactive screens and then compose the exhibition. The central transport division will bring the material to the museum in question and the information- and service centre will organize the practical things. The museumgoer will in this HAMLET-exhibition find audio-visual reproductions of one or more performances, shown on screens - the same way as we today study old movies at a filmmuseum. Costumes, props and paper-material will be shown on interactive screens. The original material will - apart from very few things, exhibited as artistic highlights - be in climatic controlled repositories in order not to be damaged too soon. In other words the material to be collected for the next century will not differ much from today's collecting. But the way in which it is done will be more effective than it is nowadays, where each curator collects for one museum in accordance with the museum's financial situation and what is missed in the collection. There will be less permanent and more separate exhibitions, housed in may different places. Such a development will put many questions also on ethics to the museum staff trained in todays museology. Is the above mentioned example fantasy or reality? I am afraid it is reality. For in my country the first steps have been taken. We already have common conservation-centres, common inventory databases for objects, common store facilities, and common exhibitions with joint administration. 20th Congress URL: http://www.sibmas.org/congresses/sibmas94/antw_12.html |
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