In the light of various comments in favour of interpretation in museums
(apparently an issue contentious only in art museums), herewith another
case recently emerged in Sydney, Oz:

The Museum of Sydney on the Site of First Government House has just opened
its very stylish doors.  I would call it this country's first postmodern
museum.  It presents a multitude of grabs and snatches of the history of
Sydney between 1788-1846, the period when the colony's first Government
House occupied the site, and as such can be seen as a key site of
Aboriginal-European contest for the land.  There is almost no clear,
thematic, dare I say didactic, display or presentation throughout.  Many of
the displays are made by artists, and make swipes and jokes about
historical things and events, with considerable style and occasional wit.
The approach is based on the claim that by presenting a multitude of
voices, the contested nature of history is available for visitors to gather
their own insights, make their own judgements.

This sounds fine - very correctly relativistic and anti-authoritarian.
However, I have criticised the museum in reviews for not offering *any*
recognisable paths (otherwise described as interpretation) through the
jumble of voices.  Myself, I was lost by it, and I am relatively an expert
on early 19thC Sydney.  I cannot believe that many visitors make head or
tail of it, though I note in a letter from the director to a friend who
wrote to express her distaste, that the management believes that most
people love it.  I must ask Peter Watts what evidence he has for such a
claim.

So, the issue is whether there is a place for interpretation in the
post-modernist museum (which might be similar to art museums).  The answer
appears to be 'no'.

Any further thoughts on this?

I append one of the said reviews, to give readers more of an idea about MOS.

Linda Young
Cultural Heritage Management
University of Canberra
[log in to unmask]

Museum of Sydney, on the site of First Government House.  Corner of Phillip
and Bridge Sts, Sydney.

        The opening of the Museum Of Sydney On The Site Of First Government
House (MOS to its friends) has been awaited with much interest; its
curator, Peter Emmett, has been called Australia's first (and possibly
still only) postmodern curator.  Mastermind of the re-presentation of Hyde
Park Barracks under the aegis of the Historic Houses Trust of NSW, Emmett
here pushes the envelope of museum history in more fluid and mysterious
directions than any other historical presentation in this country.
Originality and innovation are certainly virtues, and challenges to
conventional wisdom constitute timely interventions in historiographical
habits.  But the death of certainty, the denial of the possibility of any
objective historical truth, make postmodern approaches shallow and
suspicious.  The fragments, hints and murmers which compose this museum
leave me ultimately unsatisfied.
        MOS occupies a stylish building, a sleek sandstone cliff on the
habour-side of a gigantic CBD development, which funded the expensive
design and finish.  The building perches on the flank of a tower block in
order to expose a plaza covering the archaeological remnants of First
Government House.  Center of imperial power in the Australian colonies from
1788 to 1846, the place is now interpreted as representing the interface
between Aboriginal people and the British, containing tragedy for one and
profit for the other.  A portion of the groundplan of the House is traced
in white markers, its bulk now underneath a busy asphalt intersection; it
is overlooked by a sculptural forest of tall, variously textured poles
representing 'the edge of the trees' whence the original owners looked out
at the invaders.  This conjunction foretells the frame of the MOS
interpretation of colonial history, and to the ire of some First Fleet
descendants and others, there is none of the conventional glory of colonial
foundation in its picture.
        Instead, the story is presented in shards of excavated pottery,
brick and bone, labelled on blocks of clear perspex and therefore almost
invisible.  'Labelled' is the wrong word in any case.  In a catalogue
essay, Paul Carter draws a distinction between captions, which he calls
neutralising agents of the power of objects, and quotations, which he
posits as agents of imaginative liberation.  I am not convinced by the
distinction, but it explains the style of 'labelling' throughout the
museum: long panels of quotes abstracted from early diarists and occasional
philosophers, plus a regular dose of David Malouf interspersed with items
of the Eora language.  As commentators, they are an odd but interesting
panoply, and they present a multiplicity of voices commenting on the
museum's themes in impeccably correct diversity.
        I expect noone is anticipated to read every panel, but to dip and
browse and have one's attention taken unexpectedly and carried away into
speculation beyond the hackneyed realm of linear history.  There is
certainly plenty to divert attention: artefacts are arranged in
unconventional space and form; soundscapes cut in and out in many tones and
accents; talking heads converse with each other as you eavesdrop, or
sometimes rant into the dark.  There are so many such episodes that in a
three hour visit, I never heard one repeat, which must be a mercy to the
delicious young guides who move among the audiences, prompting and
encouraging.  I think MOS visitors will need encouragement, for the
blurring of the conventional distinction between language and society, or
text and context, makes it nigh on impossible to discern any statement of
cause and effect  of the kind that visitors tend to expect from a bastion
of cultural authority such as a museum.
        What does it all say?  Six or seven large themes are distributed,
mainly in small packages, in the museum's tall, narrow spaces.  The bush
environment of Sydney appears in a two storey-high bank of video monitors,
offering vast, grainy images of timeless sandstone coast and bush;
stretching the height of the museum's bold central staircase, they look
like the foyer of Film Australia.  The indigenous Eora people are
acknowledged with ancient implements and more videos, this time asserting
that contemporary Aboriginal people survive and occupy the land still,
eating shellfish salads in an Ikea-furnished dining room.  The colonists of
Sydney's first fifty or so years are represented by a host of busy tools
and equipment, by a dark chamber of disembodied projections, and a sighing,
chattering soundscape which is said to offer a meditation on the theatrical
nature of the museum.  British power is presented in signs of luxury such
as gilt-framed portraits and silver swords.
        Typifying the oblique ambiguity of the MOS displays is the contrast
of the Dixson Library's c.1820 painted cedar collector's chest with a pair
of post-modern chests of drawers made of stainless steel.  Each
glass-topped drawer pulls open to reveal a little pile of bones, or a
scatter of clay pipe stems, or an arrangement of old buttons, set on or in
historic or natural imagery.  As you pull, tiny lights spotlight the
objects, and when you let go the handles, the drawer slides shut by itself
- magical, entrancing.  I couldn't see an attribution, but I believe this
strange conglomeration was composed by artist Narelle Jubelin, who has
employed museum artefacts in previous work.  I found myself captivated by
opening the drawers, peeping in and letting them shut, but I have no idea
what it means.  This makes me restive: the abandonment of purposeful
analysis of historical material seems to me an irresponsible rhetoric of
emptiness.  And in refusing to succumb to fairy pleasure, I don't
appreciate being cast as a curmudgeon who resists jokey digs at
conventional history.  Jokes after all are infamous masks of the assertion
of power, and of subliminal inadequacy.
        MOS has been the butt of fierce criticism simply for coming into
existence.  The Friends of First Government House (I may not have the whole
story) feel that any museum on the site should interpret primarily the
house itself, its occupants and the stories of colonial power enacted
there.  My own view is that these issues are indeed addressed in the
presentation, but that the manner of their appearance trivialises them,
makes them ephemeral and impressionistic.  This strikes me as a more
important criticism than the possibility that the facade re-creation may
not be 100% accurate, or that the name claims more of Sydney's history than
it actually offers.  These are sins of many museums, but at least of
museums that attempt to offer explanations of the events that shaped
today's products and relics.
        Emmett's presentation at MOS is grounded in the expectation that
language itself is a barrier to truth.  Hence he offers an acre of
relativist texts, not only subject to, but expressive of, multiple and
conflicting interpretations.  Each visitor will create unique, individual
understandings.  This arrangement contests the traditional authority of the
museum, but at the expense of shared, social or civic experience.  Among
the mansions of the Museum House, MOS is for children of the soundbite, the
rock video and neo-pulp fiction.  Curmudgeons will love the temporary show
of First Fleet sketches and watercolours, gathered together in a rare
realisation of Bernard Smith's European Vision in the South Pacific, but
are likely otherwise to be disheartened.

This review is for Australian Historical Studies, October 95.