Reading.

Here is a brief extract from:

Hooper-Greenhill, E., 1998, Museum, Media, Message, Taylor & Francis

Communicating and Learning in Gallery 33 - evidence from a visitor study, Jane Peirson-Jones

Read the extract carefully, the book is available from the library and contains a large amount of useful background for museum and heritage design. While you are reading, note the range of thought that goes into the design of an exhibition. Heritage design is not just a matter of the naive presentation of a few 'interesting objects'.

Aims of Gallery 33

The purpose of the Gallery 33 project, commenced in 1986, was to redisplay Birmingham Museum's ethnographical collection of art and material culture from North America, Africa and Oceania in an innovative way. The exhibition is about human societies, their customs, social relationships and traditions. The aim as outlined in the Initial Design Brief was to create a didactic exhibition which is interesting, challenging and fun to visit and which encourages visitors to question the assumptions they make about their own and other people's culture. In doing this the exhibition aims to encourage visitors to gain a greater understanding of and respect for both their own and other people's culture.

Items from the ethnographical collection had not been on public display for over twenty years. The challenge was therefore to redisplay the collection for an audience who had little experience locally of this type of museum material and to do it in a way which was pertinent to Birmingham as it is today rather than as it was when the museum collections were first assembled and interpreted for public benefit.

The exhibition title serves as its mission statement. It is 'Gallery 33: a meeting ground of cultures; an exhibition about beliefs, values, customs and art from around the world'. The principal theme or concept explored is cultural relativism. In each exhibit the cross-cultural presentation offers an opportunity to compare and contrast the way different cultures have resolved similar problems of social organization. The communication goal is to assist visitors in thinking about their own cultural identity in relation to others via the constructions of 'self' and 'other' which are offered for consideration. The aim was to engage visitors' attention sufficiently so that they pause for thought once, perhaps only momentarily, to consider their own cultural identity. Sufficient arousal might be provoked by only one thing in the exhibition: an artefact, an image or apiece of technology. This condition of limited intellectual engagement need happen only once in the course of a visit to the exhibition for the communication goal to be reached.

The secondary theme in Gallery 33 is the issue of cultural representation in museums. By this I mean the political acts of collecting, preserving and interpreting cultural heritage. Cultural representation is an issue in all exhibitions and it would have been impossible to have redisplayed the Birmingham collection for a present-day audience without making explicit reference to this issue. At the heart of this lies the key question of who has authority to control the process of cultural representation at each stage of the museum process. The word 'authority' in this context carries three shades of meaning: the possession and exercise of power, the notion of expertise and the notion of authorship.

The issue of authority was addressed by taking approaches in project management and exhibit development which were a departure from current practice in Britain at the time. The project was managed in such away that the curatorial authoring voice was broadened by the involvement of specialist advisers. The production of the exhibition was personalized by the acknowledgement of all the team members. Authorship was explicitly discussed in the orientation video and its limitations defined. The Collectors interactive video was developed as a multivocal exhibit to address subjects such as the return of cultural property where a single monovocal storyline would have been inadequate.