Page 166 - Museums, Media and Cultural Theory In Cultural and Media Studies

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faced was how to rehang an existing twentieth-century art collection in ways
which would increase the range of possible interpretations and move from a
singular historical narrative to a multiplicity of stories (Blazwick and Wilson
2000). The decision was made to hang the collection according to themes which
derive from the traditional classifications of genre in painting, reinvented to
accommodate the preoccupations of twentieth-century art. The genre of still
life is translated in Tate Modern into a series of rooms entitled ‘Still Life/
Object/Real Life’; landscape becomes ‘Landscape/Matter/Environment’, por-
traiture and the nude are given modern relevance with the title ‘Nude/Action/
Body’, historical narrative and allegory are updated as ‘History/Memory/
Society’. Arguably, this new thematic arrangement has contributed toward the
popularity and accessibility of the museum. It offers an interpretative frame-
work which allows the audience to make connections across works of art pro-
duced out of very different concerns, in a wide range of media. It deals with the
difficulty of interpretation by grouping objects according to subject-matter.
This arrangement may well be experienced by visitors as more flexible and
open than the evolutionary model that had dominated modern art museums.
However, flexibility of interpretation is not always experienced as something
liberating. In some cases it could be disorienting. We could see this in similar
terms to the problem identified by the art historian Hal Foster in interpreting
contemporary art, where the proliferation of different interpretative frame-
works makes the critic or the visitor ‘like an anthropologist who enters a new
culture with each new exhibition’ (1996: xii). Though Foster is referring specif-
ically to the difficulties of interpreting contemporary art rather than the full
range of twentieth-century art, this observation captures something of the dif-
ficulty facing the non-specialist visitor to art museums which have discarded the
certainties of the old historicist and evolutionary arrangements. The knowledge
needed to understand those older arrangements of modern art might
adequately be understood as a form of cultural capital in Bourdieu’s (2003)
sense of a stable and institutionally maintained system of distinction. The
opening up of interpretative possibilities in new museum arrangements may
work to challenge that stable system of distinction but at the same time it befits
a new situation in which social position is maintained through the ability to
keep up with the latest cultural shifts and changes (Watkins 1993: 32).
At Tate Modern, as at the natural history museums and ethnographic
museums that I have mentioned, the museum remains a teaching machine. The
certainties associated with evolutionary and historical arrangements may have
gone, but access to the collections is still mediated through the arrangement of
the display, interpretative text in the form of wall panels, leaflets and so on, and
the generic headings under which the work is distributed into the four sections.
Arguments against didacticism and the role of curatorial interpretation in the