Lindow Manchester

Joyce Tyldesley, one of the Museums and Academic Joint Appointments or MAJAs, here at the Manchester Museum, popped into the office on Wednesday to say that she’d heard a BBC Radio 4 programme – Thinking Aloud with Laurie Taylor – that quoted part of our report on the public consultation in advance of the Lindow Man exhibition. The programme was a short discussion about how museum attitudes to human remains have changed. Tiffany Jenkins at the University of Kent and Adam Cooper at  Brunel University took part. In brief Taylor asked the question whether the approach to human remains shown by the Lindow Man project is indeed sensitive treatment of a difficult subject or just plain daft. Jenkins sketched the history of collecting human remains from the acquisition of curiosities in the 18th century to the rational scientific collecting of the 19th century. Taylor talked about these human remains as objective material evidence, not having any residual meaning for people at the time.  In Lindow Man a Bog Body Mystery we try to show that human remains do have a range of very different meanings for some people. As a university museum we naturally want to provide opportunities to both students and the general public to explore the world from very different perspectives. The Lindow Man exhibition allows people to do precisely that without us saying that any one point of view is right.

We place great importance on public consultation in the Manchester Museum and the Lindow Man exhibition, to a degree, reflects the wishes and requests of the very wide group of people we consulted with in February 2007.  Many of the consultees agreed that Lindow Man should be treated with sensitivity and respect and that different sides of his story  or stories should be told. The Lindow Man a Bog Body Mystery  exhibition is the working through of those wishes, albeit tempered by our own museum experience, bearing in mind what was practicable within our limited budget and design considerations.

In Thinking Aloud our efforts to make the exhibition process more inclusive, more representative and dare I say it, democratic, was passed off as a retreat from traditional curatorial authority in the face of sustained critiscism of the museum’s role.  What we seem to have here is a profound misunderstanding of what is or what should be the role of curators and museums in modern times. There has been a shift in the way museums work partly in response to new thinking about claims to be authoritative and partly in reponse to national developments.    Government policy and government funding requires us to work with different communities and to bring in communities and voices previously excluded from the work of the Museum. Lindow Man A Bog Body Mystery reflects these policies but it would appear that the Radio 4 presenters were advocating a retreat to an old-fashioned and elitist role for museums.

I think the programme would have been more balanced if someone from the museum had been invited to take part.

I might also add that this is the first time that a report that I have written has ever been quoted on Radio 4!

Collective Conversation about the Lindow Man exhibitions

It’s amazing to think that is already over 20 years since Lindow Man first came to the Manchester Museum on loan from the British Museum. The temporary exhibitions of 1987 and 1991 were very popular and influenced a generation of Museum visitors in Manchester and the North West. Yesterday I took part in a Collective Conversation comparing the current Lindow Man exhibition with earlier exhibitions. Helen Rees Leahy, Director of the Centre of Museology at the University of Manchester, kindly took part and commented on changes in curatorial practice; and Manchester Museum colleagues Sue Bulleid and Tom Goss contributed their memories of the earlier exhibitions. I brought along some black and white photographs as prompts. Tom and Sue talked about their impressions of the  earlier Lindow Man exhibitions: the darkness, the use of palisades and other props to give a sense of an Iron Age setting and the emotional impact of seeing Lindow Man’s body. We talked about the differences between the approaches taken to interpretation, from giving a sense of Lindow Man’s life and times in the 1980s and 1990s, to the current exhibition, looking at the body from different perspectives. Commenting on the exhibition, particularly the way in which the Museum had stood back from its traditional authoritative role as sole interpreter of the exhibits, Helen Leahy welcomed the inclusion of different voices and the innovative design but wondered whether this created a mismatch between what was offered and visitor expectations. By setting aside a single authoritative narrative voice, the exhibition had become a  disorienting experience for visitors. The difficulty with  debating responses to the exhibition is knowing precisely whose comments and criticism are  paramount. So far we have little formal data  from the Museum’s core audience of families and children. Observations over the summer suggest they have enjoyed the numerous different ways  of engaging with the subject and younger people may be more attuned to a cultural environment in which plurality, relativity and poly-vocality are taken for granted. Older visitors may miss the re-assurance of definitive, confident interpretation. The Collective Conversation will be edited shortly and hopefuly it won’t be too long before it is posted on U-tube or made accessible via the Manchester Museum website.