Contested Pasts

Today a museum, but not one I have visited – it’s the Museum of the Moving Image in Deal, opened by a film archivist and his wife in a house they purchased for the purpose. Ms Brightshades and partner Stan recently went there and with the pictures she shared was this one in which among the other movie stars you can glimpse Louise Brooks. Well, I was excited, anyway.

Museums rarely get in the news unless they do something unusual, and over the last few days this has meant the Horniman concluding an agreement to return its Benin Bronzes to Nigeria (eventually) and the Wellcome Institute dismantling the Medicine Man exhibition structured around the collection of Henry Wellcome. The museum staff at the Wellcome claim that they’ve attempted to interrogate the display with contradictory or contextualising installations alongside bits of it for some years, but the time has come to abandon the whole thing and do something different. I’ve seen it several times over the years, and my main complaint at it closing is that it was always fun to drop into as the Wellcome is free and the stuff in it is fascinating.

The reaction, at least to the closure of Medicine Man, coalesced around the predictable lines that this was ‘vandalism’ carried out by a ‘cultural Marxist elite’, or that it was a welcome re-evaluation of assumptions that no longer seem true or just. Beneath that is a more interesting philosophical question of whether the historical stories museums tell are part of a movement towards greater truth, or are mere fictions that serve our purposes at a particular time. A Christian is committed to the idea that there is an objective viewpoint from which truth can be judged, and we can approximate our own closer to it or further away from it; I’m not sure a non-believing historian can say the same. Perhaps accepting that there is such a thing as truth, a real, overarching story that in theory we could tell if only we had enough time, knowledge and sensitivity, might help, as we can see that there are genuine, objective experiences which can be included within or excluded from museum displays or history books, and could at least accept that they are real. Otherwise all we are left with is force – who happens to control the institution at any one time.

Were I still in the industry I might be tempted to shoehorn Louise Brooks into every display I could, which only proves the point.