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“Museums as Mausoleums: Is Memory Killing the Muse?” Michael Houlihan, Director General, Amgueddfa Cymru/National Museum Wales Plenary address given at the “History and the Public” conference held at Swansea University, Wales, April 2007 for a short bio of Michael Houlihan, visit: http://www.nmgw.ac.uk/en/29/ To access the audio file, go to the Swansea conference’s main page: http://www.swansea.ac.uk/history/publichistory/index.htm Scroll down to the Plenary 2 session and click to download the MP3 file. The talk is about an hour long, including questions from the audience at the end. In places Houlihan refers to his PowerPoint slides, which we unfortunately cannot provide in this format. For those not able to access the MP3 file, H-Public provides a brief summary of the talk below. (NOTE: Any errors or omissions in this summary are entirely the responsibility of the H-Public editor!) Houlihan’s talk intersects in intriguing ways with the current NCPH attempts to define public history, and with Kathy Corbett and Dick Miller’s response to the draft NCPH definition (see the separate posting "What is Public History?"). How much relative power can or should museums, curators, and audiences have in interpreting the pasts as represented in museums? Is there a role for public memory in museum display? Has memory become a kind of proxy for national, curatorial, and other agendas in museums? What is the most productive relationship that we might envision between amateurs and professionals engaged in interpreting the past? H-Public invites you to respond to this presentation or to these questions by posting a message to: h-public@h-net.msu.edu. ----------- SUMMARY: Examining a range of museums ranging from the national to the local, Houlihan argues that museums are much more devoted to memory than to history, and that this weakens museums' ability to act as neutral spaces where many different perspectives can be found. Even at museums that present a very long time span in their exhibits, the majority of space tends to be devoted to the most recent pasts—-those that are still within reach of memory. In fact, Houlihan says, "Museums singularly fail in terms of the configuration of their space to reflect time." Museum displays often go beyond living memory, but they are still strongly influenced by community, individual, and national memories. Memory is often enlisted to support national narratives. For example, in national war museums and memorials, the memories and experiences of soldiers and civilians are often used to reinforce national understandings of wars, without challenging dominant stories or raising questions about the nature of war itself. At other times, memory is more specifically local or asserted by particular groups or interests. Houlihan notes that whenever individual memories are invoked in museums, they are usually used as a way of testifying to some kind of community memory. At the same time, curators sometimes impose their own narratives on the objects and memories from which they construct their exhibits. He asks, "What we’re currently doing in our museums...is not so much about collection as recollection, about reproducing, about reinventing, about reconstructing. To what extent is it actually about history?" Houlihan is not seeking to keep memory out of museums altogether. Rather, he seems to be saying that what we should be wary of are the over-arching narratives, whether curatorial, national, or local, that make use of memories in ways that short-circuit critical inquiry. Doing history, he contends, should offer people an opportunity to construct their own narratives, rather than presenting them with packaged reconstructions. He sees hope in the emergence of new media for the development of a more questioning kind of museum display, in which audiences can exercise more choice and work with objects, memories, and information in ways of their own choosing—to "develop your own future, in a sense." --------------- Send comments to: h-public@h-net.msu.edu.
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