The Objects & The Process

by Sue Lawton

Growing up in a Catholic home and school, I was often surrounded by sacred objects. These included things like crucifixes, holy cards, rosaries, and statues. I still remember very clearly the day my grade school class stood in the sanctuary of the church while the priest explained that Catholic Churches keep relics of saints under or within their alters. It seemed a paradox to me; the Bible clearly warned against idolatry or object worship, but here were these objects that were held as holy or to be protected from harm and defilement. I later came to understand that these were, in some senses, intended as tools or conduits for prayer, not necessarily as the recipients.

While I’m no longer a member of the Catholic faith, I’ve carried that sense of “holy object” or “conduit of prayer” with me into adulthood. Even as I’ve embraced a more scientific view, some objects still feel holy in an almost inexplicable way. What is this strange power that objects hold over our minds and hearts? Does it reside in the object itself or only within its meaning? Since any museum collection is basically a giant warehouse of special objects, does this aura extend to secular content? Are specimens and artifacts tools or conduits for meaning?

The Milwaukee Public Museum’s collections date back to a group of collectors and enthusiasts in the late 19th century. The “A Sense of Wonder” exhibit on the museum’s main floor is meant to depict displays from that time period. There are so many different things clustered in one place, that it’s dazzling and almost overwhelming. Most of the biological specimens and cultural artifacts are kept in glass fronted wood cabinets and cases. Little is provided in the way of context or signage, so what you get is an exquisite array of lovely and interesting objects to look at. The care with which they have been arranged and the protection they are granted by way of the cases, implies not only wonder, but also a strong sense of reverence.

A small sample of the objects on display in the “A Sense of Wonder” Exhibit

This is also very much in the vein of what the natural sciences were like in the 19th century; many of the famous scientists of the time period were upper class gentlemen who took months or years traveling the world on ships to collect specimens. The science consisted of gathering as many “things” as they could, then taking them home to examine, categorize, and preserve them. Bag it, name it, put it in a case or a jar. This approach was one of ownership and categorization. Many museums still have storage shelves filled with specimens from this time. Libraries of organisms.

But, as you step away from the Sense of Wonder exhibit, the rest of the museum is arranged quite differently. There are still hallways of glass-fronted cases (especially on the second and third floors), but you also see more of the objects displayed with INTENSE levels of context and oodles of signage, sometimes within immersive environments, and life-sized dioramas. In some ways, the objects are still the stars of the show, but their meanings become more relevant. Some artifacts are displayed in a particularly meta way; within a diorama depicting its own discovery, complete with detailed body casts of the researchers in the act of discovering.

A detailed replica of Peter Sheehan points to an actual sample of the K-pg boundary (Left)

A copy of renowned Peruvian scholar Dr. Julio C Tello discovers some pottery and mummies (Right)

On the main floor, there is a lab you can walk through showing what the research environment hidden within the non-public facing parts of the museum might look like. There are benches with microscopes, specimen drawers you can pull out, and a glass-fronted refrigerator filled with jars of frogs and fish and snakes. This theme is also found in the Rainforest exhibit where you can see both a field research station and a diorama of a researcher’s office within the museum building. The part that makes the Rainforest labs fascinating, is that these dioramas were made in the 1980’s and have not been updated since. So what you are really seeing is not what the research spaces look like now, but a historical representation of how they would have looked in my childhood. The office diorama is full of newspapers, magazine clippings, comics, and other ephemera, while smart phones and laptops are conspicuously absent.

Mustachioed mannequins hard at work in a rainforest research station (left) and a museum laboratory (right)

As the Milwaukee Public Museum shares plans for its new building, it sounds like they will house much of the collections and research at a separate location. This would further remove the active process of research from public view. Many other natural history museums have taken the opposite approach. For example, the Burpee Museum in Rockford, IL has a large, publicly visible fossil prep lab. The Wyoming Dinosaur Center, Utah Field House Museum, and many others all have visible workspaces where visitors can observe scientists, technicians, and volunteers doing the messy, tedious, and often collaborative work of studying fossils. These spaces can be cluttered (much like the dioramas in the rainforest) and people aren’t always actively working during all museum hours, but viewers can see the fossils laying out in varying stages of cleaning and reassembling broken pieces, whether anyone is actively working at the moment or not. Unlike the rainforest research dioramas, these spaces change frequently and feature real people doing real work, as opposed to a detailed mannequin sitting frozen at a desk looking at the same insect specimen for thirty-plus years. Arguably, the live butterflies and tanks of other crawlies are a more engaging experience, but do not demonstrate research.

Views of the publicly visible fossil labs in the Burpee Museum in Rockford, IL

As an artist who has done live art in the past, it’s not always the most comfortable experience, so I can understand why researchers may prefer not to do all of their work during open hours. But this is one of the things I appreciate about having an art studio within a gallery space. Whether we’re present and doing our thing, the pieces we are working on are out on the desk surfaces. The sketches and specimens are all over the place along with the supplies we use at various stages of our processes. The walls and shelves double as exhibition space and the finished pieces frequently get moved around with newer works being rotated in. In essence, our workspace is its own sort of installation piece. People can see the messiness of it and, if they return, can see the most recent results of our work. These results take the form of many types of objects: illustrations, paintings, sculpture, books and journals, and (yes) glass-fronted cases with natural specimens inside. While natural history museums have always been a place to store, display, and study objects, art studios are a place where objects are made. But the process of art, much like the process of science, is one of continual inquiry and experimentation. Finished artworks are merely the published results. The process is perhaps just as important.

The experimental art lab of Sue and Ven, inside Scout Gallery

So, after thinking about all of these elements, what is the role of an exhibit space? Is it merely to convey information? At a time when we have more information and images at our fingertips than ever before, this seems unlikely. No, it seems the reason people still go to museums is to experience being in the presence of physical objects. To get a real sense of their size and texture, the way the light reflects on something, the weird musty smell of preserved things. These are sensory experiences that cannot be found by clicking through the results of an image search online or swiping through pages on a touch screen. The “objects” and the “process”, then, are the two crucial features the public should have access to and insight into.

The question remains whether or not the current Milwaukee Public Museum successfully meets both of these needs. And the question for the new museum will be, how can both the collections and the process best be made available to the public?