Anarchist's Guide to Historic House Museums by Franklin D Vagnone Deborah E Ryan

Author:Franklin D Vagnone, Deborah E Ryan [Franklin D Vagnone, Deborah E Ryan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Art, Museum Studies, Education, Non-Formal Education, History, General, United States, State & Local
ISBN: 9781629581712
Google: ftjDCgAAQBAJ
Publisher: Left Coast Press
Published: 2016-01-15T05:11:07+00:00

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Touch it, smell it, taste it. Kill the silence. Allow tactility. Engage your guests' senses through light, scent and sound installations to bring your HHM to life and provide for more visceral, immediate connections to be made. Present your HHMs as more of a home and less of a museum. Visitors should be made to feel like welcome guests, rather than intruders onto a fragile stage set. Very little of your collections should remain in locked glass cases or behind velvet ropes. Guests should have access to almost everything. Encourage visitors to occupy rooms, not merely be led through or by them.

Be creative with how to engage the senses. Take a cue from Colonial Williamsburg, which announced plans in 2014 to install lighting in its Historic Village to encourage nighttime visitation. Consider the myriad ways of incorporating sensory experiences into your site, and realize the monumental effects even simple changes can engender.

Take, for example, a wonderful site-specific audio installation called Lullaby Factory at London's Great Ormond Street Hospital. Designed by StudioWeave, the work is a complex series of pipes and horns installed in a cramped, ten-story courtyard between the hospital's 1930 building and a recent building addition. The pipes expel Jessica Curry's original lullaby that can be heard in the wards by tuning into a special radio station or through listening pipes next to the canteen. The art piece transforms a forgotten urban space between buildings, and turns it into a both visual and audial sensory experience.42 Imagine a similar sort of art installation at a HHM that interprets the sounds of everyday life in a fanciful way.

Famous Deaths, an exhibit at the Museum of the Image in the Netherlands illustrated the impact of engaging the senses in a public place. Dutch scientists recreated "the deaths of some of the world's most famous personalities by reconstructing their last moments using scents and sounds. From the sweet smell of Jacqueline Kennedy's perfume, mingled with the scent of John F. Kennedy's blood to Whitney Houston's last drug-fuelled moments in a Beverly Hills bathtub," visitors were invited to lie in the claustrophobic, pitch black of morgue-like metal boxes, and for five minutes experience a smell tableau that was a "unique, if somewhat macabre, historical snapshot."43

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