Curation and Pitt Rivers: Starting a Conversation

When I visited the Whipple in Cambridge, my contact there mentioned in passing that the museum didn't want to be thought of like the Pitt Rivers museum. Because I didn't make the connection immediately, I inquired what she meant. For her, the Pitt Rivers Museum was a trope epitomizing an outmoded approach to collection. When I visited Oxford, I immediately understood. 

A few things mark this museum. First, it's dark. The museum actually rents flashlights so you can really see into the cases. Second, the organizing principles are so different from other museums. For example, I love razors, so I liked finding this case:

A friend and I have been pondering the meaning of curation, collection, and the role of curator and audience. Pitt Rivers, I think, is a useful point of reference for understanding these relationships between collection and curation and the public. Here we can see what an old model of display does, and we are able to better understand the gradations of exhibits that move away from simple cases of related stuff.

Pitt Rivers has a very basic curatorial framework: objects organized by similar use -- swords, maces, human dolls, razors, shields, etc. Before we had a sense of the scope of things, Pitt Rivers captured what seemed like a useful snapshot of human stuff. From here, we start making more distinctions -- historical, cultural, material -- into which these groups of objects can be separated. But even this initial framework is curation: the application of an organizing principle to a collection of things. It's not as sophisticated as the Linnean system of binomial nomenclature, but it's a start.   

To an extent, this kind of organization sparks our curiosity, but it then leaves us unsatisfied, because the cases fil to communicate use, culture, history, or construction of any of these things. They're simply and functionally related.  

We don't often catch glimpses of this kind of structure. Museum collections are now taxonmized, organized, and presented with narratives. In the Rivers museum, the visitor marvels and makes meaning. Someone has grouped these objects together, so the collection part isn't within the visitor's purview. But visitors are left to make sense of the cases.