Public collections for public health
Myna Trustram, Manchester City Galleries (Renaissance)
(m.trustram@manchester.gov.uk)
Talk for ‘The Feel Good Museum’, Walsall Leather Museum, Midlands
Federation of Museums and Art Galleries, 13 October 2011
Introduction
What I want to do is to use the concept of asylum to think about museums
and galleries as places where health and wellbeing can be enhanced.
I think it can be helpful to use metaphors to think about museums. Another
metaphor that is often used, and which has links with the idea of asylum, is to
imagine museums as 21st century churches if not cathedrals. Thinking
metaphorically can free up our thinking.
The talk will consider the following areas:
1. The museum as an asylum
2. The Telling Our Lives project at Manchester Museum
3. The Who Cares? Museums, Health and Wellbeing programme
4. ‘Public Collections for Public Health’
But I want to start by showing you some images of objects in museum
collections.
They are all accessioned and catalogued objects so you could say that they
have their passport and are full citizens of the museum.
The point I want to make is that many things happen to objects in museums.
Some:
flourish and are shown off
some are the object of intense scrutiny
1
some deteriorate and are rarely seen
some receive intensive treatment to restore them
some are hidden away in great order
some are hidden away and forgotten about
some are the object of great moral and political interest
are repatriated
some exist in close and closed groups
some are sold
again, some are neglected – zebra
some are allowed out under close surveillance
some
stabbed in the back
scurrying away
about to attack
Asylum
I am talking about ‘asylum’ as in mental asylum and political asylum. Asylum
has connotations of loss, displacement, hospitality, exclusion, privilege,
destruction – all relevant to museum practice.
Any sociologists amongst you may be familiar with Erving Goffman’s book
Asylums: SLIDE
2
‘A total institution [an asylum] may be defined as a place of residence
and work where a large number of like-situated individuals, cut off from
the wider society for an appreciable period of time, together lead an
enclosed, formally administered round of life.’i1
Goffman’s description of a closed institution is remarkably similar to a
museum. Instead of human subjects the museum has physical objects.
Above all perhaps asylum is about loss – loss of freedom, loss of status, loss
of relatives and friends and so much more. And anything gained through the
hospitality of an asylum is a poor substitute for what has been lost.
Museums promote themselves as places of knowledge and learning derived
from concrete objects, sometimes many millions of them. But there are
complex affective and aesthetic phenomena occurring in the encounter with
objects which go far beyond the accumulation of facts. It is these phenomena
which we are harnessing when we try to use museums to enhance health.
I think we are asking, How can museums help make life worth living? We are
looking for more than the usual things we advertise - a fun day out or a
chance to learn something. Some people2 believe that it is the very early
relationship that we have with the mother or principal carer that gives us a
sense, or not, that life is worth living. I suppose I am wondering if there is any
link at all between those early relationships and the experience a person
might have in a museum.
Telling Our Lives 2001-2
Telling Our Lives was a project run by Manchester Museum with Somalian
women refugees.
1
Erving Goffman, Asylums: Essays on the social situation of mental patients and other
inmates, Penguin, 1961 p.11
2 For instance the paediatrician and psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott. See his Playing and
Reality, Penguin,1971
3
Working with refugees and asylum seekers in UK museums isn’t unusual.
Such work takes place within the policy context of ‘social inclusion’. Typically,
projects say that they want to ‘give a voice’ to refugees; they want to make the
museum ‘relevant’ to refugees; to ‘record the heritage’ of refugee
communities; to give them skills in order to enter the labour market.3
The project that I will talk about at the Manchester Museum had a slightly
different focus from this.
The University of Manchester School of Medicine and the leader of a local
Somali refugee women’s group first approached the museum’4. They thought
that an inability to talk about their cultural identity was a prime factor in the
depression of some Somalian women refugees. As refugees they had little
sense of self and were left behind by their children’s greater ease with
speaking English and finding a place within their life in the UK.5 They came to
the museum weekly for six weeks to work in storytelling, textile arts and
learning English. SLIDE
Khadra, one of the women, said it took her eight years to feel any sense of
security in the UK.
‘Ask Khadra where home is, and she will say “Somalia”. Ask her to
explain this home to you and she will bring you an object, something
she carried with her on that arduous journey [to the UK], like a
talisman. Her object she says, tells others, “This is me”.’6
SLIDE
The irony of the women seeking refuge or asylum in the museum’s
ethnographic collection, a product of colonial relationships, was not lost on the
3
Refugee Heritage Project (London: Renaissance London, 2007)
Bernadette Lynch, If the Museum is the Gateway, Who is the Gatekeeper? engage review
Winter 2011 issue 11, p.3
5 Bernadette Lynch, Access to Collections and Affective Interaction with Objects in the
Museum. PhD thesis, School of Art History and Archaeology, University of Manchester, 2004
p.158
6 Ibid
4
4
staff of the museum. There is a whole complexity of post colonial
relationships between these women and the museum. When the women first
came ‘they had never before entered a museum, or any building that
represented, for them, the power of the state, or colonial cultural power. They
were completely intimidated and fearful, unwilling to meet the eyes of
Museum staff.’7
Somali objects from the collection, in particular photographs from Italian
Somaliland taken by an Italian photographer during the Second World War,
were shown to the women who explained the photographs (in museum terms,
interpreted them) from their perspective. ‘There was a great deal of nostalgia
for well-remembered (or part-remembered) landscapes and (obvious) pride in
being able to tell something new to museum staff’.8 They evoked memories
of loss.
One might imagine that the museum provided temporary mental asylum for
the women from their difficult lives in inner city Manchester. They were
listened to and given privileged access to special objects. They shared their
experiences and feelings with each other which enabled them to do some
‘working through’.9
Whether they were offered some measure of what might loosely be called
political asylum is less clear.
The project can perhaps be imagined as an act of reparation. It appears to
democratise the museum through enabling the women to present their own
meanings of the objects rather than privileging that of the curators. The
museum’s role is complex here though and it’s important not to idealise. It
has a humanitarian desire to help the women, to listen to their stories. It also
7
Lynch, Access to Collections, p.162
Lynch, If the Museum is the Gateway, p.5
9 See Laurence J. Gould, Collective WorkingThrough: the Role and Function of
Memorialisation, Organisational and Social Dynamics, 11 (1) 2011, pp.79-92
8
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has an interest in capturing their stories to enhance the documentation of the
collections.10
My second study looks at a programme which sought also to provide some
kind of refuge, but this time without the overt political context of refugees
visiting a symbol of the host country’s former colonial past. The demons here
are less overtly political and more mental.
Who Cares? Museums, Health and Wellbeing
This is a programme of projects run in six museums in the NW of England
from 2009-11. The programme was funded by Renaissance NW. the six
members of the NW Renaissance Hub took part: Manchester Art Gallery,
Manchester Museum, Whitworth Art Gallery, Bolton Museum Service, the
Harris Museum and Art Gallery, Tullie House Museum and Art Gallery. The
programme has won two national awards from the Royal Society for Public
Health for the practice and the research.
The projects were experiments in using the museums’ collections and spaces
to help the health and wellbeing of the participants. They worked with
community based organisations such as a group for homeless people, health
partners such as a young people’s psychiatric unit in a hospital and with
residential and daycare centres for the elderly. The practitioners they worked
with were psychiatrists, nurses, care workers, artists, community workers.
Some of the projects sought to enrich lives through handling objects, looking
at art or making art. Other projects, where close partnerships were formed
with clinicians, directly addressed the participants’ mental state.
You will know that for many decades now there has been an ‘arts and health’
movement which for the most part uses practical creative activities to enhance
people’s health. In this work we are trying to establish the distinctive ways in
which museums and their collections can enhance health.
10
Lynch, Access to Collections, p.186
6
Example: Ophelia by Arthur Hughes, 1852 (Manchester Art Gallery) SLIDE
So we commissioned the Psychosocial Research Unit at the University of
Central Lancashire to analyse the work.
The most relevant finding for our purposes today is in the area of what we are
now calling ‘public collections for public health’ – hence the title of my talk. As
you know, ‘Public health’ is the term for non-clinical policy and action about
health considered at a population level.
The participants used objects to create distinctive personal meaning. So for
instance in a cancer hospital in Manchester young patients were shown a
range of domestic objects to handle and talk about. One young woman chose
a miniature egg timer. This led to a discussion about time and in particular
‘how time (to think and to wait)’ hung heavy on her as a patient in an oncology
ward. Perhaps she is wondering if she will grow old.
In many of the projects the people formed symbolic relationships with the
objects. The power of the relationship in part stemmed from the objects being
museum objects ie they exist in the public domain, publicly owned. If an
attachment can be made to something in the public domain then the symbolic
link can assist a sense of inclusion in the wider society;
‘By making a personally distinctive use of an object, I retain my
uniqueness and individuality…but I bring that individuality into relation
with what the object stands for in the wider cultural field. I therefore
begin to dissolve the separation I may feel from the cultural field of
which others appear to be a part.’11
Museums are used to providing objects for educational use. In the Who
Cares? work objects were made available for their psychic use, or in other
11
Lynn Froggett (et.al.) Who Cares? Museums, Health and Wellbeing Research Project. A
Study of the Renaissance North West Programme, UCLan and Renaissance NW, 2011, p.66
7
words to find meaning. Critically, this takes place within an ethos of care
(curator is from curare to care for).12 One might suggest that both the objects
and the people are being curated or cared for. (It is though worth noting that
the quality of care afforded to some objects in museums is way above that
which many humans receive in society.)
Museums can bend over backwards to make their collections ‘relevant’ ie to
provide objects which ‘resonate with what is already familiar to’ people. 13
(The MM project seemed to assume that the Somalian women would be only
interested in Somalian objects.) But this is a rather simple way of thinking
about relevance. The Who Cares? projects showed that if one is mindful of
the possibility of resonances with deeply held inner objects / fantasies, it is
impossible to predict what will be ‘relevant’.14
Example: acid jug, Doulton and Co Ltd, 1935, (Manchester Art Gallery) SLIDE
The collections of many museums were gathered together in response to
imperial adventures and a fear that the new industrial and political order of the
19th would destroy pre-industrial crafts. Collectors sought refuge for treasured
objects in museums. I am suggesting that the museum can be imagined as a
benign asylum15, a place of (mental and political) hospitality for both people
and physical objects. A place where displacement (or in museum terms
disposability) is not entertained. And yet displacement (disposal) – the return
of people to their country of origin or of mental patients to the ‘community’, the
disposal of museum objects - is in fact entertained by nations and by mental
asylums, as it is by museums. And so, as with so much in life, ambivalence
and ambiguity are paramount in what is done.
Public collections for public health
I’ve reached now the title of my talk!
12
Froggett, Who Cares? p.67
Froggett, Who Cares? p.65
14 Froggett, Who Cares? p.65
15 Khanna, Ranjana, ‘Asylum’, Texas International Law Journal 41 (2006), pp.471-490
13
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The work I’ve described consists of small intensive and expensive projects
which are not really sustainable in the long term and are not available for
large numbers of people.
Mark O’Neill has looked at research about the impact on health of ‘general
cultural attendance’.16 Note this is about attendance rather than participation.
We already know that taking part in creative activities (visual art, music
making, writing) has a measurable impact on physical and mental health and
we also know that the quality of one’s immediate environment makes a
difference to how quickly one recovers from illness.17
But Mark O’Neill’s survey of research led him to this conclusion: SLIDE
…taken together this body of research amounts to convincing evidence
by medical and public health researchers that cultural attendance
provides a distinct stimulus to human beings that has an impact on
their well-being to such a degree that it prolongs their lives.18
The studies that he drew this conclusion from were controlled for things like
age, sex, cash-buffer, educational standard, long-term disease, smoking and
physical exercise.
Even solitary cultural engagement makes a real difference. Culture is a
separate variable from the social
We don’t know what the psychological and physiological mechanisms are that
give rise to these effects but we do know that cultural experiences can
produce that ‘flow’ experience, or a deep sense of concentrated immersion
which makes us feel good. They bring a sense of wholeness and
Mark O’Neill, Cultural Attendance and Public Mental Health – From Research to Practice,
Journal of Public Mental Health, 9 (4) 2010, pp22-29
17 O’Neill, Cultural Attendance, p.22
18 O’Neill, Cultural Attendance, p.25
16
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meaningfulness. They enable people to become as engaged as they wish to
be, emotionally or cognitively, alone or with people. Experiences mustn’t be
so simple as to be boring or so complex to generate anxiety; the activities
must be flexible so that people can deepen their engagement if they so
wish.19
There is a strong moral dimension to all this. The work is not about consumer
choice but rather is related to issues of equality and justice.20 If access to
cultural facilities is a matter of life and death then there is a moral imperative
to make it available. There is a strong case for cultural attendance to be
included in public health planning and specifically in social prescribing.
So in Manchester we’re talking with public health officials and looking at ways
in which we can encourage more people to become habitual users.
My preferred way of thinking now about museums within this field of health
and wellbeing is to ask, What use might a person make of this museum?
How useful can we be to individuals (from the psychotic to the moderately
depressed), and to health professionals?
When someone walks through the door of the Leather Museum what use can
they make of it? Are they free to make their own use or do they need
guidance? Do they need guidance because of their psychological state or
because the Museum is incomprehensible to all except the initiated?
19
20
O’Neill, Cultural Attendance, pp.25-26
O’Neill, Cultural Attendance, p.26
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