Closed on Mondays: Behind the Scenes at the Museum

"That’s right. Dinah is a friend and when I learned that she too was writing a book about museums, I thought to myself, there’s clearly something in the air. We both started pre-Covid, and although we had never discussed it, her motivation was very similar to mine, even if the result is so different. It was only in April when she came to me with a museum related question that I realised we were both writing in parallel, and in fact that her book was due to be published in November 2020, well before mine! Where I might at first have thought, oh well, bad luck if she ends up saying all the things I felt were worthwhile covering. In fact, it’s 100% different in character, and in the best possible way. “At the Ethnological Museum in Dahlem, southwest of Berlin, visitors were asked to instal their coats, hats and bags in display cases as if they were themselves ethnographic specimens.” Museum designers are often rather invisible. We rarely learn about what they think and do, and their importance in display. It’s simply not evident to most people, who assume that curators or gallerists or agents put things out. Museums themselves, I believe, often underestimate the role of the designer, because curators are on the staff while designers are on contract. So they celebrate the role of the curator who will probably have chosen that designer and worked closely with them, but it’s the curator who gets the credit. What I like about Dinah’s book is that it’s so personal. She has worked all her career designing museums. She looks back at her long involvement with museums and thinks aloud as it were about the things she wishes they did better or differently. I loved it as a book precisely because it is so personal. I love the short chapter about the coat check – clever and funny and unexpected. At the Ethnological Museum in Dahlem , southwest of Berlin, visitors were asked to instal their coats, hats and bags in display cases as if they were themselves ethnographic specimens. As an addition to the typical installations it is absolutely brilliant because it’s such a simple way of getting people to think about the nature of museums, their visit and what it’s all about. By coincidence, I went to review that exhibition. Although I had been to the Gulbenkian before, what that exhibition made you appreciate is the experience of the museum itself, how you are being made to walk around the museum in a particular way that encourages reflection on the museum’s design, almost as much as the exhibition itself. The museum itself becomes an exhibit. This was a show about other places which were represented in a necessarily rather arbitrary way through photographs and little displays. Whereas the Gulbenkian itself was Exhibit A. It made you realise how beautiful a building it is, and how well it has worn. Exactly as Dinah mentions, the museum draws your attention to the quality of daylight and the nature of the surrounding environment, the internal courtyard and the display cases, so that it’s all done in a very low key way, a trademark of the architect Franco Albini who advised on its design. While it may be low key, it is very considered. At Dia Beacon, Michael Govan made sure to have the exterior, the gardens around this industrial building, enter and fuse visually with the interior exhibition spaces."