Thresholds of Memory: Representing Function through Space and Object at the Imperial War Museum, London, 1918–2014
2015; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 8; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1179/1936981615z.00000000053
ISSN1936-9824
Autores Tópico(s)Photography and Visual Culture
ResumoAbstractThe Imperial War Museum (IWM) in London has always balanced a number of functions. Seeking to represent the post-1914 conflicts of Britain and her Commonwealth, those responsible for the institution have also sought to commemorate and to inform. The balance of these priorities has shifted over time in ways that can be traced within the combined use of spaces and objects by the museum's curators. This article analyses the major changes in key elements of IWM London's display structure since 1918. Using this single institution as a case study reveals the particular importance of thresholds to the interpretation of the material culture displayed within its buildings. Thus, this article argues, these symbolically crucial border spaces merit attention in any analysis of museum spaces.Keywords: Imperial War Museum space interpretation display war cultural memory Notes1 King George V, ‘Address,’ in Third Annual Report of the Imperial War Museum (London: HMSO, 1920), pp. 3–4.2 IWM, Imperial War Museum, Imperial Institute Road, South Kensington (c. 1926).3 Michel Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces,’ Diacritics, 16 (1986), 22–27 (p. 24).4 Alongside Foucault, Edward Soja has also made an exploration of the radical power of margins in his analysis of what he terms ‘Thirdspace’. Of heterotopias, he has written they ‘are frustratingly incomplete, inconsistent, incoherent. They seem narrowly focused on peculiar microgeographies, nearsighted and near-sited, deviant and deviously apolitical. Yet they are also the marvellous incunabula of another fruitful journey into Thirdspace, into the spaces that difference makes, into the geohistories of otherness’. Edward Soja, Thirdspace: Journey to Los Angeles and Other Real-And-Imagined Places (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), p. 162). The presence of these thresholds within a war museum is notable also in relation to the liminal status of memorials. Dacia Viejo-Rose has described memorials as ‘fundamentally liminal in character, especially when it comes to the relation between intention and impact. Memorials exist in a space between history and memory, affect and identity, between past, present and future’. Their function as icons bridging these gaps means that memorials stand on a ‘constantly shifting threshold’, whereby they occupy the ‘grey area between ordinary, everyday objects and extraordinary objects signifying an exceptional event’ (D. Viejo-Rose, ‘Memorial Functions: Intent, Impact and the Right to Remember,’ Memory Studies, 4(4) (2011), 465–80, pp. 466, 471). The placing of commemorative signifiers within the IWM's transitional spaces supports this conception of the liminality of the memorial.5 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. by D. Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991).6 Paul Williams, Memorial Museums: The Global Rush to Commemorate Atrocities (Oxford: Berg, 2007), p. 77.7 Michaela Giebelhausen has traced the development of museum architecture since the early nineteenth century (Michaela Giebelhausen, ‘Museum Architecture: A Brief History’ in A Companion to Museum Studies ed. by Sharon Macdonald, pp. 223-244 and Michaela Giebelhausen, ‘The Architecture is the Museum’ in New Museum Theory and Practice ed. by Janet Marstine (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2006), pp. 41-63). Tony Bennett's work on the origins of the ‘modern museum’ has investigated the way these Victorian institutions aimed to realize their civilizing mission by employing space as a means of establishing surveillance and thus directing the behaviour of visitors (Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics, Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1995)). This work on the broad history of museum and gallery space has been joined by research on specific case studies. These case studies have tended to focus on recent museums and on exhibitions over a short period of time. Some, however, have considered the evolving use of space at a particular institution over time. Suzanne MacLeod has argued for the need to consider museums in terms of ‘the subtle histories of site-specific change’ and has done so in her analysis of the changing space of the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool (Suzanne MacLeod, ‘Rethinking museum architecture: towards a site-specific history of production and use’ in Reshaping Museum Space ed. by Suzanne MacLeod, pp. 9-25 (pp.12-13)). Mary Beard and John Henderson similarly trace the evolving use of space in their account of the art galleries at Somerset House (Mary Beard and John Henderson, ‘The Historicality of Art: Royal Academy (1780-1836) and Courtauld Institute Galleries (1990-) at Somerset House’ in Art in Museums ed. by Susan Pearce (London: Athlone, 1995), pp. 233-259).8 Katherine Hodgkin and Susannah Radstone, ‘Introduction,’ in Memory History Nation: Contested Pasts, ed. by Katherine Hodgkin and Susannah Radstone (New Brunswick: Transaction, 2007), pp. 1–21 (p. 5).9 IWM, First Annual Report of the Imperial War Museum (London: HMSO, 1918).10 IWM, Catalogue of the Imperial War Exhibition, 3rd edn. (London: HMSO, 1918). p. 1.11 Ibid.12 Ibid.13 Peter Thwaites, Presenting Arms: Museum Representation of British Military History, 1660–1900. (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1996), p. 21.14 Thwaites, Presenting Arms.15 Gaynor Kavanagh, Museums and the First World War: A Social History (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1994).16 Charles ffoulkes, Arms and the Tower (London: John Murray, 1939).17 Kavanagh, Museums and the First World War, p. 66.18 IWM, The Imperial War Museum (1917).19 The Crystal Palace was designed by Joseph Paxton to house the Great Exhibition in 1851. Considered an architectural marvel when it was unveiled in Hyde Park, when the Exhibition closed the building was relocated to Sydenham Hill, on the south-eastern outskirts of London. There it was enlarged to double its original size and vaulted with a barrel-roof. This new incarnation was opened by the Queen and Prince Albert in June 1854. See J. R. Piggott, Palace of the People: The Crystal Palace at Sydenham 1854–1936 (London: Hurst and Company, 2004).20 The majority of these subcommittees were established at a meeting of the, then National, War Museum Committee in March 1917. The Air Services and Art were later additions in November 1917 and June 1918 respectively. Those who headed the subcommittees were officials in the relevant institutions. National War Museum, ‘Minutes of the Committee Meeting’, 29 March 1917; Minutes of the Committee of the National War Museum, March 1917–June 1920; IWM, ‘Minutes of the 29th Committee Meeting’, 22 November 1917; Minutes of the Committee of the National War Museum, March 1917–June 1920; IWM, ‘Minutes of the 44th Committee Meeting’, 27 June 1918; Minutes of the Committee of the National War Museum, March 1917–June 1920.21 Bay 2, Bay 15, and Bay 3, respectively. IWM, Imperial War Museum Official Guide (London: HMSO, 1921), pp. 2, 8, 11.22 Room 14, the Gallery, and Room 23. IWM, Imperial War Museum Official Guide, pp. 5, 13, 14, 8.23 ‘National War Museum. Royal Navy Section’, n.d., EN1/1/ADM/5, IWM Central Files.24 Mond, ‘Chairman's Address,’ Third Annual Report of the Imperial War Museum, p. 3.25 25ffoulkes, Arms and the Tower, pp. 109–10.26 Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces’, p. 24.27 IWM, Third Annual Report of the Imperial War Museum, p. 13.28 Charles ffoulkes to A. H. Burne, 3 September 1922. EN1/1/GUN/22/1, IWM Central Files.29 Imperial War Museum, Third Annual Report of the Imperial War Museum, 1919–1920, p. 13.30 Imperial War Museum, Third Annual Report of the Imperial War Museum, 1919–1920, p. 13.31 Alfred Mond, ‘Transcript of a speech given by Alfred Mond’, 15 October 1920, EN1/1/FLA/77/7, IWM Central Files.32 South Kensington was (and remains) the location of London's principal museum complex. The South Kensington Museum was founded following the 1851 Great Exhibition and later split into the Victoria & Albert Museum and the Science Museum. Other museums joined these institutions on the site. The Imperial Institute formed an imposing part of the complex on Imperial Institute Road. It housed exhibits, generally commercial and industrial, from across the British Empire. See Alan Morton, ‘Tomorrow's Yesterdays: Science Museums and the Future,’ in The Museum Time Machine: Putting Cultures on Display, ed. by Robert Lumley (London: Routledge, 1988), pp. 128–43.33 IWM, ‘Minutes of the Second Meeting of the Board of Trustees of the Imperial War Museum’, 19 April 1921; Minutes of the Board of Trustees, I, 1920–44, p. 2; IWM, ‘Minutes of the Sixth Meeting of the Standing Committee of the Imperial War Museum’, 14 June 1922; Minutes of the Board of Trustees, I, 1920–44, p. 1.34 Arthur Durrant to Charles ffoulkes, ‘IWM Accommodation’, 1921, EN1/1/ACC/17/1, IWM Central Files; Anon, ‘Draft Cabinet Memoranda’, August 1921. EN1/1/ACC/17/1, IWM Central Files.35 IWM, ‘Imperial Institute Gallery Plans. Imperial War Museum South Kensington’. EN1/1/ACC/31, IWM Central Files.36 IWM, Tenth Annual Report of the Imperial War Museum (London: HMSO, 1927), pp. 8–9.37 Charles ffoulkes, ‘Report on the Imperial Institute’, 20 September 1920. EN1/1/ACC/17/1, IWM Central Files.38 Charles ffoulkes to Earl Crawford and Balcarres. First Commissioner of Works, ‘IWM at South Kensington’, 8 August 1921, EN1/1/ACC/17/1, IWM Central Files.39 Lefebvre, The Production of Space, p. 221.40 IWM, Eighth Annual Report of the Imperial War Museum (Fifth Report of the Board of Trustees), 1924–1925 (London: HMSO), p. 6.41 The Lambeth Road building dated from 1815. It had previously housed Bethlem Royal Hospital, a medical institution dedicated to the treatment of mental illness (and popularly known as ‘Bedlam’). Located in Southwark, a borough on the south side of the River Thames, it was purchased by Lord Rothermere in 1930. He subsequently presented the building, along with the park within which it was located, to London County Council. See IWM, ‘Note on the Building occupied by the Imperial War Museum’. EN2/1/PUB/004, IWM Central Files; Ida Darlington, Survey of London Vol. XXV. The Parishes of St. George the Martyr, Southwark and St. Mary Newington (London: London County Council, 1954); IWM, ‘Minutes of the Meeting of the Board of Trustees of the Imperial War Museum’, 29 November 1935; Minutes of the Board of Trustees, I, 1920–44, p. 1.42 Galleries 16, 17, and 18, Gallery 30, Gallery 26, and Gallery 24, respectively. See IWM, A Short Guide to the Imperial War Museum. Lambeth Road S.E.1 1914–1918 (London: HMSO, 1938), pp. 31, 32, 41, 45, 48.43 Ibid., p. 8.44 Ibid., p. 35.45 IWM, A Short Guide to the Imperial War Museum (1948), p. 5.46 Ibid., p. 11.47 Deborah Marshall, ‘Making Sense of Remembrance,’ Social and Cultural Geography, 5 (2004), 37–54 (p. 39).48 Frankland's grand ambitions for the IWM were apparent upon his arrival at the institution. He summarized his position in an internal memorandum of April 1961: ‘In short, the Imperial War Museum must enter positively upon the next phase of its existence and recognize that the services required of it in the next two decades will be substantially different from those of the last two. Radical changes in the public exhibition and a radical development of the reference departments will be needed.’ Noble Frankland, ‘Proposals for the Extension of the Imperial War Museum’ (c. April 1961). EN3/1/17/2/1, IWM Central Files.49 IWM, A Handbook of the Imperial War Museum Lambeth Road S.E.1: 1914 to the Present Day (London: HMSO, 1963), p. 34.50 Ibid.51 Charles ffoulkes explained this policy in a letter of 1922 to Colonel Heath of the British Legion. The museum's officials, he noted, were ‘extremely anxious that the Nation and posterity should not forget the splendid efforts of the millions of individuals who made victory possible by their sacrifices’, and concluded by expressing their feeling that ‘the rank and file deserve the same memorials as do admirals and generals’. Charles ffoulkes to Colonel Heath, 15 June 1922. EN1/1/BLE/001, IWM Central Files.52 Noble Frankland, History at War: The Campaigns of a Historian (London: DLM, 1998), pp. 160, 168.53 Noble Frankland to Algernon Willis, 29 May 1961. EN3/1/1/2, IWM Central Files.54 Noble Frankland to Frank Carmen, Keeper of Exhibits, 24 March 1965. EN3/2/07/002, IWM Central Files.55 Peter Simkins, ‘Re-Organisation of the Public Galleries’, 3 March 1967. EN3/2/24/1, IWM Central Files.56 IWM, Imperial War Museum Handbook (London: IWM, 1976), p. 13.57 ‘Charles looks back in time’, The Evening News, 27 March 1980.58 Noble Frankland, ‘Proposals for the Extension of the Imperial War Museum’ (April 1961). EN3/1/17/2/1, IWM Central Files.59 Ibid.60 Noble Frankland to D. Mayes and F. Charge, ‘Memorandum Outlining Some Future Possibilities for the Exhibition Galleries’. EN3/1/24/1, IWM Central Files.61 Peter Simkins, ‘Philosophy, Interpretation and Structure of the Redevelopment Displays’, 11 December 1987. EN4/41/00/1/11/7, IWM Central Files.62 IWM, ‘Imperial War Museum: Redevelopment Plan’, n.d. EN4/41/CF/1/10/2, IWM Central Files.63 Alan Borg to Robert Crawford, Penny Ritchie Calder and Peter Simkins, 5 August 1988. EN4/41/DD/1/11/7. IWM Central Files.64 James Taylor, ‘Talk for Times Readers Event’, 6 August 2014.65 IWM, Lives of the First World War (2014) < https://livesofthefirstworldwar.org> [accessed 14 August 2014].66 Ibid.
Referência(s)