Final Report on Museum Assessment and Design Seminar
Ralph Appelbaum, Jack Pascarosa, Ralph Appelbaum Associates
Jillian Poole, The Fund for Arts and Culture in Central and Eastern Europe
Jessica Glass, Video Producer, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Olga Reva, Translator
In early December, The Fund took noted museum designer Ralph Appelbaum and his associate, Jack Pascarosa, to St. Petersburg to conduct a four-day seminar for a diverse group of museum directors from St. Petersburg and the Northwest Region. This inaugural cooperative seminar was focused on the desire of these museums to broaden public awareness of and access to the rich and important assets and resources they hold. It fully achieved its goal of helping them to identify common challenges and to begin networking and planning joint projects. It also exposed the participants to the ideas and concepts of interpretative design and provided them the opportunity to think together about the challenges involved, a revolutionary experience for them all that will have long-term impacts.
The seminar was initiated by and organized under the auspices of Alexander Margolis, head of the International Charitable Foundation for the Renaissance of St. Petersburg-Leningrad with support of the Soros Foundation. In his opening remarks, Margolis noted that this meeting was the culmination of 5 years of seminars he has organized on ÒMuseums in the New Economic Conditions.Ó However, this was the first time the museums of St. Petersburg had met with those of the Northwest Region and was the first time they had focused on the specific challenge of attracting wider audiences, and their opportunities for joint projects. Fund participation was made possible by The Getty Grant Program, Trust for Mutual Understanding and the Samuel H. Kress Foundation.
This seminar, whose museum participants had never met jointly, let alone considered cooperation, resulted in suggestions that their efforts be anchored by a Visitor Center in the Peter & Paul Fortress which could provide a shared window and brief introduction to all their institutions. They concluded that the historical place of the Fortress in the history of the city, and the richness of its sites and collections, makes it an ideal starting point for visitors to both the city and the region.
The sessions were videotaped by Jessica Glass, Video Producer, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. With the assistance of the St. Petersburg based Baltic Films, she taped 29 hours of sessions, interviews with some participating directors, and background in their museums. It is hoped to secure funding for both short and longer film versions in Russian and English to share the cooperative study process and illustrate the creative thinking and joint planning that emerged from the seminar processes.
The origins of this project came from concerns shared by The Fund and Alexander Margolis, that the intellectual and spiritual contributions that were made manifest in St. Petersburg and make it one of the great cultural capitals of the world, remain largely outside the visitor experience. Unlike other cultural capitals, visitors are not inclined to return to St. Petersburg again and again because many do not reach beyond the extraordinary and extensive representations of international artists in the Hermitage and visits to the palaces of Tsars and nobles. The great ideas that were made manifest in this city do not inform and enrich the visits of most tourists. For most visitors the richness of the Russian cultural heritage, the cradle of creativity that influenced the world of ideas in art, music, dance and literature, remain outside their experience in this city.
The aim of the seminar was to help directors of less-visited museums focus through their institutions on the regionÕs resources and to make them meaningful and provocative in the context of the contemporary situation. Ralph Appelbaum focused the discussions by raising the question of whether the city has a view for a true world visitation site. He challenged the participants to devise ways to refocus the visitor experience of the Fortress to emphasize the depth and breadth of its sites and exhibition venues and to use it as an introduction for further explorations. He noted it was an excellent focus for a study visit to discuss cooperative design ventures with the less visible museums of St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Oblast.
The participants developed a set of clear and detailed initiatives that have the opportunity to be developed. They shared the belief that the Peter & Paul Fortress can be an ideal orientation point and portal to the cultural treasures of St. Petersburg, that it could be the new home of a visitor center for the Northwest Region. The directors envisioned it as the first place for visitors to get the cityÕs history and sense of its cultural resources. They are aware of the immediate need for the city to coordinate its activities for the celebration in 2003. The museum directors concluded they are willing to network and continue communicating so they can make their programs compatible with their presentations at the Fortress.
There was clear consensus on the need to acquire the newest technology to develop that inter-museums network and to create new expressions and ways of presenting their collections. For this they need the tools to digitalize collections and to communicate with each other -- computer, modem CD device, digital camera, digital printer (estimated cost $8000 x 20 museums). It was also generally recognized that to support their museums and exhibits and to create a coherent visitor trail beginning at the Fortress,
The Region requires increasing upgrades of tourist services, museums shops, food services etc.
In the final summary Ralph Appelbaum noted he was taken with the vigor with which directors recognized opportunities for their joint regional cooperation. He commented on the creativity that was expressed by the participants, their willingness to share other citiesÕ experiences, their grasp of the potential economic opportunities available in 2003 and their manifest passion to participate in celebration. Realization of the depth of their cultural holdings reinforced the feeling that 2003 can be a surprising revelation of the regionÕs cultural heritage. Like an iceberg, the cultural resources of St. Petersburg have stayed submerged, and 2003 is the opportunity to reveal them and for the city and region to open its treasures to the world.
He observed, ÒWhen I entered Peter & Peter through its portal I was not clear whether I was walking into a museum or out of a museum of culture and history. This gathering can be the beginning of a social/economic journey for museums. ItÕs worth remembering that the income generated by museums in New York City is greater than all other cultural resources, including Broadway, and sports. But museums must have the resources of international public relations and marketing and the broad recognition that they are a lever for economic development -- that they can bring cash from outside into the broader economy, the primary motivation of international tourism.Ó
Jack Pascarosa said in summary, ÒIt is apparent that museums around the world are getting more inclined to band together to expand their influence and public prominence. Groups of museums have come to realize that they have the opportunity to create a dialog with the public as they compete for leisure time. The diversity of cultural institutions offers to broad audiences a wide range of experience and opportunities to engage in dialog with museums. Individually, museums have difficulty being heard on the international stage, but collectively museums can create a clear and vibrant voice for a community and the public can recognize the importance of engaging with that city.Ó
At the conclusion, it was clear that seminar participants had found a new consciousness of the opportunities of 2003 and beyond to raise public awareness of St. Petersburg and the Northwest Region to a new level, and a heightened realization that they themselves jointly are custodians of one of the greatest collections of resources in the world.
At the close of the sessions, the Director of The Naval Museum spoke fervently in support of the seminar and the desire of directors present to share their treasures. He said the seminar had stirred creativity of museums and the impulse to joint action. He noted favorably on the interactivity of the format and the unusual opportunity to think and reflect with colleagues. He said the seminar had revealed absolutely new aspects of design, and that participants had come to know that discussion and joint search is the basis of design.
The Assistant Director of The Political History Museum said in summary that communication between professionals is the basis of true learning and growth. Ò It has been an invaluable school for all of us. We are no longer afraid of marketing, public relations and management. Long ago we slipped into not thinking beyond color and shape as design, but intuitively we thought there was more, and now Ralph has told us that design involves all the senses and must be a component of the initial plan. Contemporary museum design is the soul of museum space, and I will incorporate it in all my work. Money is not the main thing, but rather a joint brain.Ó
Description of Activities:
Day One: The first daylong session was held in the auditorium of the Engineers Palace of the Russian State Museum. Some 140 - 150 museum directors and senior museum staff attended. Ralph Appelbaum showed an extensive collection of slides from his work, including slides from the Holocaust Museum, the Museum of Natural History and the Newseum, with running commentary. He particularly emphasized these points: museums that get the greatest rewards are those that offer compelling and transformative experiences, museums are moving from temples to forums and thus raise issues that are controversial. He contrasted the 19th Century European museum as a cabinet of curiosity with unrelated objects with a modern museum that sends clearer interpretative messages. Museums today are more like college campuses to engage people with art and ideas and also with each other.
He stressed that museum experience must be a trigger for social, moral, and ethical discourse. He discussed in detail questions related to museum texts and underscored the need for museums to communicate with their publics by addressing multiple intelligences in language, sound and social discourse, and to provide information on all levels and in a variety of ways. He noted museums today are a broad resource for learning, and museum design is about transmitting that learning in a shared social experience. Designers are only the facilitators of materials that provoke dialog.
Day Two: This day was largely devoted to a group tour of the Peter & Paul Fortress and its extensive historical sites and exhibitions. Appelbaum noted that the Fortress is the history of a place and a history of exhibition styles Ð objects as art and objects in context. At the conclusion of the tour, the fortress staff showed their very detailed plans for development of the remaining exhibition spaces. Since it was our understanding that a major objective of the seminar was for the seminar participants to form into groups to develop designs for this space, the highly developed plans revealed by fortress staff were a surprise.
Day Three: Rather than critique the plans presented which he was urged to do, Ralph Appelbaum refocused the group to discuss general principals of design, design in the largest sense of the word that should form the basis of any museum planning. He noted sympathetically that his own observations of museum practice in Russia indicate that curators are immensely and justifiably proud of their holdings, but too often do not focus on the narrative of the objects, nor make them accessible to the visitor who comes without a guide, nor interpret them in such as way as to create a dialog with the visitor.
He discussed the integration of media, use of timelines, non-isolation of people in the story, utilization of open storage, uses of portals from room to room and methods of creating interpretative opportunities, options for sight lines, uses of visitor senses and ways of designing for internal consistency. He stressed that design must grow from the requirements of information and should not be guided by past or present philosophical conceptions. Exhibitions must be designed to help the visitors to get to know a range of experiences to satisfy their hands, their minds and their hearts, and to be relevant to their lives. Knowledge, entertainment, career enhancement, aesthetic pleasure, technical explanation, practical advice, social pleasure, self identification must all be considered in planning an exhibition. Communication must be on a wide range of levels and media, to wide forms of intelligence -- logical intelligence, linguistic intelligence, musical intelligence and bodily intelligence. The audience must be included as a participant rather than treated simply as a spectator.
He constantly emphasized that the need for accessibility is primary, both physical and intellectual. For visitors who like to read, he clearly illustrated uses of a four-layered text from one that is introductory, to texts that are increasingly more specific, detailed and scholarly. Ways to develop a fifth layer, family labels, were also shown.
He also described ways to create an immersive environment through various uses of lighting, and ways of revealing spaces through lighting.
He particularly stressed the importance of capturing the lure of the story in any display of objects. He noted that in the history of mankind, the traditions of storytelling reach far further back in history than any object and the story must be the root of museum making.
He described the necessity of an extensive and thorough cooperative design planning process involving all the people and departments of the institution who may be affected. He explained the processes of developing voices for the exhibition -- not authoritarian voices, but multiple and diverse voices to attract diverse audiences Ðand gave examples of ways of devising themes and chronologies, developing budgets and schedules, and for creating relationships with sponsors and media.
Day Four: For the purposes of interaction and discussion, the museum directors had divided into four groups as they developed plans for future cooperation with the assumption that the Fortress of Peter & Paul might provide a gateway. On day four they reported on the stunningly original concepts they had developed to integrate in a large variety of ways and on a variety of levels museum efforts in seven major centers of the region Ð Norgorod, Pskov, Tver, Petrozavodsh (Capital of Karelia), Arkhangalgesk, Kalingrad and St. Petersburg.
There was general agreement that without money, added human resources and additional time they cannot reinvent their exhibitions and collectionsÕ infrastructure, but that they can add interpretation and make some basic preparations for tourists. There was universal agreement among the participants that inter-museum cooperation and exchange of ideas is enormously helpful. They expressed hope to continue this process with common projects and to create a series of celebratory programs rooted from an information center in the Fortress. A joint museum open storage was proposed for The Fortress, one that would invite tourists to further exploration of the smaller museums of St. Petersburg and the Northwest Region. They concluded that tying together the region in this way would make it inviting to the visitor.
Ralph Appelbaum generously offered the museums further assistance if they should so desire it, including assessments of lighting and space allocations and general critiques of their conceptions and future plans. The Fund for Arts and Culture also offered further assistance, if it is desired.