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LABELLERS – JUST WHO DO THEY THINK WE ARE?
20.12.2011 / Dea Birkett / 0 Comments
Dea Birkett, director of Kids in Museums, reads less into exhibition captions than meets the eye
When I go to see an exhibition I like to have a good read as well as have a good look. The panels, labels and captions can draw me in just as much as any of the items on display. There are always, inevitably, textual errors; apostrophes in the wrong places, abbreviations gone wrong. Or the Natural History Museum’s “Ambulant Toilet”, intending to mean a facility for those with a physical impairment but sounding as if the pan would get up and walk away all by itself. Or when the Science Museum substituted silicon (the chemical element) for silicone (the stuff used in breast implants) in one of its labels.
But the biggest mistake made by museums is not misspellings, it’s using words to convey cleverness rather than to communicate.
I’ve been collector of these miscommunications for some time, and run TextWorkshop writing courses for museum and exhibition professionals with museum consultant Rebecca Mileham, so we have a good stock of hysterical examples. Last year, the Royal Society held a Summer Science Festival as part of their public outreach programme. To help us understand their subject matter they made huge models of monster reptiles, displaying them outside the South Bank Centre. That was a good start. But then came the captions. The explanation began: “What are pterosaurs? They are extinct Volant Mesozoic ornithodirans. This is a meaningless statement to all but a few experts, not all of which agree with it anyway …” And immediately I felt like an ignorant passerby, trespassing on learned ground where I didn’t belong. At Brading Roman Villa on the Isle of Wight, they even titled a case in Latin – Quid est Novum? – as if assuming we are all fluent in ancient languages.
Art galleries are the worst. At the National Gallery’s Close Examination; Fakes, Mistakes and Discoveries exhibition last year, they unashamedly printed a glossary for visitors to take around with them so they could understand labels with words like “attribution” and “craquelure”. Tate Britain seems to excel in text that is unintelligible to all but a small group of people, most of which presumably work within the building. Take, for example, the opening line of the introductory text panel of their watercolour exhibition: “The art form we think of today as ‘watercolour’ originated in a variety of practices including cartography, miniature painting and manuscript illumination ...” This assumption of knowledge made the show – ironically of very accessible paintings – quite difficult to fathom. Tate Modern is no better. A recent piece of their apology text – “These rooms are temporarily closed for a rehang” – sounds painful to anyone not in the know.
All this sophistry simply makes visitors feel excluded; it’s like intruding into a private conversation between curators. Perhaps they know what they’re talking about (although I’m not convinced they always do), but I certainly don’t. The only thing such text clearly states is that we – the public – aren’t clever enough to understand the collection.
Revenge on this lexicon elite is nigh. At TextWorkshop we’re thinking of running a Bad Text Award for the worst piece of museum didactic. Rather like the Literary Review’s annual Bad Sex Award for the worst sexual scene in a work of fiction, we anticipate it’s a title that will be keenly fought for. We already know that most of the large museums and galleries will qualify for entry.
Let’s wrest the writing of text away from curators and put it into the hands of the communicators in museums, most often found in the learning and marketing departments. That doesn’t mean curators shouldn’t be involved, but the first draft of any public-facing text shouldn’t be constructed by them. It sets it off in the wrong direction. Why not begin with a chat with the curator, jotting down their thoughts? After all, I hope you want your text to talk to your visitors as if you were having a one-on-one conversation, not lecture them as if they were a hoard in a tiered seating hall. Then with that transcribed chat, work up a piece of real communicative writing.
In the meantime, write your worst. You might even win an award for it.
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