Flying boats and the way to travel by air in the 1950's

There was a time after the Second War when civilian aviation relied heavily on flying boat travel. No need for runways, just find a convenient strip of water (preferably not too choppy) and in can come the sea plane. Nowhere was this more enthusiastically embraced than in the Pacific, and I have just spent the last three days in New Zealand preparing conservation plans for two survivors of this era.

These are the Short and Harland Solent flying boats that flew the Coral Route between NZ, Fiji, Tonga and Samoa. Whether they were actually a plane that could float, or a boat that could fly (and does it really matter, though they were all formally launched like a ship), these extraordinary machines as large as a two storey house still have the capacity to thrill.

Upstairs a massive flight deck had a pilot and co-pilot with a navigator and radio operator behind and the all-important flight engineer who sat in front of a vast console of dials and levers, spending the whole flight moving fuel between tanks to keep the plane trimmed.

Behind them was a galley with a full cooking oven and a food lift to move food between floors and a cabin for 20 passengers. Downstairs were a further 18 travellers in three cabins plus a ladies powder room and gents toilet. This was luxury travel of a kind not seen again until Etihad introduced showers on their 380s, though I suspect the noise and vibration levels were rather different with four enormous prop engines just outside the window.

And of course landing on water though convenient has some inherent hazards, not least steering in high winds and a strong swell without a rudder. Pilots had to be adept seaman as well as aviators, resorting at times to using sea anchors thrown out each side by crewman to be able to reach the mooring buoy. Then the buoy had to be caught by a crewman leaning out of the front of the aircraft with a boat hook. Not much fun in a rough sea, the record apparently being 37 attempts before the buoy was finally secured. You can see why they did not land at night.

What makes the collection at the Museum of Transport and Technology (MOTAT) unique is that they have alongside the Solent, the military version known as the Sunderland. Gone are the internal luxuries and in their place instead a stripped out airframe bristling with depth charges and guns (nicknamed 'flying porcupines' by the U boat crews, who were their primary prey). There are only seven of these aircraft left in the world and to have these two civilian and military examples alongside each other is an amazing experience.

Currently, both flying boats are in the process of restoration, but they will shortly be on display in MOTAT's aviation display hall. Throw in a Lancaster and a mosquito bomber which sit alongside them, and any trip to Auckland should include MOTAT where even a moderate aviation enthusiast will come away enthralled.

In reality, although the 1950's was the prime time for these graceful birds, the Second War had already killed them off due to so many airfields being established and the design of planes that could carry much larger loads. By the late 50s the pressurised Constellations were taking over with twice the number of passengers at twice the speed and half the cost, to be followed shortly thereafter by the first civilian jets, the Comets.

A rare relic of a brief period in aviation history.

Bowie, ACMI and the Verbaliser

I’ve finally cracked my long standing inability to understand song lyrics – I’ve discovered most of them are nonsensical anyway! This revelation comes courtesy of the V&A’s exhibition on David Bowie currently showing at The Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) in Federation Square, Melbourne.

From the early 1970s Bowie conceived of an idea of mixing random phrases together mostly taken from short news clips. He co-authored a smart piece of software known as ‘the Verbaliser’ which rearranges words to make this happen and create some of his lyrics. I think the technical term is ‘cut-ups’ and it’s a technique that went on to influence Kurt Cobain's songwriting. I guess we would call it a mash up these days, but one of the highlights of the exhibition for me was hearing Bowie talk about how he used words in this way. 

Whilst this is not an exhibition I would have rushed to see based on its subject matter, I came away having thoroughly enjoyed it and seeing Bowie in a completely new light as an extraordinarily creative person. It’s slick and well presented, with a clever Sennheiser audio system (headphones are provided as part of the ticket price) that responds to where you are by playing songs and information relevant to what you are viewing. There’s a great review at dotsanddashes.co.uk. Sadly, I understand Sennheiser is not interested in replicating the system for other exhibitions.

This is all part of a big V&A push into Australia with no less than three of their exhibitions currently touring, David  Bowie is…. at ACMI, Undressed at the Powerhouse, and soon the Queensland Museum and Bendigo Art Gallery and Inspiration by Design currently at the State Library of NSW and soon to be at the State Library of Victoria.

ACMI is a bit of a hidden performer in Australia's cultural sector. It's been around now for over ten years in its current location, though it actually dates back to 1946 as the Victoria State Film Institute. In 2013 it attracted over 1.15 million visitors. That's an impressive statistic, and based on the current offerings it deserves to do well, and can only play a bigger role.

This is going to be significantly helped by the recent appointment of Seb Chan to a newly created role of CXO - Chief Experience Officer - a position he takes up this month, returning from 4 years in New York at the Cooper Hewitt, where he was the Director of Digital & Emerging Media, and the lead player in the development of their new interactive pen (see my blog from June 2015 for more information). Listed in 2009 as amongst Australia’s 100 most influential people (see my blog from January 2009), Seb is not going to sit quietly in his new role. Watch the ACMI space!

London offerings

London is always offering up challenging new art installations, and though it may not be the centre of the universe for contemporary art aficionados, it manages to regularly juxtapose the old with the new in exciting ways.

I hot footed it to two such artworks this week, with mixed results.

In the fabulous plaster court at the V&A there is an installation entitled 'The Tower of Babel', in the form of a 6 metre cone of nearly three thousand ceramic houses with photographic images of street fronts on them. It sounded sort of interesting, but, well it sort of wasn't, failing for me to engage in anyway with the rather bemused statues around it. Perhaps I can cite the label to explain why I moved on rather smartly: "Barford playfully likens our efforts to find fulfilment through retail to the biblical Tower of Babel's attempt to reach heaven. His seemingly precarious Tower poses questions about our society and economy, celebrating London's retailers, yet exposing the divide between rich and poor." MONA has a word for such stuff.

'The Tower of Babel' at the V&A

Down the road however, the great Ai Weiwei has installed half a dozen massive trees in the forecourt of the Royal Academy, and the juxtaposition of that rich 18th century Palladian mansion and these stark bolted leaf-less limbs is breathtaking. They are part of a major retrospective exhibition, and alright perhaps I am a little biased, because I haven't washed my hands since I found the great man himself wandering around and shook his hand, but others seem to agree (see this article published in the Guardian).

Tree sculptures by Ai Weiwei 

installed in the courtyard of the Royal Academy of Arts, London

What is particularly interesting about the trees is that their inclusion in the exhibition only came about through crowdsourcing. Working with Kickstarter, the Royal Academy raised 123,500 pounds from 1,319 backers, all of whom are listed on two great banners as you go up the main stairs.

Inspirational on two fronts - the art itself, and the action by which it came to be in London.

Crystal time at the Australian Museum

The Australian Museum has a new entrance, built in double quick time by its dynamic new director Kim McKay.

Named the 'Crystal Hall' for reasons of both its design and its ability to house the Museum's outstanding collection of crystals, it was opened last week by the Premier of NSW. Interestingly, this is where the entrance was always meant to be, instead of the slightly awkward entrance from College Street, which has been the way in for the last 150 years. And to emphasize this, the Museum has changed its street address to No 1 William Street - neat marketing.

The Australian Museum's new Crystal Hall entrance

The closure of the College Street entrance has allowed the realisation of the original concept for the entrance area, namely as a major gallery. And the result is spectacular, with truly one of the great internal public spaces in Sydney revealed as it was originally intended. For years this space has been a mixture of cafe, shop and entrance way, dominated by the blue whale skeleton to remind visitors this is predominantly a natural history museum.

The blue whale remains but now beneath it is the new 'Wild Planet' exhibition displaying the Museum's taxidermy collection with specimens large and small. My favourite exhibition on this theme is the Paris Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle's 'Gallery of Evolution', which first kicked off the concept of using stuffed animals in an artistic rather than wholly naturalistic way, though I also love the Melbourne Museum's 'Amazing Animals'. 

This is however a beautifully presented exhibition and space helped by two spectacular vault ceilinged glass cases (vitrines for the initiated) made by the doyen of such creations, Goppion of Milan. 

Take a walk on the wild side and enjoy a buzzing museum.

Canterbury Museum Tales

I was delighted to be back in Christchurch last week for the first time since the 2011 earthquake, not least to find one of my favourite museums, the Canterbury Museum, virtually unscathed and bustling with visitors. Why one of my favourites? Well first up must be that it is unique, as far as I know, in having a delightfully obscure biblical text from the book of Job inscribed over its main entrance, "Lo these are parts of His ways but how little a portion is heard of Him".

Secondly, it has one of the world’s greatest Antarctic collections from the Heroic Era, in which pride of place must go to the vehicles. There is a wheel from the Arroll Johnston motor car that Shackleton took on his 1907-09 expedition in which he hoped to cruise to the Pole at a modest 25mph. There is the extraordinary plywood boxed motor tractor that was used on Shackleton’s second expedition, with skis at the front and a big paddle wheel at the back (remember that the tank had not yet been invented). This vehicle proved far more trouble than it was worth, and vastly less efficient than the humble Manchurian pony and huskie. And then there are the two vehicles that featured front of stage in the Trans Antarctic Expedition of 1957/8 - Vivian Fuchs’ lumbering great snowcat, and right beside it the canvas wrapped cab of one of Edmund Hillary’s’ converted Ferguson tractors. Each set off from opposite sides of the continent, and what an epic story it was as they fought their way to the South Pole. You will have to read the best book on the expedition to find out who (sort of) won or check out my blog from March 2015. 

Fuchs' Snowcat with Hillary's Ferguson tractor behind

Thirdly, the Museum has some very fine dioramas. The film Night at the Museum (and its endless successors) largely works through the scenes where its dioramas come alive. They were actually invented by Louis Daguerre (he of the Daguerreotype), and became in the early part of the 20th century a common museum technique for showing an historical event or a natural history scene. At their best they can impart a highly realistic view; the battle scenes in the Australian War Memorial’s World War One Galleries (see my blog from April 2015) providing a point of access for the visitors that few other mediums can provide. The fact they survive in so many museums is a testament to their interpretive power. At the Canterbury Museum they are principally used to depict pre-colonial Maori life and bird scenes. Both types in their own way are spectacular, notable because of the quality of the artwork.

One of the Canterbury Museum dioramas

So, when you are next in South Island, New Zealand do take time to visit the Museum – it’s a real treat.

What museums need to learn from the social aspects of the digital revolution

Fascinating talk at Remix Sydney recently by Dr Genevieve Bell, the Australian born cultural anthropologist and now director of the User Experience Group at Intel. Her talk responded to the question 'how will the technological revolution going on outside the walls of cultural institutions transform the environment in which we operate?''

Genevieve talked to the dichotomy we are dealing with on six issues:

• Connectivity: We want to be connected all the time and get to where we want online instantly but we also want to be able to disconnect and have our own space. This leads into;
• Privacy: We want to share information and images all the time, but we also really worry about our reputations and what people make of us. We particularly worry about what has been collected in the past which might surface in the future, and interestingly the current generation (millennials) worry about it most.
• Big data: We all want more data as we think it will tell us more truths. In reality data is only as good as the data fed into it, and since we inherently tell lies a lot of the time ("you look great today" etc.), it's often not good data. We advocate transparency in others and yet jealously guard our secrets.
• Algorithms: Algorithms are required to make sense of big data, but are all based on what has happened in the past. The surprising thing about so much data is how poorly we predict what it will tell us.
• Memory and storage: The world is building unlimited storage and therefore memory - soon nothing will be forgotten. Yet as humans we are conditioned to (and indeed need to) forget some things in order to be able to move on. We should remember the big stories (e.g. the Stolen Generation), but we need to be able to forget the little stories about how we may have behaved with each other.
• Innovation: We crave new technology and are culturally wired to consider it as a good thing, as a mark of the progress of humanity. However, we also fear it because we are conditioned by books and films that human hubris will overwhelm us, and the technology will go feral and kill us.

Genevieve concluded by advising us to weigh up new tech solutions against the following criteria:

• They must be market inspired, solving problems that we care about
• They must be experience driven, delivering experiences we want
• They must be people centric, acknowledging that we are human and by our very nature a mass of contradictions

As the museum sector continues to grapple with new technologies and how to use them, this is salutary advice from someone right at the heart of the social dimension and impact of these technologies.

Conference time and the museum of the future

Back to back conferences on like themes are always interesting, if only to see how much stamina is required to keep engaged. Sydney has just hosted the Museums Australia Conference, followed by Remix Sydney.

The former is self explanatory, the annual get together of the local museum fraternity, always useful for catching up with old friends and meeting new ones, but this year a bit predictable and uninspiring in programming and discussions. Highlights for me were:

• Xerxes Mazda, formerly of the British Museum, currently at the Royal Ontario Museum and about to be head of collections  for National Museums of Scotland. Xerxes is always worth listening to on how to maximise the visitor experience, by integrating exhibitions, education, web, publications, design, front of house, visitor research, marketing, membership, volunteers and programming.
• Mega museum project updates with Gunther Schauerte from the Humboldt Forum in Berlin and Michael Lynch on M+ in the West Kowloon Cultural District, Hong Kong. Large though these are, we should not forget the New Museum that is arising in Western Australia. I blogged about this when it was announced in July 2012, and amazingly the monies ($428m) still seem to be there and the project is gaining significant momentum with an opening scheduled in 2020. 

I gave a paper boldly entitled 'Conservation in Museums – Whereto from here?', inspired by my own perception of the journey that conservation worldwide has undergone between the ICOM CC Conference in Sydney in 1987 and 27 years on the same conference in Melbourne in 2014.

And interestingly it was Remix that turned out to be in many ways a more appropriate forum for this discussion with the first session asking ‘What functions of museums are best served by external providers?’ Remix is a series of global summits on the future of cultural industries currently taking place annually in London, New York City, Dubai and Sydney, which aims to pull together cultural leaders, corporate directors, technologists and entrepreneurs.

It was a buzzy place to be around, reinforcing how the world of social media is fracturing at an ever increasing pace. With ever more platforms and media to share content on, the move to video as a medium, and mobile as the principal point of access, museums are scrambling to understand how to respond. Inevitably the focus on providing digital content continues to drive decision making on funding, but with it came reinforcement of the urge to see and value the real thing that is continuing to bring people into cultural institutions in increasing numbers.

Pick of the conference for me was Seb Chan’s keynote on the Future of Museums. Seb was at the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney for many years before taking up the role of Head of Digital and Emerging Media at the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum in New York, which has just reopened after a $81 million refurb. Described in the Atlantic as the museum of the future, Seb has lead the charge at the Cooper Hewitt on integrating the digital and the real seamlessly. He and his team have done this by ensuring:

• Everything on exhibition is also online, i.e. not just a representative proportion
• The online data provides a rich array of extra information, so offers significant extra value that can be accessed later
• Visitors select objects they find interesting by touching the label with an interactive pen they are provided with on entry
• These selections are then downloaded upon exit and can be accessed, researched and manipulated at home via a unique url on each ticket
• No time consuming downloading of an app, pre visit or upon arrival
• No privacy issues over requiring an email address
• This is a REALLY NEAT solution

What I came away with is that we are now seeing the next iteration of visitor access through technology, the leader until now being MONA and the O. The ground breaking nature of the O is reflected in how long it has taken to see it superseded, but look to the Cooper Hewitt for the future of this aspect of museums. Read all about it at Museums and the Web 2015. 

Conservation recognition and the Gilbert Doble story

I blogged a few weeks ago about the Marrickville Winged Victory conservation project and I am delighted to report that our work won a National Trust Heritage Award at last Wednesday’s Award presentations.

What is interesting about the project is that we still have not worked out how Gilbert Doble made his sculptures. A local Marrickville lad, he was clearly a bit of an oddball. At a time when any significant bronze foundry work had to be sent to England, he developed a home grown electro-deposition process that he perfected himself in his own studio in his back garden in Marrickville. Even after we have been intimately involved with the Winged Victory we still can’t quite work out how he did it.

The Winged Victory conservation team inspecting the sculpture 

The interesting thing is that, despite the failure of his Winged Victory sculpture (it only lasted 40 years before coming apart at the seams and needing to be brought down for safety reasons), his other public sculptures have lasted well. These include the Evans Memorial in Bathurst, notable according to the local guidebook for “its respectful depiction of an Aboriginal man crouched at Evans' knee - representing one of the Aboriginals who acted as a guide for Evans on his surveys.” 

As well as Winged Victory, Doble was also commissioned to undertake two other memorials, for Wellington and Pyrmont. At a time when war memorials were either a block of stone or had a soldier atop them, his approach was distinctive, avoiding the militaristic nature of such and concentrating on the mix of grief and motherly support to the fallen that his female figures depicted.

Pyrmont War Memorial

A fun side story of this project is that it has all been filmed as part of a 5 part documentary on the Australian War Memorial called 'The Memorial: Beyond the Anzac legend' put together by the Eye Works team for the History Channel. Neil Oliver (he of ‘Coast’ fame) fronted the cameras and kept us all entertained with his charming Scottish accent. 

The Winged Victory conservation team with Neil Oliver

And while we are on awards, I will just slip in that we also won a Highly Commended for our work on the Sydney Town Hall Air Raid Shelter sign. It was a good day for recognition of expert conservation practice.

First World War memorials in Australia

Last year I was asked to write an article on First World War memorials in Australia for the UK National Trust’s Views Magazine. It was published in September 2014 and it seems apposite to retell in my blog today. 

By the time the Great War ground to a close in November 1918, 416,600 Australians had enlisted out of a population of 4 million, representing almost 40 per cent of men aged between 18 and 44. Australia's casualty rate was amongst the highest in the war at 65 per cent, including almost 59,000 dead.

The impact on a small and new nation (Australia had become a federation only in 1901) was profound. One of the most difficult issues to come to terms with was the remoteness of the battlefields. Whereas Britons could easily cross the Channel to visit the graves of their loved ones, the high cost of travel to visit Europe was beyond most Australians. As with Britain (but unlike the USA), the Australian Government made the decision not to repatriate any bodies from the war. The only exceptions were the body of an unknown Australian soldier and Major General Sir William Throsby Bridges, killed in Gallipoli, who was the country’s first major general and the first to receive a knighthood.

The war memorial scene in Australia

War memorials and their honour rolls therefore became critical points of remembrance for grieving relatives. They were not new to the country as Australians had died in relatively large numbers in the South African War in the 1890s and even in the New Zealand wars of the 1840s. But it was the sheer number of Great War memorials that transformed Australian townscapes.

Their form followed those created in Britain. They range from statues of soldiers to obelisks to arches and cenotaphs. Some of the designs were uniquely Australian, such as depicting Australian Diggers (soldiers), and almost without exception they used local stone except for imported carved figures in Carrara marble.

The city response

In the capital cities, Melbourne chose a vast Shrine of Remembrance with an inner shrine surrounded by an ambulatory where books in glass-topped cabinets record the names of the 114,000 men from Victoria who went to the war, a fresh page turned every day to this day. Sydney also chose to record all those who had gone to the war in its Anzac Memorial, not by name but by a gold star attached to the domed ceiling, some 120,000 in all. Beneath them, in the so-called Well of Contemplation, lies one of Australia's greatest bronze figures, a naked warrior carried on a shield supported by three women sculpted by Raynor Hoff, a Royal College of Art-educated Englishman of Dutch descent who had migrated to Australia in 1923. Considered somewhat shocking at the time of opening in 1934, it was heavily toned down from the original bronze concept entitled the Crucifixion of Civilisation, which had been denounced by clergyman for depicting tastelessly vivid horrors.

A mile from the Anzac Memorial, Sydney commissioned a stone cenotaph outside the City's General Post Office designed by Australia's most eminent sculptor of the day, the Royal Academician Sir Bertram Mackennal. Mackennal chose to place a bronze soldier and sailor either end of a large block of local granite. Brisbane initially commissioned Sir Edwin Lutyens to replicate the Whitehall Cenotaph with the addition of bronze servicemen but when this proved too costly they went for a Delphic-colonnaded temple designed by local architects.

 The Cenotaph, Sydney. Photo: Julian Bickersteth

The Anzac Memorial, Brisbane. Photo: Julian Bickersteth

The National Memorial in Canberra, known as the Australian War Memorial, was conceived and developed by an Oxford-educated Australian journalist, Charles Bean. Bean had reported from the Western Front and after the war ended was determined to do all he could to help Australians commemorate their loss. Principal amongst his means of doing this was the creation of the Australian War Memorial, which is actually a war museum centred on a Hall of Memory. This vast domed space is covered by the southern hemisphere's largest mosaic, designed by Australian artist Napier Waller. Waller was himself a war veteran; having lost his right arm on the Western Front but, undaunted he taught himself to draw again with his left hand.

Placement of guns

Bean also struck upon the idea of shipping back to Australia large quantities of captured ordnance. Again he saw the power in the tangible form of these weapons in bringing the battlefields a little closer to Australia. In all some 500 pieces of artillery, 400 mortars and 4,000 machine guns were shipped back and held in Melbourne for cities and local councils across Australia to apply for them. Due to over demand, a complicated system of ceding where each item of ordnance would end up was developed based on the number of men that had enlisted locally, the number of medals won and whether the particular gun had been captured by a local battalion. The allocation did not please everyone, with some councils complaining that they had only been awarded a machine gun when their war contribution surely justified at least a mortar.

Trees and arches

Avenues of trees are a particular feature of Australian war memorials. They came about as a reminder of the avenues of trees that lined northern French roads, beneath which the Australian Diggers would have marched. The avenues serve the useful purpose of allowing individual trees to be planted as a memorial to a slain relative or platoon. Occasionally these avenues begin with triumphal arches, a form which does not seem to have become widely popular due almost certainly to its celebratory tone.

The Ballarat Arch of Victory and Avenue of Trees. Photo: Chris Betteridge

Conservation issues

Conservation work undertaken on war memorials reflects the broad approach taken in Great Britain and generally involves careful cleaning, repointing to keep them weather tight, re-gilding of incised lettering and protective waxing of bronze honour rolls and figures.

It is the guns shipped back from France and placed on top of many an Australian war memorial that often prove to be the most problematic element for the memorial's conservation due to the metal elements corroding and the wooden elements (e.g. wheels) rotting. The numbers of the most fragile of them, however, the machine guns, were dramatically reduced during the Second World War when they were removed and refurbished for action.

With the passage of time, war memorials have inevitably deteriorated, but it is a testament to the resilience of the materials selected and the care with which they were built that they remain in remarkably good condition.

Winged Victory rises again

Seated in the sun outside Marrickville Town Hall in Sydney on Sunday morning to witness the unveiling of the Marrickville War Memorial I was thinking back 93 years to the same ceremony. The great difference of course was that the audience then included mothers, fathers, brothers and sisters and even children of the 458 local lads who had so recently given their lives. 

That said almost 100 years on it was a very moving experience to be part of, but, you may well ask, why was a war memorial being unveiled now.

The original Marrickville Soldiers’ Memorial was unveiled in 1919 by Sir Walter Davidson, Governor of NSW, before 15,000 people. The monument for the top of the Memorial was created by local artist and sculptor Gilbert Doble. Doble created a hollow Winged Victory sculpture, surrounded by a copper cast that created a dominant artwork within the tight constraints of the Memorial Fund’s budget. The instability of the resulting artwork became apparent as early as 1927. Within 40 years, the condition of the sculpture had deteriorated so badly that it had to be taken down in 1962. Despite being returned to the Memorial in 1988 following restoration work, the continued instability of the Winged Victory sculpture saw its removal a second time in 2008.

Gilbert Doble's original Winged Victory sculpture

Here at ICS we considered various options for restoring and reinstalling the statue but in July 2013, Marrickville Council voted to commission a new sculpture for the Memorial. Council also endorsed the transfer of ownership of Doble’s original Winged Victory to the Australian War Memorial in Canberra. We undertook the complicated restoration of the original and oversaw its transfer to Canberra, where the sculpture has now become the focal point of the Memorial’s new First World War Galleries, which opened in November 2014. 

Doble's Winged Victory sculpture 

now on display at the Australian War Memorial

Meanwhile Winged Victory, 2015 was commissioned from Melbourne's Meridian Sculpture with lead artists Peter Corlett and Darien Pullen in cast bronze. Reflecting and respecting the original Doble sculpture, there are subtle changes, most noticeably with the position of the sword changed from being raised in triumph to pointing down to touch the earth (‘earth to earth, ashes to ashes’ etc). Along the way it stopped the sword from being a lightning rod, which we had discovered was a significant cause of the damage that had been inflicted to the original. 

Winged Victory, 2015 by Peter Corlett and Darien Pullen

So Doble’s legacy lives on, both in original form at the Australian War Memorial and in reinterpreted form in its original location, and the citizens of Marrickville once again have a focal point to honour their local war heroes.

Why we take audio tours

I must be honest that the audio guide desk is not something I regularly head for in museums. Why? My immediate response would be that a) I don’t have time and b) I have listened to too many overly didactic and drawn out commentaries. I have blogged before on the technology challenges to the traditional audio guide (January 2011, February 2011, August 2012, February 2015). A few years on from some of those blogs, the predicted smartphone take over has not happened with the audio tour still very much alive and well. My view is that visitors have decided the distraction of a further visual aid in what is already a highly visual experience, particularly in an art museum, is too much of a sensory overload.

Technology aside, it is fascinating to see what drives people to take up audio tours through new research by the British Museum, entitled 'An audio state of mind: Understanding behaviour around audio guides and visitor media'. Their starting point was the perceived low take up (160,000 out of nearly 7 million visitors) with the aim being to increase this and also understand how visitors use the audio guides.

Amongst a number of interesting discoveries:

• Time plays a key role (I can empathise with that) with many visitors presuming the audio tour will take a long time (though the definition of ‘a long time’ varied between three and six hours) and force them to spend more time than they had.
• It appears that the traditional visitor segmentation of streakers, strollers and studiers (see my blog from October 2011) is poorly servicing our understanding of visitors, with people moving between segments during visits, displaying much more personalised and flexible motivations and identities.
• Confidence plays an important role, namely whether the visitor feels they can successfully negotiate the museum unaided, relying on labels.
• Many visitors come knowing what they want to see, but once they have done so, they tend to wander aimlessly, a perfect time to take up an audio guide, if they could be corralled to be offered such.

A couple of other points. This research is from a paper due to be given at Museums and the Web 2015 in Chicago next week. Having been to three previous ones, the MW annual conference, now in its 19th year, remains for me the most wide ranging of the mainstream museum technology get-togethers, the others being the more US based MCN (Museum Computer Network) and the more European based MuseumNext.

Also I liked the way this project was put together. Described as an ‘agile‘ project, it had a small team of one staff member, three free lancers and an intern, a defined time scale, a project room, daily ‘scrums’, an initial research phase, and then a prototype testing phase, resulting in some really useful outputs.

Antarctic Matters

The heroic era of Antarctic exploration which ran from 1899 to the middle of the First War is the period which most captures our imagination, through the extraordinary exploits of, in particular, Captain Scott and Ernest Shackleton. There was then a lull in exploration proceedings, with only one expedition between the wars, the British Graham Land Expedition 1934-37. On that was a young Cambridge graduate, Lancelot Fleming, who after a stellar Antarctic career including becoming director of the Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge, turned his collar round (as my father would say) eventually becoming Dean of St George's Windsor and knighted by the Queen. I met him in his latter years, a distinguished tall and charming man who bothered to engage with a scruffy teenager (me).

Fleming was highly influential in encouraging Vivian Fuchs, better known as Bunny Fuchs, to lead the first major post war expedition, the British Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition in 1957-58. Forty years after Shackleton had tried to cross Antarctica and failed when the Endurance broke up in the Weddell Sea, the expedition's idea was to travel the 2000 miles across the continent via the South Pole.

As Fuchs needed a base on the far side of the continent from which food and fuel depots could be laid for him, he approached the New Zealand government for help. As that year was also the International Geophysical Year which brought together countries from around the world to carry out coordinated research in a number of the physical sciences, New Zealand warmed to the idea and appointed Sir Edmund Hillary, he of recent Everest conquest, to lead their part of the expedition.

The story of that expedition, its highs and lows, its risks and personality clashes is beautifully told in Stephen Haddelsey's 'Shackleton's Dream: Fuchs, Hillary and the Crossing of Antarctica'. It's a great yarn, the two different styles of leadership illustrated by the form of transport used, Fuchs with his snow cats and Hillary with his converted Ferguson farm tractors. Visit the Canterbury Museum in Christchurch New Zealand if you want to see surviving examples of both.

Anyway, this is all a preamble to an event which I was lucky enough to attend in Parliament House, Wellington last week at which the Antarctic Heritage Trust's Conservation Plan for the surviving hut that was built as part of that expedition was launched by the Prime Minister, John Key. Known variously as Hillary's Hut, the TAE (Trans Antarctic Expedition) Hut and the IGY (International Geophysical Year) Hut, it was the first building at Scott Base. The Plan was authored by Chris Cochrane, and I have been part of a peer review, so it was very special to talk to key men in the original construction, including Randall Heke who physically built it, Bill Cranfield who was on the expedition, and Hillary's widow, June. The hut marked the beginning of New Zealand's major contribution to Antarctic exploration and science, of which they are very justifiably proud.

Hillary's Hut at Scott Base

The Museum Effect and where technology fits in (or doesn't)

The American Alliance for Museums (AAM) has recently initiated a great chat site known as Museum Junction, which is continually throwing up useful information. One recent discussion was on museological books, and I was drawn to a contributor identifying The Museum Effect by Jeffrey K. Smith as being his best read of the year. Subtitled 'How Museums, Libraries and Cultural Institutions Educate and Civilise Society', it sounded like an interesting book.

And it delivers what it promises, albeit from a strongly art gallery focus, which is where the author's experience lies. I have a few gripes with its content and style, one being I don't see how the process of viewing art (described as 'The 'Right' way to look at art') can be discussed without reference in either the text or the chapter references to Kenneth Clark (see my blog on 'How to look at art' from September 2009) especially as the process described is exactly what Clark proscribed. Another is that two images turn up twice, one being a full page in each instance, which smacks to me of page filling.

However, having got that off my chest, two particular issues struck a chord with me. The first is the extensive discussion on visitor surveys, how to construct and run them, and what to make of the data they provide. This builds off the direct and extensive experience of the author whilst working at the Met, but it cites various case studies at other organisations as well - all very useful stuff for those in the business of such.

The second is the chapter on media available to present information to visitors. There is discussion on the options both current and future, including labels and wall text, audio tours, in-person tours, reading rooms and catalogues, and off-site website access. Finally there is mention of what are described as 'video tours'. The potential delivery technology for such is not mentioned, whether it is NFC, QR codes, or RFID readers, nor the vehicle for such whether they be smartphones, Google Glass, iPads, or even 3D visuals delivered through Nintendo game consoles, as is the case at the Louvre.

As I read I had pause to reflect that here was an expert writing from within one of the great art museums of the world, and making a very pertinent point "Do we really want to draw the attention of the visitor away from the work of art... with a video screen in competition with oil on wood or gouache on paper?"

Good point, Jeffery K. Smith, and for me as one who has long espoused the virtues of technology for enhancing the visitor experience, it is a salutary one.

British Museum conservation

The new British Museum conservation labs have been the talk of the profession since they opened late last year, so I was pleased to have a tour of them with Dr Anna Buelow, the acting head of conservation, two weeks ago.  

The raw data is that the BM has built a new £135 million facility known as the World Conservation and Exhibition Centre, which brings together all their conservation labs into one building over 18,000 square metres along with the Museum's exhibition operations and a new exhibition space.

A full description can be found in the latest News in Conservation, the free publication of IIC, so I will not dwell on the detail, but rather pick up my takeaways from the visit:

• First and foremost is the flexibility that has been achieved. It seems to have become a key buzz word in the planning process, and it has resulted in spaces that can be almost infinitely reconfigured to suit the requirements of the objects being worked on. This is helped by almost all staff (some 80 at present) hot desking, thus ensuring it is easy for staff to relocate to another space that may suit the treatment better.
• Alongside this flexibility is the benefits that have come from bringing all the disciplines under one roof, and encouraging cross disciplinary use of spaces. Thus, textiles and paper now share a wet space, which is not only more efficient but ensures the two sections work closely together in their planning. This process of cross disciplinary collaboration is further aided by a central break out area with comfy chairs, where for the first time in living memory all the departments can get together socially. 
• And just as this brings about efficiencies of operations, so also ease of access has been massively increased. Previously any large objects had to be brought into the labs through the exhibition halls, thus meaning it had to be undertaken out of hours. Now with dedicated loading dock access (including the largest truck lift in Europe), all this movement can take place during normal hours.
• Finally, what particularly struck me is that the labs are not full of sparkling new state of the art equipment, not that they don't present very smartly. The money has been spent more subtly on flexible furniture (see above) and quality finishes, such as beautiful polished concrete floors in the sculpture labs with much of the tried and tested equipment brought from the old labs.

Well done to the BM - Seven years of planning has produced a model to us all on how to develop a conservation facility for current times.

In defence of Egyptian conservators

Reading about the botched beard reattachment job on King Tut in the London Times on Friday, I had my doubts as to whether this was really the work of my conservator colleagues in Egypt. So I am glad to read in today’s Art Daily that the director of the Egyptian Museum, Dr Mahmoud al-Helwagy has denied that conservators were involved, strongly defending them, saying “This is illogical and inconceivable. These are conservation workers, not carpenters.”

But let’s recap on what we do know of the story so far (which I suspect has some way to run yet). It appears that a maintenance worker noted a light was out in the glass case that houses King Tutankhamun’s funerary mask in the Egyptian Museum, Cairo, which  just happens to be one of the great treasures of the world. In the process of removal, the case hit the mask and it almost fell off its pedestal, saved by a lunging curator who grabbed it in his arms. Unfortunately the lunge was just not quite delicate enough (such being the nature of lunges) and the beard fell off. I can’t imagine what language was used at the time but it would have been a jaw dropping moment for all involved.

Whereupon all hell clearly broke loose, the loudest voice being the one that yelled ‘pass me the epoxy quickly’. A hasty repair was executed and the beard was soon back in its rightful position. Two problems folks, however, arise. Number one is that, although epoxy is used in conservation, it is extremely difficult to reverse and should only be used when no other adhesive can take the strain and after much discussion around the proposed treatment. Secondly and more obviously, the repair is clearly crooked, which is what alerted the outside world to the problem in the first place.

How can this happen, you rightly ask? Well, firstly, accidents do happen - check out my blog post from February 2010 for a few examples. Secondly, involvement of non-conservators invariably spells disaster. Again, witness the story of our old friend Cecilia Giménez and her restoration of the face of Jesus in the Spanish church of Santuario de la Misericordia near Zaragoza (September 2012). 

And thirdly, this is not a unique example of such an experience. Some years ago, an Australian conservator friend of mine couriered a clay artefact to an exhibition in Europe, seeing it placed in position and the display case locked, before she set off for her hotel.  Returning the next day to the exhibition for a final look before she headed home, she was surprised to see the display case had been moved. Checking the artefact through the glass, she detected firstly a crack and then some excess glue on the surface. The sorry tale was soon revealed – the display case had to be moved after my friend left, the artefact fell over and broke in two in the process and a panicking curator applied some Supaglue to try and make good.

But don’t blame it on the conservators!