Museum meanderings
Aug. 6th, 2006 06:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
trixtahI went to the National Museum of Australia yesterday to see the exhibition on Cook's Pacific Encounters. Frankly, I was a bit meh about the whole thing. It's actually the Göttingen University collection of Cook material - while it's great that they let all this stuff go travelling, it could have done with a bit of mix-and-match curating, from my perspective.
I admit to being probably quite fussy about Pacific collections. When you've seen the Māori and Pacific collections that the Auckland Museum has, you realise the breadth of what there is to cover. The British Museum has an excellent collection as well. So, it wasn't for the actual material they had that was specifically interesting to me - other than its age - it was the context of Cook's voyages that was the interesting part.
So, ok, you got an anteroom with a once-over-lightly description of Cook and the voyages, and a couple of potted biogs of Banks and Solander, with a few portraits - mainly reproductions - including the Dance one of Cook and one or two bits and pieces from the voyages, such as a spyglass used by one of Cook's lieutenants, a sextant, a botantical collecting bottle, a couple of printed volumes. And really, that was about it.
Then it was onto the main collection, which was admittedly large and diverse, but it had no context. The only theme appeared to be that all objects of a common type were chucked in together, but with no attempt to compare and contrast. While you can do a bit of that visually, things saying that "Tahitians used pieces of mother-of-pearl from oyster shells for fishing lures while the Maori used paua in similar instances" would have given more information. All we had was a description of the object (eg. kahu muka, flax fibre cloak) and where it was collected from (eg. New Zealand). There was no attempt to place items in context of the voyages - something saying, "Collected by Furneaux in 1773 in Dusky Sound, South Is, NZ, possibly from the Ngatimamoe tribe" would have been really nice.
Of course, that kind of provenance might have been difficult to put together, although my understanding is that the University of Göttingen acquired the collection very early on, from a very limited number of dealers and direct endowments. An alternative could have been to excerpt some log and journal entries that related to various objects, even if not identified specifically. Such as, say, about a headdress: "Besides the common dress some of these people wore on their heads ^round Caps made of birds feathers which were far from being unbecoming" (from Cook's description of the Endeavour's visit to Queen Charlotte Sound). By the way, Cook's, Banks' and Parkinson's (the artist) Endeavour journals are online at the National Library of Australia.
It's a shame that no-one appeared to think of doing something like that, although it's possible that the printed catalogue ($40, so I didn't buy it) gives more background. I strongly think, if so, that that kind of information (even condensed) should be part of the exhibition proper. The trend of essentially expecting you to buy a catalogue for the context is one that really irks me - it certainly appears to be getting more common in various institutions. Still, I wished I picked one up for a look to see if that was the case.
A nice alternative would be if the collection had been used as a basis for tracing the changes in Pacific art over the last 300 or so years, in which case you would need very little reference to Cook, or no more so than the other Pacific explorers of that time and subsequently, such as Wallis, de Surville, Du Fresne, etc. Doing that for the whole Pacific would be a big job, though.
Still, it was interesting enough, and it's always groovy visiting the museum, which is a funky building, although the flow from one area to the next is kind of lacking. I like it despite that.
I admit to being probably quite fussy about Pacific collections. When you've seen the Māori and Pacific collections that the Auckland Museum has, you realise the breadth of what there is to cover. The British Museum has an excellent collection as well. So, it wasn't for the actual material they had that was specifically interesting to me - other than its age - it was the context of Cook's voyages that was the interesting part.
So, ok, you got an anteroom with a once-over-lightly description of Cook and the voyages, and a couple of potted biogs of Banks and Solander, with a few portraits - mainly reproductions - including the Dance one of Cook and one or two bits and pieces from the voyages, such as a spyglass used by one of Cook's lieutenants, a sextant, a botantical collecting bottle, a couple of printed volumes. And really, that was about it.
Then it was onto the main collection, which was admittedly large and diverse, but it had no context. The only theme appeared to be that all objects of a common type were chucked in together, but with no attempt to compare and contrast. While you can do a bit of that visually, things saying that "Tahitians used pieces of mother-of-pearl from oyster shells for fishing lures while the Maori used paua in similar instances" would have given more information. All we had was a description of the object (eg. kahu muka, flax fibre cloak) and where it was collected from (eg. New Zealand). There was no attempt to place items in context of the voyages - something saying, "Collected by Furneaux in 1773 in Dusky Sound, South Is, NZ, possibly from the Ngatimamoe tribe" would have been really nice.
Of course, that kind of provenance might have been difficult to put together, although my understanding is that the University of Göttingen acquired the collection very early on, from a very limited number of dealers and direct endowments. An alternative could have been to excerpt some log and journal entries that related to various objects, even if not identified specifically. Such as, say, about a headdress: "Besides the common dress some of these people wore on their heads ^round Caps made of birds feathers which were far from being unbecoming" (from Cook's description of the Endeavour's visit to Queen Charlotte Sound). By the way, Cook's, Banks' and Parkinson's (the artist) Endeavour journals are online at the National Library of Australia.
It's a shame that no-one appeared to think of doing something like that, although it's possible that the printed catalogue ($40, so I didn't buy it) gives more background. I strongly think, if so, that that kind of information (even condensed) should be part of the exhibition proper. The trend of essentially expecting you to buy a catalogue for the context is one that really irks me - it certainly appears to be getting more common in various institutions. Still, I wished I picked one up for a look to see if that was the case.
A nice alternative would be if the collection had been used as a basis for tracing the changes in Pacific art over the last 300 or so years, in which case you would need very little reference to Cook, or no more so than the other Pacific explorers of that time and subsequently, such as Wallis, de Surville, Du Fresne, etc. Doing that for the whole Pacific would be a big job, though.
Still, it was interesting enough, and it's always groovy visiting the museum, which is a funky building, although the flow from one area to the next is kind of lacking. I like it despite that.