Outdoors the box: rethinking how museums existing disability

The Cabinet of Curiosities staff had been amazed by the volume and variety of objects they found in museum collections. Photograph: Richard Sandell

Richard Sandell and Jocelyn Dodd, from the Study Centre for Museums and Galleries (RCMG) have been functioning closely with artist and performer Mat Fraser for the past two years. The research-led collaboration, supported by the Wellcome Believe in, just lately culminated in a series of cabaret-meets-lecture museum performances called The Cabinet of Curiosities: How Disability Was Stored in a Box.

A heady mix of research, visual culture, songs and an inspired rap, the performances check out the function that health care contemplating and practice has played in shaping attitudes towards differences, and aim to challenge the way we believe about disability.

Richard Sandell

Jocelyn and I 1st noticed Mat reside in 2005 when his demonstrate – Thalidomide! A musical – was on tour. Sitting in the audience, we seasoned a potent mix of emotions. We realized a good deal about the story of thalidomide and along the way we have been discomfited, shocked and angered. We also laughed.

We laughed a great deal. Following the display we sat in the bar listening to other members of the audience talk animatedly about the performance and we reflected on the marked differences amongst Mat’s therapy of the subject matter and the way that a museum might normally tell the story of thalidomide.

In which museums have tended to be measured and cautious – anxious to present materials in a balanced, frequently dispassionate way – Mat’s approach was imbued with emotion, flagrantly personalized and extremely political. Nevertheless, like museum presentations, it was also grounded in rigorous study. It was compelling, provocative and utterly memorable.

At that time our research was very strongly rooted in museum practice and even though our subject was novel, our method was largely tried and tested. We had grow to be interested in comprehending why disabled folks – occasionally referred to as the greatest minority – have been largely absent from museum narratives. Why, at a time when museums were increasingly making an attempt to represent much more inclusive histories, was engagement with the background and culture of disability hardly ever tackled?

We set about investigating museum collections and were surprised by the volume and selection of objects and artworks we identified – materials that was strongly linked to disability but really seldom presented in a way that manufactured these links visible.

Over time our analysis practice has turn out to be more and more concerned not merely with comprehending this phenomenon, but with effecting modify – both in how museums present disability and in unlocking museums’ prospective for modifying the way audiences (and society much more broadly) consider about disability. It was this ambition that led us to approach Mat in 2011 to check out the prospects for collaboration.

Mat Fraser

When I 1st met Richard and Jocelyn, I was not even remotely acquainted with the way museums technique their exhibitions. I did have a familiar sense of not belonging – feeling as if my standpoint of getting a disabled man or woman was absolutely absent whenever an artefact to do with disability was presented in collections and exhibiting presentations. Museums, like a lot of mainstream environments, do not demonstrate us as we actually are, or had been.

When they asked me to think about undertaking a show about the re-presenting of disability in museums, even though it was extremely much outdoors of my knowledge, I jumped at the chance.

Each Richard and Jocelyn have been and are obviously quite at ease with all of the politicised and socially concerned elements of disability, and have a comfort about the entire subject that is rare to discover, definitely in such professions. So of course, when I started out to do the real research in the archives of the project’s partner museums, I expected to encounter a a lot more reticent, conservative and fearful ignorance, from each artefacts and workers.

Rather what I typically identified was a rigorous enthusiasm for uncovering the previous, redressing the medicalised past methods of disability representation, and an virtually relieved pleasure that their museum was taking component in this task. That they had been health care and scientific museums made this all the a lot more surprising, and welcome.

The biggest shock in my discoveries was how a lot of artefacts there are in the archives that never just talk about disability they veritably shout about them. Hunting at all of these occasionally incredibly illuminating objects from the previous stored focusing me on the general job at hand. I increasingly came tosee this as helping folks – the public, disabled individuals, museum curators, managers, medical college students, medical professionals, scientists, everybody – to understand why things require to change, and to illustrate approaches in which that may be feasible (in a hopefully non-threatening way).

Thankfully, there was considerably proof from earlier museum experiments in this spot to bolster and inspire what I was saying. My total occupation was the two brilliantly supported by the prior analysis and writing, and enormously aided by the enthusiasm from the curators and museums staff I was operating with.

I still found it a challenge, and it truly did assist me produce as an artist, expanding my practice and reconnecting me with levels of academia I would virtually forgotten I could do. It also significantly expanded my demographic for audiences, but when all the dust settles on it all, what remains is the real reality in society that these improvements are painfully overdue and that we require to preserve operating in this discipline to get the work completed. It really is one thing I hope, inside the capacities of what I do and past them, I can be a component of.

Follow Richard on Twitter @RSMuseumStudies and Mat @mat_fraser

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Outdoors the box: rethinking how museums existing disability