A self-consciously encompassing yet compact “definition” of a museum offered by the International Council of Museums (ICOM) reads as:  “a typically non-profit, permanent institution in the service of society and of its development, open to the public, which acquires, conserves, researches, communicates and exhibits, for purposes of study, education, and enjoyment, the tangible and intangible evidence of people and their environment.” In some elaborations of this concept one reads phrases like the museum’s task being that of “interpretation of objects of lasting interest or value”, or as an institutional building it being a “repository for a collection of natural, scientific, historic or literary curiosities or objects of interests or works of art and designed to be viewed by members of the public”. In this sense the museum is a public institution, conceived and realized within the broad Enlightenment  framework:  a place that simultaneously recognizes, collects, protects, classifies, organizes and displays in various didactic manners the achievements of man in service of man.¹⁷

The classifying imperative, that seemed appropriate for the organization of emerging knowledge about biological world and led to the “natural history museum” became the academically legitimized way of organizing the human history in general, within a framework of civilizational classifications, with recognizable racial and hierarchical overtones.¹⁸ This led to early museums like the Ashmolean at Oxford and the British in London¹⁹, and many others including art museums in Europe and North America.  What might have started as a celebration of scientific discovery and a desire to preserve civilizational inheritance or loot in the 19th century got interwoven in the 20th century with pursuits of national identity, affirmation of cultural uniqueness, recovery of ethnic pride and even religious-imperial memory. The museum as an institution and a building has become a medium of some affirmative agenda, if not a polemic, and its contents are often feeble, sometimes blatantly artificial attempt at its own justification.²⁰

Against this brief and sketchy backdrop, it is now possible for us to make a few critical comments about the museum of today. First, the very conceptualization, the economics, the management, the acquisition policy, and continued viability in the public eye leads the museums to specialize and define clear boundaries around their purpose. In this sense, the museum reinforces the precise categorization of civilizational content. Beyond the obvious and accepted separation of science and fine art museums, there are further categorizations among arts:  modern and pre-modern or the portrait paintings and the moving image. It is possible today to have highly focused museums such as l’institut du Monde Arabe in Paris, or the Holocaust and the First Nations museums that sit distinct among the necklace of institutions in Washington DC.¹

It is inherent in the very concept of museums to show facts, artefacts and art, especially their permanent collections, in a structured and stable time frame. Most common is the simple linear sequence from old to new, from ancient to contemporary or within a historical time interval, be it a century or some decades, before or after some great event like the World War. Often, even the museum buildings are designed or used in such a way that the walk through them is like an orchestrated journey through time. But while one is witness to the changing work over historical time, the overall effect is that of observing the passage of time with its static memory. Only in specially curated shows does one see similar types of work over two or more historically separated time intervals. But the effect is still that of seeing static vignettes of time.

Museums, in the build up of their collection, in their manner of showing their own collection, as well as in their selection of the special shows that come from the outside, are potentially elitist and sometimes outright exclusivist. The curator, the critic, the art press, the publisher, the well-endowed donor, together constitute a complex organism that ends up having a major effect on what gets collected and what gets shown and in what light. In an environment of free, fearless and critical exchange including public debate, such an arrangement can be very valuable and the museums can become the focal institutions where societal views of what constitutes civilizational values can be shaped. But in non-democratic environments, fascist politics, stifled debate and especially, if special interest can take hold of such institutions, museums can become instruments of ideology and its attendant propaganda.

The above review and observations lead us to suggest that a back-to-the-first-principles look is needed for museums to resurrect as living institutions relevant to our own times. Historically, “museum” can trace its lineage to being the Greek “mouseion”, the temple of muses, a place of contemplation, and a philosophical institute. In its Latin version, it can be imagined as Ptolemy’s “Museum of Alexandria”, a place of philosophical discussion, a source of inspiration, a place conducive of absorption in one’s thoughts, a library. The late 17th century “cabinet of curiosities”, though merely an impromptu display of private collections for patron elites, stirs in us a feeling that this must have been more an event, a phenomenon of wonder and discovery rather than a structured walk through well classified and systematically displayed artefacts. In this sense one finds the awakening of curiosity as a nobler objective than the well planned display of our achievements.

Our museum of today, of science or of art, as an institution and as a building, is badly in need of contemporary living phenomena with which it has a symbiotic relationship. While we can remain respectful of the secure boundaries of the museums as our civilizational treasure chests, and continue to sustain them as the institutional trustees of our collections, we need to awaken to what lies around and beyond them. We need to recognize the nurturing dynamism of urban life, the cultural ecology of the city within which the new museum can rediscover its contemporary relevance. The “muses” that reside at the heart of the museum, need the landscape of collective aspirations over which they can cast their enlightening spell.  The fountainhead of knowledge, the library that the museum claims to be, needs its multitude of thirsty minds. And the repository of art, the sensorium of expressive imagination that the gallery-museum is, awaits its silent gazes.

The museum and the city should be considered mutually essential like the rock and the raked sand in a Japanese garden. If the museum is the walled temple of the muses of our memory, then the city is the bazaar where we can have chance encounters with the muses of our own time. If the former is a repository of printed words and silent colors, if it is a sanctuary for the lone voyeur, the latter is the buzzing labyrinth of scribes, bookbinders, story-tellers, puppeteers, magicians, jugglers, and impromptu performers. If the museum is a permanent show case of artefacts, neatly classified and didactically displayed like a medicine cabinet, then the city is a place of surprises, apparent chaos, and continuous change with deep, fuzzy but stable, clockwork like phenomena. The museum may function like a reference dictionary or a thesaurus at its best, but the city is like a continuous journal written by the citizens and perpetual literary discourse. While the constituents of the city and civilization may be found in the museums, the city as phenomena in itself cannot survive partitioning, particularization, and encased display. A poignant, though cruel image is offered by Shepheard: “you may find all the parts of a goat in a butcher shop but you will not find the goat”.²

Based on our discussions so far, it is possible to state that the city should be brought forth as an essential companion of the institutional museum to conceptualise a comprehensive and relevant contemporary “museum project”. To this end we offer a few suggestive reflections:

Complexity is the keyword for contemporary conditions. Simple, stable causalities have become complex and dynamic phenomena. Benjamin’s concerns about art in the age of mechanical reproduction become pale before the “promises” of instant reporting and voyeuristic elaborations on cable news networks, “internetted” world with magical search engines of the Google kind, online image banks, galleries and special shows, worldwide downloading possibilities of audio, visual and performing arts.³ The Collage City of yesteryear⁴ is now a multivalent, stochastic and Delirious City in which neither space nor time seems to have any stable reference⁵. The city is the writer and the script, the choreographer and the dance, and the stage, the back-stage and the show. There is an eerie resonance and blurring of the boundaries among the gentrified historic districts and historically stylized, new markets. The average eye, exhausted by the simulacra of the electronic media, cannot distinguish between the wedding hall, the movie-set, and some callously restored historic building. It is defeatist, though academically defensible, to provide refuge for historic authenticity through clinically precise exhibits in the museum. It might be far more enlightening for the public if they are presented with this authenticity residing in the museum as the “opposite and the other” of the historic reality of the city.

Most museums take pride in their educational programs for visitors of all ages and backgrounds. It is an important factor in the assertion of their societal relevance. Students welcome a trip to the museum primarily as an escape from the structure of their classroom. However, instead of attempting to fathom facts from pages of books in the school they find themselves in the museums, listening to descriptions and taking notes, standing in front of secure cabinets or roped off works of art. From classroom to the museum it is the city, as an interval of free observation and chance discoveries, that is most enjoyable. It is this role of the city as a bridging landscape of curiosity and discovery, this experiential feast for the senses, this walk-through academy, this studio of ever-changing “bowls of fruit”, this construction yard of memories, this museum that would awaken the mind and nourish it at the same time, that has eluded us for some time. Without this, the classroom and the museum may continue their own hermetic, self-serving existence, of questionable value to the citizen who might not be able to make the connection.

Students copying master paintings in the gallery or someone peering through a magnifying glass at flattened, encased butterflies in a natural history museum are images of the past. The city is a vast studio that awaits the archaeological imagination and discerning gaze of the artist⁶. Its complex ecologies can awaken us to intricate interdependencies of our natural environment as well as the beauty of our flora and fauna, of colors and textures, of spaces and forms, its paths and places, its ruins and its new constructions. Its urban nooks and crannies await art installations and its neglected quarters anticipate theatrical performances. City is a vast spatio-temporal screen on which our museums can project themselves. In turn, the richest extractions of the city as the artists’ workshop (karkhana) can be gifted to the museum.

City is the accreted evidence of civilization, its genesis, its progress, its triumphs, its trials, its ruptures and its reconstructions. City is the crucible within which a civilization experiments with itself often with magical results worthy of an alchemist.  Chance encounters, deliberate exchanges, bargains and transactions, crossed perceptions and mixed languages, even old enmities and new friendships, weave the fabric of preserved memories and recorded histories. Crucial to this phenomena is the literary and artistic imagination that can on the one hand, engage the city as an eloquent metaphor of human condition and on the other, use it as a space of historical criticism and philosophical reflection. Hafiz Shirazi and Nasir-i-Kusraw have made extensive use of city and settlement in their work, Khaqani’s poem on Madain of Iraq and Iqbal’s Masjid-e-Qartaba are reflections on the philosophy of history⁷. Numerous western writers, from Dickens to Calvino⁸ and film makers from Ruttmann⁹ to Vertov¹⁰ to Scorsese¹¹ have used city as a “forest of symbols”¹² or a metaphor to touch profound issues of human condition, from history to politics to psychopathic descent. Literary city, painted city, celluloid city and numerous extensions of fictional imagination are vehicles through which much can be  conceptualized and offered as catalyst for critical reflection on self and society, on history and the future, but much more important, on our anchors in the civilizational flow.

To sum it all, the museum needs the city much more than the citizens need the museum.

Dr. Gulzar Haider is Dean, School of Architecture and Design, Beaconhouse National University, Lahore. He has been Emeritus Professor of Architecture, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada, where he has lived for many years. Recipient of numerous scholastic awards during his academic career, Dr. Haider was Design Consultant to eleven different architectural practices in USA and Canada from 1979-2004, and has published several papers, reports, monographs and book chapters.