They’re not ‘labels’ & they’re not ‘didactics’

The word ‘label’ to refer to ‘text in an exhibition’ is a hang-up of ivory tower snobbery and needs to stop. And ‘didactic’ to mean ‘a panel on the wall with lots of words on it’ is even worse. Ready to argue? OK.

Labels

The word ‘label’ in Australian and US Museums is ubiquitous in exhibition development. I have come across ‘wall labels’ and ‘case labels’ and ‘screen labels’ — the term is used whenever there is text. Why does it bother me so? Let’s get the definitions:

Wikipedia:
a classifying phrase or name applied to a person or thing

Merriam Webster:
a :a slip (as of paper or cloth) inscribed and affixed to something for identification or description
b :written or printed matter accompanying an article to furnish identification or other information
c :a descriptive or identifying word or phrase

So in our context, a label is a device that carries information, and that information is directly and only related to the object it labels. Implied is that the reading of said label will increase ones knowledge of the object. There’s nothing wrong with this

Some assumptions of mine — the purpose of an exhibition is to connect audiences with objects and stories, with the desired result that their knowledge, emotional world and social connection grows. If a person is moved but remembers no facts — that’s fine. If they learn a lot of facts but don’t really feel much — that’s fine as well. We respect difference, and we are happy with multiple outcomes.

So the term label conflicts with this in two ways. First, it puts objects at the inviolable centre of the exhibition. This is a sucky assumption — sometimes the storytelling is unrelated to objects. Oral histories, to take a supersimple example, might be the exhibition’s major assets and audience connection. How could words with a screen of audio oral histories be called a ‘label’?

Secondly, both ‘label’ and ‘didactic’ puts factual communication as the prime purpose of text in an exhibition. All the words in the definition are grounded in the domain of knowledge. I once saw a funery urn (I forget where) with words alongside saying ‘what will happen when you die? Will anyone remember you?’ That’s really great text, prompting all sorts of emotional responses. But it’s not in any way a ‘label’.

I wrote one once, for an echidna collected by Darwin, that was simply

…in order to secure them, it was necessary to jump off one’s horse as quickly as possible, otherwise, they would have disappeared by burrowing into the sandy soil…

There’s no information there about the object, not really. But it’s a very different picture of Darwin to the beardy old guy. This is a good label (my remembering it 19 years later is a clue!).

I think it also reinforces a model of museum practice that could be expressed as:

Museum = (Room containing [ [wall panel] + [painting + label] x n ] ) x n

I think we should be thinking of ‘words’ like we do ‘sound’ or ‘image’ – something that enables meaning-making by an audience. We start with the audience and the meaning and orient our text within the panoply of engagement options. There’s a compelling case that wall panels and zero labels might be better, or object labels and zero wall panels, but this isn’t something one can engage with unless we overt and discuss this underlying thinking implied by our language.

Why do I care? I think it leads us to default to this model – somewhat art gallery-ish – when for many (science museum, social history museum) it isn’t automatically the best.

And I think it makes us lazy. If the facts are there, the label is ‘correct’. We rarely have conversation about the label’s purpose, so ‘some facts about the object’ becomes the default. And when our practice is suffused with informational assumptions, we do not make the effort to level up heart with head, feeling with fact. We may choose that factual communication is the core purpose of this text right here by the object. But let’s make that a choice not a default.

Language is powerful. We, in our colonially-derived organisations, know this. Our use of language is important if we are to serve our audiences well. We should develop our practice to be genuinely ‘media neutral’ — all the types of purpose in an exhibition might be delivered through all types of medium, so we should detox our noun phrases from our didactic academic assumptions.