The open source museum
An argument for curation as a collective pursuit
The subtle but powerful potential of the networked artefact is the theme of this article; it raises questions about the constraints of traditional museum curation (carried out behind walls, revealed in exhibitions) and the possibilities of a museum of the future in which artefacts — or, strictly speaking, data about artefacts — are reconnected with their history, with ideas, and with the people who share an interest in them.
Room 136 is a quiet and infrequently visited corner of the Victoria & Albert Museum, high up on the sixth floor; it contains a large semi-circular vitrine that mounts a few hundred pieces of Qing dynasty porcelain. Amongst them is a small dish with a perforated border around a quirkily painted coat of arms of the Honourable East India Company. For the few who might notice it, the purpose of this dish is to illustrate the 18th Century fashion for armorial porcelain, a Chinese export trade that the Company found convenient as a ballast for tea and lucrative as a source of private income for its sea captains. My purpose is to use the dish to illustrate a possible future for the Museum.
If we ask the question “What is a museum for?” then the Ceramics Study Gallery (in which room 136 can be found) gives us one answer; it is a densely-packed compendium of 26,500 of the finest, the first, the exquisite, the decadent, the archetypical and most perfect examples of ceramic design and manufacture. The Ceramics Study Gallery is a virtuously open storage space, a modern reliquary organised by place and period of origin and sometimes material and form: not a gallery that makes any other ready connections or holds a different narrative, but a place of containment and display. It’s a place to look and see the real thing.
The gallery, which the V&A refurbished at a cost of £11 million in 2009–10, provides physical accessibility in one of the most contemplative spaces in the museum. The touchscreen next to the semi-circular vitrine displays the museum catalogue and makes some connections and specific interpretations but mostly offers authoritative facts. The catalogue tells us the original price of our dish, purchased by the V&A in 1898 for £13 10s, but not its value. The value of objects in the gallery increases in proportion to their accessibility, but also to the connections made with other objects and ideas. As a museum object the value of our dish lies in what it tells us about the ceramic arts and manufacture, about fashion and taste, and about the awkward meeting of Chinese and British culture, goods and arms in the colonial period; our dish can tell us a great deal, if we dig around.
Made in or around 1798 for use in ceremonial occasions at Fort St George, the palace of the Governor of Madras, the dish is a fragment of one of the largest export dinner services ever ordered from Jengdezhen, the great centre of Chinese porcelain manufacture. The service was exceptionally grand: there were some 5000 pieces of many different types, each painted and enamelled with the arms of the Company within a spear point border and garlands of pink flowers, then elaborately over gilded; there are circular plates in three sizes, oval dinner plates, covered square serving plates, vegetable dishes, soup dishes, deep dishes, warmers, meat servers, small and large tureens both elliptical and octagonal, shrimp plates, fruit baskets and stands, salts, tea caddies and tea pots, each with ever-so-slightly-ridiculous rampant lions inconsistently and freely painted — by different hands — staring out of the wavy lustrous blue-white enamel.
Over the next hundred years or so the service was diminished as plates were broken or chipped and as different Governors brought pieces back to Great Britain as souvenirs of their office. These examples are now dispersed across the world’s museums and private collections: at the British Museum, the National Army Museum, the Metropolitan Museum in New York, the Five Colleges Museum, the Nadler Collection in Winterthur, in the former property of Earl Mountbatten and of course the three pieces at the V&A (a fruit basket and stand are displayed in the Chinese gallery). A portion stayed in Madras (Chennai) at Fort St George, now a Museum of the East India Company’s occupation. Another large group of 200 pieces — probably replacements for broken items — turned up in a Christie’s sale in Amsterdam in 1995 in a cargo retrieved by divers from the wreck of the Diana, an East Indiaman lost in the Malacca Straits, off Malaya, in March 1817 en route to Madras. The service is now scattered across the globe and the internet is a way of bringing many of its surviving pieces back together again.
In sale room catalogues and museum inventories and past auctions at ebay many of the extant individual pieces can be discovered with a simple Google search. I’ve brought them together in a pinterest, here, along with some 19th and 20th Century fakes or copies. Included in this collection is a substantial part: six oval plates, a tureen, a square serving dish with cover and two orphaned lids; they were taken from Madras by Major H.F. Collingridge in May 1919. Collingridge was Military Secretary at Fort St George. He was London-bound and travelling on the SS Chindwara with the retiring governor, Lord Pentland, who may have taken his own small portion of the service too, along with his family in first class. Travelling with Major Collingridge was his father, an indigo planter who’s business had been ruined by the invention by the German chemist Adolf von Baeyer of a synthetic substitute for indigo dye.
This is not a digression but a part of our dish’s story. The highly concentrated and immensely valuable indigo blocks (“one hundred pounds of plants yielded just four ounces of the insoluble, granular blue precipitate”) had been the means by which the Company repatriated its profits from the trade in Bengal opium with China. Opium paid for the tea that was ballasted by the porcelain as it was transported from Guangzhou to London via Madras. The indigo dye coloured the Manchester cotton that was in turn exported to India where local production had been disrupted by the British. Indigo was planted by Indian farmers under the duress of debt, the burning of villages and punishments handed out by an unjust Company judiciary. “Not a chest of Indigo reached England without being stained with human blood” heard the 1860 Indigo Commission. This was a complex six-way trade, cotton-opium-tea-porcelain-indigo-cash-cotton, bound together by force and resulting in two wars, the 1839 and 1856 opium wars in China, and a major uprising of indigo farmers in 1859–60 that prompted the founding of the Bihar Light Horse, a regiment of planter volunteers, founded in 1862 by Major Collingridge’s grandfather, Fred.
It tuns out then, that our dish in case 9, shelf 3 of room 136 is a part of something bigger: a fragment of one of the largest export services ever made; a symbol of Governorship and colonial authority to be repatriated home, which is why good examples exist in world museums and occasionally in sale rooms; an actor in a tragedy at sea; a by-product of a new global trading network; an example of fashion in flux, made at a pivotal point in the Company’s relationship with China, and representative of changing tastes as European porcelain gained its ascendancy, with a practical factory system introduced after English chemists and potters finally discovered the secret of porcelain in the late 18th Century.
And yet, despite its presence in at least six major institutions, there is not a single first class digital conservation record of a part or whole of the service. Online catalogues offer one or two views, in colour or black and white at medium or low resolution without metric or colour scale. There are no details of decoration or form or condition and often the objects are inconsistently or incorrectly described (the example below, a serving dish, from the Met, has an outlier date of 1770 and is ascribed the uncertain function of being “used for eating or serving food”: unbeknown to the Met the dish has lost the cover that would have shown that it is for serving).
Critically, each institution treats its own example as a singular aesthetic piece, unable easily to make connections with holdings elsewhere or with other parts of this service, or to share interpretations. The seven institutions with holdings (three in storage) offer a date range spanning 60 years and a consensus at 1798–1800; for the Met, “The design of these dishes and their unusual colouring may be traced to the patterns for creamware of Josiah Wedgwood”, whereas the V&A asserts that “The shape of the basket is European in origin and probably modelled on pierced work pieces made in Meissen or Berlin.” Connecting the two interpretations will sharpen the debate here. A number of catalogue entries refer to Volume 1 of David Howard’s 1974 seminal reference work ‘Chinese Armorial Porcelain’, which the avid investigator with access to the National Art Library will be disappointed to find contains a grainy monochrome reproduction of an oval dish and a two slim paragraphs of text. Most poignantly, none of these catalogues refer to the parts of the service held in other collections or their alternative descriptions (most are scant). Digitisation has not stretched this far. Our museums are struggling to emerge from the age of the book and the display case, reusing images made for publications or more often as an insurance record or visual reference to help curators relate an object to its catalogue entry. Likewise, none of the Jingdezhen pieces is linked to the three great services commissioned subsequently by the Company from Worcester and Spode that represented a stark break in both fashion and the workings of the 19th Century global economy. One of these, of 7000 pieces made for Fort St George in 1830 by Barr Flight & Barr of Worcester, shrieks ‘Wealth!’ in lathers of late Regency gilding and shocking pink; there is an example — a vase — in the V&A collection.
Our dish, 100 ft down the corridor from the Worcester vase, is by no means the finest example of the art and manufacture of porcelain, which makes it all the better as an argument for a new kind of museum because — for all that — it has significant historical and (in my case) personal interest with many valuable connections and potentially instructive interpretations. The revolution in digital recording, distribution and production now gathering pace should enable us to reconnect objects — not just the major works, but whole collections — with their complex histories and related objects, people and ideas. The 21st Century museum needs no longer be a locked cabinet or a discrete physical space marked by a singular collection policy.
Opening the doors is a simple step that requires the creation of good data and the design of a distribution system, using an open digital architecture, that makes that data available and discoverable for whatever purposes are approved whether academic, commercial or for any personal or collective enthusiasm.
The big change that museums need to undergo to make themselves (and each other) useful and relevant in the 21st Century is to make the collection a collective pursuit. Collaborative media makes the open source museum a feasible and viable option, technically simple and financially affordable. Such collaboration between different museums, and between museums and their audiences, has the potential to exponentially increase the accessibility and the value of their collections.
This is an argument for a reallocation of effort and resources to the idea of the open source museum, and to begin to concern ourselves as much with placing digital recording, conservation and collaboration at the heart of what we do — not at the periphery, where it exists now. To provide the rationale, however, means that we will have to demonstrate to financially-pressed museum trustees, using real world examples like the one above, the growth in knowledge that can be unleashed.
I hope that this story will lead to a collection of similar examples about different classes of artefact. It’s time to investigate collaborative digital spaces and begin small and then larger experiments in shared data and knowledge about the extraordinary wealth of connected museum artefacts that have been tidied away in cabinets, big and small, throughout the world, so that we can take them out, turn them around, and discover them in a new way.
Also, see: Emergency archeology: a dig in the photographic archive
and Open Access: a new digital direction for the V&A.
Footnote: The iiiF has created a set of standards for sharing image data created by a consortium of international museums and libraries. There are existing prototypes, most notably the New York Public Library which has made a large part of its photography collection freely available in an open API (application programming interface) and which is already being used by third party websites for their own studies. Made by Many has recently been working with curators and research scholars at the V&A to create prototypes for a connected catalogue that offers rich photographic descriptions of objects (2D and 3D) along with documentation from both the V&A collections management system and images and documentation from other museums with related holdings or open source databases such as Google Books.
