A very personal relationship with Robots

You may have noticed that while we try to bring you an insiders guide into the life of museum workers we can be a bit reluctant here to shout about or review exhibitions we have been working on. While we champion the use of social media for museum staff it can be a conflicting relationship to review an exhibition you have put together yourself. So I tend to keeping any reference to that on my own personal accounts.

Nonetheless some of you will probably be aware that I recently moved jobs from Collections Registration Coordinator at the Science Museum to Registrar at the National Army Museum, leaving the Science Museum was an emotional decision especially as I had put over a year of my blood, sweat and tears into one of the best exhibitions ever (yep this is a totally biased review) Robots!

As the Collections Registration Coordinator on the exhibition I was responsible for negotiating the loans of all of the objects in the exhibition on display in London and the subsequent tour, so these objects in all of their humanoid form became my friends that I didn’t get to meet until the opening night – unfortunately I terminated my contract only a couple of months before install started – so my review is going to focus around the many many loans this exhibition offers.

An insight into the history of humanoid robotics the exhibition takes you from the early automata used in churches right up to the lab robots of today. Now, it would be impossible for me to write a short and snappy blog if I was to take a journey through the whole exhibition so a few of my favourites and highlights of the show are:

The Bowes Swan

I mean, a huge silver swan! That’s an automata! This object really is one of a kind, dating from around 1773 the swan is one of the earliest automata’s that is still operating today and its pretty flashy! Back in 1774 the swan was a crowd puller at the Mechanical Museum of James Cox  (a London based dealer) and now the Science Museum is well and truly blessed to get this object down to London for the exhibition so its only there for the first six weeks of the show!

Cygan

Cygan quite definitely is my favourite object in this exhibition, he was my first loan in for the show and holds a very very dear place in my heart.  He has a bad boy past, having spend some time as a showman in strip clubs and has found love in recent years with his owner in the USA, an 8 foot high gentle giant he can walk, talk and dance with the ladies as showcased in this great film. The perfect example of a fifties robot ready to help around the home and be an aluminium beast.

Nexi

The fourth section of the exhibition has some incredible pieces from current roboticists – who are an absolute joy to work with. There’s some robotic legs – saved by curator Ben Russell from underneath a staircase in north London, ROSA a highly intelligent 3D printed skeletal robot and in it and my favourite interactive – the ultimate machine for an exhibition so high tech its so simple. Nexi is a beautiful disproportionate and creepy looking expressive robot developed to work with humans in uncertain environments. Gizmodo call this one an emo robot 

Icub

Icub robots are incredible, you can catch them on youtube dancing to the Arctic monkeys and again this is a personal favourite because it was an interesting one to negotiate and it felt really emotional seeing it on exhibition as the exit piece in the exhibition its placed to make you consider what the future of robotics is  because its so innovative its an open sourced robot and develops in a similar way to a four year old child.

Robots is open at the Science Museum until 3rd September then heading on a UK and international tour - be sure to catch it!

More than a pretty woman: Emma Hamilton at the NMM

We have been wanting to make it down to Greenwich to see the National Maritime Museum's Emma Hamilton exhibition for aaaages. I mean, the Guardian gave it a five star review, and we hear some of its text panels are being used as best practice examples at MA workshops. This is besides the fact that its an exhibition about a woman, a rare beast for a museum, and certainly for a maritime museum at that. That the NMM took up the cause of a woman who is famous for being Nelson's mistress is interesting, and one imagines a concerted move on their part to be a bit more innovative with their maritime history remit. Well, it worked. Emma is engaging and intimate, drawing you through the museum's beautiful new exhibition space with ease. Her journey through the political turbulence of the late eighteenth century is fascinating, you certainly leave having a better appreciation for the life of an extraordinary woman.

The exhibition opens with a quote from Lady Hamilton herself, 'I wish to show the world that a pretty woman is not always a fool'. That Emma was beautiful is abundantly clear throughout the exhibition. Indeed, her beauty was the source of her fame and meteoric rise to the upper echelons of the society. It was her nymph-like face which led her to become the muse of George Romney and ultimately a household name in Georgian Britain. Her beauty also got her into much of the trouble in her life. An affair with a gentleman which began in a brothel ended in her being pregnant. She struck a bargain with another aristocrat, Charles Greville, to look after herself and her child. When Greville tired of her, he literally passed her over to his uncle (if you were here I'd murder you and myself both- she wrote to Greville in a rage). Emma spent much of her life being treated as a commodity. But there is absolutely no doubt that she was a woman making the best of her circumstances. 

The exhibition has to toe a rather fine line as it tried to exonerate the historic impression that Emma was nothing more than a harlot who seduced Admiral Nelson into an adulterous relationship. While it is abundantly clear that Emma was charismatic and artistically challenging, late eighteenth century women simply didn't have the independence to be the kind of kick ass feminist hero museum-goers might like to hear about. Emma didn't really have a choice but to be 'looked after' by wealthy men, to give up her illegitimate children, to turn to prostitution when times were hard. The extent to which Emma had genuine feelings for some of the men in her life is a bit confusing- did she truly fall head over heels each time? Or was she more interested in looking after her position? The exhibition seems to suggest she was a passionate woman who truly did love her conquests. Her love letters with Nelson are particularly touching and sincere. 

Personally I was the most interested in the part of the exhibition related to Emma's time in the Neapolitan court during the Napoleonic wars. Having married the British Envoy to Naples, Emma became a close confident of the Royal Family, and in particular Queen Maria Carolina, who was also sister to Marie Antoinette. Emma's role as an intermediary between the Neapolitan Queen and the British Navy was crucial to the success of Nelson's battle of the Nile. Emma's political acumen is more difficult to communicate in an exhibition and its perhaps less enticing than her home making with Nelson, or her portraits by Romney. But to me, this is really the heart of the exhibition. Emma was beautiful yes, but she was also courageous and wanted to prove her worth to the highest levels of society. As Amanda Vickery comments in the exhibition, Emma was a woman who refused to be defined by class. 

The exhibition design I also have to say was flawless. Throughout it is full of thoughtful touches which recall the importance of the theatre to Emma's career. Indeed, it feels like walking through a luxurious theatre-set of Emma's life, and in one instance literally becomes that. I absolutely loved the rooms made to evoke her 'Paradise Merton', her home with Nelson, complete with flickering candle effects. Emma becomes much more than just an artistic muse, but a really living breathing person who was looking for love and some sense of stability. The display of Romney paintings is equally awe inspiring. 

The NMM's exhibition is nuanced and empathetic, and will leave you even more intrigued by the life and times of Emma Hamilton. While this isn't really the focus of the exhibition, I think Emma provides a fascinating sense of late eighteenth century society, weaving quack medicine, salon society, music halls, and political turbulence. She might not be quite a feminist icon by 21st century standards, but the exhibition certainly does her justice as an ambitious and determined woman in a complex world. This is Emma on Emma's terms. 

Emma Hamilton: Seduction and Celebrity is on at the National Maritime Museum until the 17th of April. 

Bedlam at the Wellcome Collection

The Wellcome Collection's blockbuster offering for thus autumn's exhibition season takes another look at the asylum. Riding on a tide of interest in mental health issues, and the perennially popular Victorians, Bedlam has proved, yet again, that the Wellcome's brand is thriving. From it's own custom twitter bot, to lectures, blogs and even a photo-booth (#spiritbooth)- Bedlam is accompanied by all the best public engagement that a museum can offer. But, is it a good exhibition? The Ministry is very conflicted...

Guys, it has taken us a long time to sit down to write this review. Bedlam has so many strong points about it that it feels unfair to say we didn't like it. However, it definitely has some iffy parts about it as well so its difficult to say that wholesale it was great. 

Let's just take for example the Madlove Asylum. The Madlove Asylum is an installation at the end of the exhibition which is clearly intended to be the piece de resistance. It's even screened off from the main gallery space just so that you don't get lured in by exciting drawings and the scale model and miss the rest of the exhibition. Madlove is a separate (Wellcome funded) organisation composed of artists who have worked with a number of mental health stakeholders, including certified patients, to create a new vision for what the asylum could be. Is it possible to go mad in a safe way? If you designed your asylum what would it be like? Visitors are asked. 

The installation is dominated by a brilliant blue landscape model doted with cheerful angular pink structures and golden furniture. The Madlove asylum is like a site-specific piece of art but inspired by people in inpatient hospital care for psychiatric issues. A running track, an artist workshop, a library and even a market garden make this designer asylum sound an idyllic place for anyone dealing with any kind of mental health issue. Visitors are even invited to take a way a small 'pocket asylum' where they can write themselves reminders for when things get tough.

The Madlove Asylum is so good in fact, it kind of feels like the Wellcome wanted to have an exhibition about it and everything else was built backwards. The inclusion of patient art from Bethlem Hospital in the nineteenth and twenteith centuries is interesting, but doesn't really seem to have the same kind of narrative purpose. Is it an exhibition about asylum history, or asylum art? Asylums in art? The first room about Bethlem hospital in the eighteenth century seems a bit like that boring introductory bit your teachers make you write. (Why are there so many pictures of a hospital in Belgium - isn't this meant to be about English asylums? Or is about the development of the asylum system generally?)

I think the real concern about Bedlam is that it is a very 'Wellcome' exhibition. The brand has become so confident in fact that their exhibitions are becoming well, a bit predictable. A catchy artistic intervention to start, a room of historic contextualization, a room which blends objects and art in an unexpected way, and then some artistic interventions to finish it all off. Even the small bits of the exhibition which were trying to provide some historic narrative about the development of asylum treatment in the UK fade a bit into the background, overshadowed by the need to make everything COOL ART ALL THE TIME.

Let's be very clear about one thing- we love the Wellcome. We love the gallery, we love the exhibitions, the Reading Room, the events. We love how they have changed peoples minds about what exhibitions can be. We really really love their social media and engagement. Empathy Deck (a twitter bot developed just got the Bedlam exhibition) is about the greatest thing ever, and leaves you fun little messages on your twitter throughout the day. It's a cross between CBT and an art-installation (seriously follow @empathydeck). Our worry is just that, in terms of the exhibition design, the Wellcome might be getting a little too comfortable with the formula that has brought them such success. But what made a Wellcome exhibition so exciting was its willingness to be different and original. Let's hope is stays that way! 

Taxidermy at the Morbid Anatomy Museum

Here at the Ministry we are all about London – but on the occasions that we do get to travel, we obviously have to report back about our museum adventures. On a recent trip to New York we finally had the opportunity to visit the place we like to think of as our spiritual home in the US- the Morbid Anatomy Museum in Brooklyn. We arrived, unannounced, on the eve of the opening of the Museum’s new exhibition Taxidermy: Art, Science and Immortality, featuring the famous Kitten Wedding tableau by English taxidermist Walter Potter. Despite the spontaneous nature of our visit, Creative Director Joanna Ebenstein took some time out to speak to us about the exhibition and the work of the museum.

As we walked in the door it was immediately apparent we had not come at a good time. With the exhibition opening shortly, install was not quite finished yet, and an impending courier arrival was the focus of the staff. Possibly because she is one of the most generous and kind people working in the field, Joanna decided to take some time out to take us through our first visit to the museum and even into the as yet unopened exhibition space. With the museum all to ourselves, Joanna told us more about the exhibition, the Library and some of the ins-and-outs of running a small museum.

The dream for the Museum had arisen from the original Morbid Anatomy Library- a resource centre created by Joanna using her own books and object collection which she has amassed through her own research and curatorial work. She explained how, unlike us lucky sods in London with our Wellcome Collection, our Science Museum, our Hunterian, there wasn’t any space in New York to have academic discussions about art, death, science and beauty. The Library still forms the heart of the Morbid Anatomy Museum – an inviting space on the second floor where people can come to read, chat and explore through Ebenstein’s ever growing collection. Unlike a traditional museum, you can actually handle any of the items on open display in the library room – from votive candles to bottles, artificial teeth and medical x-rays. The space had been transformed in honour of the exhibition to have a special natural history twist.

The star of the show however is of course the exhibition space, consisting of two hall-ways and a large central display area which showcases the Taxidermy exhibition. The display seeks to delve deeper into the many different aspects of taxidermy - the strange, the funny, the scientific, the familiar and the uncomfortable. Although the art of taxidermy can trace its origins to the ancient Egyptians, it wasn't until the nineteenth century when the practice came into its own. Wide spread interest in the natural world, and arguable the connection between the amateur scientist and the wealthy elite, prompted a craze for taxidermy so it became ubiquitous with the English, and indeed American, middle class home. In the world of ever expanding knowledge which characterised the Victorian era, this method of preservation was ideal for bringing home to the West specimens of exotic animals never before seen by the majority of the population. But taxidermy could also be funny (such as the anthropomorphic spanking frog, or a bear who served as a tray bearer), strange (from the world of carnivals and freak shows), exotic (the wall-mounted specimens of fierce predators from Africa, Asia and beyond), or very close to home (as in the display of a beloved pet). Today taxidermy continues to fascinate and repulse us (see Crap Taxidermy) and has become the subject of a renewed collecting interest. 

As we chatted, the staff waited patiently for the Kitten Wedding to arrive. It’s custom case prepared, it was a countdown to the courier’s arrival. While we have generally worked in larger museums and all the protocols that entails, the Morbid Anatomy Museum works largely with private collectors. Although it might lead to slightly harrowing moments when things don’t go according to plan, working closely with the private sphere allows Ebenstein and her collaborators to access untapped resources typically hidden away in the homes of their owners. The lion’s share of this exhibition had come from just such a collector, J.D. Powe, who also curated the display and wrote much of the text. The unique interests of people like Powe and others is what allow Morbid Anatomy to display things like a large collection of stuffed domestic dogs- a focus probably too niche for any museum.

While we weren’t able to see the Kitten Wedding in person, Taxidermy stands alone as a strong exhibition. Of course, the story of Kitten Wedding and Walter Potter, particularly his amateur but loving attempts at the art of taxidermy, fits perfectly with the exhibitions themes. However, from anthropomorphic frogs to elephant’s feat, sawfish tusks, conjoined calves, and even an anteater there is plenty to see. Potter, while perhaps particularly appealing to the average visitor due to his cache as an English folk artist, might be a draw, to overlook the collection of fascinating objects surrounding Kitten Wedding would be to miss the heart of Taxidermy. It is a show about the multifarious ways in which we are fascinated and repulsed by death, and the clever art of preserving life indefinitely. From the show’s earliest examples in the early nineteenth century through to the present day, taxidermy has proved to be an enduring interest for specialist and laypeople alike. If we really had to pick a favourite piece, it would be the Victorian taxidermy bird fireplace guard. Recalling a time when taxidermy birds were a must for any fashionable home, this extraordinary piece mimics the elaborate natural styles of the period in actual preserved animals. Displayed together with a fireplace for effect, we are reminded that taxidermy was once a part of everyday life.

In the end, Kitten Wedding arrived and the exhibition opened seamlessly to glowing reviews in the New York Times and elsewhere. Needless to say, if you do find yourself in the New York area a trip to Morbid Anatomy now (and in the future!) is a must. But as we poked through the gift shop and sat at the large communal table, we were reminded that the Morbid Anatomy Museum is much more than just the exhibition space. It’s a hub which provides a home for anyone interested in the strange and unusual – a conversation starter and a study space. While London has plenty to offer, we think the world needs a few more places like Morbid Anatomy. 

If you can't get to New York to see the show, the Museum has helpfully provided a Youtube tour for all their virtual visitors. Check it out!

Visions of the Great White South: Cambridge in Bonhams

Last week we went along for a tour of the Polar Museum's pop-up exhibition at Bonhams, Visions of the Great White South. Curated by Charlotte Connolly, the exhibition brings together art and images from the Scott Polar Expedition, alongside contemporary art commissioned by the Scott Polar Research Institute. We live tweeted the tour and now you can get a sneak peak here. The exhibition is only on until this Friday August 19th and we highly recommend a visit! 

From the bustle of Bond Street to the silence of the Pole #greatwhitesouth @scottpolar @bonhams1793

We love whenever regional museums get to showcase their collections in London, so of course we had to get down and see what the Polar Museum was doing on Bond Street! Maybe a strange choice of venue for a display of (not for sale) historic images- or so we thought.

Kicking of the tour with curator @curatorconnelly from @scottpolar - a research institute which also has a historic collection

Actually I didn't really know very much about the Polar Research Institute aside from that they had a museum. It's worth looking up the really interesting work they do - polar research not just a thing from the early twentieth century! 

Exhibition features work from the official artists of the Scott Polar Exhibition inspired by his work Broken Ice

Curator Charlotte Connolly was inspired by this image from the Terra Nova Expedition's official camera artist, Herbert Ponting. Ponting actually created a documentary about the expedition called the Great White Silence. 

Exhibition also includes beautiful water colours by artist and scientist EA Wilson

But Ponting wasn't alone in capturing the Pole- the exhibition also had along watercolour artist and scientist EA Wilson. This image features a very teeny tiny church on top of the outcropping built by the expedition team. 

Herbert Ponting - the camera artist on the expedition, captured everyday life for an explorer at Cape Evans

Ponting was really a 'camera artist' rather than a purely scientific photographer. He also took pictures of everyday life on the expedition, as well as stunning portraits. This one was taken just as this man returned from a push towards the Pole. 

Apparently Captain Scott became quite a good photographer on the expedition - @curatorconnelly with his work

In the eyes of Captain Scott, it was important that all members of the expedition were trained to be competent scientific photographers. Scott himself took to photography, and the exhibition features a number of images taken by him, including some very early panoramic photos. 

Wilson and Ponting always wanted an exhibition together of their photos and watercolours - finally realised

Exhibition artists Ponting and Wilson had always hoped for a joint exhibition of their works, but Wilson died on the fated journey back from the Pole alongside Scott. Perhaps due to the grief of Wilson's widow, the exhibition never happened. Now some of their works have finally been reunited. 

So why are we in @bonhams1793? Because they sponsor @scottpolar artist in residence who travels to Antarctica

Well the big reveal- we are at Bonhams because they sponsor an artist-in-residence at the Polar Institute! These lucky artists get to travel down to the Pole each year to capture the science of polar exploration through art. These paintings were actually done by Captain Scott's granddaughter!

A closing note on the epic landscapes of Emma Stibbon @scottpolar #greatwhitesouth

The contemporary art portion of the exhibition is really stunning. I thought this was a photograph but its actually a drawing! Amazing to see how the Pole is still an inspiration for generations of artists. 

A fantastic mix of history, science and art we really can't recommend Visions of the Great White South enough! It's free to visit so just pop down to Bonhams anytime this week. There are even tours available this Friday: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/exhibition-tour-visions-of-the-great-white-south-tickets-26825554957

Guest Post: Alison Moulds on guest curating “Vaccination: Medicine and the masses”

Guest curating “Vaccination: Medicine and the masses” at the Hunterian Museum
Alison Moulds (PhD candidate, University of Oxford)

Alison Moulds at the opening of her collaborative exhibition

This April saw the launch of my first-ever exhibition; working alongside the Hunterian Museum (at the Royal College of Surgeons of England) I helped to guest curate a series of displays that explores the history of vaccination from its inception in the late eighteenth century to its ubiquity in the present day.

My colleague Sally Frampton, a Postdoctoral Research Assistant, and I became involved with the exhibition through our wider research project, Constructing Scientific Communities. Funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, it looks at citizen science in the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries, and is particularly interested in interrogating the public-professional divide in fields such as natural history and medicine. We’re partnered with other institutions, including the University of Leicester, Natural History Museum, Royal Society, and Royal College of Surgeons.

Given the focus of our project, when it came to creating the exhibition narrative, we were keen to look at the ways in which ordinary people have contributed to the history of vaccination. This included not only those who had a hand in its discovery – such as Benjamin Jesty, the Dorset farmer whose experiments with cowpox predated those of the GP Edward Jenner – but also those who protested against its usage. During the Victorian period vaccination was made compulsory through legislation, a landmark moment in the history of state public health, but also one which sparked widespread resistance. Our exhibition’s title “Vaccination: Medicine and the masses” signals the way in which we see vaccination as a key site for interactions between medical professionals, individual patients, and the wider public. Pro- and anti-vaccination activities were equally important to us, though we knew a medical museum needed to engage with the scientific aspect as well as the social history.

Cruikshank's The Cowpox Tragedy (1812), Courtesy of the Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons

As newbies to the world of curating, one of the most exciting aspects for us was undoubtedly tracking down the objects for display. We decided early on that we wanted a diverse range of material, from ephemera to medical instruments, portraiture to film. One of our first ports of call was the Hunterian Museum’s own catalogue. Here we found papers belonging to Jenner, including personal correspondence and a draft manuscript of his inquiry into experiments with cowpox (1798). The Hunterian’s in-house collection also contained one of the earliest and most iconic satirical images about vaccination – George Cruikshank’s The Cowpox Tragedy (1812). All these items ended up on display.
We then started exploring other collections, including the Jenner Museum in Gloucestershire, the Gordon Museum of Pathology at King’s College London, and the John Johnson Collection at the Bodleian Libraries in Oxford. Among the gems we discovered was an incredibly affecting set of photographs of smallpox patients from the early twentieth century, which show the devastating effects of the disease. These were objects found ‘behind the scenes’ at the Jenner Museum that we reproduced for the exhibition. Following the installation, seeing the way in which all our objects interact with one another in the space has been one of the most rewarding aspects of the exhibition becoming a reality.

The process of display wasn’t without its hurdles, however. There were anxieties about how to share the reproduced patient photos, as well as human specimens, sympathetically. We didn’t want their inclusion to seem gratuitous, but neither did we want to adopt a sanitised approach. We were committed to showing people the reality of the disease, which is all too easy to forget now it has been eradicated. We also experienced an eleventh-hour emergency when we discovered we didn’t have a suitable screen available to show a wonderful public health information video we’d tracked down at the Wellcome Library. Getting one installed in time was a huge relief, especially since Surprise Attack (1951) has proved immensely popular with visitors. A narrative of mild peril, the film depicts a young girl who contracts smallpox and a town responding with a mass vaccination campaign co-ordinated by the local Medical Officer of Health. One of its biggest draws is probably the fact it features John Le Mesurier, better known for his later role as Sergeant Arthur Wilson in Dad’s Army.

Bringing together such a wide range of objects wasn’t always easy and perhaps one of the biggest difficulties for us was constructing a coherent and accessible narrative about the history of vaccination around them. We hoped to give some sense of the chronology of vaccination but also tease out overarching themes along the way. We wanted to tackle the objects on display but also gesture towards other aspects of the debate. As academics, brevity isn’t always our strong suit and we had to be rigorous about slicing and dicing our beloved words into something that would work well for museum audiences. We also struggled with creating object labels where provenance wasn’t always clear or where it was protracted and confused!

Since our academic research usually sees us poring over weighty tomes on our own, often in a dusty archive somewhere, the collaborative aspect of exhibition work was something we really enjoyed. It enabled us to work not only together, but also with the Museum’s in-house curator (Bruce Simpson) and curators elsewhere, as well as archivists and librarians. We were also committed to promoting wider public engagement around the exhibition, and worked with the Hunterian’s Learning and Events Officer, Hayley Kruger, to organise a “Museums at Night” opening, complete with anti-vaccination songs, a screening of public health information videos from across the twentieth century, and a talk from Dr Richard Barnett, medical historian and author of The Sick Rose. It was great to watch people exploring the space and to hear their thoughts on the exhibition. Rarely does our work have such an immediate and widespread impact.

Alison Moulds is a second-year DPhil English Literature student at St Anne’s College, University of Oxford. Working as part of the AHRC-funded project “Constructing Scientific Communities”, and in partnership with the Royal College of Surgeons of England, she is researching the construction of the doctor-patient relationship and the formation of professional identity in nineteenth-century medical writing, including fiction by doctors. She previously undertook her MA Victorian Studies part-time at Birkbeck College, University of London while working full-time in health policy and public affairs. She is Peer Review Editor for the Victorian Network journal. She blogs at https://victorianclinic.wordpress.com/ and can be found on Twitter @alison_moulds.

“Vaccination: Medicine and the masses” runs from Tuesday 19 April to Saturday 17 September at the Qvist Gallery, Hunterian Museum. Open Tuesday-Saturday, 10am-5pm. Free admission.