The Sea|Preface|Acknowledgements |Catalogue |Foreword|Credits
PREFACE Cultures, nations, institutions, academic disciplines and individuals all reach a period in their development where they become sharply aware of their early history, and of the way in which that history has shaped their present identity and actions. Usually this epiphany occurs at a point where the thoughtless rough and tumble of the past is long gone, and its innocence (or guilt) has to be considered at a distance, recovered through the distorting lens of contemporary concerns. If only we had known then what we know now... Tom Griffiths' recent book Hunters and Collectors celebrates (and is indeed subtitled) "the antiquarian imagination in Australia" at a time when the hungry, specimen-hunting, ancestor-chasing empiricism of the amateur and the dilettante has been largely displaced by the more restrained, refined and theorised methodologies of the professional historian. Likewise the museum and art gallery branches of the consciousness industry are today separated, well-ordered and intensely specialised, with clear mission statements, corporate plans and marketing strategies, yet culturists are increasingly infected with an atavistic passion for the randomly marvellous. Myriad histories, essays and critiques celebrate on the one hand the sensual and intellectual chaos of the seventeenth century wunderkämmer, and on the other the hubristic, totalising hierarchies of nineteenth century science and conquest. Contemporary artists personalise and/or politicise the vitrine with surrealistically disjunctive or mock-taxonomic installations; museologists wax lyrical about Sir John Soanes' Museum in London or the equally remarkable museum at Kapunda, South Australia. And this post-modern, post-colonial desire to synthesise the wonderful and the imperial even has its own monument, in one of Australia's most recently completed and widely discussed museums, the Museum of Sydney. For all its virtuoso virtuality, at bottom MoS represents a return to the model of the cabinet of curiosities, of the old-fashioned Mechanics Institute or Historical Society museum. It is therefore a strange and occasionally delightful experience to work in an institution where the old methodologies are present not as a fashionable revival, but as a continuous tradition. The Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery is one of only three significant public museums in Australia (the others being the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory, Darwin and the Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery, Launceston) whose collections represent both nature and culture, past and present. With the TMAG's collections ranging over the disciplines of geology, botany, zoology, indigenous cultures, history and the fine and decorative arts, fifty paces can carry a visitor past a king crab, a thylacine, a fragment of Murchison meteorite, a model of a giant pleistocene kangaroo, a late dynastic Eygptian mummy, an early Victorian long case clock, a nineteenth century French academic painting and a contemporary Tasmanian sculpture. Individual curatorial departments and research interests may be as intensely specialised and jealously defended as in any institution, but for the general public a subspecies reclassification, a beautiful patina or an interesting provenance mean relatively little. It is the visitor's total experience of the TMAG which leaves an impression, an impression perhaps of untidiness, anachronism and eccentricity but certainly of richness, variety and quality. This exhibition is an attempt to concentrate that impression in a single project in a particular time and space, to present in microcosm, through a focus on a particular subject, some of the Museum's special treasures and something of its special character. The maritime theme was selected for its appropriateness to Tasmania's geography and history, and for the way it flows easily across curatorial boundaries. The exhibition has been timed to coincide with the annual influx of Sydney to Hobart yachties and friends, to compliment the touring exhibition Sydney Harbour: David Moore - 50 years of photography and to anticipate the 1998 Olympic Games arts festival "A Sea Change". But any number of suitably broad fields of interest could equally have been chosen, and possibly will be for future shows: earth, sky, food, shelter, sex, family... In the end what is significant is not the particular theme, but rather the attempt to manage the collision of collections, to both stimulate and control the wash of ideas and associations between disparate and individually remarkable objects. The theme show is not a soft option. It does not so much represent a retreat from conventional academic standards as it does a challenge to such conventions, and to all limited epistemologies. It broadens the mind, embracing the unexpected, the non-linear, the aesthetic, the imaginative, the poetic. Sea shows the museum as the Janus-faced creature it has always been but has sometimes denied: in actual fact a separated taxonomy of singular physical entities, in potential impact an integrated ecology of multiple meanings and values.
David Hansen Senior Curator of Art and Co-ordinating Curator (Humanities) |
The Sea|Preface|Acknowledgements |Catalogue
|Foreword|Credits
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