- Points
- 0
Not really, this was an exhibition in the early noughties. I've met the lady who wrote this - she's quite a scholar and it's an interesting read.
The Gay Museum
An exhibition exploring the history of lesbian and gay presence in Western Australia
Western Australian Museum, PerthJanuary 22 to March 16, 2003
Jo Darbyshire
The Gay Museum – a history of lesbian and gay presence in Western Australia
If anything the stuff of human experience is its unruliness: a resistance to containment within a glass vitrine ... Current art practice acknowledges this restlessness of meaning and many artists have made it the subject of their work. In doing so they have put considerable pressure on the paradigms that hold sway in most museums and public art galleries.Today’s art actively challenges the definitions of art, artist, viewer, gallery, critic and even curator.Lisa G. Corrin, Give and Take Exhibition Catalogue,The Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 2001
Like many people, I have always been fascinated by museums and the ‘stuff’ in them. I knew artists worked in museums as illustrators, designers, and prop-makers but it has only been since the mid-1980s that artists have realised they had a lot in common with curators. We both love to collect, and to make meaning using objects and ideas. When I had an opportunity to work as an artist in the museum, I realised I had a rare chance to create an exhibition that talked about history and could use strategies from contemporary visual art to do so.
The way history is presented in museums has changed considerably over the last thirty years. Empirical views of history have been challenged as society has become more diverse.As concerns were raised about access and interpretation, museums began to represent ethnic and indigenous views in their exhibitions. People now understand that the curator is no longer the ‘voice of authority’, and that there is no one, fixed way to understand history. The Western Australian Museum was one of the first museums to present social history exhibitions in Australia in the 1970s, and it is keen to widen the debate about how history is represented in museums.The Museum generously supported this exhibition, allowing me access to collections and freedom to explore and interpret the material.
The theme of the exhibition was chosen not only to redress the lack of representation of lesbian and gay people in West Australian history, but also because few objects had been collected by the Museum to illustrate homosexuality or to acknowledge this cultural group. On the face of it lesbian and gay people had no history. Given this absence, my challenge as an artist was to find creative solutions to talk about our history and what meaning could be made of it.
Museums have many rules and perhaps this is one of the reasons artists feel drawn to them. Questioning rules is one of our strengths. However, it is not the artist’s wish to break rules for the sake of it, as many people fear. Rather, by breaking institutional conventions I saw the possibility of opening up new meanings and ideas. Traditionally, museums have tended to display objects in terms of their classification, referring to their function, provenance, or in the case of natural history specimens, their place in a taxonomic order. In this exhibition, I wanted to overcome this ‘unwritten’ rule by exploring other ways objects can be interpreted when displayed.
Artists bring with them training in lateral thinking and the skill of ‘looking’.This looking is the ability to see how ideas might connect with material objects: to see symbolic content and possibilities for other meanings in the materiality or
aesthetic of an object. In The Gay Museum, I appropriated objects from collections of social and maritime history, anthropology and natural science and tried to use them symbolically, ironically and humorously. Objects hold memories – our memories – and especially those to do with sex and place: touch, emotion, body, transience, fantasy and love. Unlikely objects, thrown together casually or juxtaposed with text, may evoke new meanings.
Sexuality was not traditionally something museums have been comfortable talking about, unless connected to natural science discussions. Human sexuality is notoriously fluid and changeable; a person may have different needs and desires at different stages in their lives, and fall under various definitions or labels as they do so. One thing that is certain is that the idea of heterosexuality can’t, by definition, exist without its binary opposite – homosexuality.The two have always been connected and, as the many definitions of sexual identity presented in this exhibition show, there have been many places to linger or hide between these two points. Homosexual activists, in their demands for sexual freedom, have perhaps acted as a catalyst for change in the ‘straight’ community. By reflecting on the experiences of homosexual people and their presence, I hope this exhibition encourages richer discussions about the history of sexuality in Western Australia. I believe there needs to be more effort to record and represent lesbian and gay history in our public institutions. Historian Gary Wotherspoon has said that such material has simply been suppressed in Australia. He asserts that historians have been
complicit in this, and has pointed out that material has been destroyed, either by the authorities, who wished to deny that1
such widespread behaviour existed or by relatives and family intent on protecting their ‘good name’.
While researching this exhibition, the gaps in knowledge, the collusion to keep quiet, the eradication of knowledge or memory, self-censorship and the fear of exposure in the lesbian and gay community were heartbreakingly apparent. For many people, safety lay in the eradication of all evidence of difference. Many things, such as photographs and artefacts, that signal significant moments in our history were just too dangerous to keep. Researcher Reece Plunkett suggests that these actions are evidence that gay and lesbian people have had a fundamentally different experience of history, and that
how history is hidden or disallowed is important evidence of the experience itself. She encourages us to write about2
sexuality as a central element of Western Australian history, not simply to append or consider it as an after thought.
It is with heartfelt thanks that I acknowledge those people who have spoken to me in oral histories, who shared their precious photographs, objects and private stories, and contributed to this exhibition in so many ways. These people show that our varied experience of lived sexuality, our lives as homosexual people, and our history of fighting for equality have only contributed to a richer West Australian history.
Research Institute for Cultural Heritage, Curtin University of Technology; Western Australian Museum
The Gay Museum
An exhibition exploring the history of lesbian and gay presence in Western Australia
Western Australian Museum, PerthJanuary 22 to March 16, 2003
Jo Darbyshire
The Gay Museum – a history of lesbian and gay presence in Western Australia
If anything the stuff of human experience is its unruliness: a resistance to containment within a glass vitrine ... Current art practice acknowledges this restlessness of meaning and many artists have made it the subject of their work. In doing so they have put considerable pressure on the paradigms that hold sway in most museums and public art galleries.Today’s art actively challenges the definitions of art, artist, viewer, gallery, critic and even curator.Lisa G. Corrin, Give and Take Exhibition Catalogue,The Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 2001
Like many people, I have always been fascinated by museums and the ‘stuff’ in them. I knew artists worked in museums as illustrators, designers, and prop-makers but it has only been since the mid-1980s that artists have realised they had a lot in common with curators. We both love to collect, and to make meaning using objects and ideas. When I had an opportunity to work as an artist in the museum, I realised I had a rare chance to create an exhibition that talked about history and could use strategies from contemporary visual art to do so.
The way history is presented in museums has changed considerably over the last thirty years. Empirical views of history have been challenged as society has become more diverse.As concerns were raised about access and interpretation, museums began to represent ethnic and indigenous views in their exhibitions. People now understand that the curator is no longer the ‘voice of authority’, and that there is no one, fixed way to understand history. The Western Australian Museum was one of the first museums to present social history exhibitions in Australia in the 1970s, and it is keen to widen the debate about how history is represented in museums.The Museum generously supported this exhibition, allowing me access to collections and freedom to explore and interpret the material.
The theme of the exhibition was chosen not only to redress the lack of representation of lesbian and gay people in West Australian history, but also because few objects had been collected by the Museum to illustrate homosexuality or to acknowledge this cultural group. On the face of it lesbian and gay people had no history. Given this absence, my challenge as an artist was to find creative solutions to talk about our history and what meaning could be made of it.
Museums have many rules and perhaps this is one of the reasons artists feel drawn to them. Questioning rules is one of our strengths. However, it is not the artist’s wish to break rules for the sake of it, as many people fear. Rather, by breaking institutional conventions I saw the possibility of opening up new meanings and ideas. Traditionally, museums have tended to display objects in terms of their classification, referring to their function, provenance, or in the case of natural history specimens, their place in a taxonomic order. In this exhibition, I wanted to overcome this ‘unwritten’ rule by exploring other ways objects can be interpreted when displayed.
Artists bring with them training in lateral thinking and the skill of ‘looking’.This looking is the ability to see how ideas might connect with material objects: to see symbolic content and possibilities for other meanings in the materiality or
aesthetic of an object. In The Gay Museum, I appropriated objects from collections of social and maritime history, anthropology and natural science and tried to use them symbolically, ironically and humorously. Objects hold memories – our memories – and especially those to do with sex and place: touch, emotion, body, transience, fantasy and love. Unlikely objects, thrown together casually or juxtaposed with text, may evoke new meanings.
Sexuality was not traditionally something museums have been comfortable talking about, unless connected to natural science discussions. Human sexuality is notoriously fluid and changeable; a person may have different needs and desires at different stages in their lives, and fall under various definitions or labels as they do so. One thing that is certain is that the idea of heterosexuality can’t, by definition, exist without its binary opposite – homosexuality.The two have always been connected and, as the many definitions of sexual identity presented in this exhibition show, there have been many places to linger or hide between these two points. Homosexual activists, in their demands for sexual freedom, have perhaps acted as a catalyst for change in the ‘straight’ community. By reflecting on the experiences of homosexual people and their presence, I hope this exhibition encourages richer discussions about the history of sexuality in Western Australia. I believe there needs to be more effort to record and represent lesbian and gay history in our public institutions. Historian Gary Wotherspoon has said that such material has simply been suppressed in Australia. He asserts that historians have been
complicit in this, and has pointed out that material has been destroyed, either by the authorities, who wished to deny that1
such widespread behaviour existed or by relatives and family intent on protecting their ‘good name’.
While researching this exhibition, the gaps in knowledge, the collusion to keep quiet, the eradication of knowledge or memory, self-censorship and the fear of exposure in the lesbian and gay community were heartbreakingly apparent. For many people, safety lay in the eradication of all evidence of difference. Many things, such as photographs and artefacts, that signal significant moments in our history were just too dangerous to keep. Researcher Reece Plunkett suggests that these actions are evidence that gay and lesbian people have had a fundamentally different experience of history, and that
how history is hidden or disallowed is important evidence of the experience itself. She encourages us to write about2
sexuality as a central element of Western Australian history, not simply to append or consider it as an after thought.
It is with heartfelt thanks that I acknowledge those people who have spoken to me in oral histories, who shared their precious photographs, objects and private stories, and contributed to this exhibition in so many ways. These people show that our varied experience of lived sexuality, our lives as homosexual people, and our history of fighting for equality have only contributed to a richer West Australian history.
- GarryWotherspoon,‘PrivateVice to Public history:Homosexuality inAustralia’,Public History Review,vol.1,1992.
- Reece Plunkett, 'History, Sexuality,Western Australia', conference paper, Homosexual Histories Conference, Melbourne, 1988.
Research Institute for Cultural Heritage, Curtin University of Technology; Western Australian Museum
Last edited by a moderator: