The tank that was supposed to exhibit the Gulf of Mexico's marine life is instead decorated with stickers that look like oil.
The National Mississippi River Museum & Aquarium in Dubuque, Iowa has gotten a lot of press lately for their exhibit on the oil spill. Rather than filling a new tank with marine life from the Gulf of Mexico, as originally planned, the aquarium instead decided to recreate a marine scene blighted by oil.
Ideum, makers of multitouch hardware and software, have also created an exhibit on the oil spill: an interactive Flickr and Google Maps mashup, which, according to their blog, “combines oil spill and fishing restriction data from NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association) with eyewitness photographic and video accounts from the Gulf of Mexico.” Ideum is offering the program free to any educational institution that has a multitouch table.
I can’t tell whether either of these exhibits address the question of why the spill happened and how to prevent another one. It’s commendable that zoos and aquaria are offering help for the wildlife rescue effort, but I’m interested to see how these institutions will present the disaster to the public in the longer term. Will exhibitions discuss the lack of inspections, or compare Great Britain’s more stringent regulations (and vastly better spill record) to those in the U.S? Will they confront the real (and politically fraught) reasons that this environmental disaster happened?
This brings up a question I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. Can (and should) exhibitions tackle these hazardous political issues? Whether it’s preservation of natural or cultural treasures, or the interpretation of a preventable disaster, an exhibition is truly memorable only if it’s life-changing. And it can’t be life-changing if it doesn’t challenge your view of the world in some way.
Back in 2001, museum consultant Kathleen McLean was involved in developing the exhibition “Darkened Waters: Profile of an Oil Spill,” about the Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska, for the Pratt Museum in Kachemak Bay. The exhibition traveled around the country, and even stayed for a time at the Smithsonian Institution’s Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. In a thoughtful case study on ExhibitFiles.org, McLean discusses some of the political and monetary challenges the exhibit development team faced. In spite of the problems, they managed to push through, and created what sounds like a popular and meaningful experience. They let the images and the people involved tell the story, and so avoided sounding preachy.
And yet, McLean seems to feel that the exhibition didn’t have as much of an impact as she would have liked. From the vantage point of the November 2007 oil spill in San Francisco, she writes, “As I sit here looking out on the oiled San Francisco Bay these many years later, I wonder if the exhibition really made any difference in people’s lives. It certainly didn’t avert any oil spills.”
The thing is, we don’t ever fully know the effect of our work. It would be an impossible research project to find out how an exhibit like this may have influenced visitors to rethink their politics and their use of plastics, or to ask their representatives to stiffen regulations. Maybe the “Darkened Waters” exhibition did avert an oil spill — who knows? You can’t prove a negative. I don’t want to downplay the importance of measurable objectives for an exhibition, especially in terms of local stewardship, but if too much hope is rested on results, burnout seems inevitable. Like all good work, exhibit development has to be powered by faith and courage: faith that the effort is worthwhile, and courage because anything worthwhile requires it.
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