Technikatörténeti szemle 22. (1996)
TANULMÁNYOK - MacLeod, Roy: Modern Times and the Sciene Museum: Museum Knowledge and its Management
3. Looking Ahead Mc-Clung Fleming has suggested a five-fold model for artifact study - involving the five properties of every object - viz., its history, its material, construction, design and function. 27 Within the science museum, this narrative has also to be set within a theoretical and interpretative context, explaining the relationship, given current understanding, of different species of animal, vegetable, or mineral, or the juxtaposition of machines. In a splendid doctoral thesis, Steven Allison has recently shown how a what might have been a straightforward exhibition on the botany of tropical rain forests, prepared over fourteen years at teh Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, instead revealed the a highly politicised evolution, invoking in the observer the need to apply "interpretative flexibility" to apparently unchanging natural objects. 28 In that case, the representation of a supposedly objective nature as a ideological environment owed as much to contextual circumstances as to current research. But the story suggested two other morals first, as objects of biography, museum exhibitions must be rewritten for every generation, second, that knowledge about the representation of any object, including what is known about the object's material, construction, design and function, is negotiable in terms of what is known. Such thoughts lead us to the threshold of a new analytical domain - if you will forgive an oxymoron - of "objective relativism", in which objects are seen as containing many messages, any or all of which invite interpretation and reinterpretation, and none of which can probably be interpreted "fully". The question arises, whether they should be left to illustrate "the fairy tales of.science", or to expose their levels of uncertainty to a wider public. The issue in nowhere drawn more clearly than at the Bradbury Science Museum at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where the visitor can retrace the entire history of the atomic bomb, without feeling any danger or dread, or come away with much understanding of the Cold War. That public to be sure views science museums - natural history and technology - as custodians of confidence, if not outright truth, a truth that derives from but then transcends human experience. This supposed difference between science and, say, the decorative arts, can puzzle museum curators and their clients. After all, a machine is a frozen theory, containing useable knowledge, while a painting is only a fleeting impression, a projection of an artist's mind. Such considerations have recently led one museum director to reflect that: The significance objects, such as apparatus, to a scientific idea is not the same as the significance of the potness (sic) of a piece of pottery. All the qu-
