Collection storage grabs the recent headlines as the Museum Boijmans van Beuningen opens the Boijmans Depot in the Netherlands and thus creates a new, publicly-accessible facility while closing its main building in Rotterdam for renovation. In addition, this complaint-disguised-as-an-article in Hyperallergic naively suggests we should have less storage for our institutions and fails to offer a plan for what to do with un-exhibited collections. So, I will offer some ideas. The implication of which suggests a great cascade of object redistribution may have begun.
I understand the concerns of the Hyperallergic article: the overwhelming majority of the world’s cultural heritage in museums remains unseen in warehouses that utilize an outsized amount of carbon-producing resources. The solution, as the author suggests, is not repatriation or deaccessioning. Those are important procedures, but fall well short of the scale necessary to achieve the author’s goals. Likewise, loaning, repatriating, or selling these objects and consequently moving them from a climatized storage facility to a climatized gallery, albeit in another museum (or, frankly, to another museum’s storage) does not solve the problem of the environmental impact of conditioning the spaces though it can, in theory, create more accessibility.
The fact that museums, now including the Boijmans, have begun to address this with visible storage facilities that welcome the public, shows that many institutions already understand the issues and have sought to rectify them to some degree.
Open storage at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York from Mind the Museum.
Again, these facilities do not achieve a scale sufficient to accommodate the vast number of objects in collection storage that remain unseen. Nor will they ever. Imagine building a sand castle to store the sand on the beach. Renovating an existing building or constructing a new building for the purpose of making storage visible and publicly accessible clearly requires years of planning, mountains of capital, tremendous opportunity costs, and at least an entire willing generation to get half the world’s museums to do this if they want to. Basically, all options are on the table. In fact, this article from the Western Museums Association optimistically points out that many institutions already deal with this and outlines the many factors at play.
How we house collections is just one factor to making collections accessible but we also have to change how we manage them. I have already written about other ways to responsibly create greater accessibility, transparency, and sustainability through alternative loan models. Decentralizing and distributing. Essentially, how to get objects out in the world is the real question. (We should question how and what we collect too, but that is a war not a debate.) To exhibit it all would require cities’ worth of space.
We can do more than we already do, however. Why not consider non-museum venues? What if the Guggenheim instead expanded into an abandoned mall in Oklahoma for 10 years and just exhibited its permanent collection as an alternative to storing it? To some extent, Japan has already placed exhibitions in department stores to create greater accessibility. For certain, the pandemic has made huge amounts of commercial real estate available. Perhaps opportunity awaits in the darkened food court.
The pandemic (at least in the United States) has also redistributed the professionals in the field which will, in part, make my Oklahoma mall pop-up venue possible. Redistributing museum collections would further this trend or, vice versa, the availability of qualified professionals not based solely in big cities will make collection redistribution possible.
Despite many creative exhibition ideas, we will, however, always need storage. Some museums sit on vast troves of objects that they have not even cataloged; there simply is too much for the existing staff and resources to handle. So we also need to demand that storage facilities meet high environmental standards because they consume the most resources. Many new art storage facilities have already moved to alternative energy sources like geothermal as in the case of Kunstrans Artport in Vienna or Constantine’s Art Store at London Heathrow airport which uses both geothermal and solar power. How do we incentivize more to move in this direction? (Money, obviously.)
In essence, we need all of these tools. An idea for providing the public greater access to our collections is to make storage visible. We also need to redistribute them around the world through loans and alternative venues and implement loan procedures that permit more accessibility. Leadership should seek to creatively bring collections to the public, and build and contract sustainable storage facilities. The more we utilize all options and publicize their use and impact, the more we can put pressure on, create, and affect the heart of the problem – the market.
