The Construction of Meanings in Museums

The museum is a construct; the collections and the physical building are enclosed by a structure, invisible to the eye, which is created by the context in which the museum is being viewed. The nature of that structure will depend on the viewer; he or she will make his or her own meanings. Reinhard Bernbeck, in his paperThe exhibition of architecture and the architecture of an exhibition, has investigated how the Pergamon Museum can simultaneously mean different things to different people, according to their cultural perspective. What is at the core of this is the political and social nature of museums, and one of the most dominant aspects of this is the demonstration of power. This determines how the museum collects, interprets and displays both the objects and itself, and is related to both Bernbeck's colonial and postmodern readings of the museum, as well has his discussion of ‘pragmatist’ and ‘purist’ approaches to museums in general. Though his paper is based on a case study of the Pergamon Museum in Berlin, the issues he raised are applicable to museums elsewhere. In this response to his paper, I am going to look at what this demonstration of power reflects about what museums mean and how they function and relate Bernbeck's evaluation to museum development I am most familiar with, that in Ireland.