ABSTRACT
The central notion conjured by the concept of museum storage would appear to be that of future use. This chapter investigates the teleology implicit in this notion. The dichotomy of storage and display looms large in contemporary museum practice: either something is shown or it is in storage, although displays of open storage aim to challenge this. There also appears to be an implicit conflation between display and use: displaying an object is often thought of as putting it to use, although this neglects museums’ research spaces where objects are used but neither stored nor displayed as such. At some level, the need for storage suggests that a given institution simply possesses ‘too much’ to display or use, generating new technological claims to accessibility, most notably ‘virtual’ access via online platforms, especially through digital photography. But perhaps most important is the way museum storage has given rise to narratives of object bounty yet also endlessly deferred promises of value. Such promises appear linked, in turn, to a modern utilitarian assumption that such collections will prove useful or displayable or accessible at some point in the future – even though this future moment may never in fact arrive. Museum storage might thus be seen as one of the great administrative apparatuses of modern institutions and understood as participating in the promise of bureaucratic efficiency, reminiscent of Latour’s centres of calculation (centres of storage) in his model of the production of scientific knowledge.
This chapter reflects on these themes in the performance of storage in relation to the collecting practices of Sir Hans Sloane (1660–1753). Sloane both pre-dates and undergirds modern narratives about the evolution of public museums: he collected, stored and displayed curiosities in his London home from the 1680s to the 1740s before willing his collections to the British nation. In the process, he created the first national museum freely accessible to a universal public, in the form of the British Museum, which opened in 1759, thus marking the shift from Baroque aristocratic chambers of wonders to public galleries of useful knowledge in narratives of museum history. This chapter challenges the dichotomy between storage and display by examining how Sloane’s storage in fact functioned as a form of display – one that aestheticised his collections while exhibiting the technical prowess of his specimen preservation. It makes something of the Gothic connotations of ‘Tales of the Crypt’ by discussing how Sloane became something of a museological ‘madwoman in the attic’, as much of his collection was moved from display to storage (or indeed destroyed) by subsequent curatorial regimes at the British Museum, and became linked to discourses of embarrassment, monstrosity, madness and rubbish.
