ABSTRACT
Visible storage is neither a particularly new term nor a particularly consistent set of practices. I am less concerned with defining visible storage or outlining its natural history than I am in considering why visibility is so frequently invoked by museums. One motivation might be anxiety: institutions feel the need to justify the existence and expense of maintaining large, mostly unseen, collections. Hence the turn towards visible storage is one attempt amongst a variety of strategies to be anti-elitist, demystifying and public-facing. Here is all of our collection, without concealment, all of which could be potentially inspected or studied by anyone. But often by gesturing, visually, to the enormity of their collections, museums reaffirm their aura and privileged authority: look at how much stuff we have! Even if we take it as given that ‘visible storage’ does not reveal the backstage, but is just another form of front-stage performance, what is revealed and what is not revealed is nevertheless of significance. What is stored in the Museum Director’s office is seldom made visible, and the same is true for the janitorial staff’s cleaning closet. Is it the collection that is made visible, on guided or self-guided storeroom tours, or glimpsed through carefully positioned glass walls and windows, or is it just as much the logistics and architecture of storage, movable racks, trolleys and ladders that is made visible? Is the solution to the anxiety not to display as many objects as possible, but to display curatorial practice, to display and valorise a very particular type of labour? This chapter considers how it is often industrious curatorial and collections management work, or its stylised vestiges, that is on display. Being on display (or not) has certain consequences for both employees and their managers, objects in collections re-attain legitimacy and value because they can be moved around, and, somewhat weirdly, beautifully crafted shelves, crates and packaging materials become a newly visible type of fetishised museum object.
