Dear ICOM Australia members

I thought that the beginning of a new year is a good time to do a bit of an ICOM Australia Chair's update.
 

First, I want to express my best wishes and support for all of our colleagues, and all of the cultural institutions, impacted by the recent flooding around the country. ICOM Australia is one of the foundation members of Blue Shield Australia, which seeks to mitigate against threats to cultural heritage by influencing disaster preparedness and emergency management. We are represented by my fellow Committee members Jonathon Sweet (currently Chair) and Nancy Ladas. Blue Shield is holding meetings this week to begin to formulate some practical responses to assist museums affected by the flooding.
 

Second, and on a happier note, congratulations are due to ICOM Australia Committee Member Jonathon Sweet on the birth of his son Aubrey last week.
 

Third, I've included with this newsletter a short perspective on the ICOM Shanghai conference, held last November.
Finally, I would like to take this opportunity to thank all of you for being Members of ICOM Australia, and I look forward to speaking with you more during what should be an interesting and challenging 2011.
 

Some thoughts on ICOM, and on the Shanghai Triennial conference held in November 2010.

Given its now a few months ago, I want to reflect on the ICOM Triennial conference held in Shanghai last November.   
The conference hosts were lavish in their support for the conference and in particular in the ceremonies and banquets, however the use of the Shanghai Expo site for the conference presented some serious challenges!  The theme for the conference chosen by the organisers and endorsed by ICOM was "Museums for Social Harmony".  Many of us at the conference reflected on the multiple meanings of such a phrase, and this led to serious sideline discussions about how, and the extent to which museums handle and discuss difficult social and political issues.  Perhaps regrettably, this particular topic was not openly discussed in plenary sessions, but it did come up in some of the international committee deliberations (see below).

There were several particularly significant aspects to the conference.  My perception before going to Shanghai was that ICOM has progressed greatly in terms of its general management and its overall profile in the last few years.  I saw this as a product of the ICOM Board under the leadership of former President Alissandra Cummins, and the leadership of ICOM's Director General Julien Anfruns.  This all seemed to me to lay the foundation for ongoing improvements in ICOM's effectiveness as the peak world museum body, and in its organisational efficiency.
 

These improvements, plus my great respect for Rick West, who was standing as a candidate for President of ICOM, and for David Fleming, who was standing for Treasurer, motivated me to stand for election to the Executive Council, as one of the 22 candidates for 11 ordinary member positions on the Executive Committee.
 

Several interesting things happened just before the conference.  Foremost in that was an email campaign to ICOM National and International Committee chairs from a retiring board member, Per Rekdal, that was highly critical of aspects of the direction being taken by ICOM's board and executive, suggesting in summary that the views of general members were not being taken into account enough, and too much power was being exercised at the centre.  This email traffic became quite strident up to the Shanghai meeting.
 

At the meeting itself it became apparent that there was a distinct campaign being waged by a bloc of primarily western European countries against many of the current ICOM management policies and strategic  directions. This campaign was also against candidates who were perceived as representing excessive "modernism" in the direction of museum management and development, and those who were perceived as endorsing an expectation that museums should be expected to raise more of their own funding.  This was against a background of significant austerity measures and budget cuts in European government funding in general and cultural funding in particular, and blame for the Global Financial Crisis  being sheeted home to the USA.  In summary there was general resentment by the bloc towards what was seen as the North American and British models for museums.  
 

At the election this manifested quite clearly.  Neither West or Fleming were elected, and nor was I.  Several key Board members who stood for re-election were also unsuccessful.  I came 13th in the voting, out of 22.  Interestingly, as far as I can tell no anglophone candidate was elected to any board position.

I think that as a result of these elections, ICOM is at an interesting crossroads.  On the one hand we wish the incoming Board led by Hans-Martin Hinz all the best, and will work hard to support them.  On the other hand I sincerely hope that the momentum for modernising ICOM that was really pushed by the previous Board and by Julien Anfruns, is not lost.  
A strength and a weakness of the ICOM conference set up is that the real content of the conference comes out in the parallel sessions of the international committees. but given the way the conference was organised it is logistically very difficult to attend more than one committee's discussions.  
 

I attended and spoke at the Intercom sessions, and these were wide ranging and generally interesting and useful.  Much of the credit for this goes to David Fleming, who stood down as Intercom chair this year, and to our own Lynda Kelly who is very active in Intercom.  David also delivered a special talk about the slavery museum in Liverpool, UK, and that is a difficult issue in that city, and the talk was in the context of the wider need for museums to confront and be part of discussions on controversial issues.  Lonnie Bunch, Director of the National Museum of Afro American History and Culture in Washington, also spoke of difficult issues in working out what that Museum should do and stand for.  I strongly support the need for museums to be part of debates on difficult issues, but my perspective on the conference is that that view is not universal, with a significant group seeing the role of museums to be to not rock the boar, but rather to support the current orthodoxy.  Social harmony? Perhaps.
 

Our congratulations go to the new chair of Intercom, our New Zealand colleague and chair of ICOM New Zealand, Greg McManus.   
 

Looking more widely, the American Association of Museum(AAM) is vigorously campaigning to position its annual conference as the global forum for contemporary debate for and about museums, and thus to position AAM as the real world body for discussion of contemporary museum issues.  Having now been to both ICOM and AAM meetings, I can confirm that AAM is  well on the way to doing this.  However, the great advantage ICOM has, and in many ways why I support ICOM, is the breadth and diversity of its membership.  I fear that if ICOM does not continue a process of modernising its views of museums, we will end up with two world bodies, one more narrow in membership, exclusively anglophone and more progressive, the other widely representative in membership and world coverage, but at the same time more conservative and Eurocentric in its views of the contemporary role and nature of museums.  How ICOM Australia can influence this situation will be interesting to discuss more.  Our museological thinking lies closer to that of North America and the UK, but we sit in a very different part of the world geopolitically, socially and culturally.  Something for us to talk more about I think.
 

And on that note, I would welcome perspectives on the ICOM conference from other Australians who attended, and we will include those in the next newsletter.
 

Frank Howarth
 

Chair