The Trojan Horse of the Museum World: An Interview with Steve Lyons of the Natural History Museum

Transcript

Hello and welcome to the latest
installment of Being Human from the
University of Pittsburgh.
This series is devoted to exploring
the humanities, their connections to
other disciplines, and their value
in the public world.
I'm Dan Kubis, associate director of
the Humanities Center at Pitt.
My guest today is Steve Lyons,
director of research for the Natural
History Museum.
The Natural History Museum was
created in 2014 as a project
of Not An Alternative, an activist
art collective originally based in
New York.
Since its founding in the early
2000s, Not An Alternative has
worked to create radical social
actions and intervene in political
landscapes through a focus on art
and design.
A good example of their work is
their collaboration with Picture the
Homeless, a homeless-founded group
that works to raise awareness about
homelessness in New York City.
The collective was also heavily
involved in actions surrounding
Occupy Wall Street, where they
worked towards developing visual and
symbolic links between Occupy and
the movements of the squares and
spreading across the world in the
aftermath of the 2008 economic
crisis. With the Natural History
Museum, Not An Alternative continues
to push for radical political change
while working within science and
natural history museums.
One of the Natural History Museum's
first and most visible actions
involved a successful campaign to
get oil financier David Koch to
resign from the board of the
American Museum of Natural History.
A more recent example was their 2016
project called Mining the Houston
Museum of Natural Science, which
reworked several of the museum's
exhibits to call attention to its
complicities with the fossil fuel
industry and the environmental
injustices perpetuated in its
interest. This sort of
inside-and-against strategy
characterizes much of the Natural
History Museum's projects, and
I began by asking Steve to talk
about the history of the museum and
how that strategy fits into their
work more broadly.
The Natural History Museum was very
much started as
a design problem or as a
solution to a design problem.
And so when we founded the Natural
History Museum, we didn't know
anything about museums.
We were not involved in the museum
sector.
What we wanted to do is we wanted to
devise a kind of Trojan horse,
something that could mimic
the generic Natural History Museum,
in order to enter into the museum
sector and to transform it
from within.
Now that,
like any Trojan horse, is
a packaging project.
Right. So you can get inside.
Exactly. So we began to
see what are the elements of a
natural history museum, of the
generic natural history museum, that
we need
that can make us convincing as a
museum. Because we felt that in
order to effect change within the
museum sector, the best strategy
would be to
engage the museum sector
as a peer.
This is a different strategy than a
typical sort of beating-at-the-door
activist strategy, which
is also useful and effective in
various ways, but not the experiment
that we want it to do.
And so some of the first things
that we did were
build
a website. So we built a website.
We got the domain
thenaturalhistorymuseum.org.
Who knows how that was still
available? It was.
We established an advisory board
of significant members of
the science community,
significant thinkers
like Naomi Klein, for example, major
artists working on environmental
ecological themes like Mark Dion in
order to establish a certain
legitimacy or at least a sheen of
legitimacy. We also engage with
these people to think about how
we should kind of orient
this project. So they were an actual
advisory board, and our advisory
board has grown and is significant
to our work. But first and foremost,
it was an aspect of making
the museum believable.
We faked up a bunch of
photographs of workshops,
of expeditions, all the things
that we could imagine our museum
doing at some point.
But we didn't yet have
the funding or the opportunities
to make these things
present.
And so very much, it was a
paper tiger organization.
It was fake.
So the model fake it till
you make it was very much present in
our work.
One of the-- I guess this is another
kind of question about the origins
of the Natural History Museum
as a project of
Not An Alternative.
And that, as I was reading about
the-- this is another interview
with the Natural History Museum,
it kind of seemed like the project
grew out of your
campaign to get David Koch kicked
off the board of the American Museum
of Natural History rather than being
something where it was like you and
your coworkers
in Not An Alternative.
You didn't set out to kind of target
natural history museums as much as
you did kind of like decide that
that was a way after the Koch
campaign. But I don't know.
I mean, you can kind of correct me
where I'm going wrong there about
that.
Sure. So the first
thing to be very clear on is the
Natural History Museum was not
established as a kind of alternative
organization.
We weren't trying to be
another sort of
natural history museum.
The idea was not to kind of increase
the menu of options
with which museums could choose
or a public could choose.
It was a targeted
kind of political strategy and
a creative activist strategy.
Now, the way that it came to be is
we were invited by an
NGO based in New York who
wanted us to work with them on a
project that would ask
David Koch to pay for
the cleanup from
Hurricane Sandy.
We weren't particularly
interested in that angle.
But in our research process, we
discovered that David Koch was on
the board of trustees of the
American Museum of Natural History
and the Smithsonian National Museum
of Natural History, which are two of
the largest natural history museums
in the United States.
The blatant contradiction between
sort of the ideal of a museum
science institution and
the interests of David Koch in the
way that he's used his financial
capital to spread climate
science. Disinformation was just
really blatant.
So we thought,
"This is an opportunity.
David Koch is like our
muse.
We don't really care, at
this point, about getting
David Koch off the board of trustees
of the American Museum of Natural
History." But it's sort of like a
flashpoint.
It shows people that there is a
strong contradiction
between the ideals and the practices
of mainstream natural
history museums, which can open
up a conversation.
It can open up a lot of soul
searching within the museum sector
by putting it in to the spotlight,
by building a pressure campaign
that gets these institutions to
start talking about their role.
And so it was
started through the Koch
campaign, but we thought,
"How are we going to do a Coke
campaign?" Because
museums are sort of a special
case.
They're not like fossil fuel
companies.
You can get popular support
behind hating fossil fuel companies.
You're not going to get the same
kind of public support by railing
against museums.
There's a popular desire for
museums. They're trusted
institutions. They're family
destinations.
There's a reason why people go to
them. There's a reason why public
schools send their students
to them. And so we thought
museums are actually one of those
kind of public infrastructural
resources that are relatively
salvageable.
Of course, they're compromised by a
history of colonialism, the
compromised by their embeddedness
within sort of neoliberal
capitalism.
We know these things, and we're not
letting them off the hook.
But it leads to a
different set of questions about
what would be an effective activist
strategy.
And so we thought, "Okay,
maybe if we--
if this critique
of the American Museum of Natural
History or this critique of David
Koch's relationship to the American
Museum of Natural History came
from a natural history museum
and was not against
the museum, but against the
infiltration of the
museum by corporate interests,
that we could build popular
support." In fact, that's what
happened.
Yeah, the campaign worked.
The campaign worked.
So our strategy was
to enlist
major members of the science
community to
issue an open
public letter asking museums to
cut ties to fossil fuel interests.
So it's really embedded in the whole
divestment movement.
But we wanted this to come from
important, influential scientists
because they have a lot more weight
within the natural science and
natural history museum sector
than NGOs
and activists. We organized
this open letter as well
as a petition that was more targeted
at the American Museum of Natural
History and the Smithsonian
to drop David Koch, in
particular.
And both of those
circulated wildly.
And it became a sort of viral thing
in the media, which was really
useful because not only do we
build a base of popular support,
gaining 550,000 signatures
for our Koch petition,
but it also put these conversations
about museum ethics, about
the relationship between museums and
corporate interests on the map.
So let me ask you about
your current
exhibition there.
It's on display in Gainesville
at the Florida Museum of Natural
History. It's called Whale People:
Protectors of the Sea,
and it will be there-- what are the
dates again?
Can you remember?
Mm-mm.
That's alright.
It'll be there for the next few
months.
Can you talk a little bit about that
exhibit just as a kind of concrete
example of how the
Natural History Museum does some of
the work that you've been describing?
Sure. So
after the Koch campaign, so
in December of 2016,
David Koch very quietly stepped away
from the board of trustees of
the American Museum of Natural
History.
That was a sort of symbolic victory
for us.
That wasn't our goal.
That was just a flash point, a
way of building kind of interest
and energy around a certain set of
issues. At that point, we shifted
our tactics.
So instead of doing a kind of
insider-outsider strategy of
building external pressure against
institutions at the same time that
were organizing people within
natural history museums to kind of
push these things from the inside,
we decided to invest a little bit
more firmly and thoroughly in
the sort of Trojan Horse strategy.
So if you think about the model
of the Trojan horse, you get to
the Trojan horse. It's let in.
At this point, we're in.
And this was the result of many,
many
months of having conversations
with museum sector people, going to
museum conventions.
Yeah, and we should say real
quickly, like the Natural History
Museum is actually registered as
a museum in the same way that
the American Museum of Natural
History is and all the other kind
of-- officially it's a museum
in the same way that all these other
places are museums.
Exactly. So that was one of the
first things that we did that was
part of a sort of design strategy is
we registered as an official member
of the American Alliance of Museums.
And we go to their
conventions, and we do panels
at their conventions.
And in 2015,
we did an exhibition
on the trade show floor
of the American Alliance Museums
Convention in Atlanta.
Our exhibition was 90
feet long.
It was the largest exhibit in the
on the trade show floor.
And the American Museum of Natural
History was selling the traveling
shows just to start
down. And so we were trying to
situate ourselves as peer
institution. And so, through some
of this work of building trusts
within the museum sector, at the
same time as we were registering
ourselves as a kind of disruptor
within it, we gained supporters.
So there are people within the
museum sector that are essentially
enemies. They stand
for a different understanding of
natural history and a different
understanding of what a natural
history institution can do.
There are also allies within
the museum sector, and this is how
we think about museums. They're
split, right?
They're divided.
And so the project is how do you
organize within that divided
sector to build
trust in alliance, and
then to mobilize that alliance to
push for gains to actually
operationalize demands that may
be coming from outside? Our strategy
shifted when we gained position
within the museum sector.
Basically, we said, "Now we're
a peer institution.
What we'd like to do is begin to
kind of develop
exhibitions, not in
our own brick and mortar space, but
within large
mainstream natural history museums,
in order to sort of smuggle
in complicated
social and political content -
difficult social
and political content - into
museums like the Carnegie
Museum of Natural History, which we
did an exhibition at in 2017
and, most
lately, at the Florida Museum of
Natural History in Gainesville."
Both of those invitations came
through our museum sector kind of
organizing advocacy conversations.
And both are located in
places that have
a complicated relationship
to climate change politics.
And so here we're in Pittsburgh
right now, the heart of kind of coal
and fracking country.
In Florida, the state itself.
So state employees can't utter
the word climate change.
And so there's an appeal
with progressive kind of
members of the museum community,
who are working in these states, to
inviting somebody from outside
to deliver some of this content in
ways that they maybe can't
themselves. In Florida,
what we've done is we're working
with the Lummi Nation, which is a
native nation on the Pacific
Northwest, located outside
of Bellingham, Washington,
who for the past six years has
been doing this project called the
Totem Pole Journey.
So the Totem Pole Journey is
a cross-country tour where
the Lummi Nation House of Tears
carvers annually carves
a totem pole from a
massive cedar tree that is
responding to a kind of active
struggle and campaign that is
specific to the tribe and the
tribe's relationship to the Salish
Sea region, which is where they're
in. And what they do is they travel
this totem pole to various sites of
environmental struggle,
and they do ceremonies.
And these ceremonies are meant to
build solidarity between people who
are facing similar issues across the
country.
And so the most recent totem pole
journey was
related to the Lummi struggles
on the Salish Sea, and specifically
in relation to the orca population,
which is critically endangered
in that region.
Why does the orca matter right now
in the Salish Sea is that,
because it's endangered, it's sort
of a lever for
environmental activists.
An endangered species is a
significant aspect of any legal
strategy to
protect a waterway.
And this Coast Salish
kind of region is really
the key place where,
for example, the Kinder Morgan
pipeline right now, the proposed
Kinder Morgan pipeline, will be
increasing tanker traffic by 800
tankers per year.
And so the Lummi
were really focused on
kind of amplifying the sort of
figure of the orca within this
struggle.
And so the latest totem pole journey
was really around the figure of the
orca.
So that came down to Florida,
and we brought it into
the Florida Museum of Natural
History. We built an exhibition
around it that communicated the
relationship between the orca
as a significant
traditional kind of emblem and
symbol for native tribes across
the Pacific Northwest and
the contemporary struggles to
protect the Salish Sea.
And so we paired
the totem pole with this panoramic
video that communicates
these ideas and,
really critically, objects from
the museum's collection.
So a vitrine of objects from the
museum's collection,
argilite sculptures, that also
include the figure of the orca.
And what we wanted to do here is
show how the
symbols that are active in
native environmental struggle today
are the same symbols
that native communities have held
sacred value to.
The same symbols
and objects and ideas
that have been sacred to native
communities for a very, very
long time, for generations.
But also, the other
significance of bringing those
objects from the museum's collection
into the exhibit
is to signal that these struggles
are already in the museum.
Right?
It's already there.
Yeah.
But, just to pick up on that, so
there's also kind of--
there are ways in which the museum
has included
things in their
collection or so that kind
of like speak to your piece
in that way. And is that one of the
ways in which you feel
like the piece is kind of exposing
tensions that
already exist within the museum?
Not only tensions, and not really
tensions, potential.
And so the significance
of-- so why
are we interested in
working within
museum contexts?
Museums have these vast collections,
many of which are significantly
troubled by histories of plunder
and theft.
There's active movements to
repatriate objects.
Right? But in our conversations
with people who are leading the
repatriation struggles,
we've learned that, actually,
it's not so simple as repatriating
all the objects to all of the
communities right now.
Actually, the infrastructure is not
there yet to be
able to accept all those objects and
care for them.
And so there is a way in which,
in the present term,
the question
for native organizers working
with and within museums
is how do we work
on repatriation struggles, but also
how do we mobilize what's already in
museums?
And so one of the things that we're
trying to do with this is to think
through how do you use an object
that's already in a museum that's
not currently being sort of
fought for by showing
its relationship to ongoing
environmental struggle.
Because that's one of the things
that's really special and
significant and powerful about
the native-led environmental
movement is that
the commitment to traditional
symbols and traditional objects
and traditional cultures
is absolutely significant
to the power that those movements
have. I can get a bit sort of
theoretical here first a second.
That's okay on Being Human.
Okay. So
one of our--
one of our really important
interlocutors with the Natural
History Museum and Not An Alternative
is Jodi Dean, political theorist.
And one of the concepts that she
deploys in some of her
work is the concept of the decline
of symbolic efficiency.
So she argues that in
the conditions of communicative
capitalism, so online
digital flows, all that sort of
stuff, there's been a kind of
crisis in our ability to
communicate.
Okay, so signification is sort of
troubled.
The reason is there's a
proliferation of content.
And in that, through the
proliferation of content, we don't
have necessarily a coherence, but
we have this sort of proliferation
also of these sort of subcultural
differences.
Location to location.
Community to community.
Right? And we can see that with the
online 4Chan culture
or something like that.
And so one of the problems for left
activism is
how do you-- and the question for
left activism is how do you build
a language in common that stitches
together local struggles to create a
movement? One of the answers to that
- that I think is really, really
compelling with the way that
Standing Rock, for example,
mobilized traditional objects,
histories, symbols,
images - is that it
showed that a commitment to a
set of-- to
a visual language, to language
in common, and one that
has history, can answer that
question of how do you kind of cut
against that
tendency on the left
and that tendency in society to
sort of give up on
something that has power
at the first sign of trouble.
So I want to ask you in connection
to this with this idea that
you just mentioned of kind of like
creating a commonality through a
kind of visual language.
Right?
I want to ask you about the role
that divisiveness plays
for you in your work because
creating-- and this is kind of like
reading-- I get some of this in
reading-- Jodi Dean's written about
the Natural History Museum, and we
can link to the essay
because I think it's really a good
essay. It talks a lot about kind of
like your work, and I learned a lot
about the Natural History Museum
from reading it.
And I can link to that in the
comments or the description
of the podcast.
But the idea-- but another thing
in-- so she talks a little bit about
this, you and other places
have talked about - you is
Not An Alternative - talked a little
bit about kind of the role
of divisiveness, making people take
sides and how that's an essential
part of your work.
How does that work together with the
kind of commonality
that you're trying to create and
that you just spoke about around a
kind of common language or a visual
language?
Sure. And so politics
emerges through division.
So that's a sort of a central point
that Jodi makes again and again.
But we've also made it in our work.
So what we mean by that is
the goal of political
struggle,
in the short term, is not
to be
all-inclusive.
It's to name
a common enemy.
Right?
So in the case
of Occupy Wall Street, that was the
1%.
Occupy Wall Street operated
on a logic of division
by claiming the 99%
against the 1%.
That 99% names
a new constituency,
a people, a divided people.
Their interests are different within
it. And there's been plenty of kind
of criticism within
that discourse, which is
important.
But the function of that claim,
the 99% against the 1%,
is to create
solidarity against a
common enemy.
That common enemy goes by
the name 1%, Wall Street, or
capitalism.
That is incredibly important to the
building of solidarity.
You build solidarities
not by inviting your enemy
but by establishing
bonds through struggle.
Without division, there is no
struggle.
Right. So let me ask you another
kind of like-- maybe this is another
big-picture question about
the approach that kind of
Not An Alternative has.
These are big-picture questions
about kind of like togetherness and
unity and how you
approach them.
Because one of the essays that
Not An Alternative wrote about
Occupy Wall Street and kind of
working with Occupy and the lessons
that the group took from that
work,
there's this line, and I can
just read it to you. Because to me,
anyway, it was a very central line
for understanding the way
that you view your work.
And the line is, "Occupiers made
the decision to take up the name
Occupy not because they agreed with
it, but because they knew Occupy
represented something they believed
in, and that they had seen work
elsewhere." Can you talk a little
bit about that, the difference
between agreeing and
believing as it's put here,
and is that central to your
work? And how would you elaborate
on that?
Sure. So that was in response to
a certain set of claims around
Occupy.
Consensus was essential to Occupy.
That it was about agreeing on
a set of general terms about
what Occupy meant.
Now, the problem with that is
Occupy meant very different things
for very different people.
So how do we account for the
strength of Occupy?
That's what we were trying to get out
through this.
And our argument was the strength of
Occupy was that it
was iterating on a language
that had worked elsewhere.
And so Occupy did not happen
in Zuccotti Park for no
reason. It happened in Zuccotti
Park.
So it manifested as an occupation
in a public square because there was
a movement of the squares
that preceded it. Right?
Right. Not in the U.S..
You're talking about--
About Spain, Greece, Egypt.
And so
the way that
Occupy iterated on a common form,
not of the occupation in the public
square, places it in
a
kind of a linkage of struggles.
All of those struggles were against
austerity, against
the 1%, against neoliberal
capitalism, and its effects on
people in very different places.
But it creates a sense
of a movement that threatens
capital.
Now, if it was just
a localized thing, I mean, that
is a struggle that the left has
oftentimes had in the last
30 or 40 years is
the sort of localization of
struggles. So that sort of
particularization of struggles
coming at the expense of the kind of
what was in that anti-globalization
movement I described as the movement
of movements. So the way that
movements come together to
produce a threat
to the capitalist economic
system.
Okay. So let me ask you one-- this
is maybe the last question I've got
for you. It's about a metaphor for
your group. And you can--
I hope this is interesting to you,
but like the one-- we talked a
little bit about kind of like--
you've talked about your group,
the Natural History Museum, as a
Trojan horse kind of being a way
that you viewed your work.
Your website also has a description
for it. It uses the metaphor of a
skunkworks.
And I wonder, listening to you talk
about it now, it's occurred to me
that maybe the
Trojan horse has kind of like given
way to the skunkworks, and you're
thinking about your own work because
you've already been invited inside
the gates.
Does that make sense? Is that the
way to make sense of those
metaphors?
Sure.
So returning
to the metaphor of the Trojan horse,
where are we at right now in this
project?
We're firmly inside the horse.
We're waiting.
We're planning.
We're organizing.
Right?
We're not yet getting out of the
horse. If we got out of the horse
right now, the troops would
shoot us down.
So there's a way in which patience
and organizing are
incredibly important.
But also,
the question that we have from
within our position, within the
museum sector, to get out of that
metaphor can be useful.
And so we think about the Natural
History Museum, not only as a kind
of activist organization but also as
a kind of prefiguring of another
kind of museum.
And that's kind of the model
of the skunkworks of like working
out strategies, tactics
that can be deployed more broadly.
It's a modeling project.
We're modeling the museum of the
future. That's another thing that
we're describing.
And so, from
within the gates of the museum
sector, what we're afforded
now is a certain amount of
legitimacy and visibility with
our peer institutions to model
practices that they can take
up.
And so one of the things that we're
trying to do is to train
museum workers how to
engage with climate justice in
environmental justice communities.
They just don't know many of them.
Most of them.
It's not their language.
Right? From our position within
the museum sector, we can now
work as peers to sort
of train people,
sensitize them, to the certain
way of working with communities
because there's ways of working with
communities that are detrimental to
those communities and their struggles.
And there's ways of working with
communities that can be supportive
of their struggles.
So how can we leverage the resources
of the museum sector, which are
great in terms of financial
resources, in terms of visibility.
There's a public trust.
How do we leverage those
to support struggles
that are already happening?
Okay.
Steve Lyons, thanks so much for
joining us.
Thank you.
That's it for this edition of Being
Human. This episode was produced
by Noah Livingston, Humanities Media
Fellow at the University of
Pittsburgh. Stay tuned next time for
an interview with Ed Ayers,
professor of History and President
Emeritus at the University of
Richmond.

In collections

Being Human Podcast Recordings

Order Reproduction
Title
The Trojan Horse of the Museum World: An Interview with Steve Lyons of the Natural History Museum
Contributor
University of Pittsburgh (depositor)
Lyons, Steve (Cultural historian) (interviewee)
Kubis, Dan (interviewer)
Date
February 1, 2019
Identifier
20230127-beinghuman-0039
Description
An interview with Steve Lyons, director of research for The Natural History Museum, a mobile and pop-up museum project started in 2014 that highlights the socio-political forces that shape nature. The interview focuses on NHM's work within the museum sector, particularly their attempts to change the politics of museum practice. More information on all of the exhibits and projects we discuss can be found on NHM's website. More information on the artist collective Not an Alternative is discussed.
Extent
29 minutes
Publisher
University of Pittsburgh. Department of English
Type
sound recording-nonmusical
Genre
interviews
Subject
Natural history museums
Natural history--Social aspects
Nature--Social aspects
Natural History Museum, The
Not an Alternative (Artist collective)
Source
Being Human
Language
eng
Collection
Being Human Podcast Recordings
Contributor
University of Pittsburgh
Rights Information
In Copyright. This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s).. Rights Holder: University of Pittsburgh
http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/
Rights Holder
University of Pittsburgh

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The Trojan Horse of the Museum World: An Interview with Steve Lyons of the Natural History Museum

In collections