Joana Albernaz Delgado

Museum seating has been an invisible subject to many. Its unobtrusiveness is usually part of its script, but it also reveals how the ‘material culture of everyday life’ of the museum world has been undervalued by historians and researchers. My dissertation aims to bring the history of museum seating to the fore by placing it within broader narratives of museum history and museum studies, finding it a ‘seat’ between the history of display and the history of viewing and experiencing.

Using the V&A’s Raphael Galleries – Gallery 94 and the succeeding Gallery 48a – my dissertation seeks to know what museum seating can tells us about the way the V&A has been ‘framing’ the Raphael Cartoons, and, ultimately, what does that reveal about how the museum has been positioning itself in different times.

The methodology guiding this project draws upon Madeleine Akrich’s thesis on script analysis. Script analysis makes objects talk, revealing their inner ‘manual of instructions’. Indeed, museum seats have embedded messages that condition the way visitors experience museums. In my project, the message inscribed by museums and the message that the seats effectively irradiate are more important than the script devised by furniture designers. Museums shape meaning, sometimes partially unconsciously, by interrelating architecture, space, objects, furniture and visitors. By using specific seats in specific locations, museums act like authors of a broader semantic and geographical script. Methodologically, my work ‘de-scribes’ (using Akrich’s terminology) museum seats in the Raphael Galleries, unpacking their script in context, to unveil the way the V&A has been framing the Cartoons. The ‘de-scription’ flows within a pictorial journey in time between 1865 and 2021 that reveals the evolution of museum seats in dialogue with space, objects and subjects in the Raphael Galleries.

Considering the lack of consistent primary sources about exhibition design decision processes and about visitors’ experience within such a long period of time, script analysis allows the extraction of primary information from the most stable sources available: material culture, covering visual evidence and, whenever possible, the museum seats themselves.

My investigation concludes that the Raphael Cartoons have been presented by the V&A in a dual, albeit non equal, form, which has fluctuated in time between displaying them as art or design objects. The pendular movement that embodies the presentation of the Cartoons is in itself an image of the way the V&A has been shaping its identity as an art and design museum, revealing how both the Cartoons and the museum have been symbiotically evolving over time.

Shannon Finnegan has been designing museum benches for different art spaces since 2018. The series, called ‘Do you want us here or not’, is a poignant response to the lack of seating in museums, a form of seated protest that they shape with words written in all caps on the benches themselves. ‘I’D RATHER BE SITTING. SIT IF YOU AGREE.’, or ‘IT WAS HARD TO GET HERE. REST HERE IF YOU AGREE.’ are two examples of how they use museum benches as art, focusing on the frequently invisible disabled audience.

Although my research does not focus on accessibility or museum fatigue, I borrowed inspiration from Finnegan’s benches after finishing my dissertation, to celebrate my own work on the history of museum seating. Using photographs taken at the V&A, these visual snippets embody some of my conclusions about the power of museum seats and their historical importance. Museum seats convey a specific script on how visitors should experience museums, and therefore they also reveal how museums see their own collections and themselves. Here, they are a graphic expression of my thoughts, an encounter between content and shape, substance and form.

Museum seats irradiate, but they also absorb. They are often covered with scribbles, doodles and scratches, layers of deliberate damage carved through the decades. These visual musings also pay tribute to the rich, albeit hard life of museum seating. They do not intend to praise vandalism and mischief. By inscribing my conclusions on these benches, I intend to acknowledge museum seats as repositories of memories and material instruments of a primary human need to be remembered, to leave a mark, to make an indent. They are also, in their own way, wonderful witnesses of the relationship between humans, their history and their past.

Cloud-talk was an online event led by RCA Sculpture MA graduate Camilla Laing-Tate and I during the AcrossRCA week in February 2021. The session aimed to offer an interdisciplinary journey around, through and in-between clouds, covering history of design, drawing, writing and performance.

The event was divided in two parts. The first part was called ‘Cloud generator: Design for the imagination’. It consisted of a short dialogue between the two session leaders and writer and curator Glenn Adamson, discussing themes around the cloud generator, fantastical designs, design, failure and experimentation. This first part was steered by a short presentation prepared and presented by me, in which history of design was used as a tool to show different ways in which humankind challenged clouds and the sky in different times.

The second part included a workshop called ‘Dream generator: The interpretation of clouds’. Through material provided by the two session leaders, and following their guidance, participants experimented with clouds in a spontaneous and 'unconscious' way, either by drawing or writing. Participants were given a group of images and paintings of clouds, and after uploading them on their phones or tablets, they scribbled on top of the pictures on their screens with digital pens or with their fingers. They could either draw or write freely, or try to interpret what the clouds in the pictures looked like, almost in a Freudian, oneiric way.

Approximately twenty-five participants, among students, tutors and other RCA staff, joined the session. Works produced during the workshop were uploaded live in a shared screen. The screenshot above evolved each time a new work was finished, creating a patchwork of clouds and drawings.

Robin Day's CS17 Pye Model could be identified as an epitome of 1950s modern design: thin, black metal legs, angular cabinet devoid of decoration, light wood, sophisticated knobs. But how modern was it really?

Through a detailed investigation, and drawing upon Latour’s actor-network theoretical framework, it was possible to conclude that although the CS17 was used by different entities to pass different messages of contemporary design, it was actually an object gravely divided by two dichotomies. First, the balance between television receivers as pieces of furniture and technological instruments; second, the tension between modernity and tradition in 1950s’ postwar Britain. In the end, one might speculate that these contrasts are precisely what make the CS17 an unique witness of its time, allowing it to retell its own contemporaneity.

In this project, I used drawing as a way of extracting relevant material within a History of Design context. Making the sketch above generated important visual information that I later translated into words.

This essay was submitted within Unit 2 of the V&A/RCA History of Design MA, which focused on artefacts in context.

'Musical Chairs: Attention, Change and Stasis' was composed in 2021 in response to a series of cross-disciplinary talks and workshops I attended within the Critical & Historical Studies Unit. Inspired by Maggie Nelson’s auto-ethnographic writings, my purpose with this essay was to explore the idea of Attention from my own perspective and experiences as an early career design historian.

At the time of writing it, I had recently finished a short research project about the historiography of the cantilevered chair, and this text was a welcome opportunity to experiment with the essay format and try to go beyond traditional academic writing.

The small pieces of text above belong to this essay. They capture the interconnections between history, historiography and the chair, which is depicted both as an instrument of focus and attention and the embodiment of historians' subjectivity, 'sitting' on their own chairs in their own time periods.