Bicycles in the museum

Sometimes it is hard to tell if an object in a museum is a ‘museum object’ or not. For instance, in the New Acquisitions room in the Deutsches Museum’s basement store there are several bicycles, casually leaning against a workbench. They appear to be working bicycles: they might belong to the museum technicians. Only upon looking more closely do we see that they have been labelled and classified. They are part of a large bequest recently donated by a retired scientist. The bicycles have gone from being working bicycles to being museum objects, and because of this change of their ontological status, they must be handled carefully: they will no longer be ridden. This shows that when everyday objects become museum objects, their original function is neutered, and they acquire new functions.
The bicycles are likely to stay in the basement of the museum, or be transported to a more remote store beyond Munich. It is likely that they will never be displayed, the inevitable fate of many museum objects. It is probable that the scientist who donated the bicycle donated the bicycle along with other, more interesting objects, or at least other objects which have apparently more in common with the kind of things that science museums collect. This shows how museums often gain large and varied collections when people decide to empty their attics or laboratories. In this sense museums are like charity shops with better security systems.
At the Science Museum in London, for instance, Henry Wellcome donated his extraordinary collection of medical instruments only on the condition that the museum took absolutely everything he had collected, and never to sell the collection. The Science Museum agreed, and now has thousands of duplicate objects, such as the drawers containing hundreds of pairs of scissors seen below. The Science Museum has made creative use of the Wellcome bequest, however. In the recently opened Making of the Modern World gallery, numerous ‘everyday’ objects are displayed in cases to illustrate the reciprocal relationships betweens science, technology and society. Many of these everyday objects, such teddy bears, cooking utensils, scissors and bicycles come from the Wellcome collection. This could be the ultimate fate of the Deutsches Museum bicycles if the museum makes a similar exhibition to the one at the Science Museum. It is peculiar and fascinating that the ‘everyday’ objects in this Science Museum exhibition have such a unique provenance. A strange life story of changing statuses can be constructed: from mundane household object, casually used and disposed of, to member of an important collection, catalogued and conserved, to representative of mundane ‘everyday life’, signifying ordinariness behind a thick sheet of glass.