Page 108 - Museums, Media and Cultural Theory In Cultural and Media Studies

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exhibits tend to emphasize the coherence of the story and its general truth over
the specific artefact. The experience-orientation of the museum is connected to
its increased mediatization, since it detaches objects and events from their place
in time and space, and reproduces them in simulated form. An extreme example
of this is the Beit Hashoah Museum of Tolerance. It is situated in Los Angeles,
a considerable distance from where the events it represents took place. A range
of interactive and immersive techniques are used to situate visitors in the story
and to stimulate an emotive and subjective response. For instance the museum
elicits empathy and identification through the use of identity cards which
link visitors to real victims of the Holocaust, whose horrific experiences are
narrated to individual visitors in stages as they move through the exhibit
(Rugoff 1995: 105).
This increased emphasis on subjective experience in museums is encouraged
by the discrediting of old dogmas about the objectivity of scientific and human-
istic knowledge and of aesthetic value. In privileging subjective experience,
contemporary attempts to make exhibits relevant to people’s lives are very
different from Otto Neurath’s ‘humanization’ approach discussed earlier in this
chapter. For Neurath, humanization described the process whereby exhibits are
connected with the everyday lives of visitors. Neurath’s branch museums would
address visitors in their own localities and in relation to their own daily experi-
ences. This appeal to the visitor’s lived experience assumed that experience
was social and translatable into knowledge. When combined with the facts
presented to visitors by the exhibits, Neurath believed it could enable visitors
to develop their own informed and critical perspectives relating to their own
economic and social needs. By contrast, in contemporary experience-based
museums, the locality and the specific life-experiences of visitors have little
bearing. These kinds of exhibits appeal to our subjective feelings, encouraging
us to trust those feelings as much, if not more, than any detached presentation
of information. Exhibit designers increasingly rely on psychological approaches
to attempt to control the ways in which visitors make sense of the exhibit
and assimilate it into their own life-experience. The internal spaces of the
Holocaust Memorial Museum, for example, are deliberately designed to pro-
duce psychological effects in visitors, effects heightened by careful use of music
and other theatrical effects (Hein 2000: 65, 147). In this museum the immediate
psychological effects may be feelings of dread and anxiety, appropriate to the
horrific subject-matter of the museum. However, according to some interpret-
ers, the overall psychological effect on certain visitors may even be therapeutic
since the narrative ends with an American liberation and the USA as the coun-
try which offered safe haven to survivors, thus consolidating North American
identity (Lennon and Foley 1999: 49).
One of the most useful insights of Hilde Hein’s argument, in my view, is her