Page 110 - Museums, Media and Cultural Theory In Cultural and Media Studies

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these oppositions are too simplistic, and we can begin to make finer distinctions.
Recent media theory undoes the opposition between simulation and artefact by
encouraging us to think of all representations as material. The concept of
mimesis is now used to undo straightforward oppositions between simulation
and the real, and suggests how practices of imitation and copying are a funda-
mental means of contact between peoples and between things (Taussig 1993:
xviii, 19–23). The immersive exhibits developed in Scandinavian folk museums,
or the techniques Molly Harrison used at the Geffrye Museum (see Chapter 2)
suggest some of the nuanced differences between the different mimetic and
simulation techniques used by museums, which a simple opposition between
experience and object cannot capture. It is possible to register concerns about
the homogenizing effect of certain simulation techniques and at the same time
value the attempts made by museums to capture and communicate aspects of
intangible and lived culture through techniques of performance and mimesis.
For example, in some children’s museums and exhibits, such as the Tropen
Museum Junior in Amsterdam, performance is used to enable children to gain
knowledge through experience of the various cultures the museum represents.
These children, like the child in Molly Harrison’s example, are not role-playing.
In putting on historical or regional costume and moving through furniture of
the period or place, they do not necessarily have to imaginatively identify with
children of other times and cultures or to pretend that they have had experi-
ences they have never had. Instead, they have the opportunity to bodily feel, to
experience, a small part of the lived experience of those other children.
Many exhibitions use hybrid techniques. Writing about the Holocaust Exhib-
ition housed at the Imperial War Museum, London, Andrew Hoskins (2003)
argues that the use of artefacts from the time underwrites the sense of an
authentic and accurate history, and he associates this with a ‘purist’ as opposed
to a ‘populist’ approach to history. Evidently the project director had an explicit
policy emphasising authentic artefacts, rejecting ‘theatrical recreations’, and a
display strategy ‘intended to make the visitor think rather than overwhelm them
with emotion’ (Bardgett, cited in Hoskins 2003: 14). Nevertheless techniques
are used to try and evoke a sense of ‘being there’ – so that the visitor moves in a
journey through time. This object-based exhibition uses more than 30 TV
screens incorporated into the surfaces of the display (Hoskins 2003: 19).
Hoskins questions the notion that an artefact-driven display would avoid emo-
tionally overwhelming visitors. Indeed, he argues that the exhibition’s ‘purist’
approach, by not dealing with the Holocaust’s presence in the years that
followed, or with media and popular histories, makes it ‘all the more
uncompromising and overwhelming’ (Hoskins 2003: 20).
Theories of learning through experience offer one way to rethink the oppos-
ition between object-led and experience-led exhibits. Contemporary museums