Page 116 - Museums, Media and Cultural Theory In Cultural and Media Studies

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These mythic and fantastic aspects of exhibitions may work ideologically.
This view would certainly chime with the critical literature on museums which
sees their displays and their architecture as acting to form visitors as subjects,
impressing a particular ideological content and reinforcing existing power rela-
tions. But it is worth entertaining the notion that the dream-potential of the
museum – not just its symbolic connotations but the opportunities it offers for
wandering and fantasizing – might also (and simultaneously) offer a taste of
freedom. As they merged industrial capitalism with a collective fantasy life, the
great exhibitions also offered spaces for various kinds of subject–object rela-
tions, the development of new practices, modes of attention and types of
experience which were not necessarily anticipated or considered desirable.
Museum spaces, too, work on their audiences in ways not necessarily intended
by their authors.
The uncanny and fantastic qualities of museums and exhibitions are com-
mon themes in popular fiction, but this has been given little attention in the
critical literature. Gaynor Kavanagh (2000) has written about the relationship
between personal memories and the objects held in history museums, and the
way in which history museums work with visitor memories. Other writers have
described the museum as a space apart from the everyday, using Foucault’s
concept of heterotopia (Hooper-Greenhill 1990). However in most critical stud-
ies of museums, subjective experience is understood primarily in relation to the
ideological production of subjectivity. This they have in common with media
studies. However, while studies of media and film may see representations as
interpellating subjects through processes of unconscious identification and
(mis)recognition, museum studies have emphasized how visitors, by following
an itinerary through the exhibition space, enact the exhibition narrative. Over
the next few pages, I look at how a number of studies explain how visitors’
performances are elicited by the museum’s space. The second section considers
how aesthetic experience is associated with certain kinds of attentive practices
and a certain effect of an object on a subject. The third section discusses
museum claims to universality, and occasions when these are contested, in
relation to concepts of subjectivity and identity. The final section is about how
certain kinds of taste and attachments to objects become the basis of gendered
and sexualized social distinctions and identifications.
Tony Bennett gives several examples of the performative aspect of museums.
In Henry Pitt Rivers’ 1891 proposal for an ‘anthropological rotunda’, Bennett
traces the belief ‘that a museum’s message should be capable of being realized
or recapitulated in and through the physical activity of the visitor’ (1995: 183).
Pitt Rivers held the view that if this circular building was correctly designed,
then even ‘the most uninstructed student’ could learn the meaning and history
of each object, simply by following the route and observing the spatial