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arrangement of objects within the building (Pitt Rivers cited in Bennett 1995:
183). In the Musée Carnavalet in Paris, visitors are guided by means of arrows
through a sequence of rooms arranged according to the ‘familiar narratives of
French nationhood’. The main interruption in such narratives is the French
Revolution, and here the before and after of the revolution are marked by a
spatial discontinuity – visitors pass from one building into another (Bennett
1995: 184). A further example is the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, the botanical
gardens outside the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle. Lee Rust Brown
reads the gardens as complementing the classificatory arrangement of speci-
mens inside the museum. He refers to the pathways in the gardens as ‘media’ by
means of which visitors ‘walked through the plant kingdom just as one would
“think through the steps” of a classificatory arrangement of information’
(Brown 1992 cited in Bennett 1995: 185).
The exhibition narrative that visitors enact and embody through their
movement may not always be an explicit one, that is, neither explicitly intended
by the curators nor explicitly read by the visitors. In a 1978 article about the
Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, Carol Duncan and Alan
Wallach analysed how the visitor participated in a ‘ritual walk’ organized by
the ‘script’ of the architecture and artworks in the museum. MoMA, they
argued, was structured as a labyrinth, and like the labyrinth in myth and ritual,
it was ‘an ordeal that ends in triumph’ (2004: 483, 492). MoMA is known for
the teleological history instituted in the 1930s by Alfred H. Barr’s arrangement
of the collection. In Barr’s art history, American abstract art is presented as the
culmination of developments in European art. Duncan and Wallach read this
teleology as a gendered narrative, one in which European paintings and sculp-
tures of female nudes come to represent the mother/earth who must be over-
come in the struggle for spiritual transcendence. The latter is represented by the
progressively mystical and abstract works on the higher floors of the museum.
According to Duncan and Wallach, by negotiating the windowless and laby-
rinthine white spaces of MoMA and obediently following the route laid out for
them, the visitor ‘lives’ the ‘struggle’ between the material and the spiritual –
between the demands of corporeal existence and the longing for unity with the
divine. The triumph of aestheticism and abstraction in art, the release of art
from social content, comes to represent the triumph of spirit. Ultimately, in
Duncan and Wallach’s (2004) reading, the museum does the ideological work of
transforming the experience of social alienation (in a capitalist society) into an
individualist notion of freedom.
In Duncan and Wallach’s semiotic reading of MoMA, as in Tony Bennett’s
examples, the significance and material presence of individual objects is sub-
ordinate to their place in the sequence (see also Chapter 1). For instance, they
do not suggest that every European painting of a female nude in the museum