Page 118 - Museums, Media and Cultural Theory In Cultural and Media Studies

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actually represents earth mother/goddesses, nor that every abstract painting at
the end of the sequence represents the triumph of spirit, but rather that they
come to represent this through the museum’s staging of them. In Pitt Rivers’
proposed rotunda, the visitor would still need labels to identify each artefact or
specimen within the exhibition, but their spatial ordering makes explicit their
place in relationship to the other specimens, that is, the larger message regarding
the movement from one historical period to another.
Another example is given by the cultural geographer Richard Hornsey. He
writes about the Britain Can Make It exhibition, held at the Victoria and Albert
Museum in London in 1946. Hornsey notes that though at first the exhibition
seems to be about the individual commodities on display, its impact, as recog-
nized by visitors, was more to do with the construction of spaces, and through
that the validation of certain kinds of social and domestic activity (2004: 32).
Britain Can Make It was organized by the new Council for Industrial Design,
and intended to educate the taste and shape the lifestyles of its visitors, as well
as promote British design, in the aftermath of the Second World War. Hornsey
places it in the context of wider reconstructive efforts, and especially in relation
to Patrick Abercrombie’s plans for the reconstruction of post-war London. The
plans included zoning the city into discrete spaces for residence and industry,
play and work, and so on. Through spatial planning, the exhibition and the
planning documents prescribed the social activities that were to take place in
the city. The most popular part of the exhibition, the Furnished Rooms, were in
situ exhibits, mock-ups of rooms much like the simulated rooms of the folk and
historical museums, and especially the furnished rooms displayed in the Ideal
Home Exhibitions. They were arranged according to function: schoolrooms
and offices, kitchens, bathrooms, bedrooms, living-rooms, each allocated to a
fictional inhabitant described by occupation. These Furnished Rooms ‘were
less about the artefacts that would fill Britain’s post-war homes than where
these objects would be placed and how they would be arranged’. Visitors were
invited to think like planners, and to imaginatively involve themselves in the
construction of social spaces (Hornsey 2004: 34).
Britain Can Make It was the first major British exhibition to have a heavily
controlled route through its displays. Hornsey connects the attempt to control
visitors’ movement through the exhibit (and the monitoring of their time spent
there) with wider anxieties about controlling space and social activity in the
city, and he associates the movement of people around the exhibition with
developing forms of citizenship in an era of decolonization and reconstruction.
He reads the controlled flow of visitors as a microcosmic version of other forms
of circulatory movement: the circulation of traffic within the city and the inter-
national flow of commodities and sterling that would link the nations of the
new commonwealth (Hornsey 2004: 37, 58). Bennett similarly identifies the