Page 119 - Museums, Media and Cultural Theory In Cultural and Media Studies

PUBLIC || 103

Figure 5 Design for the kitchen of a cottage in a modern mining village by
Miss Edna Mosely ARIBA, displayed at the Britain Can Make It Exhibition,
1946, in the Furnished Rooms Section. © Design Council and the Design
Council Archives, University of Brighton.

controlled movement of visitors through exhibition spaces as part of an effort
to produce new forms of citizenship. He sees the emergence of techniques of
visitor control as developing much earlier, in nineteenth-century museums in
which visitors followed itineraries ‘governed by the irreversible succession of
evolutionary series’. These itineraries make the narrative content of the exhibits
materially embodied, ‘a matter of doing as much as seeing’, but they also
turned objects into ‘props for a performance in which the progressive, civilizing
relationship to the self might be formed and worked upon’ (Bennett 1995: 181,
186). Bennett conceives of these new practices of embodied spectatorship as a
means of impressing an ideology, and for the production of a disciplined self. In
Hornsey’s account, the exhibition acclimatizes people to new forms of social
control and social organization.
Bennett possibly overestimates the success of the Victorian museum’s spatial
narrative. He states that ‘the museum visit thus functioned and was experienced
as a form of organized walking through evolutionary time’ (Bennett 1995: 186).
Other writers, drawing on Dutch and German examples, have emphasized the