Page 120 - Museums, Media and Cultural Theory In Cultural and Media Studies

104 || MUSEUMS, MEDIA AND CULTURAL THEORY

chaotic character of many nineteenth-century museums and, crucially, their
illegibility to visitors. At the Boymans museum in Rotterdam, for instance, the
entire collection of paintings was crammed onto the walls, and the rooms were
very dark until the museum was rebuilt after a fire in 1864. The museum pro-
vided very little contextual information about its collection, with visitors hav-
ing to rely on the travel guides such as Baedeker’s (Noordegraaf 2004: 34–8). In
a study of German ethnographic museums at the turn of the twentieth century,
H. Glenn Penny (2002) shows how these museums appeared almost incompre-
hensible to many of their visitors. He suggests that the German museums were
unable to fully organize their collections because of their commitment to an
ethnographic project which required that they collect incessantly, and which
privileged collecting over any narrative organization of displays. The collecting
and display functions of the museum conflicted with one another and con-
sequently visitors sometimes found themselves unable to interpret the crowded
displays. For many visitors the museum seemed either illegible or just packed
full of strange things. Those visitors who took the objects of ethnography to be
curiosities made their incoherence meaningful. For others, the unreadability of
the displays caused frustration and confusion (Penny 2002: 163–214).
Nevertheless where the displays were ordered and arranged by the
ethnologists, they should have at least spoken to a certain middle-class audience
who had a museum set. However, Penny uses the example of a 1909 critical
response to the Grassi-museum in Leipzig to suggest that some displays did not
even make sense to this audience. At the Grassi-museum collections were
arranged geographically, one region following another, so that the visitor’s
progress through the exhibition ‘mimicked a long circular voyage of discovery’.
This display, which would have made sense to ethnologists, seems to have left
visitors puzzled and with only a vague impression. Museum directors and
ethnologists were aware of this and complained about the ‘mindless’ wander-
ings of visitors (Penny 2002: 202).
In the German ethnographic museums, the collected objects were deliberately
displayed to facilitate comparative analysis, and were not placed in hierarchical
or developmental sequences. Still, the audiences had different expectations.
Local élites wanted the aesthetic they knew from art museums: ‘quiet halls for
their contemplation, organized in a way that would allow for their easy move-
ment through the displays and which would satisfy their spectatorial gaze’
(Penny 2002: 14). Here, and in museums throughout Europe, this social group
pressed for more regulation of museum spaces and expected displays to be
orderly and readable (Penny 2002: 199). For visitors who did not have the
‘museum set’, the problem was even greater. The democratization of these
museums at the turn of the century meant the introduction of a new audience
drawn from the working class and lower middle class, with different expect-