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ations and ways of seeing. Penny suggests that the lack of a common interpret-
ative framework between these visitors and the ethnologists was compounded
by two factors: the increased specialization and professionalization of the
ethnologists, and the incompatible experiential worlds which the new visitors
brought to the museum. Penny argues that a population was arriving at the
museum from a world saturated with images, representations and displays of
non-Europeans that directly contradicted the ethnographic project as Bastian and
his colleagues understood it. Museums began to be read as articulations of racial
and cultural difference, as proclamations of European superiority, instead of the
‘human unity’ they were intended to express (Penny 2002: 16, 210–1).
Penny also suggests that this population came with changed ways of seeing
in response to the ‘discontinuous heterogeneity’ of modern urban life (com-
pare Sandberg’s notion of ‘composite viewing habits’ in Chapter 2). The idea
that the new mass audience would develop new modes of attention was
introduced in early twentieth-century journalism and cultural commentary,
and theorized in that period by Siegfried Kracauer (1987) and Walter
Benjamin (2002). More recently, this idea has been expanded in Wolfgang
Schivelbusch’s theory of panoramic perception (Schivelbusch 1986). These
writers argue that ways of seeing and attending to the world are affected and
qualitatively transformed by the technical arrangements of everyday experi-
ence in modernity. These could include (in no particular order) mass-
urbanization and the introduction of the assembly line; the introduction of
electric and gas lighting of streets and interiors; travel at speed on trains; new
technologies of visual reproduction. As feminist writers on modernity have
suggested, those experiences are differentiated according to social position
and gender (Pollock 1988; Wolff 1990; Wilson 1992). The net result is that the
people who come to the museum arrive with differently attuned but distinctly
modern ‘ways of seeing’.
According to Penny, these ways of seeing were antithetical to the ethnological
project because they replaced the gaze with the glance and produced a ‘cogni-
tive distance’ that rendered visitors mere observers rather than participants
(2002: 213). This is reminiscent of early cinema critics’ descriptions of film
audiences, for whom a contemplative gaze is impossible, since ‘the stimulations
of the senses succeed each other with such rapidity that there is no room left for
even the slightest contemplation to squeeze in’ (Kracauer 1987: 94). Because of
this change in the audience, according to Penny, the German ethnographic
museums came under pressure to follow the natural history museums in pro-
ducing didactic displays intended for a broad public of all social classes and
ages. As in the natural history museums, displays were simplified and organized
around a narrative, and exhaustive collections were replaced by representative
artefacts (Penny 2002: 146–7). Thus in the early twentieth century, the liberal