Page 128 - Museums, Media and Cultural Theory In Cultural and Media Studies

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comparative looking that notes surface resemblance, moves from left to right
and commits things to mind based on their arrangement in a visual sequence.
The dioramas, however, invite a ‘deep and penetrating’ gaze, much closer to
the gaze associated with looking at art (Dias 1994: 171, see also Chapter 2). In
their presence, visitors describe being inspired to environmentalism, being
transformed, or having a moment of revelation – all things associated with the
quasi-religious character of aesthetic experience. The notion of a ‘transform-
ative moment’ has gained currency in museum and zoo design. The view that
museums should offer ‘compelling and transformative experiences’ is held by
the prominent museum designer Ralph Appelbaum (cited in Poole 2000).
Appelbaum’s company designed the interior of the Newseum in Washington
DC, the exhibition halls of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Hall of
Biodiversity in the AMNH and the Horniman Museum’s World Music Gallery,
amongst others.
The emphasis on experience displaces the emphasis on artefacts. This is a
curious aspect of aestheticizing displays – the aesthetic originates as a discourse
concerned with the concrete and the particular, with the sensuousness of the
world – yet the concern with producing a life-changing impact overrides that
encounter. As museum design becomes about setting the stage for transforma-
tive experiences, objects become little more than props or stimuli. The human
subject addressed by such displays is an inward-looking subject. Another way of
explaining this is that the experiences offered are solipsistic. Didier Maleuvre
(1999) has traced the emergence of this solipsistic aesthetic in the nineteenth
century. He sees it as the product of the disciplinary society, as Foucault defines
it (Foucault 1979: 201–2). For Foucault, ‘discipline’ requires that people inter-
iorize social norms and become self-policing. This leads to an emphasis on
interiority and the psyche and makes for a self-regarding subject, to whom the
objective world matters only in relation to the feelings it provokes (Maleuvre
1999: 154–5). Even as the overaccumulation of artefacts in the museum, knick-
knacks in the bourgeois home and mass-produced goods in the market
threatens to force ‘the subject to surrender to objectivity’, bourgeois society
actually produces a ‘derealization’ of the object (Maleuvre 1999: 198, 156).
Maleuvre writes of how the central character (Raphaël) in Balzac’s realist
novel La Peau de Chagrin attends to the objects he encounters in an antique
shop/art gallery. He ‘is not interested in the object per se, in its material thing-
ness’. Instead, the artworks and antiquities he encounters there are stimuli for
daydreams, ‘free-wheeling mental associations’ and ‘the world dissolves into a
solipsistic fantasy’ (Maleuvre 1999: 208). The ‘subjectified object’ becomes an
empty plastic form. Raphaël believes in ‘the compliance of objects’, they speak
to him, and affirm him. This kind of ‘aesthetic behaviour’ treats the work of art
as nothing but a blank slate for imaginary projections. Naturalistic pictures