Page 150 - Museums, Media and Cultural Theory In Cultural and Media Studies

134 || MUSEUMS, MEDIA AND CULTURAL THEORY

combined the technology of the archive or filing system with the communicative
capacity of the museum. In his plans for a World City in Geneva, a project
begun with the architect Le Corbusier but never built, he described as its
centrepiece a new World Palace called the Mundaneum which would include
objects and collections but would be mainly intended to make explicit the ideas
and cultures which shaped them (Vidler 2001; Vossoughian 2003). In the hands
of Otlet and Neurath, the museum would respond to the potential of mass
reproduction and communication technologies to cross national boundaries
and create a world culture. Together they planned ‘a network of museums
dispersed throughout the world’ as well as various publications, including a
world encyclopaedia. These serially produced Mundaneums would consist not
of unique and unrepeatable objects but of reproducible parts. Otlet wrote that
the Mundaneums ‘will collect and conserve objects but they will never have to
be rare or precious, [as] copies and reproductions will suffice in backing up
ideas’ (cited in Vossoughian 2003: 87).
Reproduction enables objects to become standardized and comparable. As
Andre Malraux noted in his ‘Museum Without Walls’ (originally titled Musée
Imaginaire), reproduction imposes a ‘rather specious unity . . . on a multiplicity
of objects’. This is particularly the case with monochrome photographic
reproductions:
Black and white photography imparts a family likeness to objects that have
actually but slight affinity. When reproduced on the same page, such
widely differing objects as a tapestry, an illuminated manuscript, a paint-
ing, a statue, or a medieval stained-glass window lose their colours, their
texture and dimensions (the sculpture also loses something of its volume),
and it is their common style that benefits.
(Malraux 1967: 83–4)
By stripping diverse artistic products of their original significance and func-
tion, photographic reproduction makes the meanings of art a matter of stylistic
comparison, a project that the museum had already begun (Krauss 1996: 343).
Photography doubles the museum effect, taking the already decontextualized
museum objects and equalizing them through enlargement and reduction, the
loss of relative proportion, and similarities in lighting, cropping and photo-
graphic composition. The museum can be seen as extended, insofar as repro-
duction enables objects to travel beyond the museum walls and everything to
become subject to museum-like decontextualization.
Otlet and Neurath used mass reproduction alongside new processes of infor-
mation retrieval to reinvent the museum, returning to an older convergence of
museum, archive and library. Media theorist Wolfgang Ernst sees the Centre
Georges Pompidou (Beauborg) in Paris as ‘actually realizing Paul Otlet’s 1934