Page 164 - Museums, Media and Cultural Theory In Cultural and Media Studies

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l’Évolution, glass stands in for a penguin’s ice floe or is used to invisibly suspend
fish and crustacean specimens at the same time as evoking their watery habitat.
In new exhibitions, glass is the magical substance that holds together the dis-
play, at times self-effacing and nearly invisible, at other times, made visible by
having images on its surface, or deliberately displayed to be seen from the side
exposing its blue-green density.
Just as it had at the Crystal Palace, glass still succeeds in seeming to be
simultaneously the epitome of high technology and simplicity itself. Yet I think
that the way glass is used in such exhibits is different from some of its earlier
uses. For instance, a number of writers have described the use of glass shelving
and glass supports in combination with boutique lighting and minimal label-
ling as part of an aestheticizing tendency in museum display. Unlike many other
materials, glass does not easily bear the signs of wear. Immediate traces of use
(fingerprints for instance) can be wiped away. Its hard, reflective surfaces show
little signs of age and use. This, plus the fact that fashions in glass display
techniques are shared across the museum and the store, reinforces the sense that
glass is the perfect fetishistic casing, isolating displays from time itself, and
dissociating them from the human social activities which made them meaning-
ful and valuable in the first place. Sandwiched between sheets of glass, isolated
by a single spotlight, and set against a plain background, artefacts and speci-
mens seem to float, and draw attention only to their formal, visual qualities
(Torgovnick 1990: 81; Duncan 1995: 19; Clifford 1997: 114). In displays of
African art for instance, such techniques have been used to encourage a respect-
ful approach to the products of non-Western cultures, now perceived as objects
of beauty as much as objects of ethnography. Though well-meant, such an
approach may end up reproducing Eurocentrism, imposing Western ideas
about art and aesthetic experience onto quite different cultures whilst making it
difficult to make comparisons or develop a contextual understanding (Clifford
1988: 189–214).
However, I want to argue that in the new kinds of displays which I am loosely
calling ‘curiosity-style’, glass is sometimes used differently, to encourage and
produce, not restrain, comparisons and correspondences, and to connect differ-
ent areas of the exhibition space. For instance, at the National Museum of
Ethnology in Leiden, glass was extensively used in the displays when they were
redesigned between 1996 and 2001. The intention was ‘to show the collection in
as pure a way as possible, without stagey effects or trickery’ (Ban de Sande cited
in Staal and de Rijk 2003: 95). Glass could give an impression of the objects
standing for themselves whilst at the same time preventing the various cultures
the museum represents from being seen as static, disconnected or discrete from
one another. At Leiden, large panes of glass are used to suspend objects and
also allow visitors to see through to other parts of the display, to see parallels