Page 19 - Museums, Media and Cultural Theory In Cultural and Media Studies

INTRODUCTION || 3

performative aspects of museums have been written about in terms of the
management of a public. Museums and exhibitions, through techniques of
display and the organization of space and time, attempt to position or organize
visitors, to choreograph them, or to direct and mould their attention. In many
cases these attempts are connected with ideas about citizenship and subjectivity,
but these ideas vary: from docile self-regulating citizens in the Victorian
museum, to Marxist ideas of self-realization and agency in avant-garde exhib-
itions, to the construction of ideal consumers in exhibitions of design, and
ideas of technological citizenship in new science centres. Yet we cannot assume
that such intentions correspond with the actuality of the displays, nor that the
sensory and emotive affect of a display will be complicit with the overt mes-
sages or content of the museum. Hence in science centres, the overt message of
a world rationally comprehensible through science may be undercut by a per-
ceptual experience which connects the exhibit with a magic show. Similarly,
reconstructions of historical scenes may be intended to interest visitors in
the past, but the experience of being able to ‘step into the past’ might feel like a
particularly modern thrill.
Museums need to be understood in complex relation to the wider culture of
which they are a part. Whilst the discourses of the museum may attempt to
distance it from other more commercial and popular sites of display, the chief
display techniques used in museums are shared across these other cultural sites.
One of the virtues of critical-theoretical approaches to the museum has been
the refusal to see it in isolation. Tony Bennett (1995) describes the museum as
part of an ‘exhibitionary complex’ which emerged in the nineteenth century;
William Leach (1989) writes of museums in the United States being part of an
‘institutional circuit’ through which ideas and technologies of display were
exchanged and developed; Andrew Barry (2001) writes of the changes in the
meaning and techniques of interactivity as the concept circulates between
museums and across continents. The museum audience circulates too, arriving
at the museum with expectations and modes of attention shaped by the broader
culture, and finding in the museum material with which to negotiate that world.
I have used existing studies, both well-known and obscure, and from a num-
ber of academic fields, to construct an account which prioritizes the material
character of the museum while recognizing its communicative and ideological
role. Instead of summarizing existing arguments systematically and privileging
the most influential books in the field, I have scavenged through texts for argu-
ments and accounts which enable us to glimpse something of the significance of
the thingliness of museums and exhibitions. The book is mostly based on
existing academic texts, as well as some first-hand research in Britain, France,
the Netherlands and the United States. Unfortunately, this has led to the book
being more centred around examples from North America and Europe than