Page 47 - Museums, Media and Cultural Theory In Cultural and Media Studies

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Period rooms were first used in museums at the turn of the century, and in
the 1920s and 1930s the department stores used them – at one point Macy’s in
New York had 65 such rooms (Harris 1978: 162). Window displays and museum
dioramas both made use of wax mannequins, and new lighting technologies
and techniques (such as ‘boutique lighting’) were shared between the stores and
the museums. These similarities are not unintentional or coincidental. William
Leach writes of ‘a powerful institutional circuit through which merchandising
ideas passed and were given aesthetic shape’ in the United States (1989: 128).
This circuit, as Leach says, included the museum. The newly wealthy impresarios
who ran the department stores, such as Wanamaker and Blum, sat on the
directorial boards of the major American museums in the mid- and late nine-
teenth century. They even founded museums – the Field Museum in Chicago
was founded on the basis of a million dollar donation by Marshall Field (Conn
1998: 78). They supported the arts through their stores and, from the turn of
the twentieth century, began to finance art exhibitions.
Several designers and curators operated in both the worlds of merchandising
and museum display, influencing each with ideas derived from the other. For
instance, Joseph Urban, an Austrian who designed ‘some of the first modern
museum interiors’ as well as theatre sets, murals and hotel interiors, was com-
missioned in the 1910s and ’20s to transform the interior décor of various large
department stores in the United States (Leach 1989: 122–5). The curator
Stewart Culin, known for his innovative displays and his campaigning against
the dry and cluttered displays of the museums, had come from a mercantile
background. He forged close connections between the museum displays and
displays in department stores (Leach 1989: 130; Bronner 1989). The department
stores created a new social élite in America, and the museums aggrandized
them, gave them the appearance of magnanimity and immortalized them
(Duncan 1995: 54, 83). They also provided new opportunities which shaped a
generation of designers, display artists and architects. The museums became a
resource for these designers, a place where inspiration for display themes and
settings could be found (Leach 1989: 126).
Department stores helped produce a world of display organized around the
desirability of goods. Displays work on the level of affect, they appeal to the
body, the emotions and the senses. They turn objects into fetishes, not just in
the Marxist sense, but also in the sense developed in the psychoanalytic theories
of Sigmund Freud. Fetishism in Freudian terms is the transferral of (usually
male) sexual desire onto a material thing (Freud 1953, 1961). Certain things
lend themselves to fetishism more than others, for instance certain kinds of
clothing and fabrics because of their role in concealing women’s bodies. The
nineteenth-century department stores played on the sensuality of materials such
as silks and furs, enabling customers to touch and stroke them. Contradicting