Page 48 - Museums, Media and Cultural Theory In Cultural and Media Studies

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Freud, they played on the eroticism that such materials held for women, not
men. But the stores also held back the objects, placing them – as in the museum
– behind glass to convey preciousness, and also to protect against the nimble
fingers of shoplifters. Such displays work to heighten desire at the same time as
they unavoidably distance the viewer from the thing. Historically the museum
had rejected the appetites (such as curiosity) and put in their place a supposedly
objective and neutral aesthetic value, but it reinstates desire through the use of
store-like display techniques. The play of distance and closeness, absence and
presence, which the glass-fronted display sets up, in both store and museum, is
fundamental to the construction of material things as objects of desire.
Store window displays were designed to entice potential customers and
encourage desirous looking. Window dressing first emerged in the late nine-
teenth century, and the early ‘show windows’ of North American department
stores were astonishingly elaborate. Between the 1890s and the 1930s, show
windows in these stores used live models, mannequins, brightly coloured tex-
tiles, artificial lighting, and animated mechanical displays. Whole scenarios
were created, representing exotic and historical cultures, fairy tales and fan-
tasies. The use of live female models in window displays of lingerie caused
crowds to gather in the streets and even sparked riots (Leach 1989: 117). L.
Frank Baum, the author of The Wizard of Oz, wrote a handbook for dry goods
(i.e. textiles) window dressers which was published in 1900, the same year as the
first Oz book. According to Baum, the shop windows ought to arouse curiosity,
using all the ‘humbug’ and wizardry of the trade, to invest the commodity with
magical properties, to animate it (often literally) and bring it to life – it is no
coincidence that Baum’s children’s books are filled with mannequin-like
characters come to life (Leach 1989: 107–8; Culver 1988).
Like all advertising, in other words, the role of the shop window display is to
fetishize the commodity further. Trade publications emphasized the economic
purpose of the window display, as the Chicago publication the Dry Goods
Reporter advised in 1901: ‘Goods should be so displayed as to force people to
feel that they really wish to possess them’ (Abelson 1989: 73). However window
dressers also saw themselves as artists, the window not as a means simply to
promote goods but also as a means to create a marvellous thing and to display
their own virtuosity. Through a reading of Baum’s window dressing book and
of The Wizard of Oz, Stuart Culver argues that there is an implicit recognition
that the ideal audience for a shop window display is someone who admires the
display but does not want to take the goods home – who recognizes that the
fantasy only stays intact if the display stays intact (1988: 112–3). The moment
the commodity is removed from the display and taken home it is already begin-
ning to lose its attraction. The act of consumption, though theoretically the
ultimate purpose of the display, ends the fetishistic relationship, and kills