Page 49 - Museums, Media and Cultural Theory In Cultural and Media Studies

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the commodity. The moment when the commodity actually comes to life is
in the display. For the true window shopper, the shop window is like a
museum display. When department store techniques are appropriated for the
museum, the visitor in the museum may become like a window shopper. And
the museum display technique which most resembles shop windows is the
habitat diorama – a genre common to natural history museums in the United
States and in Sweden and less used elsewhere. Both window displays and dio-
ramas produce an oscillation between closeness and distance, between wanting
to enter the scene and being placed outside it, something that is encouraged by
their shared use of sheet glass, three dimensional models and lighting.
Natural history museums in the United States began to construct whole halls
of dioramas in the 1920s. Possibly the first was the Hall of North American
Mammals in the California Academy of Sciences, San Francisco. By 1929, the
American Museum of Natural History in New York (AMNH) had five halls
being planned. From the point of view of a visitor in the darkened hall, each
backlit diorama appears like a shop window. Some halls, such as the Akeley
Hall of African Mammals in the AMNH, have two tiers, making them remin-
iscent of shopping arcades and early malls. Cinema scholar Alison Griffiths
argues that the hall of dioramas was a solution to a problem of attention in the

Figure 1 The Akeley Hall of African Mammals at the American Museum of
Natural History in New York.
Source: Photograph by the author with kind permission of the AMNH.