Page 53 - Museums, Media and Cultural Theory In Cultural and Media Studies

2 DISPL A Y

The Louvre is a morgue; you go there to identify your friends.
(Jean Cocteau)
We are not supposed to ask, as my children did when I took them to see
the dioramas, ‘did they have to kill the animals to bring them here?’
(Marianna Torgovnick 1990: 77)

The overcrowded cemetery

While the last chapter looked at how the museum turns things into museum
objects, this chapter is concerned with the development of display techniques.
I want to show how display both puts objects to work and overcomes them,
establishing new kinds of relationships to museum visitors. In the second
and third sections of the chapter we consider illusionistic genres of museum
display that place museum objects in a naturalistic scenes, reconstructing
the environment in which the museum object previously lived. Barbara
Kirshenblatt-Gimblett refers to these as ‘in situ’ displays (1998: 19–20). Here I
also address recent arguments about the modes of attention that nineteenth and
early twentieth-century visitors brought to the museum, and about the edu-
cational role of such displays. In the final section, I discuss avant-garde exhib-
itions of the mid-twentieth century, which set up very different relationships to
the audience, and in doing so, start to challenge the primacy of the object.
These developments in display were partly provoked by concerns that the
experiential and sensory impact of the museum was tainted or corrupted by its
commitment to amassing vast collections and its emphasis on history. This
found expression in a discourse which associated the museum with death, and
that is the subject of this first section.
At the turn of the twentieth century the museum came under critical
attack, as it had at the start of the nineteenth, but this time from modernists.
Attacking the Victorian attachment to the past in the form of the museum