Page 60 - Museums, Media and Cultural Theory In Cultural and Media Studies

44 || MUSEUMS, MEDIA AND CULTURAL THEORY

In the long term though, avant-garde exhibition practice did transform the
museum by introducing to it an approach to display that interrogated the
relationship between visitors and museum, and pressed visitors to question
their received habits of attending to museum displays. The fourth section of
this chapter considers this in detail. Before this though, we will look at the
realist display techniques of the natural history diorama and the tableaux and
immersive exhibits used in folk museums. These are more conservative in their
conception than avant-garde exhibition design, but they too have been contro-
versial, considered as concessions to populism which are detrimental to a deep
or interrogative understanding of science or history. Like the great exhibitions
in Simmel’s account, they attempt to construct an illusion of coherence. They
are explicitly inspirational, addressing the viewer as an individual and attempt-
ing to create an intense sense of being in the scene (in nature, or in the past).
Each in their own way is a solution to the deadliness of the museum: both
attempt to bring the subject of the museum ‘to life’ even while they deploy
technologies heavily associated with death – taxidermy and the waxwork.

Dioramas as popular education

Natural history dioramas – sometimes described as habitat groups or habitat
dioramas – are displays that use realist taxidermy set in illusionistic scenes. In
the early twentieth century they were also a means of organizing the content
of the natural history museum, addressing the problem of overaccumulation
and the consequent distracted and drifting attention of visitors. The diorama
hall, with its darkened centre, illuminated scenes, and overwhelming attention
to detail, closes off distractions. To spectators accustomed to the bombard-
ment of the senses that Simmel had diagnosed as characteristic of modern
everyday life, the hall of dioramas offers an illusion of coherence. To the
museum, it offered the possibility of regulating the unruly behaviour and
distracted wanderings of visitors (Griffiths 2002: 15). By replacing cluttered
displays, the dioramas changed the way in which the museum addressed its
audience. I have already pointed to some resemblances between the hall of
dioramas and shopping arcades and department stores (see Chapter 1). Here
I will develop this argument further, and examine how dioramas connected
museums to other sites in the ‘exhibitionary complex’. The changed address
to the audience is also to do with a shift in the educational purpose of
the museum. This section considers the educational role of the dioramas in
relation to commodification and consumption.
In a detailed study of dioramas, Karen Wonders links them with a commit-
ment to popular education. In Sweden and the United States, the two countries