Page 69 - Museums, Media and Cultural Theory In Cultural and Media Studies

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Attention and mimesis

Illusionistic exhibits address visitors who have formed new habits of attention
in response to rapid changes in social life, new popular entertainments and
forms of transport and communication. From the mid-nineteenth century,
rapid but globally uneven modernization (concentrated not just in western
Europe and the Americas, but in pockets across the continents) allowed new –
or newly dominant – practices of attention to emerge. The characteristically
modern form of spectatorship has been termed ‘panoramic perception’, a
mobile, impressionistic and distracted way of looking, shaped by the experience
of the railway train, the department stores and early cinema (Schivelbusch
1986). Late nineteenth-century museum designers were faced with the challenge
of capturing and holding the attention of visitors accustomed to the fleeting
impressions and spectacular displays of modernity. Visitors were bringing to
the museum ‘composite viewing habits’ and expectations formed in response to
other modern experiences and attractions (Sandberg 1995: 321–2). These were
not well-received by the museum. There was concern that visitors either moved
casually and inattentively through the museum galleries, or seemed to become
intoxicated by the array of stuff in the museum and would gawp at it in wonder,
failing to absorb the pedagogic messages of the institution. Though some
curators recognized that it was possible to learn through experience, without
necessarily becoming intellectually engaged, and whilst museums appropriated
popular spectacle in the form of life groups, tableaux and habitat groups, the
mindless intoxication associated with popular spectacle continued to be nega-
tively valued (Griffiths 2002: 11–6). Exhibit designers worked to produce certain
modes of spectatorship. This can be understood as an attempt to manage the
attention of visitors. Jonathan Crary (1999) has written of how attention is
produced as an object of scientific study from the late nineteenth century, in
response to anxieties about the effects of modernity on people, especially popu-
lations viewed as particularly susceptible. His concept of the ‘management of
attention’ describes how cultural forms and technologies are used, not just to
prevent and prohibit, but also to incite and produce certain kinds of attention.
In the case of museums what was required were docile spectators – engaged and
complicit – rather than passive gawpers or distracted drifters.
Before discussing the ways in which visitor attention is managed through
illusionistic exhibits, I want to say a little about the kind of rapt attention which
was, and is, perceived as undesirable. I want to suggest that the low value
attached to gawping (also called ‘gawking’ or ‘gaping’) is linked to notions of
social inferiority and the threat it poses to class distinctions. Gawping has long
been associated with peasant and working-class behaviour, the behaviour of
children and with idiocy, ignorance and credulity, while composed silent