Page 70 - Museums, Media and Cultural Theory In Cultural and Media Studies

54 || MUSEUMS, MEDIA AND CULTURAL THEORY

contemplation is associated with middle-class aesthetic appreciation and self-
possession. The dictionary definition of a gape as ‘a gaze of wonder or curiosity’
reveals the modern association of curiosity and wonder with passive spectator-
ship. This kind of looking is the antithesis of the gaze – which connects looking
to power, and possession. In cultural theory the gaze describes an abstracted act
of looking, characteristically disembodied, distanced and assured. The gape, by
contrast, is bodily; as the gawker’s eyes widen, and his or her mouth drops open
(‘gapes’) or yawns (‘gawps’). As the adjective ‘gawky’ suggests, this kind of
looking involves a dropping of composure, and a bodily awkwardness.
Since gawping is not simply an internal and invisible disposition but a highly
visible form of public behaviour, it is available to be policed. As Tony Bennett
has argued, in the nineteenth century the public museums begin to function as
‘instruments for the reform of public manners’ through a process of self-
surveillance (1995: 90). Gawping is both ill-mannered and unselfconscious. In
the 1930s, Walter Benjamin wrote of the badaud (gawper or gawker) intoxi-
cated by the city sights, completely losing herself or himself in spectacle. When
the badaud’s shifting, drifting attention does alight upon an object it fixes
excessively – he or she becomes totally absorbed in the object, unable to take a
critical distance, self-oblivious. Unable to classify or make sense of the world,
the badaud confronts it ‘with a wild and vacant stare’ (Benjamin 1983: 69;
Gunning 1997: 27–8 and Edgar Allan Poe cited in Gunning 1997: 32). Anyone
can become a badaud if they let their guard slip. By the 1840s class distinction
had become increasingly a matter of miniscule coded differences in dress and
comportment, especially amongst men (Sennett 1993: 164–8). The mingling of
social classes in public spaces such as the museum and on city streets gave a new
importance to questions of visible social distinction. Young women were
advised to police their own looking, and to be careful not to treat high-cultural
objects as ‘gape-seed’. Policing gawping is about policing class distinctions, and
the distinction of the (bourgeois) self from the mass. To become a badaud is to
join the masses: ‘Under the influence of the spectacle which presents itself to
him, the badaud becomes an impersonal creature; he is no longer a human
being, he is part of the public, part of the crowd’ (Fournel cited in Benjamin
1983: 69).
The introduction of immersive, mimetic and environmental displays, such as
the diorama and the historical reconstruction, was an attempt to counter dis-
traction and produce rapt attention. Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett uses the
term in situ to describe these kinds of displays, which ‘at their most fully
realized . . . recreate a virtual world into which the visitor enters’ (1998: 3–4).
Ironically such exhibits have become the ones most often associated with gawp-
ing, accused of producing passive and uncritical spectators who lose themselves
in the illusion. In the 1990s, the historian Raphael Samuel castigated British