Page 71 - Museums, Media and Cultural Theory In Cultural and Media Studies

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academics and journalists for disliking ‘living history’ and simulation-based
heritage displays, and for associating such displays with mindless gawping
because of their popular appeal (Samuel 1994: 268). It is interesting that the
same exhibits are understood by their advocates as producing transformative
experiences closely related to aesthetic experience – it seems that how audience
attention is read depends on notions of class and the value attached to mimesis
(see also Chapter 4, section 2).
The museum seeks to manage attention because all attempts at classifying
and organizing its objects into a coherent narrative founder without the prop-
erly directed attention of the visitor. Given the wrong type of attention, the
collection could collapse again into a ‘mere’ collection of curiosities. The
anxieties expressed by museum directors and staff regarding visitor attention
are linked to the recognition that they cannot entirely control it. In situ displays
seem to offer more control over visitor experience than the orderly collection of
objects. They often require tight control of visitor movement (in some cases
only working if visitors take a particular route through the exhibit or stand in a
specific place). Exhibit designers give great consideration to visitors’ engage-
ment by organizing and controlling viewpoints and pathways through the
exhibits, and by careful arrangement of space within the exhibit. Yet, the view-
ing pleasures visitors experience may still conflict with the explicit ideological
content of the displays.
The possible discrepancies between the stated intentions of museum directors
and the experiential possibilities of exhibits are suggested by Mark Sandberg’s
(1995) study of folk museums. He distinguishes between the ‘eventual social
function’ of the folk museum and its ‘neoromantic’ origins. Like the habitat
diorama, the folk museum flourished first in Scandinavia, where the industrial
revolution came relatively late, and the imperative which shapes both kind of
display is in many ways anti-modern, harking back to a more organic and stable
existence prior to industrialization. The Scandinavian folk museum used
immersive displays to bring folk culture closer, but the ways these displays posi-
tioned and addressed the visitors often ended up confirming and reproducing
modern, panoramic and voyeuristic ways of seeing (Sandberg 1995: 321–5).
Sandberg argues that the pleasures that visitors got (and still get) from these
kinds of displays were peculiarly modern pleasures related to mobility. Visitors
reported enjoying the ability to dip into the past and re-emerge from it, together
with the sense of themselves (and the past) being both present and absent
(Sandberg 1995: 349). Artefacts heavy with historical resonance were placed in
scenes, brought to ‘life’ by narrative (through the scene and the accompanying
text), and the presence of wax mannequins in period costume. The construction
of such narrativized space allowed spectators to take up the position of voyeurs.
Sandberg describes the mannequins as ‘in-between’ figures which enabled visitor