Page 72 - Museums, Media and Cultural Theory In Cultural and Media Studies

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identification because they appeared both alive and dead, present and absent.
This ‘in-betweenness’ helped visitors to imaginatively substitute themselves for
the mannequin (Sandberg 1995: 331–7; Metz 1982: 42–57). In this sense the
mannequins work like the figure in Friedrich’s Traveller above the Sea of
Clouds mentioned on page 51.
Voyeuristic looking was encouraged by the fact that the tableaux of the early
folk museums were arranged for an observer looking at the scene from one side,
as if looking into a house through an invisible fourth wall. As with the
dioramas, their composition was frequently based on painting: Sandberg claims
that at the Philadelphia exposition of 1876, about half the Swedish folk-life
tableaux were based on well-known genre paintings (Sandberg 1995: 335). In
these ways, the tableaux, along with the panorama and the diorama continue to
prioritize visual experience, separating visitors from the scene they behold,
which they can only enter imaginatively. This voyeuristic positioning frustrated
folk museum curators who saw it as perpetuating a detached relationship ‘too
reminiscent of the social distance between folk culture and modernity, insertion
fantasies not withstanding’ (Sandberg 1995). They developed immersive dis-
plays in which visitors wandered through actual rooms populated by manne-
quins and nothing ‘except perhaps social decorum’ prevented them from
touching or interacting with the waxworks. Artur Hazelius’s open-air museum
at Skansen deliberately confused real people and mannequins, posing living
guides in apparent interaction with the effigies in order to surprise his visitors.
Sandberg sees this playful approach as part of the transition to the new forms
of immersive display, schooling visitors in how to negotiate the space, before
mannequins were dispensed of altogether (Sandberg 1995: 339–44).
The transition to immersive space marks a significant break in the way in
which visitors are invited to engage with museum displays. While the simula-
tion remains within the constraints of a visual spectacle, addressing a spectator
positioned outside it, the space of the display is only experienced imaginatively.
Immersive exhibits engage visitors on a more sensual level, inviting them into
the space. They promise a greater degree of immediacy by allowing the material
of the display to have a physical effect on the spectators. This was noted in
1967 by Molly Harrison, the curator of the Geffrye museum in London, as
she argued for the educational importance of reproduction and dramatic
techniques within the museum:

A girl who walks among eighteenth-century furniture dressed in a good
reproduction of the costume of the period feels something of what life was
like 200 years ago, more deeply than could result from mere seeing, or even
handling the furniture. Her classmates, too, will notice that she walks
differently in the long dress, that the tilt of her head is altered by the weight