Page 73 - Museums, Media and Cultural Theory In Cultural and Media Studies

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of the wig and that her gestures become almost elegant. They will sense
the past more vividly for seeing her walk, even though the costume she
wears was made only yesterday.
(Harrison 1967: 2)
The child’s composure and behaviour is materially determined. The ability to
really feel and inhabit the past, is for Harrison, a means of engaging the child
pedagogically when ‘the pace and noise and complexity of modern life
makes concentrated looking difficult’ (1967: 6). Harrison’s educational projects
in the period rooms of the Geffrye Museum owe much to the history of
hands-on displays and progressive educational theory. But she sees in simula-
tion a means to manage attention through experience. Mimesis and theatre can
evoke the absent world from which the artefacts in the collection have been
extracted. They complement an educational emphasis on sensory experience, as
well as on environment and process. They allow the museum to reproduce that
which cannot be collected – which is immaterial, intangible, or ephemeral
(Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1998: 20, 28).
The folk museum founders saw the capacity of objects to evoke what is
absent from the display and make it seem present. In the immersive exhibits,
mannequins were replaced by guides in period costume but also by traces of
human presence: clothes, shoes and possessions placed as if someone had just
been touching or wearing them and had only recently left the room, intending
to return. However, these touches, combined with the fact that what was on
display were private domestic spaces, meant that visitors could still feel them-
selves to be in a rather illicit position, now as trespassers rather than voyeurs
(Sandberg 1995: 345–7). While the museum founders were looking for immedi-
acy, a sense of unmediated contact with the past, many visitors seemed to enjoy
the simulation as simulation, finding pleasure in the to-and-fro between decep-
tion and recognition. Instead of desiring an older and lost (or rapidly disappear-
ing) reality, a good number of visitors took pleasure in that in-betweenness, a
pleasure that was only possible through modern spectator positions, and that
dispensed with the priority of the original over the copy, reality over the repre-
sentation. By the 1910s, Sandberg suggests, many visitors no longer felt any
nostalgic attachment to the reality the folk museum represented. Instead, they
were attached to the representation itself, which allowed them to enjoy the
advantages of modern spectating. Indeed, it is possible that ‘the compensatory
social functions of narrative helped make modernity attractive, turning a
sense of “displacement” into “mobility” and a feeling of “rootlessness” into
“liberation”’ (Sandberg 1995: 352–3).
Sandberg’s study of the folk museum and visitor’s responses to it suggests a
gap between the explicit pedagogy of the exhibit and the pleasures visitors