Page 74 - Museums, Media and Cultural Theory In Cultural and Media Studies

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found in it. Even though these reconstructed spaces may seem the most
controlling of the visitor experience, offering a ready-made and already narra-
tive experience, the ways in which visitors attend to them, shaped by a host of
modern experiences outside the exhibitionary space, may be in direct conflict
with the intended lesson of the exhibit. A similar conflict exists in present day
immersive exhibits. The most dramatic examples can perhaps be found not in
museums but in zoos. Present day immersive zoo design situates visitors in
highly illusionistic reconstructions of the Amazon rainforest, Congo jungle
and so on, complete with fake rocks and waterfalls, or even fake weather con-
ditions such as a sudden snowfall or mountain mists. The explicit pedagogy of
such exhibits is about environmentalism, about inspiring visitors toward a
greater commitment to the environment, and about the new zoo project of
protecting biodiversity and endangered ecologies and species. Yet the pleasures
visitors get from such technically complex simulations may be quite antithetical
to the project of getting them to care about the reality to which such representa-
tions refer. As with the folk museum, visitors may even prefer the simulation,
and the display may compensate for ‘late’ or ‘post’ modernity in much the same
way as the folk museum ‘helped make modernity attractive’ for some.
Film theorist Tom Gunning (1989, 1990) has challenged the old view that
credulous early film spectators were duped by the cinematic illusion (ducking
below the seats, or running out of the cinema to avoid an oncoming train). The
pleasures of cinema were related to the tension between the knowledge that it is
an illusion, and the physical, habitual reactions that the sights and sounds
stimulated. As Gunning argues, astonished, speechless, gawping spectators did
not mistake the film for real, but were responding to the marvellous, magical
illusion. The assumption that spectators were duped is related to the associ-
ation of gawping with incredulity and naivety. But gawping is also misdirected
attention – it focuses on the ‘wrong’ object: instead of looking through the
illusion, the gawper is besotted with its perfection, the details of how it is
constructed and so on. At the AMNH, Franz Boas cautioned against extreme
verisimilitude in ethnographic life groups, on the grounds that the static plaster
figures would seem ‘uncanny’ or ‘ghastly’ if they were too real, but also because
high illusionism would distract visitors away from the intended content of
the display and toward the illusion itself (Griffiths 1996, 2002). The museum
director Michael Ames gives the example of an ethnographic life group in a
Canadian museum intended to demonstrate local fishing techniques, where
according to one curator, ‘the most frequently asked question by the public does
not concern the Indians or the fish, but how the designers were able to construct
such a realistic scene’ (1992: 23).
In this case illusionism becomes a demonstration of technological superior-
ity. Illusionistic exhibits necessarily set out to deceive the visitor – indeed, they