Page 75 - Museums, Media and Cultural Theory In Cultural and Media Studies

DISPLAY || 59

are often playful with the visitors’ assumptions about what is and is not real.
However, high illusionism can parade itself as technical know-how. The ability
to reproduce something can become associated with mastery of it. What
matters is not that authenticity is threatened but rather that the transformation
of a piece of culture, or nature, into an object to be exhibited is marked by a
violence that then erases itself. The everyday life theorist Michel de Certeau has
written about the transformation of popular or folk culture into an object of
academic study in the nineteenth century. He argues that popular culture ‘had
to be censored’ before being studied, and that it only became an object of study
once ‘its danger had been eliminated’ (1986: 119). Censorship tames the threat
of the popular, but the direct and uncensored use of popular culture is possible
once that threat is gone (Certeau 1986: 120). The collecting of the culture of the
‘folk’ or peasantry was linked to its destruction, and to the subjugation of that
population. In folk and popular culture studies, there is an emphasis on authen-
ticity, on finding the ‘true’ popular. The irony is that this lost origin is identical
with the origin of such studies; they come out of the suppression of the very
thing they chase (Certeau 1986: 128). Very diverse beliefs and politics may
inform the interest in the popular, but what matters is the operation by which
the search for a lost original conceals the violence on which it is founded. As
Certeau says, ‘We cannot reproach a literature for grafting itself upon a prior
violence (for that is always the case) but we can reproach it for not admitting it’
(1986: 134).
Similarly, we can see that practices of collecting and display are often violent
in origin, and exhibitions often commemorate a loss or death which neverthe-
less is the precondition for their existence (see Conn 1998: 68–73 and Luke 2002:
100–23 for the connections between extinction and natural history). The very
act of collecting is a transformative act, a surgical operation of excision which
violates that which it leaves behind. Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, in her dis-
cussion of exhibits of ‘exotic’ cultures and peoples, mentions examples of the
restaging of historical events occurring as part of the celebration of a victory,
so that exhibition is directly linked to erasure and subjugation (1998: 160).
Certain exhibits, including zoo exhibits, justify themselves on the grounds
that what they are representing is ‘disappearing’ or endangered. In the attempt
to preserve vanishing worlds, they turn to reconstruction. The copy becomes
a means to bring the original closer. We can see this in Carl Akeley’s Africa
Hall as well as in the Swedish habitat group, the Scandinavian folk museums
and immersive zoo exhibits of endangered species and threatened environ-
ments. We find it in the open-air industrial museums and ‘living history’ dis-
plays which opened in 1970s Britain as British industry went into rapid decline.
The world’s fairs of the nineteenth century, which included displays of real
indigenous people practicing traditional crafts or going about their everyday