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business, required that they perform an everyday life unchanged by the
reality of colonization or by the new context in which they found themselves
(Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1998: 47–51).
In both human and animal exhibits, display techniques are used to conceal or
distract from the possible cruelties of exhibition. An example is the immersive
zoo exhibit which gives visitors the optical illusion of greater space in the
animal exhibits, while keeping the enclosures small enough to ensure optimum
viewing opportunities. Though visitors would commonly recognize that the
habitat before them is constructed – that you cannot really have an intact piece
of the Congo in the middle of the Bronx, and so on – the impression of larger
and more ‘natural’ enclosures is also intended to assuage any concerns they
have about looking at captive animals. Some writers also argue that such simu-
lated exhibits may also make the reality they reproduce pale by comparison: the
political analyst Timothy Luke makes this argument about the Arizona–Sonora
Desert Museum, near Tucson, Arizona. He also suggests that this attraction
inadvertently contributes to the destruction of the surrounding desert through
its insertion into the political economies of tourism and urban expansion (Luke
2002: 146–64)
It is commonplace nowadays to criticize simulation-based and mimetic dis-
plays for their association with popular entertainment and commerce (as terms
such as ‘edutainment’ and ‘Disneyfication’ suggest). In my view, what is signifi-
cant is not necessarily the use of illusionism and popular spectacle, so much as
the way these attractions occupy a position ‘between voyeurism and pedagogy’
(Certeau 1986: 125). The most impeccably well-researched and historically
accurate exhibits can be deceptive; this depends not on the use of illusion, but
on their refusal to admit their own place in relation to the erasure of what they
commemorate. What matters, Certeau seems to suggest, is not the extent to
which the exhibit is ‘educational’ or ‘entertaining’, but the ‘operation’ it
performs in relation to its subject-matter.

The art of exhibition

In the final section of this chapter we will begin to examine exhibition tech-
niques which set out to counter the museum’s accumulation of ‘dead’ know-
ledge. What we can loosely label ‘avant-garde’ exhibition design emerged in the
1920s and 1930s. Like children’s museums and science centres, which I discuss
in the next chapter, these exhibitions have a hands-on or interactive element
(though I am applying both these terms anachronistically, since neither was in
currency at the time). Hands-on exhibits are very different from mimetic ones in
the relation they establish with their visitor. Mimetic exhibits situate the visitor