Page 79 - Museums, Media and Cultural Theory In Cultural and Media Studies

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the peephole recalls popular Victorian optical devices such as the kinetoscope
and the zoetrope. Peepholes also link the history of hands-on exhibits with
theatrical techniques. Kiesler had used a peephole as early as 1922 in his stage
design for Karel Capek’s R.U.R. at the Theater am Kurfürstendamm in Berlin.
In that show, the peephole mimicked a large camera shutter. In 1939 he used a
similar device in the ‘Screen-O-Scope’ which replaced the theatre curtain in the
Guild Hall Cinema, New York (Huhtamo 2002: 9). But it is in Duchamp’s final
work that the peephole device is used to its full potential. Étant Donnés (1946–
66) is a scene of a splayed female body in front of an illuminated landscape and
viewed through two peepholes in an old wooden door. Produced in New York in
a period when art was dominated by American abstract expressionism, it
rejects the emphasis on the picture plane in favour of a diorama-like scene – the
woman’s body is made of leather stretched over a metal armature, the
landscape painted on glass and backlit – and it recalls the layered illusion of
space in classical perspective painting, yet it is also disturbingly pornographic,
implicating viewers in the scene before them.
Kiesler’s elaborate peephole devices could be seen as subordinating the arte-
fact to the display device, as science centres would do later. The art historian
Lewis Kachur has commented that the peephole regiments the spectatorial
experience (2001: 201). Certainly it offers the thrill of an individualized experi-
ence, otherwise unavailable unless one was alone in the exhibit, but it also
forces a certain self-reflexive attitude on the spectator. It directs the visitors’
attention whilst making the act of direction explicit. Stepping up to the peep-
hole and laboriously turning a wheel, or pulling a lever, visitors cannot forget
the act of viewing and their own voyeuristic positioning and simply imagina-
tively immerse themselves in the illusion, as they might looking through the
invisible fourth wall into the tableau or diorama, or through the proscenium
arch of the theatre. In this sense it is related to other devices that wrote the
visitors’ presence into the space, such as the cut-out footprints used by Bayer at
the Bauhaus exhibition and the pointing hand device which directed visitors
through the display. In these devices, which Bayer used repeatedly, the imagined
viewer’s body is inscribed into the space in the form of pictorial representations
of hands, eyes and footprints.
American journalists responded to European exhibition designers’ use of
popular culture vocabulary with disdain. They commented unfavourably on the
peepholes in Kiesler’s Guggenheim gallery (‘a kind of artistic Coney Island’)
and on the use of cut-out footsteps on the floor (a ‘cheap sidewalk device’)
in Bayer’s Bauhaus exhibition at MoMA (cited in Kachur 2001: 201 and
Staniszewski 1998:145). It is possible that these criticisms derive from the differ-
ent histories and expectations of the art museum in Europe and the United
States. The European avant-garde attempted to overcome the separation