Page 85 - Museums, Media and Cultural Theory In Cultural and Media Studies

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study of the use of white in modern architecture, a ‘dressing up’ of the space.
According to Wigley’s reading of Le Corbusier’s The Decorative Art of Today
(1925), whitewash facilitates the subordination of the sensual: ‘The discretely
clothed object makes pure thought possible by bracketing materiality away’
(Wigley 1995: 20). The modernist building and the white gallery space channels
‘our attention only to those things worthy of it’ (Le Corbusier cited in Wigley
1995: 25). All distractions are removed. Though the white wall is supposed to be
neutral, allowing the art to dominate, O’Doherty argues ‘it stands for a com-
munity with common ideas and assumptions’ (1999: 79). Though austere, the
Modernist space heightens the fetishism inherent in the aesthetic experience
through subtle signifiers of luxury and class. The classic modernist art gallery
appears to many people as an exclusive space and the isolation of objects makes
them like ‘valuable scarce goods . . . esthetics are turned into commerce – the
gallery space is expensive’ (O’Doherty 1999: 76). The white cube is the ultimate
framing device, managing attention and assuring the (cult) value of the unique
art object.
Modernist exhibition strategies can be seen to have two contrary outcomes.
One was demonstrated very early on by Marcel Duchamp with his ‘Ready-
Mades’. That is, the framing power of the museum is such that even the most
mundane, mass-reproduced, or ephemeral of things can be transformed into a
museum object. The second outcome was the abandonment of the unique indi-
vidual object, and its replacement with reproductions or models, series and
multiples. At the beginning of this chapter I mentioned that I was interested
in the way in which display ‘overcomes’ the object. There, I was alluding to the
way in which the display support ends up displacing the object altogether.
Modernist exhibition design anticipates the eventual demise of the artefact, and
the advent of the ‘mediatic’ museum. It is now seen as the forerunner of the
‘virtual museum’ as well as post-1970s installation art (see Huhtamo 2002;
Staniszewski 1998; also Chapter 5 in this book). This notion of the exhibition
as a media form is the subject of the next chapter.

Further Reading

Conn, S. (1998) Museums and American Intellectual Life 1876–1926. Chicago, IL:
University of Chicago Press.
Haraway, D. (1989) Teddy bear patriarchy, in Primate Visions: Gender, Race and Nature
in the World of Modern Science. London: Routledge.
Staniszewski, M. A. (1998) The Power of Display: A History of Exhibition Installations
at the Museum of Modern Art. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.