Page 94 - Museums, Media and Cultural Theory In Cultural and Media Studies

78 || MUSEUMS, MEDIA AND CULTURAL THEORY

A 1936 article about Neurath in the US magazine Survey Graphic described
Neurath’s museum:
Traditionally, a museum director is a collector of exhibits, the keeper of a
mausoleum, where scattered relics fag the brain and tire the feet. Boldly
Neurath ventured into the Museum of the Future. His museum was
located on the first floor of the city hall. It was a dynamic representation of
the social, economic and cultural synthesis of the city. At night, when the
rooms were open for workmen, he introduced novel illumination effects
and movies.
‘It was called a museum,’ Neurath says. ‘It was really a permanent
exposition. It was not enough to show what the city did with its taxes,
what opportunities and responsibilities Vienna offered to its citizens, and
vice versa. Our exhibits and apparatus also made comparisons with other
cities and countries and other periods of history.’
(Survey Graphic 1936: 618)
For Neurath, at least, the novelty of the effects was subordinate to their
clarity as communication technologies. As he wrote in ‘Museums of the Future’
(1933) the museum has a ‘twofold task: to show social processes and to bring all
the facts of life into some recognisable relation with social processes’ (Neurath
1973: 220). To show social processes required cutting across the boundaries that
traditionally and institutionally separated media and forms of knowledge. In
other words: the museum’s multimedia character develops out of – and is suited
to – an approach that refuses to recognize the institutional partitioning of
knowledge. This is because its aim is to enable connections and comparisons to
be made for the purposes of democratic education.
Neurath reimagined a natural history museum, questioning the way typical
displays prioritized identification of species, ignoring their human uses and
compartmentalizing knowledge. Natural history museums tended to treat spe-
cies separately from other species and nature as outside and separate from
human society. Using the example of a whale exhibit, Neurath emphasized
what people do with whales – how they hunt them, what goods they make from
them (such as corset stays and soap), the economies that depend on them and
the culture that emerges in relationship to them (fetishes, taboos, religious
beliefs) (1973: 219–22, 241). This approach rejects the separation of the social
and the natural that the traditional museum reinforces. As he wrote, ‘Human
fortunes are connected with this exhibit – starving seamen, hungry families of
fishermen in the north of Norway. And so everything leads to men and society’
(Neurath 1973: 220). This representation of the whale could be rather instru-
mental, disallowing an interest in the animal as such, outside human uses and
human beliefs, but it connects the whale with the concerns, needs and interests