The paper was presented at the ICHIM 03 conference in Paris at the Louvre.
__________________________
Museum Authority and the Ways of Seeing
The Gaze as Analytical Framework
For this
analysis, the Gaze is used as the conceptual framework with which to examine
the evolution of museum practices. In Lacanian terms, the Gaze is the act of
involuntary participation in a culturally constructed, visual discourse where
there is no unmediated, pure relationship between a Subject and the Object of
its view. Every visual exchange carries the weight of environmental, cultural,
and physical conditions. Art historian Norman Bryson describes the Gaze as
requiring a collective submission of the "retinal experience to the socially
agreed description(s) of an intelligible world."[3]
At the core of the Gaze is the presupposition that the visual world is a
cultural construction in which all social beings participate. The
Subject-Object relationship is always mediated by a "screen," a collection of
signs and signifiers given by social custom that represent the Object. Because
the screen is merely an image of the Object, not the Object itself, the object
of the Gaze can never be known directly. In psychoanalytic terms, the Object of
desire always lies just beyond the reach of the viewer and is always
intermediated by the screen. The Subject is perpetually propelled toward it,
seeking but never sated.
This notion of the screen applies to museum practice in two ways. On one level, the
screen quite literally is the curatorial information provided in label text,
the design of the exhibition, the narrative on an audio guide. Each of these
devices and techniques of exhibition design aims to provide context for the
visitor, yet each also distances the viewer from the art or artifact by
predetermining its cultural value. In even the most informed or egalitarian
environment, the prescribed curatorial meaning manages the visitor's
understanding. The second manifestation of the screen concerns desire. In
abstract terms, the desire that is linked to the unattainable Object motivates
the aesthetic and intellectual pursuit. Why look over and over again if not
propelled by a deep unsatisfied curiosity? The way the Subject craves
apprehension is encapsulated in the now familiar story of the throngs of
visitors who visited the Louvre to view the space left after the theft of the
Mona Lisa.[4]
Their curiosity was compounded by the novelty of a major art theft, but
visitors also went to the naked space as if through it they might be able to
comprehend the Mona Lisa, painting present or not. This example demonstrates
that the cultural screen remains vivid even when the Object itself disappears.
Another characteristic of the Gaze is its reversibility. Lacan writes, "in the scopic field, the gaze is outside, I am looked at, that is to say, I am a picture."[5] The Gaze has the effect of alienating the Subject through this reversibility. The viewer's centricity is dislodged when another enters his field, in this case the object of art or artifact. Now the watcher is being watched. The spectator is transformed into the spectacle. Reversibility elicits self-consciousness in the viewer. This awareness of the self motivates the Subject to maintain appropriate social behavior. As with Foucault's critique of power structures outlined in the metaphorical "Panopticon," social conduct is a self-regulating process.[6] In Foucaultian terms, the museum is an institute of discipline which indoctrinates appropriate behavior in the viewer. Foucault's critique reinforces the notion of the museum as a place in which cultural values are authorized and specific behaviors encouraged as a means to produce socially acquired knowledge.
The codes observed in the Subject-Object relationship are made more clear by mapping the Gaze to three major trends in the history of museum practice. Specifically, the evolution of museum processes of display illustrates how the primacy of the museum experience has shifted from object to performance.
Evolving Typologies: Legislative and Interpretive
Museum practice can be distilled into three major typologies. Prior to
the 19th century, the museum was considered a container for
collections of objects. The museum researched and preserved curios, exotica,
rare, and sanctified objects.[7]
The aim of the legislating museum was to present the paragons of the aesthetic
and intellectual pursuit, to create a venue for display not debate. The
authority of the museum was enacted through selection and presentation of its
objects. Without contextual information that explained why an object appeared in
the museum, or its relationship to the objects around it, the legislating
museum created a distinct and distant relationship between object and viewer.
This visual system can be articulated with a simple sketch.
In
this diagram of the "legislating" museum, the first frame represents a
supposedly unmediated and direct experience between subject S and object O.
However, the link between subject and object is not uninterrupted. The layers
of social and institutional intervention, and the viewer's specific cultural
baggage, all bear on the relationship. This is indicated in this diagram by the
grid-ed field on which the museum space is described. The second panel
expresses the always-present reversibility of the Gaze where the power of
visuality is in flux. The viewer is both watching, and being watched.
Diagram 1: The Legislating Museum
Because
the legislating museum deployed authority through objects, not information, it
created a specific experience of the object which attempted to fulfill its
institutional goals. However this relationship was complicated by the viewer's
own cultural context and self-awareness inspired by the sacred museum space.
This scenario is demonstrated by the socialized behavior of the museum visitor.
When a museum patron enters the Louvre to see the Mona Lisa, the visitor's
passage is ennobled by the grand institution, as if he were walking onto a
stage. The viewer is acutely aware of his place in the museum and acts
appropriately. He positions himself in front of the painting in a certain way,
seeing himself see the object, mindful of how he is viewed by others, even how
he is viewed by the painting itself.
In contemporary times, the role of the museum in "legislating" meaning through its objects has changed to "interpreting" that meaning. Museologist Duncan Cameron writes of this change in the museum as a metaphorical shift from the authoritative "temple" to the contextualized "forum" that contains multiple voices and perspectives.[8] Through label text, docent tours, and multimedia tools, the museum provides a framework for how objects should be viewed and understood. Media archeologist Wolfgang Ernst describes the transformation of the object from subject of scholarly work to means of communication as the seminal shift in the museum mission.[9] Rather than having objects speak for themselves, museum professionals interpret cultural significance for visitors by structuring art and artifacts around easily identifiable chronologies, geographies, formal themes, and narratives.
In
the "interpreting" museum diagram, the first panel illustrates the ideal
position, where the Subject-Object relationship remains intact, but the
interpretation mediates. In this case the notion of the object is strengthened
by the interpretation. I propose that what is actually happening in the
interpretive museum is described in the second and third panel, where the
Subject splits his attention or view between the Interpreter and the Object.
This in fact has the unintentional effect of magnifying what Lacan describes as
the "screen" between Object and Viewer. (Though, of course, a screen must also
lay between viewer and these supplementary interpretive devices.) The result of
the split is described in the third panel, where the Subject privileges the
Interpreter's object, and the direct connection between the Subject and Object
is made tenuous.
Diagram 2: The Interpreting Museum
Exhibition Design as Cultural Medium
The shift from legislating to interpreting demonstrates how the
techniques used in museum practice transform objects in the museum environment.
Objects are stripped of their cultural context only to be reassembled later in
a way that advances museum pedagogy. Cultural historian Spencer Crew and
Smithsonian director James Sims characterize objects
as "dumb:"only through display and
conservation are objects stabilized and their
meanings fixed to adhere to the museum
environment.[10]
The political and intellectual factors that influence object collection expose the museum as a place that constructs cultural meaning. Art historian Svetlana Alpers suggests that the objects in museums are collected primarily for their visual interest.[11] By removing the object from its ritual, cultural, and economic associations, "museums turn cultural materials into art objects." For Alpers, museums elicit a viewer's attention through the visual appeal of the object, then ascribe meaning to that object. Art and artifacts providing evidence of esthetics, techniques, and ideologies are not necessarily selected for their specificity, but instead are chosen for their display value. The rising importance of the visual is a precursor to the performing museum, which privileges display techniques to harness visitors' interest.
Rise in Cultural Heritage
This energized collecting of cultural materials coincides with a
shift in the way history is represented in the contemporary cultural-history
museum. The new museum favors portraying
the lives of everyday people. Sociologist John Urry observes, "No longer are
people only interested in seeing either great works of art or artifacts from
very distant historical periods. People increasingly seem attracted by
representations of the 'ordinary.'"[15]
Urry interprets this as a rejection of traditional (and
monolithic) events and figures to describe the past. Cultural critic Andreas
Huyssen writes that this yearning for "diversity" among multicultural audiences
is an attempt to recover the less frequently recognized narratives that
reaffirm ethnic identities.[16]
Nora echoes this assertion by suggesting that the threat of totalitarian
regimes—like that faced by the Jewish people in WWII—has prompted
an articulation of ethnic diversity and "particularism" through structured
remembrance.[17] Museums
provide a formal space not only for the display of national icons, but the
description of the issues faced by "ordinary" members of social groups.
The newly democratized subject matter of the contemporary cultural-history museum has shifted focus
from an historical consciousness to a social history that bases historical
accounts on the lives and activities of everyday people, especially people
ignored by traditional authoritarian ideology. However the post-colonial,
postmodern museum faces challenges in developing appropriate collections. Crew
and Sims note that there is a scarcity of authentic, "ordinary" objects that
provide the same canonical impact as traditionally used museum objects.[18]
The shortage of sanctioned artifacts to express the material culture of
ordinary people has prompted exhibition design to focus more on themes, rather
than objects. At Old Sturbridge, the reconstructed 18th
century village in Massachusetts, a cook's iron griddle and a child's wooden
toy are elevated to extraordinary levels of museal importance because the
narrative is built around them, not because of their notable aesthetic,
functional, or historic value. As a result, the attention to social
history has signaled a departure from object-focused modes of museum display,
and has encouraged museums to more creatively express their ideas.
Kirshenblatt-Gimblett refers to this as a shift from in-context displays, which
"depend on the drama of the artifact," to in-situ displays which, in
privileging the experience, rely more on human display rather than objects.[19]
The New Museum Performs
This
phenomena is illustrated with this figure where the already fragile
relationship between Subject and Object actually dissolves completely. The
Interpreter and the Object collapse into one entity, and the Object is
subordinated by the Interpretation.
Vanguard of "Performing Practice"
As
the specificity of the object decreases (because of a lack of appropriate
collections or iconic artifacts), the burden of authenticity often falls on
physical place. For instance, the United States' oldest living museum, Colonial
Williamsburg, is a recreated town that derives its credibility from its siting
in the city of Williamsburg, Virginia, and from its detailed focus on
architectural preservation and restoration. The architectonic importance of the
past is elucidated in psychologist Francis Yates' theory of mnemotechnics,
which describes the practice of mapping knowledge to images and sites to create
a system of artificial memory.[23]
Yates traces the history of the power of place in anchoring history and
remembrance. Further, Urry's account of the increase in ethnographic museums
built within vacated factories, farms, and homes testifies to the value placed
on "authentic" space. Because visitors' expectation of museum authenticity is
satisfied by place, the real site provides the ideal stage for the
fictionalized performance. The authentically sited cultural-history museum can
regularly encourage visitors to suspend disbelief when considering unusual
forms of material evidence.
The
evolution of the performing museum results from a confluence of two phenomena:
the proliferation of a legible and marketable system of display, and an upsurge
in memorialization. The first issue concerns the need for the contemporary
museum to compete for its audience. While some critics describe this as a
commercial collapse of the museum, the scenario is far more complex and
involves not a dumbing-down, but a integration of a marketplace syntax of
representation.[24] The power
of display in the museum lies in the known resultant patterns that emerge from
the use of specific, shared cultural cues. Object placement under a vitrine,
the synchronized dimming and highlighting of objects to express hierarchy, and
the theme-introducing audio-visual presentation are all part of a system of
representation strategies employed by exhibition designers. In the new museum
where display techniques have primacy, exhibition designers seek to orient and
entertain viewers, the pedagogical goals are secondary.
Influence of Cultural Memory
In
the cultural-history museum, formal historical discourse meets exhibition
design in non-traditional ways. The act of "performing" the past is the display
of cultural memory. This new history relies on particular selections,
omissions, and emphases to promote a specific vision. The museal storying of
history through re-creations, re-enactments, and restorations rely on the
dramatic narrative. Frankfurt School theorist Walter Benjamin explores the
strength of theatrical representation in conveying the past in a memorable way.[27]
In addition to following the dramatic formula that includes development of a
progressive plot with a recognizable hero, Benjamin's describes the audience's
rapt attention to "epic theater" as resulting from having their "collective
interest" supported. The potency of the theatrical performance is intrinsically
linked to socialized viewing, where the interest of the group prevails over
that of the individual.
While
history always carries the burdens of various agendas, in the performing museum
there is a departure from empirical knowledge, and a movement toward the development
of narratives that promotes a sense of belonging. Philosopher Alain Renaud
theorizes that in the age of hyper-developed technologies, the past provides a
respite—a safe haven—from the frenetic present.[28]
In regard to cultural memory, there is major shift from the authentic object to
the narrativized place.
SHIFTING DEGREE OF PERFORMANCE
I am suggesting that in the early museum, the object commanded the performance.
The visitor was doing much of the performing—behaving in a certain
manner, enacting the aesthetic or intellectual experience, playing a role in
the drama of this special space. The legislating museum's role was didactic. It
taught the viewer not only how to see, but how to behave. In contemporary
times, the visitor's responsibility in creating the scene is reduced, the
museum performs for the visitor. While the performing museum claims a greater
degree of audience participation, at living-history museums interactive
activities are often scripted to inspire predictable responses. A key weekly
event at Colonial Williamsburg is a discussion with Thomas Jefferson where the
Jefferson character presents a seminal speech about independence and viewers
respond during the appropriate pauses with the cheers and jeers in unison.
The
dotted line represents the temporal component. The Subject—who according
to Lacan�s concept of reversibility is always performing—moves through
the space, engages in the museum performance, and leaves the museum with a
notion of the Object. Here the object stays the same, but the viewer changes.
The
panel on the right represents the viewer in the performing museum. P-sub-O
represents the interpretive performance of the Object by the museum. Here the
Subject is subordinated to the role of the spectator. The Subject observes the
spectacle produced by the museum, and participates in it insofar as it
preserves a sense of cultural memory. After the encounter in the museum space,
the Subject leaves not with a notion of the Object as in the previous panel,
but with an experience of the performance of the Object. Further, their
relationship is seen as working in inverse proportion. As the Subject's level
of performance decreases, the museum's performance increases.
These
diagrams help to illustrate a trend in museum experience history where the
Subject-Object relationship has radically shifted. The privileging of the
visual spectacle through commercially oriented display practices and theatrical
re-enactments has resulted in a de-materializing of the museum object as it perpetuates
a selective semi-fictionalized account of the past that reflects cultural
memory.
The Technocratic Museum
Extended Experience
Where
traditional museum visits are discrete—that is, they are usually
contained within a single physical structure and time period—a better
visitor experience could be created by linking interests outside the museum. In
a physical space, the connection could be within another museum or a retail
environment. In a virtual space, a Web site or kiosk could add value to the
visitor experience by providing access to a online community or information
related to the visitor's interests. In this way, the museum experience may be
more personalized to the visitor's specific tastes and interests, as well as
promoting spontaneous congregation and communication with other visitors. By
realizing the museum outside its physical architecture, the production of
cultural knowledge becomes a more integrated and collaborative event.
Is It Really Interactive?
Visitor as Producer
Socialized Viewing
Consumption
Conclusion
The
visibility of the museum's ideological position changes the way visitors
process what they see, and thus provides an opportunity to challenge cultural
authority and redirect dominant cultural narratives. The dematerialization and
increased theatricality in exhibition design will beget a more critical viewer
in the museum. Digital technologies have the potential to create a new
conceptual space in the performing museum which not only contains a
multiplicity of voices, but facilitates their conversation. In this way, museum
is worth exploring as a liberating experience from the typical invisible
construction of cultural authority.
The
goal of this paper has been to describe the stakes in contemporary museum
design by theorizing three primary typologies of museum practice. Considering
the museum as a legislator, interpreter, and performer illustrates a shift in
museum authority and in the visual reception of the museum viewer. Analysis of
these practices in terms of the Gaze reveals the complex relationship between
the viewer and object. The impact of socialized behavior and current cultural
pressures can be traced to this evolving relationship. The contemporary
performing museum diverges from traditional museum practice in three primary
and interconnected ways:
2.
The traditional auratic museum object has steadily declined in importance (and
sometimes availability) due to the preference of audiences for dramatic
performances in immersive environments.
3.
The scientific rigor of historical study has been challenged by an interest in
perpetuating collective, quasi-fictional cultural memory.
While the museum has always perpetuated
certain narratives, the way the contemporary museum performs its ideologies
exposes the museum's social power. Rather than diminishing the legitimacy of
the museum, perhaps this new phase in museum practice which recognizes the
museum as a medium through which cultural knowledge is produced, will create an
opportunity to challenge ideologies and convey new narratives. New technologies
can spearhead this movement if they are developed with an awareness of the
evolution of contemporary museum practice and the psychological and social
effects of cultural memory.
[1] Andre Malraux, Museum
Without Walls
(Garden City: Doubleday, 1967).
[2] Barbara
Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Destination Culture:
Tourism, Museums, and Heritage (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1998) 3.
[3] Norman Bryson. The
Gaze in the Expanded Field. In H. Foster (Ed.) Vision and Visuality (Seattle: Bay
Press, 1988) 91.
[4] Darian Leader, Stealing
the Mona Lisa: What Art Stops Us from Seeing (New York: Counterpoint Press,
2003).
[5] Jacques Lacan "What
is a picture?" In J. Miller (Ed.) The Four
Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-analysis (New York: Norton, 1978).
[6] Michel Foucault,
Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the
Prison (New York: Vintage Books, 1979).
[7] Stephen Weil,
Cabinet of curiosities: inquiries into museums and
their prospects (Washington: Smithsonian
Institution Press, 1995).
[8] Duncan Cameron,
"The Museum: A Temple or the Forum" Journal of World History 14, No. 1, 1972,
197–201.
[9] Wolfgang Ernst,
"Archi(ve)textures of Museology" In S. Crane (Ed.) Museums and Memory (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2000) 17–34.
[10] Spenser
Crew and James Sims, "Locating Authenticity" In I. Karp
& S. Lavine (Eds.) Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of
Museum Display (Washington: Smithsonian
Institution Press, 1991) 159–175.
[11] Svetlana Alpers,
"The Museum as a Way of Seeing" In I. Karp & S.
Lavine (Eds.) Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum
Display (Washington: Smithsonian
Institution Press, 1991) 25–32.
[12] AAM website, <http://www.aam-us.org>.
[13] John
Urry, The Tourist Gaze (London: Sage Publications, 2002).
[14] Pierre
Nora, "The Reasons for the Current Upsurge in Memory" Tr@nsit-Virtuelles Forum 22. 2002.
[15] Nora, 2002: 118.
[16] Andreas Huyssen, Twilight memories: marking time in a culture of
amnesia (New York: Routledge, 1995).
[17] Nora, 2002.
[18] Crew and Sims, 1991.
[19] Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, 1998: 3.
[20] Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, 1998.
[21] Urry, 2002.
[22] Joseph Pine and Joseph Gilmore,
The Experience Economy (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1999).
[23] Francis Yates, The
Art of Memory
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966).
[24] See Umberto Eco, Travels in Hyperreality (San Diego: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, 1986); Michael Sorkin, Variations
on a Theme Park (New York: Hill and Wang,
1992); Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and simulation
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994).
[25] Marita Sturkin, Tangled Memories
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997) 259.
[26] Pierre
Nora, "Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Memoire" Representations
26, 1989, 7–24.
[27]
Walter Benjamin, "What is Epic Theater?" Illuminations
(New York: Schocken Books, 1968) 147–154.
[28]
Alain Renaud, "Memory and the Digital World" Museum
International 215, 2002, 7–18.
[29]
George Lakoff, Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1990).
[30] Leader, 2003: 121.
[31] Leader, 2003: 26.
[32] Pine and Gilmore,
1999.
[33]
Joy Hendry, The Orient Strikes Back. Oxford: Berg, 2000.
[34] Michael Kammen, Mystic chords of memory: the
transformation of tradition in American culture (New York: Knopf, 1991) 620.<
[35] Huyssen, 1995: 14.
The way the
museum directs the viewer's gaze through display of selectively authorized
materials has been complicated by the recent rise in interest in cultural
heritage, and a proliferation of museums that display the past.
Of the estimated 16,000 museums in the United States, the
majority address history.[12]
Similarly in the UK, heritage sites constitute the most rapidly increasing
proportion of museums.[13]
Historian Pierre Nora writes of society's changed relationship with the
past as a result of a society-wide memorializing obsession.[14]
This upsurge in memory is "everywhere establishing
close ties between respect for the past—whether real or
imaginary—and the sense of belonging, collective consciousness and
individual self-awareness, memory and identity." Nora traces the beginnings of
this phenomena to two forces. First, the "acceleration of history" results from
a lack of permanence in the present, and the inability to plan for the future.
The future is uncertain, but the tools for remembering are finite and known.
Therefore in the uncertainty, society is compelled—has a "duty"—to
remember, and as a result an exaggerated importance is placed on documenting
the past. Because contemporary society is in doubt of what will be needed in
the future, it "stockpiles" memories, artifacts, and documents.
As the museum moves away from
using objects as the primary element to convey information, the importance of
display increases. In addition, to compete with other tourist attractions, the
museum has assimilated commercial strategies to entertain audiences. To appeal
to its experience-oriented audience, the contemporary museum privileges the
processes of display over the particularity of objects to convey information.
Kirshenblatt-Gimblett describes this museum practice as "performing museology."[20]
This "performance" goes beyond employing interactive tools and multimedia
technologies to engage visitors. Storying and sequencing combine with
entertaining re-enactments and recreations to execute the museum's didactic mission.
The contemporary museum's inclination to convey its ideologies through more
visible modes of "in-situ" representation enables a more clear reading of the
institutional processes of display at work. In addition to conveying knowledge,
the visibility of these modes of display highlights the museum as a medium for
the production of culture, where the museum itself is on display.
Diagram 3: The Performing Museum
Modes
of exhibition design focus the Gaze. The museum mise-en-scene—the
organization of collections and the sequence of displays and
objects—creates a specific view and associated understanding of museum
art and artifacts. Over time, the modern museum has evolved in its role first
as legislator, then interpreter, and now of performer. The diagrams illustrate
how the processes of display that have formerly mediated the relationship
between object and viewer have now subsumed the object and led to its gradual
de-materialization. While the notion of museum interpretation was introduced to
explain art and artifacts, the role of the interpreter has become so central in
museums that the object that is being interpreted has been overshadowed by the
performance. Where authentic cultural materials formerly conveyed museum
themes, in the modern museum, the performance of the themes is privileged.
Further analysis of the performing museum illustrates how the representation of
history has helped transform the contemporary museum from object-based to
experience-based.
While commercially oriented presentation techniques
can be detected across many museum types, the contemporary cultural-history
museum has embraced the performance strategies more comprehensively than other
museum types.[21] Through
dramatic presentation, which is one of the most advanced of the
experience-economy techniques, "living" museums provide a contextual departure
from the present.[22] By layering
traditional interpretive museum practices with additional theatrical tropes
including historical interpreters, reconstructed scenes, and character actors,
an immersive environment is created that relays the past. Lifestyles are
expressed; the social dimension of history is presented for its audiences
through interactive narratives, visitor role-playing, and the physical markers
of history presented with real or manufactured architectural cues.
The
contemporary museum-goer is invested in preserving a collective memory of the
past. Cultural memory promotes a shared sense of history, and this collective
interpretation is fundamental in creating the values, ideals, and goals associated
with social identity. However, this memory is selective. Historian Marita
Sturkin describes the role of collective memory as not necessarily to reflect any "original experience," but to provide �continuity to a
culture.�[25] In an age
of political, social, and personal unrest, a notion of the past, however
fictionalized, provides cultural congruence. For Nora, the fictionalization of
the past is perpetuated on cultural level in order to maintain social
stability.[26] Building on
this premise, I suggest that the tactics of the performing museum are
particularly effective in the cultural-history museum because of the audience�s
interest in a shared sense of cultural history. In the museum, the strength of
this collective interest in maintaining a specific version of the past allows
visitors to suspend disbelief as they explore historical re-creations, and do
not miss the lack of traditional object-centric museum practice.
The evolution of museum practices (legislating, interpreting,
performing), coupled with the cultural memory phenomena, suggests that the
museum is becoming more performative over time. However it has always been a
performative space. What has actually changed in the museum is the degree to
which the Subject and Object have been performing —the relative
proportions of the two directions of the Gaze.
Diagram 4: Shifting Degree of Performance
This
model describes the shift in the degree of performance. In the first panel where
P is the performance, the Subject-sub-p (the performing Subject) occupies a
specific position in respect to the inanimate object and performs with the
correct posture of the viewer, with the self-aware positioning in the sacred
museum space—always behaving with the appropriate mix of awe and
restraint when experiencing the aesthetic moment. In this scenario, the
reversibility of the Gaze compels the viewer to behave in a particular socially
sanctioned way.
The
performing museum is a contemporary cultural phenomena where the museum's
representation of cultural occurs through interaction, not just objects. As
exhibition design, which includes digital technologies, achieves ever
increasing importance as a cultural medium that can create and shape history,
practitioners of museum technologies must address social implications with
greater attention and sophistication. The theoretical model of the
Subject-Object relationship can inform technological design and development.
Understanding how society acquires knowledge in the museum provides the
opportunity to offer new narratives that can simultaneously appeal, educate,
and inspire the market-oriented audience. From analysis above, several
principles emerge to guide the development of user technologies in the new
museum.
Meaning is no
longer intrinsically tied to the object, but instead created in the interaction
between the viewer, the message, and the museum. Technology-facilitated museum
practice should extend the museum narrative
across multiple mediums, and assist the museologist in managing the audience
experience, before and after the visit.
The research
of cognitive scientist George Lakoff finds that people categorize the world not
on the inherent qualities of things, but on how they interact with those
things.[29]
Despite this revelation, technologists continuously misrepresent interactivity
to end-users. Like the Internet Service Provider's "walled gardens" of the
mid-1990s, most museum guides, websites, and multimedia kiosks provide limited
choices under the pretext of interactive freedom. Philosopher Slavoj Zizek uses
the "Close" button in an elevator as an example of this guise of user control.
Even if the button does not actually close the elevator door more quickly, its
presence pacifies the button-pusher. Similarly, current interactive
technologies in the museum are incredibly varied, but also limited because they
exist in a closed system. They succeed in providing the visitor with a sense of
control of what they experience. However, to provide true interactivity, adaptive
information architectures that reflect a user's natural patterns need to be
developed. In addition, technologies can offer novel approaches to information
which promote abstract connections. These do not need to overburden the visitor
with choices or complex interfaces, but can provide different access to
information and persuade the user to think differently. The QBIC web tools on
the Hermitage Museum website achieve this free-form association by allowing
visitors to use shapes and colors for search criteria, rather than just words
or selection by artist or style.
Psychologist Darien
Leader explores the notion of the museum visitor as a producer rather than
consumer, using Duchamp's deliberately unfinished The Large Glass as an example.[30]
Leader describes the "aesthetics of the nonfinito" when the viewer's job is "to
complete the picture with their own act of creative imagination. ... bringing
their own creative capacities to bear on it ... the work is unfinished because of
the creative act of the viewer." As the creation and maintenance of cultural
identity is at stake in museum, the active participation of the museum visitor
is of great importance. A strength of the performing museum is the invitation
for the visitor to interact and use personal agency in a situation. While the
mock trials at the living museum in Salem, Massachusetts, where visitors decide
the fate of an accused witch fail to offer much interactivity, they highlight
the impact of the social role in creating history. These events also enable a
participation that exceeds the passive encounter that marked early museum
experiences.
As illustrated in
the analysis of collective cultural memory, viewing in the performing museum is
socialized. I refer to a basic psychological tenet to describe the impact of
socialized viewing. Leader writes, "Visual images on their own might trap us,
but for our capture to become more than transitory, they need to take on a
symbolic, signifying value."[31]
The symbolic value is socialized. Objects must be of importance to someone else
to be of value to the viewer. This is also a primary building block of both
Piaget's theory of child development and Lacan's exploration of the mirror
stage, which state that to become a social being, the self must see through the
eyes of the other. In society, the impressions of others are both invaluable
and inescapable. Based on almost counterintuitive logic, technologists need to
develop and maintain community interaction to strengthen the individual
experience. Non-museal examples of the strong influence of community on
individual behavior, awareness, and accountability include eBay's seller's
ratings and Amazon's collaborative filtering suggestion software. These
technologies have the capacity to recover the individual as an entity with
agency while retaining communal identity.
In terms
of the Gaze, desire is an ever-present force in the Subject-Object
relationship. Desire is also strongly linked to consumer consumption.[32]
Hendry describes one result of the rise of cultural heritage as the
objectification and materialization of culture.[33]
This manifestation results in the need to consume objects, products, and
experiences that represent cultural nostalgia. Historian Michael Kammen calls
nostalgia the consumable memory that �fills [the consumer] with some
new—or old—emotion, a sense of recollection of nostalgia.�[34]
Instead of the desire created by the unsated gaze of the Subject in the
legislative and interpretative museums, the Subject's appetite becomes for many
different ways to experience memories in the living museum. Technologists can
create new ways to consume. The bookmarking/saving feature on Antenna Audio's
(pilot program) museum guide at the Tate Modern and the Experience Music Project's
museum guide both allow novel ways for museum visitors to consume by acting as
their own curators, collecting favorites to later review.
The
museum acquires social authority through its ability to direct ways of seeing.
Historically, the museum has prescribed cultural value through objects, but in
contemporary times, meaning is communicated through modes of display. Some
criticize display strategies in the new museum as eroding the cultural and
intellectual legitimacy of the institution. Critics perceive the chronology of
typologies as a negative progression that indicates the deterioration of the
mandate of the museum as cultural institution. Huyssen writes that the museum
is now a "mass medium, a site of spectacular mise-en-scene and operatic
exuberance."[35] However,
the dramatic affect of contemporary museum practice can also liberate the new
museum. The degree of artifice in presentation—which the visitor has
rarely registered in the traditional museum—becomes visible in the
performing museum. As a result, the techniques of presentation have begun to
stop concealing the processes of cultural production, and have started to
expose them. As the performance reinforces the illusion of the museum, it
undoes it at the same time—the contemporary subject is positioned within
the scene as its active viewer and outside
it as its passive witness. The detachment of the spectator has made the modes
of representation used in the museum more visible.
1.
There is a significant rise of experience-oriented display techniques to gain
audience attention.