Double Exposures

The Practice of Cultural Analysis

Mieke Bal

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781135210502
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Arte
• Subtopic: Cultura popolare nell'arte

A feminist literary theorist, specialist in Rembrandt, and a scholar with a knack for reading Old Testament stories, Mieke Bal weaves a tapestry of signs and meanings that enrich our senses. Her subject is the act of showing, the gesture of exposing to view. In a museum, for example, the object is on display, made visually available. "That's how it is, " the display proclaims. But who says so?
Bal's subjects are displays from the American Museum of Natural History, paintings by such figures as Courbet, Caravaggio, Artemisia Gentileschi, and Rembrandt, as well as works by twentieth-century artists, and such literary texts as Shakespeare's Rape of Lucrece.

1

TELLING, SHOWING, SH0WING OFF

For “A,” in loving memory

in which the threshold between the division between the two two worlds is more telling than sides of New York's Central Park, and words expose images exposing words^1

SETTING AS IMAGE, NATURE AS SIGN

New York City, in many ways the heart and icon of American culture, allows the casual stroller to be struck by the semiotic charge of environment. Its layout, with its central axis, centripetally drawing toward its green heart reminiscent of the indispensable nature it has replaced, its monumental avenues running along the Park, states the importance of a balanced intercourse between background and figure,between overall plan and detailed specifics, and between organization and spontaneity.

The tourist entering Manhattan from downtown might not even be struck by the neat symmetry in the middle of the city: Central Park, the token of an indispensable, domesticated preserve of nature-within-culture, with the two major museums, preserves of culture and of nature, on each side. The symmetry is taken for granted, and so is the rationale that sustains it. The city plan itself points to elements of the city's life.

To the right, on the more elegant East Side, stands the Metropolitan Museum of Art, or the Met: the treasury of culture. The great art of the world is stored and exhibited here, with a quantitative as well as expository emphasis on Western European art as if to propose an aesthetic base for the social structures that reign in this society. It makes the world around the Park almost look normal.²

The museum fits all the priorities of its own social environment: Western European art dominates, American art is represented as a good second cousin evolving as Europe declines, while the parallel treatment of “archaic” and “foreign” art, from Mesopotamian to Indian, literally kept in the dark, contrasts with the importance accorded to the “ancient” predecessors–the Greeks and Romans. The overall impression is one of complete control, possession, storage: the Met has the art of the world within its walls, and its visitors have it in their pocket.

The West Side is, today at least, less “classy.” On the left-hand side of the Park stands the American Museum of Natural History. Around ten A.M., yellow dominates the surroundings when endless numbers of schoolbuses discharge the noisy groups of children who come to the museum to learn about life. A booklet for sale in the Museum, published in 1984 and reissued in 1990, somewhat pompously entitled Official Guide to the American Museum of Natural History, makes sure the public does not underestimate the institution's importance on the city map. It begins as follows:

The American Museum of Natural History, a complex of large granite buildings topped by towers overlooking the west side of Central Park, has spread its marvels before an appreciative audience for over a century. Its stored treasures work their magic on millions of visitors every year and are studied by resident and visiting scientists and scholars from all over the world. A monument to humanity and nature,the museum instructs, it inspires, and it provides a solid basis for the understanding of our planet and its diverse inhabitants.³

The Guide is nothing like a guide: it does not provide floormaps and lists of exhibits, nor does it suggest an itinerary or feature a catalogue. It is emphatically a self-presentation that represents the main thrust of the institution's ambition. If taken as a symptom of the museum's sense of self, it strikes one by its insistence.⁴ This grandiose image of the museum is clearly not taken for granted. The emphatic and repeated representation of the institution's ambition signals an unease about itself, a lack of self-evidence that harbors the conflicts out of which it emerged and within which it stands: an unsettlement.

There is nothing surprising about this unease: we are confronted with a product of colonialism in a postcolonial era. The past clashes with the present of which it is also a part, from which it cannot be excised although it keeps nagging from within the present as a misfit. By way of an exploration of the issues pertaining to display, that unsettlement at the heart of this monument to settlement and the ways it is dealt with will be the subject of inquiry in this chapter.

This monumental institution houses the “other” of the Met in three senses, all three paradoxical. First, it is devoted not to culture but to nature. But nature is provided with that fundamental, defining feature of culture: history. Second, in this museum animals predominate, presented in their “natural” settings, whose representations are crafted with great artistic skill. Natural setting is the backdrop of the animal kingdom. But then, a few rooms are devoted to peoples: Asian, African, Oceanic, Native American. These are precisely the peoples whose artistic products are represented in the Met in remote and dark galleries. These are the “exotic” peoples, those who produced works that we only reluctantly, and unsure of our judgment, classify as art. These works of art are exhibited here as artifacts, rigorously remaining on the other side in James Clifford's Art-Culture System.⁵

The juxtaposition of these peoples’ cultures with the animals constitutes the conflict at the core of this museum, distinguishing it from its unproblematically elitist colleague across the Park. By this very division of the city map, the universal concept of “humanity” is filled with specific meaning. The division of “culture” and “nature” between the East Side and West Side of Manhattan relegates the large majority of the world's population to the status of static being,assigning to a small portion only the higher status of art producers in history. Where “nature,” in the dioramas, is a backdrop, transfixed in stasis, “art,” presented in the Met as an ineluctable evolution, is endowed with a story. But the American Museum of Natural History presents its own story, too: that of fixation and the denial of time.⁶

Yet in the representation of those foreign peoples, artistic production is an important part of the display. The artifacts function as indices of the cultures whose structures and ways of life have been elaboratedly crafted by the museum's staff, past and present (mainly past). Yet their works of art are indices, not of the art of the peoples, but of the realism of their representation. They serve an “effect of the real,” an effect where the meaning “realness” overrules the specific meanings.⁷ Instead of artifacts processed into aesthetic objects as they would be on the East Side of the Park, they are indices interpreted as nature.⁸ The American Museum of Natural History houses the Met's other in this third sense, too: it displays art as nature, for when “nature” turns out to be hard to isolate, “art” will assist, but as nature's handmaiden. While the Met displays art for art's sake, as the climax of human achievement, the American Museum of Natural History displays art as instrumental cognitive tool: anonymous, necessary, natural.

This exposition, both in the broader, general sense of “exposing an idea” and in the specific sense of exhibition, points at objects, and in that gesture makes a statement. The constative speech act conveys a “text,” consisting of the combined proposition of “these artifacts are natural (as opposed to artistic)” and “this (conception) is real.” I hope to analyze this text further, decomposing it into its constitutive “sentences,” as I read them during my visit to the museum in 1991.

WHO IS SPEAKING?

A first element that needs to be brought out in the open is the invisible “I,” the subject of the text, that slippery deictic element that has no meaning outside the discursive situation itself. Let me be emphatic, first, about the wrong answer that might slip in here: the expository agent is not the present curators and other museum staff. The people currently working in museums are only a tiny connection in a long chain of subjects.

Who, then, is this “I” who is “speaking” in the American Museum of Natural History, what is this expository agent's semantic makeup, and which discourse can it speak? For any museum with a past of this dimension, the agent is historically double and “monumental” serving collective memory. The historical two-sidedness–its inherited status and material condition doubled with its agency within New York society in the 1990s–emanates from all the pores of the building as you approach, then enter it.

The American Museum of Natural History is monumental not only in architecture and design, but also in size, scope, and content. This monumentality suggests that the primary meaning of the museum is inherited from its history: comprehensive collecting as an activity within colonialism.⁹ In this respect, museums belong to an era of scientific and colonial ambition, stretching out from the Renaissance through the early twentieth century, with its climactic moment in the second half of the nineteenth century. It belongs in the category of contemporary endeavors such as experimental medicine (Claude Bernard), evolutionary biology (Charles Darwin), and the naturalistic novel (Emile Zola), which claims to present a comprehensive social study. Such projects have been definitively compromised by postromantic critique, postcolonial protest, and postmodern disillusionment.¹⁰

But that troubling prefix post-doesn't make things easier. Any museum of this size and ambition is today saddled with a double status; it is also a museum of the museum, a reservation, not for endangered natural species but for an endangered cultural self, a meta-museum.¹¹ Such a museum solicits reflections on and of its own ideological position and history. It speaks to its own complicity with practices of domination, while it also continues to pursue an educational project that has to be adjusted to new conceptions and pedagogical needs. Indeed, the museum's use for research and education is insisted upon in its self-representations including the Guide. The “I” thus begins to point to itself.

The critique of nineteenth-century collectionism misses its purpose if it fails to confront the remote past–the Victorian era as the late twentieth century's bad conscience–with the present, whose ties to what it critiques need assessment as well. That is the trouble with post-, as with the disciplines that pursue an archeology of meaning. On the one hand, the prefix suggests a detachment, a severing of the umbilical cord that binds our time to history; on the other hand, it reminds us of what it leaves behind, insisting that we settle accounts with the “post-” within ourselves.¹²

Here, therefore, I will look at the meta-museum status of the displays in the American Museum of Natural History as I found them. I will examine how the gesture of display meets the content of the proposition and reveal how the museum as an expository agent shows its hand in showing others. This analysis engages the museum discourse now, and probes its effectivity today. The focus is not on the nineteenth-century colonial project but on the twentieth-century educational one. And while Donna Haraway described and criticized the way in which the collection was compiled in the past, I will consider the rhetoric of the museum in justifying or passing off the legacy of that past ambition, its forms of address in the present: where “I” says to “you” what “they” are like.

The space of a museum presupposes a walking tour, an order in which the dioramas, exhibits, and panels are viewed and read. Thus it addresses an implied viewer–in narratological terms, a foclizer–whose tour produces the story of knowledge taken in and taken home. I will focus on the display as a sign system working in the realm between visual and verbal, and between information and persuasion, as it produces the walking learner. My analysis will concentrate on a small portion of the second floor, as I visited it in the Fall of 1991.

Entering the imposing hall at the main entrance on Central Park West, and prepared by the monument of Theodore Roosevelt outside, the words of Roosevelt fall upon the visitor. His statements are engraved on all four walls. The personification of the historical expository agent speaks of the values that this institution–at the time–was expected to bring home to the nation. On the left facing the entering visitor is the statement “Youth,” on the right “Manhood.” Turning around to see the writing on the opposite wall, you read “The State” on the left, and “Nature” on the right. In order to explicate what I mean by the need to pay attention to the meta-museum status of the museum, let me quote a line or two from each. Remember, we are reading what was written at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Youth

... Courage and hard work self mastery and intelligent effort are all essential to a successful life.

Manhood

... All daring and courage all iron endurance of misfortune make for a finer nobler type of manhood.

The State

... Aggressive fighting for the right is the noblest sport the world affords.

Nature

... There is a delight in the hardy life of the open.

There are no words that can tell the hidden spirit of the wilderness that can reveal its mystery its melancholy and its charm.

The museum's installations for the most part come from a time when youth was defined through the virtues of masculinity and the goal of life in terms of success. Masculinity, in turn, was defined by aggression and sublimation. Nationhood promoted war, and women were not spoken about. Nature was mystified in terms that express while hiding them (“hidden spirit”) the qualities of femininity that put both nature and women up for grabs.

It is good, therefore, that these texts remain on these walls. All it would take, to make them work toward a better understanding of the historical embeddedness of what would otherwise seem to be a half-heartedness inside the museum, is an indication of that historicality. One could inscribe their agency within the chain of history by pointing out how these statements, meant in the first decades of the century to have an everlasting, universal value, demonstrate that history most prominently is change, although not necessarily evolution. The imposing, monumentally inscribed walls could be made the first object of display instead of a display of unquestioned, naked authority.

The most obvious problem of the museum is the collocation, in its expository discourse, of animals and foreign peoples as the two others of dominant culture. The visual displays speak to the visitor in more than just informational terms; they also present a surplus discourse. Similarly, “collocation” is more than just visual juxtaposition; by speaking at the same time about animals and foreign peoples, the displays communicate an ideology of distinction, which has this conflation as its sign system.¹³ I contend that the double function of the museum as a display of its own status and history (its meta-function), as well as of its enduring cognitive educational vocation (its object-function), requires an absorption, in the display, of that critical and historical consciousness.

This double mission entails a specific exchange between the verbal and visual discourses. One could expect that whereas the visual displays, the dioramas which form the bulk of the museum's “treasures,” must be preserved as objects of th...