Living Pictures, Missing Persons

Mannequins, Museums, and Modernity

Mark B. Sandberg

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780691238272
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: History of Modern Art

In the late nineteenth century, Scandinavian urban dwellers developed a passion for a new, utterly modern sort of visual spectacle: objects and effigies brought to life in astonishingly detailed, realistic scenes. The period 1880-1910 was the popular high point of mannequin display in Europe. Living Pictures, Missing Persons explores this phenomenon as it unfolded with the rise of wax museums and folk museums in the largest cities of Denmark, Sweden, and Norway. Mark Sandberg asks: Why did modernity generate a cultural fascination with the idea of effigy? He shows that the idea of effigy is also a portal to understanding other aspects of visual entertainment in that period, including the widespread interest in illusionistic scenes and tableaux, in the "portability" of sights, spaces, and entire milieus.
Sandberg investigates this transformation of visual culture outside the usual test cases of the largest European metropolises. He argues that Scandinavian spectators desired an unusual degree of authenticity--a cultural preference for naturalism that made its way beyond theater to popular forms of museum display. The Scandinavian wax museums and folk-ethnographic displays of the era helped pre-cinematic spectators work out the social implications of both voyeuristic and immersive display techniques. This careful study thus anticipates some of the central paradoxes of twentieth-century visual culture--but in a time when the mannequin and the physical relic reigned supreme, and in a place where the contrast between tradition and modernity was a high-stakes game.

JUST INSIDE the entrance of the Grand Café on the central boulevard of present-day Oslo, there is a table reserved for a missing person. The awaited guest is that café’s most famous historical diner, the playwright Henrik Ibsen, who for most of the 1890s came punctually to the Grand every noon and late afternoon, always sitting at the same table for an aperitif and a newspaper. The restaurant has been waiting for Ibsen to return since 1978, when the management of the restaurant reenshrined his reserved table in a museum-like display. They implied in the arrangement of traces and artifacts around the table (his hat, his cane, a yellowed newspaper, and reading glasses) that he might still be expected at any moment.¹ Imagined to be present while historically absent, Norway’s best-known literary celebrity now makes his appearance in the café as an evocative spatial effigy—a missing person. In this placeholder mode of display, Ibsen has been equated with the space in which he would fit were he to return.

This arrangement has a certain appeal for those diners who notice the restaurant’s historical gesture off in the corner of the room. The space reserved exclusively for Ibsen, that is, also provides viewers with an imaginary kind of participation, an implicit invitation to try that space on for size in their minds, measuring body for body, imagining their own fit to his obviously well-worn chair (isolated here in a publicity photo for the café, fig. 1.1).² The missing-person effect thus works both ways: the absence of Ibsen’s body makes way for the spectator’s potential presence within the scene, but viewers must also absent themselves from their own bodies in order to participate in the representational game. The display creates missing persons on both sides of an imaginary divide; it encourages spectators to be border dwellers, both inside and outside the display (and their own bodies) at the same time.

Picture for a moment some alternative display scenarios. The dynamic of the given scene would shift substantially if, say, a wax effigy of Ibsen were used to fill the absence in the chair. It is easy to imagine the uncanny effects that such a materially present body would introduce by staring blankly at the diners sharing the room with the mannequin. The current, more subtle invocation of Ibsen’s historical presence would be turned into something else, the cultural profile of the upscale café perhaps giving way to that of a theme restaurant. Ibsen would still be missing, of course, but in a less obvious way. Instead of encountering an evocatively empty space that encourages them to perform the imaginary substitution of bodies, viewers would be asked to negotiate the presence of a corpselike body with uncanny properties.

FIGURE 1.1. Ibsen’s chair, isolated for publicity photograph purposes, ca. 1974. Now positioned at the reserved table at the Grand Café. Photo courtesy of the Grand Hotel Driftsselskap. Photographer unknown.

Yet another possibility would be a living-history display, with a role-playing actor making up for Ibsen’s absence. This has in fact been the practice at the Grand on special occasions, such as reopenings of the café after renovations in 1978 and 1994. In both cases, a costumed Ibsen impersonator once again walked down the Karl Johan Boulevard precisely at noon, Ibsen’s habitual time, stopped to set his watch by the clock on the street, and took up his reserved table at the café, filling temporarily what would from that moment forward be Ibsen’s reserved, empty space. The actor was served dark beer and port, Ibsen’s customary drinks, in the artifact drinking glasses engraved with his name. The various guests at the café’s reopening were then given the opportunity to mingle with “Ibsen” and to half imagine themselves as historical patrons in the Grand Café’s bohemian heyday in the 1890s.³

A joke moment staged at the 1994 event suggests still another possibility, with the hotel’s marketing director humorously usurping Ibsen’s place at the reserved table for a photo opportunity. Doing so, he momentarily ignored the chair’s inscribed metal plate, which explicitly marks off the space for Ibsen. In the staffs private photo album, the caption reads, “But Mr. Hasselknippe—you know that this is a reserved seat!” It is easy to appreciate this joke of the good-natured interloper, the person who flouts the invisible social boundaries and behavioral conventions that keep the rest of us out. For a brief moment, too, one becomes aware of an entire set of assimilated assumptions about the qualities of display space—about the in-between status of objects that are only apparently in use, about the imperative to look but not touch, about the ways in which one routinely inhabits space in the imagination that is technically off-limits.

Rounding out these scenarios with a final one makes the usual invisibility of those assumptions even more obvious. Imagine an ordinary patron in the café doing the same as the marketing director, deliberately ignoring the implicit lines marking off the Ibsen table as display, separate from the rest of the room. The clues are many—the difference in furniture style, the fact that hat, cane, newspaper, and reading glasses are mounted to the wall, or the little sign on the table cautioning, “The glasses are glued on. Please don’t touch.” Suppose someone, in the course of a visit to the restaurant on a less ceremonious day, decided to inhabit this space more literally by taking a seat at the table, trying on Ibsen’s hat, reading his newspaper, testing out the cane, and ordering a meal. That spectator, who otherwise would of course be more than welcome to participate in a more subtle, halfway game of inhabitation, would at that moment turn rube or transgressor, and the delicate ontological balance of the display space would collapse.

Thinking through the various possibilities of display in this way, it is striking to note how easily spectators today negotiate this complex game of oblique access to the living scene of a missing person. None of the preceding scenarios are unfamiliar, each having earned a place in a repertoire of public behaviors easily called up when one is interacting with modern forms of display. Comingling with representational bodies presents no particular conceptual challenge to spectators accustomed by a wide range of late twentieth-century media experience to thinking of themselves as simultaneously inside and outside the world of representation, and of bodies on display as both convincingly present and conveniently absent. Our visual culture quite simply demands broad competency in effigies—not simply the mannequin kind but an entire range of recorded and digital bodies.

Our familiarity with an ever-expanding effigy practice may prevent us from noticing the particular variety represented in the missing-person display. For here, the body appears as space, not substance or image. Literally surrounded by evocative traces and signifiers, Ibsen’s missing body is purely a display effect. Like the body of H. G. Wells’s invisible man, or the concave bodily indentations left in Pompeii’s volcanic ash, Ibsen’s body is evoked as a trace space, a negative impression taken in the medium of its surrounding things.⁴ His corporeal form is outlined not by flesh, bone, and skin but by the array of objects and clothing that mark the boundaries of where it should be, but is not. This book’s cover photo shows that effect in a contemporary display of historical costumes at the National Musæum in Denmark, where the missing bodies are conjured up by a painstaking display technique designed specifically to make them appear substantial in absentia.⁵ The range of ready analogies reminds that the missing-person display at the Ibsen table is of course not the invention of the Grand Café. The very familiarity of the idea, however, raises an interesting series of questions: What is at stake in effigy effects of this kind? Does this kind of display have a history, a moment of invention or proliferation, and how does that relate to the more general history of effigy? Most important, what are the possible social resonances of this practice of imagining missing persons?

A turn to the longer history of the term effigy reveals connections from embalming to statuary, from portraiture to public demonstration.⁶ The most familiar meaning is the latter, the political substitution of likeness for body, originally for symbolic punishment (in cases of escaped criminals) or for ritualized protest (burning leaders or enemies in effigy). The wider range of meaning, according to the entries in the Oxford English Dictionary, encompasses any practice of corporeal image production but is reserved especially for "habited,” or clothed, figures. Wax and plaster mannequins would seem to be at the heart of this category, set off as they often are from other forms of sculpture by realistic costuming and theatrical techniques of mise-en-scène.

Late nineteenth-century modernity probably comes to mind as a likely place to look for this more obvious kind of effigy practice. One senses intuitively that the mannequin had a particular claim on this period; these lifelike yet staring figures seem tightly linked to the social context of commodified bodies and urban crowds in the late nineteenth century. The claim would not be one of invention—there is of course a much longer cultural history of mannequin display—but instead of degree and scale. During the period in question, from about 1880 up to the time of World War I, lifelike plaster and wax figures proliferated throughout many of the visual-cultural venues of European urban life. They could be found increasingly in storefront windows, at international exhibitions, and in several interrelated forms of popular museum display. The visual-cultural repertoire of the time required abilities in mannequin viewing; as urban spectators found themselves negotiating an increasingly frequent contact with these lifelike figures, they were forced to sift through the mannequin’s sometimes inconspicuous, finely nuanced ontological distinctions between the living and the dead.

Still, one senses that there is more to the idea of effigy than mannequins, and a final OED entry provides a hint of the larger semantic field. As a now-obscure transitive verb form, “to effigy” is glossed as “to serve as a picture of, to ‘body forth.’ ” This is an evocative phrase. It suggests a more extended conceptualization of effigy, one that encompasses but is not necessarily limited to a material representation of the body. I will argue this point at length in what follows, namely, that it was a combination of mannequin display, new recording technologies, and missing-person effects that served to “body forth” a convincingly lifelike yet mobile body in late nineteenth-century visual culture. More than an age of mannequins, the period in question could more productively be seen as an effigy culture in this broader sense. Mannequins were but one tangible manifestation of a wider array of circulating corporeal traces and effects that worked to “body forth” at seemingly insignificant ontological cost to the original body and helped form the late nineteenth century’s reputation as the era of a newly mobilized body. This broader sense of “effigy” helps us understand the means by which these bodies were circulated, capturing as it does both the presence effects that made them convincing and the absences that made them portable.

It ups the ante of this claim a notch to realize that it was not simply the bodies on display that could claim a new degree of circulation. “Mobility” is perhaps too cheerful a term for some of the correlative social experience of urban in-migration or poverty-induced emigration, since it skews the notion too much in the direction of the expanding systems of middle-class travel and tourism. But the fact remains that in the closing decades of the nineteenth century, the European population had access to sensations of displacement on a wider scale, even if reactions to the experience of finding oneself elsewhere ranged fully from regret to delight. This study will deal carefully with both possibilities, showing how “uprooting” got marketed as “access” in popular museum displays. At this introductory point, however, it is enough to register the fact that the impulse to “body forth” arose in a widespread social context of real bodies out of place.

The preconditions of this corporeal mobility and effigy culture were new possibilities for imagining space and time. The testimony of late nineteenth-century cultural commentators is not bashful about making claims for a radically new kind of spatiotemporal experience. After all, this was the self-proclaimed era of the “annihilation of space and time,” a phrase repeated in reaction to everything from railroad travel to phonography.⁷ Subsequent historical studies have further enshrined that idea; for example, Stephen Kern’s Culture of Time and Space, 1880-1918, proceeds precisely from the phenomenological assumption that “sweeping changes in technology and culture created distinctive new modes of thinking about and experiencing time and space.”⁸ Recent studies of pre- and paracinematic visual culture (as disparate as they may be, given everything those terms pull into their orbit) generally agree on this point: time and space were remade by urban modernity.⁹

It is easy to object that one buys into modernity’s own rhetoric when one assumes that these were novel experiences of space, time, and body. “New” is an intellectually seductive word, especially for historicizing accounts interested in locating crucial moments of paradigm shift, a tendency that suggests the need for caution in making these kinds of claims. The world was not simply static before, nor fully mobilized after the transitions we call urban modernity. If nothing else, the continued “annihilation” of time and space throughout our own century, right up to the Internet age and its own dreams of universal access, suggests that some sifting of claims is in order. Paul Valéry’s statement, “For the last twenty years neither matter nor space nor time has been what it was from time immemorial,” may indeed deserve pride of place as the opening epigraph of Walter Benjamin’s most famous essay on modernity, but it nevertheless seems late compared with other claims when one realizes Valéry was describing the twentieth century in his 1928 essay on ubiquity.¹⁰ Benjamin’s own position on the cultural effects of mechanical reproduction admits to many incremental advances in the practice prior to the nineteenth century. Furthermore, any notion that aura had “withered” definitively and finally when he wrote his essay in 1936 needs only a reminder of the public’s continued marvel at more recent media transformations of time and space to realize that there is no clear before and after in this process.¹¹

What remains after these cautionary remarks is the discursive claim that many commentators in the late nineteenth century were in fact caught up in the exhilaration of mobility and called it new. The impression of simultaneous presence in multiple places or durable presence through time sparked a collective, public imagination of access and visual availability, even if commentators tended to mistake effects of cultural acceleration for absolute movement. Far from invalidating the claim of “n...