The Politics of Display

Museums, Science, Culture

Sharon Macdonald, Sharon Macdonald

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781136878787
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Business
• Categoría: Museum Administration

The assumption that museum exhibitions, particularly those concerned with science and technology, are somehow neutral and impartial is today being challenged both in the public arena and in the academy. The Politics of Display brings together studies of contemporary and historical exhibitions and contends that exhibitions are never, and never have been, above politics. Rather, technologies of display and ideas about 'science' and 'objectivity' are mobilized to tell stories of progress, citizenship, racial and national difference. The display of the Enola Gay, the aircraft which dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima is a well-known case in point.
The Politics of Display charts the changing relationship between displays and their audience and analyzes the consequent shift in styles of representation towards interactive, multimedia and reflexive modes of display. The Politics of Display brings together an array of international scholars in the disciplines of sociology, anthropology and history. Examples are taken from exhibitions of science, technology and industry, anthropology, geology, natural history and medicine, and locations include the United States of America, Australia, the United Kingdom, France, the Netherlands and Spain.
This book is an excellent contribution to debates about the politics of public culture. It will be of interest to students of sociology, anthropology, cultural studies, museum studies and science studies.

Chapter 1
Exhibitions of power and powers of exhibition

An introduction to the politics of display

Sharon Macdonald

In recent years politics has erupted publicly into the imagined sanctity of science and of museums on an increasing number of occasions. Two cases which have caused world-wide ripples of concern are the controversy over the representation of the Enola Gay—the aircraft which dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima in World War II—and the Science in American Life exhibition, both at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington (see Gieryn, Chapter 12 this volume). Although most science exhibitions have not achieved the same notoriety, the questions that were raised in the controversies can be asked of other exhibitions too. Who decides what should be displayed? How are notions of ‘science’ and ‘objectivity’ mobilized to justify particular representations? Who gets to speak in the name of ‘science’, ‘the public’ or ‘the nation’? What are the processes, interest groups and negotiations involved in constructing an exhibition? What is ironed out or silenced? And how does the content and style of an exhibition inform public understandings?

This book is concerned with these questions. It explores the political nature, uses and consequences of representations of science and technology for the public in exhibitions; and shows that exhibitions and science are productive arenas in which to investigate questions of cultural production and knowledge more generally. The focus is on museums and exhibitions that are identified as broadly scientific and are concerned with some aspect of science and technology. This includes museums of science and industry, natural history, geology, anthropology and medicine, as well as universal exhibitions (which deal with industry, technology and their own peculiar anthropology)—all of which are referred to here as either museums or exhibitions of science. The volume contains a mix of historical and present-day examples, for the aim is to show that science displays are never, and have never been, just representations of uncontestable facts. They always involve the culturally, socially and politically saturated business of negotiation and value-judgment; and they always have cultural, social and political implications. This is the case not only for recent examples which have sparked such controversy, but also for other and earlier exhibitions which have not been publicly contested.

Exploring the politics of exhibitionary selections, styles and silences is not, however, an easy matter. Exhibitions tend to be presented to the public rather as do scientific facts: as unequivocal statements rather than as the outcome of particular processes and contexts. The assumptions, rationales, compromises and accidents that lead to a finished exhibition are generally hidden from public view: they are tidied away along with the cleaning equipment, the early drafts of text and the artefacts for which no place could be found. Likewise, exhibitions rarely seek to explain their contents in terms of a broader social and political context; and this may be something which even those involved in making exhibitions tend to overlook as they concentrate upon the intellectual, aesthetic and practical details of the task at hand. Generally invisible too, through paucity of research, are the understandings of exhibitions and science by those who visit. By analogy with the use of the term ‘black box’ (borrowed from cybernetics) in the sociology of science to describe those technical objects or scientific principles which are taken as given by scientists without any knowledge of their background or workings,¹ we might suggest that exhibitions tend to be presented as ‘glass-cased’—that is, as objects there to be gazed upon, admired, and understood only in relation to themselves. Research, however, must seek to move beyond this.²

In order to move towards a more thorough understanding of the potentials, difficulties and consequences of putting science on display we need to look analytically at the contents of exhibitions in relation to their production, contexts and reception. Clearly, it is rarely possible to do all of these within any one study (evidence of what visitors thought of historical exhibitions, for example, is scant). Nevertheless, by bringing together a range of careful, probing studies which each tackle various of these dimensions, this book provides a collective vision of what is possible.

In this introduction my aim is to set out some issues involved in the analysis of the politics of the public display of science and to provide a framework in relation to which the studies might be located. I do this partly through a schematic history of the exhibition of science and technology which seeks to highlight the changing relations between museums, science, publics and power.

MUSEUMS, KNOWLEDGE AND POWER

In this book, we bring museums and science together not just to explore the politics and cultural operations of each, but also to highlight the discursive interrelationships between the two. Museums which deal with science are not simply putting science on display; they are also creating particular kinds of science for the public, and are lending to the science that is displayed their own legitimizing imprimatur. In other words, one effect of science museums is to pronounce certain practices and artefacts as belonging to the proper realm of ‘science’, and as being science that an educated public ought to know about. Moreover, some museums are sites of scientific research, and some collections have been formed as part of the development of particular scientific disciplines. In this way, they have played important roles in the constitution of scientific knowledge (see Allison-Bunnell, Dias, and J.Bennett, Chapters 5, 3 and 10 this volume) and have helped to define and perform scientific conceptions of ‘truth’ and ‘objectivity’. At the same time, museums of science are widely conceived of as ‘scientific’ institutions in the sense that they are regarded as organized according to orderly and authoritative principles—principles conceived of as separate from power and politics.

Seeing ‘truth’ and ‘Values’, ‘science’ and ‘politics’, and ‘knowledge’ and ‘power’ as divided off from one another is characteristic of ways of thinking which, in the Western tradition, have their roots in the seventeenth century, but which crystallized in the nineteenth century. From the late nineteenth century, however, with thinkers such as Nietzsche and Heidegger, and gathering pace dramatically since around the 1960s, there has been a growing number of cultural and historical analyses which have sought to subject these divisions to critical analysis rather than take them as given. Questions have been asked about their formation and effects: how did such separations come about and what are their consequences? This has opened up many fields of research exploring the workings of power in different domains of knowledge and practice, including modern science.³

In this book, we are concerned with ‘politics’ in this broad sense of the workings of power. As Foucault has argued, power and knowledge are thoroughly mutually implicated: power is involved in the construction of truths, and knowledge has implications for power (see Foucault 1977, 1979). The production, distribution and consumption of knowledge are always political in this sense. ‘Knowledge’ here does not only mean that which is displayed in an exhibition as formal knowledge, of course. It also includes the knowledges (including unreflected-upon assumptions) of different parties involved in exhibition-making, their attempts to, for example, gather knowledge about visitors, and the understandings of visitors themselves.⁴ These do not always work neatly with one another. Politics is, therefore, a matter of (often implicit) negotiation: a dynamic powerplay of competing knowledges, intentions and interests. Moreover, if we view knowledge and power as intertwined, politics is not restricted to particular events or institutions; rather, it has ramifications throughout social life and cultural practice. Even where our concern is with what Foucault calls ‘governmentality’— the administration of individuals and populations—we should look towards the detailed tactics, or ‘semiotechniques’, by which this may operate (Foucault 1977, 1991). Politics, in other words, lies not just in policy statements and intentions (though these are important) but also in apparently non-political and even ‘minor’ details, such as the architecture of buildings, the classification and juxtaposition of artefacts in an exhibition, the use of glass cases or interactives, and the presence or lack of a voice-over on a film. This is not to say that we will necessarily be able to detect the direct influence of, say, ‘the State’ in the design of such details; and it is likely in many cases that we will not even be able to say from where we draw our assumptions that particular display techniques are appropriate.⁵ There will, however, be ‘local’ assumptions, claims and statements of intention—e.g. that exhibitions should ‘speak to the eyes’ or that labels should be designed for different ‘levels’ of reading skill and interest among the public. The task of the analyst, as the later chapters demonstrate, is to explore these beliefs and rationales, and to see how they are associated with— perhaps reflecting or opposing—wider historically located cultural logics and political rationalities.

The task is also to explore the consequences of particular forms of representation in terms of the distribution of power: who is empowered or disempowered by certain modes of display? Within the cultural study of museums, one of the most productive theoretical developments has been the analysis of museums as ‘texts’ or as ‘media’; and this is an approach that can usefully be harnessed to questions of the politics of display. While sometimes focused narrowly on content, in its more interesting forms this approach has sought to open up questions about production (encoding/writing) and consumption (decoding/ reading), as well as content (text) and the interrelationships between these.⁶ It is an approach which leads to important questions about the determination of meaning and the distribution of the power to define in exhibitions. For example, who authors exhibitions? How much agency does an exhibition-maker have? What state political or economic interests impinge? How is the audience imagined? Who is excluded? To what extent do visitors to an exhibition define it in their own terms? And how do certain exhibitionary forms or techniques enable certain kinds of readings? More specifically, this is an approach which can lead to questions about interrelationships between particular kinds of producers, exhibitions and audiences, and the different distributions of power these might entail and enable.

In many of the later chapters we see the interrelationship between exhibition production, content and imagined and/or actual audiences, and the positioning of these in relation to science and technology. That our focus is on museums of science is important, for it is by no means clear that the politics of production and reception necessarily work in the same ways for different media and genres of display. The strategies and techniques of, say, television, and the nature of the authority relationships that audiences have with it, are not the same as those of museums; likewise, the kinds of positioning of audiences through notions of taste, and the nature of appeals to authority, in art museums may well be different from those in museums of science. As Chapters 4 and 7 (by Teslow, and Macdonald) illustrate, a science museum trying to present an exhibition as ‘art’, or attempting to offer visitors choice, may easily be misunderstood. So, too, may understandings of science presented in the context of a museum differ from the understandings that the public may fo...