Cross‐Purposes: Museum Display and Material Culture Julia Petrov A museum is not a univocal medium: it is a complex of narrative strategies, objects, spaces, texts, and images. Its messages are produced by both curators and audiences and compete for dominance simultaneously. Exhibitions serve a representative function and therefore take artifacts out of their primary contexts, endowing them with new meanings and layering them with esthetic and historical values. Some classes of objects resist reinterpretation, and of these, this paper will focus on fashion, as a commodity that cannot be completely divorced from consumer context. Museums and meanings Museums, galleries, and the objects within them both shape and represent knowledge. As study collections, they form the basis of research that transforms the material into the intellectual; as spaces of display, they interpret the intellectual through the material. “The museum possesses capacities for gathering fragments of knowledge into coherent patterns and for imparting information to great numbers of people” (Whittlin 1949: 202). They show and tell (Bennett : 349) and both these functions are assumed to go hand in hand. The urge to create any kind of narrative from objects is a historical result of Western epistemological attitudes. While Arthur MacGregor's () work on collectors and collecting traced this implicitly, Eilean Hooper‐Greenhill's () volume Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge arguably remains the definitive text which provided a reading of the structures of different types of collections and museums as being organized according to complementary theories of classifying the world. Crucially, she views the museum not just as a cultural form, but also as a constructed object, which has followed an intellectual logic. Hooper‐Greenhill applies a formalist analysis to the layout of objects within a museum space, arguing that this not only represents the world‐view of the author of the space, but also shapes the understanding of the on‐looker. In a later book, Hooper‐Greenhill reiterates her argument that the physical position of an object is deeply related to its conceptual position within a museum, but concedes that the meaning is produced “through complex and multi‐layered museological processes where museum objectives, collecting policies, classification methods, display styles, artefactual groupings, and textual frameworks come together in articulation” (: 124). This is a useful reminder that not one of the individual details within the mechanism of an exhibition is arbitrary, nor do these represent final and fixed meanings. All are products of a series of contingent choices, and all are subject to the sometimes‐unpredictable interpretive process of the audience. The narrative of the traditional museum display is related to methods of classifying knowledge more broadly. Arising alongside literary forms, such as atlases, and later, encyclopedias, and combined with the accumulation of global souvenirs in collector's cabinets, by the nineteenth century, the contents of the museum were organized according to intellectual categories superimposed upon objects. Although differences necessarily existed in different geographical contexts and disciplines, the intellectual project of collecting the world remained relatively stable. Tony Bennett has written convincingly of the connection between the simultaneous evolution of the ordering systems for things and ideas, which he calls “the exhibitionary complex”: For the emergence of the art museum was closely related to that of a wider range of institutions—history and natural science museums, dioramas and panoramas, national, and later, international exhibitions, arcades and department stores—which served as linked sites for the development and circulation of new disciplines (history, biology, art history, anthropology) and their discursive formations (the past, evolution, aesthetics, man) as well as for the development of new technologies of vision. (Bennett : 333) Furthermore, these varied categories served a communicative purpose and their communications were believed to function in broadly similar ways. Once museums were no longer collection stores to be shared among like‐minded scholars, but open to the public at large (conceived as a body of ideal citizens, under‐educated, but open to paternalistic persuasion), their communicative function grew in importance, where information could be interpreted as a form of coercion. Eilean Hooper‐Greenhill traces the tale from where Bennett leaves off: The modernist museum collected objects and placed them on display. Visual statements, constructed through objects placed in carefully constructed relationships, presented aspects...
Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 14 citations exist upstream.