Pedagogic objects, clean eyes, and popular instruction: On sensory regimes and museum didactics

Configurations

Volumn 6, Issue 3, 1998, Pages 345-371

  Bennett, Tony ^a  

^a The Open University

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 2442601150     PISSN: 10631801     EISSN: 10806520     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/con.1998.0020     Document Type: Article

References (84)

1. James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), p. 189.
2. Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century Ibid., p. 191.
3. Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century Ibid., p. 193.
4. Frederick McCoy, On the Formation of Museums in Victoria (Melbourne: Goodhugh and Hough, 1857), p. 14.
5. Paula Finalen, Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting, and Scientific Culture in Early Modem Italy (Berkeley/Los Angeles/London: University of California Press, 1994), p. 101.
6. Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting, and Scientific Culture in Early Modem Italy Ibid., p. 109.
7. Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting, and Scientific Culture in Early Modem Italy Ibid., p. 100.
8. In describing this system of glances as dialogical, I am drawing on the work of Bakhtin: see Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981). I should make it clear,- however, that this is a gloss that I place on Stafford's discussion, rather than an interpretation she herself offers.
9. Barbara Maria Stafford, Artfiil Science: Enlightenment Entertainment and the Eclipse of Visual Education (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994), p. 238.
10. Barbara Maria Stafford, Artfiil Science: Enlightenment Entertainment and the Eclipse of Visual Education Ibid.
11. Barbara Maria Stafford, Artfiil Science: Enlightenment Entertainment and the Eclipse of Visual Education Ibid.
12. Barbara Maria Stafford, Artfiil Science: Enlightenment Entertainment and the Eclipse of Visual Education Ibid., p. 251.
13. Barbara Maria Stafford, Artfiil Science: Enlightenment Entertainment and the Eclipse of Visual Education Ibid.
14. Barbara Maria Stafford, Artfiil Science: Enlightenment Entertainment and the Eclipse of Visual Education Ibid., p. 218.
15. Barbara Maria Stafford, Artfiil Science: Enlightenment Entertainment and the Eclipse of Visual Education Ibid., p. 225.
16. Dauben ton was something of a go-between in the debates and struggles between Buffon's approach to natural history as still centrally concerning the story of life on earth, and Condorcet's campaign to reform natural history displays in accordance with the principles of a tabular rationalism. See Pietro Corsi, The Age of Lamarck: Evolutionary Theories in France, 1790-1830 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988).
17. Dauben ton cited in Andrew McCIellan, Inventing the Louvre: Art, Politics, and the Origins of the Modem Museum in Eighteenth-Century Paris (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 80.
18. Michel Foucault, The Order ofTlrings: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London: Tavistock, 1970), p. 132.
19. Michel Foucault, The Order ofTlrings: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences Ibid., p. 131.
20. The Order OfTlrings: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences Ibid., p. 130.
21. Stafford, Artful Science (above, n. 9), p. 266.
22. Artful Science Ibid., p. 1.
23. Artful Science Ibid., p. 5.
24. Jonathan Crary makes clear how, in this period, the importance accorded to the camera obscura was connected to a technology of vision in which the observer was decoporealized-an isolated and autonomous individual, detached from the world in an enclosed space within which vision was to be directed by the understanding;
25. see Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996).
26. For discussions of the importance of public witnessing to the truth-protocols of the experimental sciences, see William Eamon, "From the Secrets of Nature to Public Knowledge: The Origins of the Concept of Openness in Science," Minerva 23 (1985): 321-347;
27. Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985).
28. Stafford, Artful Science (above, n. 9), p. 134.
29. Finalen, Possessing Nature (above, n. 5), p. 402.
30. See David Goodman, "Fear of Circuses: Founding the National Museum of Victoria," Continuum 3:1 (1990): 18-34.
31. McCoy, Formation (above, n. 4), p. 8.
32. Crary, Techniques (above, n. 24), p. 57.
33. Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994), p. 146.
34. Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought Ibid., p. 205.
35. Rudler cited in Geoffrey Lewis, For Instruction and Recreation: A Century History of the Museums Association (London: Quiller Press, 1989), p. 3.
36. F. W, Rudler, On Natural History Museums, witli Suggestions for the Formation of a Central Museum in Wales (London, 1876), p. 4.
37. Pitt Rivers Museum Archive, Foundations and Early History, ff. 3-4.
38. F. E. Weiss, "The Organisation of a Botanical Museum," Museums Association Proceedings (1892): 25.
39. John Chard, "On Circulating Museum Cabinets for Schools and Other Educational Purposes," Museums Association Proceedings (1890): 63.
40. Jonathan Hutchinson, "On Educational Museums," Museums Association Proceedings (1893): 49.
41. Rev. H. H. Higgins, "On the Cultivation of Special Features in Museums," Museums Association Proceedings (1892): 40.
42. Australian Museum Archives, Series 24: Curators Reports to the Trustees, box 1: 1881-1887, p. S, Australian Museum, Sydney, Australia. The comment is taken from an anonymous review of the Museum's geology collections and exhibitions.
43. John Barrell, The Political Theory of Painting from Reynolds to Hazlitt: "The Body of the Public" (New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 1986), p. 8.
44. Steven Shapin, A Social History of the Truth: Civility and Science in Se\'enteenth-Century England (Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 90.
45. have discussed elsewhere why these concerns, with their focus on the workingman, were gender-specific: see Tony Bennett, Culture: A Reformer's Science (Sydney: Alien and Unwin; London/New York: Sage, 1998), chap. 6.
46. These issues were perhaps most extensively canvassed in the 1870s debates regarding the appropriateness of the rotunda as a spatial form for the exhibition of evolutionary anthropology displays; for a discussion see Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (London/New York: Routledge, 1995), chap. 7.
47. Boyd Dawkins, "On Museum Organisation and Arrangement," Museums Association Proceedings (1890): 42.
48. Museums Association Proceedings Ibid., p. 43 (emphasis in original).
49. Foucault, Order of Things (above, n. 18), p. 138.
50. Order of Things Ibid, (emphasis in original).
51. should make it clear that my remarks here are limited to museums in the Englishspeaking world. Nélia Dias's work on anthropology museums in late-nineteenth- century France makes it clear that a different economy of the visible was organized through the use of display techniques that, in aiming to ward off the tendency toward relativism that was associated with the fin de siècle subjectivization of vision, relied increasingly on statistics, charts, and tables rather than words to regulate the visitor's vision; see Nélia Dias, "The Visibility of Difference: Nineteenth-Century French Anthropological Collections," in The Politics of Display: Museums, Science, Culture, ed. Sharon MacDonald (London/New York: Routledge, 1997), pp. 36-52. As Dias notes, however, this was related to the strongly biological focus of French anthropology. In the Englishspeaking world, anthropology, ethnology, archaeology, and natural history tended to form parts of a single, interacting, interpretive and textual system from the 1870s through to the 1890s.
52. Henry Fairfield Osborn, "The American Museum and Citizenship," Annual Report of the American Museum of Natural History 54 (1922/23): 2.
53. For an account of Osborn's familiarity with the Pestalozzian system of education, see Ronald Rainger, An Agenda for Antiquity: Henry Fairfield Osbom and Vertebrate Paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History, 1890-1935 (Tuscaloosa/London: University of Alabama Press, 1991), pp. 105-111.
54. The role of this pedagogic system in earlier American museum history is discussed in Joel J. Orosz, Curators and Culture: The Museum Movement in America, 1740-1870 (Tuscaloosa/London: University of Alabama Press, 1990).
55. For the best synoptic account of these developments, see Alain Schnapp, The Discovery of the Past: The Origins of Archaeology (London: British Museum Press, 1996).
56. Pitt Rivers Museum, Foundations (above, n. 35), f. 152.
57. Foundations Ibid., f. 153.
58. Sir William H. Flower, "Modern Museums," Museums Association Proceedings (1893): 4.
59. George Brown Goode, "Museum-History and Museums of History" (1888), in The Origins of Natural Science in America: The Essays of George Brown Goode, ed. Sally Gregory Kohlstedt (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991), p. 307.
60. The Origins of Natural Science in America: The Essays of George Brown Goode Ibid., p. 308.
61. The Origins of Natural Science in America: The Essays of George Brown Goode Ibid., p. 306.
62. Barnum's fakes and hoaxes, however, also made a calculated appeal to the sensory democracy of American traditions, in urging visitors to trust to the truth of things as evidenced by their senses rather than rely on the judgments of experts: see Neil Harris, Humbug: The Art of P. T. Bamum (Boston: Little, Brown, 1973).
63. See Ben Singer, "Modernity, HyperStimulus, and the Rise of Popular Sensationalism," in Cinema and the Invention of Modem Life, ed. Leo Charney and Vanessa Schwartz (Berkeley/Los Angeles/London: University of California Press, 1995), pp. 72-102.
64. Ruskin cited in William White, "The Function of Museums as Considered by Mr. Ruskin," Museums Association Proceedings (1893): 89.
65. Asa Briggs, Victorian Things (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1990).
66. Lynn L. Merrill, The Romance of Victorian Natural History (Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 5.
67. The Romance of Victorian Natural History Ibid., p. 51.
68. The Romance of Victorian Natural History Ibid., p. 60.
69. The Romance of Victorian Natural History Ibid., p. 93.
70. The Romance of Victorian Natural History Ibid., p. 218.
71. Thomas H. Huxley, Discourses Biological and Geological: Essays (London: Macmillan, 1896), p. 69.
72. have discussed this point in greater detail elsewhere: see Tony Bennett, "Speaking to the Eyes: Museums, Legibility and the Social Order," in MacDonald, Politics of Display (above, n. 49), pp. 25-36.
73. Baldwin Spencer, Guide to the Australian Ethnographical Collection in the National Museum of Victoria (Melbourne: Government Printer, 1901), pp. 23-24.
74. Baldwin Spencer to Edward Tylor, September 1, 1900, Tylor Papers, box 13A, folio S16, Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, England.
75. Peter Beilharz, Imagining the Antipodes: Culture, Theory and the Visual in the Work of Bernard Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 15-16.
76. John Cotton Dana, A Plan for a New Museum: The Kind of Museum it Will Profit a City to Maintain (Woodstock, Vt.: Elm Tree Press, 1920), p. 13.
77. Jay, Downcast Eyes, (above, n. 31), pp. 149 and 212.
78. For a very suggestive introduction to these questions, however, see Mark B. Sandberg, "Effigy and Narrative: Looking into the Nineteenth-Century Folk Museum," in Charney and Schwartz, Cinema (above, n. 60), pp. 320-361.
79. Pierre Bourdieu and Alain Darbel, The Love of Art: European Art Museums and Their Public (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), p. 53 (first published in French in 1969).
80. W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 16 (emphasis in original).
81. Stafford, Artful Science (above, n. 9), p. 264 (emphasis in original).
82. Artful Science Ibid., p. 279.
83. This discussion is contained in Clifford, Routes (above, n. 1), chap. 6.
84. For a related discussion of the same exhibition, see Henrietta Lidchi, "The Poetics and the Politics of Exhibiting Other Cultures," in Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices, ed. Stuart Hall (London: Sage Publications in association with the Open University, 1997), pp. 151-208.