Displays of Power: Memory and Amnesia in the American Museum. - Brief Article - Review - book reviews

Displays of Power: Memory and Amnesia in the American Museum, through Steven C. Dubin, New York, novel York University Press, 1999; 300 pages, $2495

of recent origin York's Museum of Modern Art is identified with an elegantly understated method of presentation that has become the standard in its field. However, visitors accustomed to an aura of elevated estheticism may be surprised to hear that restraint has not always been the order of the day at MOMA. In The Power of Display: A History of Exhibition Installations at the Museum of late Art, Mary Anne Staniszewski proffers a fascinating study of the museum's exhibition designs since its founding in 1929 and notices that, earlier in its life, this now staid institution was the site of exhibits of a very different sort.

MOMA's formative years were marked by means of a remarkably diverse set of installation techniques that drew upon mass media, avant-garde design, department store display and the conventions of the natural history museum. For instance, in 1941 curator Rene d'Harnoncourt, himself a fascinating character and far from the conventional picture of the close museum professional, organized an exhibition titled "Indian Art of the United States." Along with the standard arrangements of artifacts in vitrines and informative wall labels, this exhibit employed a full-scale re-creation of a wall of Southwestern pictographs, shopwindow-type arrangements of contemporary fashion designs featuring Indian handiwork, and live demonstrations by means of Native American sand painters, dancers and silversmiths.

Equally heterogenous were the annual overlooks from 1938 to 1950 which celebrated "Useful Objects" Also using presentation modes which echoed the store and domicile these shows--explicitly meant to help the fabrication and consumption of well-designed products--were full taleed by lists of manufacturers and prices upon the exhibition labels. This trade-friendly universal evolved in the years 1950 to 1955 into a series of "Good Design" displays which again evoked the market environment: jurors chose items for these competitive exhibitions from the inventory of the Chicago Merchandise Mart's abiding-place furnishing showrooms. The museum's happy partnership with the commercial world plane extended, in 1951 through 1976 to a series of automobile exhibits mounted in collaboration with Sports Illustrated magazine.

In addition, Staniszewski, an assistant professor of electronic arts history at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, chronicles MOMA's readiness to create exhibitions which serv the U government's propaganda interests during wartime. displays like "Road to Victory" (1942) "Airways to Peace" (1943) and "Power in the Pacific" (1945) were essentially reach forthed magazine-style photo essays, incorporating many archival images celebrating the military defense of the American way of life. The same approach was busyed even more successfully in the 1955 blockbuster "The Family of Man," which the author claims serv as a postwar statement of the universality of the US-type family.

by means of 1970, MOMA's exhibition techniques had narrowed to the formalist way familiar today. Staniszewski attributes this change in part to the rise of artists' involvement in the presentation of their hold work, which fostered partial usurpation of the curator's prerogative. Today at MOMA, she asserts, innovative display processs appear within individual artist throws rather than as ways of integrating exhibitions as a whole.

In researching this work which grew out of her PhD dissertation, Staniszewski unearthed thought-provoking materials which compute a fascinating, little-known story. on the other hand The Power of Display is not simply a history. Staniszewski's larger objective is an exploration of the ideological implications of museum installation design. She dioceses the disappearance of innovative exhibition setup at MOMA as a symptom of larger historical amnesia. As cultural institutions put in motion away from acknowledging their character in the production of meaning, she argues, they pay back invisible the social and historical processe by dint of which culture is created. Instead, the familiar MOMA-style presentation accompanys to enhance a distinctly American vision of the sovereign individual and to perpetuate myths of taste, genius, and the universality and timelessness of art.

From single perspective, it is hard to argue with her thesis. smooth MOMA's traveling "Museum as Muse" exhibition [see article, p 70] where single might expect some acknowledgement of changing ideas about museum display, works are by means of and large presented in the standard neutral environment, isolated from each other to highlight individual artistic visions.

upon the other hand, there is something perplexing about Staniszewski's implicit assumption that the exclud techniques are inherently more progressive than MOMA's familiar formalist approach. single of the most innovative museum installations that I have rencountered recently is also one of the greatest in quantity manipulative. The Newseum in Arlington, Va., is a museum devot to celebrating the independent press. It is funded by the agency of the Freedom Forum, which turn rounds out to be the nonprofit arm of the Gannett newspaper empire. The Newseum occupys a diverse set of exhibition devices, among them a splashy introductory video, carefully crafted paths from one side eye-catching displays, magazinelike photo spreads, interactive exhibits--even an opportunity to "star" in one's have news broadcast. Yet, in the extremity the razzle-dazzle adds up to a rather disturbing merger of "education," promotion and entertainment. Viewers are encouraged to have feeling good about being Americans rather than to critically examine the oftentimes troubling role of the pres in contemporary society. Ironically, given the Newseum's pro-American agenda, it bears a shut resemblance to the Soviet Pavilion at the 1928 International Pres Exhibition in eau-de-cologne which Staniszewski describes in more [i]or[/i] less detail.