Visiting the Visitor: An Enquiry Into the Visitor Business in Museums 9783839432891

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Ann Davis, Kerstin Smeds (eds.) Visiting the Visitor

Museum | Volume 18

Ann Davis, Kerstin Smeds (eds.)

Visiting the Visitor An Enquiry Into the Visitor Business in Museums

We gratefully acknowledge the generous financial support of ICOFOM.

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de © 2016 transcript Verlag, Bielefeld

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Cover layout: Kordula Röckenhaus, Bielefeld Cover illustration: photo Kerstin Smeds, entrance hall of Bardo, the National museum of Tunisia in 2012. Typeset by Mark-Sebastian Schneider, Bielefeld Printed in Germany Print-ISBN 978-3-8376-3289-7 PDF-ISBN 978-3-8394-3289-1

Table of Contents

Introduction Visiting the Visitor ...  | 7 Affect-based Exhibition Jennifer Harris, Curtin University – Australia | 15

Individual Identity/Collective History Personalizing Essence in the Museum M. Elizabeth Weiser, Ohio State University – United States | 39

Describing and Understanding the Experience of Visitors Daniel Schmitt, University of Valenciennes – France | 55

Viewing the Museum Experience through an Identity Lens John Falk, Oregon State University – United States | 71

Empowering the Visitors Process and Problems Ann Davis, Director, The Nickle Arts Museum, University of Calgary (retired) – Canada | 89

Here Comes Everybody! The Visitor Business in Museums in Light of Existential Philosophy Kerstin Smeds, Department of Culture and Media Sciences, Umeå University – Sweden | 105

Experiencing Dialogue Behind the Cur tains of Museum Per formance Bruno Brulon Soares, UNIRIO (Federal University of the State of Rio de Janeiro) – Brazil  | 127

Social Representation Theory and Museum Visitors Aida Rechena, Francisco Tavares Proença Júnior Museum – Portugal | 139

A Visitor-Centered Approach Enhancing Museology with Perceptual Theory Anna Leshchenko, Russian State University for the Humanities, Museology Department Moscow – Russia | 153

Reflections on Michail Bakhtin’s Dialogue versus the Theory of Mirror Neurons Vitaly Ananiev, Saint Petersburg State University – Russia | 165

Who do you Think they are? Museum Visitor Studies in Russia with a Historical Perspective Vitaly Ananiev, Saint Petersburg State University – Russia | 171

Acknowledged and Empowered Visitors in Socialist Croatia Diachronic Exploration Žarka Vujić and Helena Stublić, University of Zagreb – Croatia | 183

Following Visitors’ Comments in Disigning a Museum Refurbishment Identity and Authentity Maria Cristina Vannini, Soluzionimuseali ims – Italy | 201

From Real Thing to Real Experience Rethinking the Museum Experience Wan-Chen Chang, Taipei National University of the Arts – Taiwan | 213

Museums and Visitors Giving the Lions Powers to the Gazelle Colette Dufresne-Tassé, Université de Montréal – Canada | 229

Authors’ Biographies  | 249

Introduction Visiting the Visitor ...

Within museums there is a definite shift toward recognition of the importance of the visitor. But this mindset is not always followed by actions. Museums try all kinds of ways to empower the visitor, to offer her resources for meaning making and action, to inspire him to participate. Nevertheless, the empowered visitor achieves the experience she wants when going to a museum. She seeks meaning, her meaning, discovered her own way. What might that experience be and how can it be achieved? Can we gain access to the experience of the visitors? Can we understand and describe their experiences? What does it mean to say that every visitor has a unique, unclassifiable identity? Some museums make extensive use of technological reproductions as the main medium of their exhibitions, offering means of participation. But does technology really promote accessibility to real objects, or will the effect rather be the reverse– even further alienation from the object? These are only a few of the questions that the essays in this book seek to answer. In 2010 the International Committee for Museology, ICOFOM, a committee of the International Council of Museums, ICOM, decided to concentrate for the next three years on the subject of museum visitors. To this end ICOFOM solicited papers and held three conferences on aspects of the nature and problems of museum visitors. The first year, 2011, meeting in Taiwan, the topic was the Dialogic museum and the visitor experience; the next year, meeting in Tunis, the topic discussed was Empowering the visitor: process, progress and protest; and the third year, 2013, at the triennial ICOM meeting in Rio de Janeiro, the topic presented was the Special visitor: each and every one of us. Taken together, the papers give a rich and varied view of the evolving and potential relationship between the museum and the visitor. The first topic, the dialogic museum, proved to be a challenging one. Part of the reason was that the term dialogic was ambiguous. On the one hand, the term, invented by the Russian semiologist Mikhail Bakhtin in his book Questions of Literature and Aesthetics (1973), applied to an active network of

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meaning in the development of the self in relation to others. On the other hand, ethno-museoligists, such as John Juo Wei Chen, in a 1992 article “Creating a Dialogic Museum: The Chinatown History Museum Experiment” gave the term a broader interpretation, one geared to exhibitions and general museum practice, where participatory public activities were emphasized. Some authors, unfortunately, treated the theme as visitor studies, which it certainly was not. The resulting papers provoked a rich discussion. The second year, the conversation swirled around the empowered visitor. While the first seminar explored the theory behind the shift towards the visitor and away from the collection, the second seminar turned more specifically to the individual herself, considering what empowerment meant and what such a change in emphasis would mean for the visitor and for the museum. One fear has been that an increase in visitor empowerment would axiomatically mean a decrease in the power and control by the museum. Is this fear justified? Furthermore if a person is empowered, in what way might that happen? Does this relate to services or is this expanded to encompass sensory experiences, learning and self-growth? Here is probed the complex question of the construction of meaning. The third seminar concentrated on the difficult question of the nature of individual and group meaning making. Hitherto museums have attempted to group visitors according to interests, gender, education, and age. In this way, all children were given the same tour, even if some children were not interested in that specific material or some were very knowledgeable about it and others were not. Increasingly education theory is teaching us that individuals are very different, that it is counterproductive to assume that all the members of a group might think and feel the same when engaged with a museum. Authors considered approaches that might ensure that each visitor is recognized as an individual and provided with sufficient material to develop and contribute at his own level. Part of the challenge and excitement of working with museum professionals and academics from all around the world is a very real recognition that regional and linguistic differences abound. Museums and museum theories have developed at differing paces and in various ways in distinct parts of the world. South America, for example, has developed its own, interesting systems, quite divergent from those in much of Europe. At the same time, language is potentially fraught, not only because ICOM deals in three languages, English, French and Spanish and that many of our contributors write in none of these languages, for their native tongue is not one of the three, but also because the same word in one langue does not necessarily mean the same thing in another. We have often tripped over this truism, this assumption that we are communicating clearly when we are not. The fifteen papers in this volume do not propose to solve but rather to expose interesting regional, contextual and

Introduction

linguistic differences for we firmly hold the belief that such differences are enriching and very valid. By way of introduction to our themes, Jennifer Harris examines the role of affect in exhibition visits by looking at three museum spaces that operate entirely on the affective level. Along with deepening exploration of visitors’ behavior, their expectations and needs, as well as accessibility, museums have found themselves needing to express contexts and events for which we seem not to have an adequate verbal language. Hence, museums have begun to turn to the physical body of the visitor in order to find a way to express the inexpressible and to represent the unrepresentable. Affect, physical bodily sensations that precede emotional understanding is being foregrounded in museum exhibitions. Affect centres the visitor in the exhibition resulting in the greatest power in the museum that the visitor has ever had. But, asks Daniel Schmitt in his essay, can we – and how can we – gain access to what museum visitors experience? In particular, can we grasp the physical and cognitive process through which knowledge is constructed in museums? Schmitt focuses on visitor experiences from an enactive perspective, that which makes sense from the point of view of the visitors during their visit. The visitor’s actions and cognitive paths, his “course of experience” is analyzed by subjective re-situ interviews that allow us to understand the basic units of the visitor’s engagement. Contemporary museum pedagogy and learning theories have turned to the individual visitor to gain an understanding of how exhibitions work. In this we owe a great deal to John Falk, who in his research, and in his essay in this volume, has explored the nature of the visitor’s experience and its dynamic, highly individualized character. The ways in which individuals talk about why they went to the museum as well as the ways they talk about what they remember from their experience invariably seem to have a lot to do with what they were seeking to personally accomplish through their visit. This then leads Falk to investigate the importance of personal identity that steer the choices a visitor makes before, during and after a museum visit. A key understanding of this identity is that each of us has not one single identity but maintains numerous identities which are expressed collectively or individually at different times, depending upon need and circumstance. There is always an “identity motivation” for a museum visit and this should be taken into account when planning exhibitions. Building and supporting personal identity, Falk discovered, was the primary driving motivation behind virtually all people’s museum visits. Elisabeth Weiser, in her essay, focuses on the rhetorical sense of identity as action, the sense that museums and their visitors are a discourse community in which each individual—be they visitor or staff—is actively engaged in building a common story/identity that does not exist in reality but is instead an imagined

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community. Weiser’s paper deals with how individuals in museums invoke their own group identities with which to identify, and this invocation/identification process is explored through the lens of what rhetorical theorist Kenneth Burke called a personalizing of essence: the individual characteristics that make up one’s personal identity narrative are translated into an abstract reflection, then translated back into a narrative larger than oneself—a persuasive narrative of self in society. Ann Davis looks in her essay at some of the social pressures that are encouraging museums to pay more attention to their visitors’ needs and wants and some of the problems behind so doing. Starting with motivations for visiting identified by John Falk, Davis considers how these motivations might effect visitor empowerment and how market forces might break in and change things. Do exhibitions of today really help and empower the non-specialist visitor to gain knowledge, she asks. The truth is that they often don’t, because not much has changed in terms of museum display. Museum staff has been slow to recognize and react to this reality and Davis considers reasons for resistance, also discussed in Kerstin Smeds’ essay. Smeds is concerned about the over use of technology in museum exhibitions and also recognizes the need for deep change in order to enhance real accessibility to the objects themselves. The much talked-about participation, dialogue and access to the collections is all a chimera as long as objects are more and more protected by conservation rules, security and other preservation measures which push the visitor ever further away from the object itself. Through the lens of phenomenological theory Smeds explores our intimate relationship to materiality and objects which we use as “equipments to go on with our lives” (Heidegger). In most museums this intimate relationship with objects is brutally cut off, which prevents many visitors from garnering and maintaining enough interest in museum exhibitions in general. Bruno Brulon Soares takes the theoretical discussion in another direction, away from objects and individuals and explores the museum performance as analogous to that of theater. He proposes a theory of performance for museums. With the theatrical analogy he wants to explain the relation between museum and its audience. Theater and museum both represent the real. But a museum is much more: through performance, museums add something else to reality. Museums perform the past, and also our relationships–as actors in the present–with it. Performance is a plea for permanent creation of a new attitude towards the “old” familiar aspects of the world. Museums, thus, not only perform for their audience, but perform the audiences, generating reflexive dialogues from which identities arise. The next three essays all explore the visitor business in museums through the lens of some specific theory; Aida Rechena through the theory of social

Introduction

representation, Anna Leshchenko through perceptual psycholinguistic theory and Vitaly Ananiev through the theory of mirror neurons. Social representations, Rechena notes, are cognitive phenomena and systems of interpretation which are present at all moments of interaction between individuals, and between individuals and reality. Social representations are created collectively, they are social thoughts elaborated by members of a group, which allows them to understand the world and communicate between themselves. Museums and museological exhibitions as a means of communication are also social phenomena: places where social representations interact, alter and emerge. When considering the visitor as an “actor”, the museum becomes a place of negotiation, a place of confrontation between the observer (= museum visitor), the observed (= the exhibition) and the producer (= curators and other museum professionals). Hence the museum is a place of contact between social representations: the museologist, the visitor, and the ones contained in the displayed museological objects. Thus the museum appears as a conducive terrain for change and formation of new social representations. From social interaction we leap into the deep individuality of a person. With the help of psycholinguistics and a theory of perception, Anna Leshchenko wants to find an inside-out way to see the visitor, instead of the more usual approach of paying attention to outer effects (behavior, leisure habits, demographics etc). By taking a look at the visitor’s perception skills from a psycholinguistic perspective, Leshchenko argues that museologists can create a new way of understanding why each visitor, who is encouraged to become a creative agent in the participatory paradigm, is more involved in museum communication and learns more than others who are not encouraged to be “agents”. In his first short contribution on visitors, perception and cognition, Vitaly Ananiev guides the reader away from the field of arts into natural sciences, more precisely biology. He argues that the modern discovery of mirror neurons in the field of science, showed that the well-known statements of philosophers of the 19th century, “there is no subject without object, and no object without subject,” actually has a foundation in biology. The much talked-about “dialogue” and the dialogic museum is, Ananiev claims, not an invention of Michail Bakhtin and the sociologist, but rather something that is explained through the existence of mirror neurons in our body and mind. Human nature is by its own nature “doomed to dialogue”. In his second paper, Ananiev presents his investigation of early theoretical debate on museums and visitors in the Soviet Union in the 1920’s and 30’s.The Institute for the History of Arts was founded in Saint Petersburg in 1912.This included the sections of Pedagogy, the Study of the art of the peasants in Northern Russia as well as the Museum Section. Members of this Museum Section presented papers on the most current issues of museum work and discussed

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them during their debates. They compiled bibliographies of literature in both Russian and foreign languages in the field of museology and the organization of museums; they prepared exhibitions; they produced a volume of articles; in the summer they directed practical workshops located in the museum-palaces around Leningrad. One paper, “Issues regarding the perception of the museum visitor” in the 20’s, caused a lively debate; it touched directly on museum activities and raised questions concerning the principal substance of the museum’s objectives, adding new objectives to museums. It brought about reforms, one of which was that museums were transformed into entirely new social establishments in the Soviet Union, with focus on visitors’ needs. Žarka Vujić and Helena Stublić have explored the attitudes towards museum visitors in Croatia from a diachronic perspective. They note that within Croatian museology, there was little earlier interest in museum visitors and their significance for museums as learning institutions. One reason for this is that museology in Croatia has its roots in information science, not in the liberal arts. Here museology was formed within the global theoretical framework of informatics and structuralism. Hence, visitors were introduced into the theoretical arena only in 1999, as interpreters in a schematic presentation of semiosis of museum objects in the act of collecting. In this respect theory did not follow practice, since museum practices acknowledged visitors long before that, even in the socialist period from 1945 to 1991, and today there is a “boom” in the study of visitors in Croatia. From the more historical perspective we move on to the ever so important question of authenticity in museums. As her starting point, Cristina Vannini takes the renovation of a museum–Museo Civico di Sansepolcro (home town of Piero della Francesca who painted the Resurrection)–and ponders the consequences of renovations for the visitors’ expectations and respect for the authenticity of the place. The unexpected experience the staff had was that updating the communication system with explanatory, interactive and multimedia tools had to take second place to the acknowledgement that the visitors had no complaint at all about the lack of information. Instead, the bareness of the museum and the outdated display allowed visitors to enter into a more direct relationship with the artistic essence of Piero’s masterpieces. This essay underlines the importance of choosing the correct strategy in planning environments (exhibitions, museums) in which to enhance visitors’ experience of art. Wan-Chen Chang’s essay investigates authenticity from a slightly different angle. Chang seeks to explore whether authenticity is important to the contemporary museum audience or not. She starts from theories of experiential learning, museum experience and experience economy, and, as a case study, explores the dinosaur exhibition in the renowned Life Science Hall at the National Museum of Natural Science in Taichung, Taiwan. Through interviews

Introduction

with an expert and visitors, this essay investigates how visitors to this science museum think about authenticity. Chang’s investigation indicates that visitors have an authentic experience even if they know that the exhibit is “fake.” The study argues that museums should distinguish between experience as an end and experience as a means, and should face up to the intrinsic nature of the museum audience’s visiting experience. Recognizing a growing interest in visitors’ needs and empowerment, and museums having to cope with that, there has been much talk about a professional fear of “disneyfication” and diminishing power of the museums as research institutions. Colette Dufresne-Tassé and her team have studied seven cases of power games between museum and its visitors. In the context of the latter’s visit, they discovered that diminishing the museum power does not entail a gain of power for the visitor, and that the increase of museum power could even mean an increase in the visitor’s power. If the museum would explore new avenues, such as the search for more effective exhibitions or the enhancement of visitors’ abilities to deal with them, it could gain power and simultaneously allow the visitor to gain power too. The study of the museum visitor has undergone radical transformation. Not a single paper in this volume would comfortably fit the category of visitor studies, that examination of the demographics of visitors, including gender, age and education. Rather each author represented here has asked different questions and responded with new answers. Some of these questions involve the visitor’s identity, what she brings to her museum experience in terms of past history and present expectations. Other questions probe the very nature of museum going, demanding that we reexamine the accepted fundamentals of the traditional exhibition to reposition the visitor, not the object, as the centre of the experience. This involves a new search for meaning, a new effort to understand why museums and collections, despite considerable challenges, are still considered major cultural institutions, organizations desired by countries developed and developing, and by cities large and small. All in all these essays do not provide one uniform answer to the many queries posed. Rather they seek to ask new questions, provoke new research and encourage new conclusions. 15 March, 2016

Ann Davis and Kerstin Smeds

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Affect-based Exhibition Jennifer Harris, Curtin University – Australia

The rapid development of affect studies leaves museology with a question concerning the private or social nature of the experience of affect in museums. In increasing numbers of exhibitions, museum curators are eliciting affective responses, that is, pre-emotional bodily intensities, but have done so without being able to answer the question: is affect a private or social experience for visitors? In developing affective exhibition strategies, are curators asking visitors to share the visiting experience, that is, to have experiences that, because shared, could lead to political engagement, or are visitors being asked to look for or expect private responses that do not flow easily into political responses. Contemporary writers in the field insist that affect is a social experience, that feeling through the body makes us alive to other bodies, that affect is a drive that leads to the social.1 Roland Barthes’ anguished analysis of the photograph of his mother as a five year old, however, argues the opposite to this vital question.2 In Camera Lucida, his famous study of photography in which he reproduces many photographs, the crucial photograph of his mother he declines to reproduce on the grounds that his fiercely affective response, his punctum, as strong as a “wound”, is intensively private, unique to him and, therefore, not available to readers who can only ever have a generalized interest in the image.3 If intense affect is private, what of the socio-political mission of the museum institution which today sets out frequently to provoke affect? The affective reaction would seem to be one of the most powerful ways of ensuring that exhibitions have compelling impacts on their audiences. If, however, the reaction is confined to the private, is affective response likely to produce a 1 | See for example Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion. New York: Routledge, 2004; and Melissa Gregg and Gregory Seigworth (eds), The Affect Theory Reader. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010. 2 | Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. New York: Hill and Wang, 1981, p. 67. 3 | Ibid. p. 42.

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closure of debate in museum development, one that promotes the museum in one of its strongest traditions of solitary contemplation, rather than one that aims to impel politically engaged questions? The turn to affect has occurred because expressing the inexpressible and representing the unrepresentable are the nearly impossible tasks of museums in the post colonial and post Holocaust eras. In conjunction with these challenges is a waning of faith in Enlightenment rationality. The entrenchment of the institutionalized idea of the museum throughout the world has rested substantially on a rational belief in the one-to-one correspondence between objects and meanings, separate from any meanings derived from visitor experiences. An assemblage of objects is used by museums for the work of representation, of a concept, person, historical event and so on. When confronting natural disasters and historical calamities, however, the power of the museum object has often failed to represent adequately the enormity of an event and this failure has opened up museological questions about the exhibition potential of museums. Faced with failing object power and the rising power of the visitor, museums are now experimenting with new exhibition styles. Immersion environments, especially, are centred on the visitor leading museological study to examination of the growing empowerment of visitors. From once standing, possibly mutely, before glass cases, visitors are now essential to museum environments. Where visitor response was once irrelevant to museum work, now it is central. This paper analyses an emerging affective role of the visitor in an era when museology faces both the depleting power of the use of the original object and the failure of language to express the deepest of affecting events. Some progressive museums have turned to the visitor in order to find a way to begin to overcome the near impossibility of expressing certain human experiences. They have done this by centring the affect of visitors. Bodily responses, rather than the visitor’s mind or indeed the museum object, become the focus of the exhibition. Such exhibitions prioritise evoking affective, immediate responses from visitors rather than aloof, intellectual, private reflections. In discussing the new, affective museum role for visitors, this paper also ponders, therefore, the social dimensions of affect as an exhibition strategy. The New Museology’s insistence on the cultural and political leadership role of museums means that exhibitions that primarily provoke private reactions will fail in the development of this aspect of the mission of contemporary museology. Although the argument of this paper emerges from the apparent exhaustion of the power and authority once ascribed to objects, it does not deny the formidable resonance of some original objects. For example, in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C., visitors find it extraordinarily powerful to confront lethal Zyklon B crystals used in gas chambers in World War II and bunk beds from the Auschwitz death camp;

Affect-based Exhibition

the objects have a testimonial weight seeming to bear direct witness to horror.4 Despite the shock experienced by many visitors on seeing such objects, there is, however, enormous difficulty for museums in sustaining such impact. The object challenge is all the greater in this era of the everyday intimate and immediate rewards enjoyed in computer use, the computer offering a thrilling loop resulting in a visceral link of human and machine. The proliferation of interactive experiences in museums is a sign of museums’ attempts to tap into this extraordinarily popular affective link. The expectation of multiple and contradictory meanings in a postmodern institution poses huge challenges to museums in grappling with monumental topics. This is the case because of both the long term collapse of belief in the rational mission of the museum, and the diminution of the power of objects which often seem lost in the institutional flow of highly aestheticised information. The ever-increasing emphasis on design and aesthetic considerations in exhibitions steadily overwhelms the power of the object, but the exhibitionary turn to affect has seemed to offer to museums a way to respond. In re-reading Barthes, however, and pondering the power of the private nature of affect, what he calls the punctum, one asks: is the museum turn to affect a turn to the private, the body of the individual visitor being the end point of the impact of the exhibition, or is sociality always implicit? Many writers5 have argued the social nature of affect, awareness of the body’s responses necessarily giving rise to sociality, but the ability of museums to take this up within the confines of exhibitions has been questionable. This paper commences with a brief overview of the theoretical field of affect, including Barthes’s commentary on the affective nature of punctum, before considering the new, centred role of visitors in three museum spaces: Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, in Wellington; Imperial War Museum, London and the Jewish Museum Berlin. It argues that although individual visitors are certainly empowered and enthralled by the provocation of affect the question of the social or sealed-off private nature of the museum experience still awaits an answer.

4 | The Auschwitz bunk beds are on long term loan from the Polish government. There is a possibility that they will need to be returned to Poland thus diminishing one of the most arresting spaces in the US Holocaust Memorial Museum (reported in the Inclusive Museum Newsletter 4 April 2012). This underscores the exceptional power of these objects and highlights, by comparison, the failure of most displayed objects to ignite passionate audience attention. 5 | See for example Ahmed; and Gregg and Seigworth (eds).

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A ffect Barthes’ work on affect as punctum follows work in the 1960s that distinguished between various affective states. Affect is bodily intensity, it is the raw experience we have before we make sense of moments in the body. It is difficult to name these physiological sensations, most writers turn to the work of Tomkins and Izard who argued that there were nine affective states: interest-excitement; enjoyment-joy; surprise-startle; distress-anguish; shame-humiliation; disgust (dis-taste); dissmell (dis-smell); anger-rage and fear-anxiety.6 O’Sullivan notes that we are not conscious of these moments of perception, but that they are fundamental aspects of daily living, indeed, the very things that connect us to the world, that is, that affective experience is fundamentally social. Barthes’ work on photographs distinguishes between two responses: the studium and the punctum. Studium is the polite, engaged, but also somewhat detached interest that one might show for something that was readily understood by anyone. Barthes describes it: “application to a thing, taste for someone, a kind of general, enthusiastic commitment, of course, but without special acuity” 7. Further, it is “a very wide field of unconcerned desire, of various interests, of inconsequential taste”8. Punctum, derived from a photograph’s accidental detail “which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me)”9. The private nature of punctum, he argues, means that it is meaningless for him to reproduce the image of his mother for his readers. (…It exists only for me. For you it would be nothing but an indifferent picture, one of the thousand manifestations of the “ordinary”; it cannot in any way constitute the visible object of a science; it cannot establish an objectivity, in the positive sense of the term; at most it would interest your studium: period, clothes, photogeny; but in it, for you, no wound.)10

The intensity inherent in the word “wound” implies also the shock of the experience, the incapacity to make sense of it. Barthes explains that the wound of the punctum cannot be socially coded, it comes seemingly out of nowhere to arrest the viewer, it seems inexplicable. Studium by contrast, is a coded, nameable response, a flat understanding that does not demand a response from the entrails. 6 | Silvan Tomkins and Carroll Izard, Affect, Cognition and Personality: Empirical Studies. New York: Springer Publishing Company, 1964. 7 | Barthes, p. 26. 8 | Ibid. p. 27. 9 | Ibid. 10 | Ibid. p. 73.

Affect-based Exhibition

Much of the later work on affect has been in response to the work of Deleuze, and Deleuze and Guattari11 who examine affect in relation to the idea of the human becoming-animal, an aspect of human life that has often been erased from thought. Like Barthes, they describe affect’s relationship to the body. They [previous thinkers] see the animal as a representative of drives, or a representation of the parents. They do not see the reality of it becoming-animal, that it is affect in itself, the drive in person, and represents nothing.12

In earlier work, Deleuze examined affect as sensation through the art of Francis Bacon. [Sensation is]… Being-in-the-World… at one and the same time I become in the sensation and something happens through the sensation, one through the other, one in the other. And at the limit, it is the same body that, being both subject and object, gives and receives the sensation.13

Deleuze and Guattari rethink the subject away from received, hackneyed responses that are trapped in ideology and repetitious representation. They theorise the subject as having multiple subjectivities—emerging, clashing, retreating—in response to events and time thus producing highly specific and non-ideological individual experiences. They describe the haecceity or “thisness” of the “you” and its powerful interconnections in the world. You are longitude and latitude, a set of speeds and slownesses between unformed particles, a set of non-subjectified affects. You have the individuality of a day, a season, a year… a climate, a wind, a fog, a swarm… A cloud of locusts carried in by the wind at five in the evening; a vampire who goes out at night; a werewolf at full moon. It should not be thought that a haecceity consists simply of a décor or backdrop that situates subjects… it is the entire assemblage in its individuated aggregate… The street enters

11 | See for example, Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition. London: The Athlone Press, 1994, and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. London: Continuum, 2004; and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. 12 | Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1987, p. 259. 13 | Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2003, p. 31.

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Jennifer Harris into composition with the horse, just as the dying rat enters into composition with the air, and the beast and the full moon enter into composition with each other.14

O’Sullivan says: We might say that affect is a more brutal apersonal thing. It is that which connects us to the world. It is the matter in us responding and resonating with the matter around us. Affect is, in this sense, transhuman. Indeed, with affect what we have is a kind of transhuman aesthetic.15

To paraphrase Massumi, affect is movement between our bodies and the world as the world impinges on our bodies.16 Paraphrasing Wissinger, affective responses link us to the world showing that there is no break or boundary between ourselves and other selves.17 With continuous linkages and responses we are always in states of becoming. Our responses never stop because the world is always pressing on us, we are always moving and responding. Affect is bodily feelings of response which are prior to emotion. Tomkins and Izard attempted to name affects which most critics now agree cannot be named. By contrast, emotions are the name we give to affects after we have interpreted them. Affect, therefore, is the experience we have prior to naming the experience of an intensity and making sense of it. Some writers argue, however, that there is a rapid slide between affect and emotion, a slide so rapid and visceral that it makes sense to discuss this bundle of bodily experiences as if they were one and the same, see for example, Ahmed18. Ahmed moves between affect and emotion in her discussion of the crucial role of emotions in making sense of the world, even to the point of knowing who we are. She describes the “sticky” nature of our existence as we stick to bits of the world as it presses on us calling forth a response that creates us. She says, “emotions are not “in” either the individual or the social, but produce the very surfaces and boundaries that allow all kinds of objects to be delineated”19. In contrast to Ahmed, most critics

14 |  Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 262. 15 | Simon O’Sullivan, Art Encounters Deleuze and Guattari. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006, p. 50. 16 | Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. London: Duke University Press, 2002, p. 31. 17 | Elizabeth Wissinger, “Always on display: affective production in the modeling industry”, in Patricia Ticineto Clough and Jean Halley (eds), The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social,. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2007, p. 232. 18 | Ahmed, p. 6 and p. 25. 19 | Ibid. p. 10.

Affect-based Exhibition

discuss affect, not just as prior to the cerebral sense-making of emotion, but as a central human experience that demands exploration. Paying attention to affect highlights the body and, in the words of Wissinger, allows more than an analysis of discourses, meaning systems, and the social construction of the body; it also allows for an analysis of the dynamism of the body’s matter, such as the body is thought as a center of action and reaction, a site of energy flows and changes in intensity. 20

Similar language is used by Massumi who writes of “resonance” to describe lived experience: The levels at play could be multiplied to infinity: already mentioned are mind and body, but also volition and cognition, at least two orders of language, expectation and suspense, body depth and epidermis, past and future, action and reaction, happiness and sadness, quiescence and arousal, passivity and activity, and so on. These could be seen not as binary oppositions or contradictions, but as resonating levels. Affect is their point of emergence, in their actual specificity, and it is their vanishing point, in singularity, in their virtual coexistence and interconnection—that critical point shadowing every image / expression—event. 21

Critiques of the power of the body are illuminating in relation to affect. Griffiths argues that when language fails there are opportunities. “Portals of entry into a forgotten world. They reveal the bodies buried in memory, left outside history…”22 Likewise, affect shows us that attention to the sensory world offers us new ways of experiencing the world. Highmore23 and Massumi argue the political potential of paying attention to the sensory world. O’Sullivan, and Seigworth and Gregg argue that political potential arises because affect is not first about meaning, but about reaction and doing.24 In the body, as an interface to the world, there is an impulse to act. Although the effect of affect is 20 | Wissinger, p. 232. 21 | Massumi, p. 33. 22 | Quoted in Chacon, RosaMaria, book review of Jennifer L. Griffiths, “Traumatic Possessions: The Body and Memory in African American Women’s Writing and Performance”, Charlottesville, University of Virginia Press, 2009, in: Women’s Studies, no. 39, pp. 905-908, 2010, p. 907. 23 | Ben Highmore, “Bitter aftertaste: affect, food, and social aesthetics”, in: Melissa Gregg and Gregory Seigworth (eds), Affect Theory Reader. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010. 24 | O’Sullivan, p. 22 and p. 52; Seigworth and Gregg, “An inventory of shimmers”, in: Gregg and Seigworth p. 14.

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unpredictable, nevertheless it produces energy, an undirected and free flowing energy explained by Wissinger. Intensity is felt in the moment of energy flow between bodies. It is not an energy directed toward anything in particular; it is the source of actions, although the effect of affective flow is always indeterminate until after it is registered and narrrated as a physical state. 25

Despite the critical insistence that affect is prior to emotion and outside of representation, affect is centred in some emphatically representational museum environments.

P rivate or social re actions Following this very brief summary of the critical background of affect, I now look at the issue of the private versus the social affective response. Tsai, Knutson and Fung start their evaluation of the issue of culture’s role in shaping emotion by noting that ethnographic studies in countries as culturally disparate as China, India, Indonesia, Poland, the US and the countries of the Mediterranean region have reported “significant variation in emotional experience”26 which has led many commentators in the field to determine that emotion emerges from a cultural base. By contrast, scientific studies, have concluded the opposite, people from vastly different cultural backgrounds being “more similar than different in the bodily sensations they associated with specific emotions”27. The authors used Affect Valuation Theory (AVT) to investigate the contradictory findings. AVT indicates that there is a palpable difference between the actual affective states that people experience and “the affective states that people value and would ideally like to feel”28 with cultural elements being the main determinants of the gap especially when studied along the lines of valence and arousal. Tsai, Knutson and Fung observe that scientific studies do not distinguish between actual and ideal affect and note that indeed there is often an overlap, for example, a person who enjoys feeling excitement may seek out exciting situations in order to feel more excitement. AVT studies, however, reveal that the two types of affect remain distinguishable.29 The authors 25 | Wissinger, p. 238. 26 | Jeanne Tsai, Brian Knutson and Helene Fung, “Cultural Variation in Affect Valuation”, in: Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, no. 90(2), pp. 288-307. 27 | Ibid. 28 | Ibid. p. 289. 29 | Ibid.

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conclude that conflicting reports have emerged because ethnographers have studied culturally-determined ideal affect while scientists have studied actual affect. Our findings suggest that although heritable affective traits (e.g., neuroticism and extraversion) play a robust role in determining which affective states people are likely to feel on average, independent of how they would like to feel, cultural ideas and practices may play more prominent roles in influencing how people would like to feel, independent of how they actually feel. 30

Culturally determined ideal affect, therefore, competes with actual affect. These are vital findings for museum work in multi-cultural societies: what assumptions can curators make about affect based exhibition work? Already grappling with the vastly different cultural backgrounds of different ethnic groups, for curators to be required to be cognizant of a considerable range of likely affective responses suggests that affective museum exhibitions could decline in the face of the near impossibility of mounting them. Barthes makes the field even more difficult. Barthes’ differentiation between studium and punctum, between a coded socially available response and the wounded, pricking personal reaction, makes the exhibition field even more of a conundrum in affect terms. The ideal affective reaction that Tsai, Knutson and Fung say is derived from culture, slides uneasily around Barthes’ terms. Studium certainly emerges from culture, it is the low level, detached response that is available to those from a more or less common background, and it can certainly encompass both the ideal and actual affective responses distinguished by AVT, but his concept of punctum is outside the discussion of Tsai, Knutson and Fung and insists on the private nature of some affective moments. Barthes’ transition from interpreting his response as punctum, to concluding later that his response was studium, emphasizes the often ambiguous nature of these concepts. He tracks his own reactions to a series of photographs, in one, for example, of a black family dressed formally in western clothes of what appear to be the early 1920s; he seizes on the strapped pumps worn by a woman declaring that in this photograph he experiences punctum. (…Mary Janes—why does this dated fashion touch me? I mean: to what date does it refer me?). This particular punctum arouses great sympathy in me, almost a kind of tenderness. Yet the punctum shows no preference for morality or good taste: the punctum can be ill-bred. 31 30 | Ibid. p. 304. 31 | Barthes, p. 43

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Barthes is emphatic that the punctum does not make sense, it is not nameable. “What I can name cannot really prick me. The incapacity to name is a good symptom of disturbance.”32 Likewise, with later writers, affect is usually described as experience that is pre-sense, making its sociality difficult to perceive. Barthes later reflects that punctum can take time to prick, for he realizes that it is not the strapped pumps, but actually the gold necklace of the woman that most wounds or pricks him. Given that he has stated that punctum cannot be named and coded, it seems contradictory that he should go on to explain that the gold necklace reminds him of a similar necklace worn by a lonely maiden aunt—“I had always been saddened whenever I thought of her lonely, dreary life”33. What are we to make of the slide to studium and of a punctum that is later so easily explained via words? The necklace in the photograph reminded Barthes of one that he once knew and of the apparently disadvantaged life of his aunt. Such an easily explained response opens up the photograph to empathetic perusal by others making his punctum finally a shared affect. This is a rare example from Barthes of a likely social response, but it also opens up the punctum to the possibility that its power does not need to conclude with a dead-end individual reaction. Barthes’ reservation of punctum for private experience poses acute problems for museum work because of its lack of a shared response that could lead to socio-political responses. Brower34, however, tries to unlock the punctum and re-think it with social possibilities. Examining the “moral shocks” that many people experience on viewing photographs of animal suffering, he notes that they are wounded by the images and that this can lead to political action on behalf of animals. Drawing on the work of Jasper and Poulsen and their description of “moral shocks” he says that those who convert to animal rights’ activism have not emerged usually from the social networks that give rise to activism in other fields.35 Instead they are galvanized by their encounter with images, largely photographs, of animal suffering. Some viewers of these photographs enter activism in response to the affective demands placed on them by images of suffering animal bodies… The fact 32 | Ibid. p. 51. 33 | Ibid. p. 53. 34 | Matthew Brower, “A rupture in the field of representation: animals, photography and affect”, in: Photography & Culture, no. 2(3), 2009, pp. 317-326. 35 | James Jasper and Jane Poulsen, “Recruiting strangers and friends: moral shocks and social networks in animal rights and anti-nuclear protests”, in: Social Problems, no. 42(4), 1995, pp. 493-512, p. 498.

Affect-based Exhibition that images of animal suffering can spur viewers to become activists suggests that the photographs’ affective charge elicits action and social involvement. 36

This is a vital observation for museology; despite Barthes’ declaration of its private nature, there could be a powerful element of sociality in affect. Brower goes on to argue that Camera Lucida is haunted by the idea of the animal even though it is not elaborated by Barthes and that this is one of the keys to opening up the punctum to the social. Barthes positions the punctum as the experience of death (through a shared suffering understood as animal) that is singular and unshareable. Yet the possibility of the punctum as a generalizable experience of photographic affect depends on our shared experience of finitude… [and] a second finitude we share—the exteriority of language. 37

Brower argues that Barthes refusal to take language into account in his analysis of punctum is a problem because Barthes states that photographic affect is always about death and as death is understood only via language which is shared, it, therefore, opens up affect to the social. Thus argues Brower in contradiction to Barthes, “the punctum has its roots in an experience that cannot be personal and can only be conceived as an experience through the other”38. Brower concludes his argument: “an image that opens us up to suffering opens the possibility of justice”39. The concept of suffering returns us conceptually to the body, an entity that we experience both singularly and socially. Writers after Barthes, of course, have explored the links that affect gives us to the world and to each other’s bodies arguing that in the body we find the social link, nevertheless many of us continue to experience our bodies daily as resolutely private places of joy, shame and embarrassment. Affective moments are described routinely as outside language, for example, Pellegrini and Puar say “Affect may anchor claims about materiality of bodies and physiological processes that are not contained or representable by language or cognition alone”40. Brower’s rethinking of Barthes pushes the affective moment in and out of language—and thus crucially, in and out of the social—because of his rediscovery of the role of death, and thus inherently language, in the punctum. The movement of museums to explore visitors’ bodies as vehicles of exhibition must make us ask about the end experience of the moment of bodily 36 | Brower, p. 318. 37 | Ibid. p. 322. 38 | Ibid. 39 | Ibid. p. 323. 40 | Ann Pellegrini and Jasbir Puar, “Affect”, in: Social Text, no. 100(27), 2009, p. 37.

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perception of a museum moment. In the next part of this paper I examine various examples of museum induced affect and consider possible social dimensions.

A ffect in environments derived from life and represented in the museum The controversiality of the first exhibition floor of the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa (always abbreviated to Te Papa), in Wellington, springs from its apparent Disneyland features. Complaints about hyperreality and ubiquitous, globalized elements are made frequently. Visitors are invited to time travel in a style of dark ride car associated with Disneyland and other theme parks. Similarly, there are opportunities to try wind surfing by mounting a machine-driven wind surfer while watching a screen which responds to the movements of the rider. By looking at Te Papa and, below, the Imperial War Museum, this section considers the recreation in museums of realistic environments and the ways in which affective responses are the central meaning of the visitor’s engagement as textual distance is erased. By making affective responses the focus of meaning in the exhibition, the museum necessarily makes visitors the centre of the exhibition. This is a most empowering place after 150 years of looking through a glass case or standing behind a silk rope. Distanced, the visitor knew that s/he was incidental and unimportant to museums. One of the immersive opportunities at Te Papa is called “Earthquake House”, an experience that was developed more than a decade before the 2011 series of catastrophic earthquakes destroyed the centre of Christchurch. Visitors walk inside a small timber frame cottage; when they are inside, heavy shaking commences consistent with a strong earthquake. Visitors are tossed about and likely to stumble. They lose control of their environment. Conventionally, to illustrate the destructive power of earthquakes, museums use an assortment of methods: displaying photographs of ruined buildings, making available oral histories of memories of the experience and giving scientific data such as Richter scale measurements. These exhibition methods rely on textual distance between the visitor and the exhibit. The visitor is asked to stand back and make comparisons, the visitor is not part of the exhibition text. By dramatic contrast, “Earthquake House” slams the earthquake shock right onto the body of the visitor. There is no time or space for comparison, aloofness or reflection. The visitor is caught in the shaking. Reactions to the shaking come from the body with the heart racing, and sweating and yelling highly likely. There is no place for textual distance.

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Far from intimate bodily responses, dominant visitor reactions in con­ ventional museum spaces come from the intellect and do so towards ex­ hibitions which are designed to reproduce narratives. Museums make sense to us because although they might introduce new material, they do so within narratives which are already well known, offering formulaic ways of making sense of the world. It is for this reason that museums so often seem highly repetitive even if we cannot quite identify why this is the case. When, however, affective responses are targeted by a museum, high unpredictability is the result. This is not to say that most visitors would not agree that an earthquake experience is frightening, but to acknowledge that physiological responses are likely to be multiple and unpredictable. Interpretations of them, therefore, will vary. The result is a museum moment / space that asks the visitor to experience something via the body and then to make sense of the world. The conventional, didactic, curatorial-centred museum takes a sharp back step leaving the visitor empowered. Wissinger observes that The effects of affect… are not predictable; affective change from passivity to activity, from inertia to motivation, for example, is not reducible to a single stimulus. In fact, a “circus of affective responses” can result from a single stimulus and differ in any one body at different times.41

Although “Earthquake House” leads to theorization of an empowered visitor, it by no means denies the direct, anarchic links to the fairground and Disneyland, sites which are often regarded as politically effete. Henning implicitly observes the topsy-turvy fairground connection in her comment on the “madness” of museums and the inadequacy of the Foucaultian disciplinary model in understanding the breadth of museums. “The analysis of museums as disciplinary institutions underplays the madness of museums, the over accumulation which militates against clarity, sense and orderliness.”42 Museums, fairgrounds and theme parks share many exhibitionary aspects. In the well-worn international tourist circuit, many visitors, on their previous plane stop, are likely to have been in Los Angeles where they are likely to have visited both Disneyland and Universal Studios where they probably entered the burning house which was inspired by the film, Backdraft. In this house, visitors stand in a burning ruin; near the end of the experience just when they are confident that they quite safe, the viewing platform inside the house appears to collapse, leaving screaming visitors grabbing safety rails. They are 41 | Wissinger, p. 232. 42 | Michelle Henning, “Legibility and affect: museums as new media”, in: Sharon Macdonald and Paul Basu (eds), Exhibition Experiments. Maldon, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2007, p. 43.

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shocked to have the safety of their world disappear. This unforgettable moment in Universal Studios is derived entirely from affective responses—hearts beat faster, mouths open in shock, knuckles turn white, screams and shrieking laughter overpower the tremendous sound of the fire. Although visitors remember that a burning house is frightening, it is the individual affective response which dominates memory. Museums now draw on immersive fairground methods in order to provoke affective responses. This is a huge political and theoretical leap for museums because museums are always placed in the category of high culture while fairgrounds are always placed in the category of low or popular culture.43 The immersive environment offered by the fairground is now inspirational to museums despite the long history of their apparent mutual cultural opposition. Drawing on the fairground, the museum visitor is placed into representations of real environments and invited to have a response which seems to be drawn from the marrow of the bones, but despite the generalized political nature of the fairground as a place of resistance to bourgeois mores, it seems unlikely that experience of the earthquake at Te Papa would lead directly to an immediate social response. At best, it could foster sympathy for others caught in disaster and lead to offers of assistance. Far from New Zealand, in the Imperial War Museum in London, the stirring “Blitz” exhibit places visitors into an historical context with no foregrounded written curatorial interpretation. It seems to demand nothing but affective responses and echoes fairground experiences. Visitors are invited into a recreated cellar complete with objects that might have been stored in the 1940s during the period of the London blitz. Visitors sit on uncomfortable, narrow benches around the walls of the darkened cellar. Apparently from a long distance, they hear the dull thud of German bombs “hitting” city targets. There are irregular, disturbing pauses between explosions; visitors instinctively whisper to each other. An air of solemnity fills the cellar as visitors have no choice but to empathise with Londoners of the 1940s. Eyes roam around in the semi-darkness inspecting fellow visitors and the close walls of what would have been one of the few protective environments available during the war. The air is stale and heavy, we become aware of our breathing and, unfortunately, of others exhaling also into the dank atmosphere. Visitors can feel a little anxious in the near proximity to strangers—this must have been the case in the blitz. Memories of accounts of the famous pluckiness of the London war time spirit are recalled. Memories of war photographs begin to flood back—memories of images of bodies sleeping cheek by jowl in the protection of the deep underground train stations. Did they 43 | See Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Poetics and Politics of Transgression, London: Methuen, 1986.

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really endure the close company of strangers night after night? How did anyone sleep in those awful conditions? Skin begins to prickle and sweat lightly from this close sitting and discomfort in the museum, then it sweats seemingly in empathy with the people who lived through those historic events. Minds roam around pouncing on memories of famous war images and relating them to this experience in the Imperial War Museum. After a time, nervousness is paired with boredom. After all, we have been sitting here for a long time listening to the sound of distant bombs. Is this what the blitz was like? Frightening certainly, but also boring? How could war be boring, surely terror does not go hand in hand with boredom? Then, from seemingly nowhere, comes an almost direct hit on the cellar. The blast overwhelms the polite arrangements of bodies in the small space. People scream, they clutch each other. Now we know from the inside, from our entrails, something of the terror of the blitz. We are relieved to rush from the claustrophobia of the cellar and to find ourselves alive. Massumi argues that in the rush of affect a person feels fully alive. One experiences beyond words “one’s own vitality, one’s sense of aliveness, of changeability”44. This is an exhilarating experience rarely felt in a museum before the creation of immersive environments. The visitor is asked to respond because this is the most effective way to enable visitors to know. How much more stirring it is to make the heart race in the foetid air of the sealed cellar than to show us most objects? No matter how interesting the objects, they rarely match for visceral response, the body’s discomfort, boredom and ultimate fear in the bleak cellar. Objects have the effect of distancing us because we need to stand aloof in order to perceive them, by contrast, the effect of placing us in a re-created wartime cellar during the blitz does the opposite. It centres our bodies as it pushes away the distancing effects of intellectual engagement and pulls us in on an affective level. Surely, to have even an inkling of the terror of the blitz must lead us beyond the experience of our individual bodies to wider, social and political contemplation of the horror of war and perhaps determination to resist international violence as a solution to ideological difference. One of the key elements of affective response is the dissolution of boundaries, this is particularly important in the above examples. Ahmed45 argues that when considering the effects of an affective environment, we can see that bodies begin to merge. Probyn quotes Moira Gatens who argues that affect leads us to

44 | Massumi, p. 36. 45 | Ahmed, p. 10 and p. 24.

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The provocation of empathy is highly likely to be achieved in affective exhibition. Ahmed argues that the highlighting of the pain of others is doubled back on ourselves producing a world of bodies touching and being touched. An ethics of responding to pain involves being opened to being affected by that which one cannot know or feel… Much of the thinking on pain, however, contrasts the ungraspability of the other’s pain with the graspability of my own pain…as I respond to this other’s pain… I come to feel that which I cannot know. I realise that my pain… is unliveable to others, thrown as they are into a different bodily world… Such a response is not simply a return to the self… in the face of the otherness of my own pain, I am undone, before her, and for her. 47

Like Brower’s argument outlined above,48 this is one of the keys to moving us beyond the dead-end of the individual body’s affective experience, it must open us up to the social. Deleuze, likewise, observes that the body in proximity to others is the key to that body knowing itself. “A body affects other bodies, or is affected by other bodies; it is this capacity for affecting and being affected that also defines a body in its individuality.”49 Museums, of course, have always worked from the position that bodies were quite separate, both physically and intellectually, from each other and the objects. Today, as museums embrace immersive environments as part of their exhibitionary possibilities, they necessarily rethink the body and slowly, albeit implicitly, come to regard it as linked to other bodies. The body thus emerges as now central to the museum mission not just because it makes the visitor important but because it can lead to social engagement.

46 | Elspeth Probyn, “Writing shame”, in: Seigworth and Gregg, p. 76. 47 | Ahmed, p. 30-31. 48 | Brower, 2009. 49 | Deleuze quoted in ibid. p. 77.

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Russian olives flourish at the top of 49 concrete stelae in the Garden of Exile outside the Jewish Museum Berlin. Photo by the author.

A ffect and an open me taphoric museum space A metaphoric space can rip open a received version of history. Stories of the Holocaust are very well known and repetition of the line “the murder of six million” is one of the tragic markers of the twentieth century. Despite the fact that there are many museums which tackle the Holocaust and numerous memorials, it remains an event so monstrous and unsettling that representation can never approach its monumentality. The Jewish Museum Berlin with its famous building by architect, Daniel Libeskind, was inaugurated in 2001 with the directors insisting that it was not a museum limited to the Holocaust, but investigated all aspects of German-Jewish life. It opens with deliberate avoidance of representation. In place of representation is an open, metaphoric, disorienting space; this area is the focus of this section of this paper. Tunnel, ramp-like roads lead off in several directions. Sloping floors make walking difficult and visitors have no guide posts. The bewilderment, fear and anger visitors experience as they try to find their way through the opening spaces of the museum soon emerge as the productive exhibitionary forces of this part of the museum. To the astonishment of many visitors, they find—or rather lose— themselves at the frightening centre of the exhibition.

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The Jewish Museum Berlin, like Te Papa and the Imperial War Museum, provokes affective responses and, by doing so, cuts across the received nature of Holocaust history. The argument of this paper is that there are certain areas of human experience that are beyond the representational power of conventional object-based museology and, therefore, this paper is consistent with the assumption that trauma is unrepresentable.50 Noteworthy, however, is a recent study in Israel which found that objects in a family context might “engender person-object interaction, empathy and imagination” across generations, but were resistant to public display.51 This paper examines representation in the very different public museum context, but is mindful of Kidron’s observation that mini Holocaust museums are beginning to appear in community and geriatric centres.52 The extension of the private trauma realm, to the context of a semipublic museum, is a possible future for representing trauma. This paper, however, examines the problem today and finds that grappling with some unfathomable aspects of life has led some museums to realise that the strongest and most direct way that a visitor can begin to understand is via his or her own body. The Jewish Museum Berlin jolts visitors. Whereas, the New Zealand and London institutions did so by recreating realistic environments, the Berlin museum refuses to do so. It moves, therefore, into the realm of visitor affect without the support of the representation of recreated environments referencing reality. It riskily approaches an exhibition ethos that appears inconsistent with museum activities and more akin to a non-representational metaphoric memorial. This is especially so given that since 2005 the museum has shared the tourist—historic landscape of central Berlin with Peter Eisenman’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. His huge undulating field of 2711 black stelae refuses representation. Visitors enter the Jewish Museum Berlin through a baroque building, the Collegienhaus, one of the few surviving old buildings in the Kreuzberg district of post-war Berlin. With no guidance, visitors are immediately plunged downstairs to the tunnel structures which lead to three possibilities. One is a windowless, roofless, claustrophobic cell called the Holocaust Tower. This void leaves night visitors in total darkness. By day, the tapering walls reveal a small patch of sky high above. Another harshly lit tunnel road leads to the Garden of Exile and Emigration, a bleak outdoor garden constructed on a tilted square in which willow oaks are bunched together and planted above the ground. There 50 | Saul Friedlander, Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the “Final Solution”. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1992. 51 | Carol Kidron, “Breaching the wall of traumatic silence: Holocaust survivors and descendant person—object relations and the material transmission of the genocidal past”, in: Journal of Material Culture, no. 17(1), pp. 3-21, March 2012, p. 16. 52 | Ibid. p. 19.

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is no possibility of walking between the trees or finding a comfortable place to rest. This cheerless space perpetuates disorientation. The third exit leads to a more conventional museum upstairs which asserts—almost optimistically—a story of German-Jewish continuity. Despite the apparent familiarity offered upstairs and the relief at finding conventional museum spaces that offer objects and curatorial text, the famous building intrudes, denying visitors any security or comfort. It flashes like a lightning bolt through the Kreuzberg district and inside offers few comfortable spaces. Angular voids smash through the building at every level, interrupting exhibition space and leaving visitors marooned. Even the staircases are not designed simply for mounting to the next level, they are suffocatingly narrow and the visitor is threatened by the angular placement of overhead beams which create sharp, alien forms.

Tilted walls and sloping floors in a disorienting corridor in the Jewish Museum Berlin. Photo by the author. In the tunnels, visitors are made acutely and uncomfortably conscious of their bodies—there is no boundary between the museum and us, we flow in and around it. As Seigworth and Gregg argue, affect pushes the body towards “becoming an ever more worldly sensitive interface, toward a style of being present in struggles of our time”53. They push, therefore, beyond Barthes private 53 | Seigworth and Gregg, p. 12.

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punctum declaring that affect will induce social awareness. Although centred on our own bodies, I observed during my visits in January and July 2012 that visitors tended to keep to themselves, alone and silent. In confronting our own bodies, other bodies become unbearable. The affective experience, however, insists that we feel each other’s presence. The demolition of intellectual space caused by the insistence on affect focuses us on the relationship between bodies and the world, one of the moments that opens affect to the social. In the Holocaust Tower, the sloping walls press in, narrowing over bodies so that heads tingle in the crushing space. Eyes search for a patch of light, high above, unreachable. The garden is alien with its tilted base and hard surfaces, legs work hard to carry you around the square. You can find yourself turning back to the museum, only to remember that inside await the ramp tunnels and the Holocaust Tower. One wonders: what would I have done if I had been in Germany during the war? Who might I have been? The body is linked to the suffering bodies of the Holocaust, but is also stranded in a place of such discomfort that there is acute awareness of every sensation. The affective human capacity insists on endless movement between bodies and the world. Before entering the museum we might have seen ourselves as sympathetic and rational witnesses to history, but once inside, dealing with pre-sense making affect, we are denied that rationality. We are not visitors who stand back to view or read, we can only experience. Wissinger describes the flow of the body in the world, not as a discrete entity with a fixed essence or an organism contained and bound by the skin. This move to think the body as continuous with the environment—as thoroughly social yet stubbornly material—has led to conceptualizing the fluidity of embodiment, rethinking the matter of the body as dynamic. This is a move beyond a strictly social constructionist account of the body toward a “mattering” of the body, where agency arises not only from subjectivity but from other forms of energy, coursing below the level of conscious subject identity. These forces move bodies and constitute bodies in this movement.54

It is clear that Libeskind has used our bodies to propel us into some Holocaust sensations. It was such a monstrous event, he seems to say, that it can never be conveyed by statistics and photographs, it is beyond language, it is only by turning to our bodies that there is any hope of feeling it / knowing it. Further, there are infinite ways of knowing through the body. There are as many meaning potentials in this place as there are visitors and sensations. The museum refuses to lock down the Holocaust to any confined meaning. The museum insists, by highlighting the visitor’s body, that the Holocaust is an open event, not capable of being owned by any group, not even by the Jewish 54 | Wissinger, p. 231.

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people. It is evident, therefore, that one of the museum’s political messages is that the Holocaust can happen again and that we should be on guard. It achieves this highly political impact through an exhibition of affect and drives us beyond the limits of our own bodies.

Confusing architecture in the Jewish Museum Berlin. Photo by the author. Libeskind describes the effect of the museum. “The Jewish museum has a multivalent relation to its context. It acts as a lens magnifying the vectors of history in order to make the continuity of spaces visible.”55 This is a significant statement by the architect in making sense of the building. Further, at some point around or during a museum visit, the visitor discovers that it is heavy with symbols. Libeskind explains the symbolism of the Garden of Exile and Emigration. The columns contain earth and an underground irrigation system which permits willow oak to emerge and bind together at the top. Forty-eight of these columns are filled with the earth of Berlin and stand for 1948—the formation of the State of Israel. The one central column contains the earth of Jerusalem and stands for Berlin itself. 56

55 | Bernhard Schenider, Daniel Libeskind: Jewish Museum Berlin. Munich: Prestel Verlag, 1999, p. 27. 56 | Ibid. p. 40.

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These are not transparent symbols, they are symbols that need explaining. Discovery of the symbols seems textually rich, but also entirely superfluous. Being in the garden has already been such a powerful experience, do we need to know it through symbols? We have felt / known it through our bodies. The symbols function as added layers and, therefore, have the meaning effect of highlighting the fact that we have first known the place through affective responses rather than through the intellect. The cerebral nature of the symbols points us back to the body. It has been more powerful to know the garden through the body, but in knowing it through our individual bodies we are impelled to turn outwards to others and sociality. The museum is a controversial space, early critics pondered whether it was likely to “turn German - Jewish history into a Disney spectacle”57. The “Disney” accusation had been heard before by the foundation project director, Ken Gorbey, a New Zealander who had worked on Te Papa. Reading some of the early critiques gathered by Klein58 about this immersive experience, one sees that there has been difficulty in finding a language to describe the achievement, even by the staff which seems to have been split between anxiety that the museum institution was losing its traditional authority and, by contrast, delight that the space was question-raising. The language of affect, however, helps us to speak about this space without either accepting the loss of museum authority or Disneyfication. Conceptualising a museum as offering either traditional authority or a Disneylike space crucially ascribes almost no power to the visitor. If the museum is seen to have a traditional authority then it is a didactic institution which tells people how to make sense of history. If we look at the apparent polar opposite, a site synonymous with Disneyland59, we find the same assumption of no visitor power. If we understand this place, however, through the multiples of affect, we discover Deleuze and Guattari’s “lines of flight”60, the infinity of possibilities discovered through the body that empower visitors to feel and make choices. As if to underscore the power of the visitor in the tunnel roads of the Jewish Museum Berlin, we find what amounts to a museological critique embedded in the museum. Tucked away in very small cases along the walls of the tunnel roads are original objects. Spectacles, a book, some photographs… they function not only as relics with direct links to real people, but to show us how empty and 57 | Julia Klein, “From the ashes, a Jewish museum”, in: The American Prospect, no. 12(3), 2001, p. 35. 58 | Ibid. 59 | In the Klein quote the idea of Disneyland is used evidently to mean a politically vacant entertainment place. I strongly resist the position that popular culture has no power and that its participants are intellectually passive. 60 | Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus.

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powerless a museum object can be. We look at the photographs and spectacles and wonder why we are doing so. The power of the self in being in the tunnel overwhelms the little objects. When we go upstairs and visit the conventional spaces with their photographs, maps, oral histories and swathes of curatorial text we miss the terrifying and exhilarating space below.

C onclusion The visitor is empowered by a visit to these three museums and their affective exhibitions. The Jewish Museum Berlin moves beyond representation by forcing possible exhibition effects, via affect, thus centring the visitor and decentring the museum and its objects. The museum, therefore, more or less, silences itself, passing the role and power of sense making and feeling to its visitors. Clearly, enabling a visitor to be affectively active in responding to history is a dynamic museum achievement. The future resonance of affect based exhibitions will rely on museums maximizing the potential of affect to lead to further inquiry by offering public programmes that assist in opening debate while continuing to acknowledge the impact of the pre-intellectual personal experience. The drive to social action of the type provoked by the impact of images of animal suffering, described by Brower and Jasper and Poulsen, is clearly a force that is attractive in fulfilling the museum mission of social engagement. We need to find a way to push the deeply affecting, wounding punctum described by Barthes to a textuality in which it retains its personal power while opening us up to the social.

W orks cited Ahmed, Sara, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, New York, Routledge, 2004. Barthes, Roland, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, New York, Hill and Wang, 1981. Brower, Matthew, “A rupture in the field of representation: animals, photography and affect”, in: Photography & Culture, no. 2(3), 2009, pp. 317-326. Chacon, Rosamaria, book review of Jennifer L. Griffiths Traumatic Possessions: The Body and Memory in African American Women’s Writing and Performance, Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009, in: Women’s Studies, no. 39, pp. 905-908, 2010. Clough, Patricia Ticineto and Halley, Jean (eds), The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2007. Deleuze, Gilles, Difference and Repetition. London: The Athlone Press, 1994.

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Deleuze, Gilles, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Félix, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. London: Continuum, 2004. Friedlander, Saul, Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the “Final Solution”, Cambridge: MA, Harvard University Press, 1992. Gregg, Melissa and Seigworth, Gregory (eds), The Affect Theory Reader. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010. Henning, Michelle, “Legibility and affect: museums as new media” in Macdonald, Sharon and Basu, Paul (eds), Exhibition Experiments. Maldon MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2007. Jasper, James and Poulsen, Jane, “Recruiting strangers and friends: moral shocks and social networks in animal rights and anti-nuclear protests”, in: Social Problems, no. 42(4), 1995, pp. 493-512. Kidron, Carol, “Breaching the wall of traumatic silence: Holocaust survivor and decendant person-object relations and the material transmission of the genocidal past”, in: Journal of Material Culture, no. 17(1), 3-21, March 2012. Klein, Julia, “From the Ashes, a Jewish Museum”, in: The American Prospect, no.12(3), 2001. Massumi, Brian, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2002. O’Sullivan, Simon, Art Encounters Deleuze and Guattari. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Pellegrini, Ann and Puar, Jasbir, “Affect”, in: Social Text, no. 100(27), 2009, p. 35-38. Probyn, Elspeth, “Writing shame”, in: Gregg, Melissa and Seigworth, Gregory (eds), The Affect Theory Reader, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010. Schneider, Bernhard, Daniel Libeskind: Jewish Museum Berlin. Munich: Prestel Verlag, 1999. Stallybrass, Peter and White, Allon, The Poetics and Politics of Transgression. London: Methuen, 1986. Tsai, Jeanne, Knutson, Brian and Fung, Helene, “Cultural Variation in Affect Valuation”, in: Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, no. 90(2), pp. 288-307. Wissinger, Elizabeth, “Always on display: affective production in the modeling industry”, in: Clough, Patricia Ticineto and Halley, Jean (eds), The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2007. Young, James, At Memory’s Edge: After-Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000.

Individual Identity/Collective History Personalizing Essence in the Museum M. Elizabeth Weiser, Ohio State University – United States

That every visitor brings to the museum his or her individual characteristics is a truism of work on identity issues in museum studies. Yet what does it mean to say that every visitor has this unique, unclassifiable identity? Social scientists William Penuel and James Wertsch conclude an influential article on identity noting that, rather than an essence, identity is “a form of action that is first and foremost rhetorical, concerned with persuading others (and oneself) about who one is and what one values to meet different purposes.”1 Identity as rhetorical action—yet since Aristotle’s Rhetoric first advised budding public orators 2500 years ago to know their audience by knowing the group characteristics of their audience, rhetoric as a field has struggled with how to consider an audience of individuals. With the range of concerns facing museum professionals and museologists already, adding that museum-goers cannot be defined only as group members but also as individuals seems to add just one more layer of complexity to an already impossible identification project. John Falk’s attempt to categorize these individuals not by their demographic characteristics but instead by their need to perform their identity with one of five roles (Explorer, Facilitator, Experience seeker, Professional/Hobbyist, Recharger)2 can be seen, in this light, as merely a different (if a better, more accurate) kind of grouping for the “individual characteristics” each visitor brings. In this short chapter, therefore, I plan to return to the rhetorical sense of identity as action, the sense that museums and their visitors are a discourse community in which each individual—be they audience/visitor or rhetor/museum staff—is actively engaged to build a common story and identity that does not exist in reality but (to borrow Benedict 1 | William Penuel and James V. Wertsch, “Vygotsky & identity Formation: A Sociocultural Approach”, in: Educational Psychologist 30.2, p. 91. 2 | John Falk, Identity and the Museum Visitor Experience. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2009, p. 64.

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Anderson’s famous phrase) is instead an imagined community. As Penuel and Wertsch note, identity “is always addressed to someone, who is situated culturally and historically.”3 To put it another way, this chapter deals with how individuals in museums invoke their own group identities with which to identify. As rhetorical scholars Lisa Ede and Andrea Lunsford argue in their ongoing examinations of audience, because the rhetorical tradition aims for successful communication, it risks excluding or disenfranchising those whose difference from some imagined audience norm makes success more difficult to achieve.4 The communication goal, in other words, encourages the illusion not of selfidentity but sameness. Thus we continue to encourage our student writers and speakers to either learn the characteristics of their audience, or imagine the characteristics of their audience, or create the characteristics of their audience by the information and context that they provide. At the same time, a parallel theoretical tradition has held, as James Porter put it in Audience and Rhetoric in 1992, that audience should be considered not as the end recipient of the information-dissemination process but as a “discourse community” actively engaged with the rhetor, working with them to build not only a common story but also a common identity.5 This alternate notion of the engaged audience has never been truer than in today’s era of interactive media. We can see these same issues debated over—struggled with—in museum studies. Should museologists engage in visitor studies to learn about our audiences? How much can we extrapolate from these data to imagine the holistic self that is our visitor? To what degree should professionals create or invoke the desired characteristics in visitors by certain displays, particular texts and artifacts, lighting, flow patterns, etc.? And what about interaction—how to engage the visitors with touch screens, provocative questions, reflection zones, and all the rest? I argue that one way to look at this invocation/identification process is through the lens of what modern rhetorical theorist Kenneth Burke called a personalizing of essence, in which the individual characteristics that make up one’s personal identity narrative are translated into an abstract reflection, then translated back into a narrative now larger than oneself—in other words, into a persuasive narrative of self in society. Burke’s description of this temporal/ ontological shift is very much the process described by psychologists for 3 | Penuel & Wertsch, p. 91. 4 | Andrea A. Lunsford and Lisa Ede, “Representing Audience: ‘Successful’ Discourse and Disciplinary Critique”, in: College Composition and Communication 47.2 (May, 1996), pp. 167-68. 5 | Porter, James. Audience and Rhetoric: An Archaeological Composition of the Discourse Community. New York: Longman, 1992.

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narrating one’s lifestory and by museologists for the identity work done by individuals in museums when confronted by a series of artifacts and a wall of stories. I will use the latter to return to Burke’s personalizing in order to describe the idiosyncratic identification of individuals with the communities invoked by museums. Identity, as popular and important as it is in the scholarship of multiple disciplines, is a tricky concept to define, but all identity theories have in common a dual internal-external focus on the self in society. Some theories, following the line of psychologists like Erik Erikson, focus more on the individual, personalized nature of identity as the choices made to define ourselves, while others focus more on the social forces that enable and constrain these choices, perhaps most famously articulated by sociologist Anthony Giddens’ duality of structure—that we make the structures that in turn constrain us in our potential choices—now a cornerstone of modern sociology. Giddens recognizes that in modern societies, identities are becoming dislodged from the traditional collectivist structures, such as location and kinship, such that, while still constrained, they are more individualized.6 In other words, we must form our sense of self with less of a pre-written script than had earlier people. This more individualized script exists as a narrative of our past lives and roles, unified into the story of our self-identity. Social psychologists Robyn Fivush and Catherine Haden explain that individuals construct a self-identity by selecting past episodes which seem particularly meaningful or relevant to their present quest for selfhood, mining their own memories for nuggets of self-understanding. But they do not simply leave the memories alone, any more than modern museums leave objects alone on an examination table: these life episodes are crafted into what the psychologists call a lifestory, a narrative of identity. “It is through the construction of a lifestory that self and memory are intertwined,” Fivush and Haden write, and the lifestory is built upon “social interactions or cultural frameworks that lead to the formation of an autobiographical narrative.” 7 Shaping the selected pieces of one’s random memory into something that contains the two essential qualities of narrative— linearity and causality—allows individuals to make meaning of their life as a self-in-society. As Fivush and Haden put it, “life stories are based on autobiographical episodes, but to a considerable extent reflect efforts to portray oneself in a way that makes sense within one’s social and cultural context.”8 6 | In Sharon Macdonald, “Museums, National, Postnational and Transcultural Identities,” in: Museum and Society 1.1 (2003), p. 6. 7 | Robyn Fivush and Catherine Haden, “Introduction: Autobiographical Memory, Narrative and Self,” in: Autobiographical Memory and the Construction of a Narrative Self. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2003, p. vii. 8 | Fivush & Haden, p. viii.

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Narrative psychologist Dan McAdams adds that until one is old enough to endow one’s lifestory with the narrative traits of linearity and causality (McAdams calls these unity and purpose), identity itself is not fully realized.9 That realized sense of self-identity is achieved through both a synchronic integration, uniting the different roles each of us plays into a “me,” and a diachronic integration, uniting our divergent life choices into one coherent timeline.10 In an individual these integrations might mean unifying into one coherent lifestory the timeline of majoring in music before becoming a mathematician, living in three cities, getting divorced, remarried, and having twins, and the roles of scholar/ teacher/mother/ deacon/aspiring guitarist. In a national museum it might mean diachronically unifying a history of wars, invasions and plagues, and synchronically unifying a diversity of multiple waves of immigrants, into the realized, imagined unity of the one nation. Combining the concept of the lifestory narrative with Falk’s performative roles, then, we can easily imagine ourselves walking into, say, the British Museum, being confronted with the Rosetta Stone and the colossal bust of Ramesses II and the rest of the monumental artifacts of past civilizations, and incorporating Falk’s role of Explorer into whatever personal narrative we tell about ourselves. Like actors playing Hamlet, each individual brings to the role a unique sensibility, but if the role can be made to fit our context—and the British Museum carefully encourages the context of Explorer with a spatial arrangement that requires visitors to walk around each artifact and weave their own path from object to object—then we can unify Explorer synchronically, as one of the roles we play, and diachronically, as consistent with other times when we have “explored,” into an expanded sense of ourself as we wander through the museum. Not everyone agrees with this interpretation of museum work. The European National Museums consortium (Eunamus), a multiyear international study with which I worked in 2012, puts it bluntly in their final report: National museums are about history: Most visitors surveyed said they came to national museums for social reasons, for entertainment and education. They did not visit with the intention of developing, understanding or crystallising their national identities. They believed these museums were about history, not identity.11

9 | Dan P. McAdams, “Identity and the Lifestory”, in: Autobiographical Memory and the Construction of a Narrative Self. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2003, 188. 10 | McAdams, pp. 188-89. 11 | Eunamus. European National Museums Making Histories in a Diverse Europe. Linkoping, Sweden: Linkoping University Electronic Press, 2012, p. 28.

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It is indeed true that museum-goers do not label their own identity-construction as a goal of their visit—but neither, really, does Falk, who discusses museums as “settings that allow visitors to play [a] role”12—not take on a role but perform one. The difference in viewpoint may lie in Falk’s sense of the “inter-animation” of the competing dialogues within the public space of the museum: museums narrate history, visitors narrate an individual identity that interacts with that history—and both of these performances of reality interact to create the continually replicated but always unique memory narrative of an exhibit.

Exploring in the British Museum. Photo by the author’s daughter, Sophia Tidwell. The identity narrative, in other words, may be unified into the lifestory of each individual visitor, but (as theorists such as Falk and Rowe et al. have documented), it is far from univocal. In some museums the multivocality, or what literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin called the polyphony of multiple competing voices, is embedded into the narrative crafted by museum staff: “Ask any ten people what it means to be Australian and you are likely to get ten different answers,” reads a prominent sign in the National Museum of Australia. Whether or not the polyphony is intended, though, it is always present, carried into the museum by the visitors themselves. Museologist Rhiannon Mason described in a recent presentation the experience of listening to residents of Newcastle visiting 12 | Falk, p. 64.

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an exhibit of maritime artwork. The visitors did not discuss with each other painterly techniques or camera angles—they talked about their own memories of watching ships being launched or time spent on the water.13 Such personal memories might serve to tie an individual to the collectivity represented by a museum display, but perhaps in a more idiosyncratic way than desired. As museum educator Lisa Roberts states, In any given museum, visitors will probably encounter the same raw material: an entryway, exhibits, and perhaps a restaurant or gift shop. However, each will come away with an individually unique experience and interpretation because every visitor is engaged in constructing a narrative about what he or she sees.14

Of course, as I have here begun to imply, museums themselves contribute to Giddens’ creation of structures that serve as a constraint on the range of visitors’ potential identity choices. Rhetorician Greg Clark argues, regarding a different kind of rhetorical space (significant landscapes), that visitors are encouraged by the material provided them to endow what they are looking at with collective meaning and then to determine their stance toward that meaning. Thus they are “prompted to recreate themselves in the image of a collective identity”15 —one that, pace Giddens, is partially defined by the very collective that it is defining. For instance, as I wrote in an earlier article commenting on the plethora of artifacts in vitrines (from Revolutionary teapots to chemical balances to Star Wars robots) that line the entry corridors greeting visitors to the National Museum of American History, “the visitor is confronted with three messages about America: its material culture is vast, it is indeed diverse, and it boasts a radical egalitarianism in which everything is, potentially, a ‘treasure of the American past’.”16 This display of American collective identity is not that of the nation of the Rosetta Stone and head of Ramesses, or of Winged Victory and the Mona Lisa, or of other symbols of imperial power and cultural triumph—it is instead the collective identity of the nation of Dorothy’s ruby slippers and a farmer president’s battered top hat. Their presence in the national museum prompts 13 | Rhiannon Mason, “Communities and Redisplay at the Laing Art Gallery”, in: University of Leicester School of Museum Studies Research Seminar Series, 24 Oct. 2012. 14 | Lisa C. Roberts, From Knowledge to Narrative: Educators and the Changing Museum. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997, p. 137. 15 | Gregory Clark, Rhetorical Landscapes in America. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2004, p. 4. 16 | Elizabeth Weiser, “Who are We? Museums Telling the Nation’s Story”, in: International Journal of the Inclusive Museum, 2.2, 2009, p. 29.

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visitors to identify with a specifically populist (and diverse) collective identity. Such an identity may not be consistent with visitors’ personal life story, or even with their understanding of the life story of America, but the external constraints imposed by the structure serve to encourage individual identification along such lines more than others, and thus to incline the collectivity toward a range of certain narratives—which range, in turn, influences the choice of artifacts deemed relevant to display in the national museum.

“Amir Temur—Our fervor and our pride!” Sign outside the State Museum of Uzbekistan. Photo by the author. As another example, we might look at the resurrection of Amir Temur in national museums in Uzbekistan. He is perhaps best remembered in the West as the “scourge of God” title character in Christopher Marlowe’s bombastic Renaissance play Tamburlaine, but in modern Uzbekistan he is the personification of national identity. The State History Museum of the Temurids in Tashkent, founded five years after Uzbek independence from the Soviet Union, recounts and celebrates the life of Temur seven centuries after his rise to power in Samarkand. As cultural historian Timur Dadabaev notes, the post-Soviet discourse in Uzbekistan evokes the glorious ethnic past as a counter to a long-term Soviet

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discourse that emphasized “civilizing” under-developed Central Asia.17 Thus as independent Uzbekistan (re)constructs a national identity, it is not surprising to find that Temur—conqueror of much of Central Asia, patron of the arts and sciences, ethnically non-Russian, and founder of the last “golden age” dynasty of the region—has taken on a mythic status. He is perhaps particularly promoted by the country’s president since independence, Islam Karimov, and visitors to the State History Museum can read Karimov’s assertion on a wall plaque: If somebody wants to understand who the Uzbeks are, if somebody wants to comprehend all the power, might, justice, and unlimited abilities of the Uzbek people, their contribution to the global development, their belief in the future, he should recall the image of Amir Temur.

The modern Uzbek visitor, then, is encouraged toward a particular constrained identity—one encouraging not only pride in Uzbek nationhood but in an Uzbek collective identity that values what the museum’s walls proclaim as Temur’s values: Justice, Enlightenment, Honour, and Friendliness. Whether and to what extent the visitor engages with that identity as part of his/her personal narrative is idiosyncratic—but what is not so idiosyncratic are the parameters of the collective identity the visitor has available to choose from. And I do not mean to say that the State History Museum has more of an agenda of collective identity than any other national museum, for, as Peter Aronsson, director of the Eunamus project, asserts, any national museum is part of the arena where these forces [of contemporary individuality and commonality] are negotiated, no doubt with a certain tendency to articulate the communality and the virtue of the national community, but at the same time hinting at what the desired virtues of individual citizens ought to be, giving a broad audience an ambitious opportunity to participate in the making of individual identity and community by the practice of making the museum.18

The interaction between individual visitor narratives and the museum narrative, or what John Bodnar calls vernacular and official narratives, interact in at least four ways, write researchers Rowe, Wertsch, and Kosyaeva, some of which serve to bolster the official narrative and others of which deflect or negate it. Generally speaking, visitors might simply use the official story as a jumping off point for their own narrative, but the interaction might also 17 | Timur Dadabaev, “Power, Social Life, and Public Memory in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan,” in: Inner Asia 12.1, 2010, p. 32. 18 | Aronsson, Peter, “Comparing National Museums: Methodological Reflections”, in: NaMu IV 2010, p. 12.

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work to link the individual—or their audience—closer to the larger narrative.19 Say that I am standing in the Museum of Westward Expansion in St. Louis, Missouri, looking at an artifact such as explorer Meriwether Lewis’s compass. If I am reminded by it of my grandfather’s pocket watch from his work on the Panama Canal, that might serve to deflect me from the official narrative of Western exploration in early 19th century North America. However, I might then continue on to consider, or even to discuss with others, the role of timepieces, the Canal, or my own grandfather in US expansionism—all of which would be ways of bringing my personal narrative more in line with the official one, as Rowe et al. note, and thus encouraging me to identify more closely as I interact with it.

Lifesize depiction of “Ardi,” Ardipithicus ramidus, who greets visitors to the paleontology section of the Ethiopian National Museum eyeto-eye. Photo by the author. In fact, the personal memories of individual visitors are triggered as never before by modern museum displays as collections of personal narratives have become central. In the Imperial War Museum North (England) with its highlighted soldiers’ letters and personal quotes; in the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum with its personalized permanent exhibit “Re-membering the Chil19 | Sharon Rowe, James Wertsch, and Tatyana Kosyaeva, “Linking Little Narratives to Big Ones: Narrative and Public Memory in History Museums,” in: Culture & Psychology 8.1. 2002, p. 108.

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dren: Daniel’s Story”; in the Ethiopian National Museum, where five million years of hominid ancestors are materialized in the heavily personalized fossils of Ardi, Lucy, and the Tang Child; and on and on, historical events are commonly told through the lenses of individual lives. Beyond this kind of personalized experience, however, some museums are also narratologically constructed to demand a response from their newly engaged audience on an individual level. I see three approaches used repeatedly around the world to encourage this kind of individual visitor engagement with personalized narrative. First, individuals are asked to give the museum their own personal narratives, thus implying that the visitor’s lifestory is synecdochally connected to the official story presented back to the visitor. Synecdoche, the rhetorical trope whereby a part stands in for the whole or the whole for the part, places the seemingly idiosyncratic individual narrative within the collective. For instance, in the “Eternity” exhibit at the National Museum of Australia, light boards display the lifestories of 50 Australians—some famous or historically significant, others not. Australian visitors are encouraged by the opening sign to take these personal narratives as exemplars and add their own stories to the collection: Share all the emotion as the selected stories unfold. And you’re invited to add your own: in writing, through video, via sounds. Laugh. Feel fear. Fall in love. Take a chance.

As synecdoche, each person’s story is a unique microcosm of the whole nation’s story, not a reduction from the greater whole but its own an embodiment of the collective narrative. Burke noted that synecdoche “stresses a relationship or connectedness between two sides of an equation”20 —in this case, between the vernacular narratives of the individual visitors and the official narratives of the museum. Second, museums may invite the visitor to take on the role of a participant in the official story, thus asking them to unify another unique identity into their own lifestory as they reflect on what it would be like to be that particular individual. The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum is famous for its use of identification cards given to each visitor who enters the permanent exhibit. Each card provides information, with photo, of a real person, along with the narrative of their wartime life. Receiving this card at the beginning of the exhibit encourages visitors to enter the chronological journey through the 1930s and 40s with a dual identity—their own and that of someone who suffered the effects of the history on display. Visitors to such engaged identity exhibits in effect take on the anthropological role of participant-observer, closely shadowing 20 | Kenneth Burke, “Four Master Tropes”, in: Kenyon Review 3.4, 1941, p. 428.

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a cultural informant through their lifestory. South Africa’s Apartheid Museum welcomes visitors with a more modest version of this approach, as it informs visitors that their “ticket to the museum has randomly classified you as ‘white’ or ‘non-white.’ Please use the entrance . . . indicated.” Visitors assume the dual identity and pass through separate turnstiles into two parallel tunnels made of wire-mesh cages that contain enlarged identity cards of similarly white/ non-white individual South Africans. The narrative makes an argument about the (now felt) randomness of such classification by having designated “white” and “non-white” visitors stand together at the end of the tunnels before a large photo of one of the review panels that determined each South African’s race. Finally, museums might ask visitors to directly incorporate their own individualized lifestory into that of the official museum display, not as a separate identity but as if they were in fact made over into someone else. Historical museums everywhere invite child visitors to dress up in the costumes of another age, and sophisticated walk-through displays invite visitors to feel what it was like to be in a slave holding pen or a World War I trench or a primeval rainforest or (in living history museums) any number of old-time villages. The Museum of Boca Juniors Passion (Argentina) takes its “this is you” approach even to cinemagraphic levels. The museum is tucked into the wall of La Bombonera, the iconic soccer/football stadium of the Boca Juniors team in an old working class neighborhood of Buenos Aires. Visitors to the Museum are ushered into an introductory room encircled by large screens just above head-height. With the camera serving as the visitor’s eyes and the narration employing the second person (“You run, trap and kick”), “you,” a youth in the poor neighborhood of La Boca, trace “your” first discovery by scouts for the Club, your endless practices with fellow aspirants, your first big chance on goal and heartbreaking miss, and then on to “you” working harder than ever, finally running onto the field at La Bombonera where the crowds surround you with screaming, foot-stomping cheers, and you and your teammates face off against your rivals, waiting your chance until suddenly a teammate passes you the ball—and there are your legs, running, dodging, shooting in a long arc . . . and you score!

Photo by the author.

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Since it is a safe guess that this is the dream story of nearly everyone who makes the trip to this particular museum, its enactment on film immediately invites the visitor to take on a new identity (not merely fan but player) and so connect with the “passion” that is the stated purpose of the museum—which is, after all, not devoted to the Boca Juniors but to the “Pasión Boquense”. While the assumption of dual identity might invite engagement of both reason and emotions, the temporary submersion of self into an assumed new identity invites identification at a more purely emotional level, in which one’s reason is engaged more to properly perform the role than to analyze the role’s significance. Despite their differences, all three methods of visitor engagement demonstrate the links that are forged between the narration of a lifestory (one’s own or one adopted) and one’s identity (again, one’s own or one adopted). This individual life identity, a hybrid of visitor and museum creation, is then presented back to the visitor as a piece of the collective identity of all the other individuals similarly engaged in exploring the collective in the museum—or to return to my original argument, it is presented back in what Burke named the “personalizing of essence,” translating upwards from the disconnected personal to the collective abstract, then downwards back into the personal now infused with a collective narrative with which one is invited to identify. Toward the end of Burke’s A Grammar of Motives, he began to explore the relation between ontology and history, things in their essence and things in time. He noted that narrative must by its nature historicize occurrences that do not actually happen temporally because narrative requires linearity. That is, one’s essence, who one is, being translated into narrative becomes the story of one’s origins, where one came from.21 Burke’s example is that calling someone a “bastard” maligns his essence by reference to his origins. I witnessed a larger example of this essence-origin translation in Australia in 2008 during a national campaign entitled “All of Us” that celebrated the new Australian collective identity by gathering stories and photos of individual Australians. As its website still explains, the project aimed to graphically illustrate the amazing cultural diversity in Australia today. The candidates [for photos] must have been born overseas, preferably in their country of origin. 22

The ontology of their Australianness was determined by their temporal origin. As Burke thought further about temporizing an essence, though, he added that 21 | Kenneth Burke, A Grammar of Motives. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968, p. 430. 22 | The Project, “All of Us: Multiculturalism-Australian Style”, www.allofus.com.au , [accessed 15 March 2013].

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one could classify an essence not only in terms of its origins but also “in terms of its fulfillment or fruition, conceiving of its kind according to the perfection . . . of which that kind is capable.”23 He continued, “In either choice (the ancestral or the final) the narrative terminology provides for a personalizing of essence.”24 The individual’s essence is narrated into a causal timeline unifying their identity around stories of origin or fulfillment—what was or will be. Then these individuals explore with their fellows the collective history presented in the museum, interacting with that collective history in ways that promote identification with the larger story by infusing individual acts with a more unifying ideal, personalizing their role in national history. It is in this sense of the role of identity-building that, as museologist Jay Rounds argues: Visiting a museum is both about construction of identity and signaling of identity . . . museums offer opportunities of affirming our identity, but they also offer a safe environment where we can explore other identities and gain materials to ‘construct’ ourselves. 25

This identity work happens, again, not consciously, not as the reason for visiting the museum, but as a consequence of one’s engagement with the collective ideal personalized in story as woven by the individual artifacts. Burke termed this engagement phenomenon rhetorical identification, “any of the wide variety of means by which [a rhetor] may establish a shared sense of values, attitudes, and interests with [an audience].”26 He believed that it was the necessary companion to effective persuasion, that in a world of not always rational interactions, “you persuade a man only insofar as you can talk his language . . . identifying your ways with his”.27 Far from lamenting the shifting ambiguity of such individualized, non-rational interactions, however, he celebrated ambiguity as the human condition. There are endless examples of such individual engaged identifications with their shifting collective identities as presented in museums, but I will end with two from New World indigenous culture. In the “Our Peoples” exhibit at the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, DC, an introductory sign asserts the individuality of indigenous people: “The people who live there are engineers and artists, cooks and dreamers, hunters and students. They are scientists and kings, farmers and revolutionaries. They aren’t ‘Indians.’ They have never heard of ‘America’.” 23 | Kenneth Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1950, 1968, p. 13-14, (emphasis Burke’s). 24 | Ibid. 15 (emphasis Burke’s). 25 | Jay Rounds, “Doing identity work in museums,” in: Curator 49.2 (2006), p. 138. 26 | Burke, A Rhetoric..., p. 138. 27 | Ibid. p. 55.

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Photo by the author. Modern museum visitors are strangers to them—but by providing these unknown individuals with familiar titles, the introduction provides a way for the visitors, also engineers and artists, hunters and dreamers, to identify their own ways with those ancient peoples’—who, then, are not strangers to the visitor. Each individual visitor gazes at the artifacts preserved from these other individuals—and thus, paradoxically, all share commonalities of which personalizing serves to remind them. It is much as the President of the Republic of Mexico noted on the inauguration of his country’s National Archaeological Museum almost 50 years ago (a quote now carved into the museum’s entrance, whose very existence marked an expanding sense of Mexican identity): “Faced with the testimonies of those cultures, Mexico today pays tribute to indigenous Mexico, in whose example it recognizes characteristics of its national originality.”28 If identity, “emergent rather than permanent,”29 as Falk puts it, is a rhetorical action rather than a static essence, then what better place to practice that action—“the process of negotiating with others our notions of individual

28 | Adolofo Lopez Mateos, “Frente a los testimonios de aquellas culturas, el México de hoy rinde homenaje al México indígena en cuyo ejemplo reconoce características de su originalidad nacional.” Translation and emphasis mine. 29 | Falk, p. 73.

Individual Identity/Collective Histor y

and collective identity”30 —than within the safe exploratory space of the dialogic museum?

W orks cited Aronsson, Peter, “Comparing National Museums: Methodological Reflections”, in: NaMu IV, 2010, pp. 5-19. Burke, Kenneth, “Four Master Tropes”, in: Kenyon Review 3.4 (1941): 421-38. A Grammar of Motives. Berkeley: University of California Press, [1945] 1968. A Rhetoric of Motives. Berkeley: University of California Press, [1950], 1968. Clark, Gregory, Rhetorical Landscapes in America. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina P, 2004. Dadabaev, Timur, “Power, Social Life, and Public Memory in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan”, in: Inner Asia 12.1 (2010): 25-48. Eunamus. European National Museums Making Histories in a Diverse Europe. Linkoping, Sweden: Linkoping University Electronic Press, 2012. Falk, John, Identity and the Museum Visitor Experience. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2009. Fivush, Robyn and Haden, Catherine, “Introduction: Autobiographical Memory, Narrative and Self”, in: Autobiographical Memory and the Construction of a Narrative Self. Ed. by Robyn Fivush and Catherine Haden. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2003, pp. vii-xiii. Lunsford, Andrea A. and Ede, Lisa, “Representing Audience: ‘Successful’ Discourse and Disciplinary Critique”, in: College Composition and Communication 47.2, May, 1996, pp. 167-68. Macdonald, Sharon, “Museums, National, Postnational and Transcultural Identities” in: Museum and Society 1.1, 2003. pp. 1-16. Mason, Rhiannon, “Communities and Redisplay at the Laing Art Gallery,” University of Leicester School of Museum Studies Research Seminar Series, 24 Oct. 2012. Presentation to the school. McAdams, Dan P, “Identity and the Lifestory”, in: Autobiographical Memory and the Construction of a Narrative Self. Ed. Robyn Fivush and Catherine Haden. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2003. pp. 187-207. Penuel, William, and Wertsch, James V., “Vygotsky & identity Formation: A Sociocultural Approach”, in: Educational Psychologist 30.2 1995, pp. 83-92. Porter, James, Audience and Rhetoric: An Archaeological Composition of the Discourse Community. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1992 Roberts, Lisa C, From Knowledge to Narrative: Educators and the Changing Museum. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1997. 30 | Clark, p. 3.

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Rounds, Jay, “Doing Identity Work in Museums”, in: Curator 49.2 (2006): 133150. Rowe, Shawn, Wertsch, James and Kosyaeva, Tatyana, “Linking Little Narratives to Big Ones: Narrative and Public Memory in History Museums”, in: Culture & Psychology 8.1, 2002, pp. 96-112. “The Project”, All of Us: Multiculturalism-Australian Style, , 2009. (accessed web. 15 March 2013). Weiser, M. Elizabeth, “Who are We? Museums Telling the Nation’s Story”, in: International Journal of the Inclusive Museum 2.2, 2009, pp. 29-38.

Describing and Understanding the Experience of Visitors Daniel Schmitt, University of Valenciennes – France

The public in question It is now quite evident that the “average museum visitor,” a consumer of cultural goods and services with the expectations and behavior of a consumer, is a myth constructed by researchers1. This pseudo-knowledge promotes simplistic messages and dramatic museographic effects while obscuring everything that visitors might wish to experience and understand as beings endowed with autonomous reason and a unique life trajectory. Without a doubt, we understand the motivations of visitors quite well, what they learn at a museum2 the significance of “influences” on them3, and the importance of the layout, special effects, and immersive technologies4. However, there are important questions to which we are only just beginning to glean the answers: can we access the intimate experience of visitors during their visit without significantly disturbing this experience? And if so, what actually happens from the perspective of visitors when they visit an exhibition? What provides meaning for them at each moment of their visit? And on what basis and how do visitors construct knowledge? Grasping and understanding with precision the experience of visitors in the natural setting of an unguided visit may radically transform our representations 1 | Joëlle Le Marec, Publics et musées, la confiance éprouvée. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2007, p. 200. 2 | John Falk and Lynn Dierking, The Museum Experience. Washington: Whalesback Books, 1992. 3 | Jack Guichard and Jean-Louis Martinand. Médiatique des Sciences. Paris: PUF, 2000. 4 | Florence Belaën, “L’exposition, une technologie de l’immersion”, in: Médiamorphoses 9, 2003, pp. 98–101; Raymond Montpetit, “Expositions, parcs, sites: des lieux d’expériences patrimoniales”, in: Culture et Musées 5, 2005, pp. 111–133.

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of the public. As a result, this process may help us enrich museographic conceptions as well as the mediation of museums and exhibitions.

B roaching the e xperience of visitors Researchers can describe the behavior of a visitor in a museum. This description is scientifically acceptable insofar as it concerns the relative movement of the visitor’s body in the museum space. Nevertheless, as soon as researchers begin to describe the cognitive domain of the visitor based on the observed behavior, they commit a double error: 1) they describe the environment, significant for them and, they suppose, significant for the visitor; 2) they establish a relationship between their description of the visitor’s behavior and the cognitive domain of the latter5. The verbalization of the experience by those who live this experience is a sine qua non condition if we are to understand and share in this experience. Nevertheless, the necessity of collecting the verbalizations of visitors constitutes a delicate issue for the following reasons: • If visitors are questioned at regular intervals during their visit, we interrupt the flow of their experience, engaging them in a reflective analysis of their actions. This practice thus modifies the activity and leads us further away from a visit in a natural setting. • If, on the contrary, we preserve the natural setting of the visit and question visitors at the end of their tour, we collect a summarized a posteriori discourse devoid of the finesse and precision of the lived experience. Thus, the theoretical challenge resides in bridging the temporal gap between the experience of the visitor and the verbalization of this experience, all the while preserving the precision and finesse of the description of the lived experience.

5 | For a detailed explanation, see Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, The Tree of Knowledge: The Biological Roots of Human Understanding. Boston: Shambhala Publications, 1987, pp. 137–138.

Describing and Understanding the Experience of Visitors

S emiological theory of the course - of - e xperience With Humberto Maturana6, Francisco Varela developed a theory of enaction7, which allows us to overcome the aforementioned challenges. The core idea of enaction maintains that perception and action are interdependent within any organism: “Cognition is not the representation of a pregiven world by a pregiven mind but is rather the enactment of a world and a mind on the basis of a history of the variety of actions that a being in the world performs8.” Perception, action, and sense of action from the perspective of the agent are thus inextricably linked to the environment in which the action takes place.9 From an enactive point of view, for example, human auditory perception and sounds are only meaningful in the emergence of a phenomenal domain involving an environment and the human system. Our environment allows variations in the air pressure, but variations in the air pressure alone cannot give rise to the phenomenon that we call noise, sound, or music. Only the structural coupling of our environment and human physiology renders the emergence of what we call sounds or music possible, and more generally, what we call auditory perception. The same applies to all of our sensory abilities. In this manner, we observe how this approach renders the objective description of the environment difficult, which mostly pertains to the phenomenological domain of the visitor. The environment that we describe is inevitably a description of our own relationship to this environment, which is in itself a relationship constructed with this very environment over time. From the enactive perspective, visitors are not seen to be immersed in a space in which they must discover the salient and significant features; instead, they act and react to what perturbs them and what is meaningful to them, which occurs in an environment perceived through the prism of their own past, expectations, and knowledge that may be called upon at any moment. Drawing from the theoretical foundation of enaction, Theureau elaborated a semiological theory for the courseof-experience10, defined as the construction of meaning for the agent during the 6 | Humberto Maturana, Francisco Varela and Ricardo Uribe, “Autopoiesis: The Organization of Living Systems, its Characterization and a Model”, in: BioSystems 5 (4), 1974, pp. 187–196. 7 | Francisco Varela, Principles of Biological Autonomy. New York: Elsevier, 1979. 8 | Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rosch, The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991, p. 9. 9 | Lucy Suchman, Plans and Situated Action. Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1987. 10 | See Jacques Theureau, Le cours d’action: Méthode élémentaire. Toulouse: Octarès, 2004; Jacques Theureau, Le cours d’action: Méthode développée. Toulouse: Octarès, 2006; Jacques Theureau, Le cours d’action: Méthode réfléchie. Toulouse: Octarès, 2009.

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course of his or her action.11 The theory of the course-of-experience allows us to analyze human action in its dynamic and situated (in situ) dimension in a very precise manner, in addition to the learning process that accompanies this action on the condition that it is elucidated a posteriori by whoever experiences it. When visitors are asked to comment on their actions based on the traces left by the diverse actions that they performed in a given environment, they spontaneously divide the flux of the action into discrete units that are significant from their own perspective.12 Each significant division is the manifestation of a sign, comprising six components that are both distinct and inseparable from the others: The Hexadic Sign and its Components Component of the Sign

Identification of the Component

Representamen

What is taken into account by the visitor at a given moment?

Involvement in the situation

How does the visitor connect with the Representamens at a given moment?

Potential actuality

What are the expectations of the visitor at a given moment?

Referential

What knowledge is called upon by the visitor at a given moment?

Interpretant

What knowledge does the visitor construct, whether valid or invalid?

Unit of course-of-experience

What is the minimal sequence that gives meaning to the visitor?

By identifying the components of these signs, we may reconstruct the meaningful dynamics of visitors’ actions as well as identify the knowledge constructed by them and the emotional states linked to these actions. This process therefore allows us to describe and understand their individual microcosms, with the resultant sequences leading us to identify what is meaningful for visitors during their visit.

11 | Theureau, 2006, p. 48. 12 | Luc Ria, Carole Sève, Jacques Theureau, Jacques Saury and Marc Durand, “Beginning teacher’s situated emotions: study about first classroom’s experiences”, in: Journal of Education for Teaching, 29(3), 2003, pp. 219–233.

Describing and Understanding the Experience of Visitors

M e thodology : documenting and analy zing the visitors ’ course - of - e xperience based on a subjective perspective and subjective re - situ intervie w Every visitor lives in an environment that is meaningful on a personal level. If this environment as it is perceived by the visitor can be reproduced, he or she may relive this experience and have the time to describe it. This ability to describe what is seen and felt as well as the thoughts that come to mind is based on reminiscence, namely the ability to re-experience in quality what has already been experienced; this is, in some ways, the effect of the “madeleine of Proust.” Overall, 41 individuals (21 males and 20 females) who were about to purchase a museum admission ticket were approached to participate in this research study.13 To preserve a vestige of the world as perceived by each visitor, he or she was first equipped with a mini-camera to record his or her subjective visual and auditory perspective, which left the visitor free to move about without the presence of the researcher.14 After a tour of around 30 minutes, the minicamera was removed and the visitor placed in front of a video screen situated away from the site of the visit. The recording of the visit was then projected on this screen, with the visitor then being prompted to recount and comment on his or her experience of the visit. A camera, placed behind the visitor and the researcher, recorded the interview and their gestures in front of the screen. During this subjective re-situ interview, the visitor spontaneously divided his or her actions into units deemed to be significant from his or her own point of view. The descriptions and commentaries were therefore all the more precise since the video recording was conducted from the visitor’s own perspective and thus emphasized reminiscence.15 The subjective re-situ interview was then transcribed and analyzed using Theureau’s semiological framework.16 The aim was to identify what was taken into account by the visitor at each moment: what 13 | Daniel Schmitt, “Expérience de visite et construction des connaissances: Le cas des musées de sciences et des centres de culture scientifique”, PhD diss., University of Strasbourg, 2012, available at http://www.museographie.fr 14 | Differing from a Thinking Aloud approach, here the visitor is not asked to comment aloud during the museum visit. For details on this method, see Colette Dufresne-Tassé, Monique Sauvé, Andréa Weltzl-Fairchild, Nadia Banna, Yves Lepage and Clément Dassa, “Pour des expositions muséales plus éducatives, accéder à l’expérience du visiteur adulte. Développement d’une approche”, in: Canadian journal of Education 23(3), 1998, pp. 302–315. 15 | Georgiana Gore, Géraldine Rix-Lièvre, Olivier Wathelet and Anne Cazemajou “Eliciting the Tacit: Interviewing to Understand Bodily Experience”, in: The Interview: An Ethnographic Approach, ed. J. Skinner, London: Berg, 2012, pp. 127–142. 16 | Jacques Theureau, 2006.

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he or she looked at and did in addition to the expectations, preoccupations, and knowledge called upon, with the aim of documenting each fragment of the meaningful sequence and then reconstruct the visitor’s course-of-experience.

1) Visitors were equipped with a mini-camera and microphone. A video recording resembling their natural visual perception was thus obtained. 2) Visitors were then invited to describe their experiences based on this film. A camera placed behind the visitor and the researcher recorded the video screen, interview, and gestures. The recording was subsequently transcribed and the hexadic signs recorded, thus allowing the reconstruction of the course-of-experience. All photographs by author.

The recording of visitors’ subjective perspective in tandem with a subjective re-situ interview allows us to access their verbal experience based on their reminiscence, without introducing significant secondary effects or manifest bias17, thus permitting their course-of-experience to be described with precision, finesse, and depth. We can therefore follow, show, and share the chain of meaningful sequences for visitors and the construction of meaning throughout their tour. The key aspect of this contribution resides in the subtle comprehension of visitors’ actions, understood here as both corporal and cognitive actions. This approach reveals that knowledge is not simply transmitted in the sense of accumulating information, but rather constructed by each visitor as an adequate response to his or her expectations through harnessing the resources available in the environment or linked to his or her past. What is most striking in this approach, however, is the extraordinary wealth apparent in the visitors’ course-of-experience and their inventiveness, which very often goes beyond what we imagine as museum designers or researchers.

17 | Schmitt, pp. 159-170.

Describing and Understanding the Experience of Visitors

A n e x ample of the course - of - e xperience : A nnie in the œ uvre N otre D ame museum In the Œuvre Notre-Dame Museum in Strasbourg, the room known as the rood screen presents sculptures dating from the thirteenth century. The large-scale works originate from the Cathedral of Strasbourg and loom over the visitors. The architectural volume of the room is imposing, and the mineral materials produce a strong acoustic reverberation. Annie, aged in her 50s, works in the public service. Exhaling, she enters the rood screen room, looks at the rood screen and certain statues, exhales again, looks at the figure of the Synagogue, reads a text on an information stand, looks at the surrounding statues, reads a caption, clears her throat, approaches a statue, and reads the corresponding caption; her tour around the room lasts 3 min 27 sec. From the point of view of an observer, there is little to learn from Annie’s experience because nothing enables us to interpret the tenuous signs of her actions. In contrast, with the subjective re-situ interview, Annie’s actions may be divided into several coherent sequences from her perspective, which allows us to understand with precision her experience of the visit around the rood screen room.

Perspective of the rood screen room in the Œuvre Notre-Dame Museum in Strasbourg as discovered during the sequence of the visit. “I suddenly felt a bit like I was in a ... a cathedral, but I don’t at all dislike that [...] it’s not morbid like most of the time, but that thing there [...] that big thing at the back is so imposing... so I didn’t really know what to do... I didn’t read about it, I didn’t read anything” [Annie].

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Annie’s entrance into the room Visitor:

I enter this room, and there… straight away, it’s more difficult… what immediately strikes me and oppresses me, it’s deep inside me, there… those figures like that… those statues are so posed. There it is, the image that oppresses me a bit, I felt it in the first room, in the pediment too. All those stones at the top, I don’t know why, but it oppresses me a bit… I suddenly felt a bit like I was in a … a cathedral, but I don’t at all dislike it. But I’ve got a big problem at the moment with anything to do with churches, the images, etc., but I’m not even in [a church], because there, there’s statues, stones, and it’s not… It’s not morbid like most of the time, but that thing there… That’s what I find, what I found in this room, it’s that … everything seemed so posed… well, they’re posed, they’re… The room’s not meant for that, but that’s the feeling I have… and those things that are so posed like that and that big thing at the back there, it’s so imposing… But there you go, I didn’t really know what to do… I didn’t read about it, I didn’t read anything. Researcher: What’s the big imposing thing? Visitor: The big imposing thing at the back there, all of it (Annie indicates a sculpture on the screen with her finger) < the pediment > yes, the pediment, thank you. So now, what I’m going to do, I’m going to… I’m going to go and have a look, in any case, take an interest in what’s there, the statues, what are they, what do they mean, where do they come from, where do they take me, you know? Afterwards, I’m going to take a look around, I’ll look … do I like the faces … where am I… how’s it made… Researcher: What is guiding you? Visitor: What guides me are the forms, finding something that interests me like that, something that attracts me, and it’s the statues and so what guides me in these statues it’s… wait, I’ll look < the cartels > yes, that one there, I know the blindfolded statue, but I couldn’t tell you what it is, but what interested me before was… the image didn’t stop above it, but it’s what seems less religious. After that, what guides me is the forms, the statues… that means more to me than anything else, I’m attracted to that one at the front and then afterwards… I become interested in the Wise Virgins over there, which are also quite imposing. So you see, it’s the Wise Virgins. A few minutes later, we return to the entry of the rood screen room.

Describing and Understanding the Experience of Visitors

Researcher: I’d like to return to this initial view. Do you remember… emotionally this room from the entrance? Visitor: Ah, this here? Yes, I exhaled… All I could say is “wow,” that’s what I did. Researcher: Meaning what? Visitor: Um, meaning that… for me it meant… in fact, I don’t know, how can I explain… It was just imposing, it was… just like it resembled something to do with a… a church, religion, all that I find so… all that’s heavy. Researcher: What’s meaningful for you here, I mean, the element that you perceive in this space? Visitor: It’s the prominence of the back [of the room]. Yes, it’s the prominence of the back, it’s… all of that there violently imposes itself on me, you see. Researcher: And do you remember when you entered, you exhaled < yes >. Do you remember your expectations just before entering this space, did you hope something would happen, and if so, what? Visitor: Yes, I… let’s say it means… not that, but this… you see, not that, but this, I mean I’d prefer to be accompanied. Already, it was a journey for me because it really focused on religion, no? What I want to say is that it’s mostly that, I’d prefer to be accompanied, to make it lighter.

Components of the signs Representamens • • • •

n oppressive form A A big imposing thing at the back Statues, faces of statues Forms of statues

Involvement in the situation • • • • •

Feeling oppressed Feeling like being in a religious building rather than a museum Taking an interest in statues to see whether a narrative is possible Moving away from a religious narrative Looking at the forms

Potential actualities • E xpectations associated with entering into a narrative, being accompanied • Expectations associated with seeking less religious forms • Expectations associated with identifying forms that attract and guide

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Referentials • Most of the time, churches are morbid places

Units of the course-of-experience • I mmediate, negative impression • Avoiding religion by transforming the statues into forms, into sculptures (non-religious)

Interpretant • Reinforcing knowledge: “This museum resembles a church”

Annie’s course-of-experience Annie moves from a small space, a sort of vestibule, into a vast, luminous room. She perceives the rood screen at the back of the room (Representamen) and immediately feels “oppressed”: the place is “oppressive” and things seem “posed” (Involvement). Walking down the steps toward the rood screen, she lets out a huge sigh, clearly audible on the subjective perspective recording. This time, she sees “a big thing at the back” (Representamen), the gable of the rood screen, “the object at the back” that she fails to identify. This room oppresses her (Involvement). She no longer knows whether she is in a museum or a cathedral. She seeks to immerse herself in the narrative (Potential actuality), but the proposed narrative is, in her opinion, a religious narrative, and for her, religion is “heavy and oppressive.” Her encounter with the gable of the rood screen is negative. Annie hopes to escape this feeling by “suppressing the religious elements and moving toward something more human.” For her, churches are “morbid places” (Referential). She expects the narrative of a museum, not a religious narrative (Potential actuality); as a result, she feels confined in the space and seeks to free herself from it (Potential actuality). She looks for objects that attract her, objects with which she can construct or enter into a narrative that suits her. She constructs knowledge: “this museum resembles a church” (Interpretant).

Annie’s visit around the room Visitor:

I’m looking, yes, but I don’t really know what I’m looking for, but I’ve got an idea. Either I’m attracted to a form like that, which is surprising because it’s different, because it’s someone with no legs, because… I know, because the form of the sculpture interests me. Or it’s because of something else… that reminds me, I know, like the Foolish Virgins. I know them because I saw them on the door before, there are the Wise and the Foolish. I saw the Wise so

Describing and Understanding the Experience of Visitors

I’m looking for the Foolish. So perhaps it’s an idea or a form that interests me more than anything else and I’m always trying to feel where I am, what it’s telling me, etc. It doesn’t always tell me something, I need more time… so there you go… ah yes, that one also attracts me, what’s that one there, after that, it reminds me… Researcher: It doesn’t attract you for very long because you keep moving, you drift past it. Visitor: Yes, for now I’m drifting, in fact… it’s seems to be my way of doing things, I mean, I’m… I need more time, I mean, for the moment I’m drifting, looking where I am, and then I’ll go back, that is, if I could go back and be interested for longer. I keep returning to the idea of the vestibule, I mean, the need to be guided, to feel like I’m experiencing something, which is not the case at the moment, so if you like, it’s as if… as if I were listening to what the stones were telling me, where they’re taking me because it’s the stones, especially what I have to do with them, where they’re taking me. Later, I’ll go back by going deeper. You see, for the moment, I don’t have… how to say it, I’m in the middle of feeling where I am and what the stones are telling me, roughly speaking … That’s why I drift past, yes, that’s why… Researcher: But how do you know that they’re telling you something, how do they speak to you, and when do they tell you something? Visitor: The stones, they tell me something through their form, they tell me something through their presence, well, at the moment, I’m at the stage where I feel like I’m playing it by ear. Then I turn back to the dogs, I liked the dogs, so it’s something to do with the sculpture, it’s something that’s… that goes beyond my initial idea about religion, which isn’t easy for me at the moment, in fact, all that it means. I don’t connect with it, you see, so it’s a bit like that. I’m going more by the appearance… the appearance of the sculptures, you see, sculptures made of stone. So there you go, I don’t really like the pediment so I don’t stop, it’s my first impression, I don’t stop much, and… Researcher: Why don’t you like it? Visitor: Because it reminds me of a church, it reminds me of something that is extremely formal in religion, which at the moment really tends to… to repel me more than attract me. So I’m going to do what guides me… Everything slightly different from traditional religion, for example, that statue over there attracts me because it’s different from the others, you see, that’s how I’m going to do things. So I’m going to go and look at what it is.

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Components of the signs Representamens • F orms without reference to the religious domain • Statues reified in stone

Involvement in the situation • S eeking to enter into a non-religious narrative • Drifting so as to gather her bearings, finding the right place, and returning / Verifying whether a narrative about stones is possible / Avoiding and removing herself from the religious domain

Potential actualities • E xpectations associated with a narrative outside of the religious domain • Expectations associated with feeling guided

Referentials • I am familiar with cathedrals or certain elements in cathedrals • Sculpture (art) can transcend religion

Units of the course-of-experience • Drifting–identifying stones and forms

Interpretant • T he action of drifting– identifying allows her to give meaning to the stones/ ongoing construction of meaning through the “sculptural” dimension

Annie’s course-of-experience To escape the oppressive feeling, Annie visually avoids the rood screen and focuses (Involvement) on the statues. She is still searching for an anchor in order to enter into a narrative: “what does it mean, where does it take me” (Potential actuality). But then she finds her guidance—“it’s the forms” (Representamen) and “whatever seems less religious” (Potential actuality)—so she stops to read the graphical information panel presented on the form of a lectern. A novel strategy thus begins to take shape. In a certain way, Annie “reuses” her visual field (new Involvement) so that she no longer sees churches, gables, and statues, but simply forms and stones, “something that transcends the idea of religion,” and eventually, “the stone sculpture” (Representamen). Nothing provides her with an anchor, so she drifts past the stones and forms (Involvement) with the expectation of finding works that allow her to enter into a narrative (Potential actuality). This reification of the religious statues made of stone, fragments,

Describing and Understanding the Experience of Visitors

or forms and this transformation of the nature of Representamens associated with the Potential actuality of avoidance (avoiding the religious domain) is the creative approach used by Annie in the hope of “entering into a narrative” and giving meaning to these stones. Annie thus finds a novel solution through narrowing her visual field. We observe her modifying her perceptual frame to construct Representamens in the form of non-religious statues, and with such a creative approach, she is able to cope with this environment and render it bearable for lack of rendering it “likeable.”

I nput and perspectives The analysis of visitors’ course-of-experience using a subjective re-situ interview allows us to show that every element, every exhibit, and every work, as perceived as an evident thing-in-itself offered for all eyes to see, emerges through a subtle and complex cognitive and corporal process. This process engages visitors by way of what constitutes them and reflects their relationship to the world, their unique physiological, cognitive, and perceptive capacities, past, knowledge, expectations, and desire to identify with “something” through an interaction with other members of the group, who similarly possess their own individual and unique capacities. This epistemic framework and method allow a subtle comprehension of the experience of a museum visit in a natural situation. For the most part, the catalogue of these surprisingly diverse experiences reveals an ongoing preoccupation, which incites us to rethink the nature of visitors’ relationship to the environment that constitutes a museum space, works, knowledge, and displays. What matters to visitors is their ability to connect to this environment in a manner that suits them, by developing adequate responses to questions that they ask themselves at every instant, which are independent of the intentions of the museum. As soon as they obtain a response to their preoccupation, they know something that is meaningful to them and thus gain a sense of pleasure. This approach, centered on the categorization of experiences rather than the categorization of publics, has the potential to durably transform, enlarge, and enrich museographic practices, the type of contents on offer, and their dynamic mediation. Finally, the enrichment of the experiential palette proposed by museums should thus increase the satisfaction of visitors in both quality and proportion.

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W orks cited Belaën, Florence, “L’immersion dans les musées de science  : médiation ou séduction ?” in: Culture & Musées, n°5 (2005): pp. 91-110. Dufresne-Tassé, Colette, Sauvé, Monique, Weltzl-Fairchild, Andréa, Banna, Nadia, Lepage, Yves and Dassa, Clément, “Pour des expositions muséales plus éducatives, accéder à l’expérience du visiteur adulte. Développement d’une approche”, in: Canadian journal of Education 23(3), 1998, pp. 302– 315. Falk, John, and Dierking, Lynn, The Museum Experience. Washington: Whalesback Books, 1992. Gore, Georgiana, Rix-Lièvre, Géraldine, Wathelet, Olivier and Cazemajou, Anne, “Eliciting the Tacit: Interviewing to Understand Bodily Experience”, in: The Interview: An Ethnographic Approach. London: Berg, 2012:127–142. Guichard, Jack and Martinand, Jean-Louis, Médiatique des Sciences. Paris : PUF, 2000. Le Marec, Joëlle. Publics et musées, la confiance éprouvée. Paris : L’Harmattan, 2007. Maturana, Humberto, Varela, Francisco and Uribe, Ricardo, “Autopoiesis: The Organization of Living Systems, its Characterization and a Model”, in: BioSystems 5 (4), 1974, pp. 187–196. Maturana, Humberto, and Varela, Francisco, The Tree of Knowledge: The Biological Roots of Human Understanding. Boston: Shambhala Publications, 1987: pp. 137–138. Montpetit, Raymond, “Expositions, parcs, sites: des lieux d’expériences patrimoniales,” in Culture et Musées 5, 2005, pp. 111–133. Ria, Luc, Sève, Carole, Theureau, Jacques, Saury, Jacques and Durand, Marc, “Beginning Teacher’s Situated Emotions: A Study of First Classroom Experiences”, in: Journal of Education for Teaching, vol. 29, n°3, 2003, pp. 219–233. Schmitt, Daniel, “Expérience de visite et construction des connaissances: Le cas des musées de sciences et des centres de culture scientifique”, PhD diss., University of Strasbourg, 2012, available at http://www.museographie. fr. Suchman, Lucy, Plans and Situated Action. Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1987. Theureau, Jacques, “Course-of-Action Analysis and Course-of-Action-Centered Design”, in: Handbook of Cognitive Task Design. Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2003. —. Le cours d’action: Méthode élémentaire. Toulouse: Octarès, 2004. —. Le cours d’action: Méthode développée. Toulouse: Octarès, 2006. —. Le cours d’action: Méthode réfléchie. Toulouse: Octarès, 2009.

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Varela, Francisco, Principles of Biological Autonomy. New York: Elsevier, 1979. Varela, Francisco , Thompson, Evan and Rosch, Eleanor, The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991.

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Viewing the Museum Experience through an Identity Lens John Falk, Oregon State University – United States

For more than a generation, researchers have worked at better describing and understanding the museum visitor experience—who visits, why and to what affect? I would assert that two major problems limit the validity and reliability of much of this earlier research, including much of my own research. The first of these problems is a spatial and temporal problem. Specifically, virtually all museum visitor research has been framed around what happens in the museum. Although superficially reasonable and of course practical, this limited perspective turns out to be highly problematic since only a fraction of the museum experience actually occurs within the four walls of the museum. The whole process of deciding why to go to the museum occurs outside the museum, and this along with the visitor’s prior experience, knowledge and interest profoundly influences what s/he actually does and thinks about within the museum.1 The meanings people make about their museum experience also extend beyond the temporal and spatial boundaries of the museum. It is only relatively recently that we have discovered just how long it takes for memories to form in the brain.2 It can take days, sometimes even weeks for a memory to form, and during that time other intervening experiences and events can influence those memories. Just as visitors often continue conversations in the museum that began prior to their visit, conversations also can and often do continue long after visitors leave the museum.3 Ironically, what happens after a person leaves 1 | John Falk and Lynn Dierking, The Museum Experience Revisited. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2013, pp. 35-63. 2 | James L. McGaugh, Memory & emotion: The making of lasting memories. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003, pp. 34-56. 3 | Kirsten Ellenbogen, “From dioramas to the dinner table: An ethnographic case study of the role of science museums in family life”. PhD diss., Vanderbilt University, 2003, pp. 87-98. John H. Falk, Identity and the Museum Visitor Experience. Walnut Creek, CA:

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the museum may be as critical to the nature and durability of that person’s museum memories as what actually happened within the museum. For all these reasons, accurately understanding the museum visitor experience requires expanding the time frame of investigation so that it includes aspects of the visitor’s life both before and after their museum visit. A second problem has been an over-dependence on demographic characteristics like age, race/ethnicity, gender, income and social class as explanatory variables. Over the past several decades thousands of visitor studies have been conducted in order to better understand who is visiting the museum. Although only a tiny fraction of these studies have been published, virtually every one has in some way classified visitors on the basis of demographics. The concrete, unchanging nature of someone’s demographics—adult, white, male—makes it easy to count but yields limited explanatory power. We “know” that on average museum visitors are better educated, older, whiter, wealthier and more female than the public as a whole.4 But averages don’t really help much when it comes to practice since museum visitors are not averages, they are individuals. At the level of individuals, demographic categories tell us remarkably little. Knowing that someone is female, white and better educated, older and wealthier than the public as a whole provides insufficient information to predict whether or not she will visit a museum, or more importantly, if she does visit, what the nature of her museum experience will be. The fact is that the museum visitor experience is not readily captured by these types of immutable categories.

Towards a ne w model of the museum visitor e xperience Over the past decade I have begun to develop what I think is a more robust way to describe and understand museum visitors’ experiences; one that simultaneously attempts to accommodate both the protracted, pre- and postmuseum visit nature of the experience and its dynamic, highly individualized character. Undergirding this new approach have been a series of in-depth interviews, now numbering in the hundreds, in which my colleagues and I have talked to individuals about their museum experiences both prior to their visit as well as weeks, months and years after their visits. Time and time again what leaps out in these interviews is how deeply personal museum visits are, Left Coast, 2009, pp. 129-154. Gaea Leinhartd and Karen Knutson, Listening in on museum conversations. Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press, 2004, pp. 77-90. 4 | Zahava Doering and Adam Bickford, Visits and visitors to the Smithsonian Institution: A summary of studies, Institutional Studies Report No. 94-1. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1994.

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and how deeply tied to each individual’s sense of identity. Also striking is how consistently an individual’s post-visit narrative relates to their entering narrative. In other words, what typically sticks in a person’s mind as important about their visit usually directly relates to the reasons that person stated they went to the museum in the first place; and often they use similar language to describe both pre- and post-visit memories. The ways in which individuals talk about why they went to the museum as well as the ways they talk about what they remember from their experience invariably seem to have a lot to do with what they were seeking to personally accomplish through their visit. Visitors talk about how their personal goals for the visit relate to who they thought they were or wanted to be, and they talk about how the museum itself supported these personal goals and needs. The insights gained from these interviews led me to totally reconceptualize how I thought about the museum visitor experience; led me to appreciate that building and supporting personal identity was the primary driving motivation (both consciously and unconsciously) behind virtually all people’s museum visits.

V isitor motivation and identit y Considerable time and effort has been invested in understanding the motivations of museum visitors. A variety of investigators have sought to describe why people visit museums, resulting in a range of descriptive categorizations.5 More recently, investigators have begun to document the connections between visitors’ entering motivations and their exiting meaning making.6 This is 5 | John H. Falk, 1998, “Visitors: Who does, who doesn’t, and why”, in: Museum News 77, no. 2, 1998, pp. 38-43; Marilyn Hood, “Staying away: Why people choose not to visit museums”, in: Museum News 61, no. 4, 1983, pp. 50-57; Paulette McManus, “Topics in museums and science education”, in: Studies in Science Education 20 1992, pp. 157182; Theano Moussouri, “Family agendas and family learning in hands-on museums,” (PhD diss., University of Leicester, 1997); Jan Packer and Roy Ballantyne, “Motivational factors and the visitor experience: A comparison of three sites”, in: Curator 45, 2002, pp. 183-198.; Andrew Pekarik, Zahava Doering and Deborah Karns, “Exploring satisfying experiences in museums”, in: Curator 42 , 1999, pp. 152-173. 6 | Adriana Briseno-Garzon, David Anderson and Ann Anderson, “Entry and emergent agendas of adults visiting an aquarium in family groups”, in: Visitor Studies 10 no. 1, 2007, pp. 73-89.; John H. Falk, Theano Moussouri and Douglas Coulson, “The effect of visitors’ agendas on museum learning”, in: Curator 41 no. 2, 1998, pp. 106-120.; John H. Falk and Martin Storksdieck, “Using the Contextual Model of Learning to understand visitor learning from a science center exhibition”, in: Science Education 89, 2005, pp. 744-778. Leinhartd and Knutson, pp. 145-162.; Jan Packer, “Learning for fun: The

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not surprising if, as postulated by Doering and Pekarik visitors are likely to enter a museum with an entry narrative and these entry narratives are likely to be self-reinforcing, directing both learning, behavior and perceptions of satisfaction.7 My interviews support this view as well. Of particular interest, though, was that despite the huge variability in entry narratives, a few similar themes kept emerging. At some level, each of the hundreds of visitor entering narratives I heard were unique, but stepping back a little, it was possible to see a convergence towards a relatively small subset of categories related to visit motivation. These motivational categories, in turn, could best be understood as ways people described how they thought a museum visit would help them satisfy one or more personal identity-related need. In other words, people perceived museums as settings for doing identity work,8 and more often than not, had a pretty good idea of the kind of identity-related need that museumbased identity work was intended to satisfy. For more than 100 years the constructs of self and identity have been used by a wide range of social science investigators from a variety of disciplines. Perhaps surprisingly, there is no single agreed-upon definition of self or identity, though there are a number of useful reviews of these various perspectives.9 Highlighting the complexities of the topic, Bruner and Kalmar state, “Self is both outer and inner, public and private, innate and acquired, the product of evolution and the offspring of culturally shaped narrative.”10 It has been characterized as the product of endless dialogue and comparison with “others”—both living and nonliving.11 Perhaps most pointedly, Simon states that: unique contribution of educational leisure experiences,” in: Curator, 49 no. 3, 2006, pp. 329-344.; Packer and Ballantyne, pp. 183-198. 7 | Zahava Doering and Andrew Pekarik, “Questioning the entrance narrative,” in: Journal of Museum Education 21 no. 3, 1996, pp. 20-25. Pekarik, Doering, & Karns, pp. 152-173. 8 | Jay Rounds, “Doing identity work in museums,” in: Curator, 49 no. 2, 2006, pp. 133-150. 9 | See review in John H. Falk, 2009, pp. 71-75. 10 | Jerome Bruner and Daniel Kalmer, “Narrative and metanarrative in the construction of self”, in: M. Ferrari and R.J. Sternberg (Eds.) Self-Awareness: Its nature and development. New York: The Guildford Press, 1998, p. 326. 11 | Mikhail Bakhtin, The dialogic imagination: Four essays. (ed. post mortem M. Holquist, trans. C. Emerson & M. Holquist). Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981.; Per Linell, “What is dialogism? Aspects and elements of a dialogical approach to language, communication and cognition,” (Lecture first presented at Växjö University, Oct 2000, this version 26 Feb. 2003). www.umass.edu/.../llc/.../Linell%20Per%20what%20 is%20dialogism (accessed 6 Nov. 2011).

Viewing the Museum E xperience through an Identity Lens even if identity turns out to be an “analytical fiction,” it will prove to be a highly useful analytical fiction in the search for a better understanding of human experiences and behaviors. If used as a shorthand expression or placeholder for social psychological processes revolving around self-definition or self-interpretation, including the variable but systematic instantiations thereof, the notion of identity will serve the function of a powerful conceptual tool.12

It is just such a conceptual tool that I was seeking as I tried to better understand the nature of the museum experience. The model of identity that I have adopted has antecedents in the work of a number of other investigators. Like Bronfenbrenner,13 Holland, Lachiotee, Skinner, and Cain14 and Simon,15 I subscribe to the view that identity is the confluence of internal and external social forces—cultural and individual agencies, and, like Bruner and Kalmar16 and Neisser17 I believe that identity is always influenced, to a greater or lesser extent, by innate and learned perceptions about the physical environment. And like Bakhtin,18 I subscribe to the idea that the creation of self is a neverending process, with no clear temporal boundaries. From this perspective, identity emerges as malleable, continually constructed, and as a quality that is always situated in the realities of the physical and sociocultural world—both the immediate social and physical world an individual may be immersed in as well as the broader social and physical world of an individual’s past (and future) family, culture, and personal history. A key understanding of identity is that each of us has not a single identity but rather maintains numerous identities which are expressed collectively or individually at different times, depending upon need and circumstance. A complicating aspect of identity is that it is simultaneously a process—an act of becoming—and a product—an expression of what one is.19 This dualistic 12 | Bernd Simon, Identity in modern society: A social psychological perspective. Oxford UK: Blackwell 2004, p. 3. 13 | Uri Bronfenbrenner, The ecology of human development. Cambridge: MA: Harvard University Press, 1979. 14 | Dorothy Holland, William Lachicotte, Jr., Debra Skinner and Carole Cain Identity and Agency in Cultural Worlds. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998. 15 | Simon, 2004. 16 | Bruner and Kalmer, 1998. 17 | Ulrich Neisser, “Five kinds of self knowledge”, in: Philosophical Psychology 1, 1988, pp. 35-59. 18 | Bakhtin, 1981. 19 | Thomas Brinthaupt and Richard Lipka, “Introduction”, in T.M. Brinthaupt & R.P. Lipka (Eds.). The self: Definitional and methodological issues. Albany, NY: The State University of New York Press, 1992, pp. 1-11.

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nature of identity has led some to misunderstand how I have used identity. Although one can focus almost exclusively on identity as a process, I like many others have tended to focus more on the product-oriented dimension of identity. It is not that either of these approaches is incorrect, as some might assert, but rather that each perspective provides a useful, albeit one-sided view of identity. I accept this distortion because, as will be seen below, my approach has allowed me to operationalize identity in ways that yield practical insights. Many of those that have focused on identity as a way of being have hypothesized that each of us possesses and acts upon a set of enduring and deep identities (what I call big “I” identities). Examples of “I” identities might be one’s sense of gender, nationality, political views or religion. Like the demographic-type characteristics that they are, these types of identities tend to be relatively fixed, something we carry with us throughout our lives (e.g., most of us do not change our sense of gender or nationality, though our sense of what that gender or nationality means does evolve). As described above, these are the types of identity categories that have been most frequently studied by social scientists and most frequently spring to mind when we think of identity. However, I would argue that much of our lives are spent enacting a series of other, more situated and evolving types of identities; each represent responses to the needs and realities of the specific moment and circumstances (what I call little “i” identities). Examples of “i” identities might be the “good niece/ nephew” identity we enact when we remember to send a birthday card to our aunt who lives in a different city or the “host/hostess” identity we enact when someone visits our house. In the latter case, our host/hostess identity will vary depending upon whether the visitor is a long-time friend who visits our house often or is a stranger visiting us for the first time. If we were about to get the Nobel prize and someone was interviewing us, these kinds of “i” identities would not be likely to top our list of characteristics that we offer as descriptors of “who we are”; but undeniably these types of identities play a critical role in defining who we are and how we behave much of the time. It was my observation that for most people, most of the time, going to a museum tended to elicit predominantly a very specific set of “i” identities. In other words, people went to museums in order to facilitate identity-related needs such as a desire to be a supportive parent or spouse, to indulge ones sense of curiosity or the feeling that it would be good to get away from the rat race of a little while. Although it is easy enough to imagine situations where the nationality, religion, gender or political affiliation could be a strong motivating factor behind a person visiting a museum, these identities did not seem to be the primary motivations behind most peoples’ visits to art museums, children’s museums, zoos or science centers, most of the time.

Viewing the Museum E xperience through an Identity Lens

Following on the work of Linville20 and Simon,21 I hypothesized that as active meaning seekers, most museum visitors engaged in a degree of self-reflection and self-interpretation about their visit experience—in other words were dialogic with the museum serving as a context for that dialogism. According to Simon, “through self-interpretation, people achieve an understanding of themselves or, in other words, an identity, which in turn influences their subsequent perception and behavior”.22 In Simon’s model, self-interpretation involves a varying number of enacted “self-aspects”—a cognitive category or concept that serves to process and organize information and knowledge about one’s self. According to Simon, self-aspects can refer to: generalized psychological characteristics or traits (e.g., introverted), physical features (e.g., red hair), roles (e.g., father), abilities (e.g., bilingual), tastes (e.g., preference for French red wines), attitudes (e.g., against the death penalty), behaviors (e.g., I work a lot), and explicit group or category membership (e.g., member of the Communist party). 23

In other words, within a specific situation, individuals make sense of their actions and roles by ascribing identity-related qualities or descriptions to themselves. The research of Cantor, Mischel and Schwarz24 and Schutte, Kenrick, and Sadalla25 reinforce this model, they found that individuals do indeed construct identity-relevant situational prototypes that served as a working model for the person, telling him or her what to expect and how to behave in situations of a particular type. I believed that this was also quite likely what visitors to museums were doing. People who visit museums typically possess a working model of what going to a museum entails; they also have a sense of what benefits will accrue to them by visiting. Thus I reasoned, visitors would ascribe a series of self-aspects to their museum experiences framed around what they perceived those museum experiences would afford them. Visitor’s self-aspects would therefore be congruent with both their understanding of what the museum had to offer and 20 | Patricia Linville, “Self-complexity and affective extremity: don’t put all your eggs in one cognitive basket”, in: Social Cognition 3, 1985, pp. 94-120. 21 | Simon, 2004. 22 | Ibid. p. 45. 23 | Ibid. p. 46. 24 | Nancy Cantor, Walter Mischel and J. Schwarz, “A prototype analysis of psychological situations”, in: Cognitive Psychology 14, 1982, pp. 45-77. 25 | Nicole Schutte, Douglas Kenrick and Edward Sadalla, “The search for predictable settings: Situational prototypes, constraint, and behavioral variation”, in: Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 51 (1985), pp. 459-462.

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their own perceived identity-related roles and needs. As described by Erikson, individuals have no choice but to form their identities using as a framework “the existing range of alternatives for identity formation.”26 I hypothesized, and my colleagues and I have now found evidence supporting the proposition, that visitors utilize their pre-visit self-aspects to both prospectively justify why they should visit the museum and then again retrospectively in order to make sense of how their visit was worthwhile. For example, many art museum visitors describe themselves as curious people, generally interested in art. They see art museums as great places for exercising that curiosity and interest. When one particular individual was asked about art museums she responded, “Art museums are great places to visit because they put together exhibitions designed to cultivate people’s interests and understandings of art.” When asked why she was visiting the art museum today she answered, “I came to see what’s new here. I haven’t been in a while and I was hoping to see some really new and interesting art.” Several months later when I re-contacted this person, she reflected back on her visit and said, “I had a superb time at the art museum, I just wandered around and saw all of the fabulous art; there were some really striking works. I even discovered a few works that I had never seen or known anything about before. That was really wonderful.” The visitor’s understanding of their museum visitor experience is invariably self-referential and provides coherence and meaning to the experience. Visitors tend to see their in-museum behavior and post-visit outcomes as consistent with personality traits, attitudes, and/or group affiliations such as the person above who saw the museums as a mechanism for reinforcing her view of herself as a curious person. Other visitors use the museum to satisfy personally relevant roles and values such as being a good parent or an intrepid cultural tourist. Despite the commonalities in these self-aspects across groups of visitors, individual visitors experience these self-aspects as expressions of their own unique personal identity and history; expressions that can and regularly vary from visit to visit. However, how you see yourself as a museum visitor depends to a large degree upon how you conceptualize museums in general and particular museums specifically. In other words, if you view yourself as a good father and believe that children’s museums are the kind of places good fathers bring their children, then you might actively seek out such a place in order to “enact” such an identity. Or, if you think of yourself as the kind of curious person who goes out of your way to discover unusual and interesting facts about the human condition, both in the present and in the past, then you might actively seek out a history museum during your leisure time. I believe that this is what a large percentage of visitors to museums actually do, not just 26 | Erik Erikson, Identity: Youth and crisis. New York: Norton, 1968, p. 190.

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with regards to parenting and curiosity, but as a means for enacting a wide range of identity-related meanings. As museums have become increasingly popular leisure venues, more and more people have developed working models of what museums are like and how and why they would use them—in other words, what a visit to a particular museum might afford. These museum-specific “affordances” are then matched up with the public’s specific identity-related needs and desires. Together, these create a very strong, positive, dialogic feedback loop. The loop begins with the public seeking leisure experiences that meet specific identity-related needs, such as personal fulfillment, parenting, or novelty seeking. As museums are generally perceived as places capable of meeting some (though not all) identityrelated needs, the public prospectively justifies reasons for making a visit to a particular museum based on their perception of whether or not that museum will satisfy their particular needs on that day. Once visited, over time, visitors reflect upon their museum visit and determine whether the experience was a good way to fulfill their needs. If it was, this reflection helps solidify in their minds the relationship between what they hoped to experience and what they actually experienced. These “satisfied” visitors are also likely to tell others, friends and family, about the visit which helps to feed a social understanding that this and other museums like it are good for that purpose. Through this process, these past visitors and others like them are much more likely to seek out this or another similar museum in the future should they possess a similar identity-related need. Over the course of numerous studies, in a variety of museum settings, evidence is beginning to mount supporting the existence of these identityrelated feedback loops.27 The ways in which individuals described their museum 27 | Amber Christopher, “Practical applications of the Falk visitor identity model.” (paper presented at the annual meeting of the Colorado-Wyoming Association of Museums Meeting, Golden, Colorado, April 25, 2013).; Jim Covel, “Guess that guest: Using identity-related motivations to support visitor services at the Monterey Bay Aquarium” (paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Association of Museums, Philadelphia, PA, May 4, 2009).; John H. Falk, Joe Heimlich and Kerry Bronnenkant, “Using identity-related visit motivations as a tool for understanding adult zoo and aquarium visitor’s meaning making”, in: Curator 51 no. 1, 55-80.; John H. Falk and Martin Storksdieck, “Science learning in a leisure setting”, in: Journal of Research in Science Teaching 47 no. 2 (2010), pp. 194-212.; Judith Koke, “Motivational theory as a tool for experience design; The experience of the Art Gallery of Ontario” (paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Association of Museums, Philadelphia, PA, May 4, 2009).; Judith Koke, AGO visitor motivation study: Cumulative report. Toronto: Art Gallery of Ontario, 2010.: Ida Lundgaard and Anne Foldgast, National User Survey 2012. Copenhagen: Kulture Styrelsen, 2013.; Jill Stein, “Adapting the visitor identity-related motivations scale for living history sites” (paper presented

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experiences appear to reflect visitor’s situationally-specific, identity-related selfaspects. Although, in theory, museum visitors could possess an infinite number of identity-related “self-aspects,” this does not appear to be the case. Both the reasons people give for visiting museums and their post-visit descriptions of the experience have tended to cluster around just a few basic categories, which in turn appeared to reflect how the public perceives what a museum visit affords. Based upon these findings and the work of others,28 I proposed clustering all the various motivations visitors ascribe to visiting museums into just five more or less distinct, identity-related categories. Descriptions of the five categories and some typical quotes from visitors follow: • Explorers: Visitors who are curiosity-driven with a generic interest in the content of the museum. They expect to find something that will grab their attention and fuel their learning. “I remember thinking I wanted to learn my science basics again, like biology and that stuff. . . . I thought [before coming], You’re not going to pick up everything, you know, but you are going to learn some things.” • Facilitators: Visitors who are socially motivated. Their visit is focused on primarily enabling the experience and learning of others in their accompanying social group. “[I came] to give [my] kids a chance to see what early life was like . . . it’s a good way to spend time with the family in a noncommercial way. They always learn so much.” • Professional/Hobbyists: Visitors who feel a close tie between the museum content and their professional or hobbyist passions. Their visits are typically motivated by a desire to satisfy a specific content-related objective. “I’m starting to put together a saltwater reef tank, so I have a lot of interest in marine life. I’m hoping to pick up some ideas [here at the aquarium].” • Experience Seekers: Visitors who are motivated to visit because they perceive the museum as an important destination. Their satisfaction primarily derives from the mere fact of having “been there and done that.”

at the annual meeting of the Visitor Studies Association, Toronto, Canada, July 19, 2007). Martin Storksdieck and Jill Stein, “Using the visitor identity-related motivations scale to improve visitor experiences at the US Botanic Garden” (paper presented at the annual meeting of the Visitor Studies Association, Toronto, Canada, July 19, 2007); Kathleen Tinworth, Denver—All City—Preliminary implementation of Falk’s Visitor Identity-Related Motivation typology. Denver: Denver-Area Cultural Evaluation Network, 2010. Laureen Trainer, Marla Steele-Inama and Amber Christopher, “Uncovering Visitor Identity: A citywide utilization of the Falk Visitor-Identity Model”, in: Journal of Museum Education 37 no. 1 (2012), 101-114. 28 | E.g., Moussouri, 1997.; Packer and Ballantyne, 2002.

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“We were visiting from out-of-town, looking for something fun to do that wouldn’t take all day. This seemed like a good idea; after all, we’re in Los Angeles and someone told us this place just opened up and it’s really neat.” • Rechargers: Visitors who are primarily seeking to have a contemplative, spiritual and/or restorative experience. They see the museum as a refuge from the work-a-day world or as a confirmation of their religious beliefs. “I like art museums. They are so very quiet and relaxing, so different than the noise and clutter of the rest of the city.” Within the last year, as I have considered a wider range of cultural institutions and contexts, in particular venues like memorials and ethnic-focused museums, I have proposed two additional categories:29,30 • Respectful Pilgrims. Visitors who go to museums out of a sense of duty or obligation to honor the memory of those represented by an institution/ memorial. • Affinity Seekers. Visitors motivated to visit because a particular museum or more likely exhibition speaks to their sense of heritage and/or personhood. As predicted, and evidenced in these and many other quotes I could have selected, museum visitors use museums to satisfy identity-related needs— occasionally deeply held identities, such as the person who sees themselves as first and foremost an “art person,” but more commonly important for visitors are more ephemeral identities such as the person looking for an appropriate, for them, way to spend an afternoon in a city they are visiting. Perhaps most important, though, is that my research has produced strong evidence that categorizing visitors as a function of their perceived identity-related visit motivations can be used as a conceptual tool for capturing important insights into how visitors make sense of their museum experience—both prior to arriving, during the experience and over time as they reflect back upon the visit. In the most detailed study to date, the majority of visitors could not only be categorized as falling into one of these five categories, but individuals within a category behaved and learned in ways that were different from individuals in 29 | Nigel Bond and John H. Falk, “Tourism and identity-related motivations: why am I here (and not there)?”, in: International Journal of Tourism Research, 15 no. 5, 2013, pp. 430–442. 30 | I have not created instruments for capturing these last two identity-related motivations. I am currently aware of only one instance where someone attempted to collect data using these latter two categories, and they did not find a significant number of individuals who fell into either of these categories. Thus it’s unclear exactly how including these categories would actually impact findings in most museum contexts.

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other categories.31 Specifically, individuals in some of the categories showed significant changes in their understanding and affect, while individuals in other categories did not; for some categories of visitor the museum experience was quite successful, while for others it was only marginally so. Thus, unlike traditional segmentation strategies based upon demographic categories like age, race/ethnicity, gender, or even education, separating visitors according to their entering identity-related motivations resulted in descriptive data predictive of visitors’ museum experiences. Also unlike demographic categories, these categories are not permanent qualities of the individual and are thus reflective the dynamic, constructive nature of museum experiences. An individual can be motivated to go to a museum today because they want to facilitate their children’s learning experience and go to the same or a different museum tomorrow because it resonates with their own personal interests and curiosities. Because of the differing identity-related needs, the nature and quality of that single individual’s museum experience will be quite different on those two days.

I mplications for pr actice I believe that this line of research has important implications for practice. Not only is research revealing that the majority of visitors to most types of museums arrive with one of five (seven) general motivations for visiting, it appears that these identity-related motivations directly relate to key outcomes in the museum setting, such as how visitors behave and interact with the setting and importantly, how they make meaning of the experience once they leave. In other words, being able to segment visitors this way gives museum practitioners key insights into the needs and interests of their visitors. This is very different than the one-size-fits-all perspective that has historically dominated our interactions with museum visitors. For example, my research has revealed that Explorers are focused on what they see and find interesting, and act out this me-centered agenda regardless of whether they are part of a social group like a family with children or not. Facilitators are focused on what their significant others see and find interesting, and they act out this agenda by, for example, allowing their significant others to direct the visit and worrying primarily about whether the other person is seeing what they find interesting rather than focusing on their own interests. Experience Seekers are prone to reflect upon the gestalt of the day, particularly how enjoyable the visit is. Professional/Hobbyists tend to enter with very specific, content-oriented interests and use the museum as a vehicle for facilitating those interests (e.g., information that will support their own 31 | Falk, Heimlich and Bronnenkant, 2008.

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personal collection or taking photographs). Finally, Rechargers, like Experience Seekers, are more focused on the gestalt of the day. But unlike Experience Seekers, Rechargers are not so much interested in having fun as they are interested in having a peaceful or inspiring experience. Of great importance is that these identity-related needs tend to be carried out independent of social group structure. In other words, an Explorer mother in a “family group” will not primarily focus on facilitating her child’s learning but instead will primarily pursue her own learning interests. Meanwhile a Facilitating person might actually seek to help someone outside of his own social group if he thinks that person needs help. By focusing on identity-related needs/interests, museum professionals could begin to customize and personalize the visitor’s experience and satisfy more people more of the time. Another important conclusion from this line of research has been that the “one size fits all” experiences provided visitors by most museums (e.g., exhibits, programs, tours) do not work equally well for all visitors all the time. The content may be just right for some, and totally miss the mark for others. By learning more about the specific needs of each visitor, at least categorically, it should become possible to better serve the needs of more visitors, more of the time. There’s at least some evidence too, that doing so creates more satisfied visitors.32 The closer the relationship between a visitor’s perception of his/her actual museum experience and his/her perceived identity-related needs, the more likely that visitors will perceive that their visit was good and the more likely they will return to the museum again and encourage others to do so as well. For example, Explorers are a particularly common group of art museum visitors. Explorers are individuals with a natural affinity for the subject matter but generally they are not experts. These visitors enjoy wandering around the museum and “bumping” into new (for them) objects and exhibits. Anticipating this need, museums that help Explorers discover personally satisfying things in the museum will fulfill his/her need to feel special. Professional/Hobbyists, on the other hand, tend to be quite knowledgeable and expect the museum to resolve questions others cannot answer. Not surprisingly, these are the folks who will sign up for special lectures or courses but will eschew the general tour. Figure out how to reach them—perhaps by advertising in hobby magazines or on hobby/professional websites—and get information about upcoming learning opportunities into their hands. And perhaps most importantly, recognize these individuals when they come into your institution; these folks want to be acknowledged as possessing expertise and passion and do not want to be treated as just another one of the “great unwashed.” Experience Seekers simply want to have a good time and see the best of what the museum has to offer. 32 | Christopher, 2013.

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These are the visitors who will gravitate to a tour of collection highlights; they’ll also be the first to be turned off by poor guest services, such as unfriendly ticket sellers, overly officious guards or unclean bathrooms. If your museum attracts a lot of out-of-town visitors, attending to these “guest service” issues will pay dividends in positive word-of-mouth from one Experience Seeker to another. In short, I believe that customizing museum offerings to suit the distinct, visit-specific identity-related needs will not only better satisfy regular visitors’ needs but provide a vehicle for enticing occasional visitors to come more frequently. I also believe that this approach opens the door to new and creative ways to attract audiences who do not visit museums at all. This is because these five (seven) basic categories of identity-related needs are not unique to museum-goers. What separates those who go to museums from those who do not, is not whether they possess one of these basic categories of identity-related need but rather whether they perceive that museums in general, or any given museum specifically represents a places that might satisfy their leisure needs on any given day. In other words, if we could figure out how to help more people see museums as places that fulfill their specific needs—and then deliver on this promise—more people would visit.

C onclusion A large number of visitors arrive at museums with preconceived expectations. They use the museum to satisfy those expectations and then remember the visit as an experience that did just that—satisfied a specific expectation. Therefore, being able to ascribe one of the five (seven) identity-related motivations to a visitor provides some measure of predictability about what that visitors’ experiences will be like. Each visitor’s experience is of course unique, as is each museum. Both are likely to be framed within the socially/culturally defined boundaries of how that specific museum visit affords things like exploration, facilitation, experience seeking, professional and hobby support, and restoration. Other types of experiences no doubt could and do occur in museums, but it appears that most visitors seek out and enact these alternative needs relatively infrequently. The lens of identity-related museum motivations thus provides a unique window through which we can view the nature of the museum experience and potentially can improve it. Although much of what I’ve discussed here remains a theory, there now appears to be sufficient evidence to justify efforts to use these ideas for improved practice. The hope is that this approach will lead to dramatically better ways to enhance the experience of current museum visitors, improve the likelihood that occasional museum visitors will become regular visitors, and provide new and improved ways to attract groups of

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individuals who historically have not thought of museums as places that meet their needs. The current approach, utilizing just a small number of categories is an initial, arguably crude way to tap into visitor’s identity-related motivations. My hope is that as this model becomes ever-more refined and extended it will enable museum professionals to frame ever better answers to the fundamental questions of who visits museums, for what reasons and to what end, and in the process make museums more satisfying places to visit.

W orks cited Adams, G. Donald, “The Process and Effects of Word-of-Mouth Communication at a History Museum”- MA thesis, Boston University, 1989. Bakhtin, Mikhail, The dialogic imagination: Four essays, [ed. post mortem M. Holquist, trans. C. Emerson & M. Holquist]. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981. Bond, Nigel and Falk, John H., “Tourism and identity-related motivations: why am I here (and not there)?”, in: International Journal of Tourism Research,” 15 no. 5 2013, pp. 430–442. Brinthaupt, Thomas, and Lipka, Richard, “Introduction”, in: T.M. Brinthaupt & R.P. Lipka (Eds.). in: The self: Definitional and methodological issues. Albany, NY: The State University of New York Press, 1992, pp. 1-11. Briseno-Garzon, Adriana, Anderson, David and Anderson, Ann, “Entry and emergent agendas of adults visiting an aquarium in family groups”, in: Visitor Studies 10 no. 1, 2007, pp. 73-89. Bronfenbrenner, Uri, The ecology of human development. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979. Bruner, Jerome and Kalmer, Daniel, “Narrative and metanarrative in the construction of self”, in: M. Ferrari and R.J. Sternberg (Eds.) Self-Awareness: Its nature and development. New York: The Guildford Press, 1998. Cantor, N, Mischel, W. and Schwarz, J., “A prototype analysis of psychological situations”, in: Cognitive Psychology 14. 1982. pp. 45-77. Christopher, Amber, “Practical applications of the Falk visitor identity model.” (paper presented at the annual meeting of the Colorado-Wyoming Association of Museums Meeting, Golden, Colorado, April 25, 2013). Covel, Jim, “Guess that guest: Using identity-related motivations to support visitor services at the Monterey Bay Aquarium,” (paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Association of Museums, Philadelphia, PA, May 4, 2009). Doering, Zahava, and Bickford, Adam, Visits and visitors to the Smithsonian Institution: A summary of studies, Institutional Studies Report No. 94-1. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1994.

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Doering, Zahava, and Pekarik, Andrew, “Questioning the entrance narrative”, in: Journal of Museum Education 21 no. 3, 1996. pp. 20-25. Ellenbogen, Kirsten, “From dioramas to the dinner table: An ethnographic case study of the role of science museums in family life”. (Unpublished) PhD diss., Vanderbilt University, 2003, Ellenbogen, K.M., Luke, J.J. and Dierking, L.D., “Family learning research in museums: Perspectives on a decade of research”, in: Falk, J.H., Dierking, L.D. & Foutz, S. (Eds.). In Principle, In Practice: Museums as Learning Institutions. pp. 17-30. Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press, 2007. Erikson, Erik, Identity: Youth and crisis. New York: Norton, 1968. Falk, John H., “Visitors: Who does, who doesn’t, and why”, in: Museum News 77, no. 2 1998, pp. 38-43. Falk, John H., Identity and the Museum Visitor Experience. Walnut Creek: CA, 2009. Falk, J.H. & Adelman, L, “Investigating the impact of prior knowledge, experience and interest on aquarium visitor learning”, in: Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 40(2) 2003. pp. 163-176. Falk, J.H. and Dierking, L.D, Learning from museums. Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press 2000. Falk, John H. and Dierking, Lynn, The Museum Experience Revisited. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2013. Falk, John H., Joe Heimlich and Kerry Bronnenkant, “Using identity-related visit motivations as a tool for understanding adult zoo and aquarium visitor’s meaning making”, in: Curator 51 no 1. Falk, John H., Moussouri, Theano and Coulson, Douglas, “The effect of visitors’ agendas on museum learning”, in: Curator 41 no. 2/1998. pp. 106-120. Falk, John H., and Storksdieck, Martin, “Using the Contextual Model of Learning to understand visitor learning from a science center exhibition”, in: Science Education 89 2005, pp. 744-778. Falk, John H., and Storksdieck, Martin, “Science learning in a leisure setting”, in: Journal of Research in Science Teaching 47 no. 2, 2010, pp. 194-212. Holland, Dorothy, Lachicotte, William Jr., Skinner, Debra and Cain, Carole, Identity and Agency in Cultural Worlds. Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1998. Hood, Marilyn, “Staying away: Why people choose not to visit museums”, in: Museum News 61, no. 4. 1983, pp. 50-57. Koke, Judith, “Motivational theory as a tool for experience design; The experience of the Art Gallery of Ontario,” (paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Association of Museums, Philadelphia, PA, May 4, 2009). Koke, Judith, AGO visitor motivation study: Cumulative report. Toronto: Art Gallery of Ontario, 2010.

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Leinhartd, Gaea, and Knutson, Karen, Listening in on museum conversations. Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press, 2004, Linell, Per, “What is dialogism? Aspects and elements of a dialogical approach to language, communication and cognition,” (Lecture first presented at Växjö University, Oct 2000, this version 26 Feb. 2003) www.umass.edu/.../ llc/.../Linell%20Per%20what%20is%20dialogism (accessed 6 Nov. 2011). Linville, Patricia, “Self-complexity and affective extremity: don’t put all your eggs in one cognitive basket”, in: Social Cognition 3, 1985, pp. 94-120. Lundgaard, Ida, and Foldgast, Anne, National User Survey 2012. Copenhagen: Kulture Styrelsen, 2013. McGaugh, James L., Memory & emotion: The making of lasting memories. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003. McManus, Paulette, “Topics in museums and science education”, in: Studies in Science Education 20, 1992, pp. 157-182. Moussouri, Theano, “Family agendas and family learning in hands-on museums”, (unpublished) PhD diss., University of Leicester, 1997. Neisser, Ulrich, “Five kinds of self knowledge”, in: Philosophical Psychology 1, 1988, pp. 35-59. Packer, Jan, “Learning for fun: The unique contribution of educational leisure experiences”, in: Curator, 49 no. 3, 2006, pp. 329-344. Packer, Jan and Roy Ballantyne, “Motivational factors and the visitor experience: A comparison of three sites”, in: Curator 45, 2002, pp. 183-198. Pekarik, Andrew, Doering, Zahava and Karns, Deborah, “Exploring satisfying experiences in museums,” in: Curator 42, 1999, 152-173. Prentice, R., Davies, A., & Beeho, A. “Seeking generic motivations for visiting and not visiting museums and like cultural attractions”, in: Museum Management and Curatorship, 6 1997, pp. 45-70. Rosenfeld, S., Informal education in zoos: Naturalistic studies of family groups. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 1980. Rounds, Jay, “Doing identity work in museums,” in: Curator, 49 no. 2, 2006, pp. 133-150. Schutte, Nicole, Kenrick, Douglas and Sadalla, Edward, “The search for predictable settings: Situational prototypes, constraint, and behavioral variation”, in: Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 51, 1985, pp. 459462. Simon, Bernd, Identity in modern society: A social psychological perspective. Oxford, UK: Blackwell 2004, 2004. Stein, Jill, “Adapting the visitor identity-related motivations scale for living history sites,” (paper presented at the annual meeting of the Visitor Studies Association, Toronto, Canada, July 19, 2007). Storksdieck, Martin, and Stein, Jill, “Using the visitor identity-related motivations scale to improve visitor experiences at the US Botanic Garden,”

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(paper presented at the annual meeting of the Visitor Studies Association, Toronto, Canada, July 19, 2007). Tinworth, Kathleen, Denver—All City—Preliminary implementation of Falk’s Visitor Identity-Related Motivation typology. Denver: Denver-Area Cultural Evaluation Network, 2010. Trainer, Laureen, Steele-Inama, Marla and Christopher, Amber, “Uncovering Visitor Identity: A citywide utilization of the Falk Visitor-Identity Model,” in: Journal of Museum Education 37 no. 1, 2012, pp. 101-114.

Empowering the Visitors Process and Problems Ann Davis, Director, The Nickle Arts Museum, University of Calgary (retired) – Canada

M otivation We in the museum community have spent a considerable amount of effort trying to determine who visits museums, usually so we can try to attract those who do not. The resulting demographic studies have revealed that more women than men attend; more older than younger; more white than blue collar; more white than black. But these traditional predictors have not been very useful. First they are very general: every retired professional woman does not go to museums. Secondly, and more germane to our question of empowerment, these predicators do not explain what people in each demographic category get out of their visit. A few years ago The Nickle Arts Museum tried to find out what visitors want and what they felt they had got. A company that was reputed to be the best in Canada for museum surveys was hired. Unfortunately the person who wrote the survey was unable to compose questions which would adequately capture the complexity of the museum experience. The best she could do was to ask about satisfaction rates, and fell back on demographics. As a result we learnt a certain amount about who came to the museum, but little about why or what they did when they were there. John Falk, concerned with these why and what questions, has spent a great deal of time studying the motivations of museum visitors. After hundreds of in-depth interviews, he has concluded that the reasons for going are very personal, highly varied and strongly linked to an individual’s sense of identity. Furthermore, what is remembered about the visit is directly related to the reasons for going in the first place. The interviews revealed “how deeply personal museum visits are, and how deeply tied to an individual’s sense of identity. Also striking is how consistently an individual’s post-visit narrative relates to

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their entering narrative”.1 After much study, Falk has determined that there are seven main reasons, or motivations for visiting museums, which he outlines in his paper in this volume.2 From this we understand that museum goers use their visit to satisfy what Falk calls “identity-related needs.”3 Furthermore these different motivation categories can be used to predict how visitors make sense of their visit, how they find meaning, recognizing that different motivations will engender different meaning making. Falk concluded that “individuals within a category behaved and learned in ways that were different from individuals in other categories.”4 This segmentation system, unlike the systems based on demographics such as race, age and income, can result in data predictive of the visitor’s museum experience. For example, if you take your children to a museum, you will be more concerned with how the children react to the exhibitions and programs rather than with developing your own knowledge. If you are seeking a restorative or contemplative experience, you will not bring young children with you. Can this classification system help the visitor determine which museum to visit and what to see in that museum, in other words empower the visitor? Potentially. The problem, however, from the visitor’s side is one of self-knowledge and self-analysis. Can and will visitors precisely determine, in advance, what category they will fit into? Unlikely. When asked why someone visited a museum, the answers are often general and vague: “We wanted to go somewhere fun,” “I like museums,” or “I wanted to see the exhibition.” This problem in mind, Falk acknowledged that responses to “Why are you here?” “simply reflects a visitor’s perspective on why she or he ought to be in a place”.5 A further difficulty for visitor self-identification is that visits very often fall into multiple categories rather than just one. If I take my elderly mother to the 1 | John Falk, “Reconceptualizing the Museum Visitor Experience: Who visits, why and to what effect?” ICOFOM Keynote speech, November 2011, posted on the ICOFOM website http://network.icom.museum/icofom/meetings/icofom-annual-meeting-2011.html, accessed 21 April, 2012, p. 5. 2 | It is interesting to note that Falk has recently modified this number. In his 2006 article “An Identity-Centered Approach to Understanding Museum Learning”, in: Curator, Vol. 49, no.2, April 2006, he concluded that there were twenty-five categories, twenty-five ways of segmenting audiences, since many visitors were enacting multiple identities. Of these twenty-five, five he called “main categories and 20 combinations of primary and secondary motivations.” p. 156. 3 | Falk, “Reconceptualizing …”, p. 10. 4 | John Falk, J. Heimlich, & K. Bronnenkant, “Using identity-related visit motivations as a tool for understanding adult zoo and aquarium visitor’s meaning making”, in: Curator, Vol. 51, no.1, 2008, pp. 55-80. 5 | Falk, “Identity-Centered …”, p. 6.

Empowering the Visitors

art gallery, an outing she loves, and, while there, I examine display and lightening techniques, should I consider my identity to be that of a facilitator or a professional/hobbyist? If a veteran goes to an important memorial site with a group, what identity is dominant? This mixing of motives is not rare. The vast majority of the visitors to aquariums and zoos studied by John Falk, 93%, fell into multiple identity categories.6 Recently, revisiting the National Palace Museum in Taipei, I initially joined a tour and was conducted through a portion of their incredible collection. But the museum was very crowded, attracting up to 8,000 visitors a day, and I found it hard to see the objects, so I left the tour and went, on my own, to the special exhibition, where I assiduously read the wall panels to learn about the contents. As well I noted the display cases and the labels. Before I left, I poked into the shop. Then I joined friends for lunch in the museum café. Finally, needing some quiet, I wandered around the gardens, admiring the dramatic dragon fountain. Before I left the hotel for the museum, my purposes included seeing more of the collection, lunch with friends and shopping; as the day developed, these motives shifted and expanded. Clearly my full visit fell into multiple categories and changed over the hours I spent there. The visitor’s problems in self-identification of motives are matched by the problems this poses for the museum staff. On the one hand many museums today are shifting their focus away from their collections toward their visitors. They aspire to be more democratic, more inclusive, less elitist and more pluralistic. Museum staff recognize, increasingly, that there is not one, true narrative but many stories, sometimes in conflict with each other. Museums are realizing that they must dismantle the barriers to widespread participation in their activities. They must become more community centred. At the same time, there is resistance to the abandonment of established museum norms and values, for professional and social identities are threatened, as is Bourdieu’s “cultural capital”.

M arke t forces Market forces are of increasing importance in museum management. These forces include pressures toward accountability, performance indicators, marketing and investment in visitor amenities, such as a shop and café. Over the past few decades many granting bodies, governments and philanthropists have demanded that museums operate more like business, more like the market, and have suggested that market forces should regulate museums. These market forces have not had a wholly deleterious effect on museums, for surely these very forces have helped to move museums to attracting a broader and less elite audience. Chasing money, museums sought to expand and increase their au6 | Ibid.

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dience. Yet museums belong to civil society not to the market: museums are organizations for social good not for individual profit. Markets work because they stick to the clear financial bottom line. Social transformation, by contrast, is messy, with no clear bottom line, no clear marker of success. Markets exist to satisfy the needs of individual consumers who have the ability to pay; civil society exists to meet needs and rights regardless of people’s ability to pay.7 Michael Edwards concluded: civil society is vital for social transformation and [this is] why the world needs more civil society influences on business, not the other way around—more cooperation, not competition, more collective action not individualism, and a greater willingness to work together to change the fundamental structures that keep most people poor so that all of us can live more fulfilling lives. 8

Sadly market forces in many aspects of life seem to be increasing in power and pervasiveness. Michael J. Sandel, a political philosopher at Harvard, recently published What Markets Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets9, in which he argued that market values are playing a greater and greater role in social life, not just in the exchange of material goods alone. Everything is for sale. Sandel, very much in tune with Michael Edwards, riles against this propensity for two reasons: one is about inequality, the other about corruption. In a society where everything is for sale, those with modest means find it harder. Money matters. Then there is the corrosive tendency of markets. Putting a price on good things we value, such as nature or education, can corrupt them. We do not allow citizens to sell their votes, Sandel notes, because “we believe that civic duties are not private property but public responsibilities.” Equally we do not sell children.10 The market degrades some of the good things in life if these are turned into commodities. “So to decide where the market belongs, and where it should be kept at a distance, we have to decide how to value the goods in question—health, education, family life, nature, art, civic duties, and so on. These are moral and political questions, not merely economic ones.”11

7 | See Ann Davis, “The Market and Civil Society”, in: Museums, Museology and Global Communication. ICOFOM Study Series 37, 2008, pp. 47 - 56. http://network.icom. museum/fileadmin/user_upload/minisites/icofom/pdf/ISS37-2008.pdf 8 | Michael Edwards, Just Another Emperor: The Myths and Realities of Philanthrocapitalism. New York: Demos, 2008, pp. 80-81. 9 | What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 2012. 10 | “What isn’t for sale?”, in: the Atlantic, April 2012, p. 66. 11 | Ibid.

Empowering the Visitors

This notion that museums have a social rather than an economic value is highly germane to museums and their operation, but is not one much recognized and understood outside the museum community. Rather museums have become enslaved to quantitative measurement—how many visitors entered the museum today12 and how much did they spend in the shop—rather than qualitative value—what did each visitor get out of the visit and how can meaning making be improved. But there is some pushback. An article by Jie Wang, entitled “Decline of China’s intellectual curators” reprinted in English.news.cn from the Shanghai Daily,13 explains that “The drive for profit touches many areas of art, and professional curating is one of them. Quite a few [free lance or independent as opposed to museum] curators are unqualified, uneducated in art and history and all too willing to write glowing paid review” of their artists’ exhibitions. The criticism here is levelled at the greedy, unqualified person being paid to propagate potentially bad art. Half a world away, museum directors recognize that the prevailing language has changed. The visitor is now often seen as a “consumer.” One British museum administrator complained “We need to raise income this year …your aims and your mission is changing—you’re not there to educate, you’re there to get bums on seats…”14 Max Ross summed up this societal shift, the market pressure and the visitor as consumer. [This] clearly relates to the much wider transformations taking place in contemporary society… As the modern state engages in the process of redefining the public citizen as a consumer, key institutions of civil society including schools, universities and museums, are being forced into new ways of working that facilitate this redefinition.15

The concept of the visitor as consumer does not bode particularly well for the empowerment of that visitor having a non-consumer identity. But this is not the only restriction on empowerment. If the market is challenging the power of the visitor to find individual, non-commercial meaning, so too is the power of the museum staff being redefined and reduced. Analyzing the differences between modernism and post modernism, Zygmunt Bauman suggested that a 12 | This counting is so ubiquitous that The Art Newspaper publishes annual attendance figures for hundreds of museums around the world. According to their calculation, in 2011, 8,880,000 visitors went to the Louvre, while 6,004,254 entered the Metropolitan Museum of Art. See Martin Knelman, “ROM and AGO below million visitors mark”, in: Toronto Star, 12 April, 2012. 13 | Jie Wang, “Decline of China’s intellectual curators”, in: Shanghai Daily 7 April, 2012, reprinted in English.news.cn. 14 | Quoted in Max Ross, “Interpreting the new museology”, in: Museum and Society, July 2004, Vol. 2, no. 2, p. 89. 15 | Ibid. p. 90.

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public intellectual has now changed from being a legislator to being an interpreter.16 According to Bauman, in the eighteenth century, culture in the sense of human knowledge, was made by man rather than a given in the natural order of things. With the Enlightenment, the rational, thinking individual was considered malleable and flexible, an entity whose thoughts and feelings could be recast. Knowledge shaped behaviour, and knowledge was provided by legislators, those who knew. In the nineteenth century when official institutions of culture, including schools and museums, were created, the state takes on the role of educator and becomes a legislator of truth, knowledge and morality. To Bauman “The authority involved the right to command the rules the social world was to obey; and it was legitimized by a better judgement, a superior knowledge guaranteed by the proper method of its production.”17 In the course of the nineteenth century, as the state’s reliance on culture for the reproduction of its power is diminished, the role of the intellectual shifts to that of bureaucratic usefulness rather than legislative power. The market now assumes much greater strength as arbiter of culture. Today culture is seen as irreducible. Belief systems, creativity, and forms of knowledge are considered in relative rather than absolute terms. There is no standard or system for differentiating between cultures and ordering them hierarchically. The concept of the superiority of modern reason and the inferiority of non-western thought has been widely abandoned. In this process the role of intellectuals in the postmodern period has been redefined, shifting from legislator to interpreter. With the increased power of the market rather than the state, Bauman shifted his attention to postmodernity and consumerism, for he contends that, by the latter half of the 20th century, modern society has altered from being a society of producers to one of consumers, in agreement with Edwards and Sandel. Now security had been given up in order to enjoy increased freedom to purchase, to consume and to have fun. Within this consumptive society, uncertainties certainly prevailed and they are diffuse and hard to identify, leading Bauman to call the new postmodern age, the present world, “liquid,” as opposed to the earlier modern age “solid.” Both the liquid consumer world and the shift of intellectuals to interpreter status are important for understanding museums. The postmodern emphasis on consumerism, on the market, has, on the one hand, encouraged museums to expand and diversify their audience, but, on the other hand, has perforce emphasized the bottom line over visitor experience. In this liquid world, museum staff must be constantly aware of the need to raise funds and to account for them, often in excruciating detail. The emphasis on money making and managing diverts research and time away from the visitor and her experience. 16 | Zygmunt Bauman, Intimations of Postmodernity. Oxford: Polity Press, 1988. 17 | Ibid. p. 11.

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N e w interpre tation The shift from legislator to interpreter has had a positive, democratizing effect, evident in the rise of importance of educators vis-à-vis curators, but some problems are visible too. Museums around the world now make some effort, and some museums make a considerable effort, to provide multiple entry points for the visitor, multiple ways to enjoy and learn, through interpretation. New interpretive techniques are exciting. They all, to some extent, take into account that visitor empowerment, the shifting of power from the museum to the visitor, requires increased participation by the visitor.18 These techniques range from hands-on experiences with artifacts, interaction with objects to determine how they work, the careful reading of pieces as texts, and conversations that bring out different perspectives and meanings.19 Some of these techniques involve the use of technology, smart phones, tablets and the like.20 Often emphasized is the importance of stories21, or narrative knowing. For Jerome Seymour Bruner narrative knowing is constructed knowledge that incorporates the unique experiences and perspectives of the person. This is different from paradigmatic knowing that is scientific, logical and objective.22 Narrative knowing includes storytelling, such as stories about the people involved with the objects displayed, as well as visitors’ relations to the objects. This is a technique often used effectively in war or military museums, where veterans are on hand to tell of their experiences and to elicit comparable accounts from visitors. The emphasis has changed from knowledge transmission to knowledge sharing and making.23 One of the most liberating theories of museums as centres of narrative knowing is that of museum as stage. This concept is beautifully adumbrated by Bruno Brulon Soares in his 2011 ICOFOM paper “Experiencing Dialogue:

18 | The classic paper on citizen levels of participation is Sherry R. Arnstein, “A Ladder of Citizen Participation”, in: Journal of the American Institute of Planners, Vol. 35, no. 4, July 1969, pp. 216-224. 19 | Paris, Scott G. “How Can Museums Attract Visitor in the Twenty-first Century”, pp. 25 -266, in: Genoways, Hugh H., Ed., Museum Philosophy for the Twenty-first Century. Lanham: AltaMira Press, 2006. 20 | Ann Davis, “An iPod Experiment”, in: The International Journal of the Inclusive Museum, Vol. 3, no.2, 2010, pp. 59–64. 21 | Elaine Heumann Gurian, “What is the Object of this Exercise? A Meandering Exploration of the Many Meanings of Objects in Museums”, in: Daedulus, Vol. 128, no. 3, 1999, pp. 163 -183. 22 | Actual Minds, Possible Worlds. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986. 23 | Paris, p. 260.

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Behind the Curtains of Museum Performance.”24 Here Soares explores the nature of performance, divided into ritual and theatre, contending that museums, vacillating between ritual and theatre, have never total abandoned either and never should. With ritual, museums perpetuate in societies the belief in their undisputed, sacred power, by performing the museological drama [sic] in which museums would be eternal temples of the truth. With theatre, on the contrary, they start recognizing their playful, subjective mood, revealing that a single truth does not exist.25 Not all analysts agree with Soares’ accommodation of both ritual and theatre. Carol Duncan features ritual, the obedience to the script26, while Helene Illeris prefers the theatrical, the play27. Illeris explained that ideally the play would be reengineered every time to suit the particular visitor and the specific educator: In my conception of gallery education as performance the script and the distribution of roles are ideally decided from time to time according to the ‘play’ you want to perform of the ‘game’ you want to play. Instead of talking about the educator or the participant as fixed roles, the encounter is conceptualized as an exchange between relationally constructed ‘positions’. 28

This flexibility, this confidence in visitor empowerment is not easy to achieve. The visitor and the museum staff must be in sync. If we are modifying our systems of interpretation, if we are introducing Illeris’ play, for example, we have to guard against the museum changing faster than the visitor. Falk reminds us that visitor expectation is key to visitor satisfaction: if the visitor wants and expects a quiet, respectful atmosphere, with few external distractions, but encounters a boisterous, demanding museum, filled with educators interested in play, that visitor will be disappointed, even if the museum staff are doing a great deal to make the visitors more engaged. Not only the nature of change, but also the rate of change have to be examined and visitors prepared for the new atmosphere. 24 | In: The Dialogic Museum and the Visitor Experience. ICOFOM Study Series, (ISS) 40, 2011, pp. 33–42. 25 | Ibid. p. 36. 26 | Carol Duncan, Civilizing Rituals: Inside Public Art Museums. New York: Routledge, 1995. 27 | “Museums and galleries as performative sites for lifelong learning: constructions, deconstructions and reconstructions of audience positions in museum and gallery education”, in: Museum and Society, Vol. 4, no 1, March 2006, p. 23. 28 | Ibid. p. 23.

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Not all museum staff are comfortable with these conceptual shifts toward visitor empowerment, the performative nature of interpretation. Perhaps, as John Maynard Keynes said, the difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones. As Max Ross notes, one important reason for staff resistance to change is their education, the historic subject divisions and classifications that define and defend museum professional and social identities. We have traditionally been bounded by academic subject classifications. These boundaries demarcate the cultural territory of experts, defining what constitutes legitimate specialized knowledge. Do these conventions of classifications and exhibitions help to communicate to the non-specialist visitor? The truth is that often they don’t, but museum staff have been slow to recognize and react to this reality. Not much has changed in terms of museum display. While some temporary exhibitions do use a more multi-disciplinary approach, permanent collections often retain subject-specific identities. A public relations professional in a British museum noted Frankly I don’t think the museum aims to tell any story at all, and the museum is really in itself, an historic document that tells you rather more about the curators who set it up than it does about the region in which it is placed. 29

The compartmentalized organization of artifacts and information does not necessarily help the visitor to enter into the story, the purpose of the exhibition. Museum displays too often tend to be “either chronological or hotch-poches, and they’re more related to the collection and its display than they are related to actually leading you through a process…”30 An intelligent curator in a university art museum talks the talk of visitor empowerment, but, when it comes to facilitating this through exhibition content and design, never fully delivers. Her own education, her work with artists and her academic activities all mitigate against changing how she presents programs. She has two degrees in studio art, teaches in the art department, supervises graduate students and works actively with artists, thus for her the academic divisions and rigour of her discipline are constantly reinforced, superseding those of new museology. Another example of the failure of the multi-disciplinary approach is evident in universities. While universities are preaching inter- and multi-disciplinarity, in practice students are often frustrated. Each department demands adherence to its own vocabulary, theories 29 | Ross, p. 96. See also Kerstin Smeds, “On the Meaning of Exhibitions - Exhibition Epistèmes in a Historical Perspective”, in: Designs for Learning, Vol. 5, no 1-2, December 2012, pp. 50 - 72. (online edition: http://www.designsforlearning.nu/12/no1_2/ DFL_0102_12_smeds.pdf) 30 | Ross, p. 96.

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and formats, even if these conflict with those of the adjoining department and therefore leave the poor student attempting a multidisciplinary study confused and struggling. The result is that the student usually withdraws or switches to a non-interdisciplinary topic. Daniel Kahneman, winner of the Nobel prize in economics and author of the fascinating new book Thinking, Fast and Slow, has an explanation for this attachment to traditional museology, even by those who might be expected to be open to new museology and to visitor empowerment. Kahneman discusses a two-system approach to judgment and choice. The first is intuitive thinking, often automatic and unconscious; the second is deliberate thinking, conscious reasoning that decides what to think about and what to do. Intuitive thinking is easy and fast; deliberate thinking is slow and requires effort. The intense focusing on task that deliberate thinking demands can effectively make people blind, even to stimuli that normally attract attention. We have all had the experience of driving in heavy traffic, having to concentrate hard on the task, and thus missing the prominent signpost. The effect, Kahneman notes, is that “we can be blind to the obvious, and we are also blind to our blindness”.31 It is doubtful that many museum professionals are intentionally obstructionist. But perhaps some museum staff suffer from the blindness of deliberate thinking: required to perform too many demanding tasks outside their expertise or too many challenging tasks without sufficient time for their proper execution, these people cannot see the value in the empowered visitor.

A n e x ample at the art gallery of O ntario The Art Gallery of Ontario is built around a historic house, The Grange. In 2007 The Grange received the dairies of one Henry Whyte, who had served as the butler at this important Toronto house from 1818 to 1857.32 In his 1828 volume Whyte talks of Mary O’Shae, whom he called Amber, a seventeen year old Irish woman who was hired as third maid. He wrote that he witnessed her scraping wax from candle holders and forming these into small balls. Later he observed her placing these balls in various locations throughout the house, stables and garden. Eventually he made a map of her hiding places. When Archaeological Services Ontario was hired by the gallery to probe these hiding places, a veritable Pandora’s box of items was uncovered. As part of the refurbishment and expansion undergoing in 2008 to 2010, the art gallery decided to make these excavations publicly accessible for a limited time. Dr. Chantal 31 | Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow. Toronto: Doubleday Canada, 2011, p. 24. 32 | www.haeussler.ca/amber (accessed 27 April, 2012).

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Lee, the excavation coordinator, worked mainly in the oldest part of the house, the basement, to reconstruct Amber’s biography and motives. Further investigation revealed a sealed chamber, a small room that appeared to be a kind of workshop for Amber, a stack of letters that may have been dipped in molten wax, and a bowl containing a slab of wax with what appears to be the imprint of a face. The workshop chamber was not emptied or cleaned up but left as if one was planning to return. Nothing is known of Amber after Whyte’s diary ended in 1857. Why Amber crated these wax globules, the workroom and other items is a mystery, as is her biography. From 2008 to 2010 visitors to The Grange were toured through this archaeological site, shown the workshop chamber, Dr. Lee’s tools and office, and even given her calling card in case they wanted to email her with questions. With the tour guides, they speculated about Amber’s history, whether, for example, she might have buried a stillborn baby on the property. Visitors in turn told the guides their own stories of immigration, customs and beliefs about death and witchcraft. At the end of the tour, visitors were given a short statement signed by Iris Häussler, which acknowledged that she, Häussler, a Toronto artist, had constructed the details. The project was a work of art, not a real archaeological site. Häussler explained My work was created to be experienced as historic fact, as a method for a direct and personal involvement of the visitor. It creates an experience that is not filtered by the categories of contemporary art that we would normally apply to such a tour, it provides a participatory sense of discovery. This principle has been called “haptic conceptual art”, a practice that deals with deep questions of the human condition, but initiates them through direct experience, rather than through theoretical discourse. 33

The artist goes on to note that “There is a very large difference between thinking about emotions and actually experiencing them.”34 Furthermore she comments that there is “no exact substitute for actual presence, involvement, participation. Reality has an edge that imagination lacks. However, finally revealing the fictitious nature of Amber’s story—after a time of reflection—is absolutely as much a part of my artwork as constructing the story is in the first place.”35 Presence, participation, reflection, are all, of course, central for the engaged visitor. Here then we have narrative knowing, Illeris’ play and direct experience rather than theoretical or academically defined presentation.

33 | Ibid. 34 | Ibid. 35 | Ibid.

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Clockwise from top left: “Visitors touring He Named Her Amber, photo by Iakub Henschen” ; Dr. Chantal Lee, researcher for the Anthropological Services Ontario, photo by Iakub Henschen; Iris Häussler installing He Named Her Amber. Art Gallery of Ontario, 2008-10: Photo by Iakub Henschen; Studio view Iris Häussler, Toronto, in preparation of He Named Her Amber, photo by Iris Häussler, courtesy of the artist. The curator of the exhibition, David Moss, was equally focused on the visitors’ experience: Through overcoming one’s skepticism and participating in the possibilities of the work— engaging the prospect that Amber is a kind of proto-feminist artist operating within the constraints of a historical era—one embarks on a creative path, moving from the realm of the possible into the domain of the real. Creating this new reality is akin to the artist’s own process. The potency of the installation is that it allows for visitors to partake in the creative process. 36

36 | Ibid.

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Moss goes on to quote Hans-Georg Gadamer in Truth and Method, 1960, “The work of art has its true being in the fact that it becomes an experience changing the person experiencing it”.37 Gadamer considers a work of art not to be a fixed object but rather a product that emerges from the process of the visitor engaging in a dialogue with the object. For him this means that to experience art one must be involved. “The key question” in this exhibition for Moss “is not whether her excavation is true or false, rooted in verifiable historical fact or based on fabricated narratives, but is rather to assess the intensity of a resonant art experience”.38 The Art Gallery of Ontario reported that most of the visitors to the exhibition He called her Amber did have that intense experience. Many suggested their feelings changed. In fact some enjoyed the production, the play so much that they returned more than once. Not all visitors, however, felt that way. A few were so incensed that they had been duped, that they had been led to believe Amber’s story was real, that they cancelled their membership. The tour guides, the actors, were also very involved and clearly appreciated not only Häussler’s haptic purpose in creating the piece, but also her skill in using historical facts to provoke an experience, not something always desired or achieved in contemporary art.39 The theory of visitor empowerment is strong. Based on the intense visitor and staff reactions to Häussler’s provocative exhibition He called her Amber, one can conclude that visitor empowerment is a very powerful and potent force, one that should be fostered whenever possible. The visitor who is personally engaged, who participates actively, who adds to the narrative by contributing her own stories, who enters into the play, who considers new material, becomes, as Gadamer suggests, a creator. This satisfied visitor will come back. But visitor empowerment has to battle a variety of social and educational forces. The centrality of the market system has promoted a search for ways to democratize audiences, but has also had the effect of directing attention away from visitor empowerment. Visitors themselves have not necessarily fully embraced the idea of empowerment, for it often requires both considerable self-knowledge and definite efforts. New interpretive methods favour engaged visitors rather than passive ones. Museum staff have also resisted. The forces that push against change, including tradition, education, and ways of thinking, are considerable.

37 | Quoted on the website without pagination. 38 | Ibid. 39 | Ibid.

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W orks cited Arnstein, Sherry R., “A Ladder of Citizen Participation”, in: Journal of the American Institute of Planners, Vol. 35, no. 4, July 1969, pp. 216 -224. Bauman, Zygmunt, Legislators and Interpreters: on Modernity, Postmodernity and the Intellectuals. Oxford: Polity Press, 1987. Bauman, Zygmunt, Intimations of Postmodernity. Oxford: Polity Press, 1988. Bruner, Jerome Seymour, Actual Minds, Possible Worlds. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986. Davis, Ann, “The Market and Civil Society”, in: Museums, Museology and Global Communication. ICOFOM Study Series 37, 2008, pp. 47 - 56. http://network. icom.museum/fileadmin/user_upload/minisites/icofom/pdf/ISS37-2008. pdf Davis, Ann. “An iPod Experiment”, in: The International Journal of the Inclusive Museum, Vol. 3, no.2, 2010, pp. 59–64. Duncan, Carol, Civilizing Rituals: Inside Public Art Museums. New York: Routledge, 1995. Edwards, Michael, Just Another Emperor: The Myths and Realities of Philanthrocapitalism. New York: Demos, 2008. Falk, John, “Reconceptualizing the Museum Visitor Experience: Who visits, why and to what effect?” ICOFOM Keynote speech, November 2011, posted on the ICOFOM website http://network.icom.museum/icofom/meetings/ icofom-annual-meeting-2011.html, (accessed 21 April, 2012). Falk, John, “An Identity-Centered Approach to Understanding Museum Learning”, in: Curator, Vol. 49, no.2, April 2006, pp. 151 -166. Falk, J. H., Heimlich, J., & Bronnenkant, K. “Using identity-related visit motivations as a tool for understanding adult zoo and aquarium visitor’s meaning making”, in: Curator, 51(1), 2008, pp. 55-80. Gadamer, Hans-Georg, Truth and Method. New York: Crossroad, 1985,(first edition 1960). Heumann Gurian, Elaine, “What is the Object of this Exercise? A Meandering Exploration of the Many Meanings of Objects in Museums”, in: Daedulus, 128, no. 3, 1999, pp. 163 -183. Illeris, Helene, “Museums and galleries as performative sites for lifelong learning: constructions, deconstructions and reconstructions of audience positions in museum and gallery education”, in: Museum and Society, Vol. 4, no 1, March 2006, p. 15–26. Kahneman, Daniel, Thinking, Fast and Slow. Toronto: Doubleday Canada, 2011. Knelman, Martin, “ROM and AGO below million visitors mark”, in: Toronto Star, 12 April, 2012.

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Paris, Scott G. “How Can Museums Attract Visitor in the Twenty-first Century”, pp. 25 -266, in: Genoways, Hugh H., Ed., Museum Philosophy for the Twenty-first Century. Lanham: AltaMira Press, 2006. Ross, Max, “Interpreting the new museology”, in: Museum and society, July 2004, Vol. 2, no. 2, pp. 84 -103. Sandel, Michael J., “What isn’t for sale?”, in: the Atlantic, April 2012, pp. 62–66; Sandel, Michael J., What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 2012. Soares, Bruno Brulon. “Experiencing Dialogue: Behind the Curtains of Museum Performance”, in: The Dialogic Museum and the Visitor Experience. ICOFOM Study Series (ISS) 40, 2011, pp. 33-42. http://network.icom.museum/ fileadmin/user_upload/minisites/icofom/pdf/ISS%2040_ch_web2.pdf Smeds, Kerstin, “On the Meaning of Exhibitions - Exhibition Epistèmes in a Historical Perspective”, in: Designs for Learning, Vol. 5, no 1-2, December 2012, pp. 50 - 72. Online ed.: http://www.designsforlearning.nu/12/no1_2/ DFL_0102_12_smeds.pdf Wang, Jie, “Decline of China’s intellectual curators”, in: Shanghai Daily 7 April, 2012, reprinted in English.news.cn. www.haeussler.ca/amber accessed 27 April, 2012.

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Here Comes Everybody! The Visitor Business in Museums in Light of Existential Philosophy Kerstin Smeds, Department of Culture and Media Sciences, Umeå University – Sweden

Is mankind on decline? Is the world we have created completed, our work finished, and are we left with a main priority to stop it all from vanishing, from falling into pieces—left with a task only to protect and preserve it? Humanity behaves as if there was no future, nothing more to come. This rather provocative situation has created a modern kind of perversion—the musealization of the world and the absurd idea of eternal preservation. All over the world we have to cope with a growing heritage industry, with millions and billions of objects, sites, buildings, landscapes and regions, waiting for their turn to be preserved. Then we solemnly announce that the huge collections and storages of objects should be accessible to everybody. But at the same time, paradoxically enough, all that stuff should be firmly sealed and protected from—everybody. This is my starting point. I will take a look at what abilities and opportunities museums actually have to live up to modern demands on individual learning as well as collaboration and co-creation with visitors, and bring up some serious obstacles for real participation and interaction (with objects) in the museum settings. There are some unsolved paradigmatic problems in the interaction between the institutionalized identity of the museum and the creative, processual and unpredictable identity of the visitor, due to entirely diverging needs and views. I will scrutinize all this from a phenomenological point of view. Museum discourses are subject to deep change in response to shifts in Western society over the last 25 years. Corporate ideas and principles from the business world and stock exchange have infiltrated museums and the entire cultural sphere. Many museums have adopted the principles of market economy by modifying the concept of shareholder’s value into visitor’s value for museum activities and communication. Another corporate analogy would be

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the shift from product-centered to consumer-centered marketing. Today, museums are allowed to be collection based only as far as their collections serve people. An outcome of the global economic and social development is a radical individualization of society.1 Radical individualization is closely linked to the rejection of classical universal humanistic values of Enlightenment. If there are no objective ethical, educational or identity linked truths, it’s up to the individual to establish her own standards. Instead of searching a universal prototype, the individual looks inwards and tries to build up his or her unique self, says Ulrich Beck: In the individualized society the individual must … learn to understand himself as the centre of events, as an ‘administration office’ for his own existence, talents, orientations etc. If one will survive, one must …develop a self-centred world view, which turns the relationship between the individual and society on its head, in a way which is usable for the individual’s purpose. 2

According to this, the Danish social analysts Lars Geer Hammershøj and Lars-Henrik Schmidt have formulated a theory of self-formation and self-performance.3 Self-formation is an aesthetic practice of the self, concerned with the unfolding of the personality.4 Whereas in the classical concept of Bildung (erudition), the individual (ideally) assimilates universal values and becomes part of the larger; in the case of self-formation the individual experiences the larger and then returns to his or her own particularity. Self-performance is, consequently, the way an individual seeks on a social stage to perform the personal qualities she has gained.

1 | See Kerstin Smeds, “The Escape of the Object?—crossing borders between collective and individual, national and universal”, in: Museology and Techniques, Ed. by Hildegard K. Vieregg. ICOFOM Study Series—ISS 36. Vienna/Austria, August 20-22, 2007, web edition: http://network.icom.museum/icofom/publications/our-publications/ 2 | Ulrich Beck, Risikogesellschaft. Auf dem Weg in eine andere Moderne. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1986; See also Ulrich Beck, ”Living our Own Life in a Runaway World. Individualisation, Globalisation and Politics”, in: Global Capitalism, Edited by Will Hutton and Anthony Giddens. New York: New Press, 2000. 3 | L.G. Hammershøj, Selvdannelse og socialitet–forsøg på en socialanalytisk samtidsdiagnose. Danmarks Pedagogiska Universitet, København 2003. 4 | Hammershøj, pp. 443-444.

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Individualized museum visit. Photo by the author

Many museums have adapted to the principles of market economy by modifying the concept of “shareholder’s value” into “visitor’s value” as a guiding principle for museum activities and communication.5 Another corporate analogy would be the shift from product-centred to consumer-centred marketing (see Davis, this volume). Today, museums are (allowed to be) collection based only as far as they serve all the individuals entering the museum. Accordingly, Zahava Doering, in the Curator in 1999, addressed the visitor as “client”. She divided in three categories the ways museums view their visitors: stranger, guest, and client.6 For our purposes, the third category, client, is crucial. The self-formative visitor has taken command and is no longer subordinate to the museum and its will. Doering acknowledges that visitors use museums for their own vast variety of purposes, no matter what “message” the museum tries to transmit. In Beck’s words, rather than hoping to be “educated” they seek 5 | For more material on this discussion, see the two previous ICOFOM SERIES of conference presentations, ISS 40: The Dialogic Museum and the Visitor Experience; and ISS 41 part 1-2: Empowering the visitor: Process, Progress, Protest. Both to be found at http://network.icom.museum/icofom/publications/our-publications/ 6 | Zahava D. Doering, “Strangers, Guests or Clients? Visitor Experiences in Museums”, in: Curator 42/2 April 1999. pp. 74–87.

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opportunities for self-performance. Together with Kelly and Godbey, Doering points out the museum’s role in leisure activities that serves people’s need for personal self-definitions and agendas for development. … [Here] individuals take action that has consequences for who they are and who they are becoming. There is a developmental dimension to leisure that runs through the entire life course.7

Individuals come to museums with their own entrance narratives which steers their needs, desires and behavior. The self-formative visitor will take command and will no longer be subordinate to the museum and its will. Visitors use museums for their own vast variety of purposes, no matter what message the museum tries to transmit. In Beck’s words, rather than hoping to be educated they seek opportunities for self-performance. An entrance narrative, in Doering’s model, has three main components: 1. A basic framework, that is, the fundamental way that individuals construct and contemplate the world; 2. Information about a subject matter or topic, organized according to that basic framework; 3. Personal experiences, emotions, and memories that verify and support this understanding. Doering draws the conclusion that the museums visitors find most satisfying are those that resonate with their entrance narrative and confirm and enrich their existing view of the world. Visitors are not very apt to be learning entirely new things. The museum visitor would—if allowed—rather engage in active, creative, intellectual, and emotional processes that include remembering, imagining or revering objects, and using objects to tell stories to others. D. Carr, already in 1992, called meaning making an act of personal transformation: To see the museum as an open work is to recognize that it is always discovered by its users in an unfinished state, not unlike seeing it as a laboratory, or a workshop for cognitive change. It is a setting where the museum offers tools, materials and processes for systematic exploratory approaches to experience and purposive thought that leads one further towards insight—and toward the occasional, exquisite transforming surprise. The great museum allows its users to ask—and to answer—the question, what transformation is possible for me here?8 (italics original) 7 | Kelly, J.R.& Godbey, G., The Sociology of Leisure. State College, PA, 1992, cited in Doering, pp. 78-79. 8 | Cit. in Doering, p. 81.

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These were radical thoughts 20 years ago—even more accurately described than the definitions that John Falk or Nina Simon present in their recent works.9 Recent visitor studies indicate that people go to museums not to learn, but rather to engage in identity-work.10 John Falk leans heavily on what he calls identity-related motivations and free-choice learning (see also this volume).11 Interestingly, Falk’s definition of identity is very similar to the phenomenological concepts of identity and the person described below, although he never refers to these: … our identity can be defined as something that has always “situated” in the immediate realities of the physical and socio-cultural world. Our identity is a reflection and reaction to both the social and physical world we consciously perceive in the moment, but identity is also influenced by the vast unconscious set of family, cultural, and personal history influences each of us carries within us. Each is continually constructing and maintaining, not one, but numerous identities which are expressed collectively or individually …12

Nina Simon stresses that instead of being about something or for someone, participatory museums would be created and managed together with the visitor. A participatory institution should collect and share diverse, personalized and changing content co-produced with visitors (my italics). She speaks of museum visitors as contributors, and of collaborating and of co-creating together with visitors.13 Simon states that: The institution must promise an appealing participant experience. The institution must provide access to tools for participation that are easy to understand and use. And the bargain between institution and participants—regarding management of intellectual property, outcomes of the project, and feedback to participants—should accommodate participants’ needs.14

But, and this is important for my argument in this essay, what she actually does not talk about is how for instance co-creating would happen in the realm of collections, of real objects. She gives lots of examples, not connected to objects, but merely to other media through which the user/visitor should participate 9 | John H. Falk, Identity and the Museum Visitor Experience. California: Left Coast Press, 2009; Nina Simon, The Participatory Museum. Santa Cruz, California: MUSEUM, 2010. 10 | Falk, p. 59. 11 | Ibid. 12 | Ibid. p. 78. 13 | Simon, Preface p. iii. 14 | Ibid.

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or to contribute. However, Simon concludes that if visitors were left alone in the museum, free to contribute and use the technological or other resources offered, only a tiny per cent would do this. Therefore, visitors should be invited to participate, according to their personal needs and priorities.15 The inviting principle is also John Falk’s point, introducing his visitor-identities-model with the aim of attracting visitors. This kind of architecture of participation raises new challenges in the age of technology. According to studies on participatory online audiences, only a fraction of the users would be defined as creators—those who produce, upload, and write content.16 Danish researcher Jakob Nielsen has studied participation inequality on the web, introducing the 90-9-1 principle, which states: “in most online communities, 90% of users are lurkers who never contribute, 9% of users contribute a little, and 1% of users account for almost all the action.17 Hence, one may rightly ask how well digital technology fulfils the needs and curiosity of individual visitors in museums? We have been busy studying visitors’ behavior and how museums receive visitors. We have been busy mapping out and pointing at good examples of dialogic museums all around the world, where some real change has occurred. But a brief check reveals to me that the positive examples are most often picked from institutions such as Science Centers, Technoramas, Museums of Natural History, and not from museums of cultural history, archaeology or ethnography with their large collections of artifacts. Studies of visitor participation are often conducted at entirely new museums, those with no collections at all and which in their exhibitions lean heavily on ICT and other new communication media. Many museums have indeed put into practice hands-on theories of participation and learning. But this doesn’t mean that visitors may interact with artifacts per se, may touch them. They are almost inevitably asked to co-operate with the object via some other media. In a very interesting article in 2010, Kirsten Wehner and Martha Sear discuss visitors’ encounters with objects in a very hermeneutic and phenomenological way, though they never mention this philosophy as their source of inspiration.18 In the planning process of an exhibition in the National Museum of Australia, they were: “searching for insight into how objects connect people, across time and space, to their own historical 15 | Ibid. 16 | Ibid., p. 9. 17 | Jakob Nielsen, ‘Participation inequality: Encouraging More Users to Contribute’, at http://www.participatorymuseum.org/ref1-7/, cited p. 9, in: Nina Simon, The Participatory Museum. Published by MUSEUM, Santa Cruz, California 2010. 18 | Kirsten Wehner and Martha Sear, “Engaging the Material World. Object knowledge and Australian Journeys”, in: Museum Materialities. Objects, Engagements, Interpretations. Ed. by Sandra H Dudley. London: Routledge, 2010. pp. 143-161.

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selves.” They speak about objects as constituting knowledge of being, about the material conditions of existence, about visitors wanting to know how other people’s bodies had interacted with these objects, and about understanding others’ experience through interaction with objects—all ideas that could be picked from Hans-Georg Gadamer or Martin Heidegger.19 But—and this is my point—in spite of all this phenomenological insight, the outcome was not at all conducive to interaction and involvement. The objects were, as usual, firmly concealed in bullet-proof glass cases, with all kinds of information piled up outside or in computers. In my opinion all thoughts about learning-by-doing and real interaction are here thrown out the window. Nina Simon herself, discussing the sociability of objects, engagement, sharing and participating, repeatedly turns to new technological media to prove her point. To create authenticity and participatory affordances, museums use more and more methods that are entirely detached from the authentic object itself. Museums have an overblown belief in the effect of technology in exhibitions—considering the 90-9-1–principle referred to a few paragraphs above. It is obvious that measures taken for visitors’ participation are not enough. Furthermore, there are obvious obstacles within the museum resisting change (see also Davis, this volume).

H ow institutions think First, take a look at this text: The second step if museums are going to become a dynamic force must be the realization that the functions are not static either in their relationship to one another or in their importance. Both aspects change even as do the times. Thus, if the term “museum” is going to mean something in the future, museums of today must be willing to alter and to modify their internal structure and their ideas to fit the changing world conditions and the advances in social thought. Museums have failed to do this and have shown a most extraordinary reluctance to accept new social theories and new social ideas. 20

I have picked this quotation not because of its originality, but because it encapsulates the criticism directed towards museums, at least in Europe, at any time over the last hundred years. The quotation is from 1942. Today, when everybody is not only invited but also rushing by the millions to museums, we have 19 | Ibid. 20 | Theodore Low in 1942, in: Reinventing the Museum. Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on the Paradigm Shift. ed. Gail Anderson. Altamira Press: California 2004. p. 36.

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reason to dig even deeper into the problem of epistemological and practical change within museum institutions than what the museological discussion hitherto has done. Something is clearly very wrong, considering that we for one hundred years have been telling museums to change, and they won’t do that. Why don’t they? I’m not saying that the kind of museums in question hasn’t changed at all. Change is happening all the time. Still, this lamentation goes on and on. I suggest we ask a couple of questions: 1) are there perhaps serious paradigmatic reasons restraining deeper change? And 2) how does an institution think? We tend to forget that not only the visitor, but also the institution has an identity of its own. Staff has also its education, with firm roots in classical academic traditions. I suggest that at least two serious obstacles to change lie within the institution itself: their traditional systems of collecting and preserving, and the so called museum professionalism.

We are all very acquainted with the conventional kind of museum. Photo by the author. Museums have only to a limited extent adapted to the paradigmatic shifts that have occurred in the scholarly field from positivism to hermeneutics and structuralism, from ontological values to phenomenological values. The departments of exhibitions and pedagogy have often tried to make that shift, but the departments of collections have often not—sometimes due to practical rea-

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sons. It is, for instance, not easy to start asking the collections new questions or reorganize them, because they are stuck in their old classification systems. Hence, in many classical museums there are two combating paradigms, or epistèmes,21 governing the internal professional work with collections and exhibitions and slowing down the rate of change. On the one hand a more “scientific” approach of collection care (the logical-empiricist paradigm), built upon the distinction between subject and object, mind and body. This is based on the idea of gaining knowledge by way of observation. On the other hand, a more hermeneutic and phenomenological approach, often carried out by the more publically oriented departments (exhibitions and pedagogy), which states that rather than a mind and a body, man is a mind with a body.22 In other worlds, our mind is embodied, and our body is both subject and object at the same time. This entity (body-mind) leads its life inextricably entangled with other objects, with the entire material world, which shapes a person’s “life-world”. Therefore, exhibitions should also be produced with other senses than the sight in mind. Museums are not very good at creating bridges between their own scientific and classificatory raison d’être and peoples’ (visitors’) “life-worlds”—other than by means of arranging exhibitions that require sight, recognition, and intellect. Or by means of technological devices offering “resources” of information (e.g. in exhibitions). All other senses, so important to our cognitive and experiential orientation: feelings, affect and memory, are overridden. In a profession, Clay Shirky notes, and this goes also for museums, members are only partly guided by service to the public. They have more important, introspective things to do with institutional importance (in this case documentation and preservation). A professional outlook can sometimes become a disadvantage preventing the very people who have the most at stake—the professionals themselves—from understanding major changes to the structure of their profession.23 They have often difficulties in accepting any changes. As argued above, the positivistic/empiricist and preservationist paradigm often rules the identity of collection management in a museum. This continues to be the basis not only of how objects are displayed (e.g. bullet-proof glass cases), but also how they are generally treated and handled. One of the obstacles is the axiomatic idea of eternal preservation of the objects. Nobody asks why on earth we think that future generations would be interested in all the scrap of our time. Nobody asks, why we want to reserve those objects for them, when 21 | In an article in the journal Designs for Learning from 2012 I am discussing these paradigms, there naming them epistèmes, in more depth. See: http://www. designsforlearning.nu/12/no1_2/DFL_0102_12_smeds.pdf 22 | Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The world of Perception. London & New York: Routledge, 2004, p. 56. 23 | Shirky, p. 58-59.

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it is us who actually need them in our therapeutic interaction with the past. A colleague of mine once said: “until now, our pivotal motive has been the feeling that our heritage is threatened and has to be protected, but from what!? Well, from humans. But to declare the heir incapable of protecting the heritage is not a sustainable base for antiquarian thinking.”24 To make people actively participate in the heritage and museum business requires a widening of the scope of values, norms and traditions for preservation and use. Museums should be world makers in the same way historians already are. This would ask them to entirely change not only their views, but also their practice and paradigms of collection management and research. They would, in Hilde Hein’s words, be forced to accept an ethos of dislocated meaning, of uncertainty, process and change.25 Next, I will briefly present an alternative way of thinking.

E xistential philosophy and me aning - making Most current museum learning theories26 —diverse as they are—have a few perspectives in common as we have seen above; firstly the individualistic approach to learning, and secondly a statement that human action, experience, and learning is situated; such actions occur in specific social, cultural, historical and institutional contexts. Identity is situated and social; it has been formed in specific geographical, social and cultural contexts. In the following I will try to show how most museum learning theories have lots in common with existential philosophy and phenomenology. All have, as a matter of fact, also developed along with an increased interest in a hermeneutic and phenomenological view within the human and social sciences. The problem lies not in the learning theories as such but, as I argued above, in the stiff paradigms of the professional museum. The positivist-empiricist theory of “this is the way the world is”, the conviction that truth is possible, has by now been overturned by the more communicatively oriented philosophers, historians and sociologists who observed that not only subjective but also objective facts have been constituted under quite fallible circumstances. There is no objective truth, only a vast set of interpre24 | Agenda Kulturarv, Riksantikvarieämbetet: Stockholm 2002. 25 | Hein, p. 15. 26 | Consider the different models: “Context oriented model” (Falk & Dierking); the “Experiential learning model” (Jacobsen); the “User generated education”-model (Geerstein); the “Viewer-oriented model” (Taylor); the “Learning by doing”-model (Streeck et.al; Steinkühler et.al.); the “Knowledge through action”-model (Molander; Schön).

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tations. Jürgen Habermas argued that the idea of a dialogic community and communicative reason as well as communicative acting must eventually replace the old empiricist idea of subject-object relationships, where the subject, me, can discern the truth about the object. Habermas and other advocates of communicative action theories argue that understanding requires more than only observing, seeing or listening: it requires dialogue and action; it requires bodily movement and tactility.27 Knowledge is not an object, the philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer argued; it is not something you have, or get or gain from some source outside yourself, but something you participate in.28 You use all your senses in this participation, body as well as intellect. For instance, to look at a work of art would not be an active observing subject—passive receiving object relationship. What counts is the experience which emerges at the very point where artwork and observer meet. There, at this very point, learning/ meaning-making occurs. First, we experience something with our bodily senses and feelings and this happens before we even have time to think about it. Only then the meaning-making in which experiences make sense follows. By the time meaning-making occurs, our body has already taken in everything and has made a decision for us. Hence, meaning is always grounded in our bodily interactions.29 In hermeneutics, understanding and involvement are the two core concepts embedded in the act of meaning-making. In his work Sein und Zeit [Being and Time] Martin Heidegger defines hermeneutics as our existential ability to understand and interpret, and thus discern the possibilities in life.30 Translated into a museum setting, the individual visitor would look around and ask herself, “What possibilities for self-transformation do I have here?”31 According to Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, and Gadamer, understanding is not something we have or get, simply to use when we need it. Understanding is, instead, a constitutive essential of our being-in-the-world.32 Understanding and involvement 27 | Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. Cambridge: Cambridge Polity Press, pp. 301, 311. 28 | Per-Johan Ödman, Tolkning, förståelse, vetande. Hermeneutik i teori och praktik. Stockholm: Norstedts akademiska förlag, 2007 [1 st ed. 1979], p. 27. 29 | Mark Johnson, The Meaning of the Body. Aesthetics of Human Understanding. Chicago & London, University of Chicago Press. Here I also refer to PhD Märit Simonsson whose thesis has the title Displaying Spaces: spatial design, experience, and authenticity in museums. Papers in museology 10. Umeå University 2014. [available as online publication, abstract found here: urn:nbn:se:umu:diva-95485] 30 | Palmer p. 130; Ödman, p. 25. 31 | Doering 1992, p. 81 [quotes Carr]. 32 | Ibid.

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are firmly grounded in individuality and identity. Understanding that does not come down to the core of the individual [which involves the body], is not real understanding.33 Gadamer’s philosophy is called existential hermeneutics.34 Language, text, objects as well as the encounter with them, must be viewed from an existential point of view. Hence, for our purposes, a museum visit should be viewed from an existential point of view and not only as an intellectual undertaking. According to Gadamer, the individual is anchored in time and place with the aid of memory, expectation and attention, which all we humans have in common, and with the aid of which we communicate. Without expectation and attention, I could not speak to you and you could not hear what I say. Gadamer also emphasizes the role of what he calls tradition in all actions and events. A person, who interprets something, is always constrained by her cultural context, traditions, customs and institutions. All these together makes up what Heidegger names the life-world of a person. Life-world is a person’s horizon of interpretation. Life-world is where an individual’s ‘being-in-the-world’ is constituted, where identity is formed, where she belongs, says Heidegger. The importance of Life-world and its identity-forming qualities cannot be underestimated since it is already present before we, as a new born child, are consciously aware of it. In the mind of a person, this life-world horizon constitutes the prejudice (Vorstruktur: precondition, literally translated prestructure), which more simply expressed would come close to the idea of a world view; a world and a view which are already there when an interpretation takes place. The prejudice of a person is thus firmly anchored in time, history and tradition. This, I think, could easily be equaled to parallel the individual narratives discussed in the beginning of this paper. Without this precondition or prejudice of the mind, no meaning can be created35 or, to use a didactic term, no learning can take place. The act of meaning-making, then, takes place at the very point where the horizon of the interpreter and the product, a text, image, or object meet. A fusion [merger] of horizons takes place, real communication happens and new knowledge will be created.36 For our purposes, these ideas correspond neatly

33 | H.C. Wind, Historie og forståelse. Filosofisk hermeneutik. Aarhus Universitetsforlag 1987. p 19-20. 34 | Ibid. pp. 28, 29. 35 | Jan Lindhardt, ”Historieforskningens hermeneutik”, in: Historisk kundskab og fremstilling. Ed. by Christian Kvium. Studier i historisk metode XX. Aarhus 1989. p. 66-68. 36 | Hans-Georg Gadamer, Warheit und Methode. Grundzüge einer philosophischen Hermeneutik. 3. Auflage, J.C.B. Mohr, Tübingen 1972.

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with John Falk’s definitions of experiential learning based on identity-motivations as well as Doering’s entrance narratives.

O n things , space and body I need to explore a few more phenomenological concepts essential for the analysis of our relationship with objects and the idea of engagement, participation and collaboration in museums. The phenomenological concept of being-in-theworld includes important ideas about human interaction and encounter with the material world. Starting with Merleau-Ponty and Edmund Husserl, philosophers have argued about our bodily, affect-based and sentient relationship to our material environment. This fact cannot be left out when speaking about learning processes. According to Merleau-Ponty, a human being can only embrace the truth and the idea of things because his body is mixed up with those things.37 Since our self is contained in a body, we can also recognize this as an object; myself and my body are one and the same thing. Hence I am an object among other objects in the world. A kind of recognition and empathy arises between us. Mass meets other mass, body meets body. I would put it this way: you can embrace a tree or a rock and say hello, and there is a mutual empathy and understanding that you both are made of the same stuff. You can drink from a vessel and feel that you have this bodily function in common: being a vessel, a container. Objects function as one of the primary mediums for creation, expression, confirmation, fixing and finishing ideas, human actions and social relations. We make selections, create representations and fix the meaning of things according to our social and intellectual needs, and vice versa. The material world, space, location and time will influence you in this creative process of identity forming. Objects thus represent us, who we are, what we know and want to know about reality. To quote Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi: The things with which people interact are not simply tools for survival, or for making survival easier and more comfortable. Things embody goals, make skills manifest, and shape the identities of their users. Man is not only homo sapiens or homo ludens, he is also homo faber, the maker and user of objects, his self to a large extent a reflection of things with which he interacts. Thus objects also make and use their makers and users. 38

37 | Merleau-Ponty, 2004, p. 56. 38 | Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, The meaning of things: domestic symbols and the self, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981, p. 1.

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Things create us as much as we create them, says Christopher Tilley. Material culture manifests the “constructedness” of human meaning.39 It is a cyclic process of perception and action, a social practice which is also a spatial practice where many people are involved. In everyday life we interact with things, act through things, and together with them we situate ourselves in time and space. Things act also in a dialectic relationship to us. They involve us into their secret world. So, instead of treating and interpreting objects as mirrors or representations of culture, museums should survey and reveal the multifaceted relations and structures between us and our objects. For Heidegger, the purpose of an object is (or was) its life as “equipment” (Zeug)40 for intentional action. As a prefix to all artefacts one would add a ‘withwhich’ to do something or ‘in-order-to do’. These equipments, as Heidegger says, make our daily life easier as we use them in intentional, communicative and social action. In other words, the purpose of an artifact is its life as ready-athand.41 It kind of lies there with a friendly attitude and waits to be used.

Ready-at-hand equipment in a boat for seal-hunting displayed in a museum. Photo by the author.

39 | Tilley, 1989. 40 | In German Zeug, to distinguish from Werkzeug which means tool. Zeug, translated in English to “equipment” is much more and diverse than a tool. 41 | Christopher Macann, Four Phenomenological Philosophers. Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty. Routledge 1993. p. 72-73.

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Exploring museums with Heidegger, one would say that the whole idea of establishing archives and museums, of collecting things with the intention to preserve them, would be the idea that we would be allowed to interact with them, they would be useful for us, personally in way or other, as we encounter them. In the case of museums then, the collections should have some kind of utility value—or at least indicate a quality of utility—not only for the scientist but also for the visitor. The life-world of each object would be revealed. Every object should incorporate a Heideggerian life-possibility! Because, according to Heidegger, we are only interested in those things that in one way or other are linked to our personal options to go on with our lives—and, one could add—go on with a good life. To this end, we create and need and use objects. Moreover, intentionality is guiding all our actions, all our social relations, all our interaction with objects.42 Intentionality means that all our actions have a goal, aims at something, be it consciously or not. We are guided by purpose, meaning and hope. Our life together with objects is not only intentional, it is a creative, a constantly shifting and moving life process, in which objects might entirely shift purpose and use too. What, then, does a museum do to objects from a phenomenological point of view? To reflect Heidegger, an object, picked out of its natural habitat is no longer seen as utility or equipment for us, with the purpose to go on with our lives. In a museum the meaning of a thing will be—usually for ever—fixed, and that is for scientific or educational purposes. In this respect, in the museum the artifact loses its soul, which cannot be revealed or regained by any scientific, taxonomic methods, or by just describing what it is or where it comes from. Why not? Because the soul of an artifact resides in our heads and hands as silent knowledge of what the object is all about and how it would be used in our daily lives. The process of musealization changes the purpose of an object into material for representations, signs and symbols of something else. To brutally cut off the life cycle of an object by musealizing it, is to kill it, says the German sociologist Theodor Adorno: … the word museal describes objects to which the observer no longer has a vital relationship and which are in the process of dying. They owe their preservation more to historical respect than to the needs of the present.43

In phenomenological terms, what is lost is the “ready-at-hand” relation between us and the objects. As visitors, we are left only with the vision of the object, we can look at it, read about it, perhaps remember or associate around it, but that 42 | Macann, p. 81. 43 | Adorno cit. in Douglas Crimp, On the Museum’s Ruins. 1993.

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is all. The paradigmatic gap between the world of the visitor and the world of the museum perhaps becomes too big. In hermeneutical terms: a fusion of the horizons, identities and life-worlds of the museum and the visitor can hardly take place. Real understanding and engagement does not happen, and the visitor will remember very little of what she has seen (which is a fact often documented). The complexity of the museological problem, says Donald Preziosi, lies in that we are dealing with both a kind of thing, such as a museum or an exhibition, and a way of using things, an artefact operating on other artefacts to fabricate stories which are then made legible as causal agents of artefacts themselves. Artefacts are given significance in the structure of narrative systems and political, scientific and intellectual discourses. They are redefined, moving from real to media. Their value undergoes a kind of degradation from innate to instrumental.44 No wonder then, I’d say, that many people feel dislocated and detached in a museum and find it impossible to relate to what they see. On the other hand, the object is certainly not entirely unemployed in its new context. On the contrary, one may justifiably argue that it has gained entirely new tasks in its new museum life. Both curators and visitors will add all kinds of meanings and interpretations to the objects according to their own purpose and experience. But this is beside my point in this paper.

A nother kind of museum : the small B oat M useum of H olmön , S weden I will complete and concretize my points by presenting a museum which really lives up to all the phenomenological standards I have discussed. With this I am not saying that all museums in the world should act in the same way and release all their objects, but this little museum could be a source of inspiration and lead the way when necessary steps are taken towards the truly democratic and experiential museum. The museum situates on the island Holmön in north Sweden. It is privately owned by a small foundation, showing and preserving the islanders’ everyday things, work and culture. The museum was primarily built to hold a collection of boats, but very soon it was enlarged to house all sides of island and coastal life, and consist of eight attached wooden buildings. Since the museum has no governmental or community funding and is thus not dependent on any preservation rules or regulations, the people involved in the keeping are free to do whatever they want. Their concept of preservation lies in love and voluntary care. 44 | Donald Preziosi, “Myths of Nationality”, NaMu workshop paper, Leicester June 2007 (manuscript).

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This museum is a living process which has neither beginning nor end, as life itself. In this respect the concept is close to the goals of a processual ecomuseum or, in Robert Janes’ words, economuseum.45 The collections, all of which are on display, are growing year by year, and form today a rich and fascinating aggregation of objects, neatly arranged and juxtaposed in a very creative way. All this richness almost overwhelms the visitor and affects her immediately. You are free to use all your bodily senses: touch, smell, sight, even taste if you want, and really feel the atmosphere down to your bones. You can almost hear the silent murmur of past generations. You can pick up an object and study it carefully, get to know it, feel it, see how it is made, and the object involves you in its long-lived life. Summer courses, where old techniques are taught, are arranged by the museum, among them boat building. What is the secret of this museum? First, there are almost no glass cases. Taxonomy is abandoned in the exhibition, even if each object is indeed registered and has an acquisition number. Nothing is arranged according to conventional museum practices. All objects are placed in their natural context, where they should be, together with their object mates, related to the same kind of human activity. No object is allowed to feel lonely. Together with companion objects, they can remember their past, and communicate it to the visitor in a very direct way. In phenomenological terms, the utility value of the objects is the rule, and their function as equipment for human action is still present. They involve the visitor in their doings. The modern term “user aggregation,” normally attached to ITC, is here carried out in a most concrete way: people bring in objects, add to the collections, and occasionally pick them out again if they feel a need to borrow them for other purposes. Storytelling evenings are arranged, where people, old and young, can recount whatever memory brings to mind. In short, this little museum is a piece of living heritage where memories of the bodies, hands and minds of past generations are transmitted to coming generations.

45 | Jane’s concept is close to the ecomuseum in that it is more important what a museum does, than what it is, and in the case of economuseum, focus is also on sustainability and community work for a sustainable future and climate responsibility. Robert. R. Janes, Museums in a Troubled World. Renewal, Irrelevance or Collapse?. Routledge: London and New York 2009. p. 135.

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The “yearly seasons’ house” shows important activities during the different seasons of the year: spring fishing for perch, pike and herring; summer fishing for salmon and autumn fishing for whitefish and grayling; farming and keeping livestock; everyday work, tools and customs. Photo by the author.

A new boat taking shape in the midst of the museum. The boat builder’s house is a combined exhibition hall and workshop. The old tools are privately owned and just deposited here, and are still in use. The boat building process is described and the workshop is used for boat building courses where the old boats from the island are used as models. Hence tradition, skills and practical knowledge are preserved, when the old vessels eventually and inevitably will fall into pieces. Photo by the author.

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One building shows the winter seal hunt, carried out on the ice of the Gulf of Bothnia. The hunting teams lived in open boats (image) which were pulled over the ice and cracks and sailed in open waters, and the hunting could go on for several months. In this seal hunting boat, still used in the 1950’s, every item needed for the hunting trip is there, including pelts and fleeces under the canvas sail used as a tent thrown over the boom. You may hop into the boat and try it for comfort, if you wish. Sometimes when there is a party, kids are put in bed under the covers in the boat. This is truly living heritage. Photo by the author.

C oda Museums possess millions and billions of objects. What if museums, such as the British Museum with more than eight million objects, many of them duplicates, would have the courage to bring at least part of them back into the world of transience? To pick out some and start doing things with them together with the visitors; involve the visitors in the secret world of objects, occasionally even pull them apart to show visitors how they are used and fabricated? Museums will, anyway, in the future be forced to loosen their grip on knowledge and truth and let other knowledge in. This means of course some loss of authority, but results in a true democratization of the museum. Loss of authority is, by museum professionals, often seen as tantamount to disneyfication and is perhaps what they dread the most. Would this, then, ruin the whole foundation of their existence? No. To change an entire—in some cases, 200 years old—structure and paradigm of taxonomy, documentation and truth, is not easy. To let the visitors in, to let them use the collections and contribute to the contents and knowledge of

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them, how they are used, to take the individualistic, self-formative and self-performative visitor seriously, requires perhaps more than museums can bear. For the classical museums, stuck in their old empirical paradigms, to undergo any deeper change, they have seriously to start scrutinizing and analyzing their own profession, their motives, missions and policies in relation to their collections and their use, and in relation to modern society. In short, they have to question the very origins of their identity.

W orks cited Agenda Kulturarv, Stockholm: Riksantikvarieämbetet, 2002. Anderson, Gail, ed., Reinventing the Museum: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on the Paradigm Shift. Walnut Creek, California: AltaMira Press, 2004. Baudrillard, Jean, “The System of Collecting”, in: John Elsner & Roger Cardinal, The Cultures of Collecting. London: Reaktion, 1994. Beck, Ulrich, Risikogesellschaft. Auf dem Weg in eine andere Moderne. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1986. Beck, Ulrich, “Living our Own Life in a Runaway World. Individualisation, Globalisation and Politics”, in: Global Capitalism, Edited by Will Hutton and Anthony Giddens. New York: New Press, 2000. Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly and Rochberg-Halton, Eugene, The meaning of things: domestic symbols and the self. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981. Crimp, Douglas, On the Museum’s Ruins. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press 1993. The Dialogic Museum and the Visitor Experience, ICOFOM Study Series ISS 40. 2011 http://network.icom.museum/icofom/publications/our-publications/ Doering, Zahava D.,”Strangers, Guests or Clients? Visitor Experiences in Museums”. in: Curator 42/2 April 1999. Douglas, Mary, How Institutions Think. London & New York: Routledge, 1986. Empowering the visitor: Process, Progress, Protest. ICOFOM Study Series ISS 41. November 2012. http://network.icom.museum/icofom/publications/ our-publications/ Falk, John H., Identity and the Museum Visitor Experience. California: Left Coast Press, 2009. Fienberg, Joyce & Leinhardt, Gaea, “Looking through the glass: Reflections of identity in conversations at a history museum”, in: Leinhardt, G., Crowley, K., Knutson, K. (ed.), Learning Conversations in Museums. Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2002. Gadamer, Hans-Georg, Warheit und Methode. Grundzüge einer philosophischen Hermeneutik. 3. Auflage. Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1972.

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Gardner, Philip, Hermeneutics, History and Memory: Interpretation and Fact in Academic Research. London & New York: Routledge, 2006. Geerstein, Jackie, http://usergeneratededucation.wordpress.com/2011/06/13/ the-flipped-classroom-model-a-full-picture/ [accessed 2013-03-13] Habermas, Jürgen, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987. Hammershøj, L.G., Selvdannelse og socialitet–forsøg på en socialanalytisk samtidsdiagnose. Danmarks Pedagogiska Universitet, København 2003. Hein, Geroges, “The Constructivist Museum”, in: Journal for Education in Museums, No. 16, 1995. Hein, Hilde S., Museums in Transition–A Philosophical Perspective. Washington: Smithsonian Press, 2005. Jacobsen, J.W., Experiential Learning Museums. Marblehead, MA: (Forum ’06), 2006. Janes, Robert R., Museums in a Troubled World. Renewal, Irrelevance or Collapse?. Routledge: London and New York 2009. Kelly, J.R. & Godbey, G., The Sociology of Leisure. State College, PA, 1992. Lindhardt, Jan, ‘Historieforskningens hermeneutik’, in: Historisk kundskab og fremstilling. Ed. by Christian Kvium. Studier i historisk metoder XX. Aarhus, 1989. Macann, Christopher, Four Phenomenological Philosophers. Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty. London & New York: Routledge, 1993. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, The World of Perception. London & New York: Routledge, 2004. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, Phenomenology of Perception. London & New York: Routledge Classics, 2002. Molander, Bengt, Kunskap i Handling. Göteborg: Daidalos, 1996. Nielsen, Jakob, “Participation inequality: Encouraging More Users to Contribute”, see http://www.participatorymuseum.org/ref1-7/ Ödman, Per-Johan, Tolkning, förståelse, vetande. Hermeneutik i teori och praktik. Stockholm: Norstedts akademiska förlag, 2007 [1st ed. 1979] Palmer, R.E., Hermeneutics. Interpretation Theory in Schleiermacher, Dilthey, Heidegger and Gadamer. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1969. [1972] Preziosi, Donald, “Myths of Nationality”, NaMu workshop paper, Leicester University, June 2007. (manuscript in possession of the author). Ricœur, Paul, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences. Essays on Language, Action and Interpretation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Shirky, Clay, Here Comes Everybody. The Power of Organizing without Organizations. New York: Penguin Press, 2008.

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Schön, Donald, The Reflective Practitioner. How Professionals Think in Action. New York: Basic Books, 1983. Simon, Nina, The Participatory Museum. Santa Cruz, California: MUSEUM 2.0, 2010. Smeds, Kerstin, “The Escape of the Object?–crossing territorial borders between collective and individual, national and universal”, in: Museology and Techniques, Edited by Hildegard K. Vieregg, Munich/Germany. ICOFOM Study Series–ISS 36. Vienna/Austria, August 20-22, 2007. web edition: http://network.icom.museum/icofom/publications/our-publications/ Smeds, Kerstin, “On the Meaning of Exhibitions–Exhibition Epistèmes in a Historical Perspective”, in: Designs for Learning, Volume 5 / Number 1–22012, http://www.designsforlearning.nu/12/no1_2/DFL_0102_12_smeds. pdf Steinkuehler, Constance, Squire, Kurt, and Barab, Sasha (eds.), Games, Learning and Society: learning in a digital age. Cambridge University Press, 2012. Simonsson, Märit, Displaying Spaces: Spatial Design, Experience, and Authenticity in Museums. Papers in museology 10. Umeå University 2014. [Exists also as online publication, abstract found here: urn:nbn:se:umu:diva-95485] Streeck, Jürgen, Goodwin, Charles, Le Baron, Curtis D., Embodied interaction: language and body in the material world. Cambridge University Press, 2011. Taylor, Bradley L.,”Reconsidering Digital Surrogates. Toward a viewer-orientated model of the gallery experience”, in: Museum materialities. Objects, engagements, interpretations. Ed. By Sandra H Dudley. London: Routledge 2010, pp. 175-184. Tilley, Christopher, “Interpreting Material Culture”, in: The Meanings of Things. Material Culture and Symbolic Expression. Ed. by Ian Hodder. London: Unwin Hyman, 1989. Wehner, Kirsten & Sear, Martha,”Engaging the Material World. Object knowledge and Australian Journeys”, in: Museum Materialities. Objects, Engagements, Interpretations. Ed. by Sandra H Dudley. London: Routledge 2010, pp. 143-161. Wind, H.C., Historie og forståelse. Filosofisk hermeneutik. Aarhus: Aarhus Universitetsforlag, 1987.

Experiencing Dialogue Behind the Curtains of Museum Performance Bruno Brulon Soares, UNIRIO (Federal University of the State of Rio de Janeiro) – Brazil I’m glad you appreciate my work at last, Dorian,’ said the painter, coldly, when he had recovered from his surprise. ‘I never thought you would’. ‘Appreciate it? I am in love with it, Basil. It is part of myself. I feel that.’ ‘Well, as soon as you are dry, you shall be varnished, and framed, and sent home. Then you can do what you like with yourself.1

O pening the curtains for a reflexive museology Over the past decades in the social sciences, there has been a major move towards the study of processes, mediations and performances. More and more, some renowned social scientists have been studying ‘man’ as a self-performing animal. A theory of performance applied to museums, however, has surprisingly never been developed by the museology thinkers. In fact, the performance angle has been, until now, underexplored, considering its potential to reveal how museums operate and produce cultural meanings. It is safe to point out that in our daily lives the main mediator of the dialogues we establish is performance. Through its action we are who we are to ourselves and to others—and identities are created and exercised in this process. Every action that supposes the existence of an audience, or of the elusive ‘Other’, involves a performance. As Erving Goffman put it, ordinary life in a social structure is

1 | Oscar Wilde, The picture of Dorian Gray.London: Penguin popular classics, 1994 [1890].

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itself a performance2. The museum, as a fluid part of the modern social reality, is a consecrated realm where performance and theatricality can be freely manifested. As an intrinsic part of “social dramas,”3 cultural performance is always connected to ‘real’ events, but performances are not simple expressions of culture or even of changing culture. According to Victor Turner, they may be active agencies of change themselves, “representing the eye by which culture sees itself.”4 Considering some cultural forms as not so much reflective as reflexive, Turner points out that here the analogy is not with a mirror but rather with a reflexive verb. In that sense, culture, like verbs, has, in most languages, at least two “moods”, indicative and subjunctive, and these are most hopelessly intermingled. As Turner explained it, when society bends back on itself, it meanders, inverts, perhaps lies to itself, and puts everything so to speak into the subjunctive mood as well as the reflexive voice. 5

By doing that, society works in a state of supposition, desire and possibility, rather than stating actual facts. This arrangement of things dissolves what were once factual components of reality and institutes a more playful spirit. In that case, the very idea of what is true or false in a culture corresponds to the particular frames within which these assertions are made—this means that “one culture’s truth may be another culture’s fantasy.”6 A ‘reflex’ presupposes ‘realism’. But of course, even in the context of a museum, or in art and literature, realism is only a matter of artifice and what is real is a result of cultural definition. For Turner, the genres of cultural performance are not simple mirrors, but rather “magical mirrors of social reality,” because they are capable of exaggerating, inverting, re-formatting, magnifying, minimizing and even falsifying, the known chronicled events.7 For that reason, 2 | Erving Goffman, A representação do eu na vida cotidiana, [The presentation of self in everyday life]. Petrópolis: Vozes, 2009. 3 | Social dramas are, in Turner’s performance theory, social processes in which societies can understand themselves by having its structure exposed through a series of conflictive events or crisis. For the author, drama is rooted in social reality, which is why it is useful to explain it. Turner, Victor, The Anthropology of Performance. New York: PAJ Publications, 1988. 4 | Turner, “Images and reflections: ritual, drama, carnival, film, and spectacle in cultural performance”; in: Turner, 1988, p. 24. 5 | Ibid., p. 25. 6 | Victor Turner, “Social drama in Brazilian umbanda. The dialects of meaning”; in: Turner, 1988, p. 41. 7 | Ibid. p. 42.

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the museum performance is not one without ethical consequences. It involves not just the truth, but what people think of the truth. By performing culture through drama to a society, museums also enact the very drama of the ‘museum’, its meaning, its authority, its power. Performative reflexivity is a condition in which a sociocultural group, or its most perceptive members acting representatively, turn, bend or reflect back upon themselves, upon the relations, actions, symbols, meanings, codes, roles, statuses, social structures, ethical and legal rules, and other sociocultural components which make up their public ‘selves.’8 The reflexivity, then, is not mere reflex, a quick, automatic or habitual response to some stimulus, but it is highly artificial, cultural, theatrical or even museal. Things in a museum exhibition are things that we have to think about. They are performed: I don’t think about a spoon when I’m eating at home or at a restaurant, but once the spoon is in the showcase of a museum I’m led to think about it because I am, then, confronted with the performed spoon and I’m obliged to dialogue with it. The reason why museums are powerful is by being subjunctive versions of reality and of ourselves (as audiences). Mind you we are not looking for definitions here (and indeed, all definitions are themselves performative9), but if we had to choose a verb to describe how museums work, we could easily say that museums are performed.

M useum and the ater At different times, museums have been compared to other dramatic social institutions, like temples, churches or even royal palaces. What all these institutions have in common, though, is the practice of performance. Initially perceived by anthropologists in ritual, performance was defined as often being ordered by a dramatic structure, a plot, which gives sense and brings to life the interdependent communicative codes of a social group. For Richard Schechner ritual is only one side of performance, theater being the other.10 According to him, ritual and theater define different domains of performance, and most performance genres happen somewhere in between the two of them. Throughout history, museums have flown from one domain to the other, becoming more and more theatrical while never abandoning their previous 8 | Victor Turner, “Images and reflections: ritual, drama, carnival, film, and spectacle in cultural performance” in: Turner 1988. p. 24. 9 | Henry Bial, “Introduction”, 1-4; in Henry Bial, (ed.), The performance studies reader. London and New York: Routledge, 2008, p. 1. 10 | Richard Schechner, Between theater and anthropology. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985.

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ritualistic position. With ritual, museums perpetuate in societies the belief in their undisputed, sacred power, by performing the museological drama in which museums would be eternal temples of the truth. With theater, on the contrary, they start recognizing their playful, subjunctive mood, revealing that a single truth does not stand. Progressively, in the social sciences, the drama analogy is being used for social life—and for understanding social institutions—in a less depreciatory “mere show” mode, and more in a constructional, genuinely dramaturgical one, “in which ‘making’ is not the same as ‘faking’”11 as in its general use. In museums, the theatrical analogy has for long been used to explain the relation to the audience. Museum and theater are analogous in the encounter they promote. In both instances the audience expects to see the real, the authentic, yet not in its ‘ordinary’ form. What is presented is a new setting of the things from reality, in which real things re-act the real. There is an ontological difference between reality and what museums re-present. Although constituted of the real, the museum performance differentiates itself from reality. Museums offer something else for their audiences, something that goes beyond the ordinary world of things that exist outside of the museological frame. In other words, there is more in the museum performance than there is in ordinary life. Spectators, in general, are very aware of the moment when a performance takes off. A ‘presence’ is manifested. Something has ‘happened’. The performers have touched or moved the audience, and some kind of collaboration, collective special theatrical life, is born. This intensity of performance has been called “flow” by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi,12 and it may be defined here as a dialogical force that takes both the performers and the audience to another level of existence. The museum, in the encounter of the objects and the spectators, transport them to an environment that is not real life, but, yet, that is still the real. Martin Schärer calls attention to the artificiality of the exhibition situation,13 in which—it is possible to say—things and persons are out of context, and a ‘new’, reframed reality must be composed so that they can establish a fresh relationship in the museum scenario. This artificiality comes from the fact that, as Marc Maure put it, in the real world, objects do not exist in isola-

11 | Clifford Geertz, “Blurred genres.The refiguration of social thought,” in: Bial, Henry (ed.), The performance studies reader.London and New York: Routledge, 2008, p. 66. 12 | Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Beyond Boredom and Anxiety. San Francisco:JosseyBass,1975 35-36; Schechner, Richard, Between theater and anthropology. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,1985, p. 10. 13 | Martin R. Schärer, “Museology and History”, in: ICOFOM Study Series (ISS) 35, 2006, p. 36.

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tion: “an isolated object is a hypothetical construction.”14 In other words we can say that after an object is removed from a previous context and it enters the museum scenario most of its past is left to the imagination. Hence, musealization is much more a subjective process than an objective one. For Schärer, an essential reason for this lies in the fact that, thanks to their physical durability, things often outlive the meaning systems of their first life15 —which is usually related to a performative value that has been assigned to them in the past, justifying their durability in the present. What museums musealize, in the end, is not the thing in itself, but all the relationships it can perform, and the values produced in these performances. And there is no deception in this process, since the audience knows where the line has been drawn between reality and theater. The spectators’ emotions, from the moment the performance starts, are real in the new experience that is established. The core of the museum, as well as that of theater, is presentation. This central action—that can be translated as theatricality in one case and museality in the other—is a way to look at the things in their original context as if they were strange to it, or, in a slightly different situation, a way to make things that are exotic and dislocated look completely ordinary. Theatrical performances stage repetitions as if they were brand new. A theatrical audience sees the material of real life presented (or re-presented) in a new meaningful form. But, of course, according to Turner, it is not just a matter of simplifying and ordering emotional and cognitive experiences that are chaotic in ‘real life.’ It is more a matter of raising problems about the ordering principles deemed acceptable in “real life.”16 Theater is, in the end, simply a creation from the re-creation of the world—and in that sense it doesn’t differ much from the work of musealization.

B e t ween “ to be ” and “ not to be ”: inde terminacy in performance In a performance the ‘self’ is split up the middle. According to Turner it becomes something that one both is and that one sees and, furthermore, acts upon as though it were another.17 Between the multiple selves, the dialogue, then, occurs inside the performer and each of the spectators. It is offered to 14 | Marc Maure, “The exhibition as theatre. On the staging of museum objects”, in: Nordisk Museologi, 2, 1995, p. 159. 15 | Schärer, p. 36. 16 | Turner, Victor, “Images and reflections: ritual, drama, carnival, film, and spectacle in cultural performance” in: Turner, Victor, The Anthropology of Performance. New York: PAJ Publications, 1988. 17 | Ibid. p. 25.

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them the chance to act upon their own selves. To make it possible, a performance involves a separation, a transition (or liminality), and an incorporation18 (or restoration), and each of these phases is carefully marked. In initiations people are transformed permanently, whereas in most performances the transformations are temporary (transportations). Like initiations, performances “make” one person into another. But as Schechner points out, unlike initiations, usually in performances the performer gets his own self back. The performance itself is liminal, analogous to the rites of transition.19 The liminality is, indeed, an important aspect of theater, because it instates the gap between social life and the performance genre. A “limen,” as it has been defined in Arnold van Gennep’s theory, is a “threshold”, and the author uses the term to denote the central of the three phases of the “rites of passage.” In these processes, rituals separate specified members of a group from everyday life, placing them in a limbo that was not any place they were in before, and then returning them, changed in some way, to mundane life.20 Rites of passage, as rites of separation, imply a detachment from the social structure. When separated from its structure an individual can look at its own society, admire its own values and maybe even rethink them. As an incomplete rite, theater has its focus on the liminal stage of ritual. It fosters a transportation that may or may not imply a transformation of the actors involved. Being ritual the mediation between form and indeterminacy, and liminality the stage of ritual that embraces the indeterminate and that evinces the ambiguities of society, performance can be understood as a moment of reflection because it exposes the chaos in the social structure. Museum and theater are instances where the boundaries of reality and fantasy are usually imprecise. The liminal state that is created in theater and in museums is implicit in the space between an actor and his mask. According to Schechner, the distance between the character and the performer allows a commentary to be inserted.21 That is precisely why for the actor to succeed he or she must never loose contact with the true self. The mask is not a lie, it is simply a liminal state in which something or someone can be herself and yet not herself. For Goffman, the masks that we wear in our everyday lives may represent the conception we have formed of ourselves, the role we are striving to live up to—the mask is our truer self, the self we would like to be.22 And so, most of the times, liminality contains more information about reality then reality itself. 18 | Van Gennep, Arnold, The rites of passage, [1960] London: Routledge, 2004. 19 | Schechner, p. 20. 20 | Turner 1988, p. 25. 21 | Schechner, p. 9. 22 | Robert Ezra Park, Race and culture, Glencoe: Free Press, 1950, 249 and Erving Goffman, “Performances. Belief in the part one is playing”, in: Bial, p. 62.

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Performance is a plea for the permanent creation of a new attitude towards the ‘old,’ familiar aspects of the world. When an individual plays a part, “he implicitly requests his observers to take seriously the impression that is fostered before them,” and in the relation that is, then, established the observers are asked to believe “that the character they see actually possesses the attributes he appears to possess.”23 The belief in what is performed is in fact a belief in the belief of the performer in its own performance, and it is, indeed, a precondition for the audience to be transported with the performer. In that moment when the performer is “betwixt and between,”24 in Turner’s words, it isn’t that he or she stops being himself or herself when becoming another, the fact is that “multiple selves coexist in an unresolved dialectical tension.”25 Responding to that tension, Fabian introduces the thesis that “if ‘to be or not to be’ is the question, then ‘to be and not to be’”—the most succinct conception of performance in his view—“might be the answer.”26

R egener ative action or how museums perform As something that is located in a liminal position between worlds of meanings, theater owes its specific genesis to what Schechner has described as “restoring the past.” In fact, for this author, the main characteristic of performance is restored behavior. Behavior is, indeed, separate from those who are behaving; it can be stored, transmitted, manipulated, transformed.27 For that matter, all behavior can be repeated, which justifies the common belief in the fact that past behaviors can be restored—and that museums can restore the past. Performance, then, means “never for the first time;” in Schechner’s view performance is “twice-behaved behavior.” And as the author defines it: Restored behavior can be put on the way a mask or costume is. Its shape can be seen from the outside, and changed. […] Existing as “second nature”, restored behavior is always subjected to revision. This “secondness” combines negativity and subjunctivity. 28

Schechner classifies restored behavior as either a projection of “my particular self” or a restoration of a historically verifiable past, or—most often—a resto23 | Goffman, p. 61. 24 | Turner, The Anthropology of Performance, 1988. 25 | Schechner, p. 6. 26 | Fabian, Johannes, “Theater and anthropology, theatricality and culture”, in: Bial, p. 212. 27 | Schechner, p. 35. 28 | Ibid. p. 37.

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ration of a past that never was.29 In this last case, in which the past is invented in the present as if it was ‘real’ or ‘right’, the performance is valuable for its effects on the present. The ‘fabricated’ tradition is heritage that is acquired in the present, and in the present it can be effectively used. This common occurrence, of a performance that creates the past when ‘repeating’ it, can be thought as a ‘true invention,’ a familiar notion for museums. In order for a performance to ‘work’, the restored behavior must be able to convince the audience about its legitimacy. As a result, meaning will trigger memory, in cognition of the past, and it will be concerned with negotiation about the “fit” between past and present.30 Meanings in museums work as bonds that connect people to other people, and people to their flux of present identities. By working on the restoration of the past, museums produce this ‘true inventions’ that make the past “fit” the present, and vice-versa. They accommodate the rests,31 by creating new bridges between past and present. The museum action is, indeed, a regenerative one. Regenerative action can be seen in many known examples of museums that were born in the subsequent moment and in the exact place where something goes missing. If we go back to the 1970s, in France, when the first ecomuseum was being conceived, in the urban community of the Creusot Montceau-lesMines, where a cultural institution was being created by the very social group that would benefit from it, we will see how the past is restored in the present, within a complex net of meaningful negotiations. What happened there, between the 1960s and the 1970s, was the ruin of an industrial empire which led to the rearrangement of its remains in order to form a new kind of museum later, where the old industrial symbols of the region became nostalgic monuments of ‘ancient times’.32 The Creusot, then, in the 1970s, after being a temple for the industry, becomes a theater for the memory of a village that wanted to revolutionize its history thanks to the museum.33 The ecomuseum of the Creusot34 was defined by some of the authors who studied it after the experience was over, as a particular case in which the remains of a very forgettable past fought to be remembered through the re-acting 29 | Ibid. p. 38. 30 | Victor Turner, From ritual to theatre. The human seriousness of play, New York: PAJ Publications, 1982, p. 75. 31 | Octave Debary, La fin du Creusot ou L’art d’accommoder les restes, Paris: CTHS, 2002. 32 | François Mairesse, Le musée temple spetaculaire, Paris: Universitaire de Lion, 2002, p. 108. 33 | Debary, p. 9. 34 | Écomusée de la Communauté urbaine Le Creusot-Montceau-Les-Mines–musée de l’Homme et de l’Industrie.

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of previous history and social relations. Meanwhile, by trying to restore the past from its scars, the Creusot became something else, and the objects that would be preserved as valuable heritage of that group were never seen with the same eyes that saw them in their ordinary lives. After the industry was gone, and the museum performance took place, they became rare products of an activity that couldn’t produce them any longer.35 They constituted, in that moment, pieces of collections; they were testimonies of the social relations within which they existed. The museum, here, is responsible for the regeneration of a reality that perhaps never was, and yet it was brought to life. With the label of an eco-museum, this museum takes the role of restituting to people what they have lost. This restitution takes form in the regeneration of the emotional bonds with the past, or with what people imagine of it. The performance, then, fills the gaps left by the time dilapidation, restoring the emotional tissue. Dialogue is what keeps museums alive, and all museums are dialogic; whether they foster dialogues with different peoples, different times or places, they will always be responsible for promoting meaningful dialogues within the very individuals who are part of their audience. Museums do not deal with the past, but with what is possible to do with it. In that sense, history is not what happened but what is encoded and transmitted. Performance is not merely a selection of data arranged and interpreted; it is behavior itself “and carries in itself kernels of originality, making it the subject for further interpretation, the source of further study.”36 And, so, remembering is not merely the restoration of some past intact, but setting it in living relationship to the present.37 Museums perform the past, and also our relationships—as actors in the present— with it.

Towards a rel ative museology : the audience as e xperience As it was stated by Oscar Wilde, “it is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.”38 Performance–as the art of giving oneself to an audience—is, indeed, distinct from what we call life, or reality. Museums are not showcases of ‘life’, but platforms for performances. Likewise, museums are not conceived as mirrors of its spectators; their work is presenting a reflexive version of their audiences. Performance is always performance for someone: it is the audience 35 | Bonnot, Thierry, La vie des objets. D’utensiles banals à objets de collection. Paris: Éditions de la Maison des sciences de l’homme, 2002, p. 6. 36 | Schechner, p. 51. 37 | Turner 1982, p. 86. 38 | Wilde, p. 6.

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that recognizes and validates it as performance. Museums are dialogic because they are conceived as means of communicating between cultures, individuals, imaginaries and experiences. As a performative phenomenon, a museum is made of what it performs. And for that reason, ‘visitors’ can only be conceived as unpredictable experiences, or expectations. As the fertile movement of New Museology has shown in the past decades, museums not only perform for their audiences, but they perform the audiences. Hence, the paradigm of performance for museums states that ‘visitors’ should actively engage as cultural participants, and not passive consumers. The audience is an agent in the so-called ‘new’ participatory museums—and that is, perhaps, the main reason for their success. These institutions where identities are exposed and explored are very familiar with differences. Rather than delivering the same content to everyone, a participatory institution collects and shares diverse, personalized and changing content co-produced with the audiences.39 What is collected and valued here are not objects or subjects, but the experiences that arise from their interactions. The work of the museum, in the best case scenario, is to give something and to get something back. For all that, the issue of the role of theatricality and performance in gaining knowledge of other cultures and of our own is a problem that will force us to question the very concept of culture as defining identities, because identities are themselves also liminal. According to Fabian, taking theatricality seriously may lead us to doubt the equation of social existence with cultural identity.40 Culture is, then, a result of meaningful dialogues which produce the idea of identities, i.e. of belonging to a certain performance. Dialogue is an encounter of experiences, but also an encounter of expectations, which is the main ingredient of performance. The ‘Other’ is actually an intrinsic part of the performance. In fact, it is usually this sometimes elusive ‘Other’ in the audience—which is an imagined audience that exists inside of the self—that dictates the performance. For Fabian, the greatest challenge for intercultural tolerance is not to accept, on some philosophical or political principle, the values and beliefs of the other culture. Instead, the real confrontation with the otherness in its everyday theatrical forms of self-presentation requires courage, imagination and practice.41 Performances are not tolerated or accepted, they are experienced and they are lived. To become a platform for the expression of different ‘selves’ and different performances, a museum has to make itself vulnerable in the first place, so that 39 | Simon, Nina, The Participatory Museum, Santa Cruz. California: Museum 2.0, 2010, p. iii. 40 | Fabian, Johannes, “Theater and anthropology, theatricality and culture”, in: Bial, p. 212. 41 | Ibid., p. 214.

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its users can express their own identities relative to the institution. The essence of this dialogical process is the notion of a relativization for museums, throughout which they will rehearse new ways of existing socially, no longer as centers of impositions but as indeterminate phenomena. With the relativization of the Museum and its object, we instantly promote the relativization of the audience. Museums cannot predict what the audience will see inside their walls, as much as the spectator can’t predict how a certain museum will interpret a particular topic or an object. And that doesn’t result in a problematic relationship, because the element of surprise is often important for performances and performers. Furthermore, in museums where the audience is also the performer (community museums or ecomuseums), i.e. in which the creators put themselves in the position of ‘visitors’, the two roles are played in different moments of the performance or by different people inside the community. This means that it is an illusion to believe in the fable according to which the ecomuseum is the reality. Every museum is a representation, and the metaphor of the mirror has already been broken. As Desvallées puts it, the “dead object” represented in the museum is not the same as the object “alive” somewhere else,42 because, as we have seen it, museums add something else to reality, and this additional part of the musealized things is performance. Museums have been defined as temples, in the era of their unquestionable power, and as forums when they were characterized as modern institutions and means of communication. In their contemporary conception, under the challenge of representing different Others in their most honest interpretations, museums have been learning how to show processual identities and fluid societies—and we, as audiences and also as researchers, are realizing that a reflexive and relative museology is possible. Finally, the phenomenon Museum has already shown that there is no dialogue if there is no difference! For that reason, in the perspective of a social analysis, museums cannot be conceived as temples or forums, palaces or cemeteries, because it is much more useful to think of them as stages.

W orks cited Bial, Henry (ed.), The performance studies reader. London and New York: Routledge, 2008. Bonnot, Thierry, La vie des objets. D’utensiles banals à objets de collection. Paris: Éditions de la Maison des sciences de l’homme, 2002.

42 | Desvallées, André, “Introduction”, in: Desvallees, André (dir.), Publics et Musées, L’écomusée: rêve ou réalité p. 17-18. Lyon : Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 2000, p. 13.

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Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly, Beyond Boredom and Anxiety, San Francisco: JosseyBass, 1975. Debary, Octave, La fin du Creusot ou L’art d’accommoder les restes. Paris: CTHS, 2002. Desvallées, André, “Introduction”, in: Desvallees, André (dir.), Publics et Musées, L’écomusée: rêve ou réalité, 17-18. Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 2000. 11-31. Geertz, Clifford, “Blurred genres. The refiguration of social thought,” in: Bial, Henry (ed.), The performance studies reader. London and New York: Routledge, 2008 Goffman, Erving, A representação do eu na vida cotidiana, [The presentation of self in everyday life]. Petrópolis: Vozes, 2009. Mairesse, François, Le musée temple spetaculaire. Lyon: Presses universitaires de Lyon, 2002. Maure, Marc, “The exhibition as theatre. On the staging of museum objects”, in: Nordisk Museologi, 2. 1995. Schärer, Martin R., “Museology and History”, in: ICOFOM Study Series, (ISS) 35, 2006, pp. 35-51. Schechner, Richard, Between theater and anthropology. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985. Simon, Nina, The Participatory Museum. Santa Cruz, California: Museum 2.0, 2010. Turner, Victor, From ritual to theatre. The human seriousness of play. New York: PAJ Publications, 1982. Turner, Victor, The Anthropology of Performance. New York: PAJ Publications, 1988. Van Gennep, Arnold, The rites of passage, [1960] London: Routledge, 2004. Wilde, Oscar, The picture of Dorian Gray. [1890] London: Penguin popular classics, 1994.

Social Representation Theory and Museum Visitors Aida Rechena, Francisco Tavares Proença Júnior Museum – Portugal

... each individual hosts inside him his own museum; each person is formed, filled and constantly influenced by crosscurrents of impulses throughout their life and consequently represents a place, an age, a generation. Per Uno Agren, 2001.1

Per Uno Agren’s words draw our attention to two separate but complementary facts: each individual is characteristically different from all others; each individual is also integrated in a group, a place and a specific time, with which he shares his “crosscurrents of impulses” throughout his life. By following this line of thought, in order to consider visitors as “special”, museums have to take into consideration these two realities: the visitor’s individual dimension and her social dimension. Bringing these concerns to the fields of knowledge appropriation, world categorization and construction of individual and collective conscience, this paper took social representation theory (SRT) developed by social psychology and used it as conceptual framework to understand the communication process that takes place in museums, specifically in exhibitions. How can the social representation concept serve museology? More specifically, how can it be used in the analysis of the communication process in museums and the roles of visitors and museologists in that process? The etymological meaning of the word indicates that “to represent” or “representation” is to show or make clear something not present, by spoken or written words, by actions, by images, mentally or symbolically. Representations were originally studied within sociology with the works of Émile Durkheim2 who developed 1 | Per Uno Agren, “Reflexões sobre a Rede Portuguesa de Museus”, in: Actas do Fórum Internacional Redes de Museus. Lisboa: Instituto Português de Museus, 2001, p. 22. 2 | Émile Durkheim, “Représentations individuelles et représentations collectives”, in: Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale, tome VI, Electronic Edition, 2002, Québec, in:

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the concept of “collective representations.” To Durkheim collective representations are external to individual consciences and arise not from the isolated individual but from relations between individuals. Collective representations designated a wide range of mental forms such as sciences, religions, myths, time and space, but also opinions and knowledge. Durkheim considered that collective representations perpetuate in society, have their own existence and act directly on each other, combining and creating other representations. This way, Durkheim did not acknowledge that individuals played an active role in forming collective representations, since as social phenomena they did not depend on personal nature but on realities of collective nature. Based on Durkheim’s work, Serge Moscovici uses the collective representations concept, although he moves away from the original idea, by giving individuals an active role in forming and communicating the representations that he classifies as “social”. Moscovici published his first work on social representations in 19613 studying the way of apprehending and understanding psychoanalysis in France and defined it as: A system of values, ideas and practices with a twofold function: first, to establish an order which will allow people to orient themselves in their material and social world and control it, and, secondly, to enable the communication between members of a community by providing them with a code for naming and classifying unambiguously the various aspects of their world and their individual and social history.4

To Moscovici social representations are created collectively, they are social thoughts elaborated by members of a group, which allows them to understand the world and communicate between themselves. Denise Jodelet, who deepened Moscovici’s research and theory, held that a social representation makes present an absent object, being the mental representative of the object it symbolically restores. Jodelet defined social representations as: a form of knowledge socially elaborated and shared, with a practical aim and contributing to the construction of a common reality for a social group ... The social representation is always a representation of something (the object) and someone (the subject). Characteristics of the subject and the object will affect it.5 http  www.uqac.uquebec.ca/zone30/Classiques_des_sciences_sociales/index.htm, 18th July 2009. 3 | Serge Moscovici, La psychanalyse, son image et son publique. Paris: PUF, 1961. 4 | Serge Moscovici, Representações sociais. Investigações em psicologia social. Petrópolis: Editora Vozes, 2004, p. 21. 5 | Denise Jodelet, (Dir). Les représentations sociales. Paris: PUF, 1994, p. 36-37 and 43.

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Jodelet establishes the defining limits of the concept: a subject carrier of representation, an object that is represented and a context of a social group in which the representation acquires meaning. But to Jodelet, the characteristics of each of these elements—subject–object—context—influence the created social representations and extend the participative role not only to the subject, but also to the object and the context. This triad (subject—object—context) was designated by Bauer and Gaskell6 the social representations “toblerone,” assigning a ternary matrix structure to which they added a third dimension: representations of subjects, representations of objects and representations of contexts which multiply and deploy whenever the focus and relationships between subject, object and context change. To broaden our understanding of the social representation theory we introduce the definition of Angela Arruda, a Brazilian psychologist, who relates the social representation with the collective symbolic world “being” a symbolic production to understand and guide the world, [the social representation] comes from an active and creative subject, has a cognitive and autonomous character and shapes the social construction of reality. Action and communication are his crib and ground: social representation comes from them and to them it returns.”7 To the author social representations are symbolic social constructions produced by people and reproduced through communication. This allows us to compare social representations and the museums exhibitions’ ability of representing cultural heritage. Let us go back to Jodelet’s ideas to understand how social representations are formed. Several reactions arise in an individual when facing a new event in a social context.8 They may be expectation, fear, euphoria or applause. The new event provokes a cognitive activity to understand it, master it and defend one6 | Martin Bauer, George Gaskell, “Towards a paradigm for research on social representations”, in: Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior, 29:2. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1999, pp. 163-186. 7 | Ângela Arruda, “Teoria das representações sociais e teorias do género”., in: Cadernos de Pesquisa, n.º 117, 2002, p. 142, http://www.scielo.br/pdf/cp/n117/15555.pdf. (accessed June, 13th, 2008). 8 | The author gives the example of AIDS emergence. When the disease appeared, the media and the conversations referred to it as a tragedy and a fatality. Before the scientific clarifications people developed “theories” (common knowledge) supported on the available data related to patients (drug addicts, haemophiliacs, homosexuals) and vectors of evil (blood and semen). In the first interpretation AIDS was considered a punishment-disease. This was a spontaneous moral interpretation, which led to social stigma and ostracism that caused the rejection. These early social representations of AIDS, transmitted by word of mouth, enrolled in the tables of pre-existing thought

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self from it. These are the moments of representations as “cognitive phenomena”. The lack of information in this first phase, favors the emergence of representations passed down by word and through the media. Evolved by available information and resources, these representations fall into pre-existing thought frameworks that allow interpretation (moral, religious, medical, etc.) —as Moscovici claims. Sometimes, new words appear that make possible the describing of the representation. At this point the representations form systems and give rise to spontaneous theories, versions of reality that embody images or condense words, in both cases loaded with meaning. When a new representation arises, through the transformation of a previous structure, it becomes shared knowledge and a stable structure. It is the moment of the representation as “interpretational system.” In this social process of knowledge production, the representation formation presents a sequence of two mechanisms theoretically developed by Moscovici. The first mechanism is “anchorage” through which we try to locate strange or foreign ideas within a familiar context, and reduce them to common categories and images, i.e. changing objects from unknown into familiar. The second mechanism is “objectification” through which we transform the unknown into something almost concrete, representing the ideas as concrete phenomena existing in the physical world. In objectification people link new conceptual schemes to real, concrete and comprehensible images, taken from everyday life. That’s why Moscovici states that “all representation = image / meaning” or in other words, the representation equals every image to an idea and every idea to an image”.9 From the mentioned authors we can deduce that social representations are a complex system that developed in the cognitive, affective and social dimensions of human life: cognitive because it concerns the construction of social knowledge; affective for bringing the implicit symbolic and imaginative character of this social knowledge; and social because both cognition and affections are based on social reality and all forms of interaction and communication between people. Summarizing, on the one hand, social representations are a cognitive phenomenon, a builder of social knowledge and a form of knowledge shared by a particular social group. Moreover, social representations form a system of interpretation, which governs our relationship with the world and others, directs and organizes, conducts and makes communication possible. Social representations are a way of apprehending and decoding the world, and after being built they are integrated into the system of values, attitudes, ideas, norms, prejudices related to social morals and arose words with obvious pejorative meaning to refer to patients. Jodelet, pp. 32-35. 9 | Moscovici, p. 46.

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and stereotypes with which we categorize and interpret the world, a process based on a pre-existent mental structure, which enables communication with members of our community. It is Moscovici, when speaking of social representations, who draws attention to the essential aspect of communication between individuals because, according to him, “all human interactions, be they between two people or two groups, presuppose representations”.10 The author, supported by Guareschi and Jovchelovitc11, identifies the social representations in various phenomena, such as in conversations, in the streets, in the mass media, in informal channels of communication, social movements, acts of resistance and in all social places, among which we can include museums.12 The role played by communication in the emerging and making of social representations and in their consequences13 is a fundamental element in Moscovici’s theory. Considering that museums and their exhibitions are a means of communication and a place of representation, we must admit that, as a social phenomenon, museums are also places where social representations interact, change and probably emerge.

M useums and e ach one of us By transferring the concept of social representations (as cognitive phenomenon and interpretation and communication system) to the museological sphere, and more specifically to the museum exhibitions, we presume that the human being uses social representations in the moments of interaction with cultural heritage. Our own social representations (shared with the group but related to the specific individual sphere in which they originated) are what allow us to interpret a museum exhibition and appropriate the cultural heritage placed in museums, by integrating it in our thought framework or pre-existent mental structure. It is the subject’s active role in producing and transmitting social representations that allows us to apply the social representation theory to museology and the study of museum visitors’ role. Moscovici states: What we are suggesting [...] is that people and groups, far from being passive recipients, think for themselves, produce and communicate constantly their own specific 10 | Ibid. p. 40. 11 | Pedrinho Guareshi e Sandra Jovchelovitch (Orgs.), Textos em representações sociais. Petrópolis: Editora Vozes, 2008. 12 | We treat a museum as a social space by defining it as a place where the relationship between people and cultural heritage occurs and develops. 13 | The consequences of representations are stereotypes, attitudes and opinions. Bauer and Gaskell, op. cit, 1999, p. 165.

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Both in museology and the museum/exhibition communication process, the individual plays an essential role. If the subject is represented in museums through the preserved heritage she also plays an active role as a visitor in the appropriation of this recontextualized and interpreted heritage in the museum space. If in general social representation a subject, an object and a context are always present (as Jodelet stated), the same is true in the museum context, the place where the subject relates to the cultural heritage, interpreted using social representations. The visitor’s contribution is thus crucial in the interpretation of a museum exhibition; she is constructing meanings, integrating it in her symbolic and affective system and in her mental framework. When considering the visitor as an “actor”, the museum becomes a place of negotiation, a place of confrontation between the observer (= museum visitor), the observed (= the exhibition) and the producer (= curators and other museum professionals). Hence the museum becomes a place of contact between social representations: the museologist, the visitor, and the ones contained in the displayed museological objects. Thus the museum appears as a conducive terrain for change and formation of new social representations. People entering a museum bring with them “the rest of their lives, their own reasons for visiting and their specific prior experience.”15 This means that each person or group interprets a museum exhibition differently from other people and groups. In other words, different categories of people interpret the exhibition according to their aspirations and self-knowledge, making subjective interpretations. Each person uses the communicated messages in a personal way, interpreting them using a set of factors of cultural, social and personal reasons16, making communication bidirectional. Apparently the presence of different levels of social representations in a museum exhibition, understood as a process of communication, would hinder communication. And, in fact, visitors do not often understand the message that museums want to communicate, or they interpret the exhibition in a way 14 | Moscovici, 2004, p. 45. 15 | Eilean Hooper-Greenhill (ed.), Museum, media, message. London and New York: Routledge, 1999, p. 5. 16 | Santiago Palomero calls “our islands of knowledge and perception.” Santiago Palomero Plaza, Un atlas para las musas: patrimonio en femenino, in: Patrimonio en Femenino. Madrid: Ministerio de Cultura, 2011.

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unexpected to its curator. However, when considering the existence, in each person, of a common social framework of pre-existing thought, as proposed by Moscovici, social representations are a beacon to the individualized interpretation of a museum exhibition, preventing this process from being an endless shower of subjective readings. This idea is consistent with the limitations indicated by Martine Joly17 to the subjective interpretation of works of art, limitations created by our expectations, prejudices and social stereotypes, i.e., by our social representations. In her study, Joly believes that part of our interpretation, as adults, is already partially built up before we had access to the images, because we superimpose “to the signs produced by the image, the stereotypes of its own reception”.18 To Joly, when looking at an image we associate it with something that already has a previous representation in our minds (social representations, stereotypes, prejudices) through a process the author calls “transference”. It is the limitation imposed by social representations that explains why a particular subject or a social group values and interprets cultural heritage19 differently from another person or social groups. Let us return to Jodelet’s theorization when she says that social representations, as socially elaborated and shared knowledge, have “a subject, an object and a context” as intervening parties in its construction and represent a consensual view of reality within a particular social group. To the author, the goal in social representation is that the person assigns meaning to the world and creates order and perception in it. But as dynamic structures, social representations always carry the mark of the individual and the social group that produces them, operating on a set of relationships and behaviors that come and go, along with the social representations. This dynamic of social representations is a part of the wider process of communication, also defined by the intervention of a subject, an object and a context, a situation that transports us to the museum and to the museological communication processes. We contended that social representations are formed in the streets, in conversations, in the media and also when someone stands before the historical and cultural heritage. As public institutions, museums emerge as possible location for driving thought and senses in order to make possible the establishment or modification of the dominant social representations. This possibility leads us to question the role of the museum staff in the communication process. If the visitor interprets an exhibition according to the prior knowledge and sensitivity that she already has, will it not produce an inconsequential exhibition meaning, 17 | Martine Joly, A imagem e a sua interpretação. Lisboa: Edições 70, 2002. 18 | Ibid. pp. 83-89. 19 | We define cultural heritage broadly, it contains all from objects, to rituals, traditions, symbolic systems, i.e.– everything that can be represented in a museum.

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unable to influence visitors? And in that case, what is the role of museum staff in the communication process? In other words, how do we ensure communication between the museum and its visitors? To seek an answer that allows us to reconcile the subjective dimension with the social dimension of museum visitors we follow two distinct but complementary lines of thought: the proposal of museums as service provider institutions, presented by the Portuguese museologist Mário Moutinho20 and the participatory museum proposed by the North American Nina Simon.21

M useums as institutions providing service The classification of museums as service provider institutions has been advocated by social museology. We consider social museology as a field of museology, with a focus on people, communities and their needs. Defining museology as “the relationship between the subject and his cultural heritage,” social museology focuses its attention on the subject. One of the theorists of social museology, Mário Moutinho, says that what distinguishes social museological approach is the “recognition of museology as a resource for the sustainable development of mankind, based on equal opportunities and social and economic inclusion.”22 Social museology assumes an intervention in the cultural (tangible and intangible) and natural heritages, recognizing cultural hybridization, the overlap and coexistence of multiple cultural identities, articulated or not in the same territorial space. Moutinho states: What characterizes Social Museology is not exactly the nature of its assumptions and objectives, as in other areas of knowledge, but the interdisciplinary way of calling for areas of perfectly consolidated knowledge and relates them with Museology. 23

To Moutinho, the main concerns of social museology are the recognition of a global responsibility for cultural heritage; the centrality of development issues, broadening its scope to the national and international level; museums’ performances linked to permanent social change; the need for professional training that goes beyond the range of techniques focused on collections, creating pro20 | Mário Moutinho, Os museus como instituições prestadoras de serviços, in: Revista Lusófona de Humanidades e Tecnologias, n.º 12. Lisboa, ULHT, 2008. 21 | Nina Simon, The Participatory Museum. Santa Cruz: Museum 2.0, 2010. http:// www.participatorymuseum.org/ 22 | Mário Moutinho, Definição evolutiva de sociomuseologia. Proposta para reflexão, MINOM, Universidade Lusófona de Humanidades e Tecnologias. Lisboa, 2007. 23 | Ibid. p. 1.

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fessionals committed to the local communities. As a final concern, Moutinho says that social museology assumes museums to be institutions which provide services, which involves giving deeper consideration to the relationship between museums and their visitors. Developing this latest proposal—museums as service providers—Moutinho highlights the role of the visitor in the interpretation of museum exhibitions and recognizes the “exhibition design” as an autonomous “writing” that uses cultural heritage, aiming to produce knowledge and critical thinking. Also he considers that applying the characteristics of services (inseparability, variability, perishability and intangibility)24 to museums would have relevant consequences in their performance and relationship with visitors. The first consequence of this approach relates to the inseparability, i.e. the simultaneity between the production and consumption of the service. In a museum, simultaneity is materialized when the visitor gets in contact with the exhibition. The moment of simultaneity between production and consumption of a museum exhibition is also the moment when the museum public evaluates its service. As a service provider, the museum would have to concern itself more with this moment, sometimes fugacious, in which its work is “consumed” by those to whom the service is aimed: the visitor, the community, the researchers. When the positive impact of that moment is lost, the result reflects negatively on the museum’s public image. Another impact of museums being perceived as service providers relates, according to Mário Moutinho, to variability. Institutions providing services try to adapt to each client, looking for customization, personalization and differentiated service to their customers. If museums are assumed to be service providing institutions they must seek to adapt to each user, group of visitors, students, researchers, and avoid displaying exhibitions built to please the greatest number of visitors. This would lead to acknowledging a greater autonomy for museum visitors to interpret museum exhibitions. A third consequence is linked to the intangibility of the services, which Moutinho identifies within the museum by equating it with leisure spaces. The consumption of exhibitions is intangible in that the consumer cannot take with him the exhibition itself, but only the intangible affect related to learning, feelings, leisure and enjoyment. For this reason, museum exhibitions should work more with feelings and sensations and less with the rarity, antiquity or aesthetics of objects. An observer can only decode an object in its fullness if she already possesses information about that object or a similar one. The use of sensations and feelings is a way to extend the visitor’s relationship with that specific object or theme.

24 | Moutinho, 2008.

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Finally, the fourth characteristic of museums as service providers is perishability. Moutinho considers that service provision in a museum exhibition ceases at the moment of consumption. But this feature does not apply to permanent or long-term exhibitions, where the same product is available for years on end. Moutinho suggests that exhibitions should have a limited life span to keep their impact, significance and power of communication. If we consider museums as service providers, we place the responsibility of communication in the hands of the museum professionals who should cease to have a homogenizing posture and present irrefutable technical speeches and with that try to get closer to the visitor’s needs. Applying the theory of social representation requires that museums focus their activity on visitors and requires museum professionals to be “social workers” with the ability to produce content, able to provoke sensations and ideas, to activate memories and promote thought by asking questions.

Participatory museums Nina Simon’s participatory museum proposal is close to Mário Moutinho’s proposal, in the sense that in both, the museological approach focuses on people who go to museums and not on the collections and exhibitions of objects. But if in museums, acting as service provider institutions, the responsibility for managing the communication and content production is that of museum professionals, in participatory museums this responsibility is shared between museum staff and museum visitors. Both contribute to the construction of the communication process and to the final outcome of museum exhibitions. Based on three fundamental ideas, namely: the museum is an institution focused on visitors; visitors build the meaning of their cultural experiences; the opinions of museum users can inform and invigorate the project and programs of the museums themselves, Nina Simon defines a participatory cultural institution as: …a place where visitors can create, share, and connect with each other around content. Create means that visitors contribute their own ideas, objects, and creative expression to the institution and to each other. Share means that people discuss, take home, remix, and redistribute both what they see and what they make during their visit. Connect means that visitors socialize with other people—staff and visitors—who share their particular interests. Around content means that visitors’ conversations and creations focus on the evidence, objects, and ideas most important to the institution in question. 25

25 | Simon 2010, version online (without pagination).

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The main alteration in the relationship between the museum and its visitors is that the museum assigns visitors the responsibility of co-authorship of the contents in a museum exhibition. Instead of producing content for the visitor’s consumption, as in the traditional museums communication process, the museum now acts as a platform between visitors, who are simultaneously content creators, distributors, consumers, critics, reviewers and collaborators.26 By asking the visitor to “create, share and connect with each other and around content”, Simon states, the museum is asking visitors to bring to the exhibition their social representations and build with them a museological discourse and establish a dialogue with the cultural heritage and with other visitors. This way, the museum effectively becomes a social place, where social representations manifest, evolve and emerge, in the act of communication. This way of working in museums demands that institutions have “a genuine respect and interest in the visitor’s background and capabilities,” by giving up the control of the communication and creative process.27 Simon states: People use the institution as meeting grounds for dialogue around the content presented. Instead of being “about” something or “for” someone, participatory institutions are created and managed “with” visitors.” 28

This transformation of a communication “about” something or “for” someone into a communication “with” people creates museums as dialogue places, of multivariate production, places of confrontation between social representations and consequently conducive to the emergence of new social representations.

The special visitor : “A ll of U s ” By bringing the social representation theory to the museum’s sphere we consider that the visitor is not a passive receiver but each person carries his/her own social representations — world views, beliefs, myths, religions, norms, values and stereotypes — that will be put into action when visiting a museum exhibition, interpreting it in their own way. People have an active role in the communication process and each one plays a part in elaborating, communicating and transforming social representations that arise from their own cognitive categories, their cultural environment and their personal experiences. According to the social representation theory, each of us has a social knowledge shared with others that allows communication within the museum. In the communi26 | Ibid. 27 | Ibid. 28 | Ibid.

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cation process that occurs in museums (specifically in museum exhibitions), communication does not have a unidirectional path: it is always made between those who communicate and those who receive the communication. It is important to bring to this discussion the fact that heritage in museums results from the common social representations in a particular community. This community ascribes value to a specific group of cultural objects. So, the cultural heritage selection process is subjected to the same kind of categorization of all reality, and that explains why different patrimonial objects are valued by a particular social group and others are not. Based on this line of thought, it is possible to identify some contact points between museum theory and social representation theory: 1. Museums establish categorization systems for real objects (the cultural heritage), contributing to the apprehension of the world (as constructors of knowledge), allowing people to be aware, to guide themselves and relate to the preserved cultural heritage; 2. Museums as places of representation do not work with reality but with modes of symbolic fixation of reality; 3. Museums give the person a decisive role in the communication process. 4. In the same way that social representations are located in time and space, the relationship between people and their cultural heritage is characteristic of a specific time and space. Bringing social representation theory proposals to the museological field allows us to make each visitor a special person, whether working with museums as service provider institutions or working with participatory museums. Either way, working in visitor oriented museums demands professionals committed to the social needs of visitors and aware of the communication processes and the role of social representations in them. Finally, we note that some social representations are prejudiced and promote social inequalities, like those associated with interpretations of the categories “race” or “gender”, for instance. Museums’ mission should also be to contribute to change unfavorable social representations and the ones with a negative impact on society. Presently museums are defined and experienced as active social institutions that reflect and convey what is happening in their environment, integrated in social and historical dynamics and fundamental in shaping collective identities. Museums are considered active participants, not passive observers, they are responsible for mediating strategies to identify and appropriate heritage and not mere storage for collections or memories. Today, museums reflect on multiculturalism, the relation between memory and power and the globalization impact on cultural heritage. Museums’ objectives are no longer just researching or gathering collections; it is no longer about the object but rather the

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relation between person and object. Making every museum visitor special, means to involve people in all museum actions, with their singularities, ambitions, disappointments, expectations, feelings, emotions, dreams, social representations, contributing to a society equally shared and experienced by all of us.

W orks cited Agren, Per-Uno, “Reflexões sobre a Rede Portuguesa de Museus”, in: Actas do Fórum Internacional Redes de Museus. Lisboa: Instituto Português de Museus, 2001. Arruda, Ângela, “Teoria das representações sociais e teorias do género”, in: Cadernos de Pesquisa, nº. 117, 2002, p. 142, http://www.scielo.br/pdf/cp/ n117/15555.pdf. (accessed in June 13th 2008). Bauer, Martin and Gaskell, George, “Towards a paradigm for research on social representations”, in: Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior, 29:2. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers,1999, pp. 163-186. Bezerra de Meneses, Ulpiano, “A problemática da identidade cultural nos museus: de objectivo (de acção) a objecto (de conhecimento)”, in: Anais do Museu Paulista, nova série, nº. 1. São Paulo: USP, 1993. Durkheim, Émile. “Représentations individuelles et représentations collectives”, 1898, in: Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale, part VI, Electronic edition of 2002, Québec. http://www.uqac.uquebec.ca/zone30/Classiques_ des_sciences_sociales/index.htm. (accesed in July 18th, 2009). Guareshi, Pedrinho e Jovchelovitch, Sandra (Orgs.), Textos em representações sociais. Petrópolis: Editora Vozes, 2008. Hooper-Greenhill, Eilean (ed.), Museum, media, message. London and New York: Routledge, 1999. Jodelet, Denise, Les représentations sociales. Paris: PUF, 1994. Joly, Martine, A imagem e a sua interpretação. Lisboa: Edições 70, 2002. Mannoni, Pierre, Les représentations sociales. Paris: PUF, 2008. Moscovici, Serge. Representações sociais. Investigações em psicologia social, Petrópolis: Editora Vozes, 2004. —. La psychanalyse, son image et son publique. Paris: PUF, 1961. Moutinho, M Mti. “Os museus como instituiiitu prestadoras de servierv”, in: Revista Lusófona de Humanidades e Tecnologias, nº. 12. Lisboa: ULHT, 2008. —. Definição evolutiva de sociomuseologia. Proposta para reflexta, MINOM, Universidade Lusófona de Humanidades e Tecnologias. Lisboa, 2007. Palomero Plaza, Santiago, ”Un atlas para las musas: patrimonio en femenino”, in: Patrimonio en Femenino, Madrid, Ministerio de Cultura, 2011. Simon, Nina, The Participatory Museum. Santa Cruz, California: Museum 2.0, 2010, http://www.participatorymuseum.org/. (accessed July 4th 2015).

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A Visitor-Centered Approach Enhancing Museology with Perceptual Theory Anna Leshchenko, Russian State University for the Humanities, Museology Department Moscow – Russia

As a museologist by trade and a linguist by vocation, I have paid attention to the areas which intersect and are studied by both museology and linguistics. One of the least researched issues is a visitor’s capacity to ‘read’ encoded messages on display and the museum narrative at large. Each visitor’s perception is thus seen as a factor that influences greatly the efficiency of museum communication. Museum-related research tends to focus on visitors’ behavior, which results in external observations, such as visitors seldom read labels; children are more likely to engage with interactive exhibits than adults; visitors skip many elements, visiting on average only a third of them.1 As a result, this external approach may lead to disregard for visitors’ personalities and lack of understanding why an individual would do one thing and would not do another. Besides, museum audiences themselves are not always aware of what contributes to their learning outcomes and what may cause instant fatigue. Kenneth Hudson wrote back in 1975: Unfortunately, there were no surveys carried out until very recently to discover how many museum visitors finished up with an awakened mind and an enlarged experience, and how many with a headache and sore feet. 2

1 | For example: B. Serrell, “Paying Attention: The Duration and Allocation of Visitors’ Time in Museum Exhibitions”, in: Curator, 40 (2), 1997, p. 108-125; and G. Hein, Learning in the Museum. London: Routledge, 1998. 2 | Kenneth Hudson, A Social History of Museums: What the Visitors Thought. London: the Macmillan Press LTD, 1975, p. 71.

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Since then psychological and cognitive studies have advanced. There is now no need in undertaking conventional surveys in museums to anticipate and deal with factors that may reduce fatigue as well as problems with decoding the narrative presented through displayed objects. Studies in this area concerning museum audiences are either not widely known or are overgeneralized. For example, the latter is evident in Russia, when it comes to visitors’ capacity to maintain attention before getting tired during the guided tour, the same amount of time is prescribed to rather large age groups, 1.5 hours for adults and a maximum of 40 minutes for children, 3 while within these groups people of the same age have different traits that may cause fatigue earlier than anticipated.

These perceptual issues have long been neglected and even rejected for being too physical and abstract for museums. Nowadays, museologists and museum professionals have begun to turn to the visitor’s physical bodily sensations4 and reflect on how museums work with individual identities based on emotionally-rich stories generated by curators or visitors.5 Since museums address visitor’s emotions today, it would be logical to consider visitor’s emotional and mental characteristics when studying visiting experience. This paper is addressed to both museum professionals and museum-goers with the intention of helping them recognize the uniqueness of cognitive and physical characteristics for each individual and enable them to find possible solutions to effective museum communication outcomes. The last part will describe how and why museums can work with physical senses.

3 | Calculated in the 1930s and still considered up-to-date by a number of Russian researchers, such as M. Yuhnevich in Юхневич Марина Ю., “Я поведу тебя в музей”, учебное пособие по музейной педагогике, Moscow, 2001, p. 60; and N. Nagajceva in Нагайцева Н.Д. “Современный музей– аспекты взаимоотношений с посетителем”, in: Музей и посетитель: процесс, прогресс и протест. Irkutsk, 2012. p. 52. 4 | Jennifer Harris, “Turning to the visitor’s body: affective exhibition and the limits of representation”, in: ICOFOM Study Series (ISS), 41, 2012, p. 199-210. 5 | To name a few: Holocaust museums around the world are examples of working with effects that lead to visitors experiencing emotional release, close to the idea of catharsis; another example is a story about a Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History visitor missing a deceased relative and sharing this emotion with others, see Nina Simon’s TED-talk video about “Memory Jars” exhibition that took place in 2012, http://www. youtube.com/watch?v=aIcwIH1vZ9w, min: 06:50-07:40.

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P ercep tion seen philosophically, psychologically and physically Cognitive psychologists and cognitive linguists have arrived at the conclusion that we do not see an object or understand the intended message it conveys, but we perceive and interpret them relatively. The philosophy of perception defines perception as a process that in general leads to knowledge about objects, even if on occasion we may be misled as to the exact nature of our physical surroundings. /.../ distance perception is an essentially dynamic process that is integrated with action. It does not merely lead to true belief, but to successful movement through an environment, allowing perceivers to satisfy their needs. 6

Perception involves both the physical senses (sight, smell, hearing, taste, touch) as well as the cognitive processes. Essentially, this is how museum visitors come to understand the encoded messages around them. In psychology, the notion of “apperception” is used to separate the conscious individual’s perception from the general notion of ‘perception’. “Apperception”/“perception” are related to each other as the ideas of “listening”/“hearing”, “looking”/“seeing”, relatively. Apperception studies deal with an individual’s personality, his or her motivations, thought patterns and observational capacity. Concerning specifics of apperception, Lev Vygotsky, a Soviet psychologist, pointed out back in 1971 that: any understanding is a non-understanding; that is to say, the thoughts instilled in us by someone’s speech never coincide entirely with the thought in the mind of the speaker. Understanding as apperceived contains an infusion of reality and imagination, of objectivity and subjectivity.7

Thus, each visitor to the museum will ‘read’ a unique message by interpreting or probably misinterpreting it. That means we cannot talk about ‘visitors’ as a whole, we should talk about many individuals with their single sets of perceptual characteristics. From the psychological point of view, it is very unlikely that there would be two visitors that would see and understand the same amount of information. Visitors come with their unique ‘intellectual luggage’ as well as their own fatigue limits. Visitors’ perception is shaped by their background 6 | Paul Coates, The Metaphysics of Perception: Wilfrid Sellar - Critical Realism, and the Nature of Experience. New York: Routledge, 2007, p. 59. 7 | Charlotte Hua Liu, Vygotsky’s Psycho-Semiotics: Theories, Instrument and Interpretive Analyses. Bern, New York, London, 2011, p. 34.

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knowledge and influenced by preferences, prejudice, judgments, which always lead to interpretations. As the readers of the same book do not read the same text because they are interpreting it in their way, so do the visitors of museums.

The Tree exhibition, an overview. Photo by Marina Markova, Togliatti Local History Museum. In physiology of perception the most interesting areas for museology are those that combine the psychological and the physical of the body. The factors that may ease physical and mental stresses in perception are not difficult to calculate and apply. Museum rooms have plenty of texts, those actual texts used as a commentary and those that visitors are expected to decode through viewing the objects and using their background knowledge and the commentary they have just read. When it comes to the first stage of this process—understanding the texts that the visitor is supposed to read, few museums pay attention to legibility and visual presentation. To ease the tedious visual tasks that produce eye strain, museums have to select typefaces with fewer serifs, which have been proved to be more legible, perceivable, as well as to provide illumination that not only highlights the objects but leads to visitor’s reading comfort. In addition, psychophysicists recommend using dark letters on a light background for left-handed and light letters on a dark background for right-handed people.8 At this point, when moving from the general to the more individual in the physiology of perception, the first conclusion that might come to mind is that it is impossible to create ideal conditions for each and every person. Nonetheless, most of the problems can

8 | Сиротюк А.Л. Обучение детей с учетом психофизиологии: Практическое руководство длучителей и родителей [Syrotyuk A.L. Teaching children considering psychophysics: Practitioner guide for teachers and parents]. Moscow, 2001, p. 16.

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be resolved with help of personal digital devices. That might become one of the key topics of cybermuseology for the next decades. Theories of perception vary, and they focus on different issues. This paper focusses on the studies that can be applied when dealing with perception of visual and encoded information within a museum space, a so called External (or Sensory) Perception that tells us about the world outside our bodies through our senses of sight and hearing which are studied by psycholinguists.

P sycholinguistic approach and VAKT- model Psycholinguistics and its branch Neurolinguistics are the fields of study of the psychological factors and mechanisms that enable us to acquire, comprehend and produce language. The part that can be useful for a better understanding of museum communication processes concerns the study of main sensory receivers known as VAK (Visual, Auditory, and Kinesthetic), or VAKT (Visual, Auditory, Kinesthetic, and Tactile). For museum practices the VAKT model is more appropriate, since the distinction between kinesthetic and tactile is quite evident: when visiting a museum a kinesthetic person can stop understanding information if he stands still for a long time, that is why he needs more dynamic types of guided tours around museums, but he does not necessarily need to touch an object to ‘understand’ it better.

“Five senses drawing” in the Tree exhibition. Togliatti Local History Museum. The VAKT is based on modalities, or channels by which we comprehend and process information. It is rare to find a person who would have all her modalities active while learning something new. Due to their intensive visual nature, museum exhibitions are easier to process for those who take in information visually. For an auditory visitor, a guide’s comments or music will be the best support

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and they will not get tired if they listen to most of the information and do not have to read each label. That is why if a non-visual visitor comes to the museum, the extensive visual tension would provoke fatigue sooner than for other visitors. The VAKT model suggests different combinations of active modalities; for a traditional museum the ideal visitor would be either a visual one or a combination of visual and auditory. Still there are other conditions that influence visitors’ perception and the modalities that the visitor is more likely to possess. One of them is generation-based characteristics. In the first half of the 20th century generations used to change every 25 years, decreasing closer to the turn of the century. Today the generation gap issue is more evident and critical, since, mostly due to technological influences, a new generation emerges every 10 years. Each generation, referred to as Generation X, Millennials (Gen Y), iGeneration (Gen Z), have specific personality traits that condition the way the information is perceived. If we look at the work of art museums with adult visitors in the 20th century (say, “pre-participatory era”) it looks as if it was considered a priori that most of information was received by watching and listening. Visitor’s perceptual styles have always been different, but possible failures in museum communications have never been evident, since they have not been easy to trace. The studies of generation differences show that watching and listening is not enough. When museum personnel belongs to previous generations (X or Y) and transmits information within traditional museum communication framework using only traditionally elaborated methods, todays’ teenagers may remain deaf and blind to the museum narrative. The Internet Generation (iGeneration, those born from the mid or late 1990s) is mostly both visual and kinesthetic and presumably is less apt to read the label and more apt to touch plenty of buttons on the tablet: The Net Gen is oriented toward inductive discovery or making observations, formulating hypotheses, and figuring out the rules. They crave interactivity. And the rapid pace with which they like to receive information means they often choose not to pay attention if a class is not interactive, engaging, or simply too slow … The Net Gen is more comfortable in image-rich environments than with text. Researchers report Net Gen students will refuse to read large amounts of text, whether it involves a long reading assignment or lengthy instructions. In a study that altered instructions from a text-based step-by-step approach to one that used a graphic layout, refusals to do the assignment dropped and post-test scores increased. 9

9 | Diana G. Oblinger and James L. Oblinger, “Is It Age or IT: First Steps Toward Understanding the Net Generation”, in: Educating the Net Generation. Educause, 2005, p. 25: http://www.educause.edu/research-and-publications/books/educatingnet-generation

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Interestingly, the quote shows how different visual learners of the last century generations are from visual learners of 2000s, manifesting preference for graphics instead of texts. We can also presume that digital devices, if designed properly, are not an obstacle between iGeneration and the museum object, which is one of the main concerns among Russian museum professionals, but are one of the ways that enables younger visitors to decode texts successfully. Since perception is different for each person, it is highly unlikely that two visitors to the same museum will have the same communicative experience, ‘reading’ the same messages and receiving the exact information chunks that the creators of the exhibition put into it. What museums can do is to provide opportunities for engagement in different ways and to remember that there are still people who are not eager to participate and engage but would still prefer to watch and to listen. As for kinesthetic and tactile learners/visitors, they do not require only electronic devises; museums can find less costly ways of addressing their needs. For instance, visitors who produced sketches as if they were naturalists filling in their field journals at the exhibition of Natural History at Carnegie Museum of Art in October 2012 had an opportunity to engage visually and kinesthetically.10 Examples of this and many other engaging activities addressing all the VAKT modalities are part of the participatory paradigm in the museum world.

Tree exhibition. Photo by Marina Markova, Togliatti Local History Museum. 10 | To see the sketches visit the museum’s facebook account: http://www.facebook. com/media/set/?set=a.10151170632301788.506434.38014611787&type=3

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Participatory par adigm : percep tion and emotions The emergence and rapid expansion of the participatory paradigm in museum landscape might be a logical reaction to the visitors’ willingness to take an active part in the engaging practices at the exposition, which might be due to above-mentioned Net Generation’s characteristics as well as overall internet influences on attitudes of people actively engaged in online social networking. Nina Simon, in her book The Participatory museum (2010), suggests looking at visitors from a new prospective, one new for museums and is still controversial to many museum professionals. By referring to Forrester Research released in 2008 Simon draws our attention to the way people are used to engaging. They may participate as creators, critics, collectors, spectators.11 Although the Forrester Research was observing online audiences, it contributes greatly to museum practices and broadens views of how museums could work more efficiently with visitors. This actions-based approach to museum audiences and the possibility of being active in a museum is directly linked to increase in perception and information processing. Firstly, it addresses the above mentioned problem of kinesthetic learners. And, secondly, information processing will be more efficient if the new information is somehow connected to visitors’ emotions, because if we are asked to go through a new experience and share our exhibition-related stories with other visitors we are more attentive when we go through the museum rooms.12 This new paradigm enables museums to start looking into what exhibition-related activities a visitor may participate in, which would address their best communicative and learning outcomes and will allow visitors who are not strictly visual or auditory to get involved.

M ultisensory approach Museum communication theory has long been based on information flows and visitors’ understanding of the concepts that exhibited objects convey. A multisensory tree-shaped display (see photos) that has been mounted at the Togliatti Local History Museum (TLHM), Russia, is an example of an approach that

11 | Nina Simon, Participatory Museum, Santa Cruz; Museum 2.0, 2010, http://www. participatorymuseum.org/chapter1/ 12 | Jonathan R. Zadra and Gerald L. Clore, “Emotion and perception: the role of affective information”, in: Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Cognitive Science, Volume 2, Issue 6, 2011, p. 676–685.

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could deepen our understanding of museum communication and the scope of museum objects. In 2012 the TLHM, the biggest and the most influential museum in the city of Togliatti, launched a project that worked with all five senses in a multisensory display. Along with other projects, the museum is aiming at addressing ecological challenges. Togliatti is a highly urbanized city; in Soviet times it was the main centre of the automobile industry. The TLHM’s mission is to help the visitors, living in an artificial landscape, recover lost links to the Togliatti forest and to stay linked to nature at large. The Tree exhibition is designed to be an interactive quiz display. Behind the doors of the Tree there are jars and exhibits without any commentary. Visitors are asked to taste, smell, touch and listen to the “chunks” of the Togliatti forest. They touch the bark and try to guess what tree it belongs to, listen to the recorded sound of the forest and try to guess the names of the birds and animals, smell the scent from a jar and guess the plant, taste jams made of berries found in the Togliatti forest. The visitors can also see a real anthill.

Smell. Photo by Marina Markova, Togliatti Local History Museum. According to Lubov Chernyaeva, one of the masterminds of museum’s eco-projects, the prime purpose of this venture is to engender unconscious identification with the object. In this context the ‘object’ is bigger than simply a museum three-dimensional object. It is the Togliatti forest perceived through senses. The five senses experience leads to perceptual integrity. This kind of coherence is the key to capturing the essence of the conveyed message. Such integrity of the sense is believed to be the way our ancestors perceived their environment. In this specific tree-display the senses are used to provoke unconscious identification with the object (from the tree to the forest, and then to the nature) on an emotional and sensory levels.

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In other words, activities by means of sense experience are aimed at much deeper psychological outcomes than the traditional museum ways of gaining intellectual (rational) knowledge. That experience awakens archetypal connections to nature, on a level of psychic knowledge.

C onclusion Considering both generational distinctions and multiplicity of VAKT combinations, the training of museum guides as well as writing and recordings of audio-guides should become versatile, giving each visitor an opportunity to choose whether to read printed texts, or to use tablets, or to listen. Museum exhibit designers and educators should be aware of how visitors perceive and process information in order to make learning and communication easier by working with their own style and pace, thus recognizing that each visitor will have his own set of learning preferences. On the other hand, when addressing visitors’ physical senses, most importantly, museum professions should be aware of not only how but why a visitor’s perception is awakened. A multisensory approach, as described above, has the potential for awakening meanings through perception that textual information might not convey efficiently.

W orks cited Coates, Paul, The Metaphysics of Perception: Wilfrid Sellars, Critical Realism, and the Nature of Experience. Routledge: New York, 2007. Harris, Jennifer, “Turning to the visitor’s body: affective exhibition and the limits of representation”, in: Empowering the Visitor. Process, Progress, Protest. ICOFOM Study Series (ISS), 41, 2012, pp. 199-210. Hudson, Kenneth, a Social History of Museums: What the Visitors Thought. The Macmillan Press LTD: London, 1975. Liu, Charlotte Hua, Vygotsky’s Psycho-semiotics: Theories, Instrument and Interpretive Analyses. Bern; New York; London, 2011. Oblinger, Diana G. and Oblinger, James L., “Is It Age or IT: First Steps Toward Understanding the Net Generation”, in: Educating the Net Generation, Educause, 2005, http://www.educause.edu/research-and-publications/books/educating-net-generation Simon, Nina, Participatory Museum. Museum 2.0: Santa Cruz, 2010. Zadra, Jonathan R. and Clore, Gerald L., “Emotion and perception: the role of affective information”, in: Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Cognitive Science, Volume 2, Issue 6, 2011, pp. 676–685

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Нагайцева Н. Д., “Современный музей–аспекты взаимоотношений с посетителем”, Музей и посетитель: процесс, прогресс и протест, Материалы V ежегодного симпозиума Международного Комитета музеологии Сибири, стран Азии и Тихоокеанского региона, 1–3 ноября 2012 г., Тунисская Республика Nagajceva N.D. “The contemporary museum– aspects of the relationship with the visitor”, in: Museum and the visitor: process, progress and protest, 5th annual symposium of the International committee for museology of Siberia, of the Asia and Pacific, Tunisia, 1-3 November 2012, Irkutsk, 2012, pp. 50-63. Сиротюк А.Л. Обучение детей с учетом психофизиологии: Практическое руководство для учителей и родителей Syrotyuk A.L. Teaching children considering psychophysics: Practitioner guide for teachers and parents, Moscow, 2001. Юхневич Марина Ю., “Я поведу тебя в музей”, учебное пособие по музейной педагогике Yuhnevich Marina Y. “I’ll take you to the museum”, Study guide on Museum Pedagogy, Moscow, 2001.

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Reflections on Michail Bakhtin’s Dialogue versus the Theory of Mirror Neurons Vitaly Ananiev, Saint Petersburg State University – Russia

There are two main parts in all museum visitor studies: the museum, and the visitor; and then something in between these two. What is this something? The words for naming this can vary: communication, experience, dialogue, flow or meaning-making. Take a look at the concept of dialogue and you will find the name of the Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin. Ever since the prominent Franco-Bulgarian authors Julia Kristeva and Tzvetan Todorov made great efforts to popularize Bakhtin’s works in the 1960-1970’s, he has been almost a synonym for the concept of dialogue in contemporary Western discourse. As Jennifer Harris has noted: The other and self is not characterized as creating a binary by Bakhtin, but a multiplying process suggesting a vigorous network of meaning as the self is created in relation to others. To understand the self, therefore, multiples of others must also be considered.1

Bakhtin’s concept is an outgrowth of the ideas of earlier philosophers, especially the German philosophers who were influenced by a Judeo-Christian understanding of the “Other” and the “Fellow Creature”. Hermann Cohen, Martin Buber (I and Thou) and even Johann Gottlieb Fichte (with his thesis “There is no object without its subject, and no subject without its object”) can be named as the predecessors of this sector of Bakhtin’s ideas.2 In this kind of context, Bakhtin’s philosophy is included in the discussion on dialogue by default or 1 | Jennifer Harris, “Dialogism and Visitor Experience”, in: The Dialogic Museum and the Visitor Experience. ICOFOM Study Series(ISS) 40, 2011, p. 9. http://network.icom. museum/fileadmin/user_upload/minisites/icofom/pdf/ISS%2040_ch_web2.pdf 2 | Vyacheslav V. Ivanov, “The Dominant of Bakhtin’s Philosophy: Dialog and Carnival”, in: Critical Studies, no. 3(2), 4(1/2), 1993, pp. 3-12; More information on this topic, see Lisa Steinby, “Hermann Cohen and Bakhtin’s early aesthetics”, in: Studies in East European Thought. September 2011, Vol. 63 Issue 3, pp. 227-249; and Craig Brandist,

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automatically, as a sequence of this above mentioned popular discourse. You say: dialogue, and you remember Bakhtin. It is like you would say: dinosaurs, and you remember Jurassic Park. In reality, what this popular discourse attributes to Bakhtin’s concept of dialogue is not his own ideas, but ideas of his predecessors (Cohen, Fichte). Bakhtin’s real concept of dialogue is also much more complicated and multilayered. The original development of the idea of dialogue that can be found in his work won’t actually be useful for understanding the problem of museum communication or dialogic museum, as Daniel Jacobi noted in his critical essay.3 If we take a brief look at the writings on museum communication of museum professionals and curators, we will find Bakhtin’s concepts of dialogism and dialogic in most of them as they address the public under the eye of and monitored by their peers. However, a closer scrutiny shows that every museum can turn out to be dialogic and all museum work can be defined as work for creating a dialog. So dialogue is actually too broad a concept to be really useful as an epistemological and analytical tool when examining museum communication. We need a more nuanced approach to this concept. All in all, it is very easy to avoid this kind of argumentation (going in circles) when dealing with the problem of dialogue in the museum. We could simply let Bakhtin’s ideas rest for a while and accept that his theory, as all theories, is the subjective product of the mind of one philosopher whose conclusions we cannot fully verify (as philosophy cannot be verified). I suppose we all have some cogent arguments that in some ways a human being “is sentenced to dialogue”, and that every museum, regardless of the techniques used there, is a dialogic museum. Therefore we can freely experiment with other theories. So now let’s take one step to terra incognita for many museum folks (me too!): namely to the field the natural sciences. As a matter of fact, Bakhtin picked up much from the natural sciences. His crucial concepts, ”dominant” and “chronotope”, are particularly good examples.4 It is known that he took the term “chronotope” from the famous Russian physiologist Alexey Ukhtomsky. The ambition of the humanities to prove and support their own conjectures and insights by referring to the natural sciences is a characteristic feature of the development of the humanities during the first half of the 20th century. The Bakhtin Circle: Philosophy, Culture, and Politics. London and Sterling, VA: Pluto Press, 2002. 3 | Daniel Jacobi, “Dialogism in museums”, in: The Dialogic Museum and the Visitor Experience, in: ICOFOM Study Series (ISS), vol. 40, 2011, p. 18. http://network.icom. museum/fileadmin/user_upload/minisites/icofom/pdf/ISS%2040_ch_web2.pdf 4 | Vyacheslav V. Ivanov, “Towards a Theory of the Speech of the Other Person”, in: Elementa. Journal of Slavic Studies and of Comparative Cultural Semiotics, vol. 4, no.1, 1998. pp. 71-96.

Reflections on Michail Bakhtin’s Dialogue

Already at the end of the 19th century, human sciences adopted many methods from the natural sciences, trying to prove themselves to be science, not art. Modern semiology and structuralism are the most impressive examples of this. Therefore, as a complement to the theory of dialogue, we too can cast an eye at the natural sciences and pick up the discovery in the early 1990’s of the so called mirror neurons by a group of Italian researchers headed by Giacomo Rizzolatti.5 Neurons transmit information as electrochemical signals throughout our body. They are the key components of the nervous system and transmit sensory data to our brains. Rizzolatti’s team found that some of the neurons they recorded in a monkey would respond in the same way when he saw a person pick up a piece of food as when the monkey itself picked up the food. In other words, we do not need to make a move in order to get our neurons moving. It is enough to see someone else make that move: Presenting widely different visual stimuli, but which all represent the same action, is equally effective. For example, the same grasping mirror neuron that responds to a human hand grasping an object responds also when the grasping hand is that of a monkey. Similarly, the response is typically not affected if the action is done near or far from the monkey, in spite of the fact that the size of the observed hand is obviously different in the two conditions. It is also of little importance for neuron activation if the observed action is eventually rewarded.6

More recently, Christian Keysers and his colleagues have shown that the mirror system also responds to the sound of actions.7 There are two main hypotheses on the role of these neurons: the first is that mirror neuron activity mediates imitation; the second is that mirror neurons are at the basis of the action of understanding. The presence of mirror neurons in the human brain cannot be taken as a proven fact, but scientists do see a lot of evidence of their operation. Many researchers consider an examination of the role of these neurons in the process of cognition to be their main task: Each time an individual sees an action done by another individual, neurons that represent that action are activated in the observer’s premotor cortex. This automatically induced, motor representation of the observed action corresponds to that which is 5 | More information on this topic: Giacomo Rizzolatti, Corrado Sinigaglia, Mirrors in the Brain: How Our Minds Share Actions, Emotions, and Experience. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. 6 | Giacomo Rizzolatti, Laila Craighero, “The Mirror-Neuron System”, Annual Review of Neuroscience, 2004, no. 27, p. 170. 7 | Christian Keysers et all, “Audiovisual mirror neurons and action recognition”, Experimental Brain Research, 2003, no. 153, p. 628-636.

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Many researchers believe mirror neurons are one of the most important factors in the evolution of mankind.9 In some respect we can say that mirror neurons are the very foundation for communication, the neural basis of a mechanism that creates a direct link between the sender of a message and its receiver. Thanks to this mechanism, actions done by other individuals become messages that are understood by an observer without any cognitive mediation.10 Without mirror neurons, even the famous transmission model of museum communication outlined by Duncan Cameron simply couldn’t operate.11 For our mind, then, it is not so important whether we’re operating ourselves, or whether the action is produced by somebody to whom we are listening or looking. It seems, this is why we can learn practical things, actions, simply by looking at someone doing it—the mirror neurons “see” to it that when we then try ourselves, we know how to do it. Which, indeed, gives some new perspective to the whole theory of “hands on” (implying that seeing is not enough). It was at the beginning of the 19th century that Fichte wrote “there is no subject without object, and there is no object without subject”. In the 20th century this idea was repeated by above-mentioned Ukhtomsky. These words again seem to be an illustration of the latest discovery that communication with the Other, a dialogue with the Different, seems to be a biological characteristic of our mind. The mirror neuron experiments showed that the brain responds equally to the actions performed by the representative of the same kind as to the actions performed by the representative of the different kind.

8 | Giacomo Rizzolatti, Laila Craighero, “The Mirror-Neuron System”, in: Annual Review of Neuroscience, 2004, no. 27, p. 172. 9 | Vilayanur S. Ramachandran, “Mirror neurons and imitation learning as the driving force behind “the great leap forward” in human evolution”. URL: http://williamlspencer. com/mirrorneurons.pdf 10 | Giacomo Rizzolatti, Laila Craighero, “The Mirror-Neuron System”, Annual Review of Neuroscience, 2004, no. 27, p. 183. 11 | Duncan F. Cameron, “A viewpoint: The Museum as a Communications System and Implications for Museum”, in: Curator: The Museum journal, 1968, March, Vol. 11, Is. 1. P. 33-40. This general linear model of museum communication (or transmission model) is based on the information theory by Claude E. Shannon. The three main parts of this scheme of communication are transmitter (museum folks)–channel (exhibits)—receiver (museum audience). E. Hooper-Greenhill made a few critical remarks on this theory, but even in this simple scheme the basic presupposition for communication is the capacity of our brain to receive/mirror given information.

Reflections on Michail Bakhtin’s Dialogue

Thus, the museum as the place where the Other is represented and displayed/shown, inevitably appears as a place of dialogue, communication and cognition. The aim of museologists, then, should be not to try just to stimulate dialogue but to provoke reflection about this dialogue and how it comes into being. Only after reflection and conceptualization, the dialogue at the museum can adopt the true meaning of how human dialogue works. I am not trying to dismiss or expand Bakhtin’s concept. Nor am I trying here to explain the complicated mechanics of our mind. I’m just trying to say: hey, folks, you speak so loudly about dialogue after Kristeva & Co raised the problem, but what is dialogue, really!? For Bakhtin, in his historical moment— soviet terror, world of one voice (voice of the Party) and in his studies of Dostoevsky and Rable, the answer had an imbedded political message. For Kristeva and other poststructuralists the historical moment of May 1968, in their studies of Bakhtin and the epistemological revolution, the meaning of dialogue was entirely different; and today, for our museum field, it’s again something else. And like an umbrella for all these humanist approaches there are these bright and inspiring biological facts to adopt, such as that of mirror neurons. All our activity is a dialogical activity! (If you like, you can read it in this way: I try to impose some political message here: undialogical/monological power and authority is unnatural, it fights against the evidence of natural science). In this respect the much talked-about “dialogical museum” as something new and revolutionary is nonsense, because every sort of human activity is dialogical activity and museum/museological activity is not an exception.

W orks cited (see next essay by Ananiev)

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Who do you Think they are? Museum Visitor Studies in Russia with a Historical Perspective Vitaly Ananiev, Saint Petersburg State University – Russia

On the subject of visitor studies, Eilean Hooper-Greenhill once wrote: It is only very recently that the different kinds of evaluation and research, carried out by different agents and agencies for different purposes, have been conceptualized in a collective way under the banner of “visitor studies”.1

To this, however, we can say that this subject of research is not very new, particularly not in Russia. We find visitor case studies from the beginning of the 20th century. In the middle of the 1920s, this trend was actively developed in Soviet Russia, in such museums as Tretyakov Gallery or the State Historical Museum. It seems that in this case, the development of one of the branches of museology followed the general path of the development of science in the 20th century. For instance, it was in the first third of the 20th century that one of the principles of quantum mechanics—the principle of the Observer—was formulated. The Observer was not the neutral participant in the experiment; he himself, by his presence, defined that experiment. As noticed later by John Archibald Wheeler, the act of observation was the act of creation. Little by little the literal arts, starting with anthropology, began to acknowledge that this postulate was correct. The turn to orienting museum activity towards visitors in the 1960s and 1970s was also the beginning of this recognition in museology. One consequence was the development of the concepts of museum communication and its inclusion in museum management. Really, assistance to the museum public must be based on taking the diversity of the public into account: if we do not know who they are we cannot help them grasp the museum environment. This is just as true for the symbolic environment as it is for the intellectual museum environment and the actu1 | Eilean Hooper-Greenhill, “Studying Visitors”, in: Macdonald, Sharon (Ed), Companion to Museum Studies. Chichester, England: Willey, 2008, p. 363.

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al museum space. Taking account of the museum visitor is one of the most important functions of each museum’s activities. In her doctoral thesis, Lynn Teather analyzed the history of research on this theme. She recalled that the development of visitor studies began in Great Britain in the middle of the 19th century.2 Not long ago, Hooper-Greenhill gathered together past experiences and presented them in her treatise on the main existing trends in this domain, “Studying Visitors”. Nevertheless, most of the research of this type covers only the experience of the western world, especially the Anglo-Saxon countries. It is obvious that this area of study needs to be broadened to learn about other territories and cultural traditions. The example of Russia in particular is significant in this field. Russia is often excluded from universal histories of museums (the work of Alma Wittlin is one of the rare exceptions to this rule3). In most of their work, if discussing Russia or the Soviet Union at all, they limit their study to the role of Soviet museums fulfilling the political needs of the USSR and their ideological functions. Russia is compared to other European totalitarian countries during the two world wars (Germany and Italy). The one specific aspect of Soviet museums emphasized, is the educational role. But one must realize that the Soviet period was not always the same; one can clearly see different periods. The repressions and totalitarian unification of the 1930’s were preceded by a period of relatively free research and revolutionary innovations, which lasted from 1917 until the late 1920’s. During this period Russian museologists closely followed new trends and directions in research elsewhere, including visitor studies. Experiments in this area began in the 1920’s but they were interrupted in the 30’s for political reasons and only taken up again after a long interval in the 1970’s. Currently, this research has attracted the interest of many practitioners and theorists of museum work in Russia. Returning to this experience can be useful for Russian museology today, where we can clearly see a trend of social and cultural exclusion, contradicting the principles of liberal democracy and, in some cases, basic human rights.

The audience We have already seen studies in historical and museological literature that examine the major means and procedures used in studying museum visitors,

2 | Lynne Teather, “Museology and its Traditions. The British Experience, 1845–1945”, Ph. D. Dissertation, Department of Museum Studies, University of Leicester 1984. 3 | Alma S. Wittlin, The Museum: Its history and its tasks in education. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1949; Alma S. Wittlin, Museums: in Search of a Usable Future. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1970.

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in order to analyze how Russian museum sociology was formed.4 In addition, the works of contemporary Russian museologists Larisa Rafienko and Marina Youkhnevitch, which covered the history of museum visitor studies during the years 1920–1930, give a fragmented image of the issues and discussions around this theme, because they use only published materials (articles, accounts, interviews and essays from old journals and newspapers, etc.) as a basis.5 The articles published in different journals in the middle of the 1920’s to the early 1930’s—that is to say the period when the publication of museological studies in Russia was at its best—generally present only the points of view defined by the authors. We cannot really follow how ideas were formed nor know the entire range of opinions. In order to enrich our knowledge it is useful to examine other previously unknown sources in archives, including those that have preserved the spirit of the debate. Only these sources can provide the precise intellectual history of the cultural life of the country at that time. One such source is the protocols or reports of the meetings of the Museum Section of the Sociological Committee of the State Institute for the History of Arts, material which until today is still “terra incognita” for most researchers.6 The Institute for the History of Arts was founded in Saint Petersburg in 1912 by Count Valentin Zubov. In 1916 the Institute was given the status of School of Higher Learning, and in 1925 it was given the name of State Institute for the History of Arts. The same year Fyodor Schmit, an outstanding scholar, theoretician and art historian, was appointed director.7 The Institute was composed of departments where the work was coordinated by the Committee for the Sociological Study of Art, whose mission was to link “the research work 4 | Марина Юхневич, »Я поведу тебя в музей…«. Москва, РИК, 2011, pp. 53-69. 5 | Лариса Рафиенко »Из истории изучения посетителей музеев в 1920–1930-х годах», in:  Вопросы экскурсионной работы. Москва, 1973. pp. 193-211; Марина Юхневич »Музейная аудитория и ее изучение«, in: Художественный музей в образовательном процессе. Санкт-Петербург.: Специальная литература, pp. 77-95. 6 | Виталий Ананьев [Vitaly Ananiev], »Становление Гатчинского музея в 1920-е гг. Из фонда О. Ф. Вальдгауера«, in: Вестник архивиста, no 4, 2010, pp. 176-177 ; Shapovaloff L., The Russian State Institute of Art History: Its contributions to literary scholarship and its liquidation // Записки русской академической группы в С.Ш.А [The papers of Russian academic group in USA]. New-York, 1972. Т. VI. Pp. 115-159 The article by L. Shapovaloff’s argument is based upon only published sources, as she couldn’t use the archival sources. For this reason her conclusions sometimes can be unverified. 7 | His book, Museum work. The question of exhibition, published in 1929, was a milestone in the history of Russian museology.

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of all the services of the Institute in the field of the sociology of art”.8 Among several sections in this committee were “universal theory and methodology”, “October art” (i.e. art after and about the October Revolution 1917), “pedagogy”, “study of the art of the peasants of Northern Russia”, and the “Museum Section”.9 The Museum Section was founded by Oskar Waldhauer, a prominent specialist in the art of antiquity who had worked for many years in the Hermitage. At the Institute he directed the department of Fine Arts.10 The members of this Section presented papers on the most current issues of museum work and discussed them during their debates. They compiled bibliographies of literature in both Russian and foreign languages in the field of museology and the organization of museums; they prepared exhibitions; they produced a volume of articles; in the summer they directed practical workshops located in the museum-palaces around Leningrad [now again Saint Petersburg] for students in a few of the higher learning establishments. Hundreds of people attended the sessions that were open to the public.11 During these sessions questions were raised regarding the future of museums of the history of daily life, which had been installed in former palaces and private mansions in and around Leningrad; debates were also held about the new exhibitions in the Russian Museum and the Hermitage; people discussed the use of archival material in exhibitions, as well as the new trends in museum work in Europe (Germany and Italy). One of the questions discussed during these sessions was that of museum visitors.

H ow visitors perceive e xhibitions A paper on the theme “Issues regarding the study of the perception of the museum visitor” was presented on 20 April 1926. The author, Vera Belyavskaya, an art historian employed at the Russian Museum, approached the subject by underlining the current importance of this work in contemporary museums. The “reform of the creation of museums” which followed the Revolution, made this study even more important. The new organizational system “aimed to di8 | Архив Государственного Эрмитажа (Далее–АГЭ). Фонд 6. Опись 1. Дело 219. Лист 44;   Ксения Кумпан »К истории возникновения Соцкома в Институте истории искусств (Еще раз о Жирмунском и формалистах)« in: На рубеже двух столетий: Сборник в честь 60-летия Александра Васильевича Лаврова. Москва: НЛО, 2009, pp. 345-360. 9 | Центральный государственный архив литературы и искусств СанктПетербурга (Далее–ЦГАЛИ СПб). Фонд 82. Опись 3. Дело 14. Лист 110. 10 | АГЭ. Ф. 6. Оп. 1. Д. 219. Л. 91 об. 11 | ЦГАЛИ СПб. Ф. 82. Оп. 3. Д. 21. Л. 47; Д. 27. Л. 8.

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rect exhibitions towards the masses and to this end, it is necessary to know how museum material is perceived by the larger public.” We can, says the author, reach this aim only by “scientifically taking the museum public into account”, and we must find appropriate methods to do so. In Belyavskaya’s opinion the experience gathered from the studies of theatregoers would provide a solid background for compiling the methods needed for studying museum visitors. Regarding the choice of which part of the public that should be the essential object of study, the author points out that it is important, first of all, to study the “museal needs and the perception” of workers who represent the “proletarian masses, the most important visitors, organized for excursions to the museum”. But it is also necessary to study “the other groups of social classes” because only a comparative analysis can provide significant data. The objective of this paper was to identify methods to be used in visitor studies.

M e thods of analysis Belyavskaya presented three analytical methods: 1) direct observation, when “the observer stands next to the visitor and notes his or her reaction while viewing an artistic work”; 2) recording exactly the visitors’ reactions with diagrams and time measurements: “The observer follows the path of the group of visitors through the exhibition and notes how long the group looks at one work or the another, how attentive they are and how many people move away while the group stops before one or the other work”; and 3) the enquiry method, with questionnaires that can be brief or detailed. The brief questionnaires are filled in directly at the museum, the detailed questionnaires at home. The first would give immediate reactions, the second an analysis of these impressions. In order to reach a truly authentic picture, she argued, all three methods must be used and with the largest number of visitors possible to obtain exact data.12 In general, we can see that all these methods were traditional for museum people who, since the middle of the 1920’s, had been working with the study of the museum public. They had been used successfully at the Tretyakov Gallery, which had become the “initiator of these enquiries” and also at the Historical Museum (in Moscow) which also undertook these experiments. We can suppose, in fact, that the educational department of the Tretyakov Gallery, which had been copied in many different places, including the sessions of the Academic Council of the Russian Museum, stimulated the research in Leningrad. We should note that the Russian Museum became the second museum in the

12 | АГЭ. Ф. 6. Оп. 1. Д. 219. Л. 122 об.-123.

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country doing this, and was addressing the study of its public three years before the Historical Museum.13 The paper, “Issues regarding the perception of the museum visitor”, caused a lively debate. The “reform of the creation of museums” mentioned by Belyavskaya at the beginning of her paper touched directly on museum activities and raised questions concerning the principal substance of the museum’s objectives, adding new objectives to museums. Afterwards, this reform brought serious consequences, one of which was that museums were transformed into entirely new social establishments with propagandistic goals and a strong inclination towards the inclusion not of objects but diagrams, texts and reproductions.14

A ne w starting point The debate caused by Belyavskaya’s paper not only brought to light the variety of specialists’ opinions on this topic, but especially aroused the interest of museum workers who were looking for new directions for their activities. But Belyavskaya’s paper was also criticized. Maria Kroutikova, a colleague at the Russian Museum, doubted that “an exhibition can be conceived by using the visitors as a point of departure”. Instead, the exhibition “should be based on the development of one scientific idea or another” although “naturally, the exhibition must be put together in a way that makes it accessible to the visitor’s understanding, even if he or she is has a mediocre cultural level.” This was the position of traditional Russian museology at the beginning of the 20th century, giving primary important to the scientific concept as the basis for creating an exhibition: “The initial point of departure—the scientific thought, logical and clear, expressed by the objects—not how the museum visitor perceives the exhibition”.15  Boris Brullov, one of the founders of research on visitors’ excursions to museums, supported the opinion about the importance of the visitor. During the first quarter of the 20th century he was one of the main organizers of excursions to Saint Petersburg and the author of several guides of the city. He worked with the Institute for Excursions and the Centre of Excursions in the Excursion 13 | Лариса Рафиенко, »Из истории изучения посетителей музеев в 1920– 1930-х годах«, in: Вопросы экскурсионной работы. Москва, 1973. p. 194. Ананьев, »О некоторых проектах применения 14 | Виталий социологического подхода в музейном деле Советской России 1920-х гг.», in: Вестник РГГУ. 2011. Вып. 17. Серия: Культурология, Искусствоведение, Музеология, pp. 275-283. 15 | АГЭ. Ф. 6. Оп. 1. Д. 219. Л. 123.

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Base, which was part of the local government for political teaching.16 By underlining the undeniable importance of the issue under debate, he noted that “the understanding of the museum visitor is influenced by several accidental circumstances, and very little by usual events”, and one must differentiate between them. For instance, “it is important to record the density of the public in different galleries”17, but this can also happen for accidental reasons. Pavel Schoultz, Secretary of the Section and one of Brullov’s colleagues at the Hermitage Museum, expressed the same opinion: he said that “we must not exaggerate the importance of the different categories of visitors at exhibitions … we must see the conclusions as useful auxiliary material for museum workers and excursions, but it is not possible to use this study as the basis for exhibitions”. Yet it is important that this work emphasize the attention that our museum colleagues must pay to visitors: “It helps them to find a supple exhibition language, which can be adequately adapted to the masses.” We cannot underestimate the importance of this theory, Schoultz concluded.

The l anguage of the object For quite a long time Russian historians have noted that the concepts of a specific museum language grew rapidly during the 1930s.18 During the same time researchers were attracted by the semantics and idea of a syntax of language: how, with the support of this language, do we transmit an idea? What elements make up this language? The practical questions regarding the museum language were in the background in the USSR, whereas during the1960s these issues came to the foreground in the museology of countries abroad. In his famous article “A view point: the museum as a communications system and implications for museum education” Duncan Cameron wrote that “effective communication between exhibitor and visitor remains dependent on the ability of the visitor to understand the non-verbal language of the ‘real things’”.19 In

16 | В. А. Фролов, »Жизнь и деятельность Б. П. Брюллова«, in: Анциферовские чтения: Материалы и тезисы конференции. Л., 1989. p. 40-42. 17 | АГЭ. Ф. 6. Оп. 1. Д. 219. Л. 123 об. 18 | Николай Никишин, »Язык музея как универсальная моделирующая система музейной деятельности», in: Музееведение. Проблемы культурной коммуникации в музейной деятельности. Москва, 1989. p. 7-8. 19 | Duncan Cameron, »Viewpoint: The Museum as a Communications System and Implications for Museum Education«, in: Curator, no.11, 1968, p. 36.

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her work, Hooper-Greenhill likewise insisted on the importance of mean values in the understanding of museum exhibitions.20 In the middle of the 1920’s Russian museologists already understood the need to create a specific exhibition language “that would be tactfully impressed on the awareness of the masses.” Even Belyavskaya, summing up her paper, remarked that it was necessary to develop the procedures for the studies of the museum public, if only “to establish a common language for museum workers and for visitors via exhibitions.”21 This tradition was not lost during the following periods. The best representatives of Russian museology always recalled the importance of the “anthropological factor”. Leonid Matzoulevitch, an outstanding archaeologist and historian of Byzantine art, while giving courses in museum studies at the Faculty of History at the University of Leningrad during the hardest period of repression and xenophobia of the late Stalin years, late 1940s-early 1950s, taught his students that “…the educational work, the work of giving courses, the work of discourse and demonstration, in short museum work, should necessarily contain the idea of man [in this case: visitor]. The image of the exhibition, the architectural planning, the image of architectural space [staging], also includes man, a real person, the student, the pupil, etc. The exhibition designer should know him and provide for him.”22 We see clearly that this principle is still one of the most important for work in every museum. In studying the history of this phenomenon [how visitors have been treated and studied] we can improve our knowledge of one of the most interesting periods of Russian museology, as well as envisage optimizing appropriate practices in contemporary museums.

A privileged public ? Unfortunately, the study of museum visitors was interrupted at the Institute for the History of Arts. The Museum Section changed its name, and ended its activities at the end of the 1920s. The report for the years 1928-1929 of the Department of Fine Arts says that “/…/The Museum Section was no longer functioning because of the reorganization of the Institute and the lack of necessary workers.”23 In 1930, the director, Fyodor Schmit, was forced to leave his posi20 | Eilean Hooper-Greenhill, »Learning in art museums: strategies of interpretation«, in: E. Hooper-Greenhill (ed.), The Educational Role of the Museum. London: Routledge, 1999, pp. 44-52. 21 | АГЭ. Ф. 6. Оп. 1. Д. 219. Л. 123. 22 | Санкт-Петербургский филиал архива Российской Академии Наук. Фонд. 991. Опись. 1. Дело 185. Лист 87. 23 | ЦГАЛИ СПб. Ф. 82. Оп. 3. Д. 39. Л. 36.

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tion.24 The research goals had changed and the Institute was now to be “put into the direction of Marxism”. In the research pursued at the Department of Fine Arts, the creation of “the history of Soviet art” was now prioritized. Nonetheless, the question “regarding the requests of the masses for the organization of museum work and for museum exhibitions, and how these requests and questions are addressed in museums” remained.25 However, this theme (as all the approaches to work at the Institute) became “a question of class”, nothing else. Of all the categories of museum visitors utilized by the Institute only one was chosen and formulated in the museum programme: “taking into account the worker-visitor (visitor from the working class) and his artistic level”. Moreover, museum work was mandated to have an even broader scope than before and cover not only museums but also the entire artistic life in society. Institute employees were supposed to “wake the attitudes of the working classes towards new trends, study what language of the visual arts was the closest and the most understandable for the visiting worker; highlight the differentiation of classes for the worker audience”. To reach these ends, it was necessary to link the research of the Institute to the work of the Institute for Political Education named after N. K. Kroupskaya (widow of Vladimir Lenin and a very influential person in the milieu of educational politics), and of the Pedagogical Institute named after A. I. Herzen, which was a section of the educational department of the Russian Museum. The study of the worker-audience was to be carried out in exhibitions, in museums, and during excursions. The Institute formulated plans for the methodology, which stipulated observing the reactions of visitors (questionnaires, instructions on the methods). They planned for papers devoted to the study of the public at the Tretyakov Gallery by using questionnaires, by appointing museum consultants and guides. They envisaged creating a special office that would work with visitor studies by appointing students from the higher school of education. As the ground for carrying out this research, they would mount art exhibitions at the House of Culture. The results of this research would be presented in articles addressing the two main themes: the sociological concept of the contemporary visitor, and the artistic tastes of the worker-visitor. Among the people who worked with these projects were colleagues at the Institute (for example Alexander Goutschin, a young art critic and student of Fyodor Schmit) as well as museum workers cooperating with the Institute (Pavel Schoultz, an archaeologist and curator at the Hermitage). They also wanted to use inquiries on another theme: “what should we teach the proletariat about modern European art, and why should we?”.26

24 | He was arrested in 1933 and executed in 1937. 25 | Ibid. 77 (see footnote 23). 26 | Ibid. p. 86-87.

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As we can judge from archival sources, research on solutions to these problems was, however, further interrupted by the devastation of the Institute and the changes in its profile by the beginning of 1930’s. In 1931 the Department of the National Academy of Art Criticism was created in Leningrad, and museums were excluded from its plans. We had then to wait for decades to return to taking the museum public into account, especially work that could lead to its empowerment.

C onclusion to essays 1 and 2 In these two small papers I have tried to examine the question of museum visitor studies in contemporary context and historical perspective. In my opinion, with adequate study of this question, focus may be placed on two related though different issues. The first is an issue of a dialogue or communication between the visitor and the museum. In my opinion, in the context of modern science it may become more relevant to return not to philosophical conceptualizations of humanist thinkers (such as Mikhail Bakhtin ) that (as any humanities) cannot be accurately verified, but instead to the use of the ideas of modern cognitive science, in particular the discovery of mirror neurons. This turn corresponds to general patterns of modern knowledge that are characterized by the convergence of the humanities and the exact sciences. The second is a problem of the visitor and his presence in the anthropological museum space. Using a case study of the little-known history of museum studies in Soviet Russia in the second half of the 1920s, we wanted to show by this particular instance how the study of the visitor is affected by the general socio-political context and is closely related to the problem of suppression of democratic freedoms in society. This example allows us a new look at the history of museum visitor studies that include the Russian experience. Translated by O. Krivenkova, V. Bondarchuk

W orks cited (also for the other A nanie v essay) Ананьев Виталий [Ananiev Vitaly], »Становление Гатчинского музея в 1920е гг. Из фонда О. Ф. Вальдгауера« [Formation of the Gatchina Museum in 1920th: From O. F. Valdgauer’s fund], Вестник архивиста [in: Herald of an Archivist], 2010. No 4. pp. 175-185. Ананьев Виталий [Ananiev Vitaly] ,«О некоторых проектах применения социологического подхода в музейном деле Советской России 1920х гг.« [On some projects of application of the sociological approaches to the

Who do you Think they are?

museums of Soviet Russia during 1920th], Вестник РГГУ [Herald of Russian State University for the Humanities]. 2011. Вып. 17. Серия: Культурология, Искусствоведение, Музеология [Series: Cultural Studies, Art History, Museology ], pp. 275-283. Санкт-Петербургский филиал архива Российской Академии Наук [The Archive of The Russian Academy of Sciences. St. Petersburg Branch]. Фонд. 991. Опись. 1. Дело 185. Brandist Craig, The Bakhtin Circle: Philosophy, Culture, and Politics. London and Sterling, VA: Pluto Press, 2002. Cameron, Duncan, “A Viewpoint: The Museum as a Communications System and Implications for Museum Education”, in: Curator, 1968. Vol. 11. pp. 33-40. Фролов В. А., [Frolov V. A.], »Жизнь и деятельность Б. П. Брюллова« [The life and works by B. P. Bryullov], in: Анциферовские чтения: Материалы и тезисы конференции [Conference in the memory of N. P. Antsiferov: Materials and theses]. Ленинград, 1989. Harris, Jennifer, “Dialogism and Visitor Experience”, in: The Dialogic Museum and the Visitor Experience. ICOFOM Study Series (ISS), vol. 40, 2011. Hooper-Greenhill, Eilean, “Learning in art museums: strategies of interpretation”, in: Eilean Hooper-Greenhill, (Ed.), The Educational Role of the Museum. London: Routledge, 1999, pp. 44-52. Hooper-Greenhill, Eilean, “Studying Visitors”, in: Macdonald, Sharon (ed), Companion to Museum Studies. Chichester, England: Willey, 2008, pp. 362-376. Ivanov Vyacheslav V., “The Dominant of Bakhtin’s Philosophy: Dialog and Carnival”, in: Critical Studies, no. 3(2), 4(1/2), 1993, pp. 3-12. Ivanov Vyacheslav V., “Towards a Theory of the Speech of the Other Person”, in: Elementa. Journal of Slavic Studies and of Comparative Cultural Semiotics, vol. 4, no.1, 1998, pp. 71-96. Jacobi, Daniel, “Dialogism in museums ”, in: The Dialogic Museum and the Visitor Experience. ICOFOM Study Series (ISS), vol. 40, 2011. Keysers, Christian et al., “Audiovisual mirror neurons and action recognition”, in: Experimental Brain Research, 2003, no. 153, p. 628-636. Кумпан Ксения [Kumpan Xenia], »К истории возникновения Соцкома в Институте истории искусств (Еще раз о Жирмунском и формалистах)« [To the history of formation of Sociological Committee of the Institute for the History of Arts (One more time about Zhirmunsky and formalists)] in: На рубеже двух столетий: Сборник в честь 60-летия Александра Васильевича Лаврова [At the Turn of Two Centuries: Festshrift in the honor of Alexander Vasilievitch Lavrov]. Москва: Новое литературное обозрение, 2009, pp. 345-360. Центральный государственный архив литературы и искусства СанктПетербурга [The Central State Archive of Literature and Arts of Saint-Petersburg]. Фонд 82. Опись 3. Дела 14, 21, 27, 39.

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Архив Государственного Эрмитажа [The Archive of State Hermitage]. Фонд 6. Опись 1. Дело 219. Никишин Николай [Nikishin Nikolay], »Язык музея как универсальная моделирующая система музейной деятельности« [The language of museum as an universal modelling system of museum activity], in: Музееведение. Проблемы культурной коммуникации в музейной деятельности [Museum Studies: Problems of cultural communication in museum activity]. Москва, 1989. 7-15. Рафиенко Лариса [Rafienko Larisa] »Из истории изучения посетителей музеев в 1920–1930-х годах« [From the history of museum visitor studies in 1920– 1930’s ], in: Вопросы экскурсионной работы [The questions of guided tours]. Москва, 1973. pp. 193-211. Ramachandran, Vilayanur S., “Mirror neurons and imitation learning as the driving force behind ’the great leap forward’ in human evolution”. URL: http:// williamlspencer.com/mirrorneurons.pdf Rizzolatti, Giacomo, Craighero, Laila, “The Mirror-Neuron System”, in: Annual Review of Neuroscience, 2004, no. 27, pp. 169-192. Rizzolatti, Giacomo Sinigaglia, Corrado, Mirrors in the Brain: How Our Minds Share Actions, Emotions, and Experience. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. Shapovaloff Lyubov, The Russian State Institute of Art History: Its contributions to literary scholarship and its liquidation // Записки русской академической группы в С.Ш.А [The papers of Russian academic group in USA]. New-York, 1972. Т. VI. pp. 115-159. Steinby Liisa, “Hermann Cohen and Bakhtin’s early aesthetics”. Studies in East European Thought.September 2011, Vol. 63 Issue 3, p. 227-249. Teather Lynne, “Museology and Its Traditions. The British Experience, 1845–1945.” Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Museum Studies, University of Leicester 1984. Wittlin, Alma S, The Museum: Its history and its tasks in education. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1949. Wittlin, Alma S, Museums: in Search of a Usable Future. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1970. Юхневич Марина [Youkhnevitch Marina], “Я поведу тебя в музей…” [«I will lead you to the museum ...«] Москва: РИК, 2011 Юхневич Марина [Youkhnevitch Marina], »Музейная аудитория и ее изучение« [Museum visitors and museum visitor studies], in: Художественный музей в образовательном процессе [Art museum in the educational process]. СанктПетербург.: Специальная литература, pp. 77-95.

Acknowledged and Empowered Visitors in Socialist Croatia Diachronic Exploration Žarka Vujić and Helena Stublić, University of Zagreb – Croatia

I ntroduction or the position of visitors within museology as an information science As Croatian museologists we first have to analyze the position of visitors in museological theory defined within the framework of information science by the founder of Croatian museology, professor Ivo Maroević (1937–2007), a wellknown and active member of ICOFOM. His texts on museology were carefully analyzed within ICOFOM, especially his essential work known to the international museological community as Introduction to Museology: the European Approach.1 Professor Maroević was most certainly aware of the important role of museum visitors or museum users. However, in comparison with his investigations on museum objects as signs, the notion of museality and museological functions, the role of users received little of his attention. Understandably, we had to ask ourselves what the reason for that really was. It is, however, first necessary to take into consideration the time frame in which Maroević’s system of museology was developed. It spanned the period from 1967 and the introduction of the Postgraduate Programme in Museology, Documentation and Librarianship at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Zagreb, to the early 1980s when the Croatian museological school of thought was recognized as a social science discipline. The centre of this school’s interest was the museum object, or more specifically its museality. We consider the concept of museality to be the symbol of the Central European museological school of thought. In that circle, which includes Austria, Czech 1 | Ivo Maroević, Introduction to Museology: The European Approach. Műnchen: Vlg. Dr. C. Müller-Straten, 1998.

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Republic, Poland, Slovenia and Croatia, museality is a well-known, but today not a widely used concept. In conceiving his own museological system Maroević appropriated the concept of museality from Zbynek Z. Stransky, a Czech museologist with an educational background in philosophy, and continued to interpret it as the property or characteristic of a museum object that represents one reality in another, one time in another.2 Stransky claimed that museality is that aspect of reality which we can know only through a presentation of the relationship between man and reality.3 This clearly shows his view that museality is the result of human activity. However, in that period, which was characterized by the early stages of global computerization and focused on information, museum objects as information sources and carriers were more important than people and their activities. Speaking of Maroević’s museological concepts, it should be stressed that the Zagreb School of Museology insisted on museality also being places and objects outside museums, such as nature parks, cultural monuments and urban areas. That was a new approach to defining museality which had not been mentioned or explored by authors from the aforementioned Central European museological circle (but the concept comes rather close to the more modern concept of “heritage” at large). We have tried to find the reasons for low visitor visibility in Maroević’s system of museology in the then epistemologically dominant structuralism which contributed to the view that museum object or heritage complexes as signs were more important than people and their individual meaning making practices, understanding and experiences. In order to explore museum collecting in light of semiotics, we go back to museum object as signs which were, according to Maroević, based on the triadic model of material, form and meaning. In order to bring as much clarity as possible into the issue of signs and museum objects, his approach was checked against the original theoretical semiotic works such as those by Ch. S. Peirce and C. Morris who had long before introduced into the process of semiosis the role of interpreter. Maroević also became aware of such sign structures through time. Encouraged by the polemics on the concept of museality in the circles of Croatian museum professionals, he wrote in 1996 that “people—curators, collectors, researchers or amateurs—attribute museality to objects.”4 Nevertheless, he never changed his semiotic model of the museum object as

2 | Ibid. p. 130. 3 | Ibid. 4 | Ivo Maroević, “Once again about museality”, in: Informatica museologica, No.3-4, 1996, p. 60.

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sign. We altered Maroević’s model by applying semiotic theory to explain the semiosis of a museum object as it is collected:5

Graphic presentation of semiosis of museum objects in the act of collecting

The creation of the semiotic model of collecting based on the original understanding of semiosis as sign formation required: • fusion of material and form into the material reality of the object • introduction to the reality from which the object or heritage item was taken (as an equivalent phenomenon referred to by the sign) • introduction of those who create signs—people, that is, interpreters Ever since the first presentation of the model in the academic and professional circles in Croatia, we have emphasized that “interpreter” should be understood to encompass a wide range of people, from someone who comes into contact with artefacts or heritage complexes for the first time, who researches and interprets them, to those who create various forms of communication, and to those who use them. Until recently, we thought that the new concept of “visitors”, silent and hidden within the concept of interpreter, appeared in the museological scene in Croatia at the end of the 1990’s. However, we would like to point out two earlier occasions. The first is the end of the 19th century, and the other, even more interesting, is around the end of 1930’s. The following sections will explore these historical developments.

5 | Žarka Vujić, “Museum object and museum collecting as viewed by semiotics”, in: Informatologia, Vol. 32, No. 3-4, 1999, pp. 200–208.

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V isitors in the first wave of national museums Collecting quantitative data on museum visitors began in the period when Croatia formed part of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy and especially from 1874, which was the foundation of the Croatian National Statistics Office in Zagreb. Sometime during that period, the Croatian art historian and museologist Izidor Krsnjavi (1845—1927) launched his great cultural programme. Having explored his written oeuvre and museum accomplishments, especially the foundation of the Arts and Crafts Museum in Zagreb, we have come to the conclusion that he was Croatia’s pioneer in museology. Naturally, at that time museology in Croatia was under German influence, understood primarily as practical museology, or as Krsnjavi used to say—museum science (Museumswissenschaft)6 . In his newspaper articles, written in order to promote the need for the establishment of the Arts and Crafts Museum, Krsnjavi used data collected on visitors to permanent exhibitions at similar small museums in the monarchy, but also information on museum library users and visitors to lectures held in museums. This all shows us the contemporary forms of museum communication which are, in fact, widely used today, in the 21st century. However, Krsnjavi was not satisfied only with numbers. Rather, he wanted to know the profile of visitors. The visitor book of the privately opened Arts and Crafts Museum in Zagreb in the early 1880s sought information on the person’s profession, that is, social class, as a way of finding out what sort of people most frequently visited museums. Another example is the 1897 document from the Archaeological Museum in Zagreb which shows a monthly recording of visitors. It could provide a simple but clear picture of the periods of highest and lowest attendance. Especially noticeable during the 1930’s, visitor attendance numbers served as a tool for criticizing Zagreb’s Modern Gallery. The director, painter Jozo Kljaković 7 and his opponent—painter, set designer, critic and exhibition designer Ljubo Babić8 –debated the management of the gallery. Babić used the gallery’s visitor statistics to support his opinion of Kljaković’s poor management, pointing out the very small number of only 2719 visitors in 1935. In comparison, other Zagreb museums had five to ten times more visitors. However, the dispute also involved opposing views on the Modern Gallery’s mission and audiences. Babić stated that a museum or gallery should be a lively and modern institution and constantly exhibit new national and foreign shows in order to attract a wide 6 | In Germany, also the term Museumskunde was used to address the more practical museology. 7 | (1889 -1969) 8 | (1870–1974)

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range of visitors and thereby encourage an interest in art in general.”9 Kljaković countered that Babić, “an ‘art ideologue’ has a capitalist and bourgeois criterion, as if the value of cultural institutions can be measured by the income they produce and not by the ideas and aesthetic value they represent”10. Eight decades later, we have not come very far from problems noted in this debate. Can we attract an enviable number of visitors and make money while remaining true to the educational and social mission of the museum? The museum world of the 1930’s in Europe—especially the art museum— was most certainly marked by the need for reform of the institution. An interesting survey was conducted by the Revue Magazine in Paris in 1931 on the need for reform of public galleries. The results were published as book by the gallery owner Georges Wildenstein. Under the title Musées, Enquete international sur le reforme des galleries, the book contained texts of forty one experts who participated in the survey11 including Henri Focillon, Salomon Reinach and Georges Henri Rivière. The texts show that museological thought reached a peak immediately before 1934 and the International Conference on Museography in Madrid was also the event which gathered together most of the directors of art museums, who had until then discussed pretty much exclusively museum architecture, equipment, exhibition methods, collection management and the like. The extensive conference proceedings were published under the title Muséographie; architecture et amenagement des musees d’art, Paris, 1935.12 In the United States there was considerable discussion of visitor concerns. Gilman, 1916 talked about visitor fatigue. Robins made extensive observations on museum visitors’ behaviour.13 Melton researched and experimented in art and science museums. In Great Britain Murray14 measured exhibition visit duration, 9 | Ljubo Babić, “Croatian Art - Successes, Exhibitions, Failures, Catastrophe and Support”, in: Croatian Daily. 7.02.1937, p 19. 10 | Joza Kljaković, “Mr. Joza Kljaković responds to Mr. Ljubo Babić…”, in: Morning Paper, 1937, No. 9007, p. 8. 11 | Maroevic, p. 79. 12 | Unfortunately, we still have not managed to examine it in order to see whether it contained museographic aspects considered from the perspective of visitors. Sources tell us that, as early as 1901, the Smithsonian designed a room for children-visitors in a particular way and with specially selected objects which stimulated children’s curiosity. Hood, G. Marilyn, After 70 Years of Audience research, What Have We Learned?, p. 16.http://w.informalscience.org/images/research/VSA-a0a4s8-a_5730.pdf, (accessed 14.01.2014). 13 | Robinson, Edward Stevens, The behaviour of the museum visitor. http://files.eric. ed.gov/fulltext/ED044919.pdf, (accessed 12.12.2013). 14 | C. Hay Murray, curator of a zoological collection in Liverpool, published his work in 1931.

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and introduced value based criteria, taking into consideration the change in the amount knowledge before and after the visits.15 Croatian museum professionals kept track of the development of museology and museography as much as they could. Ljubo Babić expanded his experience at European exhibitions both as a visitor and a designer for the Yugoslav section of the International Hunting Exhibition in Berlin in 1937 and the Yugoslav Pavilion at the 1939 World Exposition in New York City. Others, such as the professional and life partners—Zdenko Vojnović (1912-1954) and Zdenka Munk (1912-1985), attended professional advancement courses in Paris. Vojnović was the first lecturer of the museology course at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences from 1950 (within the art history programme),and Munk was curator and director of the Museum of Arts and Crafts. In late 1930, Vojnović went on scholarship to the French capital, while Munk attended École de Louvre in 1938. During the Second World War they shared the acquired knowledge and skills with their colleagues. As a leftist intellectual, Vojnović was even then a pronounced advocate for the educational role of the museum. He made his opinions especially clear after the war, in the period which saw the birth of Yugoslavia within which Croatia was one of six republics until 1991.

S ocialist period Taking a look at this period in reference to museum work and museum professionals we can clearly see that the very beginning of the period (apart from the first five most difficult post-war years,) was marked by pronounced attention to museum audiences and users. How else should we interpret Vojnović’s well-argued insistence on the educational mission of museums, a mission which should be equal to its scientific mission. This then is a shift in interests towards society in which museums can and should play an important role. For Vojnović museology was the study of museum work, and in accordance with social requirements, the work was dedicated not exclusively to collection but to visitors as well. Vojnović explicitly showed that he was familiar with the ideas of Laurence Vail Coleman, an American museologist who claimed that the so called European museum is defined by collections, whereas the American museum was based on a specific usage of collections for increasing the lev-

15 | Chapter Nine, The Museological Tradition at Work (“How Thought Circulated”: The Experience of the Visitor), in: Lynne Teather, Museology and Its Tradition: The British Experience. 1845-1945. Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Leicester, Department of Museum Studies, 1984, p. 12. http://www.utoronto.ca/mouseia/course2/MUSEUM9.pdf, (accessed 14.01.2014).

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el of general knowledge about culture and science16. It is interesting that such an educational museum mission was not new to the socialist realities. And it was exactly the visitor-focused mission.

Travelling exhibition “Around the Table” set up in the cafeteria of the Pliva Factory in Zagreb in 1958. Courtesy of MDC, Zagreb. Photo by Žarka Vujić. This became especially clear upon reading the book Through Exhibition Halls of Art Museums (Manual for museum viewers)17 by the Russian author R.V. Rosental which was published in 1929. Its internal Croatian translation in 1947 was requested by the Croatian museologist Antun Bauer (1911-2000), the then director of the Gypsotheque of the Yugoslav Academy of Sciences and Arts, who recognized the value the book could have for Croatian museum professionals. This translation has opened to us the world of early Soviet museological liter16 | Coleman’s words were interpreted by Germain Bazin in The Museum Age. Bruxelles: Dessoir, 1967, p. 267. Vojnović’s words go like this: ”However, there is no mistake in the view of a French museologist that European museums are primarily collections and their aim is primarily to safeguard and to exhibit museum pieces. In the USA museums, as he said, are means not ends, they are social institutions equally useful to the community as churches or libraries”, in: Muzeologija, 1953, No.1, p. 20. The reason why this view was attributed to the French and not American museologist still needs to be explored. 17 | The Croatian title of Rosental’s book, originally written in Russian, was translated into English for the purpose of this paper.

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ature whose serious approach to visitors seems rather surprising to us today. The book was originally written ten years after the October Revolution when the museum as institution was fully developed and ready to “make the rich heritage of cultural history the property of everyone”. The most famous art museums in Moscow and Saint Petersburg (Leningrad) were visited by a large number of people. According to Rosental, museums exhibitions were designed to “serve the interests of not only experts but of as wider population as possible”. However, people or xperts but of as, who became the imperative of the institution, needed to be prepared for the visit, for watching and experiencing art works. Visitor-related concerns, in fact, led to the creation of this serious manual. There is no doubt that Rosental was not only well versed in observing art works but also in observing visitor behavior in museums, especially groups guided by a docent, which was the most common way in which people visited museums in Russia at that time. Although he critically examined museum design—the number of art works, inappropriate lighting and the like, he did not choose to educate museum professionals to adapt to the masses. He rather set out to prepare the masses for visiting art museums. According to Rosental, all visitors should have the knowledge of history and mission of art museums and their role in raising awareness about art and, they should have as Rosental says, “the common notion of the meaning of art in general and of its meaning for modernity” (influence by the dominant ideology!). Finally, they should acquire a certain “technique of museum visit” based on six basic rules. The first is related to the duration of the visit which is ideally an hour and a half. The second rule suggests that the visitors should, if possible, become familiar with the exhibition as a whole (even from written materials) and then spend longer time with individual works chosen by the museum docent or visitors themselves. The third rule speaks about the intellectual preparation for the visit through publications, although they could rather rarely be found in Russia in that period. Proper lighting of and distance from art works for better watching experience is the fourth rule, while the fifth rule is related to the use of interpretative materials, especially labels and text panels. The last rule contains an explanation of the reasons why chosen art works should be observed for a long time, as longer as possible. Naturally, the visitors are also advised to acquire knowledge of the basic types of art, techniques of production and the like. It was Rosental’s view that the new mass visitors were those who bring life to Soviet museums. “Although the visitors are still inexperienced and not completely ready, they stopped gaping in confusion and bewilderment.18

18 | All citations have been taken from internal, unpublished sources. Croatian translation of Rosental’s book.

Acknowledged and Empowered Visitors in Socialist Croatia

The impact of Rosental’s book can be detected in Vojnović’s manuscript Problems of Croatian Museums and Galleries19, written in 1950, in which he wrote about the role and relation of museums to different educational and professional institutions, as well as to the Socialist government. Especially interesting part of his text is concerned with museums’ relationship with visitors in which Vojnović offers practical guidelines for additional activities related to exhibitions such as evening visits, regular and special lectures and promotional exhibits in the form of designed shop windows specially rented for this purpose, or show-cases in public places. Vojnović also emphasizes that “the audiences should be asked about their particular need for certain events related to exhibitions”. He was therefore aware of the need for visitor satisfaction surveys, though, as far as we know, they were not conducted until 1967. The professional museum circles were still more inclined to have the statistics on the number of visitors as the most important evaluation criterion. The numbers were published in 1953 in the first number of the professional journal Muzeologija which was launched and edited for a long time by the museologist Antun Bauer. Regarding the number of visitors, it was also pay attention to it in Yugoslavia’s exceptional exhibition L’art médiévale Yougoslave , opened in Chaillot Palace (Museum of French Monuments) in Paris, March 1950. The Fine Arts Archive at the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts in Zagreb holds numerous documents, partly donated by Ljubo Babić who designed the exhibition, and was one of its organizers. These documents attest to an exceptionally professional approach in organizing the exhibition, but also in its reception among the international public and a careful analysis of its visitors. The exhibition was a significant project which was used by the Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia to present itself to cultural Europe and the world after the break with Stalin and the Soviet Union. Viewed as an ideal promotional medium, the exhibition explored the historical and artistic distant past— artistic reflection of our distant, medieval past20 —which could unite all peoples without any references to their future identities, especially those which came into play during the Second World War. Equally important was the desire to stimulate the interest of Europe which was less familiar with that period of Yugoslav heritage. It took two years and a great number of people to prepare the show. According to documents and memories of a second important Croatian

19 | The manuscript is kept at the Museum Documentation Centre in Zagreb and it was probably written as a conference paper. 20 | M. Krleža. “Introduction,” In: Exhibition of Medieval Art of Yugoslav Peoples, exhibition catalogue. Zagreb: Art Pavilion, 1951, p. 5.

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participant in the preparations, the aforementioned Antun Bauer,21 the most demanding work was related to the museographic aspect—the creation of interpretative displays comprised of original art works and copies, photographs and even films. Since a large number were parts of architectural monuments, included were several projects recreating original environments. Copies of fresco paintings from Serbian and Macedonian monasteries were made in Belgrade, while Bauer supervised the process of making plaster casts of old Croatian and Romanesque monuments. It is also important to mention that this exhibition contained all the necessary exhibition elements—clear grouping of artefacts (according to chronology, type of objects and provenance), carefully designed lighting (enigmatic impression was created with the use of milk glass), color, various publications and posters and organized lectures. The contents appear on the preserved plan of the exhibition space, complete with marked locations, photos of exhibition models, and hundreds of sketched views of the exhibition created by artist Babić. In addition, we discovered among the material a graph of attendance at the exhibition (Grafikon posetnika izložbe).

Graphic presentation of the number of visitors to the 1950 exhibition in Paris. Courtesy of Fine Arts Archive, Croatian Academy of Arts and Sciences, Zagreb. Photo by Žarka Vujić. This is a big visual interpretation of quantitative data on exhibition visitors which includes details such as comments about the early period of the show when only a small number of visitors attended which had a note next to it saying transportation workers on strike. This was a strike organized by Paris’ bus 21 | N. Nekić. Life and Work of Dr. Antun Bauer, Djakovo: Karitativni fond UPT, 1994, p. 24.

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and underground drivers. The exhibition was planned to run from 9 March to 24 May but was extended until 25 June. During that period, it was visited by around 38,000 people. The number of visits usually peaked on Sundays, especially those toward the end of the exhibition. Mondays and Fridays were slow days (fatigue at the end of the work week), while on Wednesdays the organizers tried to attract visitors with evening events and guided tours held by esteemed Yugoslav researchers of medieval art and history. Another interesting thing is that the graphic presentation of visitor data was not done by French museum professionals but by the Yugoslav organizers who evidently had to document the attendance. These numbers were also supported by a large collection of newspaper articles published before and during the exhibition in the French, European and Yugoslav press. Regarding evaluation of Croatian exhibitions or museum practice in general, the first audience research was conducted in 1968 in the Croatian History Museum in Zagreb. In the spring of the same year, the most popular Zagreb daily newspaper published an exceptionally interesting article with the title What does the audience want? 22 The article presents the first results of the survey conducted with 600 citizens of various vocations and professions. The journalist called the survey unusual and clearly stated that it represented the first public opinion poll on museum work in Croatia. Friends and well known visitors to that museum, teachers and professors who visited it with their pupils and students and other people whose addresses could be found in the museum’s records, were mailed a questionnaire which they filled in and returned to the museum. The aim of the survey was to measure peoples’ opinions on the exhibitions shown at the museum in the course of 1967. The respondents were asked to state the most successful exhibition comment on the accompanying programmes (lectures, concerts and the like), and suggest new activities and services which could be offered by the museum to all its supporters. These might include organized visits to historical sites, dinners for the friends and members of the Croatian History Museum, and the like. It is significant that the most successful exhibition was the one showing the history of Croatian regions and cities. It should be noted that Croatia was then part of the Yugoslavian federation and expressed sympathies towards national history at that time can be interpreted from the present day perspective as civil courage. If we take the term empowering visitors to mean their active role in stating their own needs and wishes to be met by a heritage institution23, then this process undoubtedly began in Croatia at exactly that moment.

22 | Evening Paper, 19 March 1968, p. 7. 23 | Williams, P. B., “Educational Excellence in Art Museums”, in: The Journal of Aesthetic Education 19 (Summer), 1985, p. 122.

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The same year museologist Antun Bauer, the then director of the Museum Documentation Centre in Zagreb, informed the public about the first comprehensive survey, entitled What do the youth and tourist think of the museum?, which was conducted among pupils and tourists in the capital. Around 600 pupils of Zagreb schools completed the survey and answered just three questions—How many museums have you visited? What is your general opinion about museums? What improvements would you suggest museums make? Although his interpretation and analysis of the data was not based on a scientific method, Bauer still managed to provide a useful overview of young peoples’ attitudes to museums. He mentioned a surprisingly great interest and “intriguing remarks and observations relating to objects in collections, labels and spatial arrangement, squeaky floors, relationship of museum guards to visitors survey of tourists’ opinions was conducted at the Pleso Airport and at the bus station in Zagreb. Bauer’s report also records a selection of answers by international and Croatian tourists. While the former group was represented by their frequent answers, the latter was represented by their distinctive comments.24 This survey illustrates an audience research which went beyond the walls of museums and took place with actual visitors to museums as well as with potential visitors. At first we could not completely understand the context of this marked orientation towards museum visitors in Croatia in the late 1960s. Then we realized the reform of the Yugoslav economic system which officially started in 1965, although preparation had began a lot earlier, was the reason. The reform brought a great change in the national economy since at that time the socialist system allowed for an open economic model which presupposed, as claimed by Ljubo Jurčić and Dragomir Vojnović, a stronger role for the market and the development of indicative instead of directive planning. In other words, what became important were results—indicators of growth, production and sale. The reforms penetrated each area of activity, including museums. One of Antun Bauer’s texts published in 1967 clearly conveys the stressful circumstances of museum professionals, especially in small towns: “The situation of these museum workers is, in the majority of cases, very difficult because they are pressured by those who demand results, and yet, who are not in the position (and have hardly any interest) in understanding the number of tasks faced by museum professionals in their everyday work.”25 These words, in fact, also

24 | Today, these remarks can be interpreted as the author’s clocked criticism of society (one respondent said that he had no time for museums because he was preoccupied with his managerial functions). 25 | “Response to Our Survey: Community of Slavonian Museums” in: Bulletin of Slavonian Museums, No.2, 1967, p. 10.

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describe the current situation in which management is not familiar with the characteristics and particularities of the production it is supposed to manage. Naturally, any reform is unthinkable without an awareness of the existing situation. That is why the Blue Book of Museums—a feasibility study on the conditions and problems of museum work26, came into being. It was a sort of SWOT analysis of Croatian museums which took into account all known resources of a museum institution—the condition of the building, professionalism of employees related to collecting and exhibiting, amount of available funding necessary for functioning of the museum. Although commissioned by the socialist authorities, the study was created by independent professionals. It was based on actual data without any additional comments and it was professionally developed to point to problems which were to be solved through time. The Blue Book of Museums and the earlier mentioned reform of the Yugoslav economic system prove to be a proper foundation for understanding the early stages of the exploration into the opinions and needs of actual and potential museum visitors. Furthermore, from the present perspective and with the experience of several cultural policies and strategies that have been proposed in Croatia since 1991, in which museums and galleries are barely visible, it seems to us that the former political system considered museums to be exceptionally important institutions. That is, it was aware of the possibilities of their authorized discourses. In the socialist period, museums were visited by genuinely empowered visitors. This statement can be well supported by the article published in 1968 in the best-selling national newspaper which reported on the opinions of young visitors to Trakošćan Castle.27 They wrote an open letter to the editor of the newspaper expressing their discomfort as visitors to the closed museum in the castle and the rude guards. They clearly articulated their opinions and used the sympathy of the media in their own favour. That was the true generation of 1968! Another return to the issue of visitors in the professional museum arena occurred with the opening of the so called Museum Space in 1982, a big exhibition complex situated in the renovated Jesuits monastery in Zagreb that had been planned to hold the collection of Ante Topić Mimara (1898-1987). This internationally renowned art connoisseur and collector, supported by the state authorities, refused to place his art works into what he believed to be an unsuitably adapted building. So the space began its life as a gallery for small and big exhibitions, primarily artistic ones. Ante Sorić, a lawyer experienced in cultural management, was appointed director. It was the first time that the 26 | The study is described in the afore-mentioned newspaper article entitled What does the audience want? Evening Paper, 19 March 1968, p. 7. 27 | Evening Paper, 1 March 1968, p. 5.

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head of a cultural institution in Croatia was given to a non- museum professional and the results were felt in all aspects of museum practice. The main objective of Museum Space was to make a profit, which was achieved primarily from admission fees28. The number of visitors became particularly important. Visitors were recorded not only in individual but also for group visits, which became a new unit of measurement. We know that each exhibition was accompanied with a visitor survey as documented in the newspaper article Museum as a media celebrity 29 written by Durda Milanović, who introduced certain details of market research—demographic and socio-economic information on visitors of four big exhibitions organized at the Museum Space. The exhibition Ancient Chinese Culture was visited by almost 480,000 people! Successive research campaigns showed the existence of the so called loyal audiences, which would repeatedly visit the institution and which, according to the author of the aforementioned research, could not be drawn back only by good exhibitions. They also needed an appropriate selection of souvenirs, guided tours, various additional activities and cafes, which was what Sorić tried to organize. Texts containing opinions of museum professionals, titles and topics of round tables which were organized after the exhibition space made this Croatian museum famous, clearly show that the strategy of the Museum Space introduced a positive sort of unrest among museum professionals. They not only went back to consciously attracting audiences but also to critically analyzing the quality of experience during visits and propagating an even stronger advocacy for the profession of museum educator. In addition, an analysis of Bauer’s unpublished texts also shows that he used the method of visitor observation during mass visits.30 All things considered, the European museum boom also hit the small socialist Republic of Croatia. Unfortunately, soon after, it was hit with yet another boom, this time caused by weapons in what was the Croatian War of Independence (1991-1995).

I nste ad of conclusion The Croatian War for Independence made museum professionals, as well as Croatian people in general, reorder their priorities. Precedence was given to heritage protection and, where it was necessary, relocation. Thought was also given to better documentation which could facilitate protection, whereas pre28 | The opening of the first museum shop with specially designed products on offer accompanying each exhibition should certainly be mentioned. 29 | Start, 1987, from a private collection of newspaper articles. 30 | Museum Audiences: Criticizing Audiences and Criticizing Museums, 1985 (MDC).

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sentation was made with the sole purpose of promoting national interests and the struggle for independence. It should not thus come as a surprise that in such circumstances an inspiring lecture of the esteemed expert Paulette McManus in Zagreb in 1993 was attended by not more than ten museum professionals31. At that time, we interpreted such a small number of people as a lack of interest. However, looking from a distance of two decades, we believe that the reason for that might not have been so much the lack of interest as the war and post-war circumstances which caused both the ineffective flow of information among museum professionals outside Zagreb and the absence of genuine interest. The first decade of the 21st century was strongly oriented towards improving skills and knowledge of museum professionals in relation to visitor research. Contribution to this has been made by those who educate future museum professionals for heritage protection and management, research project Research of Heritage Users 2007-2013 at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Museology Sub-Department, together with the Museum Documentation Centre and professional associations Croatian Museum Society, especially the Section for Museum Education and Cultural Action and museum institutions. However, it is yet to be seen whether visitor research will become a common activity in museums.

Visitor research at the exhibition “Reflection of Time 1945 – 1955” by using mind map as method of collecting qualitative data, 2013. Photo by Helena Stublić.

31 | Paulette McManus, “Evaluation: Describing and Understanding Museum Visitors, their Needs and Reactions“, Informatica museologica, No. 1-4, 1994, pp. 70-73.

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We can discern, for now at least, a new tendency towards market research and the importance of quantitative data among stakeholders and the media that follow cultural activities. It is interesting that such research was conducted and well distributed in the socialist period. However, that fact is not well known or publicly acknowledged. Since 2006 Croatian museums have organized the Night of Museums32 which has, in addition to media coverage, brought to museum professionals a serious need to re-examine communication in their institutions. Many museums have hitherto concentrated on the practical problems relating to the protection of objects, the safety of the building and visitors themselves as well as their attempts to ensure the best possible quality of experience. The event has failed to attract people to other museum activities and it also gave birth to a new kind of audience—those that enter museums only once a year. The insistence on sustainability of cultural institutions as cultural industry is gradually becoming part of the everyday life of Croatian museums as well. Introduction of contract-based financing schemes with the focus on quantitative data related to visits to exhibitions, workshops, and web sites as performance measurement tools is soon to become reality. These circumstances, which characterize neo-liberal economy in addition to the pressure of a five-year-long recession in Croatia, will necessarily call for methodical efforts of empowering visitors and encouraging their participation. However, it will at the same time be necessary to provide lifelong learning opportunities to museum staff in order to enable them to follow changes in visitors’ needs. Some will resist.

W orks cited Babić, Ljubo, “Croatian Art - Successes, Exhibitions, Failures, Catastrophe and Support”, in: Croatian Daily, 7.02.1937, p 19. Bauer, Antun, “Response to Our Survey: Community of Slavonian Museums”, in: Bulletin of Slavonian Museums, No.2, 1967, pp. 10-13. —, “What do the youth and tourist think of the museum?”, in: Bulletin of Museum and Conservation Professionals, No. 1, 1968, pp. 18-19. Bauer, Antun, “Museum Audiences: Criticizing Audiences and Criticizing Museums”, 1985. (Handwritten manuscript in the Museum Documentation Centre MDC in Zagreb). Bazin, Germain, The Museum Age. Bruxelles: Dessoir, 1967. 32 | This event started in 1997 when Berlin museums first organized it within the thirty days of the Museum Month, whereas today it is held twice a year. It is interesting that Croatian museums accepted the celebration of ICOM’s International Museum Day in 1954 but that event lasted for seven days.

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Hood, G. Marilyn, “After 70 Years of Audience research, What Have We Learned? eihttp://w.informalscience.org/images/research/VSA-a0a4s8-a_5730.pdf, 14.01.2014. Jurčić, Ljubo and Vojnović, Dragomir, “Quo vadis Croatia: from self-managed socialism and prosperous society, through economy and politics of transition to wild capitalism and market fundamentalism”, in: Proceedings of the 19th HDE [Croatian Association of Economists] Traditional Conference, Opatija, 2011, pp 787–826. Kljaković, Joza, “Mr. Joza Kljaković responds to Mr. Ljubo Babić…” in: Morning Paper, 1937, No. 9007, p 8. Krleža, Miroslav, „Introduction”, In: Exhibition of Medieval Art of Yugoslav Peoples [Exhibition catalogue], Zagreb: Art Pavilion, 1951. Maroević, Ivo, “Once again about museality”, in: Informatica museologica, No.34, 1996, pp. 60-61. —, Introduction to Museology: The European Approach, München, Vlg. Dr. C. Müller-Straten, 1998. McManus, Paulette, “Evaluation: Describing and Understanding Museum Visitors, their Needs and Reactions,” in: Informatica museologica, No. 1-4, 1994, pp. 70–73 Milanović, Djurdja, “Museum as a media celebrity”, in: Start, 1987. Nekić, Nevenka, Life and Work of Dr. Antun Bauer, Djakovo: Karitativni fond UPT, 1994. Robinson, Edward Stevens, The behaviour of the museum visitor. Washington: AAM, 1928. Rosental, R. V., Through Exhibition Halls of Art Museums (Manual for museum viewers). Priboj, 1929. Teather, Lynne, Museology and Its Tradition: The British Experience 1845-1945. Ph.D. Dissertation, Leicester, University of Leicester, Department of Museum Studies, 1984. Web access: https://www.academia.edu Vojnović, Zdenko, “Scientific and Educational Role of Museums”, in: Muzeologija, No. 1, 1953, pp 19-33 Vujić, Žarka, “Museum object and museum collecting as viewed by semiotics”, in: Informatologia, Vol. 32, No. 3-4, 1999, pp. 200–208 “What does the audience want?”, in: Evening Paper, 19 March 1968, p 7. Williams, P. B. “Educational Excellence in Art Museums”, in: The Journal of Aesthetic Education 19

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Following Visitors’ Comments in Disigning a Museum Refurbishment Identity and Authenticity Maria Cristina Vannini, Soluzionimuseali ims – Italy

In 2006, the Museo Civico of Sansepolcro (Arezzo, Italy) commissioned a feasibility study for the renewal of its display. The city is the birthplace of one of the Maestri of the Western history of Art: Piero della Francesca and the building itself, in Piero’s times, was the public palace of the governors where Piero was appointed to paint the fresco of the Resurrection that was referred to by Aldous Huxely as “the most beautiful picture in the world”.1 Most of the museum’s art collection is due to the governors’ will to enrich the City Hall over the centuries; therefore, these paintings have been exhibited in the building since their acquisition. Among them can be seen artworks by the Bassanos, Raffaellino del Colle and Leonardo Cungi, in addition to a dramatic San Sebastian by Pontormo. Many other paintings and frescos, however, had entered the building after the suppression of the religious orders under Great Duke Leopold2 in the late 1700’s and Napoleon3 in early 1800’s when it was decided that the paintings, alienated from their original locations, would have been hosted in the building in order to reduce the danger of deterioration. This is the reason why in 19014 the Madonna della Misericordia polyptych, commissioned to Piero della Francesca in 1 | Aldous Huxley in Attilio Brilli, Borgo San Sepolcro. Viaggio nella città di Piero. Città di Castello, 1988, pp. 110-111. 2 | Zeffiro Ciuffoletti, La soppressione degli enti ecclesiastici in Toscana, secoli 18.19.: nodi politici e aspetti storiografici, Florence, 2008; Anna Benvenuti, Riccardo Nencini, La soppressione degli enti ecclesiastici in Toscana, secoli 18.-19.: censimento dei conventi e dei monasteri soppressi in età leopoldina, Florence, 2008. 3 | Orianna Baracchi, Il patrimonio artistico ecclesiastico: inventari delle soppressioni napoleoniche. Modena, 1991. 4 | Enrico Verrazzani, Il Museo Civico di Sansepolcro nel costume cittadino: da piccola raccolta d’arte all’inaugurazione come istituzione comunale. Firenze 2009, p. 66.

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1445 by the local Confraternita della Misericordia (Fraternity of Mercy) for their chapel and finished only 15 years later, became part of the town’s collection. In the 1920s, the museum was formally established as an art gallery.5 Since then it has undergone a series of restorations and embellishments until the late 1980s when an entrance and reception hall, designed in some sort of shopping-center style, were added, destroying the original little cloister and modifying the plan of the whole building.

Room of the “Resurrection” as it was before. Photo by the author. When we started work, it was clear that nothing structural could be done at the time, for economic reasons, but the director and the Board of the Institution of the museum decided to work on the display of the artworks, enhancing the communication within the museum and reorganizing the museological plan and visitors’ flow. We started our meetings imagining a very interactive model of a museum, with a heavy usage of multimedia devices and technological tools meant to provide a comprehensive organic understanding of the masterpieces of Piero della Francesca on the one hand, and the virtual contextual relocation of the artworks coming from the suppressed churches of the area, on the other. The underlying idea was to strongly connect the museum’s identity with its territory, first of all as the museum of Piero and then as the museum of the history 5 | Ibid. p. 83.

Following Visitors’ Comments in Disigning a Museum Refurbishment

and art of the surrounding area, empowering visitors—both residents and tourists—with an interactive and imbibing visit process, providing them with the most innovative tools (touch screens, holograms and computers). The fact that Piero’s artworks are scattered around Italy and around the world, either due to his appointments to the most important Italian courts of his times and to the history of collecting, convinced us that we had to draw together in a virtual way all of his works in order to offer visitors an overall view of his oeuvre, providing the chance to compare images, getting into them and accessing multilevel information. To our point of view, this technological approach represented the best way to allow visitors to create their own experience of visit, supporting them with different tools and with the most appropriated reference materials which might encourage them to deepen their knowledge of the subjects. At the same time, we thought it could have provided the easiest way to encourage their staying in the museum, diverting their attention from a constant high peaked concentration (given the amount of important artworks they had to confront) to self-learning moments of creative rest. We also considered it, in fact, as a sort of hands-on experiment since we were planning to give visitors the possibility to touch and follow in a very interactive way the development of history of art related to the area they were visiting. We tried to organize the sequence of the rooms of the building in our theoretical narrative path, removing anything not connected to the spirit of the museum and its mission (i.e. the little archaeological collection or the diocesan collection deposited since the 1970s in the semi-basement of the museum). The plan was redesigned basing on rationalizing visitors’ flow. Currently, the museum requires each visitor to follow a circular path on each floor, forcing the public to enter rooms they already visited in order to reach higher and lower stories. Entrance and exit are the same reception room where the shop is also situated, just in front of the entrance door, opposite the ticket desk which is not immediately seen. This provokes frequent bottle necks and is reason for some congestion at different times of the year when large groups arrive and linger in the reception hall. Reaching the flight of stairs or the elevators is also confusing since it entails mixing two different functions and reducing the value of the room itself to a hallway. Therefore we wished to avoid the sense of uncertainty and annoyance which can occur from poorly signed directions and from the lack (or redundancy) of well-balanced information, limiting to the minimum the “noise” that might arise during the visiting process. In fact the action of smoothing the process of visit within the museum area might increase visitors’ attitude to live cultural experiences in a fuller and more involving way as it in behavioral studies and heuristic science applied to space.6 6 | Daniel Kahneman, Amos Tversky and Paul Slovic, eds. Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics & Biases. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1982; Koyanagi

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Our overall aim was to offer visitors an unusual experience which could fundamentally change their approach to the museum visit, overcoming the extraordinary and unforgettable feeling due to the aesthetic and cultural exposition7 to Piero’s masterpieces that might be induced in visitors. We wanted to construct a flow experience 8 so much more complex and imbibing. In fact, a well-balanced structure of levelled information—both on a cognitive and on a spatial level—in an exhibiting frame can help visitors achieve the understanding of what they are observing and can give them the chance of building their own visit path, every time in a different way following their interests, their knowledge, their curiosity or their mind-set at that very moment, starting an informal and continuous process of self-learning.9 We had to face some unexpected surprises that restricted the project to a rationalization of the spaces and an improvement of the technical systems like air conditioning and lighting. In fact, while we started on weaving a story about the city focusing on Piero’s artistic life-time and its meaning for the area and broadening it to space and time, we also began to study the insights visitors had left us over five years of comments in the visitors’ books. At that time, the museum did not have a proper system for testing the visitors’ satisfaction, although—even after the adoption in 2007 of the form issued by Regione Toscana—the most relevant comments still can be found in the visitors’ books, still recorded by the visitors today. The outcomes of our study of this ancient but efficient and user-friendly system of creating a communication thread with the public, the visitor comment books, made us review our intensions of modernizing the museum and its communication equipment. The bare simplicity of the rooms and their minimal information apparatus was not perceived as a negative in the visitors’ exFumiko, Kon Tadashi, Higashiyama Arata, “The Recommended Path Indication System in Hakone Open-Air Art Museum with Time Designation”, in: Journal of the Faculty of Science and Technology, Seikei University, 2006, vol. 43;no. 2;pp. 1-8; Rika Burnham, Elliott Kai-Kee, Teaching in the Art Museum: Interpretation As Experience. Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2011, pp. 97-98; Torsten Reimer, Konstantinos Katsikopoulos, “The use of recognition in group decision-making”, in: Cognitive Science, 2004, n. 28, pp. 1009–1029. 7 | As following the definition of peak experience in Abram Maslow, Religion, values and peak experiences, New York, Viking, 1964; Gayle Privette, “Peak experience, peak performance, and flow: A comparative analysis of positive human experiences”, in: Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,1983, Vol. 45, pp. 1361-1368; 8 | Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: the psychology of optimal experience. New York: Harper and Row, 1990. 9 | David A. Kolb, Experiential learning: Experience as the source of learning and development. Englewood Cliffs. N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1984.

Following Visitors’ Comments in Disigning a Museum Refurbishment

pectations of the museum, since the main reason for their visit was the direct, non-mediated contemplation of the Piero’s Resurrection—even more than the Polyptich -, a masterpiece they know they cannot see anywhere else but in the very place where it was painted. Lighting and climatic control were reported as items which had to be improved, as we had already scheduled, but no claims for more technology or interactive devises were raised in the visitors’ comments. In agreement with the Director and with the Board of the Institution, and recognizing also the forthcoming economic crisis that in that internal part of Central Italy had already started to show its grip, it was decided to reduce the museological and museographical interventions and to leave the display as it was, concentrating on structural improvements (light and climatic control) and on the rationalization of the image and of the external communication of the museum (new logo; outside banners to highlight the presence of the museum and street signs to it within the town; new website; some branded merchandising…) and new activities in order to enhance the internal programming (guided tours in Italian and foreign languages to be booked; theatrical representations involving local acting companies also in local dialect on the history of Piero della Francesca; a scheduling plan of exhibitions on the “minor” collections and on modern and contemporary art…). All of these in order to match the values we discovered from the analysis of the visitors’ book, such as: emotion, glory, immersion, excellence, discovery, harmony, happiness, enthusiasm, care, sublime, fulfilment …

Room of the “Resurrection” as it is now. Photo by the author.

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In fact, the authenticity10 of the museum’s cultural uniqueness, and its complete consistency with the visitors’ expectation and the distinction of its almost out-of-time setting trumped any other request for modernization. In this sense, following the less-is-more effect 11 rule that “less information can lead to more accuracy”12 does not struggle with the PAD theory or with the theory of entertainment.13 The ostensible appearance of the fresco on the original museum wall (research proves otherwise it)14 can be compared to the appearance of an “essence”—Christ for the Christians or “the Art” for all the others. The strength of authenticity, in this case both iconic and indexical15, forges a unique experien10 | See a deeper introduction to the concept of authenticity in museums in M. C. Vannini, “La ricerca di autenticità nel processo di visita museale”, in: TafterJournal, 2012, n. 4. 11 | D. G. Goldstein, G. Gigerenzer, “Models of ecological rationality: The recognition heuristic”, in: Psychological Review, 2002, vol.109, pp. 75–90.; Torsten Reimer, Konstantinos Katsikopoulos, “The use of recognition in group decision-making”, in: Cognitive Science, 2004, n. 28, pp. 1009–1029. 12 | Konstantinos V. Katsikopoulos, The less-is-more effect: Predictions and tests, Judgment and Decision Making, vol. 5, 2010, pp. 244-257. 13 | A. Mehrabian, “Pleasure-arousal-dominance: A general framework for describing and measuring individual differences in temperament”, in: Current Psychology: Developmental, Learning, Personality, Social, 1996, vol. 14, pp. 261-292; M. Csíkszentmihályi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. New York, 1990; M. Csikszentmihalyi, R.E. Robinson, The Art of Seeing: An Interpretation of the Aesthetic Encounter. LA: J. Paul Getty Museum Publications, 1990; Stephen W. Gilroy, Marc Cavazza, Maurice Benayoun, “Using affective trajectories to describe states of flow in interactive art”, in: Proceedings of the International Conference on Advances in Computer Entertainment Technology, New York 2009; Robert Plutchik, Emotion: Theory, research, and experience: Vol. 1. Theories of emotion, New York 1980; R. Plutchik, Emotions and Life: Perspectives from Psychology, Biology, and Evolution. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2002. 14 | In 2007 Opificio delle Pietre Dure–Firenze and the Soprintendenza SBAAS Arezzo started a research project for testing with the most innovative and non-invasive scientific devices if the wall of the Resurrection is in its original position or—as some of the documents of the time might seem to hint—it was moved from the subsequent room in that where it is located nowadays. 15 | K. Grayson and R. Martinec, “Consumer Perceptions of Iconicity and Indexicality and Their Influence on Assessments of Authentic Market Offering”, in: Journal of consumer research, Vol. 31, 2004, pp. 297-298; A. J. McIntosh–R.C. Prentice, “Affirming authentic, Consuming cultural heritage”, in: Annals of Tourism Research, 1999, vol. 26, pp. 589-612.

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ce that overcomes any possible superstructure and carries the observer in a sort of time-warp where the museum environment fades away and becomes the palace of the governors during Piero’s times. Nothing else is required: no other information support or technological equipment that will be perceived as “noise”—even labels could interfere with concentration and diminish the experience. In this case, in fact, the concept of authenticity in itself and the less is more effect converges in the fulfilment of the visitor’s desire to achieve the search of authentic cultural experience, as defined by Spooner.16 The same concept is well expressed by a paraphrase of George-Henry Rivière’s statement17 in which he said that the success of a museum doesn’t depend on the number of visitors but on the number of visitors to whom it teaches something, a phrase that can be turned into the concept that the success of a museum depends on the level of authenticity perceived and experienced by the visitors throughout the visiting process. Authenticity, then, is composed of a mix of functions that, at the end, will represent the success of the cultural offer and the satisfaction of its users. The functions or fundamental elements that we recognized in the composing mix of authenticity are the elements that correspond to the four points of the cultural diamond as defined by Griswold 18 to which we added a fifth element, communication, and a variable, time. The four elements are that the museum brand must be recognizable and reliable for its public; the cultural object: the main object or objects of the exhibition must be consistent with the museum’s brand image; the social world in which the cultural objects arises; the receivers, such as the visitors, are willing to have a fruitful experience. If these four elements are well balanced, the cultural offer is cognitively consistent with what is expected and what is found by the visitors in the museum.  All of these four elements are connected by the fifth one which is communication, both the environmental and architectonical display and the messages the museum wishes to communicate along with the related techniques and tools that must be as clear and direct as possible.

16 | B. Spooner, “Weavers and Dealers, the authenticity of an Oriental carpet”, in: The social life of things: Commodities in cultural perspective. Cambridge University Press, 1986, pp. 195-235. 17 | Georges Henri Rivière, in Territoires de la mémoire, les collections du patrimoine ethnologique dans les ècomuées, sous la direction de Marc Augè, postface de Claude Lévi-Strauss, Édition dell’Albaron et Fems, 1992, p. 7. 18 | W. Griswold, Sociologia della Cultura, il Mulino, 2005; J. S. Bruner, Lo sviluppo cognitivo, Milano, 1994.

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Reconstruction of the polypthic of the “Madonna della Misericordia” by Piero della Francesca following the indications of the Soprintendenza PSAE-BAP. Photo by the author. The museum visit, thus, can be characterized as any other consumption practice and therefore it undergoes to a process that is very similar in its steps to the one drawn in the Consumer Culture Theory.19 It is important to highlight that the process of visit doesn’t begin at the museum entrance but it can be related to the individual cultural personality construction where the “consumption of museums” can be included among the issues at the highest level of the 19 | D.B Holt, “Why do brands cause trouble? A dialectical theory of consumer culture and branding”, in: Journal of Consumer Research, 2002; E. J. Arnould–C. J. Thompson, “Consumer Culture Theory (CCT): Twenty Years of Research”, in: Journal of Consumer Research, vol. 31, 2005, pp. 868-882; EJ, Arnould–LL Price, “Authenticating Acts and Authoritative Performances: Questing for Self and Community”, in: Ratneshwar, S., DG Mick, C. Huffman The Why of Consumption. Contemporary Perspectives on Consumer Motives. Routledge, 2000, pp. 140-163; Beverland, MB., and Farrelly, FJ., “The quest for authenticity in consumption: Consumers’ purposive choice of authentic cues to shape experienced outcomes”, in: Journal of Consumer Research, 2010, vol. 36, pp. 838-856.

Following Visitors’ Comments in Disigning a Museum Refurbishment

Maslow’s pyramid. Close to the moment of choosing a museum, information materials and tools such as an appropriated and easy-to-be-browsed web-site are very important. As in any consumption practice, the variable of time has a relevant role in keeping attention on the cultural offer and it usually represents a critical point for permanent exhibitions. This was the general theory that was leading us at the beginning of our work. Therefore we initially started out considering the complete renewal of the museum’s display techniques in order to renew the level of attention of both the visitors (residents and tourists) and of the local constituencies20. Nevertheless the analysis of the level of authenticity of a museum and of its cultural offer, as we saw, can avoid the need for a constant and recurring general renewal, limiting it to minor modifications and updating. As we learnt, in the Museo di Sansepolcro, the cultural object is so prominent that it supersedes the lack of an appealing and modern display but also is so strong and powerful that it maintains its appeal for visitors over time. Thus, visitors feel free from any pre-established interpretation. Therefore, in the cultural diamond scheme, adapted to host as well the elements of communication and time, the museum—along with all its branding—becomes a construction connected to the cultural objects exhibited and to the social world related to it. From these two elements the museum (and its brand) acquires value. In turn, communication is a superstructure elaborated by the museum in concert with the cultural objects and to the social world to which it refers to the point that communication can be considered the real cultural product of the museum itself.   In the example of Museo Civico di Sansepolcro, albeit having a weak brand in general due to little advertisement, the “aura”21 of the museum and the indexical authenticity of the masterpieces exhibited increase the value of the cultural object that becomes the reason—the need, the aspirational desire—the public decides to go and visit that very museum. The authenticity of the artworks and the lack of communication superstructures turn the museum visiting experience into a deeply authentic experience visitors have the power to live at their ease.

20 | We talk of constituencies instead of stakeholders in order to highlight the values— not only and merely economic—conveyed by local people, institutions and associations and of whom has interests towards the Museum. 21 | A. Mottola Molfino, Il libro dei Musei, Torino 1998.

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S. Giuliano by Piero della Francesca, chosen as “testimonial” of the museum. Photo by the author.

W orks cited Arnould, E. J.–Thompson, C. J., “Consumer Culture Theory (CCT): Twenty Years of Research”, in: Journal of Consumer Research, vol. 31, 2005, pp. 868882. Arnould, E. J– Price, L.L., “Authenticating Acts and Authoritative Performances: Questing for Self and Community”, in: Ratneshwar, S., Mick, D.G, Huffman, C., The Why of Consumption. Contemporary Perspectives on Consumer Motives. Routledge, 2000, pp. 140-163. Baracchi, Orianna, Il patrimonio artistico ecclesiastico: inventari delle soppressioni napoleoniche. Modena, 1991. Benvenuti, Anna and Nencini, Riccardo, La soppressione degli enti ecclesiastici, in: Toscana, secoli 18.-19: censimento dei conventi e dei monasteri soppressi in età leopoldina. Florence, 2008. Beverland, MB., and Farrelly, FJ., “The quest for authenticity in consumption: Consumers’ purposive choice of authentic cues to shape experienced outcomes”, in: Journal of Consumer Research, 2010, vol. 36, pp. 838-856. Brilli, Attilio, Borgo San Sansepolcro. Viaggio nella città di Piero. Città di Castello, 1988. Bruner, J. S., Lo sviluppo cognitive. Milano, 1994. Burnham, Rika, Kai-Kee, Elliott, Teaching in the Art Museum: Interpretation As Experience, Los Angeles, Getty Pubblications, 2011, pp. 97-98. Ciuffoletti, Zeffiro, “La soppressione degli enti ecclesiastici”, in: Toscana, secoli 18.-19.: nodi politici e aspetti storiografici. Florence, 2008.

Following Visitors’ Comments in Disigning a Museum Refurbishment

Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly, Flow: the psychology of optimal experience. New York: Harper and Row, 1990. Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly, Robinson, R.E., The Art of Seeing: An Interpretation of the Aesthetic Encounter. J. Paul Getty Museum Publications: LA, 1990. Fumiko, Koyanagi, Tadashi, Kon, Arata, Higashiyama ,”The Recommended Path Indication System in Hakone Open-Air Art Museum with Time Designation”, in: Journal of the Faculty of Science and Technology, Seikei University, 2006, vol. 43;no. 2;pp. 1-8. Gilroy, Stephen W., Cavazza, Marc, Benayoun, Maurice, “Using affective trajectories to describe states of flow in interactive art”, in: Proceedings of the International Conference on Advances in Computer Enterntainment Technology. New York 2009. Goldstein, D. G., Gigerenzer, G, “Models of ecological rationality: The recognition heuristic”, in: Psychological Review, 2002, vol.109, pp. 75–90. Grayson, K. and Martinec, R., “Consumer Perceptions of Iconicity and Indexicality and Their Influence on Assessments of Authentic Market Offering”, in: Journal of consumer research, Vol. 31, 2004, pp. 297-298. Holt, D.B., “Why do brands cause trouble? A dialectical theory of consumer culture and branding”, in: Journal of Consumer Research, 2000. Kahneman, Daniel, Tversky, Amos and Slovic, Paul (eds.), Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics & Biases. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1982. Katsikopoulos, Konstantinos V., The less-is-more effect: Predictions and tests, Judgment and Decision Making, vol. 5, 2010, pp. 244-257. Kolb, David A., Experiential learning: Experience as the source of learning and development. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1984. Maslow, Abram, Religion, values and peak experiences. New York: Viking, 1964. McIntosh, A. J.–Prentice, R.C., “Affirming authentic. Consuming cultural heritage”, in: Annals of Tourism Research, 1999, vol. 26, pp. 589-612. Mehrabian, A., “Pleasure-arousal-dominance: A general framework for describing and measuring individual differences in temperament”, in: Current Psychology: Developmental, Learning, Personality, Social, 1996, vol. 14, pp. 261-292. Mottola Molfino, A., Il libro dei Musei. Torino ,1998. Plutchik, Robert, “Emotion: Theory, research, and experience”, in: Theories of emotion (series) Vol. 1, New York 1980. Plutchik, Robert, Emotions and Life: Perspectives from Psychology, Biology, and Evolution. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2002. Privette, Gayle, “Peak experience, peak performance, and flow: A comparative analysis of positive human experiences”, in: Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,1983, Vol. 45, pp. 1361-1368.

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Reimer, Torsten and Katsikopoulos, Konstantinos, “The use of recognition in group decision-making”, in: Cognitive Science, 2004, n. 28, pp. 1009–1029. Rivière, Georges Henri, Territoires de la mémoire, les collections du patrimoine ethnologique dans les ècomuées, sous la direction de Marc Augè, postface de Claude Lévi-Strauss, Édition dell’Albaron et Fems, 1992. Spooner, B., “Weavers and Dealers, the authenticity of an Oriental carpet”, in:  The social life of things: Commodities in cultural perspective.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986, pp. 195-235. Vannini, M. C., La ricerca di autenticità nel processo di visita museale, in: TafterJournal, 2012, n. 4. Verrazzani, Enrico, Il Museo Civico di Sansepolcro nel costume cittadino: da piccola raccolta d’arte all’inaugurazione come istituzione comunale. Firenze, 2009.

From Real Thing to Real Experience Rethinking the Museum Experience Wan-Chen Chang, Taipei National University of the Arts – Taiwan

Museums, especially science museums, are increasingly using technological reproductions as a main exhibition medium. As the techniques used to present museum exhibits become increasingly visual and realistic, the boundary between representation and reality is becoming increasingly blurred.1 Jean Baudrillard argued that the share of our consumption taken by symbols and reproductions is rising. While the fact of an item being a facsimile may be widely known, it is still eagerly imitated and accepted2. Umberto Eco believes that in hyper-reality, simulations are more true to life than real things. Eco suggests that the construction of hyper-reality is an attempt to desire reality, to produce a false reality then consumed as real.3 The main issues addressed in this article are: 1) the relationship between reproductions / replicas and authenticity; 2) the importance of authenticity to the contemporary museum audience; and 3) the significance of authenticity in the museum visit experience. The case study used is the dinosaur display in the Life Science Hall at the National Museum of Natural Science in Taichung City, Taiwan. Data was collected at the target museum by the author using a survey instrument. Results were derived from an analysis of survey data targeting key concepts including “experience,” “museum experience,” “authenticity,” and “the experience economy”.

1 | John Urry, The Tourist Gaze. Leisure and Travel in Contemporary Societies. Sage Publications, 1990, p. 85. 2 | Jean Baudrillard, Selected Writings. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988, p. 167-184. 3 | Umberto Eco, Travels in Hyper Reality. Harvest, 1990.

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E xperience and a museum e xperience “Experience” has been used widely in the museum field in recent years, especially in the context of research on museum visitors. Although the term involves a complex etymology and implications, in general, “experience” may refer to “practical contact with and observation of facts or events” or “an event or occurrence which leaves an impression on someone.”4 The situational experience of an individual results directly in her / his accumulation of specific knowledge or emotions. In museum research, there is a developmental context to attaching value to experience. John Dewey’s landmark work on experiential learning theory Experience and Education defined learning as a constant process of restructuring and reorganizing experience and advocated the integration of all kinds of experience into traditional educational models.5 Peter Jarvis, John Holford and Colin Griffin argue that the two concepts of the “transformation of experience” and “the structure of meaning” are the core meanings and values of the experience of study, and that to study is to make experience significant, to enable the student’s actions and reflections within the experience to cause the individual, within the parameters in which he exists, to forge the best possible interaction. 6 When they introduced the experiential learning concept into the museum field, John Falk and Lynn Dierking recast the museum experience as holistic learning influenced by social context.7 Falk and Dierking emphasize that museums should value the individual experience of each visitor. They hold that, “Each visitor learns in a different way, and interprets information through the lens of previous knowledge, experience, and beliefs”.8 They also urge museums to elicit the motivations and expectations of visitors during their current and previous visit experiences as well their perceived value of visiting a museum as a leisure choice (leisure values).9 This valuing of individual experience is further affirmed in the book The Experience Economy 10, written by James H. Gilmore and B. Joseph Pine II. The 4 | ht tp://ox forddictionaries.com/def inition/english/experience?q=experience (Retrieved 25/12/2012) 5 | John Dewey, Experience and Education. New York: Collier Books, 1963. 6 | Peter Jarvis, John Holford & Colin Griffin, The Theory & Practice of Learning. London: Routledge, 1998, p. 46. 7 | John H. Falk & Lynn D. Dierking, The Museum Experience. Washington: Whalesback Books, 1992. 8 | Ibid. p. 136. 9 | John H. Falk & Lynn D. Dierking, Learning from Museums. Lanham: AltaMira Press, 2000, pp. 69-89. 10 | B. Joseph Pine II & James H. Gilmore, Experience Economy: Work is Theatre & Every Business a Stage. Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1999.

From Real Thing to Real Experience

authors regard experience as a critical factor affecting consumer consumption decisions and argue that services that provide “experience” will become an increasingly prominent locus of value in the economy. Their argument highlights the overlap between modern museums and leisure / entertainment venues and the proactive approach taken by consumers in choosing between the two.

The e xperience economy and authenticit y Gilmore and Pine argue further that authenticity is the most important quality sought by consumers in the experience economy.11 However, these authors caution that experiencing authenticity does not necessarily mean that the object being experienced possesses authenticity. Their article Museums and Authenticity states, that “All museums, (…)—as with all businesses—are fake, fake, fake”.12 At the same time, however, they emphasize that museums, like businesses, must render an authentic experience for their audience: There is no such thing as an inauthentic experience because that experience happens inside of us. Therefore, as human beings we are free to view the experience with any artifact, any edifice and any encounter as authentic—or as inauthentic. That is why museums should focus on creating the perception of authenticity in the minds of people, and why precisely the right word to describe this process is the one we introduced earlier: render.13

Further, Gilmore and Pine suggest that, to render the audience’s experience authentic, the secret of museums is not beyond the following two points: One is being true to one’s self. The other is being what you say you are to others.14 In other words, while goods or services may be inauthentic, they may still deliver a feeling of authenticity. These authors call this the “authenticity paradox”.15 One corollary of the authenticity paradox is that the only decisive factor underlying authenticity is the individual’s experience of a specific product or service, which has the potential to influence and inspire.16 Here, we notice, the authors distinguish between the authenticity of products and the authenticity 11 | James H. Gilmore & B. Joseph Pine II, Authenticity: What Consumers Really Want. Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2007. 12 | B. Joseph Pine II & James H. Gilmore, “Museums and Authenticity”, in: Museum News, May/June, 2007, p. 78. 13 | Ibid. 14 | Gilmore & Pine II, Op. Cit., p. 96. 15 | Ibid. p. 92. 16 | Ibid.

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of experience. The distinction prompts us to recall Eco’s opinion of hyper-reality from the beginning of the article, i.e., that the pursuit and fulfillment of hope can cause false realities to appear all the more authentic. Gilmore and Pine established a Real/Fake matrix to distinguish among the four authenticity “types”: real-real, real-fake, fake-real, and fake-fake. According to the authors, the Real/Fake matrix provides a mental model for conceiving the authenticity with one’s own offerings: “The X-axis describes the self-directed relationship between your company and its own output: is what you offer true to itself and to your company? The Y-axis describes the other-focused relationship between your company and customers: is what you offer what you say it is and not false to any customers?” The authors call this matrix the Polonius Test.17

The Polonius Test according to Gilmore and Pine. Each type represents a consumer’s acknowledgement of authenticity or inauthenticity at the time of her / his initial encounter with a specific product or service (Fig 1). The two authors believe that because the consumer determines authenticity, she/he naturally decides whether a product or service is: (i) true to its claim and, (ii) true to itself. This judgment stems from the self-image of the consumer as well as from the influence that this type of image has on her / his acceptance and understanding of products and services.18 Gilmore and Pine’s theory is highly relevant to the field of museums. Museums typically emphasize the authenticity of items in their collections or exhibits, with authenticity connoting the place and/or culture from which an item was taken and giving the item its specific value.19 It can also connote to a person, e.g. an artist or other maker of the object. Authentic items are perceived 17 | Ibid. p. 97. 18 | Ibid. p. 94. 19 | Jean Baudrillard, Le système des objets. Paris : Gallimard, 1968, p. 107-108.

From Real Thing to Real Experience

as having a direct connection to the subjects they refer to. Museums pursue research, build collections, create exhibits, and conduct education based upon the foundation assumed in creating authenticity.20 As stated by Cameron, the “real thing” is the core around which museums build all of their activities.21 Furthermore, this perspective tends to be part of the prime directive of most museums. Therefore, authenticity is a function rarely attributed to reproductions and replicas, which receive only grudging acceptance as symbolic representations.22 Bernard Deloche categorized reproductions/substitutes into two categories: analogous and analytical.23 Items in the analogous category are either designed to be exact representations of their original (e.g., a wax model) or to create in the viewer an emotive, authentic ( fake-real) response (e.g., a printed copy of a painting) or experience (e.g., flight and earthquake simulators). The relationship between these items and reality reflects our perception of a specific aspect that is comparable, perhaps almost identical, between the two (e.g., the shaking during an earthquake). However, despite the identical nature of the reproduction, it is not able to replace its archetype. Therefore, in light of the above, all items and descriptions used in museum exhibits should be treated as realistic substitutes because they have all been recast as museum objects and thus as substitutes of something else.24 Although there is a “no-choice” rationale regarding replicas and substitutes, at least in terms of not presenting a problem for museum ethics, we must recognize that these items lack a “halo of authenticity” or, in the classification of Pine and Gilmore, they do not enjoy the status of “real-real.” Therefore, important questions remain as to how museums that utilize replicas and substitutes should create “authentic” experiences for visitors, how the authenticity-simulation effect works, and how we should evaluate this effect.

20 | André Desvallées & François Mairesse (dirs), Dictionnaire encyclopédique de muséologie. Paris: Armand Colin, p. 570. 21 | Duncan F. Cameron, “ A Viewpoint: The Museum as a Communication System and Implications for Museum Education”, in: Curator, 11, 1968, pp. 33-40. 22 | Bernard Deloche, Le Musée virtuel. Paris : Presses universitaires de France, 2001, p. 185-186. 23 | Ibid. pp. 193-205. The so-called “analytical substitute” is a representation intended to highlight an item’s underlying structure or logic. Substitutes in this category are not visibly similar to their represented original. An example is the periodic table of elements, which provides a visual representation of the order of natural elements rather than their structural nature. 24 | André Desvallées & François Mairesse (ed.), Key Concepts of Museology. Paris: Armand Colin, 2010, pp. 63-64.

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The dinosaur e xhibition at taiwan ’s national museum of natur al sciences

The animatronic tyrannosauruses at the National Museum of Natural Sciences. Photo by the author. The National Museum of Natural Sciences in Taichung City is one of the most heavily visited museums in Taiwan.25 The dinosaur exhibition in the Life Science Hall is particularly popular and often crowded with visitors. The exhibit’s animatronic dinosaurs at the center of the venue’s main hall are a main focus of visitor attention. While most if not all visitors realize that dinosaurs have long been extinct and that only fossils remain for research, the realistic nature of these animatronic displays create palpable excitement and visceral reactions in many. Beneath the high, vaulted ceiling of the Dinosaur Hall is a pair of huge model tyrannosauruses. The effect is of a mother and son, shaking their heads from time to time, whispering in each other’s ears, and emitting low-pitched, deep roars. Surrounding this central display are various other displays featuring smaller, static dinosaur models of velociraptors, stegosauruses, and oviraptors. Behind a glass display wall, visitors see two more crudely constructed model dinosaurs in a backdrop perhaps meant to inspire thoughts of Jurassic Park. The narrative strategy used in this exhibit may be categorized as follows:

25 | See the museum’s official website : http://www.nmns.edu.tw/

From Real Thing to Real Experience

View of the Dinosaur Hall at the National Museum of Natural Sciences. Photo by the author. 1. Subtle Time Sequencing: The first section of the exhibit, entitled “What are Dinosaurs?” By means of display boards, the exhibition introduces the time-frame within which dinosaurs first appeared and finally disappeared from existence. This provides a general idea of when the animals depicted in the exhibit were active. 2. Subtle Logical Sequencing: The first section further introduces current theories regarding the potential causes of dinosaur extinction and regarding potential modern evolutionary descendants of dinosaurs. 3. Overt Spatial Sequencing: Subsequent sections on “Dinosaur Diversity”, “The Dinosaur Family”, and other topics describe the earth during the age of the dinosaurs, with animatronic dinosaur models featured throughout the exhibit space. Based on the above, the Dinosaur Exhibition may be classified as an explanatory narrative exhibit interspersed with many narrative elements, including automated realistic models of dinosaurs, which facilitate visitor cognition of dinosaur behavioral motivations. The introduction to the oviraptors, for example, uses the highly descriptive title “Thief or Mother?” to draw attention to the core message of the display. Aside from the hypothetical context of explanations addressing potential causes of dinosaur extinction and their potential modern descendants, exhibit elements are presented in the context of historical facticity.26 However, as 26 | Facticity refers to the subjective acceptance of something as fact. Facticity differs from factuality in that the latter refers to something inherently true. See Rom

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Ludvik Fleck’s pioneering research highlighted, the scientific hypotheses and theories are not equivalent to immutable fact, sparked academic discussions about their fundamental nature.27 The results of scientific research including hypotheses, laws and methods are all temporal in nature and varies according to what “thought collectives” (Fleck) people/researchers belong to. Thus, given the evolutionary nature of scientific research and scientific theories, museum exhibits must be prepared to evolve as well. For career research scientists, there can be no absolute conclusions or truths, only the continuous verification and challenges of hypotheses. However, museum visitors may interpret the “authority” of museum exhibits as the “final word” on a particular scientific subject, where, at best, these exhibits are only current, temporal truths. Therefore, from a scientific perspective, in the absence of absolute truth, museums rather than encouraging visitors to accept current paradigms as fact should inspire visitors to think for themselves on exhibit topics.

Oviraptor section of the Dinosaur Exhibition. Photo by the author.

Harré, “Some Narrative Conventions of Scientific Discourse”, in: Cristopher Nash (ed.), Narrative in Culture. The Uses of Storytelling in the Sciences, Philosophy, and Literature. London & New York: Routledge, 1990, p. 81. 27 | Ludwik Fleck , Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1935.

From Real Thing to Real Experience

M useum ’s visitor perspectives on the dinosaur e xhibition The author interviewed 11 visitors to the Dinosaur Exhibition on July 20th, 2011 to elicit their opinions regarding exhibit authenticity. The interviews addressed 5 key questions, as follows: i. Do you believe the contents (storyline) of the dinosaur exhibition to be true or fabricated/imaginary? ii. Which contextual elements do you believe are true and which are fabricated/imaginary? iii. Do you believe it is important whether exhibit content is real and does authenticity affect your opinion of an exhibit? iv. Which part of the Dinosaur Exhibition left the deepest impression on you? v. What do you think you learned from the Dinosaur Exhibition? A word-by-word analysis of interview transcripts by the author generated the following principal findings. Responses to the first interview question indicate that respondents had personal standards for determining the level of exhibit authenticity. First, many believed that the exhibited dinosaurs were “authentic visualizations.” Some of the visitors extrapolated on the basis of what they knew about dinosaurs. Others believed that the external representation presented by the animatronic models was not “authentic” enough: “Highly authentic, but I believe it’s fake because it couldn’t possibly live for so long. One might feel that it’s real because it can move, make a noise and is, generally, made to look very real.” -“Fake.” (Which do you think was real? Or were they all fake?) The tyrannosaurus was very authentic. “Fake.” (Which do you think were relatively realistic? Which do you think were relatively unrealistic?) “Those two velociraptors were relatively realistic. The tyrannosaurus was relatively unrealistic.” “The way it looks and sounds must both be imaginary! Only the bones can be relatively authentic. Everything else is false!” “Fabricated. It’s made to look very real, but one can easily tell it’s fabricated. It looks very real, but in your heart you know it’s absolutely not real. To children, it must be very authentic.”

Although the author did not define the concept of “authenticity” to the respondents, their responses indicate that they gave initial responses based on the concept of “realism” rather than “authenticity.” Although some respondents

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said that the Paleolithic fossils were real, no respondent expressed the belief that the animatronic models were real dinosaurs: “Isn’t this real? It’s just that it’s a model. The tyrannosaurus is quite real. Children like it. (Which part is imaginary?) Oh, it’s all very real. (Including their movements and voices?) Yes. -“Of course it’s real, because we study life sciences. Dinosaurs truly existed. It’s just that the things behind us are based on conjecture. The tyrannosaurus’ sounds, for example, are simulated. The fossils are real. The movements and sounds may be fabricated and imaginary and the colors are false. “Real. Of course there are parts that are fabricated and imaginary. Actually, of course, dinosaurs existed. What is fabricated is their outer skin, their sounds. These are all imagined!”

The results of interviews infer that visitors have individual, subjective standards for determining whether lifelike animatronic dinosaurs are real or fabricated. While none expressed a belief that the museum had gone back in time to collect living dinosaurs, respondents refrained from providing descriptions of the models that explained their lifelike movements and sounds from a technical / robotic perspective. Although respondents clearly understood that the animatronic displays were fabricated, this apparently did not detract from the trust they invested in the content of the exhibit. In answering the second question, nearly all respondents, whether they answered “important” or “unimportant”, expressed the opinion that their perception of the animatronic models as real or unreal did not affect their views of the museum. The author interprets this as “not affecting trust in the contents of the museum’s exhibition.” - “Not important because it has real characteristics.” - “This is adequate. Otherwise, how real does it need to be? Whether something is real or unreal will not affect one’s understanding of knowledge about dinosaurs.” - “Important, because children will compare it with the books and videos they’ve seen in the past. (So it will affect their impressions of the exhibition?) Of course the more it moves and the more DIY (do-it-yourself) it is the better. (Is that because you feel that things that move are more real?) What I mean is that children prefer things that they can manipulate. With dinosaurs, for example, you could use a few bones that they could assemble, and that would make them very happy.”

Some respondents believed that the museum’s exhibitions could serve as a basis for imagination or self-reflection. Thus, for this group, the real or unreal character of displays was not a factor of critical importance.

From Real Thing to Real Experience “It’s just for reference. As for everything else, one thinks one’s own thoughts.” “Not important. It’s theoretical. Exhibitions just raise one of the theories.” “Whether it’s real or unreal is all the same to me. I don’t believe it makes any difference because I’m an adult. I can tell the difference for myself.” “No. I believe that this is by its nature something one has to imagine. Because without imagination it’s just some bones; not very interesting.”

But there were also respondents who believed that fake dinosaurs were “safer”: “Important, because real dinosaurs would be relatively dangerous.”

Summing up answers to this question, respondents placed a high level of trust in the integrity of the exhibit content. Although not “credulous,” the respondents were “trusting.” Although respondents did not attach much importance to whether the dinosaurs were real or unreal, animatronic dinosaurs possess a certain entertainment value. Respondents generally felt that the animatronic dinosaurs possessed a certain entertainment value. In response to question 4, all but one respondent named the “father and son tyrannosauruses” display as their favorite. The remaining respondent named the velociraptor display as leaving the deepest impression. As to why the tyrannosauruses left the deepest impression, the most important reasons cited were their realistic movement and their particular attractiveness for young visitors. “The way the tyrannosaurus moves seems pretty good. At least it’s not like machines used to be, starting to move and then getting stuck.” “I think the moving dinosaur model is so sweet! Is it new? I haven’t been here since I was in elementary school. I think it’s really sweet, but surely it might frighten small children! It’s really very well made.” “Still that moving dinosaur.” “The tyrannosaurus. My child was staring at it constantly.” “The moving dinosaur. Its visual and aural effects are good. It left a deep impression on children.”

Because of their lifelike quality and motion, the realism of the dinosaurs, as far as some of the visitors were concerned, still exerted a psychological effect. Some of the visitors, for example, expressed a belief that the tyrannosauruses were a little frightening: “Now this tyrannosaurus, if you saw it at night, would certainly frighten you.” “I’ve seen it many times and am no longer scared of it.”

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As an emotion behind a reaction, “fear” or “dread” is also the fear or dread that resides in a fabricated perspective, a kind of imaginary effect. There is entertainment value to these emotions: “Real or unreal is not very important, as long as one is happy.” “Pure entertainment, right?”

Moving, lifelike animatronic dinosaurs definitely had an entertainment effect on respondents and conveyed “entertainment value.” The motivations and objectives for visiting a museum differ fundamentally from one visitor to another. It is very difficult for museums to demand that everybody maintain an attitude of conscientious study. In response to question five, some visitors stated clearly that they had come with no intent to learn anything in their museum visit: “I didn’t learn anything, because I didn’t look carefully. I just came in to kill time and take advantage of the air conditioning.” “Fortunately, I came in with a leisurely attitude.” “I can’t have learnt anything because I’ve already been here umpteen times. The children must have learnt something.” “I don’t seem to have learnt anything. Perhaps in the future, if I have children, I’ll bring them here.”

Those visitors who were relatively conscientious, however, mainly by reading the explanatory words at the venue, got some new information about dinosaurs: “Their [the dinosaurs’] characteristics and the nature of their lives.” “Dinosaurs are already extinct.” “Just that some organisms evolved. Natural selection. This is just the way it is. There’s no need for such painstaking questioning.” “The knowledge taught by the signage. You learn it. I don’t have much feeling about most of it though.” “Oh yes, I learnt things. I think there’s a hypothesis about it that we didn’t really know before, which is that it [dinosaurs] actually had fur. Because we all thought it was like a crocodile. How could it have fur?” The velociraptor is the same and so is the child of the tyrannosaurus. This is something I’ve never seen before.” “What mankind can know about the past is very limited. We need to see more things, discover more things, so that we can have more understanding and development in relation to both the past and the future.”

Looking at it from the perspective of respondents’ answers, the absence of narrated hypotheses and the presentation only of the lifelike animatronic di-

From Real Thing to Real Experience

nosaurs would make it extremely difficult to learn or reflect upon the characteristics, life habits, and properties of dinosaurs. Exhibitions, however, should not rely solely on text-based descriptions. Visual and aural effects appropriately used through the exhibition space have important roles to play.

C onclusion : false dinosaurs and re al e xperiences Using Pine’s and Gilmore’s classifications, we would classify the science museum’s Dinosaur Exhibition as an example of “Fake-real.” While “fake-real” is inconsistent with its advertised claims (to be true), the exhibit is absolutely faithful to itself. By creating a false reality, the exhibit conceals its inauthenticity, which must be done to create a product or service that is intrinsically perfect.28 As far as the two authors are concerned, Disneyland is an archetypal example. However, making a product “fake-real” requires making this product manifest the authenticity in which the consumer freely wishes to believe. This is socalled “creating faith.”29 A significant body of museological research has shown that museums serve as disciplinary or ritual arenas, which possess considerable authority and legitimacy in relation to their visitors.30 This sense of trust may establish a senior-to-junior asymmetrical relationship similar to the relationship between father and son or teacher and student. Based on this, visitors should adopt an attitude of trust toward the dinosaur exhibition. While earning their trust, museums are in turn responsible to create for its visitors a fictive stance. This imagined reality anticipates a specific response, inviting visitors to form attitudes of “make-believe” rather than “believe” from presented content and correlations among content. However, while animatronic dinosaurs may reflect verisimilitude, they cannot be authentic. It is thus appropriate at this juncture to cite the observation of Hayden White that truth and fallacy rather than truth and fiction is the key dichotomy.31 Many truths, even so-called historical truths, are conveyable to readers only through virtual reconstruction. Interviews with Dinosaur Exhibition visitors demonstrated that visitor understanding that animatronic dinosaurs are not “real” did not diminish the reciprocal understanding between museum visitors and the museum. Visitor trust in the Dinosaur Exhibition was rooted in the 28 | Gilmore & Pine II, Op.cit., p. 102. 29 | Ibid., pp. 108-110. 30 | Eilean Hooper-Greenhill, “The museum in the disciplinary society”, in: Susan M. Pearce (ed.), Museum Studies in Material Culture. Leicester and London: Leicester University Press; Washington, DC: Smithsonian University Press, 1989, pp. 61-72. 31 | Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse. Essays in Cultural Criticism. Baltimore and London: The John Hopkins University Press, 1978, p. 123.

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information conveyed by the exhibit and not in the authenticity of its individual display items. Therefore, the “fake” dinosaurs on display could still evoke a “real” experience for visitors. Similarly, the “real” experiences of visitors do not necessarily mean that a museum’s education objectives have achieved. The “disneyfication” of museum exhibitions has gained the attention of many museum researchers.32 This case study supports the position that the realism of animatronic dinosaurs will not lead visitors to reflect effectively on underlying museum information and messages, if overall planning and presentation of the scientific contents is not strengthened. Furthermore, this creates a difference between using authentic experiences in museums as an objective or as an educational strategy. A museum can, in such cases, appear more entertaining than educational. A final point: visitors undergo highly individualized experiences at museums, with each visitor viewing and responding to things in unique ways, even when environmental and situational conditions are identical to her / his peers. In the realm of “motivation for learning,” some visitors maintain a learning attitude, while others take a wholly leisure or entertainment approach. Visitor attitudes toward animatronic dinosaurs also differ from person to person. The ways in which an individual utilizes the services provided by cultural institutions naturally reflects that person’s perspectives and attitudes on life, her / his utilization of resources, and how she / he forges life values. However, even given this diversity, museums must continue to provide the potential for in-depth learning within what is overtly an entertaining experience. The scholar, David Thelen, believes that: Individuals construct from time, place, and circumstance not determinants of their behavior but horizons of possibility and constraint, including relationships, pressures, and conventions from which they frame choices and take responsibility for them. 33

Despite its success in creating a lifelike animatronic dinosaur experience, the Dinosaur Exhibition may still fail to effectively induce visitors to further learn about and understand dinosaurs and ancient organisms. The visitors have a real experience based on false reality and may not be able to apprehend the scientific message about the dinosaurs. Thus, the most important focus of further research is to distinguish between experience as an end and experience as a means. Effectively distinguishing between these two types of experience is 32 | See for example no. 5 of Culture & Musées and also Serge Chaumier (dir), Expoland. Ce que le pacr fait au musée: ambivalence des forms de l’exposition. Paris: Editions Complicités, 2011. 33 | David Thelen, “Learning from the Past: Individual Experience and Re-Enactment”, in: Indiana Magazine of History, Vol. 99, No. 2, June 2003, p. 159.

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critical to helping museums effectively address the nature of the museum visit experience.

W orks cited Baudrillard, Jean, Le système des objets. Paris: Gallimard, 1968. Baudrillard, Jean, Selected Writings. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988. Cameron, Duncan F, “A Viewpoint: The Museum as a Communication System and Implications for Museum Education”, in: Curator, 11, 1968, pp. 33-40. Chaumier, Serge (dir), Expoland. Ce que le pacr fait au musée: ambivalence des forms de l’exposition. Paris : Editions Complicités, 2011. Deloche, Bernard, Le Musée virtuel, Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2000. Desvallées, André & Mairesse, François  (dirs), Dictionnaire encyclopédique de muséologie. Paris: Armand Colin, 2011. Desvallées, André & Mairesse, François (ed.), Key Concepts of Museology. Paris: Armand Colin, 2010. Dewey, John, Experience and Education. New York: Collier Books, 1963. Eco, Umberto, Travels in Hyper Reality. Harvest, 1990. Falk, John H. & Dierking, Lynn D, The Museum Experience. Washington: Whalesback Books, 1992. Falk, John H. & Dierking, Lynn D, Learning from Museums. Lanham: Altamira Press, 2000. Fleck, Ludwik, Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1935. Gilmore, James H. & Pine II, B. Joseph, Authenticity: What Consumers Really Want. Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2007. Harré, Rom, “Some Narrative Conventions of Scientific Discourse”, in: Cristopher Nash (ed.), Narrative in Culture. The Uses of Storytelling in the Sciences, Philosophy, and Literature. London & New York: Routledge, 1990, pp. 81-101 Hooper-Greenhill, Eilean, “The museum in the disciplinary society”. in: Susan M. Jarvis, Peter, Holford, John & Griffin, Colin, The Theory & Practice of Learning. London: Routledge 1998. Pearce (ed.), Museum Studies in Material Culture, Leicester and London: Leicester University Press; Washington, DC: Smithsonian University Press, 1989, pp. 61-72. Pine II, B. Joseph & Gilmore, James H, Experience Economy: work is theatre & every business a stage. Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1999. Pine II, B. Joseph & Gilmore, James H, “Museums and Authenticity”, in: Museum News, May/June, 2007, pp. 76-93.

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Thelen, David, “Learning from the Past: Individual Experience and Re-Enactment”, in: Indiana Magazine of History, Vol. 99, No. 2, June 2003, pp. 155165. Urry, John, The Tourist Gaze. Leisure and Travel in Contemporary Societies. Sage Publications, 1990. White, Hayden, Tropics of Discourse. Essays in Cultural Criticism. Baltimore and London: The John Hopkins University Press, 1978. ** This study is one in a series of research projects funded under the Taiwan National Science Council project: Truth and Fiction of Historical Narrative–Museum Exhibition as Text (NSC101-2410-H-144-002). The author wishes to thank the NSC for their financial assistance and the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and insights.

Museums and Visitors Giving the Lions Powers to the Gazelle Colette Dufresne-Tassé, Université de Montréal – Canada

The situation of an adult’s visit to a museum reveals not one but a variety of powers as regards both actors, namely museum and visitor.

Powers of the museum A major or primary power: choosing the content of its exhibitions. As an institution, a collection of resources assembled by society to render it services and exercise leadership, this is one of the museum’s main attributes. A secondary power: choosing the methods by which the proposed contents of exhibitions will be offered. A tertiary power: influencing the visitor through what is on offer.

Powers of the visitor A power of immediate action: having the ability to process the museum’s offer, understand and appropriate it. A power of subsequent action: thinking or acting following the knowledge or skills acquired during a visit. A power of pressure: influencing the functioning of the museum.

V arious visitor empowerment efforts A study of the French, English, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese literature has enabled me to classify empowerment efforts according to the following five situations. 1. The museum gathers the information that it will be able to use, if it sees fit, to modify the content of its offer or the ways in which the latter is presented. For instance,

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it analyses its programming,1* it carries out studies concerning the socio-cultural characteristics of its visitors,2 * it creates a place where the latter may express themselves, make suggestions concerning future exhibitions, 3*4* express criticisms either in visitors comments books,5*or on the occasion of general exhibition evaluations.6 In this type of attempt, the museum does not modify its offer and nothing changes for the visitor. However, the museum seems amenable to influence from the visitor (pressure power). For these reasons, these efforts should preferably be considered as pre-empowerment interventions. 2. The museum does not modify its offer as such, but rather adds mediation7 * or interpretation8 * as conceived by Tilden.9 Here, the museum makes a move and listens to the visitor. The latter has influenced it, even though it is not through a direct and precise intervention. However, neither the museum’s primary power (choosing exhibition content), nor its secondary power (choosing exhibition presentation methods) 1 | * Anderson, G. (ed.)., Reinventing the Museum. Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on the Paradigm Shift. New York, NY: Barnes and Nobel, 2004. * A reference with an * means that it is offered as an example, publications on the subject matter being too numerous for all to be cited. 2 | * Peréz Santos, E. y Garcia Blanco, A., Conociendo a nuestros visitantes. Estudio de publico en museos del Ministerio de Cultura. Madrid: Ministerio de Cultura, Subdirección general de bellas artes y bienes culturales, 2011. 3 | * Daignault, L,. L’évaluation muséale. Savoirs et savoir-faire. Québec, QC: Les Presses de l’Université Laval, 2011. 4 | * Simon, N., The Participatory Museum. Santa Cruz, CA: Museum 2.0, 2010. 5 | * Poterie, S., O’Neill, M.C. et Dufresne-Tassé, C, “Le livre d’or comme barographe du besoin de s’exprimer des visiteurs. Proposition d’un instrument d’analyse”. in: C. Dufresne-Tassé (ed.), Familles, écoliers et personnes âgées au musée: Recherches et perspectives / Families, Schoolchildren and Seniors at the Museum: Research and Perspectives / Familias, escolares y personas de edad en el museo: Investigaciones y perspectivas. Paris: Conseil international des musées, Comité international pour l’éducation et l’action culturelle, 2006, pp. 267-278. 6 | * Coelho Studart, D., “O Público de Familias em Museus de Ciência”, in: M. Marandino, A. Mortara Almeida e M.E. Alvarez Valente (org.), Museu: lugar do publico. Rio de Janeiro: Editora Fiocruz, 2009, pp. 95-121. 7 | * Nardi, E., Forme e messaggi del museo. / Shapes and Messages of the Museum. Serie diretta da B. Vertecchi. Milano: Franco Angeli, 2011. 8 | * Black, G., The Engaging Museum. Developing Museums for Visitor Involvement. Abingdon: Routledge, 2005. 9 | Tilden, F., Interpreting our Heritage. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press (3rd édition), 1977.

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is affected. But its tertiary power of influencing the visitor has increased. Indeed, by gaining easier access to the content the museum offers him, the visitor has probably acquired knowledge that he might not have gathered otherwise. The visitor has thus increased his subsequent power of action (thinking and acting based on knowledge acquired) at the same time as the museum has increased its tertiary power. 3. The museum does not modify the content of its exhibitions, but tries to adapt their presentation to the type of public that will visit them, for instance by doing prefiguration studies10 * or formative evaluations.11* As above, the museum has made a move but has done so differently. It has allowed the visitor to influence its way of presenting the content of its exhibitions and has thus shared its secondary power. The visitor, for her part, has probably been able to process the museum’s offer more easily so that the latter has probably influenced her more through the content of its exhibition (tertiary power). And this influence has probably led to the acquisition of knowledge and greater power for subsequent action on the visitor’s part. 4. The museum seeks the public’s participation, from members of a cultural community for example, in the conception and eventually the realization of an exhibition.12 * Here the museum lets the visitor influence the choice of content of its exhibition. It can thus be said to share its primary power. However, what does the visitor gain? If the people who have acted ‘on behalf of the public’ are truly representative, the visitor gains an exhibition corresponding to his current interests and world vision. To the extent that his representatives have opened the door to the unknown, the visitor usually gains a great deal of knowledge and power of subsequent action. But if his representatives have chosen a subject 10 | * Van Praet, M., “Une rénovation muséographique à la convergence d’un lieu, de publics et d’idées. La Grande Galerie du Muséum national d’histoire naturelle”, in: La Lettre de l’OCIM, 1994, No 33, pp. 13-24. 11 | * Castro, A.H., Pérez, L., Rosales, R. y Téllez, O., “La investigación-evaluación como herramienta para transformar los museos”, in: C. Dufresne-Tassé (ed.), Familles, écoliers et personnes âgées au musée: Recherches et perspectives / Families, Schoolchildren and Seniors at the Museum: Research and Perspectives / Familias, escolares y personas de edad en el museo: Investigaciones y perspectivas. Paris: Conseil international des musées, Comité international pour l’éducation et l’action culturelle, 2006, pp. 85-94. 12 | * Brady, M.J., Discourse, Cultural Policy and Other Mechanics of Power: The Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American Indian. Ph. D. thesis presented at the Pennsylvania State University, 2008.

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that is merely entertaining or fashionable as the theme of the exhibition, the visitor gains nothing, for he has little chance of acquiring new knowledge. So in this case, under the visitor’s influence, the museum certainly gives up some of its primary power and probably some of its secondary power, without gaining tertiary power as in cases 1 and 2. However, this sharing of power does not necessarily mean a gain in power for the visitor. 5. Taking the diversity of its publics for granted, but without awaiting their criticisms, the museum modifies its offer of exhibitions,13* their accompanying information (accessible before, during and after the visit) and even its museographic or design formulas.14* This case is particularly complex. To understand the power games, the planning prior to the museum’s modifications must be considered. Has it sought visitors’ opinions’? If not, then there is presumably no sharing, as we have seen above, but a real abandonment of power which may well affect the museum’s primary power as well as its secondary and tertiary powers. Whether the museum’s primary or secondary power is in question, if the diversification of its offer is not based on preliminary studies, there is little chance that the visitor will find in it a context favoring the acquisition of knowledge and power for subsequent action. In short, the museum abandons its power in vain. However, if it diversifies its offer as the result of consultations, what happens is equivalent to what occurs in cases 3 or 4, with the same result for the visitor: gain in power of subsequent action, but only when the exhibition facilitates the acquisition of knowledge.

P ower sharing and t ypes of empowerment The five categories of efforts described above represent a number of cases of empowerment and power games between the museum and the visitor. The following propositions can be drawn from their analysis: 1. Not all the efforts listed should be considered as real empowerment efforts. Some constitute preliminaries to an intervention and thus may be called “pre-empowerment” attempts. 2. The museum may adopt three positions: not moving, sharing its power or abandoning it. 13 | * Dufresne-Tassé, C., “Ils ne veulent pas choisir. Ils veulent être fascinés ”, in: Y. Bergeron, D. Arsenault et V. Ferey (eds), Le musée, théâtre d’objets? Impacts des nouvelles tendances et responsabilités éthiques (title provisional, to be published). 14 | * Hughes, P., Scénographie d’expositions. Paris: Eyrolles, 2010.

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3. The museum’s power comes in three forms: primary, secondary and tertiary. 4. The visitor’s power may potentially take three forms: immediate action, subsequent action and pressure. But in the efforts identified, it has never taken the third form. 5. Even in a situation where the museum’s power is not affected, the visitor can gain power. 6. Sharing power by the museum may or may not lead to a gain in power for the visitor. 7. Abandonment of its power by the museum probably does not lead to an increase in power for the visitor. These propositions lead to the conclusion that a) visitor empowerment may take various forms that lead to complex and different power games between museum and visitor; b) visitor empowerment does not necessarily mean the loss or abandonment of power for the museum; the sharing or loss of power by the museum does not always lead to visitor empowerment; d) this is because the types of power of both museum and visitor are sometimes similar, sometimes different, so that a gain for the visitor does not always mean a loss for the museum. The fear of deterioration in the museum’s attributions (prerogatives) resulting from increased power for the visitor is therefore largely unfounded, at least in the five cases studied.

D ifferent power games Two series of studies carried out by the University of Montreal team15,16 have revealed a somewhat disturbing situation. Indeed, they have shown that in seven major thematic exhibitions presented in Paris and Quebec City: 15 | Marin, D. et Dufresne-Tassé, C., “Xi’An, capitale éternelle”. Traitement des données recueillies en pré- et post-visite. Rapport de recherche déposé au Musée de la civilisation, 2002; Marin, D. et Dufresne-Tassé, C., “Gratia Dei. “Les chemins du MoyenÂge”. Traitement des données recueillies en pré- et post-visite. Rapport de recherche déposé au Musée de la civilisation, 2003; Marin, D. et Dufresne-Tassé, C., “Le temps des Québécois”. Traitement des données recueillies en pré- et post-visite. Rapport de recherche déposé au Musée de la civilisation, 2004. 16 | O’Neill, M.C., Étude de la réception d’une exposition par ses visiteurs. À propos de l’exposition “Visions du futur: Une histoire des peurs et des espoirs de l’humanité”, présentée aux Galeries nationales du Grand Palais. Rapport de recherche. Paris: École du Louvre, 2001; O’Neill, M.C., Étude de la réception d’une exposition par ses visiteurs. À propos de l’exposition “Matisse-Picasso”, présentée aux Galeries nationales du Grand

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• Visitors read about 50 % of the texts offered, but the rate of reading of each type of text (introductory panels, section panels, labels) varies considerably from one exhibition to the other; • Visitors process between 50 % and 80 % of the objects on view; • They examine these objects in an order that often differs from the order built in the exhibition by its curator; • They treat most of these objects as if they were unrelated each other, although in a thematic exhibition they are in principle arranged to convey a real discourse; • Of all the ideas they develop while visiting the exhibition, only 2 % to 5 % can be seen as a synthesis, or a reflection on what they have seen or read. In short, visitors deal only with a portion of the museum’s offer. Moreover, they break it down and do little to reassemble the fragments so that the semantic universe they create is fragmentary and incoherent to say the least. In spite of the present enthusiasm of adults for thematic exhibitions, they do not seem to derive much from their visit. These conclusions led my team to develop two lines of research. As will be seen from each of these, the power games differ from the preceding ones, for both the museum and the visitor gain power in them. The first line of study focuses on the increase of exhibition processing skills by adult visitors, their power of immediate action. The second, for its part, seeks to perfect the thematic exhibition. This effort at improvement does not consist, as has often been attempted, in adapting the exhibition to the characteristics of a particular public.17* It is an improvement that makes the exhibition more effective and thus better able to convey the museum’s discourse. N.B: The Université de Montréal team’s studies that will be discussed were conducted in major thematic exhibitions and with members of the general public, with people who visit the museum three times a year or less.18 The resulting conclusions are therefore only valid for this type of exhibition and this type of public.

Palais. Rapport de recherche. Paris: École du Louvre, 2002.; O’Neill, M.C., Étude de la réception d’une exposition par ses visiteurs. À propos de l’exposition “L’or des Rois Scythes”, présentée aux Galeries nationales du Grand Palais. Rapport de recherche. Paris: École du Louvre, 2003. 17 | * Holguin, M.C. y Baquero Martin, M.J., “Los adolescentes, los museos y la virtualidad”, in: M.C. Holguin, M.J. Baquero Martin y M.A. Botero Saltarén (org.), Educar: Aprender y compartir en museos. Buenos Aires: Editorial Teseo, 2010, pp. 158-177. 18 | Marin et Dufresne-Tassé, 2002, 2003, 2004 ; et O’Neill, 2001, 2002, 2003 op.cit.

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I ncre ase in the visitor ’s power of immediate action The visitor’s power of immediate action, or primary power, is her ability to give more or less complex meaning to the objects she observes and more generally to the exhibition she is visiting as a whole. In other words, it is her ability to process the museum’s offer, to understand and appropriate it.

Research strateg y Based on the studies from which the above observations emerge,19 we have: 1. identified the abilities that might permit a marked improvement in what visitors do and produce; 2. devised an intervention aimed at promoting an increase in these abilities, and verified the results. The abilities enabling improvement in what visitors do and produce in an exhibition gallery are also those used by an adult when he is about to make an acquisition requiring careful consideration, like buying an apartment or an outfit for a special occasion. This characteristic means that any adult has these abilities to a certain degree and that they have merely to be transferred to the museum situation. The abilities involved are as follows; using one’s imagination, one’s sense of observation, ability to compare, one’s formal and experience-based knowledge,20 exercising one’s skill in giving meaning to a detail, gathering several together, giving them meaning, or being able to see implications or consequences; dealing with the physical impressions that stem from contact with what is close to oneself; recognizing pleasure or discomfort, positive or negative emotions as they appear and remaining with them as long as they produce information, whatever their nature.21 On three occasions, we have offered a workshop to groups of 25 to 30 adults during which they could practice the above-mentioned abilities and succeed in transferring them to the visit situation.

19 | Marin et Dufresne-Tassé, 2001, 2002, 2003 ; et O’Neill, 2001, 2002 et 2003 op.cit. 20 | Experience-based learning is the result of what Claude Lévi-Strauss calls “le bricolage” (pottering ideas). 21 | Dufresne-Tassé, C., Lapointe, T. et Lefebvre, H., “Étude exploratoire des bénéfices d’une visite au musée”, in: The Canadian Journal for the Study of Adult Education, 1993, vol. VII, pp. 1-19.

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Findings The participants in the workshop: • Deal easily with objects related to art, ethnology or the natural sciences, but some are still put off by contemporary art when this involves minimalist, ready made works, or installations. • Their exploration of the objects is lengthier, more thorough and more complex than before. It involves observation as well as personal references that stem from strong emotional, imaginary or cognitive functioning and involving considerable experience-based knowledge. • Their treatment of the objects often causes them to exchange the pleasure of contact with a beautiful or intriguing object for the functional pleasure stemming from a successful use of a series of abilities, in other words, a competent use of self. • In addition, the participants increase the length of their visit and prefer to stop longer before certain objects that please them rather than ‘see everything.’ Lastly, they acquire enough self-confidence as visitors and are so convinced that the museum is a place where it is a pleasure to deal with objects that they bring other people to the museum. • An unexpected result: over 66 % of the participants consider that the practicing of abilities and their use in the museum has enabled them to improve their use in their professional lives. Such an effect, that we had not sought, proves interesting for it shows that skills acquired in the course of cultural activities help the adult do his work, a fact still doubted by educators unfamiliar with museums.22 The above findings suggest that it is possible to greatly improve the abilities of general-public-type visitors to deal with major thematic exhibitions. With some slight modifications, the workshop we developed could become a museum program regularly offered to adults. The latter would gain power but so would the museum. Indeed, according to the above definition, a greater ability to deal with exhibitions represents an increase in the visitor’s primary power. Moreover, this increase is automatically accompanied by a gain in secondary power, for if the visitor can deal better with an exhibition, he acquires more knowledge that can be re-used. Thus, the museum influences the visitor more easily through its offer, which leads to an increase in its tertiary power. How22 | Dufresne-Tassé, C. et O’Neill, M.C., “Transfering Their Skills in Order to Make Adults More Competent Visitors”, in: K.S. Ahn and S.H. Kook (eds.), Heritage, Museums and Non Visitors/Diversity in Museum Education. Seoul: Korean Association of Museum Education and Museum Education Institute, 2007, pp. 269-285.

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ever, this is not its only gain, for visitors who increase their appreciation of its offer, get less tired of it and insist less on a constant renewal of exhibitions (that has become a real problem for the museum).

I ncre ase in museum power through e xhibition improvement As we have seen above, the second aim of the Université de Montréal team was to make the thematic exhibition more effective, better able to convey its message, the empirical knowledge the museum wishes to diffuse. This intervention creates the seventh case of power games between museum and visitor. Why try to improve the exhibition? Two reasons justify such an attempt: 1. The museum cannot hope that the workshop presented above, although it certainly improves visitor behaviour, could be taken by a large number of adults; for lack of time, most of them limit themselves to visiting exhibitions. 2. The fact that visitors are interested in only 50 % to 80 % of the objects on show, that they process these in an order different from the order built into the exhibition, and as if they had little relationship with their neighboring objects, suggests that the exhibition’s discourse was not strong enough. In other words, its discourse was not sufficiently structured to be clear and precise; visitors could not understand it easily, and follow it closely. In short, we thought that the partial and erratic treatment of exhibitions that we observed was mainly due to a lack of coherence and we therefore developed a principle together with rules designed to ensure coherent relations between the main elements of an exhibition.

Research strateg y The approach in the second part of the studies carried out by the Université de Montréal team is more complex than that of the first part. It involves: 1. The study, using the so-called Thinking Aloud23 technique, of the visitor’s psychological functioning, namely what he thinks, imagines or feels as he goes round the exhibition.24 23 | Ericcson, K.A. and Simon, H.A. Protocol Analysis. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1993. 24 | Dufresne-Tassé, C., Sauvé, M., Weltzl-Fairchild, A., Banna, N. et Dassa, C., “Pour des expositions muséales plus éducatives, accéder à l’expérience du visiteur adulte; Développement d’une approche”, in: Canadian Journal of Education, 1998, vol. 23, no

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2. The production, for each of the exhibitions studied, of a photographic record giving an overall view of the exhibitions as well as a detailed view of each of their units. 3. The identification of the parts of the exhibitions where visitors function poorly, namely the places where they view few objects or read few texts. 4. An attempt to identify the problems that explain the visitors’ poor functioning, and verification that problems of coherency are in question. 5. Verification that these problems are found in most of the seven exhibitions studied, also in other exhibitions,25 and identification of ways in which they arise. 6. The development of principles or rules aimed at correcting the problems identified. 7. Verification that in the parts of the exhibitions obeying to these principles or rules one observes better visitor functioning than in the problematic parts. 8. Research of exhibitions other26 than the seven studied in order to identify the variations in the way the principles or rules take form. 9. Research of exhibitions where the set of principles developed find concrete form in order to verify how such exhibitions are presented.

A pre-condition Before focusing on the coherence of an exhibition, the visitor’s psychological and physical comfort must be considered. Indeed, several studies conducted by graduate students at the École du Louvre and the Université de Montréal have shown that if this is not undertaken, any attempt at improving an exhibition has little effect.27* Recommendations published since 197528* show that psychological comfort is ensured by the empirical excellence of the content of the exhibition as well as by texts that are easy to read and understand, whereas physical comfort depends on well kept premises, ease of circulation in the exhibition, furnishings and design that facilitate the viewing of the objects.

3, pp. 302-316; Dufresne-Tassé, C., Sauvé, M., Weltzl-Fairchild, A., Banna, N. et Dassa, C., “Pour des expositions muséales plus éducatives, accéder à l’expérience du visiteur adulte; Élaboration d’un instrument”, in: Canadian Journal of Education, 1998, vol. 23, no 4, pp. 421-433. 25 | About a hundred in Europe and America. 26 | Idem. 27 | * Barbieux, C. et Gavaud, A.S., La salle “Imagine” du Centre des sciences de Montréal: ses visiteurs, leur expérience et réception de l’exposition. Mémoire de recherche déposé au Centre des sciences de Montréal et à l’Université de Montréal en 2009. 28 | Hooper-Greenhill, E. Museums and their Visitors. London: Routledge, 1994.

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A principle of coherence We have borrowed our concept of coherence from linguistics.29 Applied to the thematic exhibition, it has produced the following principle: “The global discourse of the exhibition is a strong and rigorous one. It has an obvious and progressive structure for the visitor. It is also a discourse of perfect continuity, in other words it has no defect, nor superfluous element.”30 There are three main types of coherence to be ensured in a thematic exhibition are the horizontal, the vertical and the textual. Seven rules detail them.31

Horizontal coherence The horizontal coherence focuses on the relationship between the exhibition’s parts. The latter should be articulated in a rigorous and progressive way. This coherence is governed by three rules. The first concerns the exhibition’s conceptual aspect, namely the relationship between its sub-themes, whereas the other two concern the relationship of the material aspects (design and objects) with the conceptual one. Rule 1 (concerning the relationship between the exhibition’s sub-themes): “The relationship between sub-themes is governed by a strict (logical) progression; it is presented rapidly and clearly in order to facilitate anticipation of the subthemes as the exhibition and is visit proceeds.” (logical-type coherence). This type of coherence applies whenever the subject of the exhibition is complex enough to include secondary ideas or sub-themes. Justification Without a strong link between its sub-themes, an exhibition does not tell a real story; at best it constitutes a series of juxtaposed ideas. Requirements 1. The link between the sub-themes corresponds to structures familiar to western thought,32 like narrative, chronological, demonstrative or explicative structures. When this is not the case, the structure must be detailed. 2. The chosen structure is presented in a clear and easy way to understand in the introductory text, at the entrance to the exhibition. Each sub-theme is 29 | * Pépin, L., La cohérence textuelle. Laval, QC: Beauchemin, 1998. 30 | Dufresne-Tassé, C., Médiation culturelle, texte du cours donné en 1999. Paris: École du Louvre, 1999. 31 | Dufresne-Tassé, C., Notes de l’enseignement offert aux conservateurs de l’Institut national du Patrimoine. Paris: Institut National du Patrimoine, 2010. 32 | This restriction comes from the fact that research has been realized only in the West.

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then repeated and explained in the corresponding part of the exhibition so as to periodically recall the chain of sub-themes. Rule 2 (concerns the link between design and organization of the sub-themes): “Each sub-theme, each conceptual part of the exhibition, is clearly marked in space by the design, in other words, each sub-theme is at least physically delimited in space.” (correspondence-type coherence). Justification Since an exhibition is both a visual and an intellectual production, its physical parts are as important as its sub-themes, and both must match. Requirements 1. The physical divisions of the exhibition space (often called sections) are seen by the visitor as an indication of his passage from one sub-theme to another. 2. When visual “distractions” appear, the division markers are stronger than these. Rule 3 (concerns the link between objects and sub-themes): “The progression of the objects—their visible characteristics—and those of the sub-themes are parallel.” (correspondence-type coherence). Justification The aim of this rule is, here too, to harmonize the exhibition’s perceptual and conceptual aspects. Vertical coherence The vertical coherence focuses on the relationship between the levels of information within an exhibition sub-theme (or section). There should be a perfect continuity from one level to the next. This coherence is governed by three rules. The first two state the continuity that must exist between the object, the label and the sub-theme panel. The third rule indicates the role of design. Rule 4 (concerns the object-label continuity): “The information contained in the label must enable the visitor to identify the object, and if it is an “extended” label, it will draw attention to observable(s) aspect(s)s of the object, then enhance its (their) meaning in line with the exhibition’s discourse.” (continuity-type coherence).

Museums and Visitors

Justification Without a close link between what the visitor sees and what she reads, the object becomes a “free electron,” an element detached from the exhibition as a whole, and the extended part of the label becomes a mini-statement with no real function. A semantic gap is thus created that the visitor cannot fill because she does not have the specialized knowledge that would enable her to do so. Requirements 1. The information that appears on the identification part of a label—name of the object, author, material, provenance, date of creation or fabrication, etc.—is absolutely necessary to the visitor, for it meets the pressing need of the adult to know what he is looking at or to verify the accuracy of what he thinks about it.33 2. The additional information on the label must take over, start from what the visitor sees and take her further. The extended label will thus detail the exhibition’s discourse. Rule 5 (concerns the continuity between the labels and the sub-theme (or section) panel: “The information contained in the panel recalls the general sense of the sub-theme. It also frames and integrates the information of the whole set of labels comprised in the part of the exhibition corresponding to the sub-theme.” (continuity-type coherence). Explanation and requirements The sub-theme panel usually recalls the general idea of the corresponding section of the exhibition and details or explores this idea. Thus, it presents a rather general level of text, whereas the text of each label, as we have seen, offers limited information because it only refers to one object. The visitor must be able to make the link between these two levels, and in order to do so the panel must offer a synthesis of the labels of the exhibition section it is introducing. If it does not play this role, the visitor is confronted with a semantic gap that he cannot fill because of his lack of knowledge. In fact, the section panel must offer the visitor an idea of what he will find on the labels or, inversely, broaden the sense of what he will have read on them. Rule 6 (concerns the link between the design, the objects and the content of their labels): “The elements of design that surround the presentation of the objects are primarily used to show each one off, to support the ideas that the

33 | Dufresne-Tassé, C., Notes de cours. Enseignement aux étudiants du Diplôme de recherche appliquée de l’École du Louvre. Paris: École du Louvre, 2004.

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curator wishes them to express, and eventually to emphasize the objects that present the major ideas.” (correspondence-reinforcement-type coherence). Justification and requirements Since each object (or group of objects) “speaks” a part of the discourse of an exhibition, the design must back it up, and when one of them represents a major idea, the design must emphasize it. Each design element has at least three functions: a utilitarian function, such as protecting objects, or keeping the public at a distance; an aesthetic function that enhances the forms, volumes, etc., a semantic function that consists in conveying meaning.34 This semantic role must cohabit harmoniously with the utilitarian role, and never lose ground to its aesthetic role. Textual coherence The textual coherence insures a close and rigorous relationship between the sentences of a text. This coherence is governed by a single rule, Rule 7. Rule 7 “The succession of the sentences of a text is logical. It presents no missing or excessive information, nor redundant information that stops the progression of ideas, the sequence of sentences contains no element that breaks or confuses the sequence of ideas.” (logical-type coherence). Justification An incoherent text is hard to understand and confuses the reader.35 In the museum, the visitor usually attributes his problems of understanding or his confusion to his own lack of attention. This does not prevent him from wanting immediate understanding. If this is not forthcoming, he will read partially and sporadically.36

34 | O’Neill, M.C. et Dufresne-Tassé, C., “Augmenter notre compréhension de l’impact de la muséographie sur les visiteurs”, in: Culture et Musées, 2010, No 16, pp. 239-244. 35 | Van Dick, T.A., La noticia como discurso. Comprensión, estructura y producción. Barcelona: Ediciones Paidos, 1990. 36 | Dufresne-Tassé, C., Médiation culturelle, texte du cours donné à l’École du Louvre en 1998. Paris: École du Louvre, 1998.

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Coherence of the exhibition, the power of the museum and power of the visitor For reasons of space, I have limited my presentation of coherence to the principal rules that a thematic exhibition must obey.37 Respect for each one of them is essential, for it favours a fruitful treatment of different aspects of the exhibition. However, the whole set of rules is still more important, for they complete and reinforce each other, thus producing a clearly articulated exhibition, of great precision and easy to follow for the visitor. Enabled to grasp the exhibition’s secondary ideas as well as its main ideas, the visitor finds it easy not only to comprehend, but also to synthesize the whole exhibition and reflect on it.38 As we have seen before, when an exhibition plunges a visitor in an unfamiliar universe, the museum creates a context favourable to knowledge acquisition. In turn, the exhibition coherence facilitates this acquisition. So it means an increase in the visitor’s two first types of power. Nevertheless in making this possible, the museum increases its tertiary power of influencing the visitor through its offer, its third type of power. So both visitor and museum gain power. In the two series of studies conducted by the Université de Montréal team, both museum and visitor gain power because each increases its strength as an actor. Indeed, in the first study, the visitor increases his abilities to deal with the museum’s offer, and in the second, the museum enhances its offer, makes it more effective and capable of influencing the visitor. This last way for the museum to increase its tertiary power differs greatly from the other means that consist in sharing its power or offering mediation or interpretation that enable the visitor to deal with an offer that seems abstruse to him.

S ummary and prospects Three types of power intervene in the games involving the museum (primary, secondary and tertiary powers) and the visitor (powers of immediate action, subsequent action and pressure) when the latter visits an exhibition. In the seven cases presented, the gains and losses are as follows:

37 | There are others, especially rules that deal with the relationship between the title of an exhibition and the content of its introductory panel; between the elements of the same window case, or between a window case and its surrounding. 38 | Dufresne-Tassé, C., “When Building an Exhibition, Do not Forget its Coherence and the Visitor’s Meaning Making”, in L.Teather (ed.), The Museum Professional Network: Carreer, Connexions and Communit, To be published.

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Cases taken from a series of publications Visitor’s powers Museum’s powers

Case 1 No modification of power

No modification of power

Case 2 Gain in subsequent action power Gain in pressure power

Gain in tertiary power

Case 3 Gain in subsequent action power Gain in pressure power

Sharing secondary power Gain in tertiary power

Case 4 According to context Gain or not of subsequent action power

Sharing of primary power and probably of secondary power

Case 5 According to context Gain or not of subsequent action power Gain or not of pressure power

According to context, sharing or abandonment of primary and/or secondary and/or tertiary power

Cases created by the Université de Montréal team Case 6 Gain in primary power of action

Gain in tertiary power

Case 7 Gain in subsequent action power

Gain in tertiary power

This summary of gains and losses in museum and visitor power leads us to state that: • The museum does not necessarily have to lose power for the visitor to gain some; • The museum’s sharing of power is not always accompanied by a gain in visitor power; • The museum’s abandonment of power probably does not lead to a gain in visitor power; • The gain in museum power may lead to a gain in visitor power.

Museums and Visitors

It may therefore be concluded that the museum does not necessarily have to lose power for the visitor to gain some. If the museum would only explore new avenues such as the search for more effective exhibitions or the enhancement of visitors’ abilities to deal with them, it can gain power and simultaneously allow the visitor to gain power too.

C oherence and other char acteristics of a thematic e xhibition A coherent exhibition does not mean merely offering a good understanding of its content, the possibility of synthesizing it easily and reflecting on it. Like a good novel, it also represents a framework, a thread that supports the visitor’s psychological functioning, and that he uses as a basis to add all kinds of personal elements that also enrich the content of the exhibition. For the visitor, these constitute a source of secondary benefits such as the recall of memories or knowledge that, without such occasions, might remain more or less inactive in the adult’s memory and fade away. It might be feared that the particularly intense intellectual functioning encouraged by coherence would block the visitor’s emotional and imaginary functioning, promise39 of an experience she seeks and that the museum wishes to give her.40 This is untrue, for both the reading of correctly structured information and the observation of carefully presented objects produce emotions, feelings, memories and pleasure. Indeed, strong and healthy cognitive functioning usually promotes emotional and imaginary functioning.41 But it is also possible, while maintaining strong coherence in the exhibition, to favor both types of functioning directly by ways of “playing” with the objects, texts and design. The team I lead is now exploring ways of doing this, so that the development of rules of coherence represents only the start of studies aimed to make the thematic exhibition, the museum and the visitor more powerful.

39 | Doering, Z., Introduction to Curator, Volume 42, (2), 1999, pp. 70-74. 40 | Carr, D., The Promise of Cultural Institutions. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 2003. 41 | Dufresne-Tassé, C., La relación del publico adulto con la exposición. Su interpretación de los objectos”, in: R.M. Hervás de Avilés (org.), Textos fondamentales de investigación en museologia. Murcia: Universidad de Murcia. A parecer.

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W orks cited Anderson, G., (ed.). Reinventing the Museum. Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on the Paradigm Shift. New York, NY: Barnes and Nobel, 2004. Barbieux, C. et Gavaud, A.S., La salle “Imagine” du Centre des sciences de Montréal: ses visiteurs, leur expérience et réception de l’exposition. Mémoire de recherche déposé au Centre des sciences de Montréal et à l’Université de Montréal en 2009. Black, G., The Engaging Museum. Developing Museums for Visitor Involvement. Abingdon: Routledge, 2005. Brady, M.J., Discourse, Cultural Policy and Other Mechanics of Power: The Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American Indian. Ph. D. thesis presented at the Pennsylvania State University in 2008. Braverman, B. Empowering Visitors: Focus Group Interviews for Art Museums, in: Curator, 1988, vol. 31, no 1, pp. 43-52. Carr, D. The Promise of Cultural Institutions. Walnut Creek. CA: AltaMira Press, 2003. Castro, A.H., Pérez, L., Rosales, R. y Téllez, O., “La investigación-evaluación como herramienta para transformar los museos”, in: C. Dufresne-Tassé (ed.), Familles, écoliers et personnes âgées au musée: Recherches et perspectives / Families, Schoolchildren and Seniors at the Museum: Research and Perspectives / Familias, escolares y personas de edad en el museo: Investigaciones y perspectivas. Paris: Conseil international des musées, Comité international pour l’éducation et l’action culturelle, 2006, pp. 85-94. Coelho Studart, D., “O Público de Familias em Museus de Ciência”, in: M. Marandino, A. Mortara Almeida e M.E. Alvarez Valente (org.), Museu: lugar do publico. Rio de Janeiro: Editora Fiocruz, 2009, pp. 95-121. Daignault, L., L’évaluation muséale. Savoirs et savoir-faire. Québec, QC: Les Presses de l’Université Laval, 2011. Doering, Z., Introduction to Curator, Volume 42, no 2,1999, pp. 70-74. Dufresne-Tassé, C., Médiation culturelle, texte du cours donné à l’École du Louvre en 1998. Paris: École du Louvre, 1998. Dufresne-Tassé, C., Médiation culturelle, texte du cours donné à l’École du Louvre en 1999. Paris: École du Louvre, 1999. Dufresne-Tassé, C., Notes de cours. Enseignement aux étudiants du Diplôme de recherche appliquée de l’École du Louvre. Paris: École du Louvre, 2004. Dufresne-Tassé, C., Ils ne veulent pas choisir. Ils veulent être fascinés. Dans Y. Bergeron, D. Arsenault et V. Ferey (eds), Le musée, théâtre d’objets? Impacts des nouvelles tendances et responsabilités éthiques (title provisional. To be published). Dufresne-Tassé, C., La relación del publico adulto con la exposición. Su interpretación de los objectos, in: R.M. Hervás de Avilés (org.), Textos fondamen-

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tales de investigación en museologia. Murcia: Universidad de Murcia. A parecer. Dufresne-Tassé, C., “When Building an Exhibition, Do not Forget its Coherence and the Visitor’s Meaning Making ”, in: L. Teather (ed.), The Museum Professional Network: Carreer, Connexions and Community. (To be published). Dufresne-Tassé, C., Lapointe, T. et Lefebvre, H., “Étude exploratoire des bénéfices d’une visite au musée”, in: The Canadian Journal for the Study of Adult Education, 1993, vol.VII, pp. 1-19. Dufresne-Tassé, C. et O’Neill, M.C., “Transfering Their Skills in Order to Make Adults More Competent Visitors”, in: K.S. Ahn and S.H. Kook (eds.), Heritage, Museums and Non Visitors/Diversity in Museum Education. Seoul: Korean Association of Museum Education and Museum Education Institute, 2007, pp. 269-285. Dufresne-Tassé, C., Sauvé, M., Weltzl-Fairchild, A., Banna, N. et Dassa, C., “Pour des expositions muséales plus éducatives, accéder à l’expérience du visiteur adulte. Développement d’une approche”, in: Canadian Journal of Education, 1998, vol. 23, no 3, pp. 302-316. Dufresne-Tassé, C., Sauvé, M., Weltzl-Fairchild, A., Banna, N. et Dassa, C., “Pour des expositions muséales plus éducatives, accéder à l’expérience du visiteur adulte. Élaboration d’un instrument”, in: Canadian Journal of Education, 1998, vol. 23, no 4, pp. 421-433. Ericcson, K.A. and Simon, H.A., Protocol Analysis. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1993. Holguin, M.C. y Baquero Martin, M.J., “Los adolescentes, los museos y la virtualidad”, in: M.C. Holguin, M.J. Baquero Martin y M.A. Botero Saltarén (org.), Educar: Aprender y compartir en museos. Buenos Aires: Editorial Teseo, 2010, pp. 158-177. Hooper-Greenhill, E., Museums and their Visitors. London: Routledge, 1994. Hughes, P., Scénographie d’expositions. Paris: Eyrolles, 2010. Lévi-Strauss, C., La pensée Sauvage. Paris: Librairie Plon, 1962. Marin, D. et Dufresne-Tassé, C., “Xi’An, capitale éternelle”. Traitement des données recueillies en pré- et post-visite. Rapport de recherche déposé au Musée de la civilisation, [Quebec] 2002. Marin, D. et Dufresne-Tassé, C., “Gratia Dei. “Les chemins du Moyen-Âge”. Traitement des données recueillies en pré- et post-visite. Rapport de recherche déposé au Musée de la civilisation, [Quebec] 2003. Marin, D. et Dufresne-Tassé, C., “Le temps des Québécois”. Traitement des données recueillies en pré- et post-visite. Rapport de recherche déposé au Musée de la civilisation, [Quebec] 2004. Nardi E., Forme e messaggi del museo. / Shapes and Messages of the Museum. Serie diretta da B. Vertecchi. Milano: Franco Angeli, 2011.

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O’Neill, M.C., Étude de la réception d’une exposition par ses visiteurs. À propos de l’exposition “Visions du futur: Une histoire des peurs et des espoirs de l’humanité”, présentée aux Galeries nationales du Grand Palais. Rapport de recherche. Paris: École du Louvre, 2001. O’Neill, M.C., Étude de la réception d’une exposition par ses visiteurs. À propos de l’exposition “Matisse-Picasso”, présentée aux Galeries nationales du Grand Palais. Rapport de recherche. Paris: École du Louvre, 2002. O’Neill, M.C. Étude de la réception d’une exposition par ses visiteurs. À propos de l’exposition “L’or des Rois Scythes”, présentée aux Galeries nationales du Grand Palais. Rapport de recherche. Paris: École du Louvre, 2003. O’Neill, M.C. et Dufresne-Tassé, C., “Augmenter notre compréhension de l’impact de la muséographie sur les visiteurs”, in: Culture et Musées, 2010, No 16, pp. 239-244. Pépin, L., La cohérence textuelle. Laval, QC: Beauchemin, 1998. Peréz Santos, E. y Garcia Blanco, A., Conociendo a nuestros visitantes. Estudio de publico en museos del Ministerio de Cultura. Madrid: Ministerio de Cultura, Subdirección general de bellas artes y bienes culturales, 2011. Poterie, S., O’Neill, M.C. et Dufresne-Tassé, C., “Le livre d’or comme barographe du besoin de s’exprimer des visiteurs. Proposition d’un instrument d’analyse”, in: C. Dufresne-Tassé (ed.), Familles, écoliers et personnes âgées au musée: Recherches et perspectives / Families, Schoolchildren and Seniors at the Museum: Research and Perspectives / Familias, escolares y personas de edad en el museo: Investigaciones y perspectivas. Paris: Conseil international des musées, Comité international pour l’éducation et l’action culturelle, 2006, pp. 267-278. Simon, N., The Participatory Museum. Santa Cruz, CA: Museum 2.0, 2010. Tilden, F., Interpreting our Heritage. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press (3rd edition), 1977. Van Dick, T.A., La noticia como discurso. Comprensión, estructura y producción. Barcelona: Ediciones Paidos, 1990. Van Praet, M., “Une rénovation muséographique à la convergence d’un lieu, de publics et d’idées”, in: La Grande Galerie du Muséum national d’histoire naturelle. La Lettre de l’OCIM, 1994, No 33, pp. 13-24. This text is an English version of: C. Dufresne-Tassé (2012). Concéder aux gazelles les attributs du lion. Beaucoup de bruit pour rien? Dans A. Desvallées (ed.), Empowering the Visitor: Process, Progress, Protest / Responsabiliser le visiteur: Processus, progrès, contestation / Empoderar al visitante: Proceso, progreso, protesta. Paris: ICOFOM Study Series (ISS) 41.

Authors’ Biographies

Vitaly Ananiev (Candidate of History of Science) is senior lecturer of the Department of Museology at the Saint-Petersburg State University, Russia. His research field is history and theory of museology, with special focus at the history of museologial ideas, discussions and centers in early Soviet Russia (1917–1930). Wan-Chen Chang is professor of the Graduate Institute of Museum Studies of the Taipei National University of the Arts, Taiwan. Her research interests are mainly on exhibition narrative theories, museum studies and the history of the nineteenth-century Sino-French art exchange.  Ann Davis is retired from the University of Calgary, Canada, where she directed The Nickle Arts Museum and taught Museum and Heritage Studies. She was the president of ICOFOM from 2010 to 2013. Her research focusses on museology and Canadian art history. Colette Dufresne-Tassé is full professor at the Université de Montréal, Canada. Her research focus on the psychological functioning of the museum adult visitor and the way exhibition design influences it. Dr. John H. Falk is Director, Institute for Learning Innovation and Sea Grant Professor of Free-Choice Learning, Oregon State University, United States. His research focus is on how and why people learn across their lives, particularly in free-choice settings like museums, zoos, aquariums, parks and ecotourism sites.   Jennifer Harris is senior lecturer in the School of Built Environment at Curtin University in Perth, Australia. Her research focus is popular culture in museums and heritage. Anna Leshchenko is a senior lecturer in the Department of Museology, History of Art Faculty,Russian State University for the Humanities (RGGU) in

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Moscow.  Her research interests include  cognitive studies,  psycholinguistics, philosophical anthropology and communication theory. Aida Rechena (Ph.D) works in the field of museum and heritage management in Portugal. Her research interests include museology and gender, museology and social representations and  inclusive communication in museum exhibitions. Kerstin Smeds (Ph.D. in History at Helsinki University). Professor of museology and heritage studies in the Department of Culture & Media Sciences, Umeå University, Sweden. Research interests and projects: the raison d’être of museums; Exhibition theory and praxis; Towards a new understanding of the idea of museums. Helena Stublić, Ph.D, is junior research and teaching assistant in the Department of Information and Communication Sciences at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Zagreb, Croatia. Her research interests include exhibitions in art museums, difficult heritage and social networks. Bruno Brulon Soares is researcher and teaching associate in the Department of Museological Studies and Processes at the Federal University of the State of Rio de Janeiro (UNIRIO), Brazil. His research focus is Museology and Museum Theory, Museology and Museum History, Musealization and Decolonization.  M. Cristina Vannini, with a background in field archaeology, in 2004 founded soluzionimuseali-ims, an Italian consulting agency for museums. She also worked in marketing. Zarka Vujić is professor in the Department of Information and Communication Sciences at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Zagreb, Croatia. Her research focus is collecting and forming of collections as well as art museums, its characteristics and interpretation strategies. Elizabeth Weiser is an associate professor in the Department of English at the Ohio State University, United States. Her research focuses on modern rhetorical theory, particularly identity and identification as it is shaped and reflected in national museums worldwide.