Atmospheres of display
In many museums, intangible qualities, such as light, smell, sound, and climate, are very carefully controlled. Museums and galleries mediate objects through environmental technologies. Systems necessary for preservation purposes also affect visitor experience: displaying the watercolors of William Blake in a dimly lit room prevents them from fading, but it can also produce a sense of intimacy and add to the dreamlike, almost hallucinatory, quality of the pictures, reinforcing the narrative of Blake as a visionary. Light is a particularly powerful mediating tool because, while it renders things visible, it often passes unnoticed. Alice Barnaby’s chapter shows how light has a role in producing certain kinds of valued aesthetic experiences, by charting changes in exhibition lighting in Britain over a 100 year period, from 1750 to 1850 (Chapter 9).
The idea of lighting as a media technology is not new. McLuhan used the example of the electric light bulb to explain the concept that “the medium is the message” in his book Understanding Media ([1964] 2001). For McLuhan the light bulb is a medium without any content, which nevertheless makes possible certain kinds of social practice and experiences.5 By contrast, Alice Barnaby sees light as having a symbolic content that is closely tied to its technical form. In 1961 the exhibition designer Herbert Bayer listed light among the “combined means of visual communication” that made exhibition design “an intensified and new language” (quoted in Staniszewski 1998, 3). In fact, Barnaby shows that this language was already being developed by means of new lighting technologies in the early nineteenth century, when light was used for “the staging of statements about wealth, power, and taste” (Chapter 9). Cultural trends in art gallery lighting were linked to ideas about who should have access to public art collections, and what they ought to get from the experience, with different lighting styles seeming to produce “civilizing effects” associated with rationality and civic virtue or producing a sensuality and poetic quality that confirmed an aristocratic sensibility.
Barnaby’s discussion of the nuances of different approaches to lighting in this period provides a different perspective from accounts of museums as “hegemonic disciplinary structures,” instead making vivid the “multiple and seemingly contradictory agendas” which produced and popularized a wide range of different lighting practices (Chapter 9). Nevertheless, Barnaby shares with these accounts an emphasis on the visual and visibility. Rupert Cox’s chapter challenges this emphasis, offering sound and aurality as a means to rethink social relations in art museum and gallery contexts. He suggests we think of museum space in terms of acoustics and address “listening as part of the sensorium through which museum visitors engage with artworks” (Chapter 10). The materials used in new museum interiors are chosen with acoustics in mind: to dampen or muffle the sound of footsteps or of visitors talking, for instance. At the same time, there are various uncontrolled sounds – air conditioning and heating systems – or sounds from nearby displays. Inviting visitors to attend to such sounds means inviting them to think differently about the museum space. This attentiveness to sound is something that has been encouraged by the sound art installations and projects Cox discusses.
Cox argues that sound can be experienced by visitors as ambiguous and dispersed, bodily felt rather than cerebrally interpreted (Chapter 10). While he discusses sound art in terms of “affective space” – with “the absence of a fixed viewing perspective,” Brigitte Biehl-Missal and Dirk vom Lehn point to how atmosphere in general is experienced bodily as “indeterminate, a spatially extended quality of feeling” (Chapter 11). The construction of atmospheres in museums and retail environments involves architecture, lighting, color, sound, electronic media, and even the behavior and speech of staff. Biehl-Missal and vom Lehn see atmospherics as a means of ideological manipulation because it includes intangible aspects which nevertheless impact on the museum experience. Designed or manufactured atmospheres appear to bypass symbolic communication altogether, working directly on feelings – Bettina Habsburg-Lothringen refers to the discipline of constructing atmosphere as “emotional design” (Chapter 15).
In highly staged environments, meaning appears to emanate from the atmosphere itself. Atmospherics welds feeling and affect to the museum narrative. This can be understood as a variation of the “reality effect”: in literature, the way in which an accumulation of apparently insignificant details (details that don’t appear to be “signs” within the larger text) combine to produce a strong sense of realism (Barthes 1986). Hilde Hein sees immersive exhibitions as potentially creating “a public reality that passes for knowledge” (2000, 80). But this assumes that all exhibitions must be first and foremost factual representations. Yet, reality effects are part of the pleasures of fiction (which is never entirely invention), and in exhibition contexts they arguably help to construct temporary and playful worlds apart, rather than insidious substitutes for fact.
Reinventing exhibition space
Biehl-Missal and vom Lehm look at the development of atmospherics as a retail marketing tool in the context of the “experience economy” (Chapter 11). They suggest that the production of staged atmospheres is about the production of value. In a time of corporate sponsorship and private–public partnerships, highprofile and often spectacular museums have become integral parts of new planned urban environments, alongside shopping centers, travel hubs, and other “cultural assets.” In his chapter, museum designer Peter Higgins lists some of the elements of increasingly vigorous attempts to market museums as destinations alongside other attractions and family days out: “including high-quality food and beverage, sophisticated retail, profitable temporary exhibitions, and corporate out-of-hours events” (Chapter 14).
The global spread of neoliberal economics and ideology is particularly evident in the contemporary art world; as Mark Rectanus points out, art museums are entangled with private agencies, large-scale commercial events, and global art markets. Rectanus gives the example of corporate museums such as the BMW complex in Munich, and the Leeum Samsung Museum of Art in Seoul, South Korea, which combine educational, consumption, and entertainment facilities to reshape, not just the museum, but the urban environment (Chapter 23). In the late 1980s the majority of commercial art galleries in London were to be found in Cork Street, Piccadilly, and had relatively small exhibition spaces. During the 1990s wealthy collectors and art patrons started to develop their own large exhibition spaces that could compete with museums (such as the Saatchi Gallery in St. John’s Wood). Today, London is full of museum-standard, huge white cube spaces which are privately owned and which sell contemporary art rather than collect it, such as the Gagosian, the Lisson Gallery, and Hauser & Wirth’s large Savile Row galleries. These private museums reconfigure social space more widely: in summer 2014 Hauser & Wirth opened another large-scale institution on a rural farm in the southwest of England with five galleries covering 2483 square meters, which will turn the small town in which it is situated into a key destination for contemporary art tourism (Shalam 2014).6
Designing retail environments and designing museums involve different constraints and priorities: in the United