The first Chapter of Luke’s book, addresses the exhibition ‘The West as America’ shown at the National Museum of American Art in Washington D.C. during 1991. While discussing how the conventional understanding of the Old West became a delicate subject of cultural struggle as a result of the 1991 exhibition, Luke is also able to develop an alternative perspective of this controversy by comparing the Washington exhibition to the Gene Autry Museum of Western Heritage exhibition of the ‘Old West’ in Los Angeles, California. On one hand, the Autry exhibition is a mixture of fact and fiction, which depicts the image of the Old West that most Americans want to see and want to believe in: the West that Americans are well accustomed to ‘because of the times they have spent at many Saturday matinees with Gene Autry, John Wayne, Roy Rogers, or Jimmy Stewart in the reel Old West..’. (p.10) ‘The West of America’ exhibition instead, is described by Luke as being ‘unique as it explicitly posed a reinterpretation of “frontier images” as they had been invented, produced and consumed for nearly four generations of Americans from the 1820s through the 1920s… the selection of images and the explication of their reception in historical context aimed to contest what the images might have meant to their producers, how they were received by their consumers, and why they should not be treated as neutral documents of the West for America today..’. (p.5) The Washington exhibition was staged - ironically Luke says - in the aftermath of the Bush administration’s victory of the Gulf War over Iraq and just before the final collapse of the Soviet Union. ‘ At this unique historical conjuncture, one might have thought that an America flush with such geopolitical successes could have easily tolerated such small ideological countermoves…(p.8) Instead, the ‘West as America’ drew protest from the political right with claims that an exhibition staged by a national government agency should have been a ‘show of force, restating and revitalizing the disciplinary agendas of American nationality’. (p.9) ‘Americanness’ Luke points out ‘is a particular persona that requires constant reinvention and reaffirmation by inducing all who occupy American territory to impersonate an approved range of “Americanized” behaviors, values, practices…if the personification of the American nation is resisted by images or texts that would cast cowboys and pioneers as brutal colonizers rather than benign civilizers, then each impersonation of the American nation might crack a bit, splintering along tiny stress fractures…’(p.12) Creating American citizens is a process of ‘institutionally organized impersonation’ (p.13)…art exhibitions are performances of power, creating states out of narratives, images, practices endorsed as authoritative in the power plays of the artwork put out on show as a moralistic performance. This is why from ‘ The West as America’ exhibition, we are supposed to learn ‘not only what happened, but also how the westward movement was a complete triumph’. (p.13)
The second Chapter of the book continues to focus on cultural controversy by examining the ‘Enola Gay’ atomic bomber display at the National Air and Space Museum. Luke takes us behind the scenes to look at the intent, the reaction and the aftermath. The dropping of the Enola bomb on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, ended a long and bloody war, but at the same time inflicted horrible carnage on the civilian population of a country on the verge of surrender or total defeat anyway and inaugurated a nuclear arms race and the Cold War. The initial aim of the show was to examine the interconnection between the atomic bomb, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and ‘ the atomic stalemate of the Cold War by commemorating the fifty years since the bombing with a display of the partially restored Enola Gay’. (p.19) Eventually though, these ‘educational goals’ (p.22) were dropped in favor of ‘a patriotic fete for the airplane and her crew without any discussion of the atomic bomb or the Cold War’.(p.19) The exhibition drew protest from all factions, and was eventually taken off. Luke sees the Enola Gay episode, not as a case of political censorship, but as symptomatic of a far larger and more volatile American ideological battle, which became crystallized in the context of an institutional structure: the museum.
Luke also explores museums as memorial spaces, such as the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington.
If on one hand these museums are seen as crucial in taking a firm position against all the attempts that try to deny that the Holocaust ever happened, on the other hand, ‘the unspeakable is said, the unimaginable is seen and the incomprehensible is simplified in ways that are too entertaining’ (p.38) Luke denotes a double horror as the Holocaust is transformed ‘into mechanically reproduced spectacles in the rhetoric of museum entertainment’.(p. 57) Both exhibitions fail in the attempt to weave the events of the Holocaust into a larger fabric of genocide around the world: while the Tolerance Museum focuses at least partially on the Armenian genocide in the Ottoman empire, on Pol Pot’s reign of terror in Cambodia and on the ‘desaparicidos’ in Latin America; the Holocaust Memorial Museum display focuses almost exclusively on the six million Jewish victims and their special persecution by the Nazi Regime. Even more, both these portrayals of immense epic evil fail to explain how intolerance grew in advanced industrial societies and how individual decisions and ordinary acts brought participants to commit genocide. ‘…The attribution of such events purely to demagogues, who artfully exploit mass fear and frustrations among receptive audiences by using personal magnetism to attack scapegoat populations, simplifies all of history’s genocidal episodes to fit the same psychic profile given to Hitler and the Nazis in Germany from 1918 through 1945.’ (p. 51) ‘…They give far too much away… they do not show how people could fall under the sway of Hitler; they do not demonstrate the dangerous excitements of fascism. They also require too little from the visitor, who can get swept into the pulse and pace of the show, awed by the artifacts, swayed by the statistics. They do not indicate how necessary it was to think and fight back, right then and there, like many German communists and socialists tried to do. They do not illustrate how hard it was to resist the Nazi movement and state, whether one was Jewish or Protestant, communist or conservative, gay or straight. Instead… they totally accept Hollywood’s version of Der Fuhrerprinzip as its narrative theme..’.(p.60) But then, is there really a museum exhibition that can pursue this task? An attempt, in Luke’s view, is made by the ‘Topography of Terror’ exhibition of Berlin, first established during the years of the old East German communist regime. The show gives concrete examples of how the Holocaust worked through mechanisms of empowering and disempowering individuals, showing photographs of both the oppressors and the oppressed, and making the whole historical event ‘much more comprehensible than the B-movie scripts from cinematic war stories used to construct the Third Reich at the Holocaust Museum’. (p.61)
Chapters four and five examine the politics of nation, trade and representation.
Chapter four looks at the shifting cultural linkages between Japan and the United States as expressed in two exhibits in Washington D.C.: the first during 1988-1989, titled ‘Japan: the Shaping of Daimyo Culture 1185-1868’ and the second staged in 1998-1999, entitled ‘Edo: Art in Japan 1615-1868’. Luke argues that the shows are expressions of economic and political diplomacy: the rise of corporate Japan in the 1980s was exhibited by a show on samurai power in Daimyo culture, while changing fortunes in the 1990s were expressed by an exhibit on Edo period art. ‘This’ as Luke argues ‘is cultural diplomacy at a high level…(p.66)…museums are highly political agencies, which become engaged in authoritatively allocating scarce cultural values and by helping to define who means what to whom, where, when, and how (p.67); museums should be read as ontologues whose passages and presentations reveal an important dimension of international relations that few other indicators provide.’ (p.80) The 1988-89 exhibition traced the emergence of the Daimyo feudal lords back to the Kamakura period when the first of the shogunates was established and at the same time analyzed the major artistic and cultural changes that the period underwent. If very little was said in the exhibition on contemporary Japan’s rising power and growing prominence, ‘the entire show spoke endlessly about it in its silences, by showing what Japan no longer was, and what it well never be again, Japan’s power gained its greatest voice by stressing images of its past’(p.69) The international context in which the Edo art exhibition of 1998-99 took shape was quite different. Japan was no longer the superpower it used to be. Despite some doubts and due to the uncertainties in the new Russian state, North Korea’s unpredictability and China’s growing strength, America continued to believe in the necessity of close ties with the ‘Empire of signs’. ‘At this time, however, the exhibition showed where different people share many cultural practices and values across the divides of time and space.’ (p.77)
Chapter five explores the construction of a whole region in a study of the Heard museum’s exhibit of 1995 labeled ‘Inventing the Southwest: The Fred Harvey Company and Native American Art’. The company’s railway tourism has been able to shape the popular imagination of the Americans about the Southwest, while collaborating with local social forces to invent the form and the substance of Arizona’s cultural economy. The Heard museum positions Indian life in the aura of tourist spectacles, visualizing Native American people as exotic beings, as producers of supreme art and crafts at excellent selling prices.
In chapter six, Luke explores the American Museum of Natural History, an essentially uncontested site, in its aim to manufacture our ideas of nature. ‘Facts are first extracted scientifically from the field, disciplined next technically in the laboratory, and then finally aestheticized formally as “knowledge” by the American Museum’s many authorities” (p.102) Luke sees the reorganization of life through the classification of the dead specimen as done by ‘an observation machine, classification engine, and preservation apparatus’ (p.111) which aims to bring nature into a rational, comprehensible industrial order. At the American Museum of Natural History, the power play is, in Luke’s view, about how nature is captured, classified and made a subject of capitalism.
The subject of nature inside the structure of capital is addressed in the following chapter. Luke is able to demonstrate how the Missouri Botanical Garden and the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum exhibitions reveal how the earth’s biodiversity is brought under the administrative power of science and transnational capital. This control and organization of nature is pursued through research at these sites, using ‘green preservationist rhetoric’.
From the catalogation of nature, Luke proceeds to examine technological nature in the chapter dedicated to the ‘Pima Air and Space Museum’ in Arizona. Luke sees the museum as a ‘collective of human-machine interactions’ (p.174), as an impressive display of American superpower and technology. Museums, like cemeteries, share society’s assignment to care for the material and moral remains of human beings: ‘aircraft alone are only apparatus, but when positioned in such museum settings with their aeronautical antecedents and successors, these war machines of World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, Kuwait or the Cold War, acquire tremendous personality…’. (p.185)
The last two museums visited by Luke are the ‘Tech Museum of Innovation’ in San Jose’ which invites the visitors to support the needs of technology’s constant and superior to human evolution, and the Virginia’s ‘Newseum’, where Luke sees the flow of global communications that shape perceived political reality made visible.
In Luke’s interesting and innovative analysis, we learn that museums are an important public site of affirmation and empowerment for both collective values and social understandings. For these reasons, museums will remain the main location for serious political debate and should be the subject of growing political studies.
Luke challenges us to think critically about how we legitimize knowledge. Museums provide culture, but this cultural information is structured within a set of rules that tell us how we must interpret broad themes like art, history, nature, technology, memory..
The writing style is very good, although Luke uses a very dense sociological and academic language which can at first can be quite intimidating for a non-English mother-tongue..
Although concentrating on external museum politics and the outside consequences of museum exhibitions, the book says too little about internal museum politics and about the internal struggles which occur within museums. At the same time not enough attention is given to the important role played by the marketplace in attracting visitors and in making exhibitions an entertaining as well as an educational experience for them. And the tremendous fall in museum exhibition attendance after 9/11 is also not addressed at all.
Luke’s analysis of museums and their policies hardly takes into account basic issues like museum budgets, finance, donations, fund-rising and marketing. Policy documents are not cited, staff observations are unrecorded, and artists included or excluded are not consulted. It would have been interesting to know something more about the social origin of the visitors to museum exhibitions: do museums attract mainly individuals coming from society’s elites or upper classes? Does the ticket cost play a significant role in attracting different social classes to museum exhibitions? Or is this role played entirely by the exhibition topic?
Though containing a wealth of comments on globalization and culture, Luke’s book remains a study of museums confined to the United States of America, with little or no reference made to museum exhibitions in Europe or elsewhere in the States.
Timothy Luke’s volume is worthwhile reading; it challenged my thinking and I learned from it. Yet, one unanswered question remains: can museums be a public space for discursive wars, a site of struggle between new unconventional understandings and collectively accepted views of reality, and not be destroyed by these wars of position?