Timothy W., Luke 'Museum politics: Power plays at the exhibition'

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                                                              Book Review:

                       Timothy W., Luke ‘Museum politics: Power plays at the exhibition’

                                                         (Minneapolis, 2002)        

Each year museums across the United States attract more visitors than either movie cinemas or sport games. Yet until recently, museums have not been the subject of serious political analysis.  However, the past ten years have witnessed a series of debates about the social, political and moral implications of museum exhibitions, but as Luke points out ‘these debates.. have chewed over the significance of only a few controversial exhibits whose curators dared to question some unspoken assumptions about America’s national identity and historical development..’. (p.4)

In this interesting volume, Timothy W. Luke, Political Science Professor at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, explores museums’ power to shape collective values and social understandings and argues persuasively that museums exhibitions have a profound effect on the body politic.  As he stresses, ‘ this book is my attempt to highlight this reality’. (p.4)

Luke has published a wide range of work on human, nature, democracy and the process of globalization; this critical perspective on ‘how different types of museums work in the public life of the United States’ (p. 218) is equally valid.

As a political space, Luke sees the museum as combining the secular and the sacred, and providing cultural teachings for the young generations and a collective memory for the elderly.

In the first few pages of the introduction to the book, while emphasizing the importance of museums as sites of public instruction and collective imagination, Luke also gives us a definition of culture as ‘the conventional understandings common to specific social groups, which are made manifest in their shared acts and artifacts’. (p.25)  This enables him to point out the major role played by museums as battlefields, due to their capacity to preserve and often define, the changing conventions of social understanding.  Far from being marginalized and irrelevant institutions, museums can inspire, invoke and shape or reshape memory, making values central or irrelevant in the modern ‘ culture wars’.  These ‘discursive struggles’ or ‘wars of position’ as Luke labels them, have attracted a great deal of attention in the past fifteen years and make museums truly interesting locations for political analysis.  Museums become ‘frontline emplacements for competing classes, groups, or regions, to either declare or defend their hegemony and then conduct culture battles in defense of their visions of reality’.(p.16)  Museums are ‘ the commanding heights of many ongoing battles over what is accepted as “reality”.. their display halls can be seen as polemical fortifications meant to hold, through the artful presentation of words, pictures, sounds, and objects, the hearts and minds of visitors.’ (p.16)

When do these ‘cultural wars’ break out and when do museums become the subject of  ‘science wars’?   When any view that doubts existing conventions or endorses new unconventional interpretations emerges, a cultural battle between the latter and the conventional, collectively accepted view of reality, will begin.  As a consequence, the objects belonging to the mainstream view of reality presented  at museums, will be exposed to unconventional forms of understanding and some may question their worth.  A culture war will then have been launched.

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  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 ...

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