Thinking (with) Museums: From Exhibitionary Complex to Governmental Assemblage

Abstract

This chapter reviews the similarities and differences between two theoretical frameworks that I have proposed for thinking about the relationships between museums and society: first, one which interprets museums as parts of an “exhibitionary complex” and, second, their interpretation as parts of governmental assemblages. While these are both derived from the work of Foucault, they have different consequences, which I explore. I begin with the concept of the exhibitionary complex which, while it has proved quite influential since I first proposed it in the 1980s, has also had its critics. I review these criticisms and indicate what I think is still worth retaining from this earlier proposal. I then go on to review the lines of inquiry that are suggested by referring to museums as “governmental assemblages.” I illustrate both concepts and their consequence with selected examples from a range of the different kinds of museums to which I have applied them: nineteenth‐century art and natural history museums, and twentieth‐century anthropology museums, for example.

Special Issue Editorial: Methodologies for Researching the Museum as Organization

“…In different ways, several articles in this issue draw on the notion of the museum as an assembly of actors, of both people and things. There is significant precedent for an assemblage approach in Museum Studies, with several authors claiming assemblage as a useful research companion (Bennett and Healy 2009;Macdonald 2009;Byrne et al 2011;Bennett 2015;Cameron and McCarthy 2015). Given the extensive uptake of the concept of assemblage in Museum Studies, it is not surprising that the concept has been configured differently by authors who rework these ideas according to their needs.…”

Crafting the Past: Mission Models and the Curation of California Heritage

“…After a time in storage, the models were sold at auction in 1998 to a woman who established a museum where the models are exhibited today. The path from the 1939 Exposition to the present day California Missions Museum offers an opportunity to interrogate more closely the connection between these discursive objects and the construction of heritage, particularly through the models' public display in an "exhibitionary complex" (Bennett 1988). Michael Baxandall's (1991) model of exhibits as a coalescence of three spheres-the original makers and users of the object, the visitors or viewers who bring their own subjectivities to the experience, and the curator who has made the myriad choices of object selection, design, and interpretation to produce the exhibit-is useful for decoding the ideology of the mission models and for tracing their role in the formal and informal heritage practices that have helped shape the social constitution of the California past.…”

Museum-Making as Serious Leisure

“…Private collections and their semi-public exhibition have never disappeared and the cabinets of curiosities have assimilated and reflected social and epistemological changes together with other kind of museographic organisations and not merely after them. For instance, a very specific and paradigmatic discursive museographic tool like the guided tour -a currently highly institutionalized technique with a strong ceremonial character (Meyer and Rowan, 1977)appeared in museums during the first decade of the 20 th century (Bennett, 1988), but long before that cabinet makers already introduced the objects of their displays to their visitors with a very similar kind of oral explanation. Nowadays and in a similar manner, contemporary private collectors also tend to orally explain their objects, the story of their inclusion in the collection, the relation between objects and so on to any visitor that would be interested to listen.…”

“…Jannelli also finds processes of empowerment in her case studies of collective amateur museums (2012) in which museum makers use their collections and the museographic language to build and transfer specific museographic constructions about their pasts, their jobs or their land. The structural power tensions that crystallise in the exhibitionary complex (Bennett, 1988) are also the reasons that can turn them, through their intentional use, on a tool for empowerment (Lord, 2006). But although there are chances for empowerment in collecting and in museum making, People's Shows should be questioned specially because the structures of power that allow them to propose a controlled and up-to-down visibility and legitimisation.…”