This paper examines the embodied sensual experience of visiting a museum, in particular, the feeling of wonder experienced by the museum visitor. It argues that museums, like bodies, are suffused with an activating spirit that has the potential to somatically transform visitors through the sensory power of exhibits. A successful museum, then, can be regarded as a ‘spirit house’, a place made lively by a flowing, connective, integrative force that can be felt by a visitor encountering the somatic and semantic configurations. This essay combines the film theory of Fereydoun Hoveyda, the architectural theory of Bernard Cache and Elizabeth Grosz, and the Indigenous Australian philosophy of David Mowaljarlai, to suggest a trans-disciplinary understanding of this sense of wonder experienced by the visitor of the vivacious museum spirit house.
This essay ponders the sense of wonder you sometimes feel when visiting a museum. Do you know this sensation? Partly, it’s a feeling of care for the artefacts on display. More precisely, it’s a ‘structure of feeling’ (Williams 1977, 128–135), a carefully composed configuration of intrigues and affirmations moving you and moving through you when you contemplate the system of objects and propositions laid out in the galleries. More than just the apprehension of meanings in the displays, it’s a feeling of involvement, with all the emotive forces generated in you by the entire array of the exhibits. It’s a palpable sense of being absorbed and altered by everything on offer when you are engaged as much by the textures, heft and scale of the materials as by their curatorially determined significance. And because you feel the museum getting into you somehow, you sense a burgeoning responsibility for the material on display. You care for the exhibits as you would for yourself and you want to comprehend how the museum is defining and expanding your sense of self, how you’re getting this sensation of a real, historical continuum folding into yourself, past into present, through these artefacts.
I always get this curious urge, for instance, when I visit the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford. A knot of emotions and hunches cinches inside me as I feel the acquisitive lust, the surreal ravaging of meaningful categories, and the catastrophic displacements and realignments that were enacted by colonialism across the globe. Moving amid the massed displays, I get some sense too of the vivacious originating cultures that produced the singular marvels that are recontextualised so astonishingly in the museum’s great glass-roofed chamber. By adhering to the typological ‘logic’ of General Pitt Rivers’s taxonomic principles, the museum’s curators make sure that several sense-making systems from Europe, Africa, Asia, Oceania and beyond are all put in contention and made just a little more palpable because of how startling most of the conjunctions feel. Without fail, I always get shocked bodily by the tangles of shape, size, colour and provenance that are so provocatively assembled all around me, as thousands of musical instruments, for example, press against the innumerable weapons, cooking utensils, love charms and ‘fetishes’.
Places such as the Pitt Rivers Museum are made vivacious by the organising force of their combined somatic and semantic systems. So disturbing, so stimulating, such places are inspired, which is to say they are suffused with an activating spirit the same way a living body must have breath in it, the way anything vital is always inspiring, expiring, respiring. After all, ‘spirit’ and ‘breath’ are words for each other. It’s in this context that a successful museum can be regarded as a ‘spirit house’, a place made lively by a flowing, connective, integrative force that can be felt by a visitor encountering the somatic and semantic configurations.
Thus museums can be more than just representative models of the world, more than just secondary commentaries on primary experience. Rather, because of the way their artists and curators can select and conjoin particular aspects and artefacts from lived experience, the social and sensory constructs called museums can offer intensifications of the world’s vitality. A museum can give you the chance to discern vivacious aspects of experience that are usually too obscure or attenuated to be well apprehended in the ‘outside world’. The system of exhibits can focus some of the vital forces that move through our shared world of space, matter, labour, passion and time.
The sensory power of exhibits is crucial to museology. Granted, the structured feelings that a museum can give you are not necessarily more important than the information that you might garner. But if the feelings are missing, if there is no sensory involvement, then people aren’t roused to care about the exhibits, and the museum won’t have fully succeeded, for the visitors won’t have undergone any transformative relationship to the world that’s been intensified by the system of artefacts. This transformation is a palpable, somatic response that’s not readily decoded like a message or a batch of data. Not entirely reasonable, this transformative urge is a passion: something that passes through the visitor’s sensibilities while artefacts and people and time-scales fold into one another and alter one another within the overall patterning of the museum.
How might you become more adept at installing and ‘channelling’ this transformative feeling? How to harness it for the purposes of more effective museological display? This feeling, which I’ve described as ‘somatic’ a couple of times, is precisely an aesthetic concern rather than a semantic one. Aesthetics is literally a field of study concerned with whatever is ‘perceptible by the senses’ (Wilkes and Krebs 1991, 24). When studying museum aesthetics, you try to comprehend how the senses can be engaged and enriched in a curated display that causes an organised urge to move through the perceiver.
Pondering all this, I’ve learned that some overlooked aspects of film theory are useful. Also snippets of unorthodox architectural theory make some sense, along with portions of Indigenous Australian philosophy. I have a hunch that it’s feasible to combine all these in an attempt to understand the experience of wonder in museums, to see what this trans-disciplinary melding might yield.
We can start with the film theory.
Every now and then, I delve in my files to puzzle over an essay published in 1960 by the French journal Cahiers du Cinéma. It’s called ‘Sunspots’, by a young Iranian scholar named Fereydoun Hoveyda (1986). Each time I read it, I marvel at how it’s beautiful and strange, possibly meaningless, possibly brilliant. Using image-ideas not customary in conventional European aesthetics, Hoveyda explains that cinema works best when it captures and channels an ever-unfolding force that runs through the spaces, objects and temporal rhythms of a film and also through the audience in the dark room. When a film really works, he explains, some kind of energy pulses coherently in space, in time and in people so that the animus of a scene flares through all the components of an individual shot and then arcs like electricity from shot to shot, from moment to moment, from screen to audience and back again. This is the mise en scène of the film, the manner in which space and time are manipulated to make a special place for the viewer. The way mise en scène works, a charge is generated that carries, excites and transforms every portion of the filmic experience. Characters, objects, spaces, luminance, time-patterns and viewers all get altered as the aesthetics and semantics play out during a cinematic session. The result is somewhat pantheistic and plainly expansive of yourself. When a film lights everything up like this, a world of urgency is harnessed, swirling around you and through you in much the same manner as radiation emits from the flares that sometimes burst off the surface of the sun.
These elemental energies, so lucidly evoked by Hoveyda, have always been in Western culture. For example, in the 1890s when the Lumière Brothers first showed their films, viewers flocked to the screenings when they heard some amazing accounts of trees. At the time, Maxim Gorky recorded how he was disturbed by some kind of ghost-power that seemed to shiver the leaves, causing every element on the screen to appear oddly alive. For Gorky, cinema offered life in a spectral form. He called it ‘the kingdom of shadows’ (Gorky 1996, 5–6). He saw not an intensification or clarification, but a stark, leached trace of natural vitality. It worried him. But it galvanised him too. The vivacity of his writing betrays this much. For Gorky, all the things moving on the screen were like kindred creatures signalling to the human beings in the darkened room, as if the screen were transmitting a fellow-feeling that jumped out of the trees, across the auditorium, into the audience, and back again. In such an animated system, all things that could be shown to have vitality in them might be considered part of each other somehow.
These notions are similar to the theories of ‘suture’ and ‘enmeshment’ that arose in film theory during the 1970s, for example in the writings of Jean Pierre. Oudart (1977/8, 35–47), Daniel Dayan (1974, 22–31) and Stephen Heath (1981, 76–112). Analysing how editing works in character-based narrative cinema, ‘suture theory’ describes how the viewer is purposefully shifted through several points of view and alignments of identification. As these different vantages on the represented world line up, the viewer’s subjectivity is repeatedly cut and re-stitched, causing in the viewer a sensation of being commingled with the many characters, objects and spaces that have been presented through the unspooling sequence of the film. Viewers feel the film’s systematic, organising force moving though them, stitching them into the larger body of the film’s dynamic universe. The viewer and the film – all its characters, settings, moods and sounds – each moves through the others, each gets into the others. A holistic sensation develops as you view the film. No one element in the film, yourself included, can be construed as separate from the others.
In recent times, the practice of ecology has helped us understand how an interconnecting energy might weave through space and time so that the definitions of what is inert and what is alive must undergo extensive redefinition. Many cultures give spirit names to an animating force that binds places, things and rhythms into the lively world. Now, I’m not so pantheist as to insist that there is a quantifiable lifeforce in all the objects that comprise the world. There may be, but it’s not crucial to the museological argument that I’m developing here. The key point is that in an aesthetically designed environment an urge seems to flow through and from each object because of an energy generated within the senses of the people encountering the objects. It’s a psychic energy that can become a social energy. Attending a film, for example, the viewer’s communal affections are intensified firstly by the ritual of gathering in the auditorium and secondly by the crowd’s collective attention to the shuttling interweave of rhythm, luminance, scale, sound and language all passing through yourself and your benighted fellows in the irradiated theatre.
Determined to be thoroughly secular about the Hoveyda’s fabled energy, I keep coming back to the ‘Sunspots’ essay because it helps me understand not only cinema but also installation art and museum exhibition. Moreover, Hoveyda’s ideas about integrative energy and spectatorship link with some notions in Indigenous Australian philosophy and metaphysics. From recent times, one of the most inventive examples of adaptive Indigenous thinking comes from the late David Mowaljarlai, who spent the final 20 years of his life creating a spiritual system – pragmatic, ethical and ecological – that he was determined to communicate to non-Indigenous Australians (Mowaljarlai and Malnic 1993). This system was based on ritual knowledge stored in his country in north-western Australia. Mowaljarlai asserted that the country has psychic, social, geological and botanical life all synthesised into a vitality that guides a person to sensible actions. Literally sensible. Mowaljarlai described how he could feel the presence (or not), the valence (or not), the direction (or dissipation) of this country-vitality and he described how he could act in communion with it. He could find spots in space and moments in time where the urgency in country is intensified, where this force signals most emphatically. He could sense the land’s animus ‘swinging’ around him. This was no mystical ability. He could attune to this animus because of all the cultural work he performed, all the ritual taletelling and remembering, all the ceremonies that he enacted to frame and intensify the force in the country. This attunement was the result of relentless cultural labour – marking the ground, lodging painted figures in caves, determining sightlines to other sacred zones, bouncing songs off cliff faces. In other words, he was constantly arranging a mise en scène of country and from that mise en scène he was getting his cues for action, taking direction from the scene because countless ancestors have already fashioned the country into a kind of sense-generator that he could cleave to (Mowaljarlai 1995).
One would expect Mowaljarlai and Hoveyda to understand good portions of each other’s beliefs. And one would expect them to respond well to the ideas of French architect and philosopher, Bernard Cache, as expressed in his startling book Earth moves. Cache declares that architecture is best understood as ‘a cinema of things’ (Cache 1995, 29). Interlocking a set of directive frames, Cache explains, an architect works more with dynamics than with status, more like a film director than a builder. An architect channels the continuous flow of light and sound in consort with the trajectories of objects and people all moving in time and space so that every component of the built environment becomes implied and available to all the others. Every object, surface, sheet of light, vault of air and volume of sound gets integrated in an aesthetically complete environment that is felt as a dynamic, flowing experience in the sensorium of everyone inhabiting and appreciating that environment.
Amplifying Cache’s provocations, Elizabeth Grosz (2005) has suggested that architecture can be regarded as the primary art, because its frames are applied to preternatural forces. The act of constructing a wall forms a floor, thus transforming raw ground into something domestic, making cultural order from the given, Adamite chaos. A soffit emphasises the built shelter of a roof combining with a wall to parry the attack of the prevailing elements. Think of the frame around a window as a focusing device that directs the trajectories not only of light and wind but also of eyesight. A directional cairn of stones might show travellers how to bring a sense of optimism as well as a river toward them while making tracks through a savannah. Grosz describes architecture as a process whereby space gets rendered lively so long as the architect harnesses and organises the tendencies both within the citizens and within the territory that is being constructed for them. You can extrapolate that architecture can do for space what social history and personal memory do for time – providing momentum, shaping unstable experience, exposing and harnessing the world’s tendencies and dynamic potentialities.
Seen like this, Cache’s conception of a world made by architecture is close to Hoveyda’s vision of cinema’s integrated and irradiated universe. Which is close also to what museum exhibits can do for artefacts and interpretations. The material world can get arrayed and interpreted so that an organised, aesthetic spirit connects and excites people in relation to places, time-scales and objects.
Dylan Thomas once wrote of ‘the force that through the green fuse drives the flower’ (Thomas 1974, 77). This force is like that energy detected by Hoveyda, Mowaljarlai, Cache and Grosz, and it is comparable, I think, to the stimulation you can feel in ‘spirited’ museum exhibits. Or as Nicolas Bourriaud’s influential book Relational aesthetics has proposed, contemporary museums are most relevant to contemporary life when they help visitors grasp not the essential material qualities of the displays but the full potential of relations among people and artefacts. In the arrangement of these relations you set right conditions for generating propositions and feelings (Bourriaud 2002). As Bourriaud argues, museums can set up scenes where negotiations can occur, where people can feel secure enough to speculate about the associations and affections required to make sense in a world where all the constituent parts exist in a constantly altering force-field of power and possibility, a world shivered by globalisation, ecological change and accelerating accretions of information.
So to conclude, I’d like to make an exhibit here on the page, an exhibit of the visions generated in this essay. It’s a way of relating the various theories of Mowaljarlai, Cache and others. Each brief definition is a separate but related vision of a vivacious museum. We can arrange them as an ensemble, as if in a showcase, to see whether they make sense for us, to see if they correlate to give us a cogent feeling about what a museum can be.
Here then, to finish the essay, is my little exhibit of definitions all flowing in and out of each other. Might they conjure ideas and feelings of a museum worth visiting?
Museum: a place where we can assay the moving forces organising the world of matter, power and feeling.
Museum: a place secure enough, imaginative enough to help us trace lines connecting the existing and the potential relations among all aspects of our shared experiences of space and time.
Museum: a place where the vivacity in our built cultures can be shown to be collaborating with all our given natures.
Museum: a place where the breath of the world can be intensified so that it can be dis discerned.
Museum: a spirit house.
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Cache, Bernard. 1995. Earth moves: The furnishing of territories. Boston: MIT Press.
Dayan, Daniel. 1974. ‘The tutor-code of classical cinema’. Film Quarterly (Fall): 22–31.
Gorky, Maxim. 1996. ‘Newspaper review of the Lumiere programme at the Nizhni-Novgorod fair, Nizhegorodski listok, 4 July, 1896’. In In the kingdom of shadows: A companion to early cinema, edited by Harding, Colin; Popple, Simon. London: Cygnus Arts.
Grosz, Elizabeth. 2005. ‘Chaos, territory, art, Deleuze and the framing of the Earth’. IDEA Journal 2005 6: 15–25.
Heath, Stephen. 1981. ‘On suture’. In Questions of cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. pp. 76–112.
Hoveyda, Fereydoun. 1986. ‘Sunspots’. In Cahiers du Cinéma, 1960–1968: New wave, new cinema, re-evaluating Hollywood, edited by Hillier, Jim. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Mowaljarlai, David. 1995. ABC Radio Feature, The Law Report, Tuesday 31st October. Formerly available from: http://www.abc.net.au/rn.
Mowaljarlai, David; Malnic, Jutta. 1993. Yorro Yorro: Everything standing up alive. Broome: Magabala Books.
Oudart, Jean-Pierre. 1977/8. ‘Cinema and suture’. Screen 18 (4): 35–47.
Thomas, Dylan. 1974. ‘The force that through the green fuse drives the flower’. In Dylan Thomas: The poems, edited by Jones, Daniel. Rev. edn. London: J. M. Dent.
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Williams, Raymond. 1977. Marxism and literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Cite this chapter as: Gibson, Ross. 2006. ‘Spirit house’. South Pacific Museums, edited by Healy, Chris; Witcomb, Andrea. Monash University ePress: Melbourne. pp. 23.1–23.6.
© Copyright 2006 Ross Gibson
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