The Medium is the Métissage

What kind of phenomena are international exhibitions (or, as they are also called, world’s fairs, expositions or expos)? Are they a form of urban development, to be filed with parks or suburbs? Are they testing grounds for new technologies? Instruments for public enlightenment and world peace? Training camps in national and regional identities? ‘Places of pilgrimage to the commodity fetish’?¹ Potemkin villages that help claim an élite world status while screening off domestic disorder? Or, like the Olympics, seemingly never-ending circuses in which the participants are either corporately sponsored or surrogates for international rivalries? Or perhaps they are, as Alexander Geppert in his authoritative Fleeting Cities: Imperial Expositions in Fin-de-Siècle Europe (2010) suggests, a fantastical medium: ‘the most spectacular mass medium of the urban imagination in fin-de-siècle Europe’ (p. 1).

Fleeting Cities is a detailed study of five international exhibitions across more than three decades and three countries. It covers the large trade exhibition in Berlin (1896), the universal exposition in Paris (1900), London’s Franco-British (1908) and British Empire (1924) exhibitions, and the colonial exposition in Paris (1931). Each of its five main chapters is concerned with space, in both its temporal dimensions and human aspects, which is explored in relation to matters of site and layout, but also with regard to issues of patronage, politics, and legacies. International exhibitions are here not the straightforward products of their makers’ intentions but a medium through which societies are represented in a condensed, or prismatic, manner.

Geppert takes this idea of the exhibition as medium from an obscure early essay by the sociologist Georg Simmel. In reviewing the Berlin trade exhibition of 1896, Simmel first developed his influential theories about modernity’s psychological impact: the ‘paralysis of the senses’, the linked disassociation or blasé attitude, and the effect of capturing or conveying globalizing processes through such laboratories as the international exhibition. Simmel understood the accommodations made in order to display different kinds of objects together as a parallel to the accommodations made between individuals in order to cope with the new demands of modern urban life. There was little in this essay, however, about the exhibition as a medium, beyond Simmel’s description of its ‘single frame’, its ‘message’, and its ‘shop-window quality of things’.² Geppert’s book begins to suggest a fuller understanding; in his words, the international exhibition is ‘a particular medium with its own special problems and internal dynamics ... specific means of communication that encompass and incorporate other communicative technologies’ (p. 3). Expos are a gathering and, at least in some of their parts, a blending of multiple media, amongst which architecture, landscape, and display are only the most obvious.

There can seem to be an awful lot at issue with international exhibitions. Their multi-media aspect encourages many disciplines to stake a claim in analyzing them. Big themes are easily summoned up: from internationalism, new technologies and global trade, to regionalism, empire, taxonomic systems and even the nature of modernity itself. It is not surprising, then, that the study of world’s fairs has begun to constitute a sub-field of its own – ‘exposition studies’ – with its own encyclopedia,³ its conferences,⁴ over sixty dedicated publications every year for each of the last ten years (p. 10), and its own band of dedicated scholars, including of course doyens of the field as well as thrusting theorists. The fifty-page bibliography compiled by Geppert also suggests this, while seeming to support his claim for the ‘absolute socio-cultural centrality’ of world’s fairs (p. 7).

World’s fairs, as this indicates, also produce statistics and have statistics reproduced about them: the biggest, longest, most visited, most expensive, most expansive. The international exposition in Paris in 1900, for instance, attracted a mind-boggling fifty million visitors, more than the whole population of France at that time. That kind of statistic is worth pondering. Did it include...