Museum Politics: Power Plays at the Exhibition (review)

From his vantage point as a political scientist, Timothy Luke sees insufficient attention being paid to museums as sites of strategic rhetorical activity. He argues that museums "possess a power to shape collective values and social understandings in a decidedly important fashion," and his book, Museum Politics, is his attempt "to highlight this reality, because most American social scientists are not especially open to considering the workings of cultural power, institutions, or conflict in museums" (xiii). The author's approach to the study of museums explores the normative and ethical dimensions behind the design and preparation of museum displays, and how, once established, such displays can produce their own normative effects and ethical agendas.

Luke locates his work within the "culture wars" of the early 1990s, embodied in such high-profile museum controversies as the Enola Gay exhibit at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., and arguments surrounding the status of victims within the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. He describes his scholarly approach as "a style of interpretive criticism that articulates how fully political knowledge and power can be" (xxiv). To that end, he offers ten separate case studies of museums and their exhibits ranging from the national (for example, the National Air and Space Museum, the American Museum of Natural History) to the regional (for example, the Missouri Botanical Garden, the Pima Air and Space Museum). Each chapter discusses the formation of a particular museum from the perspective of its mission statement and the views of its founders. In addition, the author provides a helpful spatial orientation to the museum sites, and a "walkthrough" of their interiors, or grounds, during which he highlights particular aspects of the exhibits on display. Particularly thought-provoking and descriptive are Luke's chapters on the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum and the Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose, California.

Museum Politics is informed by a number of theories regarding the relationship of cultural institutions to the societies in which they operate. The author adapts the concept of governmentality explored by Michel Foucault and applies it as "entertainmentality" in the museum context. Here the entertainment functions of museums combine with their role as arbiters of the historical and cultural (similarly, his chapter on the Missouri Botanical Garden employs Foucault and coins the term "florapower"). In what I believe is the most provocative and engaging chapter in the book, Luke draws on Jean Baudrillard's discussion of simulation to examine the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum and its efforts to preserve the rapidly vanishing desert environment surrounding Tucson.

Although Luke tries to "systematically describe the objects and practices" of the museums he studies, the reader expecting to find a close textual analysis of exhibit labels or a detailed reading of the exhibit mounting process and its related arguments may be disappointed (123). While Luke's claim regarding the rhetoricity of museums and their exhibits is quite convincing, if somewhat obvious to those who study the rhetoric of places, his support for that claim tends to rely more on the fact that a museum or exhibit exists than on its many details. Particularly conspicuous by its absence is almost any reference to the specific discourse of design and display materials, including the labels all museums use to communicate to their publics. The largest textual example of this kind in the book consists of six sentences from the Newseum in Virginia (see 208). My admittedly rhetorical bias leads me to crave additional close readings of these key pedagogical museum texts, which are themselves the products of contestation and deliberation.

Also problematic is the overly broad and thus potentially misleading way in which the author uses the term "curator" throughout Museum Politics. Although modern museums staffs consist of curators, educators, conservators, exhibit designers, registrars, and many other individuals who directly or indirectly influence both exhibit decisions and daily life in the...