Exhibitionary Complex

Definition

The exhibitionary complex is Tony Bennett's term (as deployed by Stokes-Rees) for the museum as a disciplinary public space: museums as "carefully constructed public spaces through which state objectives can be achieved" — monumental institutions built "to simultaneously represent enlightened thought, political unity, and evolutionary continuity," their internal layouts echoing "the discourses of science, culture, and power presented within." Its operative mechanism is the directed route: visitors "proceeded along directed routes, devised 'to comply with a program of organized walking which transformed any tendency to gaze into a highly directed and sequentialized practice of looking.' In this way, the museum building, through its spatial layout, organizes time and ideology within its walls." The effect is a distinctive form of authority: "By controlling the path of movement, ways of seeing, and the objects and displays around which this vision is directed, museums acquire a special social authority" (after Connerton) — with visiting itself a ritual ("the climb up to the door feels like entering a church or cathedral"; Duncan's "civilising rituals" psychologically and culturally prepare visitors to respect the museum's authority).

The concept is joined in Stokes-Rees's chapter by its built-form instance — the Museum of Macau's enforced set path through a linear national history, climaxing in a rooftop panorama where the museum becomes "overseer and protector" of the city-state's heritage — and by its counter-thesis: Gillian Rose's caution that studies of museums "concentrate too much on the disciplining effects of institutions and not enough on the way [they]… may fail or be disrupted." Stokes-Rees's own observations (visitors drawn to whatever "caught their eye"; children using the galleries "as a maze, running and playing 'hide-and-seek'") temper the disciplinary claim, yet her conclusion stands: "the museum nonetheless privileges certain readings."

Key Thinkers

• Emily Stokes-Rees — deploys the concept for the Museum of Macau: the "exhibitionary complex" of organized walking, spatial layout as ideological ordering, and the observed failures of discipline.
• (Discussed in the source, not yet paged — see log: Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum (1995), the concept's source; Carol Duncan, Civilising Rituals (1995), the ritual constitution of museum visiting; Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (1989), commemorative practice and collective memory; Gillian Rose, Visual Methodologies (2001), the disruption thesis.)

Related Concepts

• Narrative Space — the content side of the same operation: spatial layout organizing time and ideology.
• Power and Space — the debate page where the exhibitionary complex joins Foucault's disciplinary architecture and Ardener's spatial ordering as a fourth register.
• Boundaries — the museum's threshold as ritual boundary crossing: stairs, set-backs, and entrances that prepare the visitor's deference.
• Memory — commemorative practice: collective national identity produced and sustained through participated rituals of movement (Connerton).
• Panopticon — the disciplinary apparatus against which Bennett's exhibitionary model (directed visibility rather than covert surveillance) is the museum-specific counterpart.
• Postcolonial Identity — the stakes: organized walking through a national story rendered "natural."

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Symbiotic spaces (Stokes-Rees 2018) — Bennett's exhibitionary complex and organized walking; Duncan's civilising rituals; Connerton's commemorative practice; Rose's disruption caveat; the MoM's directed route and rooftop overseer position.
• Volatile Architectures (Drobnick 2002/2006) — the complex's postmodern reconfiguration and its smell-regime: the conventional museum's "anosmic condition" against the postmodern museum's "heterosmia" (p. 91); Clive Bell's 1913 call to blow "the dust of erudition and the stale incense of hero-worship" out of the museums — "a revolution in museum philosophy… that favoured inclusivity and democratization over mediation and intimidation by experts" (pp. 90–91) — the democratizing demand later institutionalized in smell-infusing attractions; and the authority inversion at the complex's core: "As museums shift away from basing their legitimation on master narratives and prescriptive interpretations, exhibits that include extra-visual sensory experiences grant heightened status to the subjective nature of knowledge production… Authority and coherence are guaranteed not by collections and curatorial directives, but by each visitor's experience" (p. 93) — the organized walking's counter-form, authority relocated from layout to the visitor's body.
• Touch, Taste, Smell (Brown 2018) — the complex's bodily discipline and its relaxation. The discipline, at the object's edge: the no-touch regime is the complex's policing of the visitor's body — "Buzzing alarms, physical barriers, and watchful guards are all employed to maintain a safe distance between the object and the visitor" — organized walking's complement: the organized not-touching, distance enforced by technology and staff. The relaxation: museums "beginning to lighten, or in some cases even eliminate, the structures and policies that restrict direct access," reinterpreting themselves as "participatory community centers" (Simon: visitors "create, share, and connect with each other around content") — with the MoM's national authority (Position D) counterposed by the authority Brown's cases relocate to the visitor's hand, palate and nose. Whether the touchable museum dissolves the complex or internalizes it (participation as the visitor's self-directed performance) remains the wiki's open question. See multisensory-museum, participatory-museum.
• Time travel (Massey 2018) — the complex's field-level challenge and its counter-model. The challenge: exhibition studies' focus on artworks, "the intertextuality of the exhibition as event," and networks of artists, curators, and visitors "does not take the spatial culture of the exhibition space sufficiently into account" — the complex's spatial machinery is precisely what the field neglects. The counter-model: the ICA as the complex's deliberate inversion — a "modern arts laboratory" that abandoned the permanent collection (the founders realized "they personally owned most of the modern artwork located in Britain"), housed its avant-garde in a remodeled drawing room, ran twelve exhibitions a year through the same interior (see ephemeral-interior), and admitted by purchasable one-day membership rather than national narrative (privatised-public-space). Where Bennett's museum organizes citizens through a directed route and a permanent collection, the ICA organized an avant-garde milieu through turnover, membership, and argument — the exhibitionary apparatus without the exhibitionary complex's permanence. And the complex's archival afterlife: when the ICA finally "looked to its past," it did so by inserting facsimile private-view cards into the Comme des Garçons store that now occupies its old gallery — the exhibitionary complex remembering itself inside retail. See white-cube, memory.
• Documenting interiority/inhabiting duration (Macken 2018) — the complex's preserved-interior case: the studio-museum as "an adjunct exhibition space under the auspices of the Art Gallery of New South Wales" — the exhibitionary apparatus attached to an interior that is itself the exhibit. The complex's visitor-position is stated at its purest: the visitor "retains the role of the 'viewer,' at once existing within the space but also a member of the audience" — inside the exhibit and yet held by the visiting apparatus (the space "observable but not occupiable," "resist[ing] inhabitation (except by the 'spirit' of the former artist)"). Where Bennett's route directs the gaze and Stokes-Rees's route directs the walk, Macken's preserved interior directs the co-habitation: the visitor walks freely, but the room's non-occupiability performs the authority — organized walking replaced by organized non-dwelling. See spatial-document, white-cube.
• Hearts and minds and dishwashers (Larson 2018) — the complex's Cold War, interstate form: the design exposition as state counter-propaganda, aimed not at a nation's own citizens (Bennett) but at rival populations. The sequence: So Wohnt Amerika (Berlin 1949 — "eight scale models and 150 display panels"); America at Home (West Berlin 1950 — the Minneapolis prefab built "by carpenters working around the clock," "a patriotic reaffirmation of our way of life"); We're Building a Better Life (1952 — "consumer goods designed to raise the standard of living" as the "primary directive… to have the maximum effect on the average East German visitors"); the American National Exhibition (Moscow 1959 — "50,000 square feet of floor-to-ceiling consumer goods in what one historian called a 'combat of commodities'" and a bifurcated prefab through which "millions of visitors would pass in a mass consumption of, well, consumption"). The register's two extensions of Bennett: the apparatus is turned outward (populations of rival states, not domestic citizens) and its organized route stages a way of life rather than a national history — the directed route through kitchens and appliances as organized persuasion, with the "kitchen debate" as the apparatus's climax. The exhibitions' annual routine ("another of the design exhibitions that had become an annual showing in countries with a large stake in the Cold War") makes this the complex's most institutionalized register. See kitchen-debate, propaganda, soft-power, cold-war.

Open Questions

• Does the exhibitionary complex survive the visitor's body — Stokes-Rees's hide-and-seek children, the eye-led wanderers — or is discipline only ever probabilistic ("privileges certain readings")?
• Bennett's museums organized citizens through visible instruction; what is the exhibitionary complex in the platform era, where the museum visit is staged for the camera — is the directed route replaced by the directed shot?
• The MoM's route is linear and univocal by design ("They didn't want to talk about different versions of this history") — can an exhibitionary complex be plural, or is multiplicity its negation?
• How does the museum's "special social authority" differ from Foucault's discipline — persuasion by ritual and display rather than surveillance — and does the difference matter for power-and-space?
• Drobnick's authority-inversion ("guaranteed… by each visitor's experience") — is visitor-authority the exhibitionary complex's dissolution or its most efficient form (discipline internalized as performative self-direction — cf. Davis's "perform" rather than "consume")?
• Larson's Cold War exhibitions turn the complex outward — organized persuasion aimed at rival populations ("maximum effect on the average East German visitors"). Is the interstate exhibition the complex's extension or a different apparatus entirely — instruction replaced by competition, ritual replaced by shopping ("a mass consumption of, well, consumption")? See kitchen-debate, propaganda.