Display/Politics: From the Transparent Woman to Enola Gay (Key Readings) - Detailseite

20th century museums, exhibitions and world's fairs displayed science and technology within frameworks highly dependent on society and its underlying politics and powers. National, political and cultural aims strongly influenced the planning of museums as well as the concepts of object presentation also in fields of natural history, anthropology or art.

In this Übung we return to central discussions of the relation between display and politics, both widely construed, and analyze the interpretations of museums as walkable or living textbooks, laboratories (Hein) or political machines (Barry). Looking at specific exhibits like the transparent woman, atomic models, interactive demonstrations of electricity, chemistry or animal, and controversies such as that over the Enola Gay exhibit provides case studies, which eventually may allow to identify the common mechanisms and functions of display/politics.

(selection)

Sharon Macdonald (ed.): Politics of Display, London 1998.

Andrew Barry: Political Machines, London 2001.

Hilde S. Hein: The Exploratorium. The museum as Laboratory, Washington 1990.

Karen A. Rader and Victoira Cain: Life on Display, Chicago 2014.

Alan Morton: The Electron Made Public. The Exhibition of Pure Science in the British Empire Exhibition, 1924-5, in: Bernard Finn: Exposing Electronics, Washington 2000, p. 25-44.

Robert P. Shaw: The Progressive Exhibit Method. A New Technic in the Field of Science Presentation, The American Physics Teacher (1939), p. 165-172.

James Bentley Taylor: Science on Display. A Study of the United States Science Exhibit (Seattle World's Fair 1962), Seattle 1963.

Sonja D. Schmid: Celebrating Tomorrow Today. The Peaceful Atom on Display in the Soviet Union, Social Studies of Science 36 (2006), p. 331-365.

Jean-Baptiste Gouyon: Making Science at Home: Visual Displays

of Space Science and Nuclear Physics at the Science Museum and on Television in Postwar Britain, History and Technology 30 (2014), p. 37-60.