6 - The Elusiveness of History and the Ephemerality of Display in Nineteenth-Century France and Belgium: At the Intersection of the Built Environment and the Spatial Image in Literature
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 June 2021
Summary
Abstract
This chapter explains how the ephemeral dimension of nineteenth-century exhibition spaces testifies to the awareness of a highly elusive past and present. Such an awareness underlies a historical, museal society, also beyond the walls of museums, exhibits, and collections. Responding to the particular historical dimension and sense of elusiveness of the culture of their day, exhibition spaces emerge as problematic settings of coherence and “presentification.” In this context, an analysis of the interstices between spaces in literature (Balzac, Rodenbach, and Mallarmé), and the experience of the built environment throughout the century, shows how the interplay of ephemerality and presentification communicates a particular experience of temporal deferral, fragmentation, and composition from the part of the spectator.
Keywords: temporality – museum – Balzac – Rodenbach – Mallarme
Introduction
Mille causes réunies, […] ont concouru à faire de l’Italie une espèce de museum général, un dépôt complet de tous les objets propres à l’étude des arts.
Removed from their utilitarian purpose, objects in the pre-modern cabinet of curiosities functioned as what Krzysztof Pomian referred to as sémiophores , “des objets qui n’ont point d’utilité, mais qui répresentent l’invisible, c’està- dire sont dotés d’une signification.” Curious objects from faraway places are “ramassés […] à cause de leur signification, en tant que representants de l’invisible: des pays exotiques, des sociétés différentes, des climats étranges.” From the outset, the spatial organization of cabinets, museums, or exhibits embodied an ambition to represent the invisible in a comprehensive context. As Francis Bacon wrote in Gesta Grayorum, “ and so you may have in small compass a model of universal nature made private.” This was the role the cabinet had to play, together with the library and the garden, in the encapsulation of “universal nature.” Display contexts were thus managed, on the one hand, through a process of removal and displacement of objects, of cutting and separation, or, of “making fragments,” as Barbara Kirshenblatt- Gimblett argued. On the other hand, exhibition spaces also constituted new settings of coherence, significance, and re-enactment. Contexts of display, therefore, negotiated an ambiguous tension between absence and presence, elusiveness, mobility, and fixation.
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- Information
- Ephemeral Spectacles, Exhibition Spaces and Museums1750–1918, pp. 161 - 190Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2021