The Rise of the Must-See Exhibition

Blockbusters in Australian Museums and Galleries

Anna Lawrenson, Chiara O'Reilly

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781317090991
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Library & Information Science
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Blockbuster exhibitions are ubiquitous fixtures in the cultural calendars of major museums and galleries worldwide. The Rise of the Must-See Exhibition charts their ascent across a diverse array of museums and galleries. The book positions these exhibits in the Australian cultural context, demonstrating how policy developments and historical precedents have created a space for their current domination.

Drawing on historical evidence, policy documents and contemporary debates, the book offers a complex analysis of the aims and motivations of blockbuster exhibitions. Its chronological approach reveals a genealogy of exhibits from the mid-nineteenth century onward to identify precursors to current practice. This provides a foundation upon which to examine the unprecedented growth of blockbusters in the latter half of the twentieth century. The examples discussed offer a unique opportunity to study how institutional growth, political support, individual champions and audience interest have influenced the development of large-scale temporary exhibitions.

The Rise of the Must-See Exhibition considers blockbusters as an international phenomenon and, as such, is highly relevant to practitioners working across the cultural sector around the world. The book will also appeal to academics and students engaged in the study of museums and galleries, arts management and curating, as well as those interested in the history of exhibitions and cultural policy.

Part I

Laying the foundations

Culture, spectacle, exhibitions, 1850s–1940s

1International expositions

Social, scientific and spectacular

Exhibitions are our latest and highest industries. They require the attention of our most intelligent men to bring them to a successful issue, and they are at the same time a most correct and useful record of the progress of a nation.

(Governor Hon. J.P. Bell at the opening of the Fifth Annual Exhibition of the National Association [Brisbane], 1880. Queensland Times, Ipswich Herald and General Advertiser 1880, 4)

Since the foundation of Victoria, there has always been a disposition to foster and encourage home productions by means of exhibitions.

(J.G. Knight, ‘Introduction’ in Official Record of the Intercolonial Exhibition of Australia 1866–67 1867, xxiii)

Across the globe, the nineteenth century provided many opportunities for the general public to view temporary exhibitions. This was as much the case in Australia as in more established centres. Perhaps the most visible of these events were the international expositions, also known as ‘great exhibitions’, ‘expositions universelles’ or ‘world’s fairs’. As spectacular events comprising crowded assemblages of art and industry, they played a crucial role in shaping contemporary exhibitionary culture – and ultimately public museums – around the world (Bennett 1995). They filled large and elaborate purpose-built temporary exhibition halls, whose construction celebrated new industries of the modern world and the advent of consumer culture. They drew huge audiences, and served as forerunners of today’s blockbuster exhibitions, due to their format and ambition. Brian Goldfarb is just one theorist who has suggested that blockbusters are in fact ‘the closest contemporary analogy to the great exhibitions of the nineteenth century’ (2002, 147). International expositions, in Australia and abroad, were widely reported in newspapers, and Australia’s participation helped promote the new British colonies and celebrate their industry and advancement (Darian-Smith et al. 2008; Freestone, Proudfoot and Maguire 2000). This chapter argues that the expositions’ legacies are manifold: they created exhibition infrastructure in the form of buildings, advanced the skills of professionals in the field, contributed to local collections and attracted government support for – and popular interest in – the temporary exhibition format.

For exhibition makers in Australia, participating in international expositions helped establish a culture of display, and we argue an understanding of the format and logistics involved, that would eventually equip them to generate such shows locally. We can trace a trajectory from Australians participating in international expositions overseas, to staging intercolonial shows locally, to hosting full-scale international expositions. This reveals a growing confidence and capacity on the part of exhibition makers.

We further argue that for viewers, early exhibitions in the Australian colonies established important precedents for public display, which in turn helped cultivate an audience ready to accept more ambitious offerings. Underpinning the desire to participate was an understanding of exhibitions’ potential to educate on a mass scale, reflecting the nineteenth century understanding of seeing as the primary method of learning (Bennett 1995; Knight 1867). This early history reveals major themes that have endured in current blockbusters: contemporary ideas of spectacle and its importance in Australia, the roles of individuals in building capacity and governments’ growing awareness of the value of temporary exhibitions.

Exhibitionary practice in nineteenth century Australia

Australian exhibitionary practice in the nineteenth century followed global trends, with a mixture of displays in formal cultural institutions alongside more fleeting exhibitions and temporary spectacles staged elsewhere. The Australian colonies were distinct from the metropolitan powers in their geographical isolation from Europe. Exhibitions came to be crucial spaces for education and civic reform because they offered the community a chance to see and reflect on ideas of progress (Rusden 1857). And unlike European centres, the colonies were still young; significant morale was needed to maintain rapid development (Armstrong 1906). In the cultural sector alone, the pace of change was considerable. Across Australia, new colonial outposts adopted European models and set up cultural institutions and educational organisations in the image of the motherland. Historian Geoffrey Serle, in his discussion of the development of the colony of Victoria, wrote: ‘The cultural habits and institutions of Britain were transplanted, and a worthy replica of the cultural life of an English provincial city was formed’ (1963, 353).

This practice was mirrored in all the Australian colonies. In its first century, for example, Sydney, the continent’s first European settlement, quickly established major cultural organisations, including Australia’s oldest museum, the Australian Museum (of natural history and ethnography, established in 1827), a university in 1850, a public library in 1869 and the beginnings of an art gallery (with the foundation of an academy of art) in the 1870s. A science and technology museum was founded in 1879. Melbourne, established in 1835, grew even more quickly, due to the gold rushes of the 1850s and 1860s that rapidly transformed the economy and population of Victoria. Thus a public library was opened in 1853 which included a room for fine arts; a museum of natural history and ethnography was established in 1854; an art gallery in 1861; and a technological museum in 1871. Other cities across Australia witnessed a similar pattern of establishing cultural organisations (Markham and Richards 1933). These institutions became, and have remained, central spaces for temporary exhibitions and permanent collections of cultural material (Underhill 1979).

These cultural institutions and exhibitions served a civic purpose in the developing colonies. This was made obvious, for example, by one of the founders of the Melbourne Public Library, Lieutenant-Governor Charles La Trobe (1801–75), whose ambition for the institution was driven by a sense of the positive ‘influence likely to arise from voluntary adult mental improvement, as well as of the intellectual and moral elevation to be created by a cultivation of the works of standard authors’ (The Catalogue of the Melbourne Public Library for 1861 1861, v). Likewise, the educational potential of multidisciplinary expositions held outside institutions was emphasised. Educator George W. Rusden stated, on the opening of the new Exhibition Building in Melbourne in 1854, that expositions brought people together: ‘for the good of work and learning … which puts us hand to hand, and shoulder to shoulder, striving emulously for the advantage of all’ (1857, 24). Both La Trobe and Rusden saw potential for culture to contribute to formal learning and moral improvement, in addition to galvanising the local population under the banner of progress. International expositions in particular, because of their exhaustive displays, provided ready evidence of this development and maturation.

The civic role of exhibitions has been theorised by academics including Tony Bennett and Carol Duncan. It was understood in the nineteenth century that the ‘first responsibility’ of the art museum was to ‘enlighten and improve its visitors morally, socially and politically’ (Duncan 1995, 16). Bennett applies this more broadly by looking at the roles of international expositions alongside more formal cultural institutions. He concludes that, as displays became open to the public – whether in museums or expositions – they served a civic and democratic role, functioning as ‘new instruments for the moral and cultural regulation of the working classes’ (Bennett 1995, 73). For Bennett, the exhibitionary space was one of power, in which its structures elicited a response from patrons. It was not simply a space for education in a formal sense but was also, as Duncan similarly notes, a space for moral instruction. Central to Bennett’s argument is the fact that exhibition spaces provided opportunities to not only see the latest displays – technical, cultural, historical and artistic – but also to become part of the display. Exhibitions provided opportunities for visitors to both see and be seen; the ‘exhibitionary complex’:

perfected a self-monitoring system of looks in which the subject and object positions can be exchanged, in which the crowd comes to commune with and regulate itself through interiorizing the ideal and ordered view of itself as seen from the controlling vision of power – a site of sight accessible to all.

(Bennett 1995, 69)

Thus it was exhibitions’ unique combination of ‘spectacle and surveillance’ (Bennett 1995, 65) that enabled a disciplining of visitors through self-regulation, transforming the potential problem of disorder among large crowds into an orderly consumption of culture. Exhibitions were responsible for ‘winning hearts and minds as well as disciplining and training bodies’ (Bennett 1995, 62). Although Bennett’s argument draws primarily on the history of museums in England, it applies equally to Australia, to which British models of display, order and systems of knowledge were readily transplanted (Serle 1963, 353).

Australia emulated exhibition models from Britain and Europe to position culture as a central part of a mature and ‘competitive’ colony. The Australian News for Home Readers offers just one example of praise for these new institutions and their displays, here the new Picture Gallery at the Victorian Public Library in 1865:

Every day since its opening the gallery has been crowded, and the attendance as yet has not shown signs of diminishing. Victorians, it cannot be doubted, are sincere lovers of art, and the establishment of such a valuable institution in the metropolis will stimulate our local artists to use their best efforts to the production of works worthy to be placed in competition with those received from the mother country.

(1865, 7)

Three aspects of the exhibition are illustrated in this quote. Firstly, vision is at the heart of the exhibition space: by simply looking at these objects, local artists will be stimulated. Secondly, the notion of civic progress: the colony will be able to take over the role of producer and alleviate the need to import culture from the motherland. Finally, and crucially for the success of exhibitions, there is a ready and enthusiastic audience, willing to participate.

It was not just the civic underpinning of Australian exhibitions that emulated European – particularly British – models. The physical nature of displays also reflected the types of public spectacle staged elsewhere. As Richard Altick makes clear in his research into London from the Tudor period to the 1880s, the nineteenth century was rich with public spectacle outside official institutions (1978). Such spectacles were most often commercial ventures that conflated entertainment with education or instruction. Before public museums were easily accessible, these exhibitions – which included ‘displays of pictures, objects, or living creatures, including human beings’ (Altick 1978, 2) – helped to form ideas on display, and to shape audiences’ expectations. They were also inherently democratic spaces that ‘engaged the attention of the “lower ranks” [and] also attracted the cultivated’ (Altick 1978, 3). These aspects correlate directly with the function of blockbusters to this day, which continue to be commercial enterprises bearing the ‘two great streams of appeal – amusement and instruction’ (Altick 1978, 509).

Temporary exhibitions and public spectacles were a vibrant part of social life in the Australian colonies; in this respect too they reflected overseas trends. Moreover, there was a great variety of exhibits on offer, some organised by groups such as mechanics institutes (spread throughout Australia), regular agricultural fairs, temporary exhibitions held by art so...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations and acronyms
• Introduction
• Part I Laying the foundationsCulture, spectacle, exhibitions, 1850s–1940s
• Part II The rise of the blockbuster, 1950s–1990s
• Part III Blockbuster or bustThe necessity of the blockbuster in the twenty-first century
• Epilogue
• Index