Mannequins in Museums

Power and Resistance on Display

Bridget R. Cooks, Jennifer J. Wagelie, Bridget R. Cooks, Jennifer J. Wagelie, Bridget R. Cooks, Jennifer J. Wagelie

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000440720
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Kunst
• Subtopic: Museumswissenschaft

Mannequins in Museums is a collection of historical and contemporary case studies that examine how mannequins are presented in exhibitions and shows that, as objects used for storytelling, they are not neutral objects.

Demonstrating that mannequins have long histories of being used to promote colonialism, consumerism, and racism, the book shows how these histories inform their use. It also engages readers in a conversation about how historical narratives are expressed in museums through mannequins as surrogate forms. Written by a select group of curators and art historians, the volume provides insight into a variety of museum contexts, including art, history, fashion, anthropology and wax. Drawing on exhibition case studies from North America, South Africa, and Europe, each chapter discusses the pedagogical and aesthetic stakes involved in representing racial difference and cultural history through mannequins. As a whole, the book will assist readers to understand the history of mannequins and their contemporary use as culturally relevant objects.

Mannequins in Museums will be compelling reading for academics and students in the fields of museum studies, art history, public history, anthropology and visual and cultural studies. It should also be essential reading for museum professionals who are interested in rethinking mannequin display techniques.

1
The museum mannequin as “body without organs”

Jessica Stephenson

DOI: 10.4324/9780429260575-1

The museum mannequin reminds one of French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s concept of the “body without organs,” that is, a virtual reservoir of potential (which could be a literal body, real or imagined, or more generally as the form that precedes content) that comes into being as external forces and flows act across this potential, activating certain possibilities and foreclosing others (1972). The “body without organs,” in its highly variegated, yet distinct and intentional forms, demonstrates the absence of content until it takes in and reproduces the particular cultural milieus within which it is chosen to be embedded.

Equating the mannequin with the concept of “body without organs” elucidates the genres’ ontology. Museum mannequins serve as supports for dress and other bodily adornments, or as descriptive prompts to flesh out broader display contexts, as for example when placed within diorama settings. They have no “organs,” no content, no identity, until dressed or located within a contextual display. However, the hyper-realistic life-cast mannequin, a museum genre that rose to prominence in the nineteenth century and has endured into the twenty-first century, despite considerable criticism within public and museological circles, would appear to complicate the support function of the mannequin due to its appearance as simulated human body derived from once living individuals. Yet, as evident in this chapter, even the hyper-real life-cast mannequin only takes on identities or “content” as external forces act upon it. The reasons why this may be so are evidenced if we consider anthropologist Marzia Varutti’s observation that the human body serves as the interface between the personal – the body as receptacle of individual subjectivity – and the social – the body as a signifier of one’s place in society (2017). The human body can be understood both as the site of the self, as well as a catalyst for social relationships because, says Varutti, “it is evocative, symbolic and metaphoric, it can stand for other concepts, such as culture, race or gender. As a result, the body is a prime site of construction, contestation and negotiation of individual and collective identities” (2017, 6). Varutti’s observations apply not only to the human body, but also to its simulacra, as for example the museum mannequin. Petra Kuppers notes that “envisioning” bodies results in processes of “translation, interpretation, intervention” (2004, 125). Museum representations of bodies are thus constitutive and revelatory; envisioned bodies support specific viewpoints and express social imaginaries about those bodies’ identities (Varutti, 2017).

This chapter offers an appraisal of the hyper-real life-cast museum mannequin as material process and as “body without organs” through discussion of a specific set of mannequins, created between 1907 and 1924, and then reproduced, repaired, and redisplayed until 2013 when they were dein-stalled from exhibit within the South African Museum, today known as the Iziko South African Museum, Cape Town, South Africa. I argue that the life-cast mannequin provides a surface upon which numerous social constructs may be imprinted. I consider how it is that the research into, production of, and multiple display moments of these life-casts afforded a means by which to strip away the models’ personhood; impressions of their bodies were transferred to paint and plaster as they took on various “imaginaries” within the museum.

Over the course of a century of manufacture and display, these particular mannequins have passed through five distinct museological phases, with additional ones yet to come. Museum mannequins may have many “senses of self,” those traced here include their identity as “specimens” and “fetishes,” instruments of racial and scientific physical inquiry and sexual fantasy; as “artifacts,” props for ethnological theory, theatre, and political propaganda; as “historical documents,” witnesses to historical moments, practices, and persons; “art objects,” sites for activism and museum critique; and as “surrogate persons,” claimed ancestors and physical evidence for genocide and human suffering. To trace the history of life-cast mannequins over the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries is thus also to trace shifts in museum ethos; dialogic study reveals that specific museo-logical practices and display techniques – here the simulated body as pliable object in the service of constructed representations of race, gender, culture, and class – endure, shift, change, and are contested. The layers of meaning that accrue to their surfaces eventually led to a reclaiming of personhood, in the sense that the mannequins have recently become surrogates for lost bodies, peoples, and personal and collective histories.

Photographic reproductions of the mannequins in question are intentionally excluded from this chapter, written at a moment when they remain off display, their futures up for debate as objects signifying complex genealogical and epistemological connections between the past and the present, the dead and the living, ancestors and descendants (Schramm, 2016, 131). Currently, museum officials and representatives of certain Khoisan groups regard the mannequins to be human remains, not of “specimens” but of “ancestors.”¹ They are also, as Schramm observes, “material evidence to … (the) destruction, dispossession, and scientific objectification” of individuals (2016, 138). In what follows, the history of mannequin production and display at the South African Museum is described, but is intentionally withheld from visual consumption in deference to prior and current criticisms by certain scholars and Khoisan that to do so repeats a violence otherwise described in this text (Douglas and Law, 1997; Bregin, 2001).

The life-casts were made under the auspices of Louis Péringuey, then director of the museum, and his team, most notably, taxidermist and museum modeler James Drury, in a quest to capture and fix a physical impression of what Péringuey, writing in the early twentieth century, termed “pure-bred” or “pure-blood Bush People,” those labeled within colonial culture as Bushman or Hottentot, designations applied to groups of people then perceived to share certain unique linguistic, physical, and lifestyle traits and today known through self-designations as Khoisan (Davison, 1993; Skotnes, 2002).² Between 1907 and 1924 Drury photographed, measured and made field-molds of eighty-eight so-called “pure-bred” Khoisan living in far-flung regions from Prieska, Carnarvon, and other villages of the Northern Cape to Grootfontein and Sandfontein in southwest Africa (Namibia), Kanye in the Bechuanaland Protectorate (Botswana), and Lake Chrissie area in eastern Transvaal. Fourteen of the individuals whose bodies were recorded were incarcerated at the time. Back at the museum, the field-molds of sixty eight people were cast in plaster and carefully painted to convey a sense of realism and exactitude (Davison, 1993), the purpose underpinning the project being to capture the imprint of a perceived dying race, as is evident in an excerpt from one of Péringuey’s letters, in which he requested the blessing of the Cape Government:

Sir,

Owing to the rapid disappearance by reasons which I need not mention here, of the pure specimens of Hottentot and Bushmen races the Trustees of the Museum are endevouring to obtain models from the living flesh which would enable the exact physical reproduction of the survivors of these nearly extinguished races.

(in Davison, 1993, 168)

Here, the life-cast mannequin functions as effigy, which, as Sandberg notes, served as one “tangible manifestation of a wider array of circulating corporeal traces and effects” designed to stand in for actual persons and at the same time offering “new possibilities for imagining space and time” (2003, 5). Wax figures, notes Weber, and ethnographic objects including life-cast mannequins, are such replacements. Along with photography and film, the life-cast mannequin implicitly conveys that those depicted are temporally and spatially absent (2016, 305).

Péringuey sent Drury to Kanye in 1908 to collect data, make life-molds, and collect Indigenous material culture. He armed Drury with very specific criteria:

For Drury – memorandum about the modelling

I would like to have first, a group of five or six men, women and children photographed in the position they naturally assume, either sitting down, or as if they were on the march: the men carrying his few arms and chattels; the women carrying what they generally carry, the youngsters carry nothing … make them assume positions that will not make the models appear too stiff … try to place them in such a position that would not prove too fatiguing, in order avoid also stiffness in the reproductions…. Pay special attention to the hairs in your note of the specimens, of the colour or expression of the eye, of the shape of the ear, and above all copy the colour of the skin, and verify your slab a couple of days after you have painted it in order to make quite sure of the genuine colour…. Men are of course desirable, women more so. You will be careful to take all their peculiarities, including the “apron.” A special moulding of the same to be added to the statue is very much wanted.

(in Davison, 1993, 172)

Capturing the imprint of live “specimens” with all the “racial” data of skin tone, texture, hair, and other features in the form of the life-cast mannequins formed part of a larger project to document a “dying race” to include the collection, generally under ethically dubious circumstances, of human remains from graves which Péringuey referred to as “relics” (Legassick and Rassool, 1999, 31).³ The South African Museum project thus conforms to a much longer history – the popular and scientific fixation on the Bushman body (Gordon, 1992), which can be traced back to at least the early 1800s through the tragic example Sara Baartman. Taken from her native homeland in the Cape Colony in 1810, Baartman was paraded and prodded on stages in London and France as the Hottentot Venus, a living curiosity, exemplar of the Bushman race defined by her steatopygic buttocks and female “apron” – elongated labia. She was subjected to close physical scrutiny in life and after death, when her brain, skeleton, and genitals were retained for further study and her body “preserved” through a cast made after her death. It was shown at a French museum until 1974 alongside her reconstructed skeleton. The vitrine tombstone identified the mannequin and skeleton as “La Vénus Hottentote,” belying the conceptual shift performed within the museum where reconstructed skeletal remains and mannequin as simulacra represent imposed constructs – they are specimens of gender, race, and sexual perversion, they are not Sara Baartman herself.

In both Sara Baartman’s case and those who “participated” in the South African Museum project, the transfer of living flesh to molded wax and cast plaster entailed a reduction of an individual, a person, to a physical racial type through a stripping away of social context and personal biography. Names, living conditions, and contemporary material culture were not recorded by Drury in the field. Further, the mannequins’ museum accession records support their typological purpose, only recording a description of the mannequin’s appearance, the model’s sex, area of origin, and racial designation according to colonial academic classifications. The modeler and casters name (Drury) are also given, thereby drawing attention to the mannequin as crafted object (Davison, 1993, 174).⁴

Within the museum context, the life-cast fulfills the function of relic (in a quite literal sense for Baartman who had passed before a mold was made of her body). Per Pérignuey’s instructions, they were designed to defy artifice (stiffness), to appear life-like; they nevertheless serve as literal death masks, not of specific individuals, but of the “purebred Bushman,” a perceived fast disappearing physical type that, in the context of the museum’s mission to document and preserve, could be “saved” from loss through life-like simulacra. The choice of life-cast to fulfill this goal was critical: although mannequins are inanimate things, they often appear eerily alive to the viewer (Weber, 2016, 303). The poses assumed by each are unique and striking, designed to persuade, the delicate coloring of the skin intended to be realistic, details such as hair, wrinkles, veins, and nails contributing clinical precision, implying objectivity, but of course Péringuey’s letters and memos reveal the staged nature of the entire enterprise.

The negation of personal and cultural information in favor of physical context and classification as “specimen” was further enacted through the mannequins’ display location within the vicinity of the museum’s faunal collection. A selection, grouped in a tableau with minimal scenery hinting at a vague geographical location and titled Karoo Diorama, went on public display in 1915 (Davison, 1998, 144). Even though placed in a group, the figures did not interact with each other or with their surroundings. Some figures were positioned towards and others posed facing away from the viewer (Legassick and Rassool, 1999, 5). The viewer’s focus on naked body parts was amplified by the scantily clad figures wearing nothing but diminutive loincloths and through their position at a raised elevation bringing the midsection of the body to the viewers eye level. The exhibit label invited close viewing of the mannequins as exemplars of a now absent race:

CAPE BUSHMEN: The Bushmen of the Cape appear to have been the purest-blooded representatives of the Bushman stock, much purer than those of the Kalahari and other more northerly districts. They are now practically extinct. They were light in colour and of small or medium height; the prominent posterior development (steatopygy) of the women was a characteristic feature of the race.

To anthropologists the Bushmen are one of the most interesting races in the world. There are strong grounds for suspecting that they are of the same stock as the remote Upper Palaeolithic period. This cannot yet be definitely asserted but recent discoveries in North and East Africa have tended to strengthen the probability considerably.

(in Davison, 2001, 15)

The life-casts moved between various displays into the 1950s, with amendments made through the addition of dress. These additions were noted on the life-casts’ accession cards, reflecting the shifting status of the mannequins as both physical specimens, but also now as “artifacts” – cultural prototypes – through their location within the newly named Bushman Room and New Ethnology Gallery. Although the figures were generally more fully clothed, they continued to stand out singly within grouped displays, with labels placed at the foot of each figure to identify it by race, sex,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 The museum mannequin as “body without organs”
• 2 From life?: histories and contemporary perspectives on modeling Native American humankind through mannequins at the Smithsonian
• 3 Likeness and likeability: human remains, facial reconstructions, and identity-making in museum displays
• 4 Fashion and physique: size, shape, and body politics in the display of historical dress
• 5 Asian physiques of mannequins in American art museums
• 6 Figures of speech: black History at the National Great Blacks in Wax Museum
• 7 Black is the color of my true love’s skin: the symbolism and significance of the Black female mannequin figure in Mary Sibande’s creative work
• Index