Multisensory museology (forthcoming)

by David Howes

This essay will be appearing in the book Exploration of the Ways, Means and Values of MUSEUM COMMINICATION WITH THE VIEWING PUBLIC. A Seminar held on October 9 and 10, 1967 at The Museum of the City of New York, with Principal speakers: Marshall McLuhan, Harley Parker and Jacques Barzun, edited by William Buxton. Edmonton: University of Alberta Press (forthcoming).

When Marshall McLuhan and Harley Parker descended on New York and stormed the  Museum of the City of New York in October 1967 – at the invitation of then Director, Ralph Miller – they unleashed a maelstrom of ideas and special effects. True to Canadian form (http://canadianicon.org/), the duo presented a “mosaic approach” to the museum which consisted of diverse “probes” and an experimental exhibition (curated by Parker) with a weltering array of media (see pp. 37, 38). The juxtaposition of media created a “collideroscopic” surround that illuminated the Dutch and subsequent history of the city in a decidedly non-linear (anti-chronological, contrapuntal, multimodal) fashion.

It is fitting that the invitation to the 1967 Seminar took the form of an audiotape of a dialogue between the two media iconoclasts, and the event itself survives in the form of a transcript of McLuhan and Parker riffing off each other’s ideas and (im)moderating a discussion with the 80 or so participants. Their whole purpose was to disrupt the “visual space” of modern literate society (bounded, linear, ordered, rational) with its “one-at-a-timeness” by superimposing onto it the “acoustic space” (boundless, directionless, horizonless and charged with emotion) or “all-at-onceness” of traditional oral societies and the “tactile space” of the emergent post-literate society of electrical circuitry (ditto)

Reading the transcript of the Seminar with the benefit of hindsight is an exhilarating and refreshing experience, since McLuhan and Parker’s probes have since become commonplaces or clichés of museum discourse and practice. Multi-sensory museology is the new Grundnorm of the museum world as evidenced by a series of ground-breaking shows, including Tate Sensorium (2015), A Feast for the Senses (2016) and The Senses: Design Beyond Vision (2018), and increasingly widespread experimentation with so-called interactive display techniques in place of labels (Classen 2017: ch. 6; Bielo 2020).

This paper seeks to situate the conversation at the 1967 Seminar in light of current trends in the museological literature.