abstract: The Victorian era was the age of museum development in the United States. In the wake of these institutions, another important figure of the nineteenth century emerged--the flâneur. The flâneur represents the city, and provided new mechanisms of seeing to the public. The flâneur taught citizens how to gaze with a panoptic eye. The increasing importance of cultural institutions contributed to a new means of presenting power and interacting with the viewing public. Tony Bennett's exhibitionary complex theory, argues that nineteenth-century museums were institutions of power that educated, civilized, and through surveillance, encourage self-regulation of crowds. The flâneur's presence in the nineteenth century informed the public about modes of seeing and self-regulation--which in turn helped establish Bennett's theory inside the museum. The popular writing and literature of the time provides an opportunity to examine the extent of the exhibitionary complex and the flâneur. One of the most prominent nineteenth-century authors, Henry James, not only utilizes museums in his work, but he often uses them in just the manner Bennett puts forth in his theory. This is significant because the ideas about museums in James's work shaped the minds of an expanding literary public in the United States, and further educated, civilized, and regulated readers. James also represents the flâneur in his writing, which speaks to broader cultural implications of the both exhibitionary complex on the outside world, and the effects of broader cultural influences on the museum. Beyond the impact of James's work, in the late nineteenth century American culture increasingly became centered around the printed word. The central position of books in American culture at the end of the nineteenth century allowed books and libraries to appropriate the exhibitionary complex and become tools of power in their own right. The book and the library relate to the museum as part of a larger cultural environment, which emerged as a result of modernity and a response to the ever-changing nineteenth-century world.   / Dissertation/Thesis / M.A. History 2011

This thesis presents three main arguments. First, that curating in national museums is a process of meaning making and that the exhibitionary meaning is situated in and mediated by culture, thus, the products of curatorial work, i.e. the exhibitionary complexes are complex political and cultural constructions. Second, that the exhibitionary complexes final visual outcome, i.e. the exhibitionary complexes images and texts result in the presentation of mythological constructs of Byzantium as the only truth to their audiences. Third, that what is finally communicated through the presentation of mythological constructs of Byzantium is national identity and dominant cultural values. The latter is effected through the representation of the Byzantine Empire as part of the identity of the dominant cultural group of the country to which each national museum belongs. National identity is communicated through the exhibitionary complexes, either by suggesting historical continuity of the contemporary national identity of a country s dominant cultural group through Byzantium, as in the case of the Greek national museums, or by undermining the very idea that Byzantine history, European history and British history are so very different, as in the case of the British Museum. Both interpretations are culturally constructed realities . The above approaches are explained through the investigation of exhibitionary meaning around Byzantium, by identifying and analysing the nature and cultural functions of the presuppositions that are involved in each museum s curatorial practices. These presuppositions are the cultural ideas, values and beliefs of the involved dominant cultural groups on Byzantium and on their own identity. My identification and analysis of these presuppositions includes research on the historical, political and cultural context of each museum, the culturally accepted history and art history literature of each country on Byzantium, as well as research on museum archives. By explaining and using the curatorial concepts of democratisation and demystification , adopted and adapted to the practices of the museums under study, and by analysing the British and Greek interpretations of Byzantium, which make themselves apparent in the images and texts of the British and Greek exhibitionary complexes , I provide a cultural account of the making of exhibitionary meaning, explaining contemporary perceptions of Byzantium, its use in identity making and its relation to national politics. By doing this, I also explain the implications of those presuppositions to the making of exhibitionary meaning, and I provide an explanation of how and why the power system of the exhibitionary complex is still in play although we are shifting into the era of the Democratic museum (Fleming, 2008). The concluding remarks of the thesis include suggestions for the further development of the curatorial practices of democratisation and demystification.

This dissertation traces the history of a diagram. The diagram shows four circles of gradually diminishing sizes, lodged one inside the other, like the layers of a circular or spherical body. For a group of artists, curators, architects, and activists centered around Moderna Museet in Stockholm between the mid-1960s and the mid-1970s, the diagram represented a new type of museum: a museological Information Center modeled on the computer, operating as a site for radically democratic social experiments. The four layers stood for different functions: information capture, processing, interface, storage; or, put differently: social spaces and media resources, workshop floors, exhibition facilities, collection. Through close readings of a series of exhibitions and institutional projects in Sweden, the US, and France, this dissertation follows the development of this diagram: its prehistory and formulation, its different implementations, and its direct and indirect effects. It studies Moderna Museet’s original, unrealized project for Kulturhuset in Stockholm, according to which the museum should project its dynamic energies across the city center, serving as a “catalyst for the active forces in society”. It discusses the museum’s confrontation with digital technologies in the late 1960s, through pioneering museological organizations such as the Museum Computer Network in New York. It analyzes the exhibition formats developed in correspondence with the notion of the museum as a “vast experimental laboratory” and a “broadcasting station”: the exhibition as critical information pattern, as tele-commune. And it studies the diagram’s afterlife as one of the models informing the Centre Pompidou in Paris, during that project’s early phases. The Exhibitionary Complex reads these endeavors and visions as attempts to devise a critical understanding of the exhibitionary apparatus in relation to new information environments and media systems. It sheds light on a largely forgotten aspect of the exhibitionary, museological, and cultural history of the late twentieth century, in Sweden and internationally. But it also seeks to establish new models for grasping the exhibition’s singularity and potentials as a cultural and media technological form, in relation to the emergence of new information networks, as they exert increasing control over social, cultural, and political existence. / Space, Power, Ideology