Performing and the Real Thing in the Postmodern Museum
1995; Cambridge University Press; Volume: 39; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.2307/1146462
ISSN1531-4715
Autores Tópico(s)Cinema and Media Studies
ResumoWhen artifacts are displayed, viewers' relationship to the real is particularly important. Whether the context is a museum such as Skansen (Stockholm's prototypical museum of agrarian architectural preservation) or a theatrical production such as David Belasco's installation of a Child's Restaurant (in 1912 for The Governor's Lady), the material authenticity within a logically illusionistic setting is key to the attraction. This simulacrum is so well established by various genres in the history of 20oth-century entertainment that it can even translate into the immaterial medium of cinema. Steven Spielberg's Jurassic Park (1993), for example, depicts a museum in two parts: an interpretive center containing fossils and educational presentations and the Jurassic park itself, a biological collection of prime specimens which happen to be extinct yet, as in zoos, are corporeally present and alive. The variation on this staple of entertainment that concerns me here is the more unusual instance when, through a physical relationship to the artifacts (invariably the viewer's ocular and kinetic experience in the objects' midst), the installation is constructed in such a way that a performance about the underlying meaning of the place occurs, and it is made by the visitor without the intercession of docents. Jurassic Park shows us how this works. Dinosaurs are supposed to be extinct due to either a cataclysm or Darwinian natural selection. In the context of a spectacularly thrilling ride, the paleozoological collection gives its would-be endorsers the ultimate encounter with the artifacts: a chase to the death where the fittest (by Spielbergian definitions of poetic justice) survive. The screenplay pits revived dinosaurs against modern-day humans, and is structured around the question of whether this time a cataclysm will stop the rapidly adapting dinosaurs from naturally selecting the humans' extinction.
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