March 2nd, 2016 | RESEARCH
I argue in this article that the tangible proximity, the sensual evocative power of things is lost in a visit to the museum. Too often the aesthetic form of the exhibition utterly destroys the objects’ core material function. One of my contentions is that we cannot think with objects we are unfamiliar with, or cannot fully grasp and manipulate. In a museum we are compelled to admire the objects’ formal and abstract ‘beauty’. They have been robbed of their function: they are functionless. I address this long-standing dichotomy between form and function. I argue that Art has undesirably become one of the chief criteria of museum exhibition design. Though artistic attributes can at times acquire epistemic value, as I will illustrate with an example taken from the French Enlightenment, modern science exhibition design tends to utterly obscure the latter in favour of the former. Science museums, I propose, need to better adapt their discourse and presentation to the research programme developed over the last thirty years in the field of science studies: the history, philosophy, and sociology of experimentation, in which instrumentation and laboratory performance play a crucial analytical role in our understanding of scientific practices.
Document
(no document provided)
Team Members
Jean-Francois Gauvin, Author, Harvard UniversityCitation
Identifier Type: doi
Identifier: 10.15180/160506
Publication: Science Museum Group Journal
Volume: Spring 2016
Number: 5
Related URLs
Tags
Audience: Museum | ISE Professionals
Discipline: Art | music | theater | General STEM | Nature of science
Resource Type: Peer-reviewed article | Research Products
Environment Type: Exhibitions | Museum and Science Center Exhibits