How Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan influenced today’s multi-sensory museums
In recent decades, museums and galleries have made a sensory turn when it comes to designing displays and engaging visitors.
Museums like the Metropolitan in New York offer multi-sensory activities so visitors so can smell, touch and hear art, and museums have curated exhibitions about the senses.The move is part of larger efforts to make public institutions more accessible.
It’s also aligned with museum and gallery institutional efforts to decolonize governance structures, and widen opportunities for museum and gallery participation from Indigenous and Global South artists and their communities, who have long been marginalized. Museums and galleries have sought to shape policy, reinterpret and repatriate artifacts stolen from Indigenous and Global South societies in response to social movements, community advocacy and decolonial theory.
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Thinkers like Taiaiake Alfred have written about Indigenous cultural resurgence and resistance to colonialism, and shaped a questioning of curatorial practices.
As anthropologist David Howes argues, museums’ questioning of traditional forms of museum display and visitor engagement is aligned with the kind of re-ordering traditionally associated with unsettling colonial regimes.
In my forthcoming study, Harley Parker: The McLuhan of the Museum, I examine the influence of exhibition designer and painter Harley Parker (1915-92) on this “sensory turn” in museum curatorial practices.
Parker was head of design at the Royal Ontario Museum for 11 years from 1957-68. By applying media theorist and philosopher Marshall McLuhan’s ideas to museums, Parker created what has become known as “multi-sensory museology.” It is only beginning to be recognized as a precursor to the sensory museology in practice today.
Head of design at the ROM
Beyond being head of design at the ROM, Parker was an influential media thinker and a longtime collaborator of McLuhan’s.
Harley Parker: The McLuhan of the Museum by Gary Genosko.
(University of Alberta Press)
Parker’s name is not yet well known. One reason is that his book manuscript, The Culture Box: Museums Are Today, was lost for almost 50 years.
Working with Parker’s children, I uncovered a typescript and will be bringing it into print. Retitled The Culture Box: Museums as Media, it contains detailed discussions of how Parker conceived of exhibition display through the lens of McLuhan’s idea that all media were sensory extensions of human capacities.
Multisensory design
Marshall McLuhan in 1977.
(CP PHOTO)
For Parker, the museum became a laboratory in which a designer could experiment with multi-sensory exhibition designs. These reflected McLuhan’s claim that new electronic media supplanted an older visually oriented linear model with a non-linear, aural-tactile environment.
Getting beyond the close link between visibility and linear thinking was one of main pillars of Parker’s efforts.
Between 1963 and 1967, Parker was considering designing with alternative orchestrations of perception, especially with regard to displays of Indigenous artifacts. He didn’t, however, achieve a fusion of what current sensory studies scholars call “sensory decolonization.”
In museums, “sensory decolonization” refers to shifting sensory and cultural perceptions around the meaning of “artifacts” from Indigenous or Global South communities. It means revisiting assumptions about protocols for engaging with or handling these, and developing new ethical protocols in relationship with communities.
Parker investigated the necessity of changing sensory assumptions around the display of artifacts, but lacked a decolonial critique.
Hypothetical exhibits
In the early 1960s, Parker published essays on hypothetical exhibits of Indigenous artefacts in the museum’s holdings.
He considered using recordings of Indigenous languages, visitor-controlled heating, cooling and lighting, odours, as well as multi-media projections. He tried to provoke, through design, some empathetic correlation between the mental modes of a contemporary museum visitor and the sensory attitudes of an Indigenous maker and creator of objects.
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He linked the reordering of the senses with calls for greater community involvement in museums. He also expressed frustration about museum elitism and the gulf between philanthropic culture and visitors’ concerns.
Reflecting on chronology of change
Since Parker’s time, there has been a concerted effort in Canada to decolonize and Indigenize museums. In 1994, the joint Task Force on Museums and First Peoples by the Assembly of First Nations and Canadian Museums Association sought greater input by Indigenous Peoples.
The Canadian Museum Association has recently adopted new standards of practice in response to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s recommendations.
Pauline Poundmaker (left), Brown Bear Woman of Poundmaker Cree Nation, presents Valerie Huaco, deputy director for collections and research and chief innovation officer of the Royal Ontario Museum, with a banner during a ceremony to repatriate Chief Poundmaker’s saddle and pipe to the Poundmaker family in Toronto in February 2023.
THE CANADIAN PRESS/Frank Gunn
Nevertheless, change has been slow and uneven; some exhibits have made strides by paying close attention to cultural values and sensory worlds of Indigenous societies.
Parker’s role as a designer precursor can be newly integrated into the existing accounts of when this kind of change began to unfold.
Parker’s ‘newseum’
Parker developed a vanguard idea: build what he called a “newseum” where multimedia and multi-sensory exhibitions would take place.
This is not about educating people about a free press (like the former American Newseum). Rather, Parker’s newseum imagined exhibition centres adjacent to large, prestige museums. These would utilize museum artifacts and materials to mount topical displays based on discoveries, advances or events.
Such displays would be community-driven and participatory. The buildings themselves would be flexible, inside and out. They would have three wings: a current topical public exhibition; an exhibition in process; and a preparatory area for gathering materials for a new exhibition.
In The Culture Box Parker asked us to think about museums beside the box in terms of “process” over “product,” inspired by McLuhan. It was Parker’s goal to get the museum out of the museum and to get relevant communities into this displaced museum as full participants bearing important expertise.
Parker experimented with galleries inside existing museum spaces at the ROM and the Museum of the City of New York to reorient visitors’ perception, but Parker’s newseum was never realized.
Revisiting Parker today
Today, revisiting a Parker-influenced newseum could further collaboration with Indigenous curators and cultural experts.
A newseum concept might help address the concerns of the Indigenous arts community and the discomforts of some museum directors with the task of “de-building.”
We can look back at Parker’s tentative efforts and recognize that his hypothetical galleries were never constructed.
Together with his unbuilt newseum, they await development for newly remodelled museum galleries flexibly built, bearing in mind his contributing ideas about multimedia and multi-sensory spaces. These could be attuned to the most topical concerns of our time, and the ethical purpose of decolonization and Indigenization, with the full range of available digital technologies. Läs mer…