Abstract
One of Chicago's great visionaries, Waldemar B. Kaempffert, enthused to Commercial Club in 1928 that new industrial museum would not be a collection of mechanized fossils, but a place of action: We are going to have activity! Buttons to push! Levers and handles to turn! And nowhere any signs reading 'hands off'! (in Kogan 1973:27). Since museum's creators did not want to make a mausoleum of dead exhibits, it is ironic that in midst of building's sensual onslaught rests a display of 40 preserved human fetuses and embryos. Ashen skin illuminated by boutique lighting, specimens in Prenatal Development have neither amplified narration nor buttons to make things light up or move. Situated in midst of a technological funhouse, this mesmerizing spectacle of human body quietly dramatizes gestating life.' Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry (MSI) attracts annually over four-and-a-half-million people and is second most visited museum in America. Since opening in 1933, MSI has admitted countless visitors to its visual chaos and deafening cacophony of bangs, booms, whirs, and hums. Squatting like a great white frog on edge of a greasy lagoon in Jackson Park, one visitor recalled of childhood visits in 1930s, the Museum was to my impressionable young mind a magic amalgam of haunted house, toy store, world's fair, farm, railroad depot, amusement park and even, I admitted reluctantly, school. It had everything a boy with all his marbles could want: things to see, to do, to buy, to try, to see again (Calisch 1975). Unlike typical art and history museums filled with silent glass cases, MSI is an unabashedly entertaining place designed more in spirit of P.T. Barnum's Museum or Mr. Peale's Repository of Natural Curiosities than Chicago's Field Museum of Natural History or Art Institute. Like Renaissance trade fairs analyzed by Peter Stallybrass and Allon White (1986:3 I), industrial museum straddles boundary between museum and trade fair, high and low culture, vividly illustrating
Published Version
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