Voices in the Museum

Abstract

Museum visitors hear many voices. artifacts themselves speak with the greatest clarity and authority, carrying the burden of the exhibit. A curatorial voice emerges from labels, story lines, and even the selection of artifacts. museum itself gives voice to its history and purpose. Sometimes voices from the street intrude upon the visitor's experience. All these voices reverberated through the exhibit of the Enola Gay, producing a tower of Babel. National Air and Space Museum (NASM), reportedly the most visited museum in the world, intrudes on the visitor's communion with the artifacts. Perhaps all Smithsonian museums do. The Nation's Attic, as the Smithsonian has been labeled, is a special kind of repository. Unlike many museums, which display all or most of their collection, the Smithsonian displays only a small fraction. Choosing what will be removed from the attic and put on public display necessarily mediates the collection. Putting an artifact in one of the museums on the Mall, the nation's front yard, attaches still more symbolism to the selection. Putting the object in the world's most visited museum, within sight of the halls of Congress, burdens the exhibit still further. NASM would be an ideal place if only it could insulate its exhibits from the symbolism of the place. Few museums suffer this handicap. Normally, the voice of the artifacts dominates that of the repository. Bock's Car, the airplane that dropped the atomic bomb on Nagasaki, has been on display for years at WrightPatterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio. aircraft has stirred no great public controversy, because visitors expect an air force museum to celebrate this instrument of war. It is something else again to display Enola Gay, the Hiroshima bomber, in the NASM on the Mall. site of the exhibit, in the same building with the Wright Flyer, the Spirit of St. Louis, and the Apollo 11 space capsule, trumpets celebration.1 By its own existence, the NASM colors its artifacts.