I visited the Creation Museum with the idea that it would serve as a sort of starting point for this project. I imagined it would throw into relief the fact that museums are rhetorical and then illuminate how they are rhetorical.
Because I experienced it so directly, I want to talk first about exhibit routes. I've discussed this before, so I won't recap some of the broad ideas. Here's the point.
Because the events museum's sponsor in support of their exhibits can be illuminating, I specifically went to the Creation Museum on a Saturday so I could catch a presentation titled "Is Genesis Relevant Today?" I got to the museum at 1. The talk was at 3. I figured I'd just jump out of the galleries when the talk started and jump back in afterwards. But at 2:55, when the the final reminder went out, I was deep in the belly of the museum, stuck in the route.
When I sped up to get to find an exit, I was suddenly skipping rooms and major portions of the exhibit. After about three minutes of fast walking, something happened. I felt like I was spoiling the museum, giving away the story and the narrative, and I slowed down. Then I realized that to return to the point where I "left" the route, I'd have to begin all over again. These two realizations stopped me, and I walked back to where I had stopped reading and skipped the talk.
This experience heightened for me the authority, power, and control inherent in strong route-driven experiences. Never before had I felt so limited in my movement or in my ability to escape an exhibit. Never before did I feel the ideology of the place so thoroughly. I've often felt frustrated by the lack of narrative in free choice exhibits, but the deep justification for their structure was made clear at the Creation Museum.
But the next day, at the Cincinnati Natural History Museum, I experienced a very similar controlled route exhibit -- the Ice Age Trail. Here, however, I didn't feel the same weight or control and authority problem. Even though many of the exhibit tropes were exactly the same, the content didn't turn me off, so it was easier to ignore the fact that I was being guided. In this way the Creation Museum highlights the way the rhetoric of space sharpens our assessment of other kinds of narrative spaces. It's not enough to criticize the use of space in exhibits that we disagree with. We must also assess the way it works in spaces where we're comfortable. The Creation Museum makes strange.
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