More on carnage in museums...

At 02:50 PM 5/7/98 -0500, you wrote:

>In none of these do you see any dead or wounded.  A bloodied boot
>sticking out of the top of a bombed-out tank is about the closest you
>get to carnage.  In the trench, if you listen closely to the ambient
>audio, you hear soldiers talking to an injured comrade as he slips away.
>The "you-are-there" experience at Normandy has visitors emerge from the
>bowels of a transport ship on the day *after* the invasion, landing on a
>secured beach head.
>
>I asked the Education Curator why they made these choices.  (It's been a
>few years, so I don't recall her answer verbatim.)  She said the museum
>felt that graphic depictions of carnage would overwhelm the exhibits'
>historical messages.

And in this day and age with carnage action movies being so popular,
straight carnage has lost it's effect.  Plus if you have patrons getting
ill at the sight of carnage and puking on the exhibit, it tends to make
your visitorship drop off.

One of the most powerful "carnage" exhibits I've seen is the wall of shoes
at the Holocaust Museum in DC.  It's a wall of something like 100,000 shoes
that belonged to people killed in the death camps.  This simple, yet
powerful image is more effective that a whole museum filled with pictures
of dead bodies.

I also tend to think things like Piccasso's Guernica (sp?) is more chilling
than the photos from the aftermath.  It's an extremely disturbing painting
and directly captures the horror the people in the town must felt.

Deb Fuller
-------------------------------------
Staples & Charles Ltd
Museum exhibit designers
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