Lindow Man rant
I've just returned from the Lindow Man exhibition and have to express my complete displeasure as to how they've designed the display. Put simply, its total balls. The theory behind it actually quite sound: everybody experiences the world - in this case, a bog body - differently. My reading/understanding of Lindow man as an archaeologist would not be the same as, say, an unclean pleb from the street. Accordong to the tenets of phenomenology/relativism, each understanding is equally 'true'. The exhibition thus contains a series of personal biographies provided by people who have all experienced Lindow Man in some, but markedly different, way (eg archaeoligists, the man who first found the body, pagans, children). The idea, of course, is that these parallel 'truths' work upon the visitor as he is passing through the display. When he finally reaches Lindow Man, he has to reconcile what he's now experiencing with what he's just learnt, and in the prosess creates a totally unique, personal worldview. Put simply, the body itself acts as an agent and 'works against' the agency of the visitor. Now, this is all very interesting and pseudo-philosophical, but in practice they've totally fucked it up.
The main grip i have is that they've completely pandered to the New Age Pagans. Instead of having Lindow Man at the end of the exhibition - the room is linear and divided into a series of paths, like a ladder - in his own empty, enclosed space, in which people can ponder their experience, they've stuck the bloody pagan material opposite his display case in the third aisle. This mean, of course, that the gay new-age disourse is being given an implicit precedent over the archaeolgical facts, which have been shoved into the final aisle. Indeed, the average pleb would come to Lindow Man's case, view the money shot (as it were) and not actually bother to discover the context in which it was discovered. Mel, my Iron Age Britain tutor who actually has a 'wall' herself in the exhibition, is not best pleased at this series of events, especially as they hardly consulted her at all in the design process. I mean, its not like she's a world expert on Bog Bodies or anything...
All in all, it seems that the museum have completely fallen over backwards to appease these 'druids' who don't seem to realise that their whole fucking religon was created a scant 300 years ago by William Stukeley as a mastabatory aid for his 'Golden Age of Britian' fantasies. Oh, and the whole exhibiton space seems to have been created out of cheap MDF, meaning it looks like it was cobbled together by a couple of Lithuanian builders for £15.
Rant over.
The main grip i have is that they've completely pandered to the New Age Pagans. Instead of having Lindow Man at the end of the exhibition - the room is linear and divided into a series of paths, like a ladder - in his own empty, enclosed space, in which people can ponder their experience, they've stuck the bloody pagan material opposite his display case in the third aisle. This mean, of course, that the gay new-age disourse is being given an implicit precedent over the archaeolgical facts, which have been shoved into the final aisle. Indeed, the average pleb would come to Lindow Man's case, view the money shot (as it were) and not actually bother to discover the context in which it was discovered. Mel, my Iron Age Britain tutor who actually has a 'wall' herself in the exhibition, is not best pleased at this series of events, especially as they hardly consulted her at all in the design process. I mean, its not like she's a world expert on Bog Bodies or anything...
All in all, it seems that the museum have completely fallen over backwards to appease these 'druids' who don't seem to realise that their whole fucking religon was created a scant 300 years ago by William Stukeley as a mastabatory aid for his 'Golden Age of Britian' fantasies. Oh, and the whole exhibiton space seems to have been created out of cheap MDF, meaning it looks like it was cobbled together by a couple of Lithuanian builders for £15.
Rant over.