Uncovering the Domesticated Spectator: Film Exhibition and Spectatorship in the Home, 1920-1950

This dissertation builds on recent historical scholarship that adds complexity to apparatus theory from the 1970s by examining the experience of film exhibition and spectatorship in the American home from 1920 to 1950. While the screen, projector, and content of home exhibition influenced the spectator’s experience, so too did the domestic environment: blurring private and public spaces loaded with sociocultural tensions of gender, sexuality, race, and class. Through my investigation of amateur filmmaking magazines, primarily Movie Makers, Home Movies, industry journals such as The Journal of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers, and more widely read magazines like Popular Mechanics, Popular Science, and Architectural Record, I offer an analysis of the nuanced relationship between gender roles, class distinctions, domestic media objects, and film spectatorship. I examine how the newfound middle-class identity – entangled with the modern woman, genteel public culture, film exhibition practices, domestic interior design, and the home movie – complicates distinctions between the amateur and professional and what each term signifies. Ultimately, I argue that the material and discursive practices of these heterogenous elements form a dispositif that lends insight to contemporary spaces and modes of film spectatorship

Museums, discourse, and visitors : the case of London's Tate Modern

This thesis examines the conceptualization of the visitor within the discursive construction of the contemporary public art museum. It takes the rhetorical formulation of the interaction between the theorized visitor figure and the discursively rendered museum to constitute the ‘visit’. This work argues that the position of the visitor within museum discourse has radically shifted in the past generation; the primary claim being that the visit is reconceived as a personally customizable experience less oriented toward the transfer of information from the curator (regarded as expert and educator) to the visitor figure (regarded as ignorant pupil), and more oriented toward meeting the particular needs and preferences of the visitor. This conception currently appears in museum discourse and in the minds of influential actors who shape this discourse. To analyze this claim, this thesis draws on the institutionalization of the visit via a case study of the Tate Modern museum, which provides the primary empirical evidence demonstrating the above claim. The resulting study relates the questions, structure, and findings of a systematic investigation into the historical, social, and museological conditions necessary to an institutionally manifested personalized, visitor-centered visit. The conceptual development of the visitor figure is traced through implicit accounts of the visit within academic studies of the museum, institutional records, marketing reports, advertisements, and the public discourse convened around Tate Modern’s opening thematic displays that served as an extension of Tate’s marketing and audience development programs. This visitor figure is now coextensive with and conditioned by a neoliberal participatory agenda that trades on the notion of personal agency and enlightened cultural consumption, which is, in turn, undergirded and conditioned by the intertwined forces of consumerism, marketing, and branding