2. CHARACTER IN MOTION

Visitor Performance

The visitor’s movement through the museum is shaped both by culture and by space. As she travels, she embodies prescribed ways of walking—her pace, her rhythm—and of looking—how she is looking and what she is looking for—that have remained relatively stable for at least the last two hundred years of western culture. These behaviors have been cultural expectations in museums since the eighteenth century: to walk at a moderate pace, to speak at a moderate volume, to begin in the first gallery and end in the last.

To be sure, visitors have not always conformed to these expectations. Nonetheless, Helen Rees Leahy affirms, “As people move through a gallery, their bodies articulate the shape of their museum visit, whether or not they conform to its script or walk in the ‘right’ direction. Their movements cal ibrate the space of the gallery as a quantity of both distance and time.”
The rhythm of the visit, Leahy goes on to argue, is produced reciprocally by the visitor and the museum itself. It is

set by the punctuation of our walking as we stop to look . . . before moving on again, as well as by our pace of walking and the overall duration of the visit. In turn, each of these factors reflects the structure of the display, the density of the exhibits and the size of the exhibition or building.1

By the ways in which they perform their subjects, museums encourage visitors to move and to see in particular ways.

This chapter considers how the presidential libraries of two men, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, elicit particular performances of American character from their visitors. Setting aside temporarily the major scandal of each president’s second term (see chapter 5), I focus here on how the sites, architecture, and layout of the two museums encourage the visitor to move, think, feel,and act. The performances these spaces move visitors toward have significant implications for their behavior in American public life.

The Clinton and Reagan Libraries perform very different kinds of knowledge, creating contrasting visions of America’s relationship to its history, the role of the president in public life, and the optimal relationship between the president and his citizenry. Explicitly and implicitly, each museum creates what Kirshenblatt-Gimblett might call a different “museum effect,” offering its own model for participating in American public life outside its walls. Through these differences, the libraries produce two divergent moral imperatives for the American character—that is, two different versions of who an American ought to be.

Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton embody American leadership at the end of the twentieth century. Together, they led the nation for sixteen of the century’s last twenty years. Although President Clinton left office in 2001 and President Reagan died in 2004, the legacies of both men continue to have a major impact on our shared understanding of American character. In a 2010 poll conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute in which respondents were asked their views about a number of American leaders, including Barack Obama, George W. Bush, and Sarah Palin, Bill Clinton had a significantly higher favorability rating than any other figure, republican or democrat, with 68 percent of Americans reporting a very or mostly favorable opinion of the former president.2 Ronald Reagan is still one of the foremost icons of conservative America. In 2008, presidential hopeful John McCain characterized himself as a “foot soldier in the Reagan revolution”3 at a convention that featured an enormous image of the former president as it s backdrop. And in September 2011, the republican presidential candidates debated each other at the Reagan Library, implicitly vying for the mantle of his legacy.

At its site and through its internal organization, the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library stages an America of limitless space in which each individual is free to make his or her own path. Its exhibits present Reagan, a radio and film actor, as a speaker whose words are performative; they conjure a mythic land into being. His is a frankly selective performance, obviously partial in both senses of the word, which derives its authority from the space between the president’s body and other bodies. The museum exhibits work to create distance between Reagan and other leaders, and between Reagan and the visitor, in order to underscore the Great Communicator’s unique strength. The visitor’s role is to move through the landscape at a leisurely pace, and with appropriate deference to the leader who makes this independent movement possible.

The William Clinton Presidential Library presents Bill Clinton, a Rhodes scholar and Yale Law School graduate, as a student of history. His story can be told in text—lots and lots and lots of text—and requires a serious reader to understand and appreciate it. In sharp contrast to the Reagan Library, the story that the Clinton Library tells derives its force from its claims to comprehensiveness and shared authority. It is a linear narrative with a large bibliography and an extensive list of coauthors. While the Reagan Library creates distance through its uses of space, the Clinton Library creates intimacy by way of a temporal logic. The museum exhibits work to create a sense of intimacy between the president and other leaders, between the president and his predecessors, and between the president and the visitor. The museum presents the American story as one of historical progress and situates the visitor as the actor who will move us to the next critical point on the timeline.

Read the complete text of Chapter 2.

Excerpted from “Presidential Libraries as Performance: Curating American Character from Herbert Hoover to George W. Bush” by Jodi Kanter. Reprinted with permission.