The Museum as Large-Room Pinball Machine

This new book recovers a path-breaking venture in museology from the late 1960s that has largely gone unnoticed. In 1967, media theorist Marshall McLuhan and his collaborator Harley Parker, pioneer of museum exhibit design, were invited by the Museum of the City of New York (MCNY) to moderate a two-day seminar on museum communication attended by leading museum officials from around the state and further afield. The seminar report, originally published in 1969, captures the extent to which the audacious views of McLuhan and Parker on rethinking the museum were greeted with puzzlement, scepticism, and consternation by those in attendance. In their view, “the monolithic nature of the museum itself—print-orientation and linear sequential patterns” hamstrung efforts to reform it. Drawing on extensive archival sources, William J. Buxton sheds light on the context of the seminar, its main participants and organizers, its funding, and its reception. Also included is an essay on Parker and his close working relationship with McLuhan by Gary Genosko, and another on multi-sensory museology and the overall significance of the seminar today by David Howes. Charting connections to the Our World TV broadcast of June 1967, Expo 67, and the contemporaneous Electric Circus in Manhattan, this exciting work demonstrates the importance of this period of McLuhan’s thought, his collaborations with Parker, and the cluster of work published between 1967 and 1972. The Museum as Large-room Pinball Machine makes a unique contribution to McLuhan scholarship, cultural history, and museum history in the late 1960s.