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Creator (Definite): Karen A. Rader
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Full title:
Rader, K.A. 'Interacting with The Watchful Grasshopper; or, Why Live Animals Matter in Twentieth-Century Science Museums', in Thorsen, L.E., Rader, K.A. and Dodd, A. (eds.), Animals on Display: the Creaturely in Museums, Zoos, and Natural History (Pennsylvania University Press, 2013) pp. 176-191.
Description:
Rader highlights the emergence of live animal displays in American science museums during the twentieth century. Focusing on The Watchful Grasshopper museum exhibit, which was part of the Exploratorium in San Fransisco from the late 1970s to the mid 1980s, she highlights how audiences interacted with such displays in ways that their scientist curators often did not anticipate. Rather than, as the curators had hoped, 'naturalizing relationships emblematic of the museum space - between dead and living animals, or between animal subjects and human scientists', Rader relates how 'The Watchful Grasshopper simultaneously revived visitors' interest in animal life and destabilized beliefs about how (and who) should best make natural knowledge from it.' (177)
Rader charts the context for the installation of the exhibit, as well as its operation, and foregrounds ways in which some museum visitors felt that the exhibit (which utilised a wire inserted into grasshopper's ventral nerve cord to enable visitors to explore how the animals react to stimuli) was not appropriate for a museum setting. 'In The Watchful Grasshopper', Rader suggests, 'nonscientist visitors saw the contradictions, rather than the naturalness, of live animals in the museum space. By presenting a live insect and engaging the visitor in an experiment with it, The Watchful Grasshopper enabled the animal to be viewed both as a holistic form of life and as an analytic tool of scientific knowledge. Exhibit designers, without intending to... evoked this response in nonscientist visitors by compelling them to become scientists.' (187)
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Cited byGuro Flinterud, 'Polar Bear Knut and His Blog', in Thorsen et. al., Animals on Display (2013), pp. 192-213
Description:Knut 'had an emblematic identity that was filled with content according to shifting opinions. Knut's blog displays how these opinions existed simultaneously withing the same culture, much as did reactions to The Watchful Grasshopper (see Rader, chapter 8).' (210)
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Quoted byA. Dodd et. al., 'Introduction', in L.E. Thorsen, et. al. (eds), Animals on Display: the Creaturely in Museums, Zoos, and Natural History. 2013. pp. 1-11.
Description:'Karen Rader's essay on The Watchful Grasshopper brings us to the twentieth century in order to consider the live animal's uneasy place within the educational agenda of the interactive science museum. The grasshopper, a human agricultural pest, here elicits empathy as the living subject of a scioentific experiment controlled by museum visitors. Rader's examination of this peculiar and largely overlooked case of insect-human interaction illustrates another chapter in a long and complicated history of cultural mediations of insects that evoke (often unsettling) emotions in the human observer... Intended as a public educational installation dealing with the insect's visual perception, the exhibit aroused a largely negative response from museum visitors who, as if suddenly provoked to ask themselves "What is it like to be an insect?," protested against the inhumane treatment of an anonymous arthropod. The Watchful Grasshopper draws attention to the important role that representational conventions play in mediating human-animal relationships; the ways in which we think, and indeed feel, about animals are very often responses to how our expectations intersect with the way animals themselves are presented to us for consideration. For this reason, Rader explains, live animal displays in museums are have both "transgressive and contradictory possibilities."' (9-10)
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Related toExploratorium
Description:Rader notes that 'When the Exploratorium was founded in 1969, its exhibit designers took "science in action" to a new level. Director Frank Oppenheimer envisioned a series of exhibits on perception that would demonstrate commonalities in the way plants, animals, and human beings perceived stimuli; these would complement the successful hands-on physics exhibits that formed the core of the Exploratorium's existing displays.' (180-181)
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Related toMuseum of Science (Boston)
Description:Rader notes that during the ate 1950s, 'The Boston Museum of Science... featured what exhibit designers dubbed "animal demonstrations," which entailed carefully monitored, hands-on contact between visitors and living animals. Museum education department staffers mediated these interactions: they invited children to touch animals like Black Beauty, a seven-foot-long indigo snake with unique camouflage markings, or the slightly more approachable Herkemiah and Cuddles, two pet porcupines whose quill-release mechanisms had been disabled.
What became the Boston Museum's most famous live animal demonstration arose by chance. After finding a fledgling owl and reviving the fluffy ball with a medicine dropper, two suburban Boston residents had called [museum director Bradford] Washburn to see if the museum wanted the tiny bird. Christened "Spooky," the young owl was featured in exhibit halls afer only a few weeks at the museum, and to museum staff, the owl took on near-human status as a charismatic educator...
Washburn claimed that Spooky and other live animal demostrations represented new educational successes because they were hands-on...
Later in the decade, the Boston Museum developed an arrangement that allowed more direct animal-visitor interaction: they hired teenaged "junior assistants" who were charged with caring for the museum's growing menagerie. High school students could get behind the scenes and learn about the animals - not only their natural history and behaviour bit also what it took to keep them healthy and happy for museum use, Washburn argued that these students were participating in "science in action" - and he featured the junior assistants in a museum newsletter story about educational outreach.' (179-180)
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Related toMuseum of Science and Industry (Chicago)
Description:Rader notes that 'Starting in the early 1950s, science museums introduced yet another approach: live animal exhibits that simultaneously took both biological concepts and human-animal interactions as their subjects (even when those subjects presented contradictions). The chick hatchery display at the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry represents a case in point. First mounted as a temporary display in April 1953, to attract visitors during the Easter season, Chicago curators installed a large, glass-topped incubator in the International Harvester tractor exhibit's farm. This allowed visitors to observe baby chicks developing and hatching. The chick hatchery attracted so many vsitors that Swift Nutrition, an international food corporation, approached the museum later that summer about "an extensive exhibit on the field of nutrition." The resulting Food for Life Hall displayd (according to in0house descriptions) the "complete story of man's food; where it comes from, how it is adapted to fit his needs, how the various elements entering into the production of food affect man." By the end of the decade, the success of the chick hatchery spawned a full-scale animal nursery at the museum. Visitors could feed a multitude of agricultural food animals, including piglets, lambs, calves, rabbits, and ducklings, and follow their favourite animals in the museum's member newsletter, where the education department reported on their development.' (178-179)
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Related toAmerican Museum of Natural History
Description:Rader notes that 'between 1920 and 1950, New York's American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) mounted displays that (in retrospect) epitomize two broad categories of "state of the art" exhibits with live animals by the middle of the twentieth century. First, in the 1920s, AMNH entomologist Frank Lutz envisioned introducing live animals into natural history museum displays as a corrective to boring dioramas... he put bowls of water with live aquatic insects and plants into exhibition cases. Encouraged by visitors' responses, Lutz next exhibited a wire cage of "trim, up-on-their-toes cockroaches," on which, he recalled, "even New Yorkers stopped to gaze."...
The displays of AMNH herpetologist Gladwyn Kingsley Noble, and early animal behaviour scientist, continued this trend but toward slightly different ends. Noble displayed his research animals - including snakes, chameleons, and rats - which were collected from the wild and then bred in the museum for his Laboratory of Experimental Biology... live animals were displayed alongside devices designed to insure a dynamic presentation of key biological concepts.' (177-178)
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Related toThe Watchful Grasshopper
Description:Describing the exhibit, Rader claims that 'The Watchful Grasshopper parted company with what came before it in one very important way: it asked visitors to engage with its animal subjects by playing the role of scientific experimenter.' (177) It 'featured a live grasshopper, under a dome, with a wire electrodes inserted into its ventral nerve cord... This procedure, explained the signage, did not make the grasshopper uncomfortable and allowed visitors to explore the grasshopper's visual field, in order to determine what triggered impulses in the insect. The electrodes were hooked up to measuring devices that were also a part of the display: an oscilloscope, which recorded extracellular signals in the grasshopper's brain, and ampliufying speakers, which allowed visitors to hear, not merely see, the oscilloscope's activity as it "clicks."...
The relative sophistication of the grasshopper exhibit setup, combined with the fact that it featured a live animal, presented significant challenges for its creation. First, although [exhibition designers] Carlson and Shaw settled quickly on Schistcerca nitens as the insect that would most clearly illustrate the relationship between neurological stimuli and animal behaviour for visitors, its status as an agricultural pest in California meant that the insects were nearly impossible to acquire through commercial means. This forced staff members into temporary careers in grasshopper husbandry, breeding whatever grasshoppers would be used in the display. Exhiobit builders promptly incorporated their newly acquired knowledge of grashopper husbandry into the exhibit. Carlson created a supplementary display explaining the grasshopper's life cycle, featuring the museum's grasshopper colony and the exhibit designer's scientific knowledge of behaviour and husbandry.' (181-182)
'When it was first mounted, biologists and fellow museum workers hailed The Watchful Grasshopper and other similar life science displays as a "tour de force of exhibit construction."... Carlson... received numerous requests to create instructions so university teachers could replicate The Watchful Grasshopper and a host of other displays that the Exploratorium had regrouped into a broader exhibition, The Language of the Nerve Cells. Local medical school physiology professors brought their classes to use the Exploratorium biology displays as laboratory experiments. Biology undergraduate students suggested additions that would make the exhibits more useful for their own research.
But although popular with scientists, these displays did not draw the same response from the broader public: according to an in-house study only about 5 percent of the Exploratorium's 560,000 annual visitors interacted with the displays. Further, visitors drew conclusions about science and animal behaviour from the museum's exhibits, but these conclusions did not always echo those drawn by the Exploratorium's own staff and the broader scientific community.' (183-184)
'As a matter of pedagogical phiolosophy, Exploratorium exhibits intentionally excluded broader political and cultural discussions of science and its methods. Oppenheimer actively disavowed exhibits whose lessons could be easily applied to social issues...
[Yet] Those visitors committed to the expansion of animal rights were unconvinced by Oppenheimer's reasoning, and not easily converted to a purely rationalist perspective. In the case of The Watchful Grasshopper.... the comparison between animals and humans generated controversy and actively disrupted the museum's pedagogical mission... Ultimtely, many Exploratorium visitors concluded that the museum prioritized scientific discovery over the preservation of animal life - even when the animal life in question was not a charismatic mega-fauna but belonged to an agressive agricultural pest insect.' (185-186)
'this extraordinary display had a relatively short life on the science museum floor... it was removed from the Exploratorium sometime in the mid-1980s.' (187)
