Exhibit Review Compte Rendu D'exposition

Exhibit Review Compte rendu d'exposition National Maritime Museum, Reading the Relics: Titanic Culture and The Wreck of the Titanic Exhibit MICHAEL MCCAUGHAN National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, time given to slumber and rest will be free London, The Wreck of the Titanic from noise or other disturbance.. .The friendly Curator: Dr. Roger Knight intercourse, mutual helpfulness and bonhomie Designer: Alistair McCaw of third class passengers is proverbial...The Publication: Catalogue, Gillian Hutchinson, The new field of endeavour is looked forward to with hope and confidence. In these vessels Wreck of the Titanic, London: Addax the interval between the old life and the new is Publishing Ltd., 1994. ISBN 094806-5230 spent under the happiest possible conditions. Duration: October 1994 - October 1995. Tour itinerary to be determined. When Titanic struck the iceberg her steel We have arrived at a new time — and with this hull was opened below the waterline for a new time, strange methods, huge forces and length of ninety-one metres. The inrush of combinations — a Titanic world — have water, with which the pumps and systems of spread all around us. hull subdivision could not cope, doomed the ship. The essential tragedy of Titanic's sinking Winston Churchill, 1909. was the huge loss of life. There were not enough The wreck of the Titanic is an epic tale of the lifeboats to save all of the 2 201 people on twentieth century. On the evening of 14 April board. There was provision for only 1178 peo 1912, Titanic — the essence of modernity and ple, but not even all of the available lifeboats technological achievement — was steaming were filled to capacity. Boats were lowered only across the Atlantic on her maiden voyage from partly filled with passengers who refused at the Old World to the New World. On board, her first to believe that Titanic could possibly sink. passengers and crew were oblivious to the ice Almost 1 500 people, passengers and crew, per berg's presence and the imminence of destruc ished in the icy waters of the North Atlantic in tion and death. Enshrining the values, self- the most appalling circumstances imaginable. confidence and social fabric of the era, Titanic The sinking of Titanic had a traumatic effect was a microcosm of Western civilization in "a in both Europe and the United States. The great gilded age" before World War I. The Zeitgeist ship, a signifier of the civilized world, now lay was reflected and proclaimed, with unknowing fractured on the ocean floor, after plunging irony, in the White Star Line's grandiloquent down through over three kilometres of freezing advertising of Titanic and her sistership water. Millionaires and emigrant poor on board Olympic: had gone down with her. It was a mighty blow to the self-confidence of the age. An American The White Star liners Olympic and Titanic — writer, Bruce Jackson, has interpreted the impact eloquent testimonies to the progress of of the disaster from a modern perspective. mankind, as shown in the conquest of mind over matter — will rank high in the achieve The rising star of modern technology had a ments of the 20th century.. .the Staterooms in sudden loss of magnitude, as that sleek and their situation, spaciousness and appoint enormous ship that could not be sunk tore its ments, will be perfect havens of retreat where hide and collapsed. It was the major disaster many pleasant hours are spent, and where the of the era, and it struck the imagination of the Material History Review 43 (Spring 1996) I Revue d'histoire de la culture matérielle 43 (printemps 1996) 68 rich, who lost friends and relatives on the The destruction of Titanic by a spur of ice shat ship.. .and the poor, for whom the ship repre tered popular faith in the supremacy of tech sented the great shining and glistening world nology, progress and privilege. The age of self- forever denied them and anyone they would confident belief in the inexorable progress of ever know. society through the appliance of science was Public expressions of grief knew no bounds. over. In retrospect, the utter failure of this micro- Feelings of loss, bewilderment and the point cosmic machine and all that it represented, ing of lessons were expressed in a cathartic symbolized the end of the nineteenth century. outpouring of popular verse. There was an irre The twentieth century had begun. The day of sistible urge to string the lyre, invoke the Muse Salman Rushdie's "Titanic Verses" and other and in the seventeenth-century phrase, indulge Titanic jokes was at hand! in pious ejaculation. Entrepreneurs, catching the Throughout the twentieth century, Titanic mood of emotion, flooded an eager market with has gripped the imagination of people, not only mementoes of the disaster. This was the mod in Europe and North America, but virtually ern Titanic industry in embryo, a profitable throughout the world. Yet with the passage of symbiotic relationship between production and time attitudes have changed and, for us today, consumption, keyed initially to a prevailing Titanic has a significance beyond tragedy and sense of human loss. Commemorative post death. While potent images of the stricken liner cards were especially popular as they com have endured for eight decades, the multiplic bined a high level of memorialization with the ity of metaphors resulting from the catastro commercial advantage of low cost. The publi phe have been equally powerful. Cultural pro cation of specially composed Titanic sheet cesses of absorption, transformation and music was another commercial activity and diffusion began immediately after the disaster market opportunity generated by the disaster. and as resonances of Titanic's disaster, they In the United States, for example, the first pub perhaps have significance for humanity greater lished song was copyrighted on 25 April 1912 than the event itself. Titanic and the mythic pro and within twelve months more than one hun portions of her loss have become the subject, dred Titanic songs had been composed and generator and carrier of all kinds of signs, mes published in America. Over fifty of these songs sages and meanings, from the sublime to the were published by the Washington, D.C., firm tacky. They embrace the cultural spectrum, of H. Kirkus Dugdale, who organized a promo from high culture to low culture, from popular tion whereby members of the public submitted culture to consumer culture. The Titanic litany lyrics and company hacks set them to music. includes books, verse, vaudeville, religion, Overwhelmingly the cultural response to the songs, music, opera, dance, drama, art, poetry, disaster was popular and vernacular, but artists film, cartoons, jokes, fantasy, graffiti, advertis and writers, most famously Max Beckman and ing, satire, politics, pornography, propaganda, Thomas Hardy, also expressed the catastrophic romantic fiction, science fiction and, of course, event in terms of their individual imagination museum exhibitions. and vision of humanity. In the north of Ireland Titanic has a special For many in 1912, the wreck of Titanic was significance, for the great liner was built in rich in symbolic significance. Her sinking called Belfast and there remains a thwarted pride in into question the established order of things. It her memory. In a retrospective way the tragedy deeply troubled those who implicitly believed of the ship can be seen as mirroring that of the in a good and merciful God. For others, it city itself. But today there is a spirit of optimism confirmed their belief in divine retribution for in Belfast and new possibilities for the future human conceit and arrogance. It seemed to are being envisioned. With unerring commer demonstrate the folly of man's presumption cial sensibility these include reappropriations and vanity that nature could be a conquest of of a Titanic past. For example, Harland and science. In a speech in 1909, Winston Churchill Wolff, builders of the original ship, are looking had proclaimed the advent of a new "Titanic to the new millennium with a proposed Titanic world." Now in 1912 the Bishop of Winchester Technology Park and on 20 June 1994 The preached its nadir: Belfast Telegraph reported that: When has such a mighty lesson against our a Northern Ireland construction firm is hoping confidence and trust in power, machinery and to launch a Titanic twin — by building an money been shot through the nation? The exact replica for a mystery Japanese buyer.. .the Titanic, name and thing, will stand for a mon life-size model of the 270-metre vessel, minus ument and warning to human presumption. engines, would be permanently moored in Material History Review 43 (Spring 1996) I Revue d'histoire de la culture matérielle 43 (printemps 1996) 69 Tokyo Bay for use as a luxury conference cen are custodians of historical truths and gnostic tre.. .we are talking big, big money. possessors of arcane knowledge. The Titanic Historical Society is the largest and most senior Within this commercial frame, irony and par enthusiast organization in the Titanic pantheon. ody are unconsciously present, and the pro Based in the Untied States, but with a world posed transfiguration of Titanic from substance wide membership, the mission of the Society to pastiche is a retro-visionary proclamation is that the ship's "memory and history be pre that millennial post-modernity is alive and well served for future generations." To this end the in Belfast. Society publishes a regular journal, holds con Titanic, or rather Titanicism, is an interna ventions and, most recently, organizes Titanic tional cultural phenomenon. It shows no sign Heritage Tours. As the pilgrimage advertising of abating and indeed it is clear that the scale says, "Hurry, Act Now. Get on Board!! We have and potency of Titanicism has increased rather only a few spaces still available." than diminished since the remains were located Beyond popular culture, Titanic continues to on the seabed in 1985.

Load more