Authors

Discussion

This talk will address the contradictory relationship between welfare provisions and the progressivist ideology of making the new man through the history of the social museums in the CEE region. The social and industrial workers' welfare education museums appeared at the turn of the century (Paris, Charlottenburg, Budapest, Harvard, Cambridge, Vienna). Based on new social reform plans, detailed museographic display systems were developed to highlight the legislation and phenomena related to the working class’ health conditions. In the region the Social and Healthcare Museum (1901) in Budapest, and Gesellschafts- und Wirtschaftsmuseum in Vienna (1924 by Otto Neurath) were primarily a space for the construction of the workers’ body in the integrative imagination of the ideological state apparatus. But the figure of its organisers links its history to that of the labour movement before the WWII. Both institutions played a role in the formation of new states after the disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy (1867–1918) and the development of industrial capitalism. However, they became part of the state institutions seeking to integrate industrial labor for completely different purposes. 

I will present the changes in welfare politics and ideology that have shaped the two museums in the two cities.To demonstrate the museums changing representational policies, I compare the exhibitions’ rhetoric in Budapest and Vienna. The formation of the industrial society, world war, and the transformative geopolitical situations the body was constantly changing. The aspiration of exploiting cheap manpower is based on the logic of industrial capitalism and at the same time the desire to create the new man. How did these museums respond to crises that have been shaped around bodies, such as epidemics, the radical exploitation of labour? 

The conceptual framework follows Marius Turda’s terms of the relationship between nationalism, modernism and racial hygiene, and Oliver Botar's approach to the relationship between biocentrism and avant-garde art. I am going to analyse the museum institution as an institutional articulation of power and knowledge relations, following the Foucauldian terminology of Tony Bennett. The paper’s central reasoning and questions touch upon the Foucauldian dual notions of autonomy/paternalism, care/discipline, education/self-regulation, combined with representational theories, and the history of the left-wing movement. As I examine these represented body-related utopias of the 20^th century, I ask the question, how did all this relate to the political ideas and movements of the 20th century?