The [cultural] archive is mediated through the collection, instantiated as museum, gallery or library, and given focus through the exhibition, as sequence of objects or artefacts, on the one hand, and as sequence of displays (of objects or artefacts), on the other. Within the exhibition as focus, the display guides perception, to establish a visual regime or rather a scopic regime [1], that enables the object, as artificialia or naturalia, to be 'seen properly' or recognised, so that one has the 'proper cognisance' of the object. The scopic regime positions and constitutes the (viewing) subject, so that what you see is what you think, and what you think translates as 'this is what matters (now)'.
The viewing subject is engaged in a negotiation with the object, via the display, on the one hand, and is engaged in a negotiation with the body, on the other. The body itself is in negotiation with the inter-corporeal space of the gallery, museum or library. The body/subject is further engaged with the person, who has a certain degree of autonomy of action in relation to body and subject, and the self, as flow of experience, proprioceptively mediated, organised around 'statues', working models of the self, or, in other words, identities/identifications.
Notes
[1] Martin Jay (2008) discusses the term "scopic regime" in the following terms:
"The French film theorist Christian Metz coined the term “scopic regime” in The imaginary signifier (1982, 1st pub.1975) to distinguish the cinema from the theatre: “what defines the specifically cinematic scopic regime is not so much the distance kept … as the absence of the object seen” (1982, 61). Because of the cinematic apparatus's construction of an imaginary object, its scopic regime is unhinged from its “real” referent. Representation is independent of what is represented, at least as a present stimulus, both spatially and temporally.Others employ the term more broadly to define visual experiences mediated, even constituted, by other technologies, such as photography, television, and digital computers, as well as to postulate significant gender differences (more often a regime fostered by the “male gaze”..." .
See also Scopic, Vocative by Courtney Tunis in the University of Chicago's Theories of Media Keywords Glossary
Further Reading
Bal, M. “Telling Objects: A Narrative Perspective on Collection” in Cultures of Collecting,
eds. John Elsner and Roger Cardinal. London: Reaktion, 1994.
Barringer, T. and Flynn, T., eds. Colonialism and the Object: Empire, Material
Culture and the Museum. London: Routledge, 1998.
Carrier, D. Museum Skepticism. A History of Display of Art in the Public Galleries.
Durham and London: Duke UP, 2006.
Clifford, James. “On Collecting Art and Culture” The Predicament of Culture:
Twentieth Century Ethnography, Literature and Art. Cambridge: Harvard UP,
1988.
Coombes, Annie. Re-inventing Africa: Museums, Material Culture and the Popular
Imagination. New Haven: Yale UP, 1994.
Drobnick, Jim. “Toposmia: Art, Scent, and Interrogations of Spatiality.” Angelaki:
Journal of Theoretical Humanities 7 (1) (2002), pp. 31–47.
Duclos, Rebecca. “The Cartographies of Collecting.” Museums and the Future of
Collection. Ed. Simon Knell. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004.
Duncan, Carol. Civilising Rituals. Inside Public Art Museums. London: Routledge,
1995.
Gonzalez, Jennifer A. “Archaeological Devotion.” With Other Eyes: Looking at Race
and Gender in Visual Culture. Ed. Lisa Bloom. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P,
1999.
Karp, Ivan, and Steven D. Levine. Exhibition Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of
Museum Display. Washington: Smithsonian Institution P, 1991.
Macdonald, Sharon, and Gordon Fyfe, eds. Theorizing Museums: Expressing Identity
and Diversity in a Changing World. Oxford: Blackwell, 1996.
O’Dogherty, Brian. Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of Gallery Space. Santa
Monica: Lapis P, 1987.
Richards, Thomas. The Imperial Archive: Knowledge and the Fantasy of Empire.
London: Verso, 1993.
Tribby, Jay. “Body/Building: Living the Museum Life in Early Modern Europe.”
Rhetorica, 10 (2), (1992).
Young, P. Globalisation and the Great Exhibition: The Victorian New World Order.
London: Palgrave, 2009.