Museum Piece

In January 1967, Yousuf Karsh photographed Marshall McLuhan inside the Royal Ontario Museum’s recently opened hall of invertebrate fossils. In the portrait, McLuhan sits before a bank of telephones mounted on a dimly lit wall resembling a seabed, rakishly holding the camera’s gaze, his smile teasing some tantalizing secret. The innovative exhibition offered visitors touch-friendly facsimiles, sand underfoot, recorded sounds, and the smell of the ocean. It was acclaimed in the press as an example of how McLuhan’s ideas about sensory engagement could shape the future of museums. He may have been the poster boy, but the architect behind the new paleontology wing was his lesser-known collaborator, Harley Parker.

That Parker, who led design and installation at the ROM for ten years, was never photographed in his own exhibition is an injustice reflective of how he was viewed in relation to McLuhan (the New York Times called him a “disciple”). Parker was a man of many talents: beyond working as a researcher at the Centre for Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto from 1967 to 1975, he was also a theorist, typographer, and painter. Yet he’s best known as McLuhan’s “right-hand man” or, less generously, as the “traveling crony” who acted as his stand‑in at events once Understanding Media, published in 1964, became wildly popular. Parker seemed content to play the part, regardless of criticism. “I front for Marshall,” he explained in a Toronto newspaper profile. “I have my own dignity, and doing things for Marshall doesn’t affect it.” Although McLuhan bragged that “we are so entirely conversant with each other that we can give a joint lecture as if by one man,” he also quipped that “every man needs a dog.”

Gary Genosko, a professor at Ontario Tech University, in Oshawa, traces how Parker interpreted McLuhan’s ideas for exhibition design, highlighting his creation of an “explorimental” gallery at the Museum of the City of New York. Genosko had his work cut out for him: to dig Parker out from under McLuhan is no small task. It’s difficult to tell where one ends and the other begins — and to what extent they were developing their own concepts. But through close readings of Parker’s writings and curatorial projects, Genosko offers a thorough account of his subject’s core theories and “basic principles.”

Parker’s dream of mounting a display without a storyline has perhaps influenced the author’s structure. Narrative was anathema to Parker, who associated it with straightforward and rational modes of presentation that he viewed as outdated in the ’60s — useless when it came to commenting on the era’s new technology. While this non-linear approach may work well in an exhibition, Genosko’s shifting focus makes it hard to see the man behind the projects.

Nonetheless, there are enticing biographical snippets: an allusion to Parker’s struggle with alcohol, his wife’s devotion to a local ashram, and his rebellious children, particularly his eldest son, Blake, who created multimedia “synthedelic” performances with the electronic music group Intersystems. Unfortunately, such details are few and far between. The book contains only a few images, making it easy to forget that Parker considered himself to be, first and foremost, a visual artist. It does, however, feature a lengthy discussion of his self-portraits that centres on his depictions of facial hair — puzzlingly described as “bearded media.” Although Genosko excavates some of Parker’s unique contributions to cultural studies, his version of the visionary remains “the McLuhan of the Museum”— an epithet adopted for the book’s subtitle.

If Parker’s individuality gets lost in Genosko’s account of his life, it shines brightly in his own monograph, The Culture Box, in which his contrarian voice, love of wordplay, and passion for audience participation convey an idea of the museum as a medium of communication that is as fresh today as it would have been in 1973, had it been published then. In 2022, his daughter found the pages in an old briefcase. Why the manuscript went unpublished for so long remains unclear, though Genosko — who edited the text — suggests it may have taken a back seat to Parker’s work for McLuhan.

In his articulate but “angry book,” Parker condemns museums for being dead, joyless, and elitist spaces shaped by “filing-cabinet minds.” These institutions have a grammar and a syntax, he suggests, and we’ve been using both all wrong. Rather than sharing content in a one-way, top-down stream from a specialist curator to a lay audience, these institutions should be laboratories for heightening perception. Parker thought galleries could radicalize education by confronting visitors with sensations from other times and cultures, harnessing the past to revolutionize one’s relationship to the present.

The Culture Box is light on direct references to McLuhan, whose concepts are adapted in a way that speaks to Parker’s back-pocket familiarity. He sharpens McLuhan’s brand of media theory, which lacks any explicit form of social critique. He rejects the use of artifacts to affirm Western superiority and urges a move away from “plunder.” Cultural dialogue, Parker suggests, is a “two-way street” that should unsettle our assumptions. He wants museums to become “meeting houses” where ordinary “citizens can encounter an interface of the university and the political economy of the community.”

Genosko changed the subtitle from Museums Are Today to Museums as Media, arguing that Parker’s historical moment is “very much yesterday.” Yet there is something deeply contemporary about The Culture Box, which arrives in time for a curatorial landscape that has embraced the techniques Parker championed. He hoped exhibitions would offer drugless revelations and “mind-blowing experiences.” While his ideal countercultural audience never engaged with his displays in the way he imagined, today’s museumgoers are primed to revel in interactive experiences rather than view objects at a distance.

Next June, the ROM will open Psychedelics, a transdisciplinary exhibition that promises a “mind-bending, immersive AV installation” evoking “the sensory phenomena associated with ‘tripping.’ ” This will be a hall of fossils for the twenty-first century, and I like to think that Harley Parker would have approved.