Border Patrol Museum (2009), exterior view, El Paso, Texas. Photo: Lee Rodney.

JCS 1 (2) pp. 139–156 Intellect Limited 2012

Journal of curatorial studies

Volume 1 Number 2
© 2012 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/jcs.1.2.139_1

Lee Rodney

Exhibiting the Frontier: American

Borders as Museological Projects

Abstract Keywords
In the twenty-first century, international borders are being rethought and frontier
remade after the concept of a ‘borderless world’ of the 1990s lost its promise. border exhibitions
This article looks at some of the ways in which borders have recently been soft power
re-conceptualized and framed through case studies of two museological projects: globalization
the Border Patrol Museum in El Paso, Texas and the Mauermuseum/Haus am Border Patrol Museum
Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin. As abstract, conceptual phenomena, geographical Checkpoint Charlie
borders pose a representational quandary that is addressed not only through
state strategies of demarcation and surveillance, but also through soft power
and the strategies of architectural and museological display that bolster popular
support for, and lend meaning to, the abstraction of a line.

Conventional wisdom has always held that the state with the largest
military prevails, but in an information age it may be the state (or
nonstates) with the best story that wins.
– Joseph Nye (2009)
When does the fortress become a penitentiary?
– Wendy Brown (2010)

I frequently cross the Canada–United States border between Windsor

and Detroit, the world’s largest international trade crossing. The long
queues of transport trucks that clog local roads have subsided in the last
few years, but border traffic can still be unpredictable. When crossing to
the United States (the only legal way is to drive) you often find yourself

139
Lee Rodney

in one of two awkward scenarios, either 100 feet above the Detroit River
on an 80-year-old bridge, or 100 feet below in an equally aged two-lane
tunnel. Waiting in border traffic leaves time to look around for cracks
in  the infrastructure and to ponder the strange feelings of statelessness
when traversing the 500-metre stretch between the two countries. The
international boundary line is marked by two flags, one Canadian, the
other American, set side-by-side somewhere in the middle of the span.
But these markings seem inconsequential as the infrastructure itself
has come to represent the border in its permanent state of reconstruction
and repair.
The Ambassador Bridge and the Detroit–Windsor Tunnel were prod-
ucts of Progressive Era urban industrialization, built as symbols of the
emergent automobile empire in the late 1920s and early 1930s just prior
to the Great Depression. But now these aging frameworks of civil engi-
neering threaten to collapse before governments and private actors can
decide upon what role these border crossings should play – in the middle
of the rust belt, in the middle of a long-term recession – at the onset of
the twenty-first century. In many ways the problems exemplified by these
crossings reflect a larger problem: they stand for the uncertain status
of the Canada–US border, which for many years has been understood
less as a physical boundary than as a variable line that separates the two
countries. The international boundary has become more significant in the
last decade as the recently formed US Department of Homeland Security
set its sights on re-defining border control. The ambiguous status of the
Canada–US border emerged as a kind of side effect, one produced by the
new emphasis on security and the vast walling projects taking place on
the US–Mexico border since 2006.
International borders have been in flux for the better part of a decade
and they are now in the process of being re-conceived and re-purposed
to respond to the challenges brought on by globalization’s signature
movements: increased migration, transnational capital, global terrorism
and digital technology. The events of 9/11 indisputably changed the
so-called borderless world promoted during the 1990s, but it is critical to
note that such a fantasy was indeed short-lived, falling chronologically
between the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989 and the attacks on the
twin towers in 2001 (Mirzoeff 2005: 139). I argue that the premise of the
‘world without borders’ promoted during the 1990s has been followed
by the re-conceptualization of borders as significant physical sites over
the last decade and that the ways in which they are represented and
symbolized are crucial to their purpose (to mark territorial limits, to stage
national differentiation, and to limit free movement). The mixed messages
generated about borders through the language of globalization, with its
dynamic metaphors of speed, flow and uncertainty, compete with those of
security mandates, which aim to codify and contain danger (Bauder 2011;
Brown  2010; Rodney 2011). These competing messages are contained
within the multiple borders and checkpoints that exist not only between
countries but also in the securitized landscape that permeates people’s
movement within and between cities (Schuilenberg 2008).
National borders are not merely maintained by the mutual
understanding of a geographic survey, or by the military presence of

140
 Exhibiting the Frontier

border patrol and border walls, however imposing. They also need to be 1. Amy Kaplan questions
the choice of the term
sustained by a variety of methods that add dimension and give weight to a ‘homeland’ in the
boundary survey by making the demarcation significant. This is especially establishment of
the Department of
the case for American territorial borders that have undergone a significant Homeland Security
transformation in the twenty-first century, a transformation that has been (established in 2002), a
brought on by a crisis of meaning around the physical boundaries of the term that has almost
no historical precedent
United States.1 in American history.
This article looks specifically at ways in which borders have been She argues that the
introduction of the
exhibited in museological contexts, the ways in which their artifacts are ‘homeland’ as an idea
curated to naturalize the ideological presumptions behind their rise or fall. masks deep national
insecurities, and
In looking to contemporary examples of border exhibitions in Germany indicates a semantic
and the United States, I aim to trace some of the changes in border narra- shift that introduces
tives globally as they have emerged after 1989 and 2001, respectively, and both nostalgia and
defensiveness. In
how these exhibits serve to reinforce the political constructions that they her analysis, the
represent. While these projects strive to create (or recreate) the geopo- ‘homeland’ becomes
‘something a larger
litical conditions of the borders that they reference, they share little else power threatens
in common, but these differences point to the conflicting narratives to occupy or take
away, and one has
that borders engender in the contemporary world as well as the diverse to fight to regain’
processes at work that contribute to their meaning.2 (Kaplan 2003: 89).
Additionally, since
The Mauermuseum/Haus am Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin and the 2005, the proliferation
Border Patrol Museum in El Paso, Texas, are dedicated museums with of sensationalist
collections that were acquired and maintained by the idiosyncratic vision of television shows
focused on border
dedicated individuals. Furthermore, both museums are popular attractions: patrol, such as ABC’s
during my visits to the Border Patrol Museum and the Mauermuseum/ Homeland Security
USA, the National
Haus am Checkpoint Charlie, both spaces were busy with organized tour Geographic Channel’s
groups of seniors and school children. As different as these places are in Border Wars, and, more
recently, CBC’s The
context and world-view, they share the odd, eccentric qualities of inde- Border, all contribute
pendent museum practice – from adapted buildings and inexplicable cura- to the idea that
torial juxtapositions, to faded text panels and crowded, makeshift display borders are inherently
dangerous places that
strategies – qualities that make them unique and compelling. must be defended.

2. It should be noted that

I am dealing exclusively
The Border Patrol Museum: Reviving the Frontier with museums in
this article rather
The Border Patrol Museum is set in the rolling hills of West Texas than artistic practice
on the outskirts of El Paso, the American city that has the dubious or other forms of
contemporary display
distinction of sharing an international border with Juarez, Mexico.3 related to borders.
While El Paso bills itself as one of America’s ‘safest cities’, Juarez has I have written about
been branded one of the world’s most dangerous, particularly since the US border as a
site for intervention
2008 when Felipe Calderón brought in the Mexican Army to contain in other publications
drug cartel violence that had been building over control of cross-border (most recently in Space
and Culture, 2011). The
routes to lucrative US markets (Borunda 2010). But the military presence way in which artists
on the Mexican side has only exacerbated violence as loyalties continu- and activists have used
borders within site-
ally shift between the municipal police, the Mexican Army and the specific projects and
cartels, whose members move rather fluidly between legitimate and ille- performances is, for
gitimate organizations. At the same time, El Paso, a mere stone’s throw the most part, far more
critical and therefore,
across the border, remains eerily quiet. Despite concerns about ‘spillover fundamentally
violence’ pouring into the Southern United States from Mexico’s trou- different than the
way that these
bled northern states, El Paso has defied logic in prospering against the museums/institutions
odds of the current economic recession and in spite of its neighbour’s have approached
the concept of
issues (Rice 2011: 4).

141
Lee Rodney

borders/frontiers. I Many Americans would like to credit the swelling ranks of the
plan to address these
differences more fully Department of Homeland Security and its subsidiary, Customs and
in a forthcoming book, Border Patrol, for the disparity between El Paso’s extraordinary safety
but my first goal in
this article is to try to
record and Juarez’s extraordinary violence. As the largest reorganization
understand and unpack of the US government in 50 years, the Department of Homeland Security
the various roles of the was established in 2002 and has since spent billions fortifying American
state and the smaller
institutions that have borders over the last decade (Drache 2004: 4). Recent studies demon-
a stake in defining strate that the decline in apprehensions of undocumented migrants and
changing notions of
an American border/ drug arrests at the El Paso border are more likely to be attributable to the
frontier. downturn in the US economy than to the increased security at the border.
3. The museum is
The predicted ‘spillover’ of both economic migrants and drug violence
variously named seems to be a popular fear-mongering tactic used by American politicians
on-site and online as who promote these new fortifications to win votes (Rice 2011: 12).
the National Border
Patrol Museum and El Paso has always been a flashpoint for US–Mexico relations, from
the US Border Patrol the time of the revolutionary general Pancho Villa at the turn of the twen-
Museum. For the sake
of brevity, this article tieth century onwards. The El Paso sector was established in 1924, along
will refer to it as simply with the Detroit sector, as one of the first two official border crossing
the Border Patrol
Museum. points on the northern and southern borders of the United States, and
the first training school for border patrol was established here in 1920.
But it is the historic circumstances of El Paso del Norte as a frontier post

Border Patrol Museum (2009), road sign, El Paso, Texas. Photo: Lee Rodney.

142
 Exhibiting the Frontier

that has established the site as a significant location for this museum. 4. While the Department
of Homeland Security
In contrast with the technologically sophisticated image promoted by has given billions
the twenty-first-century ‘smart border’ programs established by the of dollars in grants
to increase security
Department of Homeland Security, the Border Patrol Museum promotes in several states
a version from early twentieth century, taking its cue from Hollywood (including funding for
visions of the American frontier. A fifty-foot steel sculpture of a border communications and
research), the Border
marshall on horseback marks the entrance from the roadside. The figure Patrol Museum does
is depicted in silhouette mounting his trusted steed. Against the backdrop not list the Department
of Homeland Security
of the desert landscape, the sculpture looks almost cinematic, like a still among its supporters
from the climax of a John Ford or John Sturges western. The Border Patrol and donors. See Priest
and Arkin (2010) and
Museum’s sign is more modest, but continues the western theme with the Border Patrol
its stone foundation and cartoonish, yellow lettering painted on a rustic Museum’s website
wooden backdrop. Combined, these elements conjure up a generalized (2012), which describes
that its funding comes
frontier narrative, one that links a golden age of border patrol directly to from private donor
the mythic, expansionist ethos of the American West and its implicit logic sources exclusively.
of manifest destiny. As the most distinctive elements of the museum’s
exterior, the sculpture and road sign act as heraldry as the building itself is
an otherwise unremarkable bunker surrounded by a large parking lot.
The Border Patrol Museum was founded in 1979 by a group of
retired border patrol agents, but the organization did not officially open
until 1985, moving into its current premises on the outskirts of El Paso
in 1994. Although there have been significant federal budget increases
directed towards the expansion of Customs and Border Patrol in the last
decade, the Border Patrol Museum seems to have shunned the largess.4
Its premises and collection betray a sense of its limited financial resources,
but this may be by design as the institution distances itself from official
government operations. Reflecting the political slant of West Texas, the
Border Patrol Museum is essentially a conservative organization, but it
conveys a strange, almost contradictory mix of American patriotism and
libertarianism, announcing its self-sufficiency, independence and debt-
free status. The Museum proudly advertises that it is ‘built and supported
by your donations’: the website and donation box remind visitors that
donations are ‘cheerfully accepted’ and those of $200 or more qualify to
be part of the ‘Wall of Support’, an installation that runs along two inte-
rior walls within the main exhibition hall.
Perhaps the most contentious installation within the museum, the
‘Wall of Support’ conjures up a strange image in the context of Texan
politics. The state is known for its opposition to the recent construction of
the border wall along the US–Mexico boundary, as many ranchers have
property that straddles the borderline (Root 2007). Additionally, Texas has
always clung to its historical identity as an independent state within the
United States. In this context, the ‘Wall of Support’ serves as more than
just a donor’s wall, it becomes an implicit statement in favour of new wall
construction, implying that walls strengthen the nation rather than signi-
fying weakness or structural problems. While numerous logical arguments
have been made to demonstrate the ineffectiveness of wall building to
deter immigrants, contraband or even (supposedly) terrorists, the popu-
larity of walling as a viable security strategy continues to grow. Wendy
Brown argues that the recent international trend towards wall building is
a sign of ‘waning sovereignty’ or the detachment of sovereignty from the

143
Lee Rodney

Border Patrol Museum (2009), ‘Wall of Support’ and patrol car, El Paso, Texas. Photo: Lee Rodney.

nation state. She sees these new walls as theatrical expressions of insecu-
rity, becoming ‘icons of the erosion of state sovereignty’ within a globalized
world. Although they appear as ‘hyperbolic tokens of such sovereignty’,
Brown suggests seeking to understand what they also mask:

[L]ike all hyperbole they reveal a tremulousness, vulnerability,

dubiousness or instability at the core of what they aim to express
[…] Hence the visual paradox of these walls: what appears at first
blush as the articulation of state sovereignty actually expresses its
diminution.
(Brown 2010: 24)

Similarly, the Museum’s ‘Wall of Support’ also masks a central contradic-

tion. In its appeal to the libertarian spirit of West Texas it must appear
politically independent while at the same time soliciting ‘support’ in the
form of donations or conscription.
Within this new world order one might ask how the role of the Border
Patrol has shifted, becoming at once more central and also more routine.
Customs and Border Patrol has always been a state agency, only recently
falling under the jurisdiction of the Department of Homeland Security,
where it has significantly expanded and risen in stature (Andreas 2009;

144
 Exhibiting the Frontier

Drache 2004). However, the history presented through the Border Patrol
Museum bears no mark of this recent (and important) political shift and
presents the history of the US Border Patrol as a kind of quasi-independent
frontier force that owes nothing to big government in Washington. At the
same time, the museum doubles as a US Border Patrol recruitment centre
where one can fill out an application for a career in the Border Patrol
service. In line with right-wing distrust towards the role of government –
which enthusiastically supports military funding while denouncing the role
of taxes and ‘government waste’ – the Museum displays its distance from
the state in exhibition strategies that seem to be proudly amateur, in stark
contrast with the slick contemporary image presented by the Department
of Homeland Security as portrayed through their website and also in the
General Services Administration exhibition discussed below.
One might expect to find an overarching narrative logic in the Museum’s
display, but this has been neglected along with professional lighting stand-
ards, framing and interpretive panels. Rather, the organizational approach
is no-nonsense, logical and tidy: photographs and videos to the left of
the front door, decommissioned border patrol vehicles to the right. This
assortment of vehicles configures the most esteemed artifacts in the Border
Patrol Museum’s collection, conjuring up popular narratives of high-speed
chases and the apprehension of hardened criminals. These include heli-
copters, speedboats and snowmobiles, all formerly used in patrolling land
and maritime borders from the 1920s to the 1980s, which are haphazardly
displayed in the main exhibition hall like a display in a high school gymna-
sium. The lack of museological standards, however, works to convey a kind
of ‘democratic’ appeal, as the history of the US Border Patrol is portrayed in
the same manner as baseball or other all-American sports displays: photo-
graphs of guards from the various border sectors are lined up like teams in a
league; a profusion of banners, medals and other memorabilia, all available
in replica for purchase, along with colouring books for the kids featuring
animated patrol dogs. This emphasis on gear and heroes trumps any histor-
ical context for the formation of the Border Patrol, which is consistently
presented as being as central to the American psyche as NASCAR, and as
natural as apple pie. This popular and reassuring image of the border patrol
is furthered by the Museum’s ‘Wall’ that can be seen as ‘for the people and
by the people’, a life-sized stand-in for the vast and impersonal US–Mexico
border wall, which could be seen as a ‘big government’ mega-project.
The Border Patrol Museum treads a fine line between the official
concerns of state security and the popularity of vigilante organizations like
the Minutemen Civil Defense Corps, a national group that has chapters in
border states along both the northern and southern boundaries. Although
the Museum maintains its independence from government funding, it
still functions, indirectly, as a form of ‘soft power’ for the Department
of Homeland Security. After its hasty formation in 2003, its public rela-
tions efforts resulted in mistrust over lack of transparency in its operations
contingent to policies under the PATRIOT Act (2001) that directly affected
civil liberties. Although the term ‘soft power’ was conceived by Joseph
Nye as a means of conducting international diplomacy (in contrast with
the common idea of ‘hard power’ and coercion through military means)
it can equally apply to domestic situations, such as garnering widespread

145
Lee Rodney

Mauermuseum (2011), above, installation with escape vehicle, and below, view of Ronald
Reagan exhibit with chainsaw, Berlin. Photos: Lee Rodney.

146
 Exhibiting the Frontier

public support for the expansion of border security. Nye sees soft power
as the ability ‘to attract or repel other actors to “want what you want”’
(Nye 2004: 31). The idea of soft power is hardly news to scholars of twen-
tieth-century art history, who have come to see the promotion of Abstract
Expressionism in Europe as a kind of soft power narrative operating in
the background while the grand narrative of the Cold War played itself
out (Guilbault 1985; Harris 1995); but Nye’s text brings these ideas into
the mainstream of contemporary American political thought. The Border
Patrol Museum functions within this context to popularize border patrol
activities and to historicize its security operations as a necessary part of
American statehood.

Mauermuseum: Spectacle of the American Sector

The Mauermuseum/Haus am Checkpoint Charlie was established by
Rainer Hildebrant, a German historian, in 1962, a year after the Berlin
Wall was erected. What began as an exhibition in a small two-room
apartment on Bernauer Strasse in West Berlin (the famous apartment that
straddled the border), eventually grew to accommodate a large collection
of escape vehicles donated by East Germans who had successfully fled to
the West. The museum moved into its permanent quarters at Checkpoint
Charlie in 1963 and took on its present day configuration in 1987 when it
expanded into the first two floors of Peter Eisenman’s partially completed
housing project, the Haus am Checkpoint Charlie. Eisenman’s project was
built around the three remaining pre-war buildings at the site including
the Mauermuseum (‘wall museum’). After the Wall fell, the Mauermuseum
collected the defunct border signs and other Cold War paraphernalia from
the divided Germany, including the famous ‘You have left the American
Sector’ sign.
This fifty-year-old institution has survived the division and subsequent
reunification of Germany due to Rainer Hildebrandt’s singular vision:
every object on display in this kitschy and idiosyncratic museum bears the
imprint of its founder’s efforts. At first glance the Mauermuseum would
appear to be cast in the negative mold of the Border Patrol Museum:
the Mauermuseum celebrates the unbordering of Eastern Europe, while
the Border Patrol Museum promotes American borders as integral to
national identity, providing justification for the newly built fortifica-
tions along the US–Mexico border. The overriding final message of the
Mauermuseum corroborates the familiar story of the fall of the Berlin
Wall and ends with a section celebrating non-violent struggle, freedom,
world peace and understanding between ‘all peoples, ethnic and ethical
groups, and of religions’. This generalized association between the fall of
the Wall in 1989 and the potential for a world without borders would
seem to convey an opposing view to the patriotic naval gazing promoted
by the Border Patrol Museum. As both institutions are privately funded,
their messages serve as impassioned polemics, variously for and against
bordering; but they are equally dedicated to the fetishization of border
paraphernalia as a means to promote ‘freedom and democracy’. And
though they showcase antithetical situations – one presents a border to
keep people in, the other to keep people out; one displays a collection

147
Lee Rodney

of escape vehicles, while the other displays patrol vehicles – they do so

in such zealous and dogmatic ways that their messages almost seem to
converge. Owing to their independence from government support, these
institutions have crafted singular narratives of the divergent border histo-
ries that they seek to memorialize, and though they represent different
political situations and positions on bordering, they operate as two
successive episodes in a shifting saga of territorial borders at the outset of
the twenty-first century.
The Mauermuseum/Haus am Checkpoint Charlie presents the history
of the Berlin Wall as one of extreme oppression and violence, a tragic
period that cleaved the nation and the capital in two and sent thousands
fleeing across the border towards the West. Writing on the history of
the Wall, Frederick Taylor suggests that it ‘supplied, above all, an excel-
lent propaganda weapon against the Communists’ (2006: xxi). If this can
be seen as the Berlin Wall’s Cold War identity, it continues to exercise
significant influence in its relative absence, and can be seen to take on
increased powers in its reliquary forms, not only in the Mauermuseum,
but above all in its various pieces that are distributed throughout Berlin
and around the world.
The size of Checkpoint Charlie today is significantly reduced and the
guard station exists only in replica, just outside the Mauermuseum, near
the intersection of Friedrichstrasse and Zimmerstrasse. But the site still
acts as one of Berlin’s most popular tourist attractions. As ground zero
during the Cold War, Checkpoint Charlie served as a twentieth-century
version of the American frontier, partitioning the American-controlled
sector of West Berlin from the Soviet-controlled East Berlin. Checkpoint
Charlie now functions as a strange kind of street theatre, with actors
playing the roles of Soviet and American border guards offering to stamp
tourist’s passports. This small, performative space at the threshold of
the Cold War divide is one of a few remaining traces left of the walled
city. Like the Mauermuseum itself, what remains of Checkpoint Charlie
is simultaneously triumphant and stifling, performing as both participa-
tory theatre and as a sober monument to the recent past. Moreover, the
site celebrates the arrival of a new world order in Europe, a borderless
world that is defined in the spaces colonized by transnational capitalism
surrounding the former Cold War relic.
The Mauermuseum is divided into two sections, running somewhat
chronologically from the entry. The first half is housed in a series of nine-
teenth-century apartments that span two floors containing exhibits that
cover the history of the post-war division of Germany up to 1987, as well
as the Museum’s collection of escape vehicles, including a homemade hot
air balloon, a mini-submarine, a Trebant, Volkswagon and an Opel, as
well as other artifacts of the divided city. Lining the stairwells and hall-
ways are paintings and sculptures schooled in expressionism, caricatured
allusions to the metaphor of the Wall as a wound across the German body.
The second half of the museum extends into architect Peter Eisenman’s
Internationale Bauausstellung project (IBA) and prominently houses the
Ronald Reagan gallery. This display includes Reagan’s personal chainsaw
and the handwritten notes to his famous ‘tear down this wall’ speech,
presented side-by-side, as if Reagan arrived for his historic visit to West

148
 Exhibiting the Frontier

Berlin with chainsaw in hand. The large windows along this gallery
look out across Friedrichstrasse to a view of the signs for McDonald’s,
Subway and Snackpoint Charlie, a backdrop that gleefully announces the
triumph of global capital and the arrival of homogenized fast food, while
also suggesting that the ‘American Sector’ lives on into the twenty-first
century. The Reagan room prepares visitors for the grand finale in the
Mauermuseum, a section of Eisenman’s new wing that juts out over the
intersection of Friedrichstrasse and Zimmerstrasse, showcasing the mate-
rial remains of Checkpoint Charlie, including the original sign as well as
the dividing line that once geographically marked the division between
East and West. Embedded in the floor and covered in Plexiglas, the broken
pieces of the line are referred to as the ‘crown jewels’ in the museum’s
literature, a not-so-ironic reference to the monetary value of the broken
bits of concrete that were sold and shipped around the world as token
memorials of the Berlin Wall after 1989.
It was with an archeological metaphor that Peter Eisenman began his
project for the IBA, The Haus am Checkpoint Charlie. Completed in 1987,
the project took the location of Checkpoint Charlie metaphorically as an
‘artificial excavation’ site in the block running adjacent to the Berlin Wall
(Bedard and Balfour 1994: 5). Eisenman’s ambitious housing complex

Mauermuseum (2011), original Checkpoint Charlie sign and the ‘crown jewels’ of the dividing line
between East and West Berlin embedded in the floor. Photo: Lee Rodney.

149
Lee Rodney

was never completed to plan, only partially realized along the block of
Friedrichstrasse. In pure deconstructionist fashion, Eisenman’s view to
the past was not one preoccupied with a singular search for truth, or the
type of fact-finding missions traditionally used in archeological processes.
Making use of a series of canted, overlapping grids – the Mercator grid
over the eighteenth-century urban plan of Berlin – Eisenman’s project
suggested a complicated history of the site that anticipated a future equally
charged by the material remnants of its past.
If the seemingly banal remnants of the Cold War have become popular
fetish objects enshrined in a contemporary museological setting, it should
be asked what these have come to stand for? Indeed, what might this
museum actually stage for the thousands of tourists who visit it year after
year? As a testament to unbordering in an era of pervasive security, surveil-
lance and suspicion, the ‘bi-polar world’ represented by the Berlin Wall
provides a comfortable picture of a clearly defined world order, the black
and white of communist oppression and capitalist freedom, spatially
divided by the Wall that served for years as an ‘existential symbol tran-
scending immediate political significance’. Thus, writes Yosefa Loshitsky,
‘within the context of the sudden collapse of world bipolarity, the fall of
the wall appeared as the perfect metaphor of what has been described as
both the “end of history” and the rebirth of history’ (1997: 11). Indeed,
the Berlin Wall has become a primary object of contention within German
historical consciousness: Loshitsky writes of the role played by the Wall
as a involuntary memorial to World War II, one that stood, indirectly,
as punishment for the Third Reich and the subsequent occupation of
Germany by the Allied forces (1997: 7). Given the subliminal status of
the Wall in German post-war consciousness, Loshitsky suggests that its
destruction in 1989 marked a kind of release, one linked to the desire to
forget the burden of the Holocaust. For her, the manual destruction of
the wall served not only as a symbol of ‘freedom’ but also as an act of
‘redemption’ for the German people: ‘The people, however, enacted this
redemption with their “own hands” by manually destroying the Wall. The
people’s choice was not to remember World War II and their destruction
of the Wall attests to this fact’ (Loshitsky 1997: 8).
In Berlin’s makeover as a unified city, there is very little of the Wall
remaining. Much of it has been stamped out by new developments that
seek to advertise the triumphal touchdown of global capital and Berlin’s
status as the financial capital of Europe. In this context, the Wall, or what
remains of it, is the tourist attraction par excellence, much like Rome’s
ruins, though buried and camouflaged by the successive building blitzes
in the city over the last 30 years. Thus the Wall becomes part of an urban
puzzle or treasure hunt. While much of its former route is marked by large
photographic panels to document historical events that took place along
its 96-mile (154 km) course, the small remaining sections of the Wall and
its physical representations throughout the city work to punctuate the
urban landscape and make it legible through the grammar of a new world
order that led to its destruction.
The symbolic importance of the remaining Wall is especially apparent
at the Berlin Wall Memorial, a site at Bernauer Strasse where a 60-meter
stretch, including the former ‘no-man’s land’ (a heavily militarized strip on

150
 Exhibiting the Frontier

the Eastern side of the Wall) has been preserved undeveloped. The memo-
rial stands as a stark counterpoint to the Mauermuseum. The remaining
section of the Wall at Bernauer Strasse has been framed by metal laminate
panels that bracket the Wall and former border zone, reflecting the space
so that it appears like a slice of time cut out of the surrounding urban
area. Unlike the Mauermusuem, with its highly animated and sensation-
alized presentation, the starkness of the Berlin Wall Memorial is typical of
many professional heritage practices where the site itself becomes archeo-
logical, stripped down to its component parts and left bare for the visitor
to contemplate the magnitude of the historical circumstances. The impor-
tance of site is underscored in Berlin’s recent reconstruction projects,
particularly the Topography of Terror (1987–2010), an open-air museum
at the site of the former Gestapo and SS headquarters, flanked on its
North side by the second longest remaining section of the Berlin Wall that
was constructed atop the former Gestapo prison. These layers of political
extremes become painfully apparent in the archeological presentation
where the excavation frames the ruins.
However, the Mauermuseum also has a very small slab of the Wall,
but it has no relation to its original location and is situated, conveniently,
like a decorative sculpture near the entrance of the museum for passing
tourists. On the fifteenth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 2004,
Alexandra Hildebrandt, the current director of the Mauermuseum, staged
a temporary memorial to the victims of the Wall by placing pieces of the
original structure near Checkpoint Charlie along with black crosses. The
controversial installation prompted debate over how to devise ‘a clearly
focused plan to remember the German division’. The following year the
Berlin Senate Department of Culture set out to better integrate the various
sites into a ‘holistic memorial site concept’ (Sigel 2008), modes of exhibi-
tion that impacted both the Topography of Terror and the Berlin Wall
Memorial.
Sunil Manghani suggests that such display strategies and images can
be understood in terms of their repetition, much like ‘a vibration that
rings out over time’ resonating a western sense of ‘liberation and victory’.
The endless televised images of the fall of the Berlin wall, he writes, form
an ‘underlying repetition, as a continuum, rather than a series of discrete,
empirical occurrences’ (Manghani 2008: location 935). This idea was
confirmed in the televised twentieth-anniversary celebrations commemo-
rating the fall of the Berlin Wall in 2009. Strikingly, its central motif staged
simulated replicas of the Wall that fell like dominoes in a continuous line
to a cheering crowd snapping photos and videos.
This official demonstration of unbordering that took place in 2009
served as a global media event that replayed the promise of a borderless
world, one that appeared to be so close in the 1990s and so far away a
decade later. In the current context, borders are being actively reinvented
to accommodate or gloss over inherent paradoxes that are all too apparent
to anyone seeking to migrate or even travel outside of one’s country of
origin. Simultaneously, national boundaries and norms have been dras-
tically altered by the marriage of transnational capital and new western
security initiatives, programs that privilege the movement of goods over
people. Just as the Berlin Wall produced the conformist, passive ‘walled

151
Lee Rodney

subjects’ of the East Germans it kept in, Brown suggests that contempo-
rary walls, ‘especially those around democracies, often undo or invert the
contrasts they are meant to inscribe’ instead generating ‘an increasingly
closed and policed collective identity in place of the open society they
would defend’ (2010: 40). In spite of its temporal and political alterity, she
suggests, the Berlin Wall is not so different from the new generation of
walls that have been put up around the world since 1989.

Mobile American Frontier

US border stations, writes David Winstead, commissioner of the General
Services Administration Public Building Service, ‘strive to convey a sense
of openness and welcome that is a hallmark of America’s history’ (2006).
This bold statement comes from the General Service Administration’s
exhibition, Thresholds Along the Frontier: Contemporary Border Stations, a
touring show that featured the designs for thirteen new border stations
at crossings along the Canada–US border and the Mexico–US border
in  2006. Funded by the Department of Homeland Security as a part of
their multi-billion dollar border upgrades, the GSA was charged with the
task of presenting a friendly face for the contemporary US border after
mass confusion, frustration and delays at the border in the years following
9/11. The incongruity between the experiences of travellers using US ports
of entry and the calming platitudes in the press-release for the exhibition
is striking: ‘Crossing the border between the United States and Canada
or Mexico is a significant experience’, Winstead continues in his curato-
rial statement, ‘and one increasingly distinguished by iconic architecture’
(qtd in General Services Administration 2006).
The project to rebuild and re-conceive the idea of the US border
station was prompted, first and foremost, by the significant transnational
traffic problem that resulted from the conflicting mandates of free trade
and security that became apparent at the border after 2001. Second, it was
part of an important public relations program initiated by the Department
of Homeland Security. Brian Finoki, a blogger tracking various forms of
‘military urbanism’ in Southern California, expressed suspicion about
the motives behind the show in asking ‘what does the US Border station
symbolize in today’s geopolitical climate? Especially, along the US–Mexico
border where a broken and controversial patchwork security fence tells
a different story from the warm aesthetic embrace of these new breed
checkpoints?’ (Finoki 2006).
This exhibition opened during the first phase of construction on the
new security fence (or wall) along the US–Mexico border, a massive
project that has been highly controversial throughout the United States
and internationally. Staging the border station as an entry point or
gateway to the United States at a time when the image of fortress America
was circulating both home and abroad seemed like a carefully timed
public relations exercise to soften the impact of twenty-first-century
border policies that undercut the founding mythology of the United
States as an open and free society. The curating of Thresholds Along the
Frontier is inseparable from this political moment, and whether or not it
succeeded in shifting public opinion about the new security-first border

152
 Exhibiting the Frontier

Thresholds Along the Frontier: Contemporary US Border Stations (2006), installation view, Ronald
Reagan Gallery, Washington, DC. Photo: courtesy of the Art in Architecture Program, General Service
Administration.

programs under the Department of Homeland Security, it certainly

worked to present a fresh and friendly face on border that had been
missing since 2002 when the Department of Homeland Security was
formed.
Joseph Nye (2009) updated his 2004 thesis of ‘soft power’, re-branding
it as ‘smart power’, a blend of conventional force (military, border patrol)
with well-timed, non-aggressive communications exercises. This notion
can be detected as early as 2001 when the ‘Smart Border Declaration’
was inscribed in new programs that encompassed everything from pre-
clearance processing for goods shipments to Nexus and F.A.S.T. lanes
to expedite ‘trusted travellers’. Such techno-bureaucratic terms paint a
picture of new world borders that are almost magic: secure and efficient,
open and closed. It is within Nye’s ‘smart’ framework that the curatorial
aims of Thresholds Along the Frontier might be situated. If the Department
of Homeland Security directly manifests hard power with its walling
projects along the border of the southern United States, the General
Services Administration could be seen as a soft power player that attempts
to ideologically balance such state force.

153
Lee Rodney

5. Many thanks to The choice of the term ‘frontier’ in the exhibition’s title is curious, partic-
the reviewer for
bringing my attention ularly when one considers the fact that the southwestern United States is
to the presentation of now heavily populated rather than the terra incognito or the ‘edge of civili-
Ellis Island as an early
twentieth-century
zation’ that once was implied by the historic idea of the American frontier in
frontier. The the nineteenth century. Evoking the frontier in the title perpetuates a sense
comparison merits of mystery to the sometimes tense, sometimes mundane (but always slow
further consideration
in a future text. and bureaucratic) passage across the international boundary. This exhibition
reinvests the international boundary between the continental United States
and its neighbours with a sense of symbolic importance that is missing in
the highly technical and militaristic language of twenty-first-century security
discourse. It does this by conveying the notion of ceremonial passage that
is theoretically implied by crossing the border, even if this liminal threshold
is frequently eclipsed by such negative experiences as long queues, invasive
and criminalizing questioning, uncertain motives and occasional searches.
This exhibition seems to reframe the US border in terms of a hassle-free
travel experience. As if the border were a place to orient the weary traveller,
its displays feature public art commissions and architectural designs remi-
niscent of tourist bureaus and highway rest stops from a previous golden
age of motor travel. While it is clear that this vision of the border will never
materialize as imagined in the design competition, the General Services
Administration seemed to recognize the importance of the frontier in the
American imagination as a concept that could blend the mobility of the tech-
nological border with an older patriotic attachment to place and territory.
Far from its nineteenth-century origins somewhere in the south-
western United States, the American frontier has proven to be an excep-
tionally resilient and malleable idea. These exhibitions, which have
emphasized both its mobility and its impermeability, differ fundamentally
from those presented at the Ellis Island Park and Immigration Museum,
where America’s ‘golden doors’ have become ideologically reified as the
legendary early twentieth-century gateway to America.5 Notably, the Ellis
Island Museum falls under the jurisdiction of the US Department of the
Interior serving as a frontier heritage site that provides a comforting narra-
tive about America’s past as a refuge for the ‘poor, huddled masses’. In
looking to the ways in which the American frontier has been set into exhi-
bition and museological constructs, I question the truth claims pertaining
to American borders, as well as those implied in museological processes.
Both are deeply tied to political process and are frequently presented
as natural facts. The Border Patrol Museum and the Mauermuseum are
private institutions that establish the notion of the American frontier
(whether territorially situated or geographically extended during the Cold
War) as the spatial limit of democracy and freedom, a claim that has been
increasingly challenged over the last decade.
The idea of the American frontier has steadily evolved over the course
of the twentieth century, being re-inflected at Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin
during the first phase of the Cold War. During the 1970s and 1980s, the
American frontier got ‘lost in space’ after the televised moon landing, when
transnational capitalism forecast the end of the nation-state. More recently
with the establishment of the US–Mexico border wall, the frontier came
crashing back down to earth like an old satellite, a piece of technology that
will never work again in the way it was intended to. As Wendy Brown points

154
 Exhibiting the Frontier

out, the new walls of the nation state do not serve a military function. Rather,
‘they have come to present a “reassuring world picture” in a time increasingly
lacking the horizons, containment, and security that humans have histori-
cally required for social and psychic integration and for political membership’
(Brown 2010: 26). Ultimately, these contemporary border exhibitions artic-
ulate a secure American frontier for both domestic and international audi-
ences that obscure the uncertainty unleashed by the 1989 heralding of a
borderless ‘free world’.

References
Andreas, Peter (2009), Border Games: Policing the US-Mexico Divide, Ithaca:
Cornell University Press.
Bauder, Harald (2011), ‘Toward a Critical Geography of the Border:
Engaging the Dialectic of Practice and Meaning’, Annals of the Association
of American Geographers, 101: 5, pp. 1126–39.
Bedard, Jean François and Balfour, Alan (eds) (1994), Peter Eisenman:
Cities of Artificial Excavation, Montreal: Canadian Centre for
Architecture.
Border Patrol Museum (2012), ‘Contributors’, http://www.borderpatrol-
museum.com/about/contributors.html. Accessed 20 February 2012.
Borunda, Daniel (2010), ‘Special Report: Juarez Deserves Title of Most
Dangerous City in the World’, El Paso Times, 7 June, http://www.
elpasotimes.com/juarez/ci_15241689. Accessed 20 February 2012.
Brown, Wendy (2010), Walled States, Waning Sovereignty, New York: Zone
Books.
Drache, Daniel (2004), Borders Matter: Homeland Security and the Search for
North America, Halifax: Fernwood.
Finoki, Brian (2006), ‘Welcome to America’, SUPTOPIA: A Field Guide
to Military Urbanism, 2 August, http://subtopia.blogspot.com/2006/08/
welcome-to-america_02.html. Accessed 17 January 2012.
General Services Administration (2006), ‘GSA Showcases U.S. Border
Stations Exhibit’, 3 August, http://www.gsa.gov/portal/content/102213.
Accessed 19 March 2012.
Guilbault, Serge (1985), How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art,
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Harris, Jonathan (1995), Federal Art and National Culture: The Politics of
Identity in New Deal America, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge
University Press.
Kaplan, Amy (2003), ‘Homeland Insecurities: Reflections on Language
and Space’, Radical History Review, 85, pp. 82–93
Loshitsky, Yosefa (1997), ‘Constructing and Deconstructing the Wall’,
CLIO, 26: 3, Spring, pp. 275–89.
Manghani, Sunil (2009), Image Critique and the Fall of the Berlin Wall,
Bristol: Intellect (Kindle edition, Amazon.com).
Mirzoeff, Nicholas (2005), Watching Babylon: The War in Iraq and Global
Visual Culture, New York: Routledge.
Nye, Joseph (2004), Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics,
New York: Perseus.
—— (2009), The Future of Power, New York: Perseus.

155
Lee Rodney

Priest, Dana and Arkin, William M. (2010), ‘A Hidden World Growing

Beyond Control’, Washington Post, 19 July.
Rice, Andrew (2011), ‘Life on the Line between El Paso and Juarez’,
New York Times, 28 July.
Rodney, Lee (2011), ‘Road Signs on the Border: Transnational Anxiety in
North American Border Cities’, Space and Culture, 14, pp. 384–97.
Root, Jay (2007), ‘Texas Ranchers Scoff at Border Fence’, Seattle Times,
15 July.
Schuilenberg, Mark (2008), ‘The Dislocating Perspective of Assemblages’,
Open, 15, pp. 18–35.
Sigel, Paul (2008), ‘The Berlin Wall as a Memorial’, http://www.goethe.de/
ges/mol/dos/ber/wan/en205918.htm. Accessed 23 February 2012.
Taylor, Frederick (2006), The Berlin Wall: A World Divided, London and
New York: Harper Collins.

Suggested Citation
Rodney, Lee (2012), ‘Exhibiting the Frontier: American Borders as
Museological Projects’, Journal of Curatorial Studies 1: 2, pp. 139–156,
doi: 10.1386/jcs.1.2.139_1

Contributor Details
Lee Rodney is Associate Professor of Art History and Visual Culture at
the University of Windsor, Canada. She has written on contemporary art,
cultural theory and visual culture in a range of books and publications
including Space and Culture, Parallax, Prefix Photo and PAJ: Performance
Art Journal. In 2008 she was a Fulbright Research Fellow at Arizona
State University where she began research investigating the fragmented
cultural geography of border regions in North America. She is a member
of the INTERMINUS urban research group and director of the Border
Bookmobile Project: borderbookmobile.net.
E-mail: llrodney@gmail.com

Lee Rodney has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work in the format
that was submitted to Intellect Ltd.

156
 Intellect
publishers of original thinking | www.intellectbooks.com

Clothing Cultures Fashion, Style & Popular Culture Critical Studies in Men’s Fashion

Editors Principal Editor Principal Editor

Jo Turney & Alex Franklin Joseph H. Hancock II Andrew Reilly
ISSN 20500742 | 3 issues per volume ISSN 20500726 | 3 issues per volume ISSN 2050070X | 3 issues per volume
Forthcoming 2014 Forthcoming 2014 Forthcoming 2014

Art & the Public Sphere Journal of Curatorial Studies Moving Image Review & Art Journal

Principal Editor Editors Founding Editor

Mel Jordan Jim Drobnick & Jennifer Fisher Catherine Elwes
ISSN 2042793X | 3 issues per volume ISSN 20455836 | 3 issues per volume ISSN 20456298 | 2 issues per volume
Volume 3, 2013 Volume 2, 2013 Volume 2, 2013

Intellect is an independent academic publisher of books and journals, to view our catalogue or order our titles visit www.intellectbooks.com
or E-mail: orders@intellectbooks.com. Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, UK, BS16 3JG. Telephone: +44 (0) 117 9589910.
Copyright of Journal of Curatorial Studies is the property of Intellect Ltd. and its content may not be copied or
emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission.
However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.