Museum Bodies (Helen Rees Leahy)
A now familiar presence in contemporary museology is the figure of the self-regulating, self-disciplined visitor whose perambulations through the museum or exhibition are directed as a form of 'organised walking' via both the space syntax of thresholds, corridors and rooms, and also the visual grammar of display. Compliance with the institution's visual regime is thus signalled through a choreography of movement and looking which, in turn, constitutes a new kind of civic ritual that first emeged the second half of the 18th century and spread throughout the metropolitan centres of Europe in the first half of the 19th century. Yet surprisingly little historical or theoretical attention has been given to the visitors' embodied encounter with the museum or exhibition or to the processes whereby a continually changing repertoire of normative 'techniques of the body' (Mauss, 1973) in the public art gallery has been produced and acquired - ranging from regimes of regulation and instruction to licensed sociality and consumption.
'Museum Bodies' is an empirically-based study of how museums have staged, prescribed and accommodated a repertoire of bodily practices from their emergence in the mid-18th century to the present, including the politics and practice of visitor studies, and also the physical and symbolic inclusion and exclusion of certain types of bodies. The project draws on a range of interdisciplinary perspectives including: sociology, space theory, museum visitor studies, performance studies, gender studies, theorisations of the body and aesthetics.
'Museum Bodies: The Politics and Practices of Viewing and Visiting' Ashgate, October 2012.