Books: Museum Bodies, the Politics and Practices of Visiting and Viewing

In the introduction to Museum Bodies, the author Helen Rees Leahy uses a Tino Sehgal performance at the Guggenheim Museum in New York as an example of how people move and interact in museums.

The piece from 2010 is called This Progress; as visitors walked up the spiral ramp at the centre of the museum they were joined at various stages by performers who asked them questions and began conversations. It’s an interesting jumping off point for a book that looks at how and why visitors behave as they do in museums.

Many histories of museums take an institutional perspective or recount how collections were acquired, or describe the people that acquired them. Museum Bodies stands out because it is a history of how people visit and how they physically react to what they find once they get through the museum doors.

Viewing habits

This promising concept is slightly marred for me by the over-use of academic language, in some cases to the extent that meaning is obscured or lost.

For example: “This Progress stages a performance of the institution through the performative bodies of its visitors: by restructuring museum habits of walking and talking the institution is experienced afresh as a site of proprioception (awareness of one’s body and its boundaries in space and in relation to other bodies) and of sociality.”

Setting the obfuscation aside, the central question that Rees Leahy poses – how and why did we acquire our habits of viewing art– is an interesting one.

Leahy begins with the idea of how we look at art and explores the notion of the idealised gaze – prolonged, focused and aloof – compared to the reality, which is often transitory, distracted and brief.

This tension between what is deemed acceptable and what actually happens is then illustrated though various historical accounts.

Contemporary descriptions and illustrations of the Royal Academy of Arts’ crowded hangs, with walls covered from floor to ceiling, are compared with the 1857 Manchester Art Treasures’ linear and chronological displays, the former encouraging a more social style of exploring art, the latter a more didactic and controlled approach. However, as displays are homogenised over time, so behaviour becomes codified.

Rees Leahy asks how we learned these modes of behaviour, not just how to look but also how and where to stand, what pace to walk at and what to say about the objects on view.

She describes this code as the “exhibition script”, which instructs those visitors who know how to read it. And in the 19th century this script is not just an abstract concept; more than one guidebook containing hints and tips on how to behave existed and they were usually aimed at working-class or female visitors.

There are some interesting glimpses into the history of institutions through the lens of visitor behaviour that point to the early tension between opening up to the public and attempting to control and modify the behaviour of those who visit.

Gallery etiquette

The infamous description by William Hutton of a guided tour of the British Museum in 1784 is worth revisiting for his damning conclusion in which he complains that he left about as wise as he went in and came away “completely disappointed”.

It is resonant for today that institutions such as the National Gallery were havens for the working class – it would hardly be described as such now – and in fact one of the drivers for the introduction of written and unwritten codes of behaviour was that those in charge felt the need to try to exclude the “idle and the unwashed”.

The book also examines how performance can change the way we move through galleries, the issue of museum fatigue and protest in galleries. The debate is brought up to date in an epilogue looking at the example of the British Museum and its record visitor figures in 2011.

Although today’s visitors might appear free of the strictures and regulations of 19th century, they are still directed and led through tours. Audioguides are used and social conventions remain.

More people are visiting museums than ever before but a glance at the profile of visitors to national museums in particular reveals that large chunks of the population, mainly from lower socio-economic groups, still don’t visit.

Not just because they think they don’t know how to look, walk, talk or behave, but because they’ve actually never been made welcome in the galleries.