Museum Bodies: The Politics and Practices of Visiting and Viewing

by Helen Rees Leahy

Museum Bodies provides an account of how museums have staged, prescribed and accommodated a repertoire of bodily practices, from their emergence in the eighteenth century to the present day. As long as museums have existed, their visitors have been scrutinised, both formally and informally, and their behaviour calibrated as a register of cognitive receptivity and cultural competence. Yet there has been little sustained theoretical or practical attention given to the visitors' embodied encounter with the museum. In Museum Bodies Helen Rees Leahy discusses the politics and practice of visitor studies, and the differentiation and exclusion of certain bodies on the basis of, for example, age, gender, educational attainment, ethnicity and disability. At a time when museums are more than ever concerned with size, demographic mix and the diversity of their audiences, as well as with the ways in which visitors engage with and respond to institutional space and content, this wide-ranging study of visitors' embodied experience of the museum is long overdue.

216 pages, Hardcover

First published October 1, 2012

Reviews

[Lette Hass · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Not Just Looking"
"Disquieting Bodies"

...both empirical and archetypal bodies to apprehend the socio-cultural script of the art museum through accounts of actual and fictive visitors, and through their visual representations. Historically, anxieties about certain kinds of visitors coalesced around categories of gender, age and class, each of which were deemed to correlate to an innate or acquired deficit of cultural receptivity.....


Sounds familiar???

[Timothy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Next time you are in a museum notice and reflect on the admissions practices, the hours of operation, and the layout. All these and more (such as how objects should be displayed) are the outcome of a century and a half of debate about how bodies should admitted, surveilled, categorise and en/dis couraged from entering the museum. Even the manner of walking and looking in a museum have been manufactured by cultural arbiters over the centuries.