Incorporating the Period Eye
Spectators at Exhibitions of Exhibitions
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4364801 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Helen Rees Leahy (University of Manchester, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2014 |
| Volume | 9 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 284-295 |
| Publication date | 2014-11-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | The Senses and Society (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1745-8927 • E-ISSN: 1745-8935 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.2752/174589314x14023847039836 |
| OpenAlex | W997980863 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 2 |
| References cited | 6 |
In recent years, museums have staged a number of “exhibitions of exhibitions.” These experiments in institutional, curatorial, and artistic revivalism have ranged from allusions to and quotations from past installations to full-scale re-enactments and reconstructions. The motivations of the curators and artists responsible for these diverse projects have included the desire to recuperate both famous and forgotten shows and also to reproduce past modalities of display and spectatorship, and thus build an archive of the immaterial through retrospective and performance practices. Some of the most interesting “exhibitions of exhibitions” have focused on the historical conditions and institutional conventions of spectatorship, with the objective of alerting the contemporary viewer to differences in the performativity of spectatorship, past and present. By evoking former practices of looking, walking, and touching, these exhibitions also remind us that techniques of the museum visitor are both embodied and acquired. They require the contemporary viewer to recalibrate their choreography of their looking and moving; put another way, they activate what Michael Baxandall termed the “period eye” in order to decode the visual effects of the exhibition and to relocate oneself in the position of the historical spectator. This article explores how a number of recent exhibitions have redrawn attention to the corporeality of museum visiting and viewing, as well as to the historical acquisition of competences and attitudes that we take for granted today
Aesthetics · Art · Embodied cognition · Exhibition · Order (exchange · Performativity · Period (music · Sociology · Visitor pattern · Visual arts · Computer Science · Historical Art and Culture Studies · Museums and Cultural Heritage · Photography and Visual Culture
| Citations per year | 0.5 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2022 - 2024 (3) |
| Highly cited | No |