Museum Bodies

The Politics and Practices of Visiting and Viewing

Helen Rees Leahy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781409418610
• eBook ISBN: 9781317093060
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Library & Information Science

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.

1
Making a Social Body

In the present times of political excitement, the exacerbation of angry and unsocial feelings might be much softened by the effects which the fine arts had ever produced on the minds of men … The erection of the … [National Gallery] would not only contribute to the cultivation of the arts, but also to the cementing of the bonds between the richer and poorer orders of the state. (Sir Robert Peel, 1832)1

[I must announce my misgivings] to the fitness of the present site for the collections of very valuable pictures, combined with unrestricted access, and the unlimited right to enter the National Gallery, not merely for the purpose of seeing the pictures, but of lounging and taking shelter from the weather; to attempt to draw distinctions between the objects for which admission was sought, to limit the right of admission on certain days might be impossible; but the impossibility is rather an argument against placing the pictures in the greatest thoroughfare of London the greatest confluence of the idle and the unwashed. (Sir Robert Peel, quoted 1853)2

These two well-known comments by Sir Robert Peel, separated by some 20 years, eloquently contrast the art museum’s idealised production of a cohesive and receptive public with its actual audience of unbiddable, listless and dirty bodies. Such divergent, and apparently contradictory, reflections on the National Gallery’s potential and real visitors provide a pithy introduction to the central questions of this chapter: how was a public for art both conceptualised and realised within an expanding sphere of art exhibitions and museums during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries? Specifically, what was the role of visitors’ bodies in the negotiation and materialisation of this new art public – or, more accurately, art publics? And how was the unprecedented congregation of diverse bodies managed by the institution and, in turn, experienced by its members?

As Colin Trodd notes, Peel’s observations demonstrate how the early National Gallery ‘oscillates and hesitates’ between polarities of cultural elitism and mass participation.3 The fact was that, 30 years after the gallery was founded in 1824, many people evidently had not responded to its displays in quite the way that its administrators had anticipated. The trustees had opened the doors to the disembodied space of the embryonic national art collection with an invitation to an aesthetic encounter that would be both ordered and attentive. In response, according to Peel, ‘the idle and the unwashed’ had transformed the gallery into a very different social space adapted to their corporeal, rather than their spiritual or intellectual, interests and needs. Evidence presented by members of the National Gallery staff to successive Parliamentary Select Committees from the 1830s to the 1850s confirmed that certain visitors were not really interested in the pictures at all, but used the building for keeping themselves warm and dry, as well as for meeting friends, eating and drinking, and as an indoor playground for their children. By the 1853, the gallery’s success in attracting a large and diverse public seemed increasingly incompatible with a curatorial regime that required the protection of the paintings from the dirt of the metropolis and its inhabitants, as well as the redeployment of the collection within an explicit art historical framework.4 As Peel’s second comment indicates, in response to these challenges, rather than restrict admission to the National Gallery, a proposal to move the collection to a more salubrious site was seriously considered: that is, one that would be less convenient for casual use by the undesirable bodies of those who lived and worked close to Trafalgar Square, its nearby military barracks and public wash house. In the event, the idea was not pursued, and the collection stayed where it was, open free of charge to young and old. Visitors were entitled to stay as long as they liked and to wander through the rooms as they pleased.

Institutions such as the fledgling National Gallery did not exist in isolation from other sites of visual display and collective spectatorship across London. Tony Bennett’s concept of the ‘exhibitionary complex’ succinctly embraces the range of commercialised spectacles – including private museums, dioramas, panoramas, dealer’s galleries, arcades and department stores – amongst which official museums and exhibitions were positioned.5 Richard Altick’s Shows of London describes in detail the diversity and popularity of these diverse sights and also the corporeal excitements that they offered, including ‘scare shows’, a glimpse of the pictorial sublime and close encounters with wild animals.6 They were often lively affairs and consequently presented a challenge to the organisers of the first ‘serious’ public art exhibitions hosted by the Society of Arts in the 1760s: accounts of disorderly and rough behaviour amongst the visitors to the first of these exhibitions were, argues Altick, hardly surprising. As he puts it, ‘“the opportunity of a show” attracted, amongst others, persons who had no idea of decorum, let alone of art, but shared the universal enthusiasm for seeing something for nothing’.7 Henceforth, the art exhibition would be a critical site in which the possibility of an inclusive cultural sphere was continuously tested and debated.

According to Bennett, the formation of the exhibitionary complex made access to art and culture progressively more available to more people. In effect, it produced ‘the transfer of significant quantities of cultural and scientific property from private into public ownership where they were housed within institutions administered by the state for the benefit of an extended general public’.8 However, unlike purely commercial ventures whose success (or failure) depended primarily on their popularity and revenue from ticket sales, museums such as the British Museum and the National Gallery were required not only to attract an audience, but also to demonstrate their cultural efficacy by operating on the minds and bodies of their visitors. Similarly, exhibitions held at the Society of Arts (from 1760) and by the Royal Academy of Arts (from 1769) were, ostensibly, directed towards the more serious objectives of promoting British art and providing the public with an opportunity for aesthetic education. Within these spaces of official (or semi-official) display, the ‘crowd’ was assembled and, in principle, regulated by being rendered ‘visible to itself’.9 There was a necessary self-awareness about becoming a viewing subject within the expanding field of public art, not least because spectators were simultaneously and continually scrutinised for evidence of their good behaviour and cultural competence.

Mary Poovey puts the unprecedented visibility of this emerging art public into a wider social context when she describes how, in the early nineteenth century, new processes of quantification and aggregation of persons were used as a means of ‘making a social body’ that comprised the entire population.10 She argues that this process of aggregation went hand in hand with a process of disaggregation, whereby the social sphere was increasingly distinguished from the economic and political spheres. Whilst the arithmetical aggregation of persons (for example, via the accumulation of statistics) enabled the abstract delineation of the social body, it was ‘innovations like affordable transportation, cheap publications, and national museums’ that enabled its materialisation by bringing ‘groups that had rarely mixed into physical proximity with each other and represent[ing] them as belonging to the same, increasingly differentiated whole’.11 From Poovey’s perspective, public participation in museums and exhibitions can be viewed as a critical event in the abstraction of the ‘social’ within the city; but how was this ‘social body’ defined and managed in practice by institutions? And what did it feel like to be a body amongst other bodies within this new social world?

This chapter explores the early histories of ‘museum bodies’ in two contrasting exhibition sites in London, both established in the middle of the eighteenth century: the British Museum founded in 1753 and the Royal Academy of Arts founded in 1769. My focus is on the period leading up to the 1820s (broadly coinciding with the reign of George III from 1760 to 1820) when, prior to the creation of the National Gallery, the British Museum was the only state-funded museum in Britain, whilst the Royal Academy was alone amongst artists’ associations and exhibition societies in enjoying the patronage of the monarch. Signifying its official status within the emerging cultural state, from 1780 the Royal Academy, together with a number of learned societies and government offices, was housed in a suite of rooms in the major public building of George III’s reign, Somerset House. Unlike contemporary galleries such as John Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery (1789–1805), Robert Bowyer’s Historic Gallery (1792–1807) and even the British Institution (1805–67), the Royal Academy’s longevity, prominence and cultural ambition enables the comparison with the British Museum; although the Academy was located within an increasingly dense network of art galleries in late eighteenth-century London,12 this was where habits of exhibition visiting became most visible, where ways of looking were continuously rehearsed and debated, and where museum bodies were produced over a sustained period of time

The question of who should (and should not) be admitted to the British Museum and Royal Academy respectively was a matter of intense argument throughout the long reign of George III: that is, during the decades when the bodies of their visitors were first assembled, mobilised and scrutinised as exhibition spectators. Throughout these years, the two institutions’ contrasting practices of delimiting and managing their potential and actual publics were vigorously contested and defended, both internally and externally, amongst critics, politicians and visitors themselves. In turn, debates about the regulation of access to both the British Museum and the Royal Academy were symptomatic of, and constitutive of, the instability of each institution during the second half of the eighteenth century as each negotiated its position within the expanding ‘exhibitionary complex’. Questions of what it meant for each organisation to be a ‘public body’, funded respectively by the state and (at least partly) by the monarch, were both immediate and practical. Was it necessary for a national institution to be accessible to the entire population, and if so, what would such equality of admission entail? Closely related to this was the question as to what a ‘social body’ might look, sound and smell like in terms of the actual bodies of diverse visitors. For both the British Museum and the Royal Academy, the process of becoming a ‘social body’ was therefore figuratively and materially enacted via mechanisms of access and exclusion, as well as via the congregation and conduct of those who had both the desire and the means to cross their thresholds.

Although the early histories of these two institutions are well known, most accounts are primarily concerned with their organisational formation.13 With notable exceptions, including the work of Anne Goldgar, David Solkin and Peter de Bolla, less attention has been paid to the experiences and responses of the people who visited them.14 Nor have they have been discussed in relation to each other, yet their respective premises were never more than a mile apart across Georgian London.15 Whilst many more people visited the annual exhibitions at the Royal Academy during the s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Making a Social Body
• 2 Not Just Looking
• 3 Walking the Museum
• 4 Performing the Museum
• 5 Bodies of Protest
• 6 Disquieting Bodies
• Epilogue
• Bibliography
• Index