Paper short abstract:

An examination of the history of sensory display and experience in the museum, contrasting the interactivity of early museums with the hands-off policies of the modern museum and exploring the social factors motivating this sensory shift.

Paper long abstract:

Traditionally the sense of sight is the only sense with a ticket to enter the museum. The other senses must be held in check, their encounter with artefacts kept to a prescribed minimum, if allowed at all. The same tendency exists in histories of museum artefacts in which objects are often wiped clean of the physical and emotional traces of the people who interacted with them.

This presentation counters this tendency by offering a history of artefacts with the fingerprints left on. Among the questions to be addressed are: Why did early museum goers insist on touching paintings? Why were people fascinated with the smell and taste of mummies? What did it feel like to be an exhibit? Why did museums lose their touch in the nineteenth century? Addressing these issues offers important new insights into both the allure of the rare and curious and the ways in which the museum became a key site for training the bodies of visitors in the sensory techniques of modernity.

Paper short abstract:

What happens when ‘exhibitions of exhibitions’ require contemporary museum visitors to look and behave like historical spectators? This paper discusses how the reproduction of earlier modalities of display and spectatorship can draw attention to the corporeality of museum viewing, past and present.

Paper long abstract:

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. Some have reproduced assemblages that were first exhibited two centuries ago, while others have remounted exhibitions from the recent past. 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 re-locate oneself in the position of the historical spectator.

This paper 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.

Paper short abstract:

This papers discusses the use of sound, particularly voices, for the critical engagement with colonial history in ethnographic museums with a special focus on the traveling exhibition "What We See. Images, Voices and Versioning".

Paper long abstract:

The traveling exhibition "What We See. Images, Voices and Versioning", initally curated by Annette Hoffmann for the IZIKO Slave Lodge in Cape Town, offers a critical perspective on a so called "archive of vanishing races", i. e. casts, measures, photos and audio recordings, assembled by the German artist Hans Lichtenecker 1931 in then South-West Africa. Its main goal is not only to come to terms with an often neglected chapter of ethnography's past, namely the entangled histories of anthropology and colonialism and the physical and ethical abuses that went along with it, but to excavate and rehabilitate the recorded voices that make up a considerable part of Lichtenecker's collection.

The Namibians' accounts of colonial rule as well as their "Greetings to Germany" are complemented by archival material, video interviews with some of their descendants as well as portrait paintings by contemporary South African artists inspired by their "unruly voices".

The exhibition's dialogical and multisensory approach breaks with the "authoritarian and ocular-centric forms of didacticism that characterize the earlier organization of the exhibitionary complex" (Bennett 2006) and invests the visitor with a clear responsibility of "making sense" of the various sources and stimuli.

Considering the power-laden dynamics between artefact, curators, collecting and exhibiting institutions, and audiences, this paper discusses the multisensory aesthetic and discursive strategies that the exhibition adopted in order to display disquiet of the discipline's anthropometric past.

How and why did the significance of the "ghostly" voices change according to the different exhibiting contexts (Cape Town, Basel, Vienna, Berlin)?

Paper short abstract:

Examining the possibilities of storage drawers that can be opened by visitors, this paper focuses on the Pitt Rivers Museum to explore whether or not the non-visual senses and active, corporeal encounter with objects may enhance visitors’ cross-cultural understandings in the ethnographic museum.

Paper long abstract:

Much current museum theory and practice emphasizes the importance of story-telling and the inclusion of multiple perspectives in richly layered museum interpretations, with a key objective being the elicitation of empathy for the lives and personal interactions of people in other times and places. Yet in the process museum objects themselves can often appear to recede in significance, appearing as little more than illustrations rather than the complex, material entities they actually are. Increasingly, a strand within both museums and academe is speaking up for objects and the powerful effects they may be said to have. This paper explores the power of objects in the setting of the University of Oxford's Pitt Rivers Museum. Visitors can open glass-topped drawers underneath a number of the display cases and find themselves gazing on artefacts in storage: some with museum labels visible and legible, others not. This experience of the objects is actively performed and, while objects cannot be removed for handling, facilitates their imagined, non-visual exploration. It is a variously pleasing, alienating, surprising or reassuring encounter that may, the paper argues, through its disjunctures ultimately enhance cross-cultural understanding by provoking deeper, sometimes empathic and sometimes troubling, corporeal experiences.

Paper short abstract:

Pagan visitors to the Museum of Witchcraft in Cornwall describe their interactive and relational engagements with a plethora of magical items seen as active and alive. This ethnographic paper explores how these stories add to our understanding of sensory and dynamic museum experiences.

Paper long abstract:

The turn towards a dynamic museology has seen radical changes in some museum exhibits through the increased effort to make museums more interactive. The Museum of Witchcraft on the North Cornish coast provides a valuable sense of heritage for many magical practitioners today. It has an extensive collection of magical artefacts, which although exhibited in an apparently silent and still manner, pagan visitors experiences are far from static. The objects contained inside glass cabinets are perceived as active and numinous. These are not salvaged from a lost past, but are dynamically engaged with through an array of magical practices, invested with supernatural agency and spirit. While many of the artefacts are seen in a positive light, as healing or protection charms and talismans, others, such as curses, are more problematic, and are safely concealed inside cabinets. These items are very much alive.

Stories engage with these dynamic artefacts in ways that intersect and validate visitors own magical histories and practices. Museum visits are described interactively through highly charged atmospheres and supernatural experiences. Encounters with artefacts connect with human and non-human entities. Magical practitioners to the Museum do not see a flat, silent collection, but one full of expansive and sensory engagements. Other visitors, while often full of intrigue and wonder, sometimes remark that the museum is a little old-fashioned. These contrasts reveal the diversity of interactive museum experiences. This paper examines some of the stories pagan visitors tell, and situates this within a broader range of sensory experiences and practices.

Paper short abstract:

This presentation examines how the museum is being transformed back into a sensory gymnasium, as it was in the beginning. It focusses on the efforts of two organizations dedicated to providing art education for the blind, and the work of a research team which uses digital and other media to construct performative environments modelled on the sensory orders of specific non-Western cultures.

Paper long abstract:

The early museum would appear to have been a space where it was possible to enter into intimate sensory contact with the art and artifacts. Then came a long period of increasingly intense sensory discipline and control as the museum experience came to be concentrated in the commented gaze (with the tour guide or label providing the commentary). In recent decades there has been a sensory renaissance in the museum. This (re)opening of the museum experience to other senses besides sight is partly driven by access campaigns, such as those waged on behalf of the blind and partially sighted, and partly driven by technological advances, such as the availability of interactive computer screens, scent dispensers, and other such devices. But issues as to the quality and depth of access remain. How can the visually impaired have access to the heritage of western art when most of that heritage remains exclusively visual? How can the so-called multisensory exhibition go beyond mere sensationalism? This paper examines two case studies in an effort to come up with some answers. The first case study centres on the work of The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Art Education for the Blind (AEB), which have long been at the forefront of developments in “multimodal learning.” The second case study focusses on the work of the Mediations of Sensation research team, which staged a “performative sensory environment” (that simulated what an anthropologist might experience visiting a certain Amazonian society) at the 2011 meeting of the American Anthropological Association in Montreal. The criteria for evaluating the success of these two ventures in incorporating the senses back into the museum experience and making sense of that experience will be derived from recent research in the anthropology of the senses.