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.