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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.