Abstract
This review takes the occasion of a workshop given by Martin Myrone, curator of Gothic Nightmares: Fuseli, Blake, and the Romantic Imagination (Tate Britain, 2006) as a starting point to reflect on the practice of curating, and its relation to questions of the verbal and the visual in contemporary art historical practice. The exhibition prompted an engagement with questions of the genre of Gothic, through a dramatic display of the differences between ‘the Gothic' in literature and ‘the Gothic' in the visual arts within eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century culture. I also address the various ways in which 'the Gothic' was interpreted and reinscribed by visitors, especially those who dressed up for the exhibition. Finally, I consider some of the show's ‘marginalia' (specifically the catalogue), exploring the ways in which these extra events and texts shaped, and continue to shape, the cultural effect of the exhibition.
Highlights
The second section of this review addresses more closely how this tension manifests itself in our own contemporary culture, signalling the various ways in which the ‘Gothic’ was interpreted and reinscribed by visitors, especially those who dressed up for the exhibition
This reminds us that the Gothic is not just an academic or curatorial category: insofar as any exhibition space brings to visibility the “body of the public”, Gothic Nightmares blurred the distinction between subject and object, and
The last section of this review addresses the exhibition’s ‘marginalia’, drawing parallels with Catherine Flood’s discussion in Heather Tilley, Curating Gothic Nightmares 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, 5 (2007) www.19.bbk.ac.uk this issue of 19 of the function of the catalogue in nineteenth-century exhibition viewing experiences
Summary
As part of the conference workshop, Martin Myrone circulated various documents relating to the show: a draft proposal of the show, a press release in the form of a room guide, and a link to the exhibition’s webpage on the Tate Britain website. The exhibition, and its accompanying catalogue with critical essays by Christopher Frayling, Marina Warner and Myrone himself, offers a constructive dialogue between the fields of literary studies and art history.[6] As we will see, the space of the exhibition and its interpretation by viewers was potentially in conflict with the critical objectives of the curators, not least because those objectives might be diluted by the wide popular appeal of featured artists such as Fuseli, Blake, Gillray, and George Romney in their reworking of the aesthetics of the sublime and exploration of the themes of horror and fantasy – an obvious sensational attraction This potential conflict was recognised at the outset, with the exhibition design playing to these expectations by incorporating spectacle and sensation into the fabric of the exhibition’s design itself, while still addressing ‘challenging’ topics around the nature of sexuality and identity to a wide and, in the main, unspecialised audience.[7]. The architecture dictated the show’s narrative flow: as well as dramatically bringing attention to the theatricality of the Gothic in visual form (for example illustrations of scenes from Milton and Shakespeare), walking through the rooms gave a sense of the reading process
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