'Here, Too, Confusion Reigned'

Abstract

It is of the greatest possible interest to any understanding of art as a social process to know how exhibitions entertain, exasperate, inform, or exhaust their visitors, and how the viewer's identity may be moulded, divided, or left untouched by them. The question seems central to one of the salient phenomena of Western culture since the Enlightenment, the invention and elaboration of the public museum. And yet the apparatus for that study proves highly elusive. What counts as evidence for the experience of the museum visitor in a given gallery at a given time, faced with given works of art in a given arrangement? What kind of data do we need on the demographics, economics, and cultural expectations of those visitors, and how do we collect it and compare it with other data from the same period, city or nation? What can usefully be said about the impression made by an art museum that is not reducible to the impression made by its several internal displays, and what can be said about the impression made by a single internal display that is not reducible to the impression made by the works that compose it? Charlotte Klonk in this ambitious new book asks these questions with the help of a single capacious but slippery term, that of ‘experience’. She wants to know what kind of ‘visitor experience’ was involved in the difference between (say) the Royal Academy exhibition in London in 1787, a display of Italian paintings in London in 1886, and the rooms of Documenta 1 at Kassel, Germany, in 1955. Sometimes she thinks that the visitor's ‘experience’ can be read off from available representations of the gallery interior, and sometimes she thinks that the answer can be extracted from the differences between them across the centuries. An obvious problem for this enterprise is that representations of the gallery interior are extraordinarily rare, and the truth-content of the few that we have is seldom very clear. Notwithstanding, Klonk wants to erect some ambitious social/aesthetic generalisations on this evidence. She wants to know how the art gallery per se could ‘conceptualise subjective experience’ over the centuries; in what terms we can treat the art gallery as a guide to ‘a cultural history of experience’ across time.