Movement in museums: Using movement as embodied learning

Abstract

This article considers the ways that movement can be used as an affective experience for art museum visitors. In so doing, the correlation between art experience and cultural history is explored through the relationship between movement and language. This exploration can be utilized to cultivate important conversations regarding the role of the unwelcome body in the institutionalized museum space that has been difficult to recognize and articulate utilizing traditional Western histories, contexts, and methods of understanding and discussion. Here, the experience of moving with an art object, rather than around or in front of, increases the connection, or relation, between the user and the object despite unfamiliarity with museum spaces or art objects. Rather than asking the participant to interpret the art object verbally in a way that is understandable to others, this article argues that using movement allows the participants to interpret what they are thinking and feeling in a way that is specific to their minds, bodies and cultural contexts. Experimental movement might interrupt the inhibiting quality of many museum experiences by making space for visitors’ thoughts, feelings and experiences above all else.