Provoking numinous experience: contemporary art interventions at the Brontë Parsonage Museum

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe early part of the twenty-first century has seen a dramatic rise in the number of heritage organisations commissioning artists to create ‘interventions’, contemporary artworks to be seen juxtaposed with their sites, buildings and collections. This article takes as its case study one such site, the Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth, West Yorkshire which, since 2006, has had a formal Contemporary Arts Programme. Through the examination of interventions from this programme and consideration of visitor comments in response, this article suggests that numen and cognitive dissonance are particularly appropriate concepts to explore contemporary art interventions in heritage sites. I argue that while interventions are thought to provoke new readings of historic sites, experiences of contemporary art which have numinous and dissonant characteristics can reinforce rather than disrupt hegemonic heritage narratives.