Walking, looking and longing: on the perceptual engagement with art exhibitions

An exhibition is experienced in time and space. Visitors move through it, continuously selecting where to stop and focus. A large part of the artworks they might never see, and there will be areas of the exhibition that they might completely skip. But their senses are continuously in play, and they form connections with the artworks and each other.1

This is much like how philosopher 2 describes the walker in the city. He argues that the strategies thought out by the government and other institutions are reflected in the overall design of the city and are portrayed in, for example, city maps. These plans and the accompanying maps comprehend and present the city as a unified whole. The walker, on the other hand, moves in her own way and never fully complies with the intended plans. She takes shortcuts, has her favourite neighbourhoods, and in her incessant movement, she never meets the city as a unified whole. In the same way, an exhibition remains fragmentary from the visitors’ perspective and is never encountered in its unified form.

This tension between the unified and fragmented – between design, materials and objects on the one hand and personal, temporal, sensuous and often impalpable experiences on the other – is at the heart of the investigative research conducted by the exhibition unit at Statens Museum for Kunst in Copenhagen, Denmark. The past five years’ experiments with immersive exhibition design and engaging interpretative practices have been combined with a variety of visitor surveys seeking to gain a better understanding both of the exhibitions as a medium and also of the elusive, volatile

and subjective experiences which constitute human engagement with exhibitions.3 In this way, empirical research, theoretical investigations and practical exhibition work intertwine, meet and mutually inspire and challenge each other. And maybe because of this triangular construction of working, the complexity of the exhibition medium has been revealed, and a necessity to look beyond the field of museology and art has risen.

In the context of the Prism project, Statens Museum for Kunst is conducting a research project based on theories put forward by anthropologists Tim Ingold and Petra Tjitske Kalshoven. As described above, an exhibition experience is essentially a sensuous movement through space while encountering materials. Tim Ingold has, in the past decade, been concerned with walking, landscapes and making lines, investigating the human sensuous experience while moving.4 Ingold finds inspiration particularly in Heidegger’s phenomenology and the work on visual perception by American psychologist James Gibson, but he also draws on, for example, Jane Bennett, who explores the relationship between humans and things.5 This has led him to suggest a theory of human perception, arguing that sense making of the world is fundamentally an embodied, creative and ongoing process, where things and humans both have agency and are entangled and intertwined, continuously leaking into one another, making connections.6

Central to Ingold’s theory are his concepts of correspondence, attentionality and line. By these he means that perception is based on a fundamental explorative and unending process: “To correspond with the world, in short, is not to describe it, or to represent it, but to answer to it”.7 The process leading to answering to the world, Ingold argues, is more attentional than intentional. Too much focus has been placed on perception as having a specificaim; instead, he claims, it is an ongoing and open-ended process. By being attentional, “the human being emerges as a center of awareness and agency whose processes resonate with those of its environment”.8 Fundamental for Ingold is that this attentive way of forming correspondences with the world happens in movement. He compares perception to “wayfaring” and imagines this wayfaring as continuously creating lines. All human beings then are moving through the world, making lines, and where these lines go into correspondences with other, the lines form knots.9

Ingold’s theory is idealistic and could be said to entail a normative dimension to how we should engage with the world. But his ideas are also inspirational, and seen in relation to empirical data, they can offer a new way into understanding the exhibition, the visitors’ actions and their engagement with the artworks.

Another inspiration for our research comes from Petra Tjitske Kalshoven, who, in several ways, explores the same issues as Ingold. Kalshoven is also concerned with the agency of objects and the attraction power they hold, and, in contrast to Ingold, she has considered this from a museological perspective. She states that ‘artifacts are accorded performative magic, recalling the age of curiosity’,10 and in addition, she discusses the artefacts as “objects of desire”.11 This animate understanding of objects – or “things”, as both Ingold and Kalshoven calls them – underlines the subjective positions of both visitor and artwork and invites a more fluid and continuously emerging relationship between the two. Ingold does not use the word “desire” but suggests the idea of “longing” when describing the fundamental drive humans have for perceiving and making relations with the world. “Humans aspire to what we are not yet”, as Ingold says, and in this aspiration, there is a longing, which consists of both a longing back (memories) and longing for (imagination).12

Informed by these theories, the aim of the research project launched by the exhibition unit at Statens Museum for Kunst is to explore how humans perceive in exhibitions. In order to do this, a specific type of data was needed, data which both presented the actual movement as it unfolded in the exhibition but also included details of why the visitor chose to look, stop and focus on given artworks or elements within the exhibition. In collaboration with Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design (CIID), a specific qualitative method was decided upon.13

The project included two types of data and in total fourteen participants. First we asked a participant to visit an exhibition while wearing video glasses. These glasses would record where she went and what she looked at. Following this walkthrough, an interview was conducted, concentrating on both the overall exhibition experience of the participant and also, more specifically, the video recording itself. In this way, the main part of the interview was conducted while going through the video footage with the participant. The aim was to let the participant give voice to some of the decisions, spontaneous reactions and unconscious movements which took place in the walkthrough, exploring how she moved around in the exhibition and why.

This method of combining live recording with a reflective interview proved rewarding, since it enabled us to set the frame for the interview within the actual lived experience. It pulled the actual experience together with the comments of the participant, but without us being present in the walkthrough, influencing the movement of the participant.

However, like any other method, this one also will have some impact on the participants’ behaviour, both when they move around in the exhibition and when they are interviewed afterwards. It is a specific situation, and the participant will act accordingly. Nevertheless, it can be argued, also seen in relation to the highly diverse walkthroughs and interviews collected, that it is impossible to invent a completely new way of behaving and a new type of vocabulary for the purpose of the research situation. Instead, based on previous research, we can assume that participants are on their best behaviour and therefore may spend a bit more time reading and looking at artworks.14

The process of coding and analysing the large amount of video footage and interview data is currently underway, and the initial results have already proven that the theoretical framework and the experimental methodology offer new perspectives on how visitors engage with exhibitions. It is clear that the more phenomenological, situated and embodied approach departs significantly from the many visitor studies concentrating on learning outcomes and meaning making. Instead, this research reveals insights into the many personal, tacit and emotional experiences visitors can have when they move around in an exhibition.