There are times in the museum/art museum when you become aware of where you need to put your body, and where your body is in relation to others, be they people, images, objects, architecture, signage ........ I started to feel the intensity of what surrounded me and at these times it is easy to become more passive and to stop looking or engaging with attention and curiosity. The spaces can pass by, you can drift, ideas not permeating deeply but rather grazing the surface of you or your thinking. Rather than the lens of the 'pedagogical art object' I started to blank areas out, really simply with a felt disc. It was like a moment of saying 'shhhhh' to the surrounding of opulence, significance, history, meaning. In that moment of observation I wanted to blur my focus slightly or create a different focus. A temporary breath. Even the shadows recast themselves onto the disc- and I enjoyed the stubbornness of it.
I have started to see the gaps be it physical or conceptual between the things I am asked to view-it is these in-between spaces that hold significance for me - they are a space to fill with subjectivity, with speculation and provocation.
0 Comments
I have started the week with many interesting conversations - practice- research- material knowledges- object connections- collection connections- fabric etching- conservation- suspended objects - material hierarchies. I have been making images by questioning what I am encountering in the galleries - what should I see - what do I see- what catches me out and changes my focus. The multiple screens - glass and lens - reflectors and protectors provide visual complexity. a virtual material presence and absence. In my Phd thesis I found Brian Massumi critical in this questioning of what our encounters can be....
In Massumi’s writings on the encounters with exhibited artworks, he suggests that the viewer perceives work, textures, shapes, and material through a form of ‘kinaesthesia’, a sensory act that ‘can relay into touch’ (Massumi, 2013). This relay forms a circuit or transmission between the potential of what the body perceives and the potential for an engagement that is more physical and embodied. What is significant to performativity is that Massumi positions potentiality at the core of the encounter and argues that the virtual exchange and the lack of physical relations keeps the artwork/thing full of virtual possibilities, and the ‘potential our body holds to walk around, take another look, extend a hand and touch’ (2013). Massumi is not referring to the physicality of touch but rather its perceived potential and, whilst there may be the opportunity to ‘take another look’, there is a likelihood that any proximity would be discouraged in the art museum unless the work is directly framed for interaction. It is arguably important that the visible and invisible boundaries around particular exhibits are understood as relevant and appropriate, allowing artworks to survive beyond the limitations of their durability.[1] Whilst this protection of valuable artworks is understood, it is interesting to consider Massumi’s ideas of a virtual relationship with the materials. He questions what kind of relationships with artworks are prevented by these material limitations, an experience where, ‘the relays of touch and kinaesthesia will not take place’ (2013, p.44). A space where the materiality is encountered through a non-material relationship. Massumi argues that the potentials that are present within the artwork can only be accessed or ‘appear’ visually. These potentials are the habitual and traditional ways of participating with forms of artwork where viewers are removed from inhabiting the same space as the material, behind an imagined line, or physical boundary. The material encounter that Massumi suggests is held almost entirely by the visual potentiality of the work and, as a consequence, Vervoet’s ‘visible staging’ of pedagogy (2001), remains distanced. As museum visitors, we do not witness the prospective touch as it happens; rather, we witness a collection of evidence that suggests prospective touch happened. (Dargaj, 2011, p.30) [1] This is with the understanding that some artworks can be interacted with, but this comment is connected to conventional ways of looking. In preparation for my time in Cambridge I have been looking at the multiple traces of other spaces, and echoes of other imagery, in a collection of photographs I took on my last visit to the Fitzwilliam. There is a complexity to what is framed, and what is also inhabiting the spaces. I have written about the information that we pull from the art/museum but also the potential rupture caused by reentering it through its documentation. There is always something important about the subjective lens - which I refer to within my research as Merleau-Ponty's 'intentional arc' (2012. p.137). What we cast forward, in terms of our own lived experience, makes a specific space for our encounter. When we move towards a more material encounter what more is possible to grasp?
My research fellowship at Cambridge University is located at the Fitzwilliam Museum with the intention of seeking new ways to create material conduits between us and the exhibits that inhabit its' spaces. Whilst I will be in residence in Cambridge for a two week period in Easter term the research process has already begun and stretches beyond my time there.
I have become increasingly focussed on the 'vitrine' and its capacity to pull us in and yet physically keep us at bay - to arrest the possibility of decay and object mortality. Enclosed and hermetically sealed - our close interrogations are in touching distance and yet the objects and their knowledges are omnipresent as they circle and surround us. In my ongoing practice research the barriers and cordons of the art/museum are a critical component that we virtually hurdle or physically bang up against. We understand why we are distanced, and why conserving and protecting imagery, artefacts and objects is necessary but we can overlook what these material barriers mean beyond practicality. The spaces of the art/museum are complicated. We are placed in a space that is predominantly about material engagement, and asked to see and encounter these extraordinary materials differently often through a non- material encounter. These images are taken at the Fitzwilliam looking at the objects shadows, and reflections in the vitrines. The objects impact is more than we see and what we see and understand is more than the object itself.. They exist alongside the objects and artefacts, they are part of an optical experience. The casts of cast, the echoes of shapes fill and charge the surrounding space of the cabinets. Shadows ricochet, ripple and multiply. https://www.cvc.cam.ac.uk/research/pedagogical-art-objects/
Pedagogical Art Objects Kimberley Foster. Visiting Research Fellow Kimberley Foster’s practice research explores approaches to learning experiences in the museum that are predicated on embodied encounters with pedagogical art objects. These objects have developed from her sculptural practice (www.sorhed.com) and are made to be handled, physically encountered, with the specific intent of disrupting conventional ways of knowing. The objects provocation is to find new material points of entry into a dialogue with collections and exhibits, to ‘[…] learn from the museum beyond what it sets out to teach us […]’ (Rogoff, 2008). This is beyond what we should know and towards what we might want to find out or imagine. Held in our hands, the matter, form, and weight of these pedagogical art objects can interrupt habitual perception and present challenges to established institutional knowledge hierarchies. Foster’s practice explores how a different material approach, tethered to a specifically tuned art object, can engage previously unheard voices, and extend the museum experience to wider communities. Within her Cambridge Visual Culture Research Fellowship residency, Foster will connect her practice research with the Fitzwilliam Museum, and the wider research community of Cambridge University, focusing on the site of the museum as a place in which new knowledges can be constructed by the visitor / learner. A space where matter is both sedimented and known, and yet has the potential to be levered open and mobilised for those who connect to it (Barad, 2007). The Fellowship will extend the scope of her PhD practice research, which explored the potential of a prosthetic art pedagogy (Garoian, 2013). This approach to research drives the learner beyond the conventions of dialectic thinking towards a disequilibrium, in which messy entanglements with materiality create an extension to the habitual ways of knowing or encountering learning. Foster will question how aspects of intangible touch have the potential to become tangible through a prosthetic encounter with pedagogical art objects. Whilst deliberate touch is more generally associated with our hands and our fingers, she questions how reaching-out towards an exhibited work (metaphorically and by handling other objects) can be consciously seeking-out a new form of engagement, an alternative way of experiencing and touching the museum. In the Fitzwilliam’s 2021 ‘Human Touch’ exhibition, touch was identified as ‘how we leave our mark and find our place in the world; touch is how we connect.’ After visiting the exhibition Foster was interested in how this could be extended and directly applied to the way that pedagogical art objects can enable learners to leave their mark and find their place in the museum. Touching materials and grasping new ideas can enable more embodied encounters within the museum, opening up spaces for more marginalised knowledges. Responding to Merleau Ponty’s (1945) ideas of how we can intensify our ways of perceiving in the (art) museum, Hubert Dreyfus suggests that ‘without our embodied ability to grasp meaning, relevance slips through our non-existent fingers’ (1998, p.11). Foster explores how, with specifically crafted pedagogical art objects in our hands, new modes of critical engagement in the museum can materialise? If we literally hold onto ideas through an alternative interpretative engagement, can the matter of these objects (when considered in proximity to exhibited objects and artworks) potentially interrupt habitual perception and extend visual literacies towards new ways of looking and encountering material culture? A move away from familiar trajectories of understanding towards less stable and more subjective diverse ways of knowing. Image: K.Foster (2018) Grip. |
Dr. Kimberley FosterKimberley Foster is an artist and lecturer and a Cambridge Visual Culture Visiting Research Fellow 23/24. Her PhD practice research; Material Acts of Thinking and Learning in the Art Museum. Embodied Encounters and the Pedagogical Art Object focused on material engagements at Tate Modern and Sainsbury Centre UEA. She has a collaborative practice as sorhed (www.sorhed.com) and works extensively with exhibitions and collections. Kimberley is the Head of Programme for the MA in Arts and Learning at Goldsmiths, University of London. Archives
April 2024
Categories |