Published: May 31, 2025; Aithor: Julia Sonrisa
Address: 172 Classon Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11205, United States
‘We have all felt museum fatigue, that sense that your body is dragging in hour two or three of your visit: your eyes cross, your feet are sore, you are fully exhausted. Your body does not feel good.
This so-called ‘fatigue’ is baked into the very foundation of the museum, arising from the historic denial of the visitor’s whole body as an active participant. With missions to collect and categorize objects and art — a kind of consumption and control that is inseparable from the concurrent aspirations of empire — museums also ordered their visitors into types and isolated key body parts: mostly the eyes and the legs — a kind of dissection and isolation that is likewise inseparable from the concurrent developments of medical science. The corporeal reality of the whole, unique, unruly body was anathema to this space of spiritual enlightenment, and so the visitor was recast as a more erudite version of herself, unburdened with bodily needs or physical stressors. Yet you can’t just wish these things away, and so the result is a dissonance between the part we are meant to play in the museum — rapt and silent, slowly processing, drinking up knowledge and beauty — and the people we are in museums — thirsty, tired, hungry, needing rest, a bathroom, a lactation room, water, food... etcetera.
This talk aims to use the expanded history of museums, colonialism, and medicine to begin to define the contours and origins of the dissonance between the body and the museum. Taking the lead from disabled artists, disability scholars, and activists, we can then think of ways to re-inject the museum experience with moments of harmony, collectively imagining a new space that is built around the bodies of visitors rather than despite them. The conclusion is a call and a question: can museums invest the same resources—both human and financial — in addressing this foundational myth as they do in capital projects, acquisitions, and collections care? Can museums ever truly become consonant with our human bodies?"
Aubrey Knox is the Managing Director at Standard Issue, a Brooklyn-based design consultancy. Before joining Standard Issue, she worked in the Design department at The Metropolitan Museum of Art for over a decade, most recently as the Senior Operations Manager. She also holds an M.Phil in Art History from the Graduate Center, CUNY, an MA in Art History from Columbia University, and a BA in Art History from Brandeis University. Her research centers on the history of art and medicine, a topic she has published on in Art in America, Platform, and in the volume States of Emergency: Architecture, Urbanism, and the First World War.
Time: 7:00 pm EST
Free!
Detailed information and discussion of the event.