Helen Rees Leahy’s work Museum Bodies provides a long-overdue, socio-historical analysis of the politics and practices of the visiting public’s interaction and engagement with the cultural heritage institution as place. In the Introduction to this work, Rees Leahy clearly outlines the book’s objective, to “redirect attention away from the museum as a collection of objects” to a consideration of “the museum as a site of social and corporeal practices” (p. 3).
Rees Leahy is Senior Lecturer and Director of the Centre for Museology at the University of Manchester in the UK. Both a Museum Director and Curator, she has been involved in the organisation of numerous exhibitions. Rees Leahy has published widely in areas relating to national identity, art collecting, the art market and art criticism. Prior to academia, the author held a number of senior positions including Director of the Design Museum (1989-1992), Communications Director, Eureka! The Museum for Children (1992-1993) and Deputy Director, the National Art Collections Fund (1993-1995).
The book’s layout and the use of an accessible writing style lend balance and readability to the content. Judicious use of illustration highlights the concepts discussed in the text. The author makes use of a range of (primarily British) institutions and exhibitions to frame discussion and draws on a wide body of literature (both fiction and non-fiction) to frame key ideas. Rees Leahy’s Introduction provides clear context for understanding the lens through which the author considers the act of viewing and visiting, and astutely positions the book’s content in relation to the broader fields of literature on which the author draws.
Structured into six chapters, Museum Bodies considers the socio-politics of visitor behaviour. In doing so, it moves beyond the quantifying frameworks often seen in visitor studies literature and considers the recursive engagement between body, institution, object and self. Rees Leahy’s emphasis in this work is not to examine the social efficacy of the museum, but rather to understand how the museum visit is enacted by visitors, including the “weary, bored, confused and even violent” (p. 11).
Chapter 1, Making a Social Body, explores the development of a socialised visiting public; how the politics and practices of viewing have been recursively negotiated, shaped and perceived by both the visitor body and the museum environment. In particular, how the politics and practices of viewing have been recursively negotiated, shaped and perceived by both the visitor body and the museum environment. Chapter 2, Not Just Looking, historicises spectatorship and considers the myriad ways in which visitors visually engage with objects in a museum space. Chapter 3, Walking the Museum, examines not only the act of stopping to look at museum objects, but also visitor movement through, around and as a stationary or resting body.
Chapter 4, Preforming the Museum, extends the themes explored in Chapter 2 and considers social performance and participation, and how the museum body contributes to the experiences of visiting and viewing. This chapter explores visitors as both intended contributors to works of art and as objects of spectacle walking the galleries.
Chapters 5 and 6, Bodies of Protest and Disquieting Bodies, consider the museum’s ability to cause sickness and fatigue in visitors and to engender violent or destructive reactions towards the museum and its collections. These last two chapters provide a significant contribution to this field of literature, and this work in totality provides an important contribution to the study of society’s corporeal engagement with the museum as institutional and political space.
The book will interest students and academics in the fields of Museum Studies, Cultural Studies, Sociology and History. Museum practitioners will find this work a thought-provoking, boundary-extending foray into the visitor studies milieu.
