Aubrey Knox, “A Problem of Dissonance: Bodies and Museums”

Join us at e-flux on Tuesday, June 24 at 7pm for “A Problem of Dissonance: Bodies and Museums,” a lecture by Aubrey Knox.

“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 re-cast 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 actually are in museums—thirsty, tired, hungry, needing rest, a bathroom, a lactation room, water, food… etcetera.

The aim of this talk is 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

Aubrey Knox is the Managing Director at Standard Issue, a Brooklyn-based design consultancy. Prior to 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.

For more information, contact program [​at​] e-flux.com.

Accessibility
– Two flights of stairs lead up to the building’s front entrance at 172 Classon Avenue.
– For elevator access, please RSVP to program [​at​] e-flux.com. The building has a freight elevator nearest to 180 Classon Ave (garage door) leading into the e-flux office space. A ramp is available for steps within the space.
– e-flux has an ADA-compliant bathroom with no steps between the event space and this bathroom.

Also check out other Arts events in Brooklyn.