Abstract:
It is the intention of this Doctor of Creative Arts to convey the complexity of
viewing art in museums. Concentrating on both the physical and cultural
contexts of art, I focus specifically on Italian museums that house artworks of
the Renaissance. I argue that the viewing experience in these museums is
formed at the intersection of cultures, histories, the past and the present, art
and the subjectivity of the viewer's own gaze. In this project the personal,
physical, cerebral, sensorial and temporal experiences of art are central to my
concerns.
The structure of this DCA combines my photographic art practice with this
written reflection. I work with both the visual and the textual to most
appropriately and effectively express my concerns with the Renaissance and
Italian museums. In a peculiar act of doubling, I am making art about the
experience of viewing it, and through image-making I am able both to explore
and to comment more profoundly on the experience of these museums. While
my research and writing at times responds to these images, it also inspires
them. Here I integrate the past, history and art, with contemporary theories
that are relevant in the study ofvision and today's art viewing, and rely on
numerous writers across the broad .fields of visual arts, art history and theory,
museology, historiography and cultural tourism. In surveying these extensive
interwoven disciplines I engage with the magnitude of the social, historical and
theoretical studies that converge in the museum viewer's field of vision.
Beyond the glorious artworks themselves Italian Renaissance museums exhibit
a dense visual and historic culture that provides an enriched viewing
environment. They paradoxically intersect 'high' art with a phenomenal
popularity that appears ever-expanding through endless reproductions and
representations via modern technologies. Through examining these museums
with their multiple histories and contexts I hope to argue for a slower, more
considered engagement with art, that encourages the viewer to experience the
sensual as well as the intellectual aspects that this opulent environment offers.
