Bruno explores contradictory nature of viewing experience

By Emily T. Simon

FAS Communications

The American Association of Museums estimates that there are about 17,500 museums in the United States, which receive more than 600 million visits annually. With so much foot traffic, American museums are among the most public spaces in modern culture. In the midst of that public atmosphere, however, museumgoers often find a deeply private experience as they connect intimately with the material on display.

Giuliana Bruno, professor of visual and environmental studies in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, explores the complex relationship between public and private experiences within the context of the art museum. Drawing on parallels from the cinema, Bruno has identified a contemporary American desire to have “intimate experiences” in public, to connect with random assemblages of people through the common medium of art.

“Both the cinema and the museum are places where we have intimacy with total strangers,” she says, “because they involve a shared experience of close identification with a text or image. Film and art can provoke traumatic memories, questions of identity, personal projection, and private desires. It’s a very private affair — and yet this all occurs in a collective way, in a social situation, and in the public sphere.”

For Bruno, these experiences challenge conventional notions of identity.

“Everyone thinks that ideas of memory and self belong to the private realm,” she says. “What we see with movies and museums is that it must lie somewhere in between.”

According to Bruno, the link between the viewer experience at the cinema and at the museum becomes stronger as more museums feature screen displays.

In her recent book “Public Intimacy: Architecture and the Visual Arts” (MIT Press, 2007), Bruno notes that many museums now incorporate motion pictures as art installations. Viewers are confronted with spaces animated by screens that play moving images. These types of displays have become an integral part of the museum experience, Bruno says, resulting in a “convergence” of the cinema and the museum.

“Museums are becoming depositories of moving archives of memories,” says Bruno, “so cinema is living beyond cinema.”

Even the spatial arrangement of these kinds of exhibits evokes a cinematic quality, Bruno says.

“There is a specific itinerary you take as you move past different objects in a museum,” says Bruno, “that creates a sequential, almost cinematic, form.”

Although the use of screens as artwork is a fairly new concept, Bruno suggests that it reflects a return to an itinerant “desire for viewing” that was inaugurated in the late 1800s, when museums first became popular urban sites.

“We see today what we think is a new phenomenon — and using screens as artwork is new — but it echoes a 19th century desire to share the viewing experience, to have an emotional encounter in public, and in motion,” Bruno says.

The desire to connect with others is increasingly urgent in today’s busy world, says Bruno, which she says partly accounts for high attendance rates at museums.

“We go because physical presence is becoming evermore important,” says Bruno. “Even if — or perhaps because — you don’t speak, at a museum you can feel part of an experience. Among strangers, you can find collectivity.”