Journal of Curatorial Studies - Current Issue

The article is a study of the presentation and interpretation of servants’ quarters in country houses in England and Wales (Erddig, Lanhydrock, Audley End, Petworth and Ickworth), directed at theorizing the latest popular fascination about the ‘downstairs’. Hinging on Gaston Bachelard’s twofold reading of the interior as a contained physical space and an elusive imaginal one, the notion of home as the site of domesticity is compared with that of the country house, whose ‘domestication’ is surveyed in a series of visual and spatial analyses of its rooms and, specifically, its servants’ quarters. Probing the tendency of ‘leaving the green baize door’ to the servants’ quarters ‘ajar’ allows for an understanding of the reasons behind the inception and development of such a vogue, arguing that it is the experience of the tangible everyday that defines the popular ‘doing’ of the country house visit.

Displays at the Museum of Old and New Art (MONA) in Hobart, Tasmania have been presented and received as an innovative democratizing departure from currently dominant curatorial paradigms. Attention is drawn in this article to multiple material similarities as well as resonances of signified meaning and affect between MONA and four sites of sublimely aestheticized experience/display constructed for socially elite audiences during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as part of English romanticism. Viewed in this light, MONA can be understood to recast visual practices and aesthetic affects whose residual intertextual traces deconstructively qualify the museum’s existing presentation and reception.

Review of: Exposure: Native Art and Political Ecology

Curated by Kóan Jeff Baysa, Nivi Christensen (Inuit), Satomi Igarashi, Erin Vink (Ngiyampaa), Tania Willard (Secwepemc Nation) and Manuela Well-Off-Man, Institute of American Indian Arts, Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, Santa Fe, 20 August 2021-10 July 2022