Museum Visitors in Search of Spirituality.
The Art Newspaper calls it an “overwhelming success” and indeed! What could bring more than 10 000 people on your doorstep every open day for 6 months? Magnificence and Spirituality! The last temporary exhibition of the Metropolitan Museum of Art “Heavenly Bodies, Fashion and the Catholic Imagination” gathered in one place what people are deeply missing today.
The Numbers Speak
“Heavenly Bodies, Fashion and the Catholic Imagination” became the third-most-popular exhibition ever at the Met, behind the “Treasures of Tutankhamun” (1978–1979), which had more than 1.3 million visitors, and “Mona Lisa” (1963). Museums and Spirituality attract visitors in gigantic numbers. Remember that the top 4 world-most visited museums are the Musée du Louvre (+10 million visitors), National Museum of China (+8 million visitors / but please remember that Chinese museums are ultra-visited as they are part of a State programme enhancing the national culture and heritage treasury of China to glorify the Nation), the Metropolitan Museum of Art (almost 7 million visitors), and with the Vatican Museums at the 4th place (+6 million visitors).
Walking in an Enchanted Path
While the juxtaposition of the +200 pieces exhibited and the permanent exhibitions of The Met Fifth Avenue and The Met Cloisters gives a new meaning to the historic artefacts and art of the permanent collection, all the models staged or shown in the aisles created some kind of life in the museum spaces. Like a pilgrimage and how the Catholic religion is told, this exhibition is a story with quite a number of steps to climb: more than 60,000 square feet in 25 galleries to walk through with some discoveries and grace to encounter on the way. But like Father Raymond J. de Souza said in his review for the National Catholic Register: “The exhibition was an introduction to an enchanted world for more than a million people”. And it is the enchanted path in which the visitors felt immersed which gave it such a success.
Museum as Ritual
Even if museums can put you outside of your comfort zone, they are comfortable places where you recognize the codes, you adopt a certain behaviour and mindset, you feel welcomed and ready to be transformed. Some people talk about the ritualistic behaviours that occur in the secular setting of the museum. They see museums as rituals and as the new churches of our time. In her book “Civilizing Rituals: Inside Public Art Museums” published in 1995, Carol Duncan talk about “The Art Museum as Ritual”. She describes art museums as sites which enable individuals to achieve liminal experience- to move beyond the psychic constraints of mundane existence, step out of time, and attain new, larger perspective.” She went deep into the observation of museums as space to experience the liminality (it is a ritual state when you are in the threshold between one stage and the other, about to be transformed but not yet).
Of course, the way we adopt a new behaviour when we enter a museum is proof of a ritualistic mindset but the experiences one can get today in museums are even deeper in the emotion and impact on people’s mind and state. Museum’s exhibitions today head to transformative experiences.
In Search of the Transcendence.
People today crave for meaning, deep-engagement, self-care and self-reflection, enlighted and transformative moments. Meditation, daily-journaling, mindfulness and mindful living are at the top of the iceberg of today’s people’s needs. While we are about to merge with high technology, we want to feel and live our Humanity even stronger. We want to experience transformative, transcendental, ecstatic or agonic moments. But it is a hard task today to find a place and a community welcoming, benevolent and safe enough for us to let go, reach other stages of consciousness and get evolved.
With his book published in 1958 “Living Museum”, Alexander Dorner, former director of the Landesmuseum in Hanover and of the Art Museum in Rhode Island School of Design, saw the museum as a medium where meaning is produced.
Museums have this power to curate the best transformative experiences and are famous for that since centuries. They are places where visitors can allow themselves dreaming, getting inspired, overwhelmed or transported by emotions, empathize with the others or transcend oneself and the present moment. This article on Hyperallergic (2014) gives explicit examples of how museums affect the brain in the same way as meditation does. After this first pilot study mentioned in the previous article, Professor Juan Bermudez published the book “Transcending Architecture: Contemporary Views on Sacred Space” in 2015 where he says: “Instead of the temple, the cathedral, mosque, or synagogue, the art museum became the alternate venue for this — a typology in which transcendent experience could be had without mention of literal faith.”
And I will add that this implies not only to the art museums but all sort of museums heading to transform their visitor's experiences into deep emotional or spiritual memories. My daily research of new identities and roles of museums today have led me to discover fabulous examples of museum space open to spirituality. In these special places, we worship Art, Nature, Life as the main architects — We venerate time, silence, reflection and spiritual or emotional uplift:
- In order to offer a space and some time to decompress and reflect on the exhibitions presented at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture (United States), the team created this very powerful and useful “Contemplative Court”. Most of the visitors leave in high emotional stages with a mix of anger and sadness and getting back to reality after that is not an easy task. The “Contemplative Court” is a low-light room with cylindrical fountain rains into a pool in the centre coming from a skylight above. Surrounded by this white noise and facing this water falling, visitors get an undeniable holy-impression seeing the time passing, cleansing the emotions and entering a meditative state.
- The recently open Arvö Part Center in Estonia is all about the spiritual manifestations of music’s transcendent power gathered in one physical space in the middle of the forest not far from the sea. With his wide windows opening up on Nature scattered light breakthroughs, the Center was build to emanate fully the spirituality that Arvö Part’s music contains and, there, the visitor can not escape this feeling of powerful power.
- To visit the Foundation Carmignac in France is worthy of a pilgrimage as you will need to go in the South of France near Hyères then take a 15-min boat to finally make 680 steps and arrive at the destination. There, be prepared to visit the exhibitions barefoot and to have good shoes to walk in the gardens. “Liberté” [freedom] is Foundation Carmignac’s guiding principle and this is what you are heading for when you decide to visit it.
- The Glenstone Museum in Maryland in the United States is a unique overall spiritual destination where visitors find serenity, appreciate art, architecture and landscape in an untimely space. Each detail in this 230 acres has been through precisely to create a sensation of transcendence. And even if the ticket is free, the entrance is limited at 400 visitors per day, avoiding to distract the experience.
- Like James Evans, visitor engagement Officer at the National Trust UK, “Writ in Water” in Runnymede in the United Kingdom is a way to “have a break from the external world and a chance to think about things more deeply”. Runnymede is a memorial place to remember that 800 years ago the basis of common law across the world have been written here with the “Magna Carta”. Now, it is a place to reflect and meditate on how you feel about the world today in the light of history.
- The exhibition “Sound of Silence” currently presented at the Museum of Communication of Bern (Switzerland) until 7th July 2019 immerses the visitor into soundscapes making us more aware of this sense that we don’t exhibit often enough and which impacts us immensely. By making the museum space into a place to find silence, this exhibition is turned into a spiritual destination to find peace away from the highly agitated society we are in today.
And for those who enjoy the enhancement of Spirituality through Nature and Art, you can check the Kiyotsu Gorge Tunnel for the Echigo-Tsumari Triennale 2018 (Japan), “Fog x Hill” installation by Fujiko Nakaya on view in 2018 at the Arnold Arboretum in Boston (United States) or the Camp Adventure Treetop Observation Tower in Denmark.
If you have more examples of museums enabling a deep spiritual experience, please share them in the comments!
