feeling looking: queer desire and the erotics of research in the (neo-)classical sculpture gallery

In this paper we explore the concept of ‘feeling looking’ in the figurative (neo-)classical sculpture collections at the Altes Museum, The British Museum, and Victoria and Albert Museum, classical galleries as such were known as cruising sites in the pre-Stonewall era. We do so through an analysis of our 35mm slide installation with accompanying techno soundtrack feeling looking (2023), which was originally made for the exhibition Bodies of Love (2023) at gr_und gallery in Berlin. In feeling looking we investigate these collections informed by the shifting social contexts in which the works were viewed, with a focus on the role of looking, bodily desire and inter-corporeal connections in museum display and, more widely, in art historical research. In contrast to the “straight photograph”, which aims to represent an “objective” version of the artwork on display, we investigate what it might mean to take a “queer photograph” in the museum in feeling looking. In this paper we consider the cinematographic, darkroom and installation techniques that we used to do so, drawing upon Laura Marks’ concept of ‘haptic images’, which she argues are ‘erotic regardless of their content, because they construct an intersubjective relationship between beholder and image’ (1998). Informed by our artistic research undertaken in feeling looking, we end by exploring how audio-visual approaches to art historical research could be used to rethink museum viewership from the perspective of contact and encounter, moving towards embodied, multi-sensory research that centres the palimpsest of felt histories present in the museum.