ABSTRACT

Museums and their painstakingly curated constructions of history are increasingly being scrutinised for their heteronormative, androcentric and decisively white biases, often through museum interventions. Based on an understanding of museal hospitality as the constantly-shifting laws that regulate access to Britain’s prestigious exhibition spaces (and the intersections of these spaces with issues of race and gender), this article posits that Sonia Boyce’s Six Acts (2018) can be understood as a neo-Victorian intervention that critiques and forces us to acknowledge the conditions of Britain’s museal hospitality. In conceptualising the museum space as a host, based on Immanuel Kant’s and, particularly, Jacques Derrida’s notion of hospitality, this article argues that Six Acts addresses and modulates the relationship between host and guest, and interrelatedly, re-conceptualises the Victorian art gallery as a neo-Victorian museum (as an institutional space that self-consciously and reflexively engages with the gendered and racialised subtexts of Victorian visual arts). Boyce’s artwork performs epistemic labour, helping us to continually unlearn both the Victorian ideological biases that still suffuse contemporary discourses on heritage and art, on artistic merit as a law of hospitality, and a distorted imagination of a historically white Victorian Britain.

摘要

博物馆及其精心策划的历史构造越来越多地受到审查，通常是通过博物馆的干预来应对它们的异规范性，男性中心性和决定性的白色偏见。基于对肌肉好客的理解，因为它是不断变化的法律，规范进入英国著名展览空间（以及这些空间与种族和性别问题的交汇处）的出入，因此本文认为可以理解索尼亚·博伊斯（Sonia Boyce）的《六幕法案》（Six Acts，2018）作为一种新维多利亚主义的干预措施，它批评并迫使我们承认英国对肌肉热情好客的条件。在以伊曼纽尔·康德（Immanuel Kant）的思想，尤其是雅克·德里达（Jacques Derrida）的待客概念为基础，将博物馆空间设计为主人时，本文认为：《六幕法案》解决并调节了主人与客人之间的关系，并且相互关联，重新将维多利亚美术馆视为新维多利亚博物馆（作为一个体制性空间，自觉地，自觉地与维多利亚视觉艺术的性别化和种族化的文字进行互动，将其重新概念化） ）。博伊斯的作品进行了认知劳动，帮助我们不断地了解维多利亚时代的意识形态偏见，这些偏见仍然使当代有关遗产和艺术的论述，艺术价值作为待客之道，以及对历史上白色的维多利亚时代英国的想象力的扭曲。