ABSTRACT
Museums are looked at as places in which physical, cognitive and emotional experiences are to be had; as places that incite change. As such, museums are subject to human patterns of feeling. One of the most fundamental of these is anxiety, an emotional response we traditionally think of the museum existing to mitigate. But anxiety can also be thought of as mediating between desire and desire’s realisation – as an emotion connected to imagination and wonder. Anxiety is something of great value for a ‘radical critique’ of institutions: institutions such as museums, which are irretrievably implicated in the social and political worlds around them. Anxiety is a central part of who they are and what they experience. Anxiety should also be utilised as a reflective device in museums: for one, because those institutions legitimated by historic and official discourses risk complacency; and two, because all institutions, even those involved in socially engaged practice can themselves fall into a blinkered state of righteous inviolability. ‘Innocence is ignorance’, said Kierkegaard: all museums must, if they are to be true social actors, be constantly anxious, questioning their actions, motives, and ultimate purposes. Using the examples of the Happy Museum Project and the Greenpeace Sinking Cities protest at the British Museum, together with philosophical and psychological understandings of anxiety, this chapter explores how this emotion is both an inherent part of museums and a powerfully productive force for social engagement and radical practice.
