The Museum as a Gym. Fitness trail at the Kunsthaus Graz. A Project by Aldo Giannotti

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The Museum as a Gym tests Kunsthaus Graz for its fitness capability and invites the audience to be active not – as usual – only with the mind, but also with the body.

The theme of the individual’s relationship with their surroundings runs like a red thread throughout Giannotti’s body of work, and here too it is his main concern.  Indeed, there is a functional correlation between the way a space is arranged and our tendency to behave in a particular way inside it. In accordance with the notion of Umwelt as developed by Baron von Uexküll (1), Giannotti explores the museum space as a set of orientation marks that act as instructions and turn the physical, objective space into a system of significance or living environment. In order to turn a museum into a gym, it is necessary to alter those “bearers of significance” (Bedeutungsträger) that delimit the extent of actions within the museum space in such a way that the audience is tempted to do gym exercises in it. By doing so, the artist investigates the structure and functioning of the museum as a social space.

By shifting from one significance system to another and crossing the border between them, the functional relationship with the environment, which guides the audience’s behaviour, is temporarily suspended and deactivated. This “being-held-in-suspense” between different semantic worlds lets those sets of rules, inherent to a museum or a gym, appear in their contingency and plasticity. Ultimately, by way of this disarming artifice, Giannotti is able to hint with ease and irony at those common marketing strategies which, with regard to the audience and membership development, link the museum to the gym.

The Museum as a Gym can also be considered as a stress test, in which Kunsthaus Graz is examined for its functional capacity and social elasticity. Through an active exploration that doesn’t shy away from physical strain and personal commitment, the institution’s infrastructure opens up as its symbolic musculature. This musculature points in different directions of contraction and, thereby, suggests its potential extension. Measuring such extensibility by using the museum as a gym, the visitors can activate untapped possibilities of dealing with the museum environment and, at the same time, question the role, which a museum of contemporary art plays in the interaction between different social bodies.

(1) For Uexküll’s notion of Umwelt, see the brief but accurate overview by Giorgio Agamben in The Open. Man and Animal. Stanford 2004, pp. 39–43.

The Project The Museum as a Gym by Aldo Giannotti (born 1977 in Genoa, lives in Vienna) has been designed on the occasion of the series Open House@Kunsthaus Graz.