The Last Judgement (Hieronymus Bosch, 1482) in The Paintings Gallery of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Veronika Mayerböck, left, lighting designer (ALLES oder Licht, https:// www.allesoderlicht.com/) and collaborating partner, and colleague discuss a new study on the impact of lighting and visitor reactions.
Can art have a positive impact on society? Can art have a positive impact on individuals and society? Can it reduce anxiety and help bring people together? Researchers in the ARTIS project are probing the way that people engage with works of art, which could then open up the possibility of using art to achieve positive outcomes, as Professor Matthew Pelowski explains.
38
The experience of viewing art can
ARTIS project
have a positive impact on both individuals and society, for example by reducing stress, helping bring people together, and even changing attitudes, behaviours, or peoples’ views of themselves and the world. However, the nature of what happens during the actual experience of viewing art is still unclear, a topic at the heart of Professor Matthew Pelowski’s work as the Coordinator of the ARTIS project, an initiative funded under the EU Horizon 2020 programme. “We want to look at the way people engage with art. What does that look like? How do we experience art? What role can the arts have in our institutions and society?” he outlines. The project itself brings together nine partners, with researchers from a wide range of disciplines – including philosophy, psychology, art education, and arts or cultural policy – looking at how people experience art in locations across Europe. As one of the main undertakings of the project, Pelowski notes, “we’ve been documenting how thousands of people experience visual art, from art in galleries or museums, to murals on the side of buildings, to sculpture or drawings. Before we can even begin to start talking about how art might be applied in various settings or to different challenges, or the importance and value of having art around us, we need to start understanding the possible ways we can experience it and what art could do!”
Researchers in the project have recently finished a major component of their overall program. This work, led by Professor Pelowski and Stephanie Miller, a PhD candidate in his Vienna lab, involved gathering data on thousands of peoples’ reactions to specific works of art. These were assessed by using a list of what Professor Pelowski calls ‘phenomenal states’, broadly speaking the way that people felt after viewing a work of art. The general aim in the project is to reconstruct people’s experiences based on their
responses to a set of questions, with respondents reporting their reaction immediately after viewing a work of art, which then forms the basis of what’s called a network model. “This is a cloud of interconnected reactions, but interconnected in a way that’s driven by the data, essentially reflecting how these feelings go together during an art experience,” explains Professor Pelowski. A sophisticated mathematical approach called latent profile analysis can then be applied to look for shared patterns. “It doesn’t matter who you are or where you viewed a work of art, we
We want to look at the way people engage with art.
What does that look like? How do we experience art?
Marta Pizzolante (visiting PhD candidate, Catholic University of the Sacred Heart) prepares a participant with a functional near-infrared spectroscopy, fNIRS, brain-imaging device for use in the Albertina Museum, Vienna (collaborating institution partner).
can find a basic pattern that describes what happened,” he continues. The next step is then to connect the kinds of experiences that people are having to specific outcomes, such as relieving stress, changing ideas or actions, or possibly even preventing the development of disease. This research also holds wider pragmatic importance to museums and policy-makers, as people who enjoyed the art are more likely to visit again, while others may react very differently, and the project’s work will also yield insights in this respect. “We can even talk about when and why art might bring you insight or make you bored, or mad,” says Professor Pelowski. Studies have been conducted on how people experience art at galleries in several
EU Research
cities, including Berlin, Venice and Vienna, and Professor Pelowski says the project team have access to a lot of data beyond basic patterns of feelings. “We can really track a lot of things,” he stresses. One part of the project involves looking at movement tracking data for example [Further information here]. “We can track individuals as they walk around in a gallery. We saw that some people would move in a kind of ‘T’ pattern, where they enter, approach a work of art, then move backwards and forwards, and from side to side,” outlines Professor Pelowski. “The extent to which they showed this movement pattern in front of a painting was related to the depth of insight and reflection that a work provoked, which in turn can be connected to a basic type of experience. Individuals who didn’t move in that way were found to be less likely to have engaged deeply with a work of art.” These insights, then, hold great potential value for artists, curators or galleries keen to know more about their visitors and the nature of their experiences. While some galleries and museums may not historically have seen this as a priority, Professor Pelowski believes attitudes are shifting and says there is growing interest in the project’s work. “A lot of museums have contacted us to ask; ‘what are you doing? What are you finding? Would you tell us about it?’” he outlines. The nature of people’s reactions to a work may vary widely, from sensations of awe and wonder to negative and troubled feelings, and Professor Pelowski is keen to stress that there is no single ‘correct’ way to experience art. “Individual people may react to art in very different ways, but each of those reactions is valid and none of them are wrong,” he says, “but it is important that we start understanding them.” A change in setup or presentation can also influence the ways that people react to a work of art, another topic researchers are investigating in the project.The Paintings Gallery of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, for example, holds a triptych by the Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch, The Last Judgment, and the gallery experimented with a new lighting setup to showcase the work. “They wanted to make it as powerful an experience as they could. We had the opportunity to work with the director and
the lighting designer and we did two different setups – the new one and the old – then asked people questions,” says Professor Pelowski. “By tying these investigations to our broader work to understand and tease out the nuances of art experience, we can now provide feedback to institutions and say, ‘OK, this is what these changes do’.” In addition, Pelowski, his team, and the wider ARTIS consortium are also exploring the impact of similar art visits on mental wellbeing, stress, anxiety, and also recently started testing impacts on activation in the brain, using mobile methods for study in the gallery.
Reactions to art This research feeds into a wider debate about the purpose of art institutions, beyond the view that art and culture is intrinsically good, towards a deeper understanding of the types of reactions that it might elicit in different people. The intention is to link the psychological data that has been gathered to specific outcomes, which could open up the possibility of using art to achieve change at both the individual and societal level. “Which kinds of experiences and artworks lead to the results that we want to achieve? We have about 18 months left in the project, and we plan to start feeding our results back to museums and policy-makers,” outlines Professor Pelowski. The presentation of these results is an important consideration for Professor Pelowski and his colleagues in the project. “I’m coming at this from an art theory perspective. I’m interested in the psychological process, but then we want to put that information into a relevant form for a curator, or even an artist, for example,” he says. “There is a growing awareness that art can be really useful in different ways, such as in patient care, or in helping people regulate their everyday lives, reduce stress, or even opening new ways of seeing the world” says Professor Pelowski. “We are looking at how people engage with art, then relating that to their training or background. What is the context? How does this lead to different experiences? How can this knowledge be used to further the importance of art in our cultures and cities? That’s really what we are trying to do.”
Study participant, wearing fNIRS device, engages with the painting The Water Lily Pond (Monet, 1917-1919) in the Albertina Museum’s Batliner Collection.
www.euresearcher.com
ARTIS (A)rt and (R)esearch on (T)ransformations of (I)ndividuals and (S)ocieties
Project Objectives
We argue that to make better policy that advances art’s efficacy, it is necessary to build a systematic program that combines empirical and theoretical research with perspectives of artists, art educators, and other art stakeholders.
Project Funding
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 870827.
Project Website and Partners
https://artis-h2020.eu/who-we-are
Contact Details
Project Coordinator, Matthew Pelowski, Ph.D. Asst. Professor, Psychology of Cognitive and Neuroaesthetics ARTIS Lab: Art Research on Transformations of Individuals and Societies University of Vienna Faculty of Psychology, Vienna CogSciHub Wächtergasse 1/306, 1010 Vienna E: matthew.pelowski@univie.ac.at W: https://artis-h2020.eu Trupp, M. D., Bignardi, G., Specker, E., Vessel, E. A., & Pelowski, M. (2023). Who benefits from online art viewing, and how: The role of pleasure, meaningfulness, and trait aesthetic responsiveness in computer-based art interventions for wellbeing. Computers in Human Behavior, 145, 107764. Kühnapfel, C., Fingerhut, J., Brinkmann, H., Ganster, V., Tanaka, T., Specker, E., ... & Pelowski, M. (2023). How Do We Move in Front of Art? How Does This Relate to Art Experience? Linking Movement, Eye Tracking, Emotion, and Evaluations in a Gallery-Like Setting. Empirical Studies of the Arts, 02762374231160000. Pelowski, M., Cotter, K. N., Specker, E., Fingerhut, J., Trupp, m. D., & Speidel, K. (in press). For a Moment, Maybe: An Exploratory Study of the Incidence and Duration of Art Exhibition-Induced Prosocial Attitude Change Using a Two-Week Daily Diary Method. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts. DOI (preprint): https://osf.io/w594s/
Matthew Pelowski, Ph.D.
Matthew Pelowski, Ph.D. is Assistant Professor of Cognitive and Neuroaesthetics in the Faculty of Psychology at the University of Vienna. He has a background in both the humanities, with undergraduate degrees in both oil painting and advertising from the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, and in social science. He completed his PhD in Information Science at the University of Nagoya in Japan. Currently he is Coordinator of the H2020 project ARTIS and has a main research interest on the impacts and implications from our engagements with visual arts.
39