Spectatorship and Ekphrasis

Abstract

D. S. MacColl’s 1898 review of Charles Conder’s paintings on silk provides an opportunity to analyse the embodied, subjective and multisensory qualities of aesthetic spectatorship promoted in Edwardian art writing, and this chapter draws on phenomenological approaches to investigate the role played by imaginative, conceptual and narrative space in framing and eliciting such a response. I argue that spectatorial experience in Edwardian period is performative at a structural level: that performativity is built into the very conditions in which spectatorship occurs and into the language in which it is discussed. I look also at the significance of environment and space in constituting its performance and argue for a broader notion of what sort of space this can be: rhetorical or conceptual as opposed to only physical.