Different Artistic Techniques Promote Different Modes of Engagement with Art: A Free-Exploration Study of the Artworks and Installations of Pieter Vermeersch

In 2019, M Museum Leuven hosted an exhibition celebrating the oeuvre of the contemporary Flemish artist Pieter Vermeersch. With a strong focus on the interplay between natural materials and raw colour, Vermeersch's artworks both invite and reward intentional and detailed viewing. His architectural installations—gradient murals, floor-to-ceiling mirrors, and maze-like concrete walls—promote exploration and immersion within the exhibition space. We conducted a naturalistic, free-viewing, and exploratory study within this celebratory exhibition to examine whether the intentions to promote exploration, immersion, and in-depth viewing of Vermeersch's art and architectural installations would manifest in visitors engagement with the artworks. We also sought to determine whether the extent to which visitors engaged with the artworks would impact their overall appraisals of the exhibition and its aesthetic merit. We used mobile eye-tracking to record visitors’ navigation through the exhibition space, and coded the resulting videos according to our Taxonomy of Museum Navigation Behaviours (TaMuNaBe). We found that artworks that incorporated natural materials elicited more detailed viewing ( p = .024, η 2 = .41), while traditional canvases and the installation features of the exhibition promoted more alternating gazes ( p < .001, η 2 = .87). These results suggest that the use of different artistic techniques and materials promote different modes of engagement from viewers. Engagement with the installation elements was also predictive of the perceived aesthetic merit of the exhibition, and of preferences for those elements. This suggests that active, embodied engagement with immersive installation artworks results in heightened aesthetic appraisals of the artworks and the exhibition as a whole.