Le « jonglage » des visiteurs entre œuvres et cartels : de l’étude d’un comportement à l’application d’un principe muséographique.

“Object-label juggling” is the back-and-forth movement that a visitor performs several times between observing a work and reading its wall label (Grassin, 2007). This cognitive process recurs during the museum visit, when the visitor confronts the object. This behaviour, a veritable technique of the body and a cognitive strategy aimed at appropriating the work, was the subject of a specific study on the occasion of a larger-scale investigation into the influence of the exhibition medium on the psychological functioning of the adult visitor. This study, using the tools of applied research in museology, took place at the heart of the Chinese archaeology exhibition Xi’an, capitale éternelle, at the Musée de la Civilisation in Quebec City in 2002, based on a collection of data from ninety visitors, in collaboration between the École du Louvre and the Université de Montréal. It showed that the structuring of the information governing the label triggers the juggling. The labels that induce the most back-and-forth with the work to which they refer are all provided with a text whose information has a homogeneous and precise editorial structure. These writings offer a set of information distributed in a homogeneous, constant and hierarchical manner from the particular to the general: the nominative, descriptive, explanatory and contextual information is articulated to serve the work exhibited nearby. This visiting strategy is therefore an interpretative process that can improve the perception of the object by making it more complex and richer. Consequently, at a time of crisis of sensitivity to works of art, a real crisis of attention, characterised in particular by an observation time of less than nine seconds, juggling constitutes a strong museographic principle that can encourage observation and allow enriched access to the work. This is why, twenty years after its updating and definition, object-label juggling has guided the redesign of the written mediation of a national museum in Paris, the Musée de Cluny – Musée National du Moyen Âge, which was closed for twenty months for the renovation of its buildings and museographic itinerary. This paper will describe how the study of object-label juggling act has contributed to the change in attention to writing in the vicinity of works of art and the prospects for applied research that this makes possible.