This performance departed from the research that I’ve been doing for my project Looking at the Woman in a Bomb Blast, which will culminate in a publication with Art & Theory in Stockholm in 2019/20. For this work I presented a performance in the guise of a museum guide or expert, exploring the gestures and history of a number of works in the Konstmuseum, primarily in the Furstenberg Galleries. The performance questioned the way in which formalist or connoisseurial descriptions of these works still obscure the most obvious sexualisations that are present in them and prevent us from directly addressing the gendering of museum space. I looked at the changing status of the ‘model’ in late 19th century European academic art, and also the proliferation of the ever more frankly sculpted female nude as a trope figuring male artistic freedom and originality (paradoxically, one that was slavishly copied by several artists over the course of about 50 years, until it finally emerged in Sweden in the hands of Per Hasselberg). My inhabitation or performance of the gestures used in the sculptures, and my discussion of the history and communicative value of gesture, also involved troubling or unsettling (we could say, queering) the gaze of the museum viewer. I argue that that viewer is constructed as complicit with the possessing, heterosexual, male gaze of the artist, regardless of their own gender, unless and until they question it: this particular assertion has been the subject of multiple critical conversations around the performance since I executed it in October. I maintain that it is of crucial importance that I perform this work (rather than executing it through a female performer). In previous, similar performances with other works (see http://danieljewesbury.org/other/lookingwoman.html), I’ve observed that a strong discomfort is produced for some viewers, arising from my position as a man discussing the eroticised male gaze. I believe this ‘unsettlement’ of the viewer is essential for the work to do more than merely indicate the theoretical questions at stake. This queering needs to be felt at a visceral level by viewers. It also demands that questions about the appropriateness of discussing that eroticised gaze in a critical, eroticising register are raised.