I caught up with a couple of interventions at this year's conference - both chosen because of relevance to the practice of using art interventions in museums - manifestly to "open up" collections, "encourage" visitor participation/exploration and/or radically change curatorial practice.
Two things of note.
Edinburgh's The Collective Gallery in 2007-2008 hosted an evaluative exercise on audience participation in interpretation, using works by Jason Nelson, Artur Zmijewski, and Freee (Dave Beech-Andy Hewitt-Mel Jordan) - picture above (http://freee.org.uk/works/how-to-be-hospitable). The gallery's attempt at harnessing multiple perspectives in the development of meaningful interpretations, while a laudable one, left me wondering whether most models of visitor/user generated meaning making are actually a self reflexive exercise that benefits gallery and museum practitioners in the sense that it involves a vocal, interested audience/curatorial panel, while leaving most visitors indifferent. In a postmodern sense, most of these panel based self-reflexive exercises seem to benefit those who take part in them, rather than the end user.
Does reflecting on the mechanics of meaning-making affect end users? Less than it could.
Is this practice legitimate? Even if you are not an artist?
The other excellent case study came from the session entitled "Artists and Museums: what's the limit?" during which Maria Bradshaw, Director of the Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester, explored what happens when galleries embrace new steps in interpretative practice by involving artists as curators - in this case, the "grande dame of performance art", Marina Abramovic, during this year's Manchester International Festival. In this clip, Marina Abramovic presents the unnerving and unforgettable (see http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/video/2009/jul/06/marina-abramovic-manchester-festival-adrian-searle).
The Whitworth was cleared of all its collections; artists took part in intimate audience encounters for the duration of the international festival, each performing for an exhausting 4 hours each day; the public were taken through a drill - a sort of initiation ceremony - and finally explored the building freely, observing artists exploring their responses to the space, the (secreted) collections etc.
The lesson learnt was potentially a very strong one: live hauntings, the "renegade energy" of live art injects (can inject) traditional museum/gallery practice with new life, the collections seeming "new" even to their curators.
So why am I cynical?
There is a sense that this style of interpretative intervention - which takes inspiration from promenade theatre and site specific installation work, which turns visitors into private viewers who partake of a bespoke ritual rather than visit... are not our day to day audiences.
When Ms Bradshaw stated "we took this experience as a statement of what we intend to do all the time" - I sighed. It is precisely the "event" nature of the experience, the out-of-the-ordinary exclusiveness, the tailor-made character of becoming one with the gallery spaces and the artworks... that makes this type of experience intensely attractive and socially successful.
The issue is to find ways of maintaining the secretive nature of interesting interpretation - to encourage meaning making in visitors even when there is no special event. Is the solution actually to "open up" collections and "make them more accessible" - or is it, rather, to keep them secret and explorable? Should we encourage visitors to see more - or should we offer them the opportunity of discovering for themselves?
Is access a free exercise, or an initiation ritual of which we partake not as consumers but as co-celebrants? Has access rendered void an encounter with the unknown?
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