Post Critical Museology

Theory and Practice in the Art Museum

Andrew Dewdney, David Dibosa, Victoria Walsh

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136192678
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Archaeology
• Index: Social Sciences

Post-Critical Museology considers what the role of the public and the experience of audiences means to the everyday work of the art museum. It does this from the perspectives of the art museum itself as well as from the visitors it seeks. Through the analysis of material gathered from a major collaborative research project carried out at Tate Britain in London the book develops a conceptual reconfiguration of the relationship between art, culture and society in which questions about the art museum's relationship to global migration and the new media ecologies are examined. It suggests that whilst European museums have previously been studied as institutions of collection, heritage and tradition, however 'modern' their focus, it is now better to consider them as distributive networks in which value travels along transmedial and transcultural lines.

Post-Critical Museology is intended as a contribution to progressive museological thinking and practice and calls for a new alignment of academics and professionals in what it announces as post-critical museology. An alignment that is committed to rethinking what an art museum in the twenty-first century could be, as well as what knowledge and understanding its future practitioners might draw upon in a rapidly changing social and cultural context. The book aims to be essential reading in the growing field of museum studies. It will also be of professional interest to all those working in the cultural sphere, including museum professionals, policy makers and art managers.

Part I
Policy, practice and theory in the art museum

1
The Post-Traditional Art Museum in the Public Realm

The year 1981 marked a historical watershed in British culture and society. In January of that year, a devastating fire took hold of a private party in New Cross, South London, claiming the lives of 14 black teenagers. As angry protests followed the tragedy, frustrated by the lack of police interest in claims of arson, the Conservative politician Enoch Powell, declared on 28 March that England was on the verge of ‘racial civil war’. In April, the two-year-old Conservative government, led by Margaret Thatcher, announced major cuts and reforms to the public sector and official figures recorded the highest unemployment in 50 years at 2.5 million. On 10 and 12 April, major riots broke out in Brixton, South London, home to a predominantly African-Caribbean community, and an area defined by poor housing, high unemployment and high levels of street crime which police were tackling through an undercover street campaign named Operation Swamp 81.

As newspaper and TV coverage broadcast scenes of burning buildings, upturned cars and raging street battles between police and rioters, it became clear that the scale of protest and violence could not be dismissed or contained by political rhetoric and by 14 April the Home Secretary had commissioned Lord Scarman to undertake an inquiry into the causes of this major outbreak of civil unrest. As the summer months unfolded and much of the country began to settle back into national preparations for the Royal Wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana and media excitement replaced discussions of a broken England, a more disconcerting mood was reflected in the bleak lyrics of the song ‘Ghost Town’ by the British ska band The Specials, which topped the UK music chart and remained in the top 40 for more than ten weeks. On 4 and 5 July, three weeks before the Royal Wedding and as Lord Scarman was preparing his report, a second, significantly more intense and widespread wave of race riots erupted across England, starting in Toxteth, Liverpool, another city suburb of industrial decline, high unemployment and low life expectancy, which, like Brixton, had experienced large scale immigration from Africa and the Caribbean since the 1950s.

With the first ever use of CS gas against protesters in the UK and an increasingly nervous British public, the government recognized the imperative to actively engage with the protests of inner-city black communities. As Secretary of State for the Environment, Michael Heseltine, went to Liverpool for a week and consulted local communities, businesses and politicians, and rapidly recognized the need for substantial investment in the regeneration of such inner-city and post-industrial areas neglected or abandoned since the end of the Second World War. As the Scarman Report into the Brixton riots was published on 25 November – noting that ‘complex political, social and economic factors’ had created a ‘disposition towards violent protest’, concluding that ‘urgent action’ was needed to prevent an ‘endemic, ineradicable disease threatening the very survival of our society’ (Scarman 1982) – Heseltine was already in the throes of securing a major shift in government thinking and on 9 December he announced a £95 million package of funding initiatives to turn the tide of urban decay and inner-city unemployment.

It was in this heady mix of politics, economics and social unrest that the idea of a ‘Tate in the North’ began to take shape as a reality. The disused Albert Dock in Liverpool had already been identified in 1980 by the then Tate director, Alan Bowness, as a desirable location for a new national outpost to the Tate Gallery in London, but the impetus created by Heseltine’s campaign to restore Liverpool’s position and reputation as an economically dynamic and culturally proud city substantially bolstered this aspiration. After various stages of negotiation and essential building work was carried out on the allocated set of buildings in the Dock, crucial funding was confirmed from the Merseyside Development Corporation (the Liverpool regeneration body) and in March 1985 the government formally announced their approval of the Tate Gallery’s plans (Spalding 1998: 222–7). As the Tate’s biennial report of 1984–6 describes in detail, the ambition for this new gallery to introduce and share the Tate Gallery collections to new and larger national audiences was to be supported by innovative thinking made possible by allocating this first regional outpost ‘a degree of autonomy from the Tate Gallery in London’. The report went on to say: ‘In this way the new Gallery will, we hope, serve sensitively and flexibly the needs of the Northern community within reach of Merseyside. It will seek all means of integrating itself into the artistic and cultural life of that community’ (Tate Gallery 1984–6: 23–4). In May 1988, the Tate Gallery Liverpool opened to the public.

In a series of interviews with past and present staff about the history and practice of education at Tate since its inception in 1970¹ including Toby Jackson, the first head of education at Tate Liverpool (and subsequently the first head of education at Tate Modern), it was revealed to what extent the creation and opening of Tate Liverpool had marked one of the most significant entries into cultural politics for Tate as an institution. Separated off from the neo-classical architectural language of heritage and power that defined the Tate Gallery in London, Tate Gallery Liverpool’s contemporary conversion of its spaces in the Dock, designed by the architect James Stirling, firmly located it in the present, and with it the politics of the present. It was also the first time since its inauguration in 1897 that the Tate Gallery had to consider how to create and build a new and sustained audience. As Jackson recounted, despite being part of the government-led programme of urban regeneration, the gallery found itself under attack from all sides. On the one hand, the local authority was aggressively antagonistic towards the creation of a cultural centre of activity instead of housing developments (‘Tate was not considered to be of any significance’), despite the promise of employment; and on the other, the scheduled displays of ‘modern art’ were deemed not to represent ‘the right sort of art’. Equally, as Jackson went out into the local community he was met with strong and volatile levels of resistance which came ‘as a surprise to Tate’ and created intense levels of anxiety as the gallery found itself in ‘the middle of all the debates around racism and institutional racism’. These debates were inextricably tied up with Liverpool’s unacknowledged and unresolved history of slave trading, which the Tate Gallery’s own history was perceived to be linked to through the founding philanthropic donations of Sir Henry Tate, whose financial success and art patronage was derived from his sugar business company, Tate & Lyle.

Having gained experience in local authority organizations working in the community, Jackson readily identified the need to develop a strategic way forward to overcome this resistance that would directly take on the questions of power, politics and representation that he was regularly confronted with when he met with local groups of potential audiences. Most importantly, this critically engaged view was shared and supported by the first director of Tate Liverpool, Richard Francis, and working in close collaboration the two developed a series of strategies to reconceptualize traditional modes of curatorial and educational practice in order to establish the Tate Gallery Liverpool as both a legitimate and culturally dynamic place in the life of the city. The form and impact of these strategies still resonate within Tate more than 20 years on, securing Tate Liverpool’s reputation as the test-bed for much of the thinking that went into the planning and success of Tate Modern in 2000.

Invested with the authority of the Tate trustees and director in London to develop new forms of museum practice the two oversaw a key organizational shift to reorientate the gallery’s culture from one of the custodial display of objects in an overtly controlled and supervised space to a more public-orientated environment in which the visitor was both directly acknowledged and encouraged to speak back to the gallery. This translated firstly into the redesignation of the role of security staff to the hybrid role of ‘information assistants’ (recruited locally) who were trained not only by Jackson in the master narrative of the museum framed by art history, but also in the arguments of cultural studies in order to develop a critical understanding of the role of the museum in society that could be confidently engaged with in conversation with the public. As Jackson noted in his interview, ‘antagonism is a good point to start a conversation’ and staff needed to develop a critically reflexive relation to the objects on display as much as to the institution of the museum if they were to forge open and meaningful dialogues with sceptical audiences. Such a move invariably demanded a shift in the knowledge-base of the museum and to realize this Jackson sought out new academic partnerships that introduced the social sciences disciplines of anthropology and ethnography, informed by an awareness of the need to develop levels of expertise and knowledge around public interaction with the work of art, as much as with the museum as an organizational structure with its own hierarchies of meaning and value.

In addition to brokering such external partnerships, the organizational separation between educational and curatorial knowledge and practice was addressed through the creation of a ‘programme group’ in which staff from both departments came together to plan and ‘co-curate’ changing displays of the collection that were reconceived thematically in order to break with the paradigms of art historical canons and the connoisseurial model of the museum that the Tate Gallery had historically assumed. To secure a productive level of collaboration with curatorial staff, Jackson recognized that the perceived role of educational staff as primarily ‘servicing the curriculum’ to schoolchildren had to be redefined and that equal professional value needed to be awarded to their work and own body of expertise. This recognition was achieved as the educational staff’s work progressively moved from a dominant focus on responding to the demands of the school curriculum to a more proactive engagement with an adult audience through the establishment of ‘public programmes’, designed to encourage debate and dialogue, and to give validity and place to a politics of difference that, at the institutional level, the Tate Gallery had traditionally elided in its relation to the public. As Jackson won the argument that educational staff should be equally professionally recognized in their posts as ‘curators’, his own title changed from ‘head of education’ to ‘head of education and public programmes’. This reflected his conviction that the role of education was ‘not simply to amplify the role of collections and exhibitions’ as an extension of marketing, but to critique it and ‘engage people with larger issues around culture’. The need for this approach was still evident in the early 1990s as the city of Liverpool continued to experience poor levels of employment and social conditions and the relevance of the space and place of the gallery had to be constantly reconfirmed. Physically separated from the language of heritage and tradition invested in the Tate Gallery and its collection in London and dislocated from the authoritative status of both, the Tate Gallery Liverpool had to generate its own paradigms of value and meaning, not least given the vehement levels of antipathy that surrounded modern and contemporary art in the UK at this time.

Indeed, the category of art itself was highly problematic, perceived as it was as either the ‘luxury commodity’ of an elite patronage or as a form of cultural conceit (if not deceit), the understanding of which socially demarcated the educated from the working classes. Such perceptions of art were considerably bolstered by the media presentation of the visual arts, ranging from TV documentary series such as Kenneth Clark’s 1969 epic series Civilisation (the first documentary series to be produced in colour by the BBC), and Robert Hughes’ The Shock of the New: Art and the Century of Change (1980), to satirical cartoons of modern abstract and conceptual art in tabloid newspapers. The proliferation of the latter had particularly gathered momentum in direct association with the Tate Gallery following the debacle that is still referred to in British public life as the ‘Bricks Affair’. As the collections curator Richard Morphet discussed in detail in his interview,² the ‘Bricks Affair’ played out on a rather distorted timetable given that the original purchase of Carl Andre’s sculpture Equivalent VIII had taken place in 1972, the work had been on public display in 1974 and 1975, but it was only when a Sunday Times reporter reviewing the Tate Gallery’s acquisitions in 1976 that a public furore broke out.³

In many respects, the ‘Bricks Affair’ was a very English affair, following in the footsteps of the Whistler v. Ruskin trial of 1878, at the heart of which was the public mistrust of modern abstract art and the prevalent belief that the value of a work of art rested on the material evidence of its labour, translated through technical skill and craft. In this light, clearly Andre’s assemblage of 120 industrially manufactured firebricks arranged in a rectangular form on the gallery floor flouted the public’s perceptions of what constituted a genuine and valuable art object. Furthermore, unlike other national museums whose collections were readily understood to hold established educational value – historical, scientific, technological – the history of the public art museum in England was considerably more stunted due to the lack of national belief in and support for the development of the visual arts. While it is beyond the scope or need of the current text to chart, suffice to say that the history and patronage of twentieth-century British and international art did not quite match the interest at the level of state or private individual as in America or other European countries; a fact made most explicit if one considers that the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York was founded from private monies in 1929 and the state-initiated and funded Centre Georges Pompidou opened in Paris in 1977.

Within such a context of cynicism and hostility, it was clear to Jackson from the outset that the restricted, conventional and albeit cursory nod to a public viewer in the form of an artwork’s label was a hopelessly ineffectual form of communication. Based on the prerequisite template of information that defined the standard collection catalogue entry (artist’s name, title, date of work, size and medium) and reflecting the practices of art historical scholarship and connoisseurial knowledge (provenance, authentication, scholastic citations and archival references), the conventional label was a technical tool of reference primarily of interest to a specialist audience and certainly of little value or currency to a non-specialist one. In response, Jackson oversaw the introduction of new ‘extended labels’ to the works and contrary to the Tate Gallery’s tendency at the time towards presenting a unifying, ‘consistent’ voice to the collection, he actively encouraged ‘inconsistency’ by opening up the work of art to multiple textual accounts of meaning through inviting a dissonant range of ‘voices’ from different disciplines to be included in interpretative materials. In allowing the work of art to be understood as a site of dynamic meaning and contested knowledge, and situating it firmly within a contemporary cultural politics of viewing, Jackson sought to present the idea of a ‘museum in motion’; a place of perpetual changing values and meanings which would question the prevailing Tate Gallery paradigm of the autonomy and universalism of art. As Simon Wilson, a contemporary colleague at the Tate Gallery in London noted in surprise at the end of Jackson’s interview, however, there was little or no awareness among staff in London at the time that the Tate Gallery Liverpool had found itself operating in such a hostile environment and indeed official accounts of Tate’s history do not quite capture the conditions of this moment either. As Jackson reflected, ‘you didn’t speak of these things, but it was a story that had to be told and had to be heard’.

In resurrecting the history of the emergence and practice of education at the Tate Gallery since 1970, what became apparent throughout the interviews was the consistently uneasy relationship between collection and exhibition curators, and the educational department (‘the poor cousin’ in the gallery, as Jackson described it); the former invariably looking upon the latter as a necessary corollary to the public service of the museum, but not one significantly invested in the aesthetic or intellectual project of the art museum. This view was particularly reinforced as successive governments looked first and foremost to the educational work of the museum as the primary form of engagement with a museum’s public, leaving the curatorial work of acquisition and display essentially uninterrupted by policies aimed at rendering the museum a more democratic space of cultural value. The circumstances in which the Tate Gallery Liverpool opened, however, combined with the need to create a new audience, clearly demanded a new model of collaboration between collection curators and education staff, but at the very same time that Jackson was developing critically reflexive practices of gallery and outreach programming to overcome the disjunctures between the public sphere of the art museum and the public sphere in which its potential audiences were located, the Tate Gallery in London was pursuing a diametrically opposed approach.

The subsequent institutionally pervasive silence in London surrounding the challenges that the Tate Gallery Liverpool had been forced to engage with was a functional response to preserve and protect the narrative of tradition and national heritage that the Tate Gallery in London drew its authority and public status from and, given the challenges it was also facing to demonstrate its public value, was in the process itself of reconstructing in order to build new audiences of a very different kind. For, while the Liverpool outpost was to assume more importance a decade later, its roots and critically reflexive practices were invariably underpinned by cultural and social conditions that explicitly questioned the value formation of tradition and heritage that the Tate Gallery drew its institutional legitimacy from. Seen within the arguments of ‘reflexive modernization’ posed by Beck, Lash and Giddens (Beck et al. 1994), the Liverpool gallery’s negotiation of itself in a new spatio-temporal relation with art through the conditions of contemporary culture signalled its requisite place within a post-industrial, detraditionalized culture (Beck et al. 1994), or what Giddens terms the ‘post-traditional’. Indeed, as Giddens notes:

Modernity destroys tradition. However (and this is very important) a collaboration between modernity and tradition was crucial to the phase of modern social development – the period during which risk was calculable in relation to external influences. That phase ended with the emergence of high modernity or what Beck calls reflexive modernization. Henceforth tradition assumes a different character.

(Beck et al. 1994: 91)

But as Beck stresses, ‘to speak of detraditionalization is not to talk of a society without traditions’, but ‘rather the concept refers to a social order in which tradition changes its status’ (Beck et al. 1994: vi). Fundamental to this argument is the demise of post-industrial certitude and the teleological certainty of the Enlightenment project on which the principles of modernity evolved, which, as the decay of the shipping industry and dock life in Liverpool demonstrated, along with the new patterns of post-war migration, the project of modernity could no longer lay claim. With the collapse of such anchoring narratives, ‘reflexive mode...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I Policy, practice and theory in the art museum
• Part II Displaying the nation
• Part III Hypermodernity and the art museum
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index