Outcomes - Seminar 2 - Context
The presentations
PRESENTATION TO THE SEMINAR ‘CONTEXT’ BY DR. HELEN REES
LEAHY
MANCHESTER ART GALLERY, JULY 22ND 2006
Dr Helen Rees Leahy
I hope the few words that I am going to offer will be a useful contrast
with Peter’s presentation. and will to contribute to the debate
that you’re all engaged with.
I want to talk for a very few minutes about the work that I’m
involved with at the Centre of Museology in the University of Manchester,
where collaboration and also context are very much key words in the way
that we operate. The Centre of Museology is actually incredibly small.
It was founded in the year 2000 and there are really only a handful of
us who are full-time involved with it. But really I think the impact
that we have, and the work that we do, achieves far more than our size
might suggest, and that really is through collaboration. It’s at
the centre of everything that we do, and I think that when you’re
involved with museology (which is our shorthand for thinking about museum
practice, history and theory) the only way to do that kind of work is
through collaboration.
We are essentially a research centre, based in the university, and engaged
equally with post graduate and staff research. The role of post graduate
research is something that I’m sure has been part of the conversation
that you’ve all been having and something that we might want to
pick up again. I think that both at MA level and also at PhD level there
are great opportunities for students to work with us, and the case study
that I’m going to present is an example of that.
I say collaboration really is at the core of our activity, simply because
if we are investigating museum practice, whether it’s in the past
or in the present, there’s no way we could do that without working
with museums. So we’re working with practitioners, with curators,
educators, administrators, marketing people, development people, all
of the time. And that collaboration also takes place within the university.
We have a lot of people involved in museology in the university - in
anthropology, archaeology, art history, sociology, or example. And I’m
sure many of you know that we have two collecting institutions within
the university, the Whitworth Art Gallery and the Manchester Museum.
We work closely with both, and I’m going to describe a project
we’ve been doing with the Whitworth.
Beyond the university we work with museums and galleries across the
city, including the Manchester Art Gallery, and other institutions as
well, and also elsewhere in the region and nationally.
We’re always interested in context and for us the interest is
in how the institution frames the context and how context is produced
or reproduced through the institution. We are interested particularly
in experimental practice as subject of research, to see how the institutional
framework operates.
So just to give you a quick example of the sort of work that we do,
I want to draw your attention to a partnership project with the Whitworth
over the last couple of years. The overall title of this project is the
Object of Encounter, and I’ve been working on the project extremely
closely with Jennifer Harris (a member of the context and collaboration
advisory group and deputy director at the Whitworth) and I guess it’s
fair to say that the project came out of the conversation between Jennifer
and me..
And the context for it is this. The Whitworth and the Centre for Museology
wanted to consider ways in which we could jointly work together on the
organization of some quite simple, quite low key, not big budget exhibitions,
that would involve both staff at the Whitworthand, the Centre for Museology,
and also MA students from the Centre for Museology. We wanted it to be
a project that worked on a number of different levels where would have
the opportunity to work together to find out more about each others’ perspectives,
to test out ideas, jointly as professionals collaborating and to bring
students in as well. We didn’t want to make it the kind of student
exhibition where we just said to the students: here’s some objects,
here’s a space, sort of get on with it. We wanted to create a staff
student team where everybody around the table would have an equal voice.
This was obviously going to be a great opportunity for the students
to have some direct experience of working on an exhibition, but specifically
we wanted the exhibitions that we developed together to be innovative,
and the Whitworth as a university gallery is very committed to the development
of experimental practice. The model that we came up with for curating
the exhibitions was to test how we could translate a museological or
a critical text into a three-dimensional exhibition using objects from
the Whitworth collections to do this. The intellectual rationale was
that the Whitworth has incredibly rich mixed collections encompassing
fine arts, prints, drawings, sculpture, and wallpaper and textiles. It
was also pragmatic because these were going to be quite small scale,
low budget exhibitions, not involving a large number of loans from other
institutions.
So, the principle was to take a text and to see how that could be made
into an exhibition, which was quite tricky. We’re halfway through
the process at the moment, ie the second exhibition – and as you
will see from the images, it’s partly successful and there are
issues that arise from it.
The text that we’ve taken for this particular exhibition is an
essay that some of you may be familiar with, and I think it really feeds
into the context and collaboration theme. It’s by the American
literary historian and critic and scholar, Stephen Greenblatt whose work
you may be familiar with. He’s mainly interested in literature
, and he’s been very closely associated with the ‘new historicism’ in
literature, which is a way of placing a literary text in its wider historical
sociological and cultural frameworks and contexts - so you can see where
he’s coming from with this.
Greenblatt wrote an essay called Resonance and Wonder*, where he’s
really bringing some of the ideas from the new historicism into the space
of the museum or gallery. And he talks here about two different ways
in which museums exhibit objects, and his thesis is really that museums
tend either to exhibit wonder or they exhibit resonance. Each has its
positive dimensions, and perhaps each admits certain other possibilities
and encounters.
Resonance is an idea that connects back to the concept of new historicism.
By resonance he’s talking about the object as part of a wider context,
that larger world as he describes it, both in view of the complex dynamic
cultural forces from which it has emerged, and the form which it may
take. He’s drawing from that idea of an object within a collection
within a museum, as a metaphor for a wider culture.
By wonder, he is really talking not so much about the kind of the wider
context, but the possibility of the work of art or the object on display
as just, as he says, stopping you in your tracks. It has that the ‘wow
factor’, that arresting sense of uniqueness that evokes an exalted
attention.
Greenblatt talks about different ways in which museums try to create
each of these effects through the type of material that surrounds the
display of an object. When evoking wonder he talks particularly about
the isolation of the object in certain kinds of lighting, for example.
The challenge that we set ourselves was how to try to make an exhibition
of these ideas. We had a group of students who were researching ideas
from the Whitworth collection and, in conversation with Whitworth curators,
they came up with the idea that there should be a single object that
would form the centre of this exhibition, that would be displayed in
such a way to evoke wonder, and then around it in the exhibition there
would also be supplementary material and other kinds of objects and works
of art that would produce resonance.
The object that was chosen by the students and the Whitworth curators
is this textile,. It’s the Whitworth tapestry that was commissioned
by the Whitworth Art Gallery in 1968 by Edoardo Paolozzi and was woven
by Dovecote Studios in Edinburgh.
The context of this particular textile was extremely interesting. It
was commissioned by the Whitworth at a very critical moment in its history.
In 1968 the Whitworth itself was having a major architectural renovation,
and installing modern, open plan Scandinavian style galleries. So the
commissioning of this piece by Paolozzi signaled the moment of institutional
reinvention within the Whitworth, a moment which came to signal its commitment
to a post-war modernity.
This was the key object that we chose to exhibit, both in terms of wonder
and of resonance. And ironically I think you can see that it’s
actually very difficult using these modern spaces within the Whitworth
(precisely the spaces that the commission of the tapestry celebrated),
to evoke wonder, because there’s all usual clutter that you have
in a museum or gallery, the labels, a ventilation fan here and so on.
Also the ceiling lighting was not conducive to creating that of sense
of wonder. But these are just the practicalities of working in certain
kinds of spaces. If we’d had the budget to create a structure within
the space where we could have created a shrine-like effect, it would
have been a different thing, but this was an exhibition that was produced
for a few thousand pounds. So we really didn’t have the budget
to do that. But still the idea was that within the space, we would isolate
the object. You can see it’s hung against the wooden wall, and
there isn’t even a label next to it, breaking with good practice
standards at the Whitworth.
The tapestry with its richness and its complexity, is a wonderful object
to read. It’s very figurative, within the tapestry there are
lots of different characters in it, from Mickey Mouse through to kind
of computer generated imagery.
What we then tried to do on the walls leading back from the main focus
of the tapestry itself was to give it resonance. And we did this by linking
a network of ideas and connecting them with a kind of graphic device,
these arrows that emphasize the links between the objects, which again
quite an unusual way of exhibiting works of art within a space like the
Whitworth. On this wall are other pieces and also with Manchester. Paolozzi
was extremely interested in both Wittgenstein and also Alan Turing, each
of whom had a close connection with Manchester, because they both taught
at the university, so we were trying to draw out the resonance of the
tapestry and also the kind of cultural influences that affected Paolizzi’s
work.
And on the opposite wall some other pieces from the Whitworth collection,
both textiles and fine arts, showed work by artists who were also during
the 60s and 70s interested in the kind of digital visuality of computer
generated images, and also textiles, such as the pieces by Edie Squires
for Warner textiles just displayed on the wall there.
It’s not for me really to sort of judge its success in terms of
an exhibition. As I say, I think that we are always struggling with the
space in making these exhibitions. They are deliberately intended to
be experimental. But from one point of view it has tremendous value in
terms of an important partnership with the university gallery, with the
Whitworth. It’s a fantastic opportunity for the students to be
involved with this both in terms of researching the exhibition, producing
it, and also its evaluation. I think it’s also a model that, for
us, suggests ways in which we can develop further collaboration in terms
of research and practice with the Whitworth as well.
Well I’ll leave it there because I think the purpose of this afternoon
is sort of discussion as much as presentation, but obviously more than
happy to answer any questions about that or to take the debate on in
any dictation that you want to.
*Resonance and Wonder’ by Stephen Greenblatt, first published
in Ivan Karp and Stephen D Lavine (eds) Exhibiting Cultures. The Poetics
and Politics of Museum Display, published by The Smithsonian Press, Washington
DC and London, 1991 (pages 42-56)
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PRESENTATION TO THE SEMINAR ‘CONTEXT’ BY PETER MURRAY, DIRECTOR,
YORKSHIRE SCULPTURE PARK
MANCHESTER ART GALLERY, JULY 22ND 2006
Peter Murray
It is a great pleasure to be here. At YSP we work across the board and
although we may not know a great deal about textiles, we know a great
deal about contexts. The team approach at YSP is very important and we
have a great deal of experience working with and collaborating with artists.
Hardly a day goes by without an artist visiting or working on-site.
YSP started in 1977 when there was little support for contemporary sculpture
and few examples to see it in public places. There was no model to look
at in this country although some models in other countries e.g. Kroller
Muller in Holland which is a national museum with a wonderful collection
and well stocked sculpture garden.
At YSP we started with an empty space which was not open to the public.
Our first task was to create public access and over the years we have
learnt to understand the landscape, creating a context for sculpture
and generating a large and supportive audience. We have worked with musicians,
composers, poets, dancers and choreographers but our main concern is
sculpture and since 1977 have worked with hundreds of artists and organised
major exhibitions.
Context is one of the most important things to consider first when dealing
with sculpture in the open air. Plonk sculpture is something to be avoided
at all costs. Apart from the aesthetic consideration, we should be aware
of the social, environmental and educational implications of placing
sculpture in the open air. The growth of sculpture parks and public art
programmes has not always resulted in excellence. There are some mediocre
examples around the world. The initial aim of YSP was to create a museum/gallery
without walls and develop a sensitive approach to curating sculpture
in the open air. I don’t like it when sculpture parks are seen
as theme parks. We now have 500 acres of 18th century landscape and it
is a complex business working with nature, farmers, gardeners, estate
workers, the public and of course with artists. Without this level of
collaboration it would have been impossible to have curated such an impressive
programme of exhibitions.
The presentation then went on to look at a number of visual images of
sculpture in public places to emphasis the importance of context. They
included a highly inappropriate siting of a piece of sculpture on a roundabout,
a red stabile by Calder which was insensitively sited under a skyscraper
in New York and a monumental Henry Moore badly sited outside an art gallery.
The main point here is that the setting and siting overwhelms excellent
works of art doing a disservice to the artist and the public’s
appreciation and understanding of contemporary art. The point was further
emphasised by contrasting sculpture by Henry Moore at Hakone in Japan
and his King and Queen at Dumfriesshire, Scotland. King and Queen in
Scotland was also contrasted with the showing of the same sculpture at
YSP. Both were well sited, creating interesting but different contexts
which emphasised the importance of scale in sculpture.
From the outset, YSP has provided direct support for artists via residences.
Residences have provided support at a critical stage in the career of
artists we have supported. Examples include Sophie Ryder and Andy Goldsworthy
(images shown of them working in Yorkshire Sculpture Park).
Although YSP mainly concentrates on exhibitions, we have an important
collection. Examples shown include a Richard Wentworth, Anthony Caro,
Sol le Wit, Andy Goldsworthy, Henry Moore, Lynn Chadwick and others.
The slides were selected to emphasise context, placement, the use of
spaces, the changing environment and the experience of discovering works
of art distributed throughout the varied landscape.
Each year we curate a number of exhibitions (large and small) and over
the years we have developed a curatorial tradition for this work. Organising
exhibitions in the open air is very different to working indoors with
an emphasis on aesthetic placement rather than chronological development.
The relationship between the sculpture and the varied landscape is fundamental
and often much time must be spent on choreographing the shows, good examples
include Joel Shapiro and Magdelena Abakonowicz. These major exhibitions
required a great deal of choreographing to get the spatial relationships
right between sculptures, space and landscape. Several slides were shown
to illustrate and emphasise these points.
Over recent years we have built some impressive indoor gallery spaces.
These spaces have been built within the landscape and planned to provide
a link between indoors and outdoors. Slides of Underground Gallery were
shown to illustrate this point along with slides of William Turnbull,
Barbara Hepworth and others. The images were intended to provide an insight
into how we site and plan exhibitions, link between indoors and outdoors,
the use of vistas, how sculpture can lead visitors through the varied
landscape and how the interaction can provide insight into both nature
and sculpture.
The tactile nature of sculpture can be important and YSP provides kinaesthetic
experiences for visitors.
All exhibitions at YSP are supported by an extensive and exemplary education
programme attracting 30,000 children and students per annum. Images of
public sculpture workshops and other aspects of education work were shown
along with community activities. A good example was the Simon Whitehead
Walks to Illuminate.
YSP has developed a clear programme of residences, exhibitions and collecting
all supported by education. The next step is to create a series of major
site specific sculpture spread throughout the 500 acre landscape. Earlier
this year we launched the first of these with the opening of James Turrell’s
Deer Shelter Skyspace. Images were shown of James Turrell’s Roden
Crater in Flagstaff Arizona followed by his Skyspace created from an
18th century Deer shelter at YSP. The aim here was again to emphasise
context, a sense of awe and discovery along with the link between indoors
and outdoors and the elements.
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DISCUSSION BETWEEN PETER MURRAY AND DR. HELEN REES LEAHY MODERATED BY
DR. POLLY BINNS
‘
CONTEXT’ SEMINAR, MANCHESTER ART GALLERY, JULY 22ND 2006
Polly Binns
My difficulty, as always, is I have far too many questions
but my role is to set this conversation going between both of you. There
are two
elements that I feel have come over to me as each of you have talked:
the essential commonality both your interests and your projects have,
and the essence of discovery, and discovery to do with the participant,
i.e. the maker, the museum, the curator, as well as the discovery of
the viewer, of the audience, of the public. And also the complex relationships
that we all have with objects and how we encounter then.
My first little question was, I wonder do you have a piece of Paolozzi’s
sculpture in Yorkshire?
Peter Murray
Yes we have, we’ve got several, got quite a few Paolozzi’s.
We worked with Eduardo. He was a very good friend of the Yorkshire Sculpture
Park, and we worked with him several times. We organized an exhibition
of his work, I think it was for his 70th birthday, and we’ve got
eight sculptures along with a lot of works on paper.
Helen Rees Leahy
Coincidentally at the same time as some of our students
were working on the exhibition at the Whitworth, they were just delighted
to see the
same prints in fact on the café wall at YSP as we were going to
put up in the exhibition as well.
Peter Murray
The whole business of collaboration is fascinating because
when you work with someone like Eduardo, you just don’t know what
you will get. Sadly he’s dead now. He was one of the most generous
and one of the most difficult people you could encounter. So when you’re
doing a project with someone like him, particularly when you’re
dealing with something in the open air, it can be both vexing and interesting.
Generally speaking when we work with artists, not many of them have really
worked a space as large as YSP, and to have to cope with the 18th century
landscape, it is quite a challenge: even for the most determined of artists.
Polly Binns
What kind of induction process do you have - how do you enable
them to work within the landscape where they might be much more used
to siting
works in a sort of white cube space or, even an urban square, for example.
What kind of process do you go through with them to make it work?
Peter Murray
It’s a fascinating question, it obviously varies from artist to
artist. Often we establish relationships with artists over a long period
of time. If I can give you an example of this, Andy Goldsworthy first
came to the Sculpture Park as an Artist in Residence. We’re very
proud of our Residencies, and we’ve got quite an impressive record
in terms of artists going on and establishing themselves. Andy Goldsworthy
is a good example of that.
We’ve had an ongoing relationship with Andy for a long, long time,
but next year we are going do a huge Andy Goldsworthy exhibition and
have spent two years debating with him about how this exhibition will
evolve. These discussions will continue almost until the opening. Andy
Goldsworthy’s work is all about landscape. And we still are having
many, many arguments with him in terms of how it should be presented,
how it should be perceived. Andy in a sense is easier than many artists
because he is to do with the landscape, everything he does comes from
the landscape or goes back in the landscape. But if you take someone
like Philip King who works in a totally different way or Anthony Caro
who originally preferred galleries or clearly defined space, working
in the open air is more difficult. You had to have a defined space for
Tony’s work or Philip King’s work.
Fifteen years ago we organized Phillip King’s first open air exhibition.
We had quite a battle, because he preferred the formal garden and I just
knew it wouldn’t work. And so we had this long debate, walking
around the landscape, looking at the landscape and discussing how a piece
of sculpture can visually just blow away in the landscape if you don’t
establish the context.
In the end we were right and together we organized a great exhibition.
At YSP it’s very important to take into consideration what the
artist is trying to do, but it’s also very important to refer to
our own experience in terms of our understanding of the space, because
it’s taken us a long time to understand the space.
And that’s why earlier, I said generally we’re not looking
at the work chronologically, we’re looking at it in terms of, how
pieces of sculpture actually fit in the space and relate to the trees
and bushes and other sculptures.
Polly Binns
That, what I would call critical interface, that relationship
of the curator to the space, and to the artist coming in, in relation
to that
space, how much of that do you have an ambition to articulate to the
audience, to the viewer? Is it something that very much becomes part
of how the exhibition is discussed, is written about, or does it only
occur in a way in its visual context?
Helen Rees Leahy
As far as we are concerned, I think probably it’s
much more explicit in terms of, types of enquiry and research and practice
that we at the
Centre of Museology, because those are precisely our issues.
But I suspect that most curators don’t want necessarily to be
visible. I’ve had lots of arguments, again with curators about
how explicit this sort of reflective practice should be. I was at Kelvingrove
in Glasgow last week, which has just reopened, and I absolutely urge
anybody who has an opportunity to go and see it, because I think that
the redisplay of its collections is extremely interesting. I think it’s
really relevant to what we’re talking about this afternoon in terms
of context.
I think they have actually introduced, a really nice self reflexivity
throughout the museum and galley, where they use archival photographs
of what some of the spaces used to look like, and they’ve used
those photographs to answer questions about contemporary practice. When
you go into the gallery for example, there’s a text panel which
is a kind of Q&A of frequently asked questions. Why are so many objects
still in store? The easy answer is showing you a photograph of what one
of the galleries looked like in Edwardian times when it was stuffed full
of everything, like clearly nothing was in store, and of course nothing
is visible
It was a really nice kind of light touch way of just making some of
those issues explicit but without being too heavy-handed, and also without
detracting from the sensory and the kinesthetic encounter with the space
and the objects today.
Peter Murray
Generally speaking we don’t make that explicit, but for us it’s
a continual learning process in terms of how we actually use the spaces
we have. About two years ago the Arts Council Sculpture Collection was
rehoused at YSP. We’ve never had a collection to work with in the
way that museums have and so through the Arts Council England exhibitions
we are learning a lot about how you curate from collections, and how
you present this within an educational context.
Helen Rees Leahy
I suspect that walking around YSP, you are always aware
that you are passing a number of thresholds, and I think every time you
cross a threshold,
within any kind of institution that every time you cross the threshold
there’s a renewal of the kind of contract between the institution
and the visitor. When a visitor comes in here today they come in from
the street across the first threshold, and as they go through successive
thresholds, as they move backwards through the building, it marks a further
stage in a contract. And I think that certainly one is conscious of moving
from one kind of space to the next, and a different kind of opportunities
and encounters that one experiences there.
Peter Murray
Yes that is we try to do is we try to give that experience
of spaces, the sculpture park is a series of spaces. The whole concept
of the 18th
century landscape was to provide that experience of wandering through
the spaces, from the open to the enclosed, the open and the enclosed,
the panoramic and so on.
And that is, if you like, the guiding principle in terms of what we
are trying to achieve through the display of work, through the curating
of exhibitions, and also in terms of our new buildings. The dominant
theme about the estate was the landscape. There is a nice mansion but
it’s the landscape which is the dominant thing. We’ve tried
to hold onto the guiding principles of it and bring it, and respect those
spaces within a 21st century context.
In the early 19th century you’d just get this fantastic landscape,
and nothing would impede your view. And we try to do exactly the same
now. Now, you come around the corner and you get a Henry Moore, and that’s
it, and you’re not aware of anything else. You’re not aware
of the two lakes or any of the many other things - it is that process
of discovery.
The other thing about the sculpture park is it’s never static.
We’ve been continuously adding to the space. When we first started
we had around 100 acres, and now we’ve got 500 acres; gradually
over the years we brought back the designed landscape and so as we bring
back more of the landscape into YSP we have got to learn how to use that
space. We have large areas of land with no sculpture because we think
that by walking through that landscape, you will discover something,
James Turrell’s Skyspace, Andy Goldsworthy or Henry Moore.
Also we’ve got this incredible underground gallery now and the
Longside Gallery and between those two points we’re doing all sorts
of other things. We have the collection, or we might have another open-air
exhibition, or we might have a vast area with nothing in it apart from
an intervention by Andy Goldsworthy.
And as I mentioned earlier, we are going to about six major site-specific
projects throughout the landscape. These will be sculptures based on
the notion of shelter. They’re not going to be huge objects in
the landscape, they’re going to be part of the landscape, built
into the landscape. And so you will actually discover them as you move
through the landscape.
At the same time we are working with younger artists who have different
approaches. I showed you slide of Simon Whitehead, who is interested
in walking in the landscape, in a very different way to e.g. Richard
Long. We’re working with an American artist, Brandon Balengee,
who works with newts and he’s in collaboration in research work
with scientists which he’ll finish next year. So to summarise,at
YSP, you go from Henry Moore to someone working directly with nature.
It is a very interesting way of organizing a museum.
Polly Binns
You both spoke very much about working on different
levels, working in different ways with different forms of audience and
different situations.
I loved your comment about Anthony Caro being very reticent about working
with grass. I very much enjoyed what you were saying about the difficulties
of the gallery and the practicalities of air conditioning and air ducts
and everything around an actual piece of work, and I suppose what I’m
trying to get to is the notion of how work works on different levels
to what I call the repeat visitor.
An audience and a viewer who walks your landscape and may see an Andy
Goldsworthy one year, returns another year and they have the memory of
the Andy Goldsworthy. Then there is your viewer who comes to the Whitworth,
the Paolozzi is repositioned, or it even isn’t there; there’s
something else on the wall. And there’s that memory. It’s
that notion of how work acquires different meanings and memories for
those regular visitors.
Helen Rees Leahy
Well I think that’s wonderful, and in an age when, quite rightly,
we’re constantly exhorted to reach out to new audiences, I think
that having a core regular audience is a great resource. I think it’s
a different kind of dialogue and I don’t think one should ignore
that in the search for developing new audiences. For somewhere like the
Whitworth, which does have a core audience of people who have known that
gallery for a long, long time, and who love it, but who probably don’t
like certain things that happen there, it’s grist to their mill
because they can talk about why they don’t like it. I think we’re
able to do the kind of work that we’re doing at the Whitworth precisely
because that is part of the audience mix. We know that there are people
who will come into to the Whitworth who will never have seen an exhibition
quite like Resonance and Wonder, and they will never have seen the Paolozzi
shown in quite that way with the other pieces around it, using that kind
of textual frame.
So I hope that for those visitors it will be a new way of seeing something
afresh, something which they may be very familiar with, that’s
part of their cultural memory as regular visitors to the gallery. Certainly
again that’s something that we’ve had a lot of conversations
with here at Manchester Art Gallery. The Gallery was closed, I think,
for four years for the redevelopment of the building and I did some work
again with some of my Masters students it reopened, talking to visitors,
and that theme of cultural memory came out very strongly from that research,
the way in which people had again woven this building and this institution
into their own lives and particularly into their autobiographies of being
Mancunians, whether they were born in the city or whether they had come
to the city at a certain point in their life. The role of the gallery
as part of an urban map, a kind of urban repertoire, was a theme that
people frequently articulated and one that I found extremely interesting.
People could actually pinpoint certain things that had happened here
- a particularly popular exhibition, or when the very famous Stubbs painting
upstairs was bought. People said, oh, you know, I remember that because
I was getting married or I had just got a new job, and so on.
I found the kinds of personal connections people were making, and the
kind of entanglement of kind of individual memory with the kind of cultural
memory extremely interesting. And I think there is a tremendous resource
for institutions and for curators to work with, and to think through,
the implications of those connections in terms of practice.
Polly Binns
The ambition to show the very site specific pieces that are
in the process of being developed at the Sculpture Park, they themselves
are beginning
to create a collection. They are going to become work very much at the
core of the experience of the visitor who will keep returning. Is that
in a way shifting the Sculpture Park into a new area at all, a new stage?
Peter Murray
In a sense it is, but the ambition has always been there,
it was always part of the vision, it was always part of our master plan.
We do get
an interesting visitor profile at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, and people
do travel a long way. You can come for a very short period of time and
just have a coffee and a sandwich and see a small exhibition, or you
can come for lunch and spend the whole day as there is so much to see
and do.
One of the things that we are trying to do is to spread the visitors
out throughout the landscape. There is a number of site-specific projects
that will help to spread the visitors throughout the landscape, because
the footprint on an 18th century landscape.
It’s interesting politically also, how these things develop. When
we first started the Sculpture Park there was a huge amount of pressure
placed on us to actually make site-specific pieces. There was also a
huge amount of pressure placed on us to build up a collection swiftly
and quickly. Fortunately we were strong enough to resist the pressure.
The lifeblood of the Yorkshire Sculpture Park really is the changing
exhibitions, working with different artists, providing new visual experiences.
The seasonal changes, are in a sense reflected that through the programme
and through the artists. The artists have been so important in terms
of the Yorkshire Sculpture Park. They have been there since the outset.
The first thing we did when we started was, not organize an exhibition
but develop a fellowship or a residency for an artist, and we’ve
continued that in one form or another.
We have learnt a great deal about our landscape and as a result are
now in a position to look at the site specific projects. If you are going
to do something which is going to be there more or less forever, you
have really, really got to understand what you’re doing. And that’s
why it has taken so long for the site-specific pieces to emerge.
Polly Binns
It seems a very good arena in which to draw this to an end,
very much in the sort of context of the artist and in relationship to
work. So
thank you very much indeed.
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