A month of protest at the Contemporary Art Museum St Louis

I'm publishing less here this year, and moving a lot of my regular writing to a weekly Tiny Letter email newsletter (you can sign up here) where I bring together a group of things I've read in the past few weeks that share a theme I'm interested in. This past weekend's newsletter was a bit different, so I thought I'd share it here

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On September 16 the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis (CAM) opened the exhibition Kelley Walker: Direct Drive. Organised by their chief curator Jeffrey Uslip, the exhibition is a major survey of the New York artist's work, and takes over the entire museum.

Walker, born in 1969, is a white conceptual artist, whose work uses the forms of advertising and the techniques of screenprinting and digital reproduction to comment on political and social themes. Kelley Walker: Direct Drive includes a body of work from 2005 called Black Star Press. From the exhibition page on CAM's website:

A parallel to Warhol’s canonical 1964 painting Race Riot, Walker’s Black Star Press series comprises images of racial unrest that have been digitally printed on canvas, silkscreened with melted white, milk, and dark chocolate, and rotated in ninety- degree increments. These manipulations mask and partially censor the act of police brutality with a perishable material as well as alter the power dynamic between the image’s subjects. Similarly, in his series schema; Aquafresh plus Crest with Whitening Expressions, the artist scans smears of toothpaste directly onto a flatbed scanner. Digitally overlaying the scans onto a variety of images—including the cover of men’s hip-hop magazine KING—Walker creates gestural abstractions and alludes to consumption, objectification, and impermanence.

Works from the Black Star Press series are held by both the Saatchi Collection and MOMA (who have a sizable collection of his work).

On September 17, Walker spoke about his work in a talk at the museum. On Facebook, the black St Louis artist Damon Davis wrote about Walker's appropriation of black bodies, the display of these works in St Louis after Fergusson and in the current climate of race relations in America, and the artist and curator's lack of willingness to address this aspect of his work. Hyperallergic interviewed a number of attendees about the talk, and the subsequent call for the show to be boycotted.

On September 18, three black members of staff wrote to the museum's leadership, calling for Uslip's resignation, the removal of works, and stating the limitation they were placing on their working duties for the duration of the show.  Walker released a response through his dealer, Paula Cooper Gallery.

In late September, director Lisa Melandri said that removing the works would be censorship,but the museum would build a wall to conceal the works, and put warning signage in place. A press statement released by CAM stated:

Throughout our dialogue with community activists and leaders, we have listened to their requests to remove Kelley Walker: Direct Drive from the museum. In accordance with CAM’s steadfast commitment to free speech and freedom of expression, we have concluded, after lengthy and thoughtful deliberations, to keep the exhibition on view. Taking down the show would violate the Museum’s core principles and end the productive dialogue that this work has initiated. CAM has a history of showing controversial artists; we have shown works that have challenged common sensibilities and presented work that has critiqued, in a difficult way, misogyny, patriarchy, homophobia, and the military industrial complex, among other issues. Despite the debates and discomfort these exhibitions generated, we never removed them.

On September 29, the St Louis Post-Dispatch published an editorial stating that Walker and Uslip should have backed the exhibition and treated controversy as an opportunity for meaningful discussion.

On October 3, a CAM staff member was harangued at a petrol station while wearing a CAM-branded t-shirt: the museum released a statement that a number of its staff members had been harassed and threatened over the exhibition.

On October 7, a public event was held where Lisa Melandri took questions on the exhibition. (As a director of a contemporary art gallery myself, the idea of this fills me with fear, and also admiration.) At around the same time 20 local artists withdrew from a CAM-organised open studio event in protest over the exhibition.

At the beginning of this week, the resignation of curator Jeffrey Uslip was announced; CAM have said he is moving to another institution but chooses not to say which. Three days ago James McAnally wrote a piece for Hyperallergic titled A Call for a Collective Reexamination of Our Art Institutions:

What specific factors made the museum unable to appropriately address the community’s concerns and is the reason unique to this context or is it generalizable? Is it actually the museum staff or board members involved — their biases, their inability to act — or is it the complex relations between the museum and its many partners, supporters and collaborators at stake? Is it the maintenance of the museum’s reputation within the art world itself, defined here as the spectacle industry of art fairs and commercial galleries, biennials and trickle-out economics? Or perhaps we have to admit here that the art world and its institutions are in fact constructed of mutually exclusive communities — donors and neighbors, corporate supporters and those seeking alternatives, the demographics claimed in a grant report and those whom the exhibitions are actually organized for.

Watching this story unfold over the past month has filled me with questions. I can imagine the museum's leadership being sideswiped by what has happened. I can see a scenario where they believed they were bringing to their city an ambitious exhibition by a high-profile artist, containing works which were controversial but which could provoke meaningful discussion, in a move that would garner them national attention - if not for the reasons they thought. I can see a scenario where the leadership was bewildered as to why decade-old works were provoking protest when they hadn't previously. I can see a scenario where non-leadership staff looked at what was being planned by the people above them and were appalled by their choices but felt powerless (or simply chose not) to raise questions. I can see a scenario where staff on the floor had to soak up the community's response whilst they felt leadership was hiding in a bunker. I can see a scenario where board members, funders and other stakeholders lost their shit whilst collegial support melted away.

Most of all I have taken out of this how quickly our social contexts and social movements are changing. Artworks which ten years ago were judged valid and valuable for their political statements are now being decried and protested. It's a sobering (or perhaps an illuminating) thought as a museum professional.

Art News New Zealand column #1, September 2016

This year the team at Art News New Zealand asked me to fill in a column space for a regular writer who had pulled out; I chose to write about a phenomenon I'd noticed both internationally and very locally. The column might become a regular in 2017.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Visa Wellington On A Plate took place in August, and two associated events that happened in my neighbourhood really caught my attention.

At Thistle Hall, the small gallery at the top of Cuba Street, the Jelly Archive set up for a week: displays of brightly coloured, intricately molded jellies, accompanied by a ‘Mad Lab’ where you could buy a kit and book a session to make your own. The day I went in there were no other visitors, but in a corner three PR people avidly discussed their Instagram penetration whilst a camera-man filmed the set-up. The event was sponsored by Resene.

Across the street and down a little, in one of Cuba's charming heritage shopfronts, you could find the Whittakers K-Bar pop-up store, a 10-day nostalgia fest modelled on a 1950s milk bar, staffed by female servers in pink frocks and kiss curls and male baristas in white shirts and bow-ties. The cupcakes were wheeled over from Havana Bar's bakery in an on-theme handcart, the milkshakes took their flavours from the chewy confectionery, and the white shelves were piled with the three new blocks of chocolate with their K-Bar fillings. Over the two weekends lines stretched out the door and across the nearby carpark.

I walk along Cuba Street most days, and so these two events were inescapable. What really struck me about them though was their success as ‘immersion marketing’ - and their similarity to the work of museums.

Whittakers tapped into the nostalgia value of the K-Bar, originally launched in the 1950s, and amped that up with retro stylings, criss-crossed with bunting and sealed with scarlet lipstick. The whole pastel-toned experience seemed more reminiscent of a 1950s we've come to recognise from American movies than the real thing here in Aotearoa New Zealand, but watching the shop fit-out and operation was exactly like watching a museum display go up.

Meanwhile, the Jelly Archive (note that last word) co-opted the glass display cases of natural history specimens and called for visitors to contribute their jelly memories: “stories, handwritten recipes, vintage jelly moulds, old jelly boxes/packets, memories, photos. Basically we are after nostalgic stories around jelly to be part of one of the sections within the exhibition.” Mix in the hands-on experimentation and you've got a full social history experience.

Both projects point to a strong trend in product-driven experiential marketing, focused on getting customers to share a brand via social media. In America, the brand of ‘museums’ has been appropriated to form a framework for these ventures, a new evolution of the pop-up. Thus last December we had Glade's ‘Museum of Emotions’, a temporary structure housing a series of sensory displays, offering free entry and an exit through the gift shop, stocked with the company's new line of candles and room fragrances (the Village Voice assessed it as “a confusing mix of ambient advertising and immersive art”). It drew over 50,000 people and earned a Golden Lion in the Cannes Lions international advertising festival. More recently, Dove and Tinder were among the companies behind the ‘Museum of Ice Cream’, Hulu reconstructed Jerry Seinfeld's living room and invited people in to Instagram it, and Cheetos are taking online submissions of unusually shaped examples of the orange snack for a forthcoming offline museum.

The marketers have identified our brand potential as signifiers of desirable and worthwhile experiences and are now, you could say, eating our lunch. As SC Johnson's global chief marketing officer Ann Mukherjee said AdWeek, “How do you get people to remember a smell? Build memories around it. Create an experience. We gave the world a whole new way to look at Glade”. She sounds remarkably like a museum concept developer.

Or perhaps this trend points up an uncomfortable truth. As one visitor to the Museum of Emotions, Dayna Evans, wrote for The Awl, “When [we] tried to figure out how it was we even came to learn about the pop-up museum, we both realized that a lot of our more ‘arty’ friends had said they were attending the Facebook event. It spread virally. We trusted those people’s tastes, so we decided to go. We never really thought to check if it was worthy of praise, or even exactly what it was. This is the same principle by which the casual museum attendee learns to namedrop Cézanne and Miró. MoMA is just as much sponsored content as the Museum of Feelings - they’re just sponsored by different power structures.”

We've known for a while now that in the great competition for people's leisure time we're up against sport, hobbies, tv and the internet. Now we can add to that list a rival that looks just like us. The challenge then, it seems to me, is: how do we make sure we remain the best at being ourselves?

It's time to say goodbye

On a recent Slate Culture Gabfest, the hosts bemoaned cutesy 404 pages - the responses you get when your device is able to make contact with a server, but that server is not able to deliver the page you've requested. Perhaps the most famous 404 page was Twitter's "fail whale" (discontinued in 2013), and for a period there web people got very excited about making playful, pun-filled and beautiful 404 pages. It was seen as part and parcel of caring deeply for the user's experience ("We can't give you what you want but we'll make it beautiful!"). Pages and pages of results can be generated for a search for a phrase like "best 404 pages".

So it was a little disconcerting to hear people on this podcast who I really like seeing all this effort as going to waste. Perhaps no-one really wants to be delighted when they're told they can't have what they're asking for: maybe they just want things to be fixed.

To my mind, the artisanal 404 page is one of the great artefacts of Web 2.0, and I really hope academic study, plushy print publications, and considerable archival effort are being devoted to its documentation and retention for future generations to enjoy and learn from.*

Right up there with the 404 page is the shutting-down announcement. Nothing reminds you that the web is an ephemeral space with a metabolism akin to a hummingbird's like trying to remember all the web services you've used at some point and then had to transition on from when they close (here's me three years ago being overly upset about Google Reader shutting down: reader, life has gone on).**

I've been mulling this since clicking through a couple of links to the news of Hi.co - a location-based micro-blogging-ish site I'd never heard of before - setting to close at the end of this month.

I read about this in a post by Russell Davies, where he talks about the pleasure of writing on corners of the internet that are public, but not highly frequented. Starting on Gowalla Davies had written little fictional histories about places he was spending time; when Gowalla closed down he moved on to Hi.co, which is now, too, shutting down.

But they're shutting down in the most elegant way. As site founder Craig Mod writes in a Medium post, they are taking all due care of their users that they can, but also trying to record the existence of Hi.co for posterity. As he writes:

Web projects often lack hard edges. They begin with clarity but end without. We want to close Hi.co with clarity. To properly bookend the website. Sometimes web projects exhaust themselves. Outlive themselves. Are allowed to stagnate, be forgotten. Resources dry up and then one day — poof — they’re gone. This has happened countless times, Geocities being one of the foremost examples. We don’t want this to happen with Hi.co.

So, Hi.co is enabling users to download their archives, and to promising to keep an online archive alive for at least a decade. And they're also producing a small number of physical storage artefacts, inscribed with the content of the site, that will be deposited with institutions like the Library of Congress:

We’ve partnered with Norsam Technologies and Los Alamos Laboratories to utilize a special ion-etching process, capable of printing tens of thousands of pages onto a 2" × 2" plate. 

The process does not produce “data.” It is not like a CD. It is not a composition of 0's and 1's representing the information. It is the information itself. The nickel plate is a medium, not media. And everything printed on the plate will be readable with an optical microscope. 

The nickel plates have an estimated life span of 10,000 years. They’re fire resistant. They deal well with salt water. And because they’re printed with our pictures and words — assuming contemporary language is decipherable in the future — anyone who finds this and has access to fairly elementary technology (an optical microscope) will be able to read our thoughts and experiences as mapped to city and place.

It's such an interesting question. As with video games (see MOMA on acquiring their first batch) so many questions exist. What are you collecting when you try to memorialise a website or service? The code? The visual appearance? The user interaction? The history of the making and marketing of the site? Or the described experiences of those people who made and used it?

Businesses shut down all the time, and have for as long as they've been around. Traditionally they've been captured for the record - often incidentally, lurking in the background of the main focus) in photographs, newspapers, gazettes, phone books, correspondence, government records. Sometimes - when they're old enough, big enough, flash enough or loved enough - their closing is a cause for reminiscence and celebration. But often they just slip out of sight.

But websites and services seem to take their closures with the same seriousness that they take their launch. (Three thoughts on this: (1) people who work in web design are pretty much the most self-analytical and self-descriptive that I know - what other industry devotes so much time to examining and publishing in real time upon itself? and (2) People who are shutting down things on the internet are doing so in a medium beautifully designed for people to tell them exactly what they think of their decision; and (3) like 404 pages, the attraction of the graceful failure is as potent in this part of web operations as in any other.) Here for example is John Gruber announcing the shutting down of Vesper, a notes app, last week. Although the app is shutting down due to low usage (and, from my deduction, accompanying low interest) and a notes app is hardly a crucial life tool, Gruber's post is a detailed and thoughtful retrospective on what they could have done better, and why they made the decisions they did. No simple CLOSED sign here.

Here, for example, is a long and admiring article on the grace with which Glitch, a massive multi-player online game, was shut down. The game was built out of this almost obsessive love for the end user that powered early Web 2.0 properties like first-iteration Flickr (not coincidentally, the lead designer was the co-founder of Flickr and founder of Slack, both of which place/d a tremendous emphasis on surprise and delight of users). From the Glitch post announcing their shut-down, the list of FAQ titles:

1. Why why why why?
2. What will happen to the team building Glitch?
3. What will happen to Tiny Speck?
4. How long will the game remain open?
5. Can people still sign up to play?
6. But I spent money! What about that?
7. I'm really angry about this!
8. Why can't you sell the game so someone else can take it over?
9. Why don't you give the game away or make it open source or let player volunteers run it?
10. Why can't you just _______________? 

Or for another example, look at how Matt Webb announced the closure of design company Berg through a poem on the company's blog (week 483, RIP). And here's his post on the Little Printer blog that shares that announcement, and explains that Little Printer, Berg's experiment in the Internet of Things and a more human interface with the web, will also be shutting down. And here's his post - redolent of a late night and too many cups of coffee*** - explaining that he's "trying something:

Hi everyone. Hello from where I’m sitting at home in London. It’s Sunday night, I’m Matt, my personal homepage is over here. Till recently I was CEO at Berg, now I’m the last employee and trying to wrap things up nicely. To do that I’ve got about a day a week cos I also now have other commitments. 

I’d like to try something…

I really hope someone out there - an obsessive individual, an academic, or an institution - is collecting these artefacts. By their very nature they're usually written in places that will soon disappear from the internet, and then all we'll have are the GigaOm and FastCompany rehashes (until they too degrade away.) and gravestones in the Internet Archive. But they're such a visceral and telling part of this period of design, communication, and business.  They deserve to be held on to. Maybe there's more nickel-plate books to be made.


*Seriously, there don't seem to be any print publications on the history of the 404 page, and I think that's a real oversight. And of course, all my bookmarks on this topic are long-lost in the endless shuffle of bookmarking sites I've been through over the past decade or so.

**Also, of interest to me but probably not for you, looking at what sites I opened first when I got up in the morning, I've gone from Email > Twitter > Reader > Work email to Feedly > [work] Facebook > Twitter > Email > Instagram .... work email when I get to work.

*** I have no idea how late it was or whether Webb even drinks coffee - I suspect not - but you get what I mean.

Millennial child

This essay was my contribution to The Third Enjoy Retrospective Five Year Catalogue, edited by Louise Rutledge and available from the Enjoy website for a value-packed 20 bucks. Thanks to Louise and Emma Ng for inviting me to write for this.

Millennial child  

Enjoy and I appeared in Wellington in the same year: I moved here to study art history at Victoria University, and Enjoy materialised on Cuba Street, a fresh new space for contemporary art practice. My perspective on what Enjoy offers has changed in pace with my own involvement in the art world: as a young arts reviewer, Enjoy was where I went to seek out edgier presentations than those I saw elsewhere; as an arts viewer it was an essential part of my rounds of the galleries; today, it’s where I go to locate emergent voices in art making, curating, and writing. It’s fair to say I can’t imagine Wellington without Enjoy.

I wrote the above earlier this year when Enjoy asked me for a letter of support for a funding application. I was pleased to be asked to support the gallery - flattered, even - because for a good while I was a little intimidated by Enjoy's effortless cool, the contemporary language of the work they showed. Scrolling through the (new, bounteous) online exhibition archive I realised there was a lag of two or three years between arriving in Wellington as a third year arts student and becoming a regular at the old gallery on the other side of Cuba Street.

Wellington was on a visual arts high at the turn of the millennium. The Adam Art Gallery opened in September 1999, and Te Papa (a mixed bag for the arts audience, sure, but perhaps the single biggest moment in Aotearoa New Zealand's museological history) had opened in February 1998; in Porirua, Pataka opened September that same year. In 1999 Massey University had also merged with Wellington Polytechnic, establishing the College of Design, Fine Art and Music. There was a new concentration of established artists putting down roots, and a new cohort of younger artists and art students to fill a space like Enjoy.

Something else came to Wellington in 2000 - the fifth Labour government. Technically, Helen Clark became Prime Minister on 10 December 1999, but let's not let a matter of 21 days stand between us and aligning this auspicious moment with the new millennium. In addition to being our first elected female Prime Minister, Clark took the role of Minister for Arts, Culture and Heritage. And boy, could you tell. Even as a student, I could feel the concentration of energy and belief around the visual arts in Wellington (edged with a deep border of frustration and betrayal amongst those older than me over the treatment of contemporary art at Te Papa).

This was the environment in which I came of age. It was one that made optimism around the visual arts feel natural - and one that made the leadership of women feel equally natural. In addition to the lodestar of Helen Clark, in my nearer orbit were Jenny Harper as head of Art History at Victoria, Tina Barton in the same department, Zara Stanhope as the inaugural director at the Adam, the redoubtable Cheryll Sotheran at Te Papa and Paula Savage at City Gallery Wellington. I held part-time jobs at various stages in all four institutions.

Enjoy was reflective of these trends - both towards the investment in a Wellington arts scene (an art scene that could lead the nation) and towards female leadership. From Charlotte Huddleston onwards, Enjoy has been exclusively helmed by women; a fact remarked upon in with some rancour in the first Enjoy Five Year Retrospective Catalogue by Tao Wells, an original Enjoy member.

Today much has changed, and as I look around me that buoyant positivity that I took for granted at 21 has dissolved. The National government is seemingly unassailable, and the most important announcement from central government to the arts sector this year has been a warning that more belt-tightening is needed as predicted income from Lotteries falls. While we no longer bask in the warm glow of Clark's championing of the arts, on the upside we do see increased female leadership across our art galleries, and the beginning of I what I hope is a generational change away from Pakeha dominance.

And we see the endurance, and maturation, of Cuba Street’s scrappy artist-run space. A move across the road to the same floor as Peter McLeavey Gallery placed the gallery literally on the same footing as the establishment. While still the most freewheeling figure on the Wellington visual art scene, Enjoy is definitely an “institution” these days, a place with a whakapapa of staff and supporters, artists and projects.

It's not easy to stay optimistic in the arts. But I think Enjoy has cracked the nut of that problem. Stay focused on nurturing new talent, stay focused on encouraging experimentation, stay focused on knowing and sustaining your community of interest. Draw your energy from these actions. Use that energy to support others. Kia kaha, Enjoy, and happy sweet 16.

Final report: visitor experience in American art museums

The day has finally come - I've submitted my report on my Winston Churchill Memorial Trust-supported trip late last year around art museums in seven different American states.

I've called the report Getting closer, looking deeper, coming back sooner: The visitor experience in American art museums, mostly because I found myself ready to PDF up my long-laboured-over document and realised I'd never considered a title for it and needed something quickly.

Below are the preface, areas of focus, and bullet-point conclusions from my research trip for context. You can also download the full report (49 pages) 

Preface 

If the museum is to flourish in the 21st century, it cannot afford to be solely a place of retreat from society. It must stimulate, provoke and engage, as well as offering a place for contemplation or consolation. It must be a place in which we can share in a commonwealth of ideas. (Serota, 2015)

Since the 1970s the stereotype of the museum being a starchily exclusive place for the quiet contemplation of rarities by those with the educational and social advantages to appreciate the experience has been steadily challenged, not least by people working within the sector.

In New Zealand, a wave of new galleries in regional cities (the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth, 1970; The Dowse Art Museum, Lower Hutt, 1971; the Manawatu Art Gallery, Palmerston North, 1977) explicitly set out to make the best of New Zealand's cultural production available to local constituents. An account of the opening of the Manawatu Art Gallery began:

People contributed [to a fundraising drive] because they knew the gallery would not be another city monument to an elitist arts society. Luit Bieringa has deliberately tried to make the gallery as accessible as possible to all the people of the Manawatu, whether their interest be in functional pottery or conceptual art. (Spill, 1977) 

Over the course of the 20th century, museums reoriented from a focus on collecting and categorisation to a focus on public service by way of education. This shift saw the visitor grow in prominence in the museum's view of its own operation. Over the past two decades, the visitor has shifted again, now to the centre of the museum's operation. Museums are increasingly seen as social spaces, and today's greatest innovations in museum operations are inspired by the social and economic changes intricately entwined with the rise of the internet.

The GLAMs (galleries, libraries, archives and museums) sector has avidly adopted the affordances of the internet to find new ways - from social media channels to podcasts to releasing 3D scans of collection items - of connecting the public with their offerings, and to enlarge the voice of individuals within the museum. I count myself fortunate both to have come of professional age in this part of our sector, and to have the opportunity through this research trip to explore some of the world's most vibrantly innovative museums, and better understand how they strive to serve the audiences today, and plan for those of tomorrow.

Areas of focus

My proposal for WCMT funding focused on researching four areas of museum operation:

• Connecting with visitors through digital technology 
• Visible storage displays 
• New models of membership programmes 
• Outreach programmes serving people on the autism spectrum and people with dementia, their families and caregivers 

Due to several staff not being available at the time I was visiting, or staff turnover at institutions, I was not able to conduct a great deal of research into the outreach programmes I had identified in my original plan. I met with several educators during my visit, but learned little beyond what I already knew from reading online resources.

However, as I travelled, I found myself focusing a great deal on three aspects of the visitor experience that I had not expected to study closely: exhibition spaces specifically designed to introduce new visitors to the museum's collections and exhibitions, such as those recently created at the Brooklyn Museum and in development at the time of my visit at the Baltimore Museum of Art the museum store, as a site for preparing for and reflecting on the museum visit the role of visitor hosts in American museums compared to their New Zealand equivalents.

As a result I have not included a section on outreach programmes in this report, but have written up my observations on key visitor experience trends in a fourth chapter.

Quickfire conclusions

Each of the four focus areas has its own set of conclusions. Here are the highly summarised points from these:

Digital innovation 

• Leading museums are focusing on developing 'eyes-up' experiences that encourage closer looking, questioning, and further discovery after the physical visit (Cooper Hewitt and Brooklyn Museum)
• Museums are using digital projects as part of their overall branding efforts (Cooper Hewitt, DMA, Brooklyn Museum, media stories on opening of Los Angeles' The Broad and SFMOMA in San Francisco) 
• External funding focused on digitally-enhanced visitor experience at individual institutions may be discouraging collaborative development, and projects focused on online users of museums (Bloomberg Philanthropy) 
• There is a danger that digital brands may become disassociated from the physical visiting experience (Walker Art Center) 

Open storage 

• Open storage initiatives continue to offer an more 'free range' and exploratory experience for visitors, compared to modernist exhibition design, and also assure visitors that not all the collection is ‘locked away’ 
• Some open storage displays are becoming tired, and feel static (Brooklyn Museum, Smithsonian American Art Museum) 
• There may be lessons for digital innovation projects fuelled by external funding in the model that seems to have been established by the Henry Luce Foundation grants for visible storage (significant initial investment and then dwindling ongoing attention/funding) 
• Digital projects are offering alternative ways to blend digitised collections with the physical visit (Cooper Hewitt's Immersion Room) 
• New 'orientation' galleries with mixed density displays may offer a more engaging option for contemporary audiences (Brooklyn Museum, Baltimore Museum of Art)  

Membership programmes 

• Free entry-level membership options are being offered in tiered membership programmes to encourage traditionally non-visiting audiences to attend museums, and to increase repeat visitation (DMA and MIA Minneapolis) 
• 'Free' membership is often an exchange of the visitor's data for this access; this data can be used in many ways, from better understanding audience demographics to targeting retail promotions 
• The introduction of free membership programmes accompanies a revolution in the understanding of the visitor host role (DMA) 
• Collection of significant amounts of data from our visitors creates new ethical obligations for museums over how this data is collected, stored and used 

Visitor experience 

• Major art museums around the United States have astounding collections, but can feel repetitive when visited in quick succession. 
• Even small displays that buck this trend for can convey a strong and individual sense of place (BMA)
• Museum stores can play a significant role in communicating the vision and personality of a museum (American Visionary Art Museum, Mia) 
• Large museums can induct new visitors and help them to engage with large collections through thematically-curated, cross-collection introductory galleries (Brooklyn Museum, BMA) 
• Smaller museums can distinguish themselves by cultivating distinctive personalities and ways of relating to people (American Visionary Art Museum, ASI)

Download the full report (49 pages) 

Final report: visitor experience in American art museums

The day has finally come - I've submitted my report on my Winston Churchill Memorial Trust-supported trip late last year around art museums in seven different American states.

I've called the report Getting closer, looking deeper, coming back sooner: The visitor experience in American art museums, mostly because I found myself ready to PDF up my long-laboured-over document and realised I'd never considered a title for it and needed something quickly.

Below are the preface, areas of focus, and bullet-point conclusions from my research trip for context. You can also download the full report (49 pages) 

Preface 

If the museum is to flourish in the 21st century, it cannot afford to be solely a place of retreat from society. It must stimulate, provoke and engage, as well as offering a place for contemplation or consolation. It must be a place in which we can share in a commonwealth of ideas. (Serota, 2015)

Since the 1970s the stereotype of the museum being a starchily exclusive place for the quiet contemplation of rarities by those with the educational and social advantages to appreciate the experience has been steadily challenged, not least by people working within the sector.

In New Zealand, a wave of new galleries in regional cities (the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth, 1970; The Dowse Art Museum, Lower Hutt, 1971; the Manawatu Art Gallery, Palmerston North, 1977) explicitly set out to make the best of New Zealand's cultural production available to local constituents. An account of the opening of the Manawatu Art Gallery began:

People contributed [to a fundraising drive] because they knew the gallery would not be another city monument to an elitist arts society. Luit Bieringa has deliberately tried to make the gallery as accessible as possible to all the people of the Manawatu, whether their interest be in functional pottery or conceptual art. (Spill, 1977) 

Over the course of the 20th century, museums reoriented from a focus on collecting and categorisation to a focus on public service by way of education. This shift saw the visitor grow in prominence in the museum's view of its own operation. Over the past two decades, the visitor has shifted again, now to the centre of the museum's operation. Museums are increasingly seen as social spaces, and today's greatest innovations in museum operations are inspired by the social and economic changes intricately entwined with the rise of the internet.

The GLAMs (galleries, libraries, archives and museums) sector has avidly adopted the affordances of the internet to find new ways - from social media channels to podcasts to releasing 3D scans of collection items - of connecting the public with their offerings, and to enlarge the voice of individuals within the museum. I count myself fortunate both to have come of professional age in this part of our sector, and to have the opportunity through this research trip to explore some of the world's most vibrantly innovative museums, and better understand how they strive to serve the audiences today, and plan for those of tomorrow.

Areas of focus

My proposal for WCMT funding focused on researching four areas of museum operation:

• Connecting with visitors through digital technology 
• Visible storage displays 
• New models of membership programmes 
• Outreach programmes serving people on the autism spectrum and people with dementia, their families and caregivers 

Due to several staff not being available at the time I was visiting, or staff turnover at institutions, I was not able to conduct a great deal of research into the outreach programmes I had identified in my original plan. I met with several educators during my visit, but learned little beyond what I already knew from reading online resources.

However, as I travelled, I found myself focusing a great deal on three aspects of the visitor experience that I had not expected to study closely: exhibition spaces specifically designed to introduce new visitors to the museum's collections and exhibitions, such as those recently created at the Brooklyn Museum and in development at the time of my visit at the Baltimore Museum of Art the museum store, as a site for preparing for and reflecting on the museum visit the role of visitor hosts in American museums compared to their New Zealand equivalents.

As a result I have not included a section on outreach programmes in this report, but have written up my observations on key visitor experience trends in a fourth chapter.

Quickfire conclusions

Each of the four focus areas has its own set of conclusions. Here are the highly summarised points from these:

Digital innovation 

• Leading museums are focusing on developing 'eyes-up' experiences that encourage closer looking, questioning, and further discovery after the physical visit (Cooper Hewitt and Brooklyn Museum)
• Museums are using digital projects as part of their overall branding efforts (Cooper Hewitt, DMA, Brooklyn Museum, media stories on opening of Los Angeles' The Broad and SFMOMA in San Francisco) 
• External funding focused on digitally-enhanced visitor experience at individual institutions may be discouraging collaborative development, and projects focused on online users of museums (Bloomberg Philanthropy) 
• There is a danger that digital brands may become disassociated from the physical visiting experience (Walker Art Center) 

Open storage 

• Open storage initiatives continue to offer an more 'free range' and exploratory experience for visitors, compared to modernist exhibition design, and also assure visitors that not all the collection is ‘locked away’ 
• Some open storage displays are becoming tired, and feel static (Brooklyn Museum, Smithsonian American Art Museum) 
• There may be lessons for digital innovation projects fuelled by external funding in the model that seems to have been established by the Henry Luce Foundation grants for visible storage (significant initial investment and then dwindling ongoing attention/funding) 
• Digital projects are offering alternative ways to blend digitised collections with the physical visit (Cooper Hewitt's Immersion Room) 
• New 'orientation' galleries with mixed density displays may offer a more engaging option for contemporary audiences (Brooklyn Museum, Baltimore Museum of Art)  

Membership programmes 

• Free entry-level membership options are being offered in tiered membership programmes to encourage traditionally non-visiting audiences to attend museums, and to increase repeat visitation (DMA and MIA Minneapolis) 
• 'Free' membership is often an exchange of the visitor's data for this access; this data can be used in many ways, from better understanding audience demographics to targeting retail promotions 
• The introduction of free membership programmes accompanies a revolution in the understanding of the visitor host role (DMA) 
• Collection of significant amounts of data from our visitors creates new ethical obligations for museums over how this data is collected, stored and used 

Visitor experience 

• Major art museums around the United States have astounding collections, but can feel repetitive when visited in quick succession. 
• Even small displays that buck this trend for can convey a strong and individual sense of place (BMA)
• Museum stores can play a significant role in communicating the vision and personality of a museum (American Visionary Art Museum, Mia) 
• Large museums can induct new visitors and help them to engage with large collections through thematically-curated, cross-collection introductory galleries (Brooklyn Museum, BMA) 
• Smaller museums can distinguish themselves by cultivating distinctive personalities and ways of relating to people (American Visionary Art Museum, ASI)

Download the full report (49 pages) 

Digital humanists love network visualisations, but ordinary people say, ‘so what’?

The title of this post is taken from a recent talk by Mia Ridge, Network visualisations and the ‘so what?’ problem. In the talk Mia (who is a digital curator in the British Library working mostly with pre-1900 archives but also a long time proponent of better uses of the web to get people using and understanding the holdings of cultural organisations) addresses some of the things that really concern me about the use of visualisations and interactives in the cultural sector: specifically, the question ‘What does this tell me that I couldn’t learn as quickly from a sentence, list or table?’.

That is my question with so many of the visualisations I see, especially the network ones, which seek to show you links between people, objects, places, dates, all of these things, some of these things, and/or other things.

A recent example that floated across my feeds is this visualisation of Miles Davis's legacy, as represented through mentions of him in various contexts on Wikipedia pages (from artistic collaborators to 'drug users').

It's a truly beautiful thing, and it certainly has the "spronginess" that Mia mentions as one of the appeals of visualisations like this.

But I still don't feel like I get a lot more from it than I do from the sub-1000 word write-up, and while pop-up boxes and swirling colours indicate connections and sites of information to me, I don't feel better informed than I do by a similar paragraph.

One of Mia's most salient points, to my mind, is this:

Sometimes a network visualisation isn’t the answer … even if it was part of the question. 

As an outcome of an exploratory process, network visualisations are not necessarily the best way to present the final product. Be disciplined – make yourself justify the choice to use network visualisations.

I've been pondering visualisations as a small part of a much bigger question (well, bigger for me, currently): how do you give a visitor to an art exhibition the context and detailed info that will open up the work to them? I think about this all the time - it's my job - but I've also been thinking about it a lot since visiting Space to Dream at Auckland Art Gallery, which exposed how superficial my knowledge of South America is. How could I have gleaned the information I needed about relationships between countries, about political movements and protest, about art and culture, that I needed to get the most out of the opportunity to see all those works brought together?

In light of this, I was intrigued by Jarrett Fuller's A Rough Sketch for a Video Essay as Design Criticism, recently sent to me by a friend. Fuller - using the Eames' films, and Orson Welles' last film, F for Fake - asks whether video, rather than writing or graphic design, is the best medium for describing and critiquing design for an audience.

A Rough Sketch for a Video Essay as Design Criticism from jarrett on Vimeo.

I'm not exactly sure what separates the video essay, as Fuller details it here, from a short documentary., except the intent: which is much the same, I suppose as saying that what separates the curator's wall panel from the reviewer's column is intent.

We all tend to use the tools we're most skilled at and excited by to express our ideas - writers with words rather than pixels, for example, a data visualiser with graphics rather than sentences. This points to an exciting future however where more curators may come from a design background (or schooling where basic design and coding is built in) and we can more easily find ways of inducting audiences into art than the current mis-match of text panels to artworks allows ....

The counting game / women, the art market, and visibility

I'm already saving up for my next trip to the States, and visiting the newly (massively) extended SFMOMA is high on my to-do list. Paul Laity's article in the Guardian gives great background on the museum as it was, the major long-term loan from the Donald and Doris Fisher collection and subsequent drive to get SF-based collectors to contribute works, and the new building and displays.

Given that SFMOMA is asserting its cultural might against the benchmarks of its East Coast 'rivals' - it has been previously 'lost out' for having a weaker modern art collection compared to the holy grail held by MOMA - director Neal Benezra is focusing on contemporary (1960s-onwards) art:

The director talks of the reopening being a “game changer for San Francisco”, but is careful to emphasise that the museum is now world-class in “contemporary” art – work, that is, from the last four decades of the 20th century and since – rather than “modern”. “I define modern art as going up through abstract expressionism,” he explains, “then with Warhol and Lichtenstein and the pop artists, Johns and Rauschenberg, there is a return to the visible world in one way or another. And to me that’s … contemporary art.” 

... Benezra offers no apology for where SFMOMA’s strength lies, and as we tour the galleries his excitement at the remarkable bounty of the new museum is obvious. “You’ll be hard pressed to see a better room of Warhols,” he says, pointing out celebrated new acquisitions including Silver Marlon, with Brando on his Triumph motorbike from The Wild One, and the Triple Elvis, as well as the museum’s own famous study of Elizabeth Taylor on horseback, National Velvet. There is also a “museum within a museum” of 26 works by Kelly, who became a good friend of Doris Fisher. These include the jazzy arrangement of rectangles Cité from 1951, and the vivid stripes of Spectrum I, as well as the sliced shapes of Red Curves (1996) and Blue Panel (1985). The Kelly rooms, Benezra says, are “strikingly beautiful”: “We expect our colleagues in other museums to be green with envy.”

Now, I adore Ellsworth Kelly. When I first saw a whole room of Kellys, I cried. But as I was reading the article I couldn't help noticing the paucity of women artists being name-checked compared to men, to the point where I had to get up and grab some paper and a pencil so I could do a count. It worked out as 32 named male artists to 7 named female artists (not all the male artists are necessarily represented in the new displays - Picasso, for example, is noted for not being well represented at the museum).

This might well be unconscious bias on the part of the author, or a quirk of the way the tour of the building was organised, or perhaps there were far more works by women artists on display that just didn't make the cut for the final article (no works by women artists are represented in the images either). But even when we get to the top floor and the most recent art - the self-consciously contemporary zone - it's all men:

The top floor of the museum leaves the Fisher collection behind and brings the museum’s holdings up to date, by showing media arts and works made since 1980. “We wanted it to be the most contemporary space,” Benezra says: instead of a ceiling, the ductwork has been left exposed for a rather predictable touch of industrial chic. We walk past a Jeff Wall light box not yet switched on, and pieces by Ai Weiwei, Matthew Barney and Richard Prince.

The article makes an interesting contrast to this recent interview with Frances Morris, the director of Tate Modern, which is also about to reopen a major extension. Morris has taken a feminist approach to curating (though it makes me a bit sad, still, that showing women artists should be a considered a feminist act and not simply a curatorial standard) and the re-opened Tate Modern will position the museum in our current cultural focus on diversity:

For the past decade, she has been devoted to building up the Tate’s international collections of modern and contemporary art, and has also been the curator of, during the past decade, a trio of important exhibitions of women artists: Louise Bourgeois, Yayoi Kusama and Agnes Martin. This rebalancing towards work by women has become an increasing priority for Morris, along with shifting the gaze of the institution away from just Europe and the US, towards Latin America, Asia, the Middle East and Africa. Her feminist drive “began to grow significantly when I started working with the collection a decade ago; I realised what a deficit [of work by women] there was. And then I was in a position to do something about it. I encourage colleagues to dig a little more when they see interesting work by a woman artist they haven’t heard of before, or to be aware of where women have been overlooked. Sonia Delaunay [the subject of a show at Tate Modern last year] is a case in point. For years people had been saying, ‘Let’s do a Sonia Delaunay show,’ but the feeling would be, ‘Oh no, the work isn’t strong enough.’ Well, what on earth did that mean? The work was unbelievably strong and diverse – but nobody actually knew its full extent.’”

I don't want to shit all over SFMOMA from a great distance, based on no more information than this single article. In fact, I'm more calling the article out as part of thinking through a current trend in art dialogue. There has been a great deal of attention paid to Hauser Wirth & Schimmel's opening show in their new L.A. mega-gallery, Revolution in the Making: Abstract Sculpture by Women, 1947-2016, and a reasonable amount (somewhat less favourable) to the touring exhibition of women artists represented in the Rubell collection, No Man's Land: Women Artists from the Rubell Family Collection.* It has been suggested - I forget by whom, and where - that part of the reason for this rising emphasis on women artists, especially in the context of dealer galleries, is that this is a place where the market has headroom. If only a handful of living women artists (e.g. Cindy Sherman) are commanding the astronomically high prices at auction that their male counterparts achieve, that suggests that there is a place to grow the market by asserting the importance of women artists, both contemporary practitioners and the back-catalogue of older or deceased artists who can be brought under the spotlight.

It feels like a slightly grubby way of achieving equality: capitalism driving diversity. But the article about SFMOMA also feels to me as if it's framed by the market: these are blue-chip artists being name-checked, and their prices are not far distant from their works ("Richter, the world’s most revered (and expensive) living painter."). As part of their expansion drive, the museum went out and made specific asks to local collectors for particular artists' works, or works from a certain period in an artist's career. I can't help but detect as I read the market-driven effects of private patronage on American art museums. The only way to test this against reality, of course, is to visit as soon as possible.

*Coincidentally, but perhaps not surprisingly, the name of a show of women artist's work at The Dowse in either the early 80s or early 90s - I'm not at my desk to check.

On exposing the archive, and being held static in time

(Fair warning: this piece is full of waffly writing and some awkward language. I will refine with time and feedback, but I wanted to get this out more than I wanted to edit it.)

On the 8th of April we hosted 'Four Waves of Feminism' at The Dowse, a one-day conference that re-presented a group of talks given by artists, curators and researchers from the Making Women Visible conference earlier this year at Otago University, and bookended these with two panel discussions, one looking back to earlier moments in New Zealand's feminist art history, and one exploring the current energy around feminism in our art scene.

I said in my opening remarks that we had chosen the title Four Waves of Feminism as a nod to the emergence of a new, internet-fuelled era of feminist consciousness and activity, and also  to the different decades and generations the presentations covered. The metaphor of waves also appeals to me, as I feel like each generation (or more accurately, each hub of thought and action) of feminism has acted like a wave: rolling in, carrying ideas upon it, sometimes joining together, sometimes tussling, depositing traces, and occasionally writing over each other. In employing this metaphor I was very much thinking of how Lita Barrie's 1985/6 paper 'Remissions: Toward a Deconstruction of Phallic Univocality' and other pieces of criticism had argued the case for artists such as Jacqueline Fraser and Christine Hellyar (artists whom I became very familiar with early on in my studies and through visiting exhibitions from the 2000s onwards) and dismissed as essentialist the work of artists like Juliet Batten (far less prominent in the art history I was taught and the art I saw).

The day didn't try to be didactic or to drive towards a statement about what feminism means today. Rather, it was an attempt to surface and share information and perspectives. It was driven by the same desire to better understand where we have been and where we are now that led me to kick off the timeline of the feminist art movement (still not the right title - as Tina Barton raised at one point on the day, are we talking about feminism as a subject, a mode or as a tool?) that I felt earlier this year.

The day was very densely packed with presentations and I've yet to really process it. On reflection, we shoe-horned too many presentations and panels into this one opportunity; as Matariki Williams discusses in an excellent assessment of the day for Tusk, there wasn't time to discuss everything that was quickly raised and moved on from.

Two interlinked strands of thought have evolved from me since Friday, which I want to explore here. One is around history and the archive: why things are saved, why they might submerge or disappear, and how and to whom they are made available in the future. And the other is the way people change over the duration of their lifetimes, and the tension when we want to treat (or use) people as an artefact.

In doing so I've organised my snippets from talks according to how they've fitted into the development of these chains of thought, not how they were presented on the day: some talks do not appear, but that doesn't mean they aren't in my mental mix.

Ahi Rands, speaking about the work and archive of performance artist Linda T, evoked the activist catch-cry: Nothing about us without us. It was a phrase that certainly resonated with people at the event, but one that for me summed up the struggles of not only those being spoken about, but those doing the speaking.

There are pragmatic difficulties inherent in undertaking even relatively recent art history: of tracking down dates, places, titles, names, contact details, of negotiating permissions and access. The women's art movement in New Zealand included a number of networks and collectives, with core and more transient members, some of whom have stayed connected with the art world, some of whom have migrated elsewhere, and some of whom have died. Some participants remain close to that time and their work then; others have distanced themselves from, no longer feel close to, or simply struggle to recall the events and emotions of 30 or 40 years ago. The challenge for the art historian in particular is to what extent they chose to work in collaboration with participants from the time, and to what extent they chose to historicise the period, working with documentation and primary material and the accompanying body of theoretical thought. This is a tension of the archive: the degree of separation you chose to enforce between the object and its original maker and context. While it wasn't voiced directly on the day, I got the feeling from conversations in breaks that an archival/academic or theory-driven approach was definitely not the favoured approach for many of the younger members of the audience, compared to a preference to consult with participants from the time.

Kirsty Baker presented on the Wellington Women's Gallery (1980-1984), based on her MA thesis research. Talking to Kirsty later on in the day, and asking her what triggered her to select this topic (she is a Scottish transplant to New Zealand), she told me about visiting the Wellington Media Collective exhibition at the Adam Art Gallery, seeing the Women's Gallery mentioned there, feeling somewhat shamed that she didn't know what this was - and then realising that many people she spoke to had not heard of it either. (Over the weekend I read Marian Evans' (one of the co-founders of the Women's Gallery) piece 'They Might Have Completely Forgotten Us' on the way the gallery was portrayed - or not - in the exhibition.)

Kirsty made a elegant point about visibility and prominence, using a quote from Juliet Batten. She was kind enough to email it through to me:

In the decades prior to the Gallery's opening, the Western discourse surrounding New Zealand art was concerned predominantly with an effort to characterise a distinctive national identity. The prevalence of landscape painting, along with the painterly portrayal of New Zealand's 'hard, clean light', were observed to be central to this development. The increasing dominance of this type of painting was compounded by Gordon H. Brown and Hamish Keith in their 1969 book An introduction to New Zealand painting, in which they insinuated the weight of their qualitative judgement into the discussion. Writing 20 years after Brown and Keith, Juliet Batten - an artist and educator heavily involved with the Women's Gallery - highlighted the narrowness of their judgement, stating "much has been written about the quest for the 'New Zealand' identity in art: in fact it has been written about as if it were the only identity search going on in the visual arts in this country."* 

 In question time, a point was raised from the floor: perhaps not all those involved in the Women's Gallery wanted to be mainstreamed? This point made me think of a talk I heard by Latoya Peterson at a MOMA panel discussion titled 'United States of Fluidity' when I was in the States last year. You should definitely watch the talk online, where Latoya talks about appropriation of culture, and especially black culture, in areas as diverse as high fashion and Korean rap. At the end of her talk, whilst noting that "everyone wants to be seen, everyone wants to be noticed, ... everyone wants to be appreciated", she quotes bell hooks:

Concurrently, marginalized groups, deemed Other, who have been ignored, rendered invisible, can be seduced by the emphasis on otherness, by its commodification, because it offers the promise of recognition and reconciliation.

In the Q&A following the presentations, Latoya said one of the most powerful things I heard on my trip: Culture always loves to sell your revolution back to you. The impact of hearing this inside the walls of MOMA - the pinnacle of recognition, and also the ultimate site of the smoothing of any narrative for the public digestion of millions - was massive for me. It made me question whether the mainstream museum impulse to "recognise and reconcile" marginalised groups and stories by making them accessible and understandable to a wide audience can avoid either the dulling of edges or (perhaps worse) the removal of the integral nature of difference and resistance from activist and dissident groups in particular. What do you lose when you arrive?

Roma Potiki, a panellist from earlier in the day, also raised the point that for some women, participation in the Women's Gallery was a potentially dangerous activity, and that being outed (for instance, in the case of women who explored a lesbian identity in this safe space) could have resulted in the time (or even now) in personal or professional damage. Again, the tension of the archive: does the act of saving something for the future presuppose the notion that its future involves becoming public?**

Caroline McBride gave a short presentation on the Auckland Art Gallery's early concepts around an exhibition of their feminist art archives, including the Juliet Batten archive and the Feminist Art Network archive.  Given the general tenor of the day, this possibility created a lot of excitement. (One of my hopes, as a co-organiser, is that the day would be one full of sparks, as people connected what they already knew with new information. Given that the history of feminist art and activities in New Zealand is a scattered and partial one, it seemed to me that by drawing together speakers from different generations could help create this situation. I was delighted to see it happening, and experience it myself, and I know from talking to Caroline that the context she has for these archives held by the AAG was enlarged by the day.)

The AAG also holds copies of the Women's Art Archive interviews conducted in the early 1980s by Lita Barrie. The idea of presenting these interviews - and the challenges of tracking down all the interviews and gaining permission - is fascinating in light of some of the above points. In her talk, Caroline noted how struck she was by the way individuals and collectives had committed from their beginnings to documenting and recording themselves. Was it done, she asked rhetorically, from a fear that their voices would disappear as soon as they began to be heard - that visibility was a tenuous thing?

This may have been one driver. Another is that rediscovery and presentation of past female artists was a key activity in feminist art history (see Linda Nochlin's germinal 'Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?' on this) and thus the assembling of evidence was a tactic in increasing women artists' - past and present - profile. Yet another, perhaps, is that self-examination, documentation and analysis had entered artistic practice and some disciplines (such as anthropology or sociology) as a valid undertaking, alongside forms of performance art that also intersected with feminist practice. Take Mary Kelly's Post-Partum Document (1973-1979) as perhaps the most famous example from the time. I think there's an intriguing piece of work to be done around this documentation and its drivers in the context of Aotearoa New Zealand.***

Again, I wondered during Caroline's talk whether display in such a public domain as the Auckland Art Gallery was what these original contributors had in mind. To be preserved does not automatically mean 'in order to be made public one day', and even to be published even means something different in the internet age.

I'm particularly alert to this at the moment thanks to a piece written by Canadian librarian (and for a short period, my colleague at the National Library of New Zealand) Tara Robertson, on the digitisation of On Our Backs, a Canadian lesbian porn magazine that ran for 20 years from 1984. The magazine has been digitised by Independent Voices, an incredibly admirable undertaking to digitise special press archives, and especially dissident or radical publications.

As Tara writes, on the one hand her heart leapt to see something she could relate to recognised and made available in this way. And the correct copyright process had been followed. However:

... there are ethical issues with digitizing collections like this. Consenting to a porn shoot that would be in a queer print magazine is a different thing to consenting to have your porn shoot be available online. ... Most of the OOB run was published before the internet existed. Consenting to appear in a limited run print publication is very different than consenting to have one’s sexualized image be freely available on the internet. These two things are completely different. Who in the early 90s could imagine what the internet would look like in 2016?

The art historian in me wants access to everything because detail and context is delicious, and because it's how I can build a full picture and come to a nuanced understanding of what I'm studying.

The museum professional in me has a greater regard, perhaps, for the right for objects, ideas and information to be restricted in their access, because different individuals, groups and cultures place different value upon the importance or correctness of sharing them widely.

Laid over this is the situation when public institutions are the chosen repositories of material, for the long-term safety but also the mana that they hold. At same time, these institutions tend to uphold the values of access and dissemination of knowledge and culture. This of course is the tension we've been banging on about with Tiffany Jenkins' latest book and her arguments against repatriation and for mandated general access to museum holdings.

These values are mutable as well, and change over time: to think that the feelings and expectations that surround an object (a taonga, an oral recording, a portrait photograph) remain preserved at the point when they entered the archive is to misunderstand changing relationships over time, either from the originating individual or from their associates and descendants. Okay then isn't okay now; not okay now might be okay one day. It's vexed and there's no one answer or easily applied logic and that's why its vital we have develop shared understandings of expectations and culture (including the expectation and culture of the museum) so we have a firm basis to honour these agreements throughout time.

Tina Barton gave perhaps my favourite presentation of the day, for its unexpected playfulness. It was an examination of her own archive: of the period when she returned to university, aged 26, and did the new Women in Art paper at Auckland University (taught by Elizabeth Eastmond and Cheryll Sotheran). Tina showed us pages from the diary that all students in the paper were encouraged to keep, and read us sections, simultaneously wondering at and gently ridiculing that special headiness of being a post-grad student who's both fired up by and questioning their topic.

Tina has unearthed this diary for the purpose of Four Waves, having not looked at it in many years. She said she felt distant enough to assess what she had created with some objectivity: she's not that person any more. On the other hand, she was somewhat horrified by the notion that someone might use that diary in an assessment of her current practice. Later in the day, in conversation with Roma again, we talked about how some participants in early feminist activities had moved on in their lives: they may no longer hold those same views, or feel them with the same energy, or even recall them with great clarity after the passage of several decades. There's another tension here, of wanting to treat (or use) people as storehouses of information and memory, to access the power of first-hand knowledge.

I read, just before the event, Michelle Dean's wonderful essay on the poet Adrienne Rich in the New Republic. In it, she quotes a letter from Rich to a friend, about James Baldwin:

James Baldwin is as dead as Medgar Evers. Was he always, or did he die a slow death? I haven’t reread any of the early essays or that first novel that seemed so good to me five years ago. Maybe our perceptions are getting sharper. Maybe he sharpened them, blunting himself in the process.

As with Tara's post, with Latoya's presentation, and the talks called out above, those words got into my head. Maybe art history is written and experienced through a constant process of sharpening and blunting. Hopefully with Four Waves we've contributed to the sharpening, for a while at least.

* The Batten quote is from an essay of hers titled "Art and Identity" in David Novitz and Bill Willmott (eds.) Culture and Identity in New Zealand (1989).

*Of course archives have protocols such as embargoes and permission levels that can determine when and by whom material can be accessed. As noted above though, any decision made at the time of depositing cannot plan for all future eventualities.

**Now that I have said this, I daresay someone will point out to me that it's already been done, in which case, hooray.

Who owns culture - thoughts provoked by Tiffany Jenkins

Over the weekend, I participated in an accidental masterclass on contemporary museum values. It all started on Friday afternoon, when I read British sociologist and writer Tiffany Jenkins' recent blog post for OUP, which marks the launch of her OUP-published book Keeping Their Marbles: How the Treasures of the Past Ended up in Museums, and Why They Should Stay There. The blog post left me aghast - for reasons I will come to soon. 

I've struggled in the past with what I see as Jenkins' rigid - even wilful - reluctance to treat with museums on their own contemporary terms, and her tendency instead to frame all arguments in absolute terms of what museums are and aren't for. The OUP post is the latest in a couple of years' worth of strongly worded and (I believe) intentionally provocative statements Jenkins has made on the topic of museums repatriating collection items to source communities. (It makes sense that earlier columns, such as this one for The Scotsman or this one for Spiked, both from 2014, were leading up to this book.)

Jenkins is vigorously opposed to repatriation, and - for that matter - to many of the contemporary activities and goals of museums. From the Scotsman, her definition of the purpose of museums:

The role of museums is to further understanding of past civilisations and their accomplishments. 

And from that Spiked article, on the British Museum's decision to loan one of the Elgin Marbles to the Hermitage Museum as a self-conscious act of cultural diplomacy:

This is about soft power, improving relations between countries, rather than inspiring people with the artworks and the values of the ancient world. The loan is an attempt to show the relevance of museums to modern society. If they can prove they are essential to international relations, they might survive. 

These strategies threaten the future of the museum. Pursuing social outcomes that museums can’t possibly achieve will come at the cost of their core role: research and dissemination of knowledge. The decision to loan the marbles to Russia shows that museum heads today have things completely the wrong way around: artefacts should not be put to work for the museum; the museum should be put to work to understand the artefacts. 

In her blog post, Jenkins makes a series of assertions, including:

• repatriation activities are not only returning collection items to source communities, but limiting what museum-going audiences (where 'museum' means, implicitly, the encyclopedic collections of parts of Europe and North America) can see and learn from 
• the involvement of source communities in decisions about the management, research and display of collection items makes an 'unfortunate elision [] between someone’s ethnicity and their authority to speak definitively about cultural artefacts, which excludes those who do not share that ethnicity, despite their expertise' and leads to 'the disappearance from public display of important material' and the restriction of access on the basis of spiritual, religious and cultural beliefs 
• consulting a source community in research for a collection or exhibition ('it’s true that people who may be close to the original manufacture and use of an artefact will reveal a significant amount about its creation, use and meanings') is okay, but 'granting a measure of control to people on the basis of their apparent cultural roots' risks threatening the museum's highest purpose, as 'a secular institution in the service of historical inquiry' 

The most breathtaking assertion to my eyes however was this:

The Western traditions for the production and disposition of knowledge [] are the best way to research history and culture. Indeed, surrendering the authority to curate an exhibition to communities on the basis of their identity hinders the understanding of the very people it claims to help, because the effect is to make it impossible to research historical—and current—indigenous life. And it is an approach that does nothing to address the political and economic problems faced by indigenous populations. 

I was blown away by what I perceived as the enormous arrogance of that position. At that point, I wrote two tweets 

Sweet jeepers: "The Western traditions for the production and disposition of knowledge [are] the best way to research history and culture."

— Courtney Johnston (@auchmill) February 26, 2016

That last from the ever-reliable Tiffany Jenkins https://t.co/c6bJbmn8rG #ttrttpt

— Courtney Johnston (@auchmill) February 26, 2016

Via those tweets, a number of New Zealand museum professionals and cultural commentators went to the article and a robust, occasionally emotional, and occasionally defensive conversation ensued. I took part, here and there, but also settled into write a blog post - the first draft of which was definitely emotional and defensive, and not especially robust. Since then, I've been following the conversation, and trying to widen my understanding, and trying to articulate my own position - an endeavour that has resulted in this piece you're reading now.

From that blog post I went to Jenkins' site, and found there this review of her book, by John Carey, published in the Sunday Times. Carey describes the book as "an outstanding achievement, clear-headed, wide-ranging and incisive" and Jenkins' position as a defence of "the enlightenment ideal of universal knowledge" against the "betrayal" of Western museums returning artefacts (obtained legally or illegally) to source communities. He also notes that "[a]t its most extreme the case for repatriation can sound like the ravings of some weird apocalyptic sect", a characterisation of communities' desire to have their taonga returned to them that is best unsympathetic and at worst - well, I'll leave it to you to decide what your 'at worst' is.

Carey extrapolates Jenkins' arguments against the return of the Rosetta Stone to Egypt, the Elgin Marbles to Greece, and the Benin Bronzes to Nigeria, with recent atrocities committed against cultural heritage:

Her book is timely. The enemies of enlightenment are strong. In March 2015, Isis bulldozed Nimrud; in September they destroyed parts of Palmyra. That the great national museums should safeguard their collections has never seemed more vital. 

This kind of generalisation - that museums' collections are under an ideological threat from repatriation that is equivalent to the danger posed to architecture and objects in an ideologically-driven war zone - is inflammatory in the extreme.

It's worth taking a moment to interrogate the word 'enlightenment' there, because it's important. Far from being the kind of omniscient, objective institution Jenkins and Carey describe, today's Western encyclopediac museums are founded upon a set of English and North American Enlightenment-era ideals, relating to how the natural and cultural phenomena of the world should be collected, organised, studied, interpreted, displayed, and made publicly accessible. The British Museum's Enlightenment Gallery sets out the museum's raison d'être - of universal collections and universal access (a term which has morphed with time, as originally 'universal' originally meant "learned and studious men, both native and foreign": the right of access was limited to those of the correct gender, educational level, and financial ability to travel).

Tangentially, the BM's own study guide for this gallery is a fascinating read. To the point however: in 2004 the then-director of the British Museum, Neil MacGregor (who stood down at the end of last year) mounted a spirited, eloquent, and almost convincing defence of the need for institutions like the British Museum to hold true to these ideals and, in particular, resist the pressures to return items to source communities, or the "narrowing of [an] object's meaning and its appropriation to one political agenda", actions which would both threaten the public's ability to encounter a collection that "embraces the whole world" and therefore "consider the whole world".

This is a noble and important goal and role. It's one that Jenkins clearly believes in wholeheartedly. However, I personally and professionally believe it to be a goal and role that can't be treated as one static set of unchanging rules and conditions, but one that must be aspired to, and worked on, at a level that effectively encounters each item that resides in a museum collection on its own terms, with respect to who it was created by, when, and where, and with what original intent - and the path it travelled from its source to the storeroom or gallery in which is now lies. I fundamentally support the collaborative care of collections in partnership with source communities. I acknowledge that the repatriation of objects is a far more nuanced and difficult topic - and one that changes in every instance under consideration - and I don't claim to have any hands-on professional experience in this area, let alone guidance as to when repatriation is "right" or "wrong". But I disagree with Jenkins' assertion that a source communities claim must always be bested by that of the enlightenment museum.

To ensure I wasn't just going off half-cocked, I sat down and read the first chapter of Jenkins' book, which is available online. The book has three aims, which she delineates in this introduction. First, she sets out to explain how Western museums (my modifier, not hers) have assembled their collections over time. Here she acknowledges that 'repatriation sceptics' - a group she sees herself as aligned to, but not part of - tend to "underplay the more questionable acts by means of which objects were seized".

Second, she seeks to understand why the conversation around repatriation is becoming louder, and the number of requests is growing. She writes:

More countries, groups, and individuals have agitated for the return of ‘their’ artefacts since the late 1980s than did in the past. The objects that they want returned were taken centuries ago. Yet the cries for return escalate. ... Returning artefacts is said to heal the wounds of the past, to provide a kind of therapy to the descendants of those violated, and to restore the objects to their rightful place. Great claims are made for what repatriation can do and what the movement of cultural artefacts can achieve. 

My hackles rose as soon as I read this - based entirely on my education and experience as a 21st century museum professional raised in Aotearoa New Zealand. Perhaps the "cries for return escalate" because indigenous communities all around the world are finally - after decades or centuries of economic, educational and social disadvantage resulting from colonial actions - finding themselves in the position to think about expanding their reclamation of self-governance to their lost heritage, and also having the social, political and and financial leverage to undertake this work?

Thirdly, Jenkins outlines what she sees as the role of the museum. For her, this is clear (even in our ever-more nuanced times):

My central observation is that our great museums as institutions are struggling to find their place in the new millennium, and that this is an important contributing factor in why they have become the object of scrutiny, and defensive in response. Social changes and intellectual currents have contributed to challenging the foundational purpose of the museum: to extend our knowledge of past people and their lives. Since the latter half of the twentieth century, museums have faced a crisis of conscience and confidence, as an array of social and intellectual shifts—including the ideas of postmodernism and postcolonialism, which question the possibility of knowledge and common understanding—have become mainstream. With the influence of these trends, the institution has become a focus of a relentless critique, castigated for historical wrongs and current social ills. (My emphasis)

Here Jenkins frames the museum sector's evolving understanding and interpretation of its role in society in negative, reactive and reluctant terms - rather than proactive, collaborative, and socially-driven ones. Her assertion of "the foundational purpose of the museum: to extend our knowledge of past people and their lives" is one she defends against all things she sees as encroachments, from co-curation of exhibitions to child-oriented programming.

All of this left such a sour taste in my mouth, and anger in my heart. I mentally railed against Jenkins' solipsism, her Eurocentricism, her patronising tone towards the descendants of those people who originally made, lived with, used or worshipped the objects to which she refers: the "sincere laypeople from the relevant cultural group", a phrasing which denies the learning and professionalism of so many I see working around me in Aotearoa New Zealand, and in particular the role and work of kaitiaki Maori here.

So I went looking elsewhere. I went, for example, to the work of an anthropologist Jenkins disparages in that blogpost. I elided Ruth B. Phillips' name in the above quote, so let me reintroduce it here:

Removing artefacts that were once on display is an increasingly common practice in museums with indigenous collections, one celebrated by the anthropologist Ruth Phillips, as rendering objects “invisible” and as a “grand refusal of key Western traditions for the production and disposition of knowledge.” 

... Scholarship cannot thrive if limits are placed on who can investigate the past, or if lines of investigation are shut down. The Western traditions for the production and disposition of knowledge, so disparaged by Ms Phillips, are the best way to research history and culture. 

The quoted phrases from Phillips are drawn from a chapter of her book Museum Pieces: Toward the Indigenization of Canadian Museums, and a chapter from which Jenkins' quotes can be (mostly) read online. It relates to the return of particular taonga - ceremonial objects, never intended for general public display - to their original tribal owners. It describes what is to my mind the future of the responsible and responsive museum: a storehouse at the service of its many communities, a place where objects and ideas are lodged, but also released, on the basis of community consensus and changing needs.

I went to Huhana Smith's description of taonga in E Tu Ake, a description that conveys the power of objects and ideas and cultural knowledge as far more active and pluripotent than Jenkins' static objects, which wait to be cracked and communicated by qualified researchers:

taonga - both physical and intangible - have a vital connection to a living culture. They are sacred links to the past - a past that is alive in the present and that guides Maori towards the future. Taonga are an expression not only of the histories, identities and world views of Maori, but also the future political aspirations of this strong and resilient culture. 

I went to Mark O'Neill's (head of Glasgow Museums) response to Neil MacGregor's article above, and the the preceding 2002 Declaration on the Importance and Value of Universal Museums, signed by over 30 international museums, asserting the universal values MacGregor argues for. O'Neill challenges many of these assertions, including the implication that the non-returning of objects is somehow a neutral act. He writes, near his conclusion:

Unless the museums which signed the Declaration make a fundamental shift in their basic mode of engaging with visitors, they will remain not universal, but narrowly metropolitan. Despite new mission statements tailored to fit the political language of our time, they continue to insist on being the centre, not merely in a geographical or demographic sense which could be transcended, but as the point from which all others are viewed and judged. The clearest evidence for this is the almost complete absence of any but the curatorial voice from their displays - there is no technical or aesthetic reason why historical and/or contemporary voices from the cultures which produced the objects couldn’t be included. The sense of being the invisible centre is reinforced by the exemption of one culture in each museum from scrutiny – that of the metropolitan country itself. 

And I stumbled upon a piece by Tessa Laird, published in Natural Selection in 2007, that I have not previously read, a meditation on her visit to the Musee Quai Branly on the occasion of its opening, and her discomfort there. Laird writes:

I experienced moments of elation and moments of a kind of dread and even nausea (perhaps it was the jetlag). I felt giddy at the enormity and weirdness of it all. Because, no matter the architecture, the multimedia, the MONEY, it was still white people looking at the sacred artefacts of non-white people for a frisson, a tingling of the nerves, a form of entertainment like any other. And while it’s an enormous privilege to be able to view such works, it’s one I’d gladly relinquish for the far greater privilege of witnessing the return of these objects, masterpieces, taonga, to their original people and contexts. 

In the end, I think that the only truly “modern” museum is one that repatriates its collections. Just imagine all the “going home” stories! If each one could be as detailed and magnificent as the one elucidated by Paul Tapsell in Pukaki: A Comet Returns, we would be culturally richer, not poorer, for the process. These are the stories I want to hear. 

It's a thought experiment worth working through. What if we could go back and say to every original maker or owner: This is what we who manage the museum believe it is for - to share knowledge and beliefs through objects and scholarship. Do you wish your taonga to be part of this? And on what terms? What would we learn about ourselves, not only from those objects, but from those conversations? What understanding of the "whole world" could we foster then?