Seeing the exhibition of Goya's Disasters of War at Manchester Art Gallery is a dismal experience, strangely encapsulated by one label accompanying one of the etchings - "A group of people gather sadly around a corpse which is hidden from view". The display itself is as professionally shown, in dim light, nicely laid out, as you'd expect. It is strongly supplemented with Jake & Dinos Chapman's model version of the disasters, reinterpreted with nazi torturers. But to get into the gallery you have to go through an anteroom which features children's prints of war themes - as usual, children's art is only of interest to their parents. Interestingly, quotations from the children have also been mounted in vinyl on the wall; the first one seemed to recognise this problematic intervention: 'Katy' comments: "...it makes me uncomfortable as it is so far removed from my experience and I dont know whether it is right to make a comment on it." It is a mercy that the child-centred stuff hasnt bled into the Goya/Chapman space though children are endlessly present in the show because the noise of them shouting and screaming in a nearby 'education' space fills the air. So the small group of adults looking at the prints looked very much like a group of people gathered sadly around a corpse which is hidden from view.
Showing posts with label Kids in Museums. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Kids in Museums. Show all posts
May 19, 2010
February 20, 2010
The badge machine is broken
I have been looking forward to the reopening of the remodelled and extended National People’s History Museum http://www.phm.org.uk/ as I held the old version in very high esteem. So high in fact that I used to have to steel myself for a visit because some of the histories, displays, documents, the moments of social revelation were so powerful that I would be moved to tears. This was the only museum that had such a profound effect on me – although appalling, even the Hiroshima Atomic Museum didn’t touch me so deeply.
Living in Manchester you have to have low architectural expectations – an ‘international’ city with no (contemporary) international architecture. Walking passed the museum every day, I have parenthesised my view of Austin-Smith: Lord design (http://www.austinsmithlord.com/ ) as competent mediocrity (although having seen the interior the ‘competent’ may be generous –
picture: the foyer, notice the big column right in front of the information desk). But this isn’t an architecture review; so, hopeful for the survival of something special, for my first hopeful visit I committed not to let any architectural flaws detract from the central experience.
The warmth and earnestness of the staff as we entered lifted the spirits with a sense of a collective endeavour committed to the seriousness of the mission to privilege and treasure the memory of working class struggle. And then to the museum proper… and my heart sank.
The first thing we looked at was the temporary photography exhibition “Carried Away” – “taking a sideways look at protest through the last 100 years, illustrated by images of individuals being forcibly removed from the protests by the authorities.” (As it was an exhibition of images illustrating forcibly removal from protests, I am not sure what was ‘sideways’ about it). Many of the images from anti-fascist riots in the 30’s through the Miner’s Strike, anti-apartheid, anti-nuclear, etc, were powerful, and I really wanted them to accumulate into the emotive effect I craved, a celebration of resistance and courage, but the neat arrangement of images circled something crass in the centre of the space: a (new) tent on a photo vinyl of grass on the floor and a (new) rainbow flag hanging. It was a clumsy reference to the peace camps but what pushed it over the edge was a table beside it with colouring pencils and a badge making machine. In another part of the room I looked at the comments book – the comment which caught my eye was from a child: “very very nice but the badge machine is broken”. Obviously a child’s critical vocabulary is unrefined, and I dont actually care that the machine was broken - that's what happens - but this seemed to be a double indictment of the display rather than the play equipment: fundamentally, those images shouldn’t be very very nice but they had become strangely photographically interesting rather than politically engaging; and the broken badge match is symbolic of an aesthetic problem at the heart of the conception of the museum.
There now seems to be a museological conceit that the history of workers’ struggle is manifest as primarily a graphic style, that trade unions’ and protest campaigns’ are characterized by their use of sloganising badges rather than ideas.
The frequent repetition of the museum’s new circular logo itself announces the importance of the badge as the focal point of the history.
The case is repeated in the colour coding of the displays (see sign)
And pulling out from this colour text we see a juxtaposition which again reinforces this idea.
Moving to the two floors of galleries, paradoxically, despite the colour coding, displays, items and ideas are jumbled and confusingly juxtaposed; really appalling moments of people’s struggle are thrown away; the uplifting cultures of hope are dissipated, collective aspirations for beauty and justice are marginal. At this point, I confess that there was an elephant in the museum which was completely invisible to me. Or should I say monster in the museum. It took Sue to point it out: this is a children’s museum! I think I have conditioned myself not to see the dismal signs but with her observation the sad reality confronts you.
Everywhere there are colouring-in activities, dressing up opportunities, lift the flap to find out, act out with puppets displays. If only I had remained blind to it. Faced with this I would just dismiss a museum as no interest, but as Sue used to be teacher, she made professional comments – though actually equally critical: her view is that given modern children’s greater sophistication and at the same time shorter attention span, this model of display and activity is outmoded for engaging children over 6. A good example of the problem is the pictured puppet activity. Puppets of British political leaders from the 70s and 80s.
The label invites children, for that is height at which the “TV” is located, to conduct interviews. As Sue observed, what educational value does that have? The children have no knowledge of who the puppets represent or any of the political stances/philosophies which those figures stood for.
Because UK museums are measured by the number of visitors, as currently configured the museum will be a success in those terms; it will be loved by families with toddlers (2-6 year olds can pick up a Busy Bee explorer backpack) and schools – the latter because it is almost a school worksheet on the wall. It offers all the labour-saving preparation work that teachers relish. But Sue summed up the problem thus: The history of people’s struggle has been reduced to the form of Spot the Dog.
I think(hope) the museum as a whole is a more complex picture; the value of its work is immeasurable; it has very significant labour history archives, serious relationships with academic institutions and international working history museums which are commensurate to the seriousness of the history it retains. However, curatorially, it has been infected by the national cultural policy which homogenises and dumbs everything down. Given that this museum should be the inspirational repository of a class memory, a memorial to the ordinary made heroic, and a rallying idea that progressive change has and can be achieved, the prioritisation of toddlerism directly contradicts, neuters and marginalises the idea and experience that “there are ideas worth fighting for”. For me, the most powerful museum has been brought low. For the next few weeks the museum is in a ‘soft opening’ period, but sadly has conceptually located its public access at the level of Kids in Museums and as such it now seems distant from the idea of positive social and political change in favour of the central edict of public funding: the importance of civic and capital management of public thought. I felt a little sad for the staff whom I respect greatly, who in my experience are committed to the idea, optimism and knowledge of workers’ history but the policy landscape in which the museum operates, distorts its past in the deadening political shift that has redefined community (of idea, geography or workplace) as family, family as Engels observed the organisational unit of capitalism, and family as a mediated child-obsessed hierarchy in which complexity or collective action by definition are unnecessary and undesirable.
– Clock yourself in
Living in Manchester you have to have low architectural expectations – an ‘international’ city with no (contemporary) international architecture. Walking passed the museum every day, I have parenthesised my view of Austin-Smith: Lord design (http://www.austinsmithlord.com/ ) as competent mediocrity (although having seen the interior the ‘competent’ may be generous –
picture: the foyer, notice the big column right in front of the information desk). But this isn’t an architecture review; so, hopeful for the survival of something special, for my first hopeful visit I committed not to let any architectural flaws detract from the central experience.The warmth and earnestness of the staff as we entered lifted the spirits with a sense of a collective endeavour committed to the seriousness of the mission to privilege and treasure the memory of working class struggle. And then to the museum proper… and my heart sank.
The first thing we looked at was the temporary photography exhibition “Carried Away” – “taking a sideways look at protest through the last 100 years, illustrated by images of individuals being forcibly removed from the protests by the authorities.” (As it was an exhibition of images illustrating forcibly removal from protests, I am not sure what was ‘sideways’ about it). Many of the images from anti-fascist riots in the 30’s through the Miner’s Strike, anti-apartheid, anti-nuclear, etc, were powerful, and I really wanted them to accumulate into the emotive effect I craved, a celebration of resistance and courage, but the neat arrangement of images circled something crass in the centre of the space: a (new) tent on a photo vinyl of grass on the floor and a (new) rainbow flag hanging. It was a clumsy reference to the peace camps but what pushed it over the edge was a table beside it with colouring pencils and a badge making machine. In another part of the room I looked at the comments book – the comment which caught my eye was from a child: “very very nice but the badge machine is broken”. Obviously a child’s critical vocabulary is unrefined, and I dont actually care that the machine was broken - that's what happens - but this seemed to be a double indictment of the display rather than the play equipment: fundamentally, those images shouldn’t be very very nice but they had become strangely photographically interesting rather than politically engaging; and the broken badge match is symbolic of an aesthetic problem at the heart of the conception of the museum.
There now seems to be a museological conceit that the history of workers’ struggle is manifest as primarily a graphic style, that trade unions’ and protest campaigns’ are characterized by their use of sloganising badges rather than ideas. The frequent repetition of the museum’s new circular logo itself announces the importance of the badge as the focal point of the history.
The case is repeated in the colour coding of the displays (see sign)
And pulling out from this colour text we see a juxtaposition which again reinforces this idea.
Moving to the two floors of galleries, paradoxically, despite the colour coding, displays, items and ideas are jumbled and confusingly juxtaposed; really appalling moments of people’s struggle are thrown away; the uplifting cultures of hope are dissipated, collective aspirations for beauty and justice are marginal. At this point, I confess that there was an elephant in the museum which was completely invisible to me. Or should I say monster in the museum. It took Sue to point it out: this is a children’s museum! I think I have conditioned myself not to see the dismal signs but with her observation the sad reality confronts you.
Everywhere there are colouring-in activities, dressing up opportunities, lift the flap to find out, act out with puppets displays. If only I had remained blind to it. Faced with this I would just dismiss a museum as no interest, but as Sue used to be teacher, she made professional comments – though actually equally critical: her view is that given modern children’s greater sophistication and at the same time shorter attention span, this model of display and activity is outmoded for engaging children over 6. A good example of the problem is the pictured puppet activity. Puppets of British political leaders from the 70s and 80s.
The label invites children, for that is height at which the “TV” is located, to conduct interviews. As Sue observed, what educational value does that have? The children have no knowledge of who the puppets represent or any of the political stances/philosophies which those figures stood for.Because UK museums are measured by the number of visitors, as currently configured the museum will be a success in those terms; it will be loved by families with toddlers (2-6 year olds can pick up a Busy Bee explorer backpack) and schools – the latter because it is almost a school worksheet on the wall. It offers all the labour-saving preparation work that teachers relish. But Sue summed up the problem thus: The history of people’s struggle has been reduced to the form of Spot the Dog.
I think(hope) the museum as a whole is a more complex picture; the value of its work is immeasurable; it has very significant labour history archives, serious relationships with academic institutions and international working history museums which are commensurate to the seriousness of the history it retains. However, curatorially, it has been infected by the national cultural policy which homogenises and dumbs everything down. Given that this museum should be the inspirational repository of a class memory, a memorial to the ordinary made heroic, and a rallying idea that progressive change has and can be achieved, the prioritisation of toddlerism directly contradicts, neuters and marginalises the idea and experience that “there are ideas worth fighting for”. For me, the most powerful museum has been brought low. For the next few weeks the museum is in a ‘soft opening’ period, but sadly has conceptually located its public access at the level of Kids in Museums and as such it now seems distant from the idea of positive social and political change in favour of the central edict of public funding: the importance of civic and capital management of public thought. I felt a little sad for the staff whom I respect greatly, who in my experience are committed to the idea, optimism and knowledge of workers’ history but the policy landscape in which the museum operates, distorts its past in the deadening political shift that has redefined community (of idea, geography or workplace) as family, family as Engels observed the organisational unit of capitalism, and family as a mediated child-obsessed hierarchy in which complexity or collective action by definition are unnecessary and undesirable.
– Clock yourself in
January 24, 2010
A Manifesto for Monsters in Museums
I have previously expressed exasperation about the pronouncements of the bloody woman who runs the organisation “Kids in Museums” http://www.kidsinmuseums.org.uk/about/ She is at it again – this time an article in Arts Industry magazine www.artsindustry.co.uk – talking about the Kids in Museums Manifesto
Her main agenda obviously is to promote the manifesto, but in the article she does this by attacking the ‘arts sector’ over how bad it is at writing manifestos. Her article and her manifesto manifest to me someone who actually fundamentally dislikes the arts; there is always the subtext of her residual anger that she and her noisy brood were ‘thrown out’ of the Royal Academy.
Her article basically argues:
Galleries, museums and arts campaigns are bad at writing manifestos – they create documents that are either too long or, conversely, if short, too loose – “It’s no good having a manifesto with aims that boil down to nothing more than ‘enabling more people to have access to the arts’”. The Monsters in Museums woman tells ‘us’ that manifestos should be brief and clear. Amusingly, she says if your manifesto is one page long everyone will read it, if it is two pages long, hardly anyone even reads the first page. The Kids in Museums manifesto is two pages long.
Being a journalist and mother, it looks like she only had time to look up a quick dictionary definition for her article: “a public written declaration of the intentions or motives of a party”. As I have written before I have a real problem with this organisation and with its art-destroying agenda; in this article though, I find that I have a problem with their attack on manifestos too! Putting aside that the definition she uses misses reference to the manifesto’s requirement to call to action or that “all manifestos are best at denunciation” (Eric Hobsbawm); it also fails because “almost all manifestos in the past, which took the form of a group statement - assume the voice of some collective ‘we’” (Hans Ulrich Obrist). When you actually look at the KIM/MIM Manifesto you find that it doesn’t even fulfil the bloody woman’s own stated definition as it is not a declaration of the intentions of KIM/MIM, it is a list of patronising hectoring, and, sometimes plain stupid, demands of galleries and museums that have nothing to do with art.
On the face of it, the manifesto point that I have the biggest problem with would seem the most innocuous, Point 11: “Be height aware. Display objects, art and labels low enough for a child to see.” In hierarchical order of importance the people who should define the height of a work are the artist, then, if not specified as intrinsic to the work, the curator, and then no-one else. How old is the child who is supposed to see the work? One of the KIM/MIM suggestions (not in the manifesto) apparently is that museums should have pram-parking areas to make them more welcoming to mothers; does that mean that work should be displayed at eye-level of a toddler? As a 6-foot adult why do I have to sacrifice my back so that a toddler can see an artwork which it is unlikely to understand anyway? The government’s (equally stupid) performance indicators for Galleries measure success by the number of adult visitors. Can the forces of idiocy have it both ways?
She is right that the word ‘manifesto’ has been devalued, as much by sloppy use and by political parties which omit the originating impetus to revolution, but manifestos are written by practitioners not institutions; her attack is misconceived because the ‘arts sector’, the institutional examples she quotes, and the KIM/MIM manifesto are not actually manifestos.
Having a ‘manifesto’ that tells museums to have somewhere to sit down, tells me that the writer doesn’t actually go into many museums. It’s also odd that the 2nd point on the manifesto is that museums should have flexible family tickets. Though this may sound unusual to my foreign readers, in the UK virtually all museums are free to enter, certainly I can’t think of a museum in greater Manchester where you need a ticket. It hardly inspires interest in the manifesto shopping list if the 1st item is to be welcoming and the 2nd recommends something you don’t need.
For the first Text Festival (2005), I wrote a manifesto about the future of language art called simply “Text”. It was modelled on John Cage’s “Credo for the Future of Music” http://transelectronic.net/v2/?p=302 . I wrote it as a poet not an art director. Text was 19 pages long; it was written with ideas, form and vocabulary beyond the reading age of children. It is of no interest if children can not read it. The opening shows were driven by curatorial rigour commensurate with the importance of the project – as Art Monthly reviewed at the time: “According to Foucault, the singularities that serve to rupture and renew normative discourse always emerge from the interstices – in other words, where nobody is looking. Almost certainly nobody was looking in the direction of Bury for the emergence of this significant project…” What’s a Foucault, Mummy?
Don’t get me wrong, the festival and other Bury Art Gallery programmes are supported by a full range of activities and projects aimed at children and young people but how is the cultural experience for them or for any other visitor enhanced by a gallery offering “big open spaces for children to let off steam” (point 15)? O, this relates to point 4 – don’t let galleries be places where people can experience displays without the noise of screaming running children. It is implied that the freedom to make noise in a gallery is related to galleries ‘being places for debate and new ideas’. That is exactly what they are – so how does children ‘letting off steam’ contribute to that? Of course there is the government fantasy that (point 10) ‘older and younger children … bring fresh ideas and insights’. This is plain nonsense. It has never been true and after 20 years of militarization (to paraphrase John Cage) of UK art and music education it is even further from possible. It can be argued that galleries and museums are the avenue through which young people can access and achieve their creative potential; this is true but only if galleries are allowed to be galleries that are places of ideas and not by dragging them down to the dumbness of the UK national curriculum and the chagrin of a mother with a chip on her shoulder.
Her article basically argues:
Galleries, museums and arts campaigns are bad at writing manifestos – they create documents that are either too long or, conversely, if short, too loose – “It’s no good having a manifesto with aims that boil down to nothing more than ‘enabling more people to have access to the arts’”. The Monsters in Museums woman tells ‘us’ that manifestos should be brief and clear. Amusingly, she says if your manifesto is one page long everyone will read it, if it is two pages long, hardly anyone even reads the first page. The Kids in Museums manifesto is two pages long.
Being a journalist and mother, it looks like she only had time to look up a quick dictionary definition for her article: “a public written declaration of the intentions or motives of a party”. As I have written before I have a real problem with this organisation and with its art-destroying agenda; in this article though, I find that I have a problem with their attack on manifestos too! Putting aside that the definition she uses misses reference to the manifesto’s requirement to call to action or that “all manifestos are best at denunciation” (Eric Hobsbawm); it also fails because “almost all manifestos in the past, which took the form of a group statement - assume the voice of some collective ‘we’” (Hans Ulrich Obrist). When you actually look at the KIM/MIM Manifesto you find that it doesn’t even fulfil the bloody woman’s own stated definition as it is not a declaration of the intentions of KIM/MIM, it is a list of patronising hectoring, and, sometimes plain stupid, demands of galleries and museums that have nothing to do with art.
On the face of it, the manifesto point that I have the biggest problem with would seem the most innocuous, Point 11: “Be height aware. Display objects, art and labels low enough for a child to see.” In hierarchical order of importance the people who should define the height of a work are the artist, then, if not specified as intrinsic to the work, the curator, and then no-one else. How old is the child who is supposed to see the work? One of the KIM/MIM suggestions (not in the manifesto) apparently is that museums should have pram-parking areas to make them more welcoming to mothers; does that mean that work should be displayed at eye-level of a toddler? As a 6-foot adult why do I have to sacrifice my back so that a toddler can see an artwork which it is unlikely to understand anyway? The government’s (equally stupid) performance indicators for Galleries measure success by the number of adult visitors. Can the forces of idiocy have it both ways?
She is right that the word ‘manifesto’ has been devalued, as much by sloppy use and by political parties which omit the originating impetus to revolution, but manifestos are written by practitioners not institutions; her attack is misconceived because the ‘arts sector’, the institutional examples she quotes, and the KIM/MIM manifesto are not actually manifestos.
Having a ‘manifesto’ that tells museums to have somewhere to sit down, tells me that the writer doesn’t actually go into many museums. It’s also odd that the 2nd point on the manifesto is that museums should have flexible family tickets. Though this may sound unusual to my foreign readers, in the UK virtually all museums are free to enter, certainly I can’t think of a museum in greater Manchester where you need a ticket. It hardly inspires interest in the manifesto shopping list if the 1st item is to be welcoming and the 2nd recommends something you don’t need.
For the first Text Festival (2005), I wrote a manifesto about the future of language art called simply “Text”. It was modelled on John Cage’s “Credo for the Future of Music” http://transelectronic.net/v2/?p=302 . I wrote it as a poet not an art director. Text was 19 pages long; it was written with ideas, form and vocabulary beyond the reading age of children. It is of no interest if children can not read it. The opening shows were driven by curatorial rigour commensurate with the importance of the project – as Art Monthly reviewed at the time: “According to Foucault, the singularities that serve to rupture and renew normative discourse always emerge from the interstices – in other words, where nobody is looking. Almost certainly nobody was looking in the direction of Bury for the emergence of this significant project…” What’s a Foucault, Mummy?
Don’t get me wrong, the festival and other Bury Art Gallery programmes are supported by a full range of activities and projects aimed at children and young people but how is the cultural experience for them or for any other visitor enhanced by a gallery offering “big open spaces for children to let off steam” (point 15)? O, this relates to point 4 – don’t let galleries be places where people can experience displays without the noise of screaming running children. It is implied that the freedom to make noise in a gallery is related to galleries ‘being places for debate and new ideas’. That is exactly what they are – so how does children ‘letting off steam’ contribute to that? Of course there is the government fantasy that (point 10) ‘older and younger children … bring fresh ideas and insights’. This is plain nonsense. It has never been true and after 20 years of militarization (to paraphrase John Cage) of UK art and music education it is even further from possible. It can be argued that galleries and museums are the avenue through which young people can access and achieve their creative potential; this is true but only if galleries are allowed to be galleries that are places of ideas and not by dragging them down to the dumbness of the UK national curriculum and the chagrin of a mother with a chip on her shoulder.
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