Rethinking Research in the Art Museum

Emily Pringle

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781315298818
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Archaeology
• Index: Social Sciences

Rethinking Research in the Art Museum presents an original and radical perspective on how research can function as an agent of change in art museums today. The book analyses a range of art organisations and draws on numerous interviews with museum professionals to outline the limitations of existing models of museum research.

Arguing for a more democratic formulation in tune with the current needs and ambitions of the art institution, Emily Pringle puts forward a framework for practitioner-led, co-produced research that redefines how knowledge is created in the museum. Recognising that museums today negotiate multiple agendas, the book outlines the value of constructing the art museum professional as a practitioner researcher and their work as a mode of practice-based research, be they educators, archivists, curators or conservators. Locating these arguments within the framework of new museology, critical pedagogy, professional and organisational studies and epistemology, the book offers insights and guidance for those interested in how art museums function and the role research plays within these complex institutions.

Rethinking Research in the Art Museum provides a timely and important resource for museum professionals and scholars, students, artists and community members. It should be of particular interest to those invested in exploring how art museums can continue to make the most of their unique resources, whilst becoming more collaborative, inclusive and relevant to the twenty-first century.

1

AN INTRODUCTION

Who creates the knowledge and defines the reality?

Picture this

Imagine, for a moment, that you are a youth worker living close to an art museum. You are aware of the museum’s existence and have been inside it once or twice, but you are not a regular visitor as you have never felt it offered much to you and it is, in fact, rather intimidating. However, you have been closely involved for several years in a local community organisation that works to support young people into employment. This group is collaborating with the art museum and a local university on a year-long project exploring how art can empower adolescents who have been excluded from schools. You are an active participant in this project, alongside the museum professionals and university staff, as this is an issue you are strongly committed to and you are interested in finding out more about how art can make a positive difference to young people’s lives. Your knowledge and experience are making an essential contribution to the process of enquiry and the project outcomes. These outcomes will include a written report, but also, you hope, tangible changes in how young people see themselves, revisions to the existing policies on school exclusion and a more welcoming art museum.

Now put yourself in the shoes of a curator working in the exhibitions and displays department of the art museum. You have an undergraduate and postgraduate degree in art history and quite possibly a PhD. You have a longstanding interest in one artist and have framed in your mind a key question in relation to this artist’s work that will translate into a dynamic and innovative exhibition and make a significant new contribution to the current understanding of this artist within the art world. You also believe, although you do not have any concrete evidence of this, that the exhibition will be of interest to the general visitor. You have embarked on a detailed process of finding out more about the artist, on your own and with fellow curators and art historians. You have explored archives, visited collections and interrogated relevant art, political and social histories. All this activity informs your thinking and develops the underlying thesis for the show. By the end of this two-year process you will have created the exhibition, written an essay for the accompanying catalogue, worked on the content for the associated interpretation wall texts and given talks and tours of the show to specialists and the general public.

The third scenario requires you to envisage yourself as a member of the learning department in the art museum. You are not an art historian, nor do you have a teaching qualification, but instead have an undergraduate and postgraduate training in fine art. In your role, you work with a range of artists developing and facilitating an extensive programme of activities and workshops for schools and teachers. The ambition for this work is to enable participants, whatever their existing knowledge of art, to engage with the collection and generate new understandings about themselves, about the works and about their capacity to learn. You understand this to be a collaborative and experimental process of finding-out undertaken not only by teachers and students, but also by yourself and the artists and colleagues in the department you work with. Over the last five years you have interrogated, discussed and documented this analytical and reflective process. You have presented at conferences and channelled the learning back into the programmes themselves.

Next, you are a someone who is curious about art, but not formally trained in it. You have brought your children aged ten and eight to the art museum during the school holidays and are hoping for a fun and rewarding day out that will allow you to take part in some activities with your children that will give you all something to think about. On entering the museum, you discover there is a display incorporating digital technology that invites you to curate your own exhibition, using works from the museum’s collection. Over the course of the next forty minutes you and the children systematically explore, create, refine and finally show on a large screen visible to other visitors your ideas for a display based on a theme you have chosen. In doing so you find out about individual artists and their works and gain insights into the mechanisms by which the museum’s displays come into being. You also discover over conversation later that day that your children are interested in coloured sculpture and video art and that you are drawn to a more representative work that reminds you, but also makes you think differently, of a place you spent time in as a child. You share your experiences and revelations with your partner once you get home.

What is it that connects these different scenarios? In each case the individuals are asking questions. They are seeking, through a process of gathering information, testing out ideas and thinking about what they have discovered, to gain new knowledge and understanding. In a variety of ways, they are sharing their new knowledge with others, making it visible either through written texts, or an exhibition or display, through changes in practice and policy or through conversation. They are working independently, but also with others, to interrogate questions or explore themes that they have generated and that they want to understand more thoroughly. It is true that each person is motivated to embark on the investigative journey for diverse reasons and has a different sense of who might benefit from the insights created. It is also apparent that for some the process takes place over a period of a day, whereas for others it happens over several years, but in each case the individuals are immersed in processes of investigation and discovery. In summary, they are all engaged in a mode of enquiry that is akin to research and that is taking place with and within the art museum.

The dilemma at the heart of the twenty-first-century art museum

What constitutes research and how we define and recognise it in the context of the art museum¹ is the central concern of this book. The aim, over the course of the following chapters, is to interrogate research as a concept and a practical activity, and to explore how research has been deployed in the art museum to date. More significantly, by looking closely at existing activity in a variety of art museums and arts centres in the UK, Europe and North America and drawing on established and emerging ideas within the arts, humanities, sciences and social sciences the case will be made for a different, broader and more inclusive understanding of research practice than exists at present. The ambition, as the title suggests, is to rethink research in the art museum.

In doing so the book seeks to question some commonly held assumptions regarding what constitutes valuable knowledge and who is legitimised to undertake research within and beyond the museum. What, for example, equates to research ‘rigour’? Why are some research methodologies and subject areas deemed to produce knowledge of greater quality and value to the institution? What qualifies someone to be able to undertake research? Who should benefit from the knowledge produced through a research process? In addressing these and other essentially political issues, the book confronts the value systems inherent within the current art museum model so as to unpick some existing epistemological processes and make the case for alternative modes of research. It puts forward ideas for how professionals and collaborators, working with and in the museum, can locate themselves as researchers and how their practices can be understood as forms of research. In doing so the book sets out how the art museum can engender an environment that fosters creative and critical enquiry and the formulation of new knowledge by the many ‘experts’ that come into contact with the institution, rather than a select few.

The motivations that lie behind this exercise are several and include the personal, professional, political and philosophical. Having trained in fine art, I have spent the last twenty-five years working for and alongside visual arts organisations in the UK and internationally as an artist, educator, researcher and programmer. During that time, I have been fortunate in having opportunities to collaborate with members of the public and with artists, curators, educators and academics, all of whom have informed my thinking and shaped my practice. At the heart of my work is a belief in the extraordinary capacity art can have to transform people’s ideas about themselves, about art itself and about the world, and a commitment to the unique position the art museum occupies in being able, potentially, to enable that transformation.

This view is not to be confused with the argument that art is valuable only in terms of its instrumental capacity to solve social ills. Instead this conviction presupposes that engaging with the conceptual and formal elements of art, through making, viewing, critiquing and appreciating is a rich and rewarding, indeed vital, means by which individuals can construct a sense of themselves and of what makes up their culture.² Art is a means to affirm and enrich one’s understanding of the world but also to question and trouble existing ways of being. It can be a vehicle to articulate ideas and concerns, from the highly specific and individual to the trans-historic and global. It can provide solace and joy, yet also provoke anger and frustration. It can bring about change. Given, then, that art as part of wider culture shapes a person’s framing of their reality, engaging with art becomes a question of human rights and social justice. For, as is enshrined in Article 27 of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights: ‘Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits’ (1948).

Stemming from this commitment to the idea that everyone should have the right and the ability to access and create culture, the majority of my work has been with education and learning departments, as historically these are the divisions within the art museum that have been tasked directly with reaching out to non-traditional audiences and supporting visitors’ engagement and learning. This work has been fascinating and has, within the parameters set for it, made a difference to individuals and to the cultural institutions. But herein lies the conundrum that has in part fuelled the production of this publication. Over the time I have worked with art museums there have been some positive changes in the status of education departments, yet fundamentally the situation in terms of audiences has stayed the same. There have been over forty years of museological and cultural theory and artistic interventions that have critiqued the exclusive position of the art museum and argued for more democratic and inclusive practices that support greater active participation by more diverse publics. Nonetheless, research consistently demonstrates that the demographic profile of those visiting art museums remains resolutely unchanged.³ In the UK, the greatest number of art museum visitors continue to be drawn from higher socio-economic groups and are predominantly white. This is despite sector-wide initiatives including free entry and committed and creative practitioners developing thoughtful, democratic and collaborative programming that has engaged with those who have not visited a gallery previously. So why is it that the art museum remains welcoming to some, yet continues to be intimidating and irrelevant to a great many others?

What does critical museum theory tell us and why is it more complicated than that?

Practitioners and theorists have been grappling with the issue of museum exclusivity arguably since the first public art museums opened in the nineteenth century. However, from the middle of the last century, what has been described as new museum, or critical museum, theory has contended that the processes and policies of museum professional practice reflect entrenched value systems that are ‘encoded in institutional narratives’ (Marstine, 2006: 5). The argument has been made that art museums are far from neutral objective environments but are instead tightly controlled spaces that selectively present accounts and conceptions of culture. Traditionally such narratives tell stories of significant artists and important works drawn from the canon of art. They chart the historical development of art movements and legitimate the practices of some, whilst invalidating others through a process of exclusion. In giving value to certain works and practices the museums in effect help determine our comprehension of what constitutes art. So, whilst we may not necessarily understand or like the work of an artist, we are more likely to accept they are significant if their work has been acquired for a national collection and is regularly exhibited in major museums. In research terms, we are firmly within the second scenario outlined above, where the curator is responsible for creating and determining the epistemological narrative of an artist, made visible through the exhibition and associated written interpretations.

Moreover, it is not only individual artists who are validated through museum processes. The argument was made by Ivan Karp in the 1990s that displays and exhibitions are ‘a political arena in which definitions of identity and culture are asserted and contested’ (1992: 17). In other words, museums are implicated in the complex and sensitive processes that constitute the representation of people and societies. This is demonstrated aptly in those museums that are circumscribed by their national identities, such as Tate Britain, which describes itself as ‘the home of British Art from 1500 to the present day’ (www.tate.co.uk (1)). In 2013 at the behest of the then-director, Penelope Curtis, a significant percentage of the display space in the museum was given over to a rehang of the permanent collection to offer ‘a chronological display of Britain’s greatest artists’ (www.tate.co.uk (1)). Starting with rooms of Tudor portraits, the displays lead you through the evolution of art in Britain, culminating in work by contemporary artists. The intention with this hang was ‘to do away with art historical constructs’ and ‘simply show the work in the order it was made’ (Stephens, 2013) to enable visitors to make their own connections and develop their own stories. The implication from this institutional language was that the interpretive act performed by the curators in selecting specific works from the wider collection had no bearing on how the historical and cultural narrative was generated.

When it opened the hang proved popular with critics, with one describing it as ‘gloriously, satisfyingly reactionary’ (Dorment, 2013), not least because the decision was taken at the same time to remove the accompanying wall texts. Another declared ‘Not all of it is beautiful, not all of it is glamorous, but it’s our country all right’ (Jones, 2013). The latter comment suggested that the connection between the selection of works by ‘great’ artists and articulation of a specific national identity through the institutional narrative was not only inescapable, but to ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• List of Interviewees
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 An Introduction: Who Creates The Knowledge and Defines the Reality?
• 2 Why is Research in Art Museums Confusing and How Can We Make it Less so?
• 3 the Practitioner Researcher in the Art Museum
• 4 Building Practice as Research in the Art Museum: Tate Learning as a Case Study
• 5 Co-Researching with Community Members, Academics and Visitors
• 6 Fostering a Culture Where the Practitioner Researcher can Thrive: Knowle West Media Centre as a Case Study
• 7 Constructing an Expanded Framework for Research in the Art Museum: Moving From the Exotic Animal to the Household Pet
• Afterword
• Bibliography
• Index