Bowie, ACMI and the Verbaliser

I’ve finally cracked my long standing inability to understand song lyrics – I’ve discovered most of them are nonsensical anyway! This revelation comes courtesy of the V&A’s exhibition on David Bowie currently showing at The Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) in Federation Square, Melbourne.

From the early 1970s Bowie conceived of an idea of mixing random phrases together mostly taken from short news clips. He co-authored a smart piece of software known as ‘the Verbaliser’ which rearranges words to make this happen and create some of his lyrics. I think the technical term is ‘cut-ups’ and it’s a technique that went on to influence Kurt Cobain's songwriting. I guess we would call it a mash up these days, but one of the highlights of the exhibition for me was hearing Bowie talk about how he used words in this way. 

Whilst this is not an exhibition I would have rushed to see based on its subject matter, I came away having thoroughly enjoyed it and seeing Bowie in a completely new light as an extraordinarily creative person. It’s slick and well presented, with a clever Sennheiser audio system (headphones are provided as part of the ticket price) that responds to where you are by playing songs and information relevant to what you are viewing. There’s a great review at dotsanddashes.co.uk. Sadly, I understand Sennheiser is not interested in replicating the system for other exhibitions.

This is all part of a big V&A push into Australia with no less than three of their exhibitions currently touring, David  Bowie is…. at ACMI, Undressed at the Powerhouse, and soon the Queensland Museum and Bendigo Art Gallery and Inspiration by Design currently at the State Library of NSW and soon to be at the State Library of Victoria.

ACMI is a bit of a hidden performer in Australia's cultural sector. It's been around now for over ten years in its current location, though it actually dates back to 1946 as the Victoria State Film Institute. In 2013 it attracted over 1.15 million visitors. That's an impressive statistic, and based on the current offerings it deserves to do well, and can only play a bigger role.

This is going to be significantly helped by the recent appointment of Seb Chan to a newly created role of CXO - Chief Experience Officer - a position he takes up this month, returning from 4 years in New York at the Cooper Hewitt, where he was the Director of Digital & Emerging Media, and the lead player in the development of their new interactive pen (see my blog from June 2015 for more information). Listed in 2009 as amongst Australia’s 100 most influential people (see my blog from January 2009), Seb is not going to sit quietly in his new role. Watch the ACMI space!

London offerings

London is always offering up challenging new art installations, and though it may not be the centre of the universe for contemporary art aficionados, it manages to regularly juxtapose the old with the new in exciting ways.

I hot footed it to two such artworks this week, with mixed results.

In the fabulous plaster court at the V&A there is an installation entitled 'The Tower of Babel', in the form of a 6 metre cone of nearly three thousand ceramic houses with photographic images of street fronts on them. It sounded sort of interesting, but, well it sort of wasn't, failing for me to engage in anyway with the rather bemused statues around it. Perhaps I can cite the label to explain why I moved on rather smartly: "Barford playfully likens our efforts to find fulfilment through retail to the biblical Tower of Babel's attempt to reach heaven. His seemingly precarious Tower poses questions about our society and economy, celebrating London's retailers, yet exposing the divide between rich and poor." MONA has a word for such stuff.

'The Tower of Babel' at the V&A

Down the road however, the great Ai Weiwei has installed half a dozen massive trees in the forecourt of the Royal Academy, and the juxtaposition of that rich 18th century Palladian mansion and these stark bolted leaf-less limbs is breathtaking. They are part of a major retrospective exhibition, and alright perhaps I am a little biased, because I haven't washed my hands since I found the great man himself wandering around and shook his hand, but others seem to agree (see this article published in the Guardian).

Tree sculptures by Ai Weiwei 

installed in the courtyard of the Royal Academy of Arts, London

What is particularly interesting about the trees is that their inclusion in the exhibition only came about through crowdsourcing. Working with Kickstarter, the Royal Academy raised 123,500 pounds from 1,319 backers, all of whom are listed on two great banners as you go up the main stairs.

Inspirational on two fronts - the art itself, and the action by which it came to be in London.

That ongoing de-accessioning debate

Nothing like kicking off the year with that old chestnut, unwanted objects and collections!

The Newark Museum has made the headlines in Philadelphia on the issue of having to store and insure loaned objects that they will never exhibit and would love to be rid of. The article  picks up on the fact that 40 US states have legislation in place whereby collecting institutions can take legal possession of objects (and thus decide what to do with them) if they send registered letters to the last known address of the owner and publish notices in newspapers signaling the end of the loan, and receive no response.

And that is a good lead into an article I came across in the UK Art Fund’s latest excellent magazine by Sir Mark Jones, the recently retired director of the V&A. Jones writes about the impulses that drive the collection of art and where museums fit into this. He likens museums to the modern day equivalents of cathedrals, which in the Middle Ages vied for and elaborately housed relics to attract pilgrims.

People collect, he argues, not to fulfill basic needs but chiefly to assert status, to establish rank and power. Museums then become the place where these collections are deposited both to advertise the wealth of the collector, and also to place those objects out of rivals’ reach. Museums then have to tread a fine line between making these collections available and advertising the power and wealth of those who made them.

Many such collections come with stipulations that the collection not only can never be sold but should remain on display. The latter point is clear, namely to continue to bring prestige to the collector, which obviously cannot happen when it languishes in the store.

But the former point is one that is critical to the de-accessioning debate and helps to explain the problems and anxiety that such a process creates. Collectors have made donations on the basis that by doing so they place their collection beyond the reach of other collectors. If museums start a process of de- accession and selling works of art, they no longer can provide collectors with the assurances they need on this front.

Incidentally on the same theme, Patricia Andersen, Editor of Australian Art Review, makes some good points on how collections have evolved in her Editorial for the latest Jan-Feb 2012 edition, reinforcing how many museums in the western world began by providing a public face for private collections. It is, by the way, a great edition focusing on the great regional collections in Bathurst, Bendigo, Perc Tucker, Townsville and Broken Hill.

Julian Bickersteth
Managing Director
internationalconservationservices

In praise of the Victoria and Albert Museum

The V&A has always been one of my favourite destinations in London ever since as a young furniture history student we used to pore over the rows of chests of drawers and chairs in the furniture galleries. By modern museological standards, such displays would be seen as inaccessible to most visitors and stultifyingly boring in design (somewhat over hyped in the latest Autumn 2010 edition of Bonham's magazine as " the long, doom laden corridors of South Kensington's own version of Gormenghast"), but we loved them.


With the opening of the British Galleries in the 2001, all that changed with the decorative arts collections now combining to tell the story of the development and evolution of British design. The galleries set an international benchmark in intelligent and accessible exhibition design, and visiting this week it was exhilarating to see the Museum continues to raise the bar. I had gone there specifically to see the highly acclaimed newly opened Medieval and Renaissance Galleries, but found myself re-discovering a range of other galleries. The Gilbert Silver Collection has now moved to the V&A from Somerset House and is so much better displayed, sitting alongside the impressively dense displays in the Whiteley Silver Galleries. The showcase, lighting supports and information design is all superb, and the extraordinary painted and tiled interiors of the V&A, not to mention the wonderful garden , are now used to maximum benefit rather than being boarded over.


I also discovered the substantial paintings collection that the Museum holds, including major works of Constable and Turner now in their own dedicated galleries. And if you are after a bit of muscle, the sculpture galleries depict the full story of the development of English sculpture, managing to slip into the story the fabulous Theseus and the Minotaur of Canova and Bernini's Neptune and Triton.

Much of the praise can be attributed to Sir Mark Jones who became director in 2001. At that time the V&A had broken the careers of a series of directors  ( Roy Strong, Elizabeth Esteve-Coll, Alan Borg) who had been unable to conquer the eccentricities of either the staff or the maze of dark galleries ( see above), or even the diverse nature of the collection. "What is the V&A for?" asked UK Culture Secretary Chris Smith in 2004, which just about summed up common perceptions of the place. So it is great to see it back as a market leader again.

A couple of observations:


1) The US style of benefactor recognition is now slipping in with many of the galleries now personally named, e.g. the Dorothy and Michael Hintze Sculpture Gallery - doesn't worry me, especially if it allows such great results.


2) The provision of computers to allow visitors to access the wider collection was as far as I could see being completely ignored. I saw the same thing at the National Portrait Gallery later in the day. I believe such provision is missing the point. Visitors come to see the real thing and know they can access much of the collection on line so why bother during a visit. Let's ditch this idea.


And the Medieval and Renaissance Galleries? - mind blowing. Do make time to visit them for a wonderful museum experience when next you are in London.

Julian Bickersteth
Managing Director
internationalconservationservices

Museums, galleries and their carbon footprints

The emissions trading scheme may have been shelved in Australia for the near term (though watch this space after the ascendancy of Julia Gillard to the PM’s position) but museums and galleries, just as businesses, need to treat a low carbon and energy efficient economy as inevitable.

And what Copenhagen did achieve, although it appeared to be a failure as a climate change summit, was a global agreement to limit temperature rises to 2 degrees. To meet this target is going to require transformational changes to the world economy, and therefore inevitably to the way museums and galleries operate. The GLAM sector is going to be in a much stronger position if it can take control of its preparedness for this rather than wait for the inevitable government dictate.

And whilst this is partly about the reactionary component, i.e. checking the resilience of museums to the effects of warmer temperatures, heavier rainfall and less predictable weather patterns, and the related risks, it is also about being proactive in reducing each organisation’s carbon footprint.

I find colleagues’ eyes begin to glaze over at this stage, as it all appears too hard. So what can we learn from the rest of the world in this regard? I checked out the UK where they are substantially ahead of Australian thinking on this issue. Museums are looking to establish their carbon footprint and then to do something about reducing it, both to save money and also to be eligible for grants that are available for those that are proactive in this area.

Carbon footprints treat an organisation’s carbon emissions in three parts:

1. Direct emissions from the organisation which, for museums relate to their own boilers and fuel used by museum vehicles
2. Indirect emissions from electricity or gas purchased by the museum
3. Indirect emissions from sources outside the museum’s control, such as staff and visitors getting to the museum, waste disposal and suppliers emissions

The first stage is to establish what these are, and the benchmark for this is the Victoria and Albert Museum, which claims to be the first museum to have calculated their footprint in 2007/08. They found that not unexpectedly 82% of their emissions arise from utilities.  However it is interesting to see the breakdown of this, namely 29% of this being for lighting compared to 63% for heating, cooling and control of relative humidity - interesting in that we tend to forget how much energy lights use and then of course how much they contribute to warming up air and thus requiring more energy for cooling. The balance of the carbon footprint at the V&A is consumed by IT (11%), touring exhibitions (5%) and staff travel (2%).

Having established a carbon footprint (and bear in mind that it helps to have sub metering so the breakdown between lights, HVAC and IT use can be identified), then the next stage is to do something about it. This should be about reducing energy use, not about using renewable energy sources or carbon offsetting.

Again check out how the V&A has achieved a 20% reduction in their carbon footprint between 2005 and 2009. They have done this through using low energy lighting on time clocks, low energy environmental controls and a combined heat and power system, known in the business as CHP.

Perhaps the most impressive part of this is how they are implementing ongoing savings as they progressively refurbish the Museum. New gallery projects now optimise the use of daylight, minimise solar gain, use intelligent ventilation and heating strategies and avoid humidification and cooling. It is a model all museums and galleries can benefit from actively considering.

Julian Bickersteth
International Conservation Services

Contemporary Art and Conservation Ethics

A useful book has hit the materials conservation literature shelf – not a very large shelf at present, reflecting to my mind the relative paucity of thinking around the philosophy and practice of materials conservation. Entitled Conservation: Principles, Dilemmas and Uncomfortable Truths, (edited by Alison Richmond and Alison Bracker; Butterworth-Heinemann 2009) it has largely grown out of discussions generated within the Victoria and Albert Museum’s conservation department. It includes an excellent chapter by our own Marcelle Scott of the University of Melbourne’s Centre for Cultural Materials Conservation, comparing the very different history and approach taken to the conservation of indigenous cultural material in Australia with that in New Zealand (to the detriment in her view of the former).

It also includes an outstanding chapter from Jonathan Ashley-Smith (former head of conservation at the V&A) entitled ‘ The Basics of Conservation ethics’. It should be a must-read for all conservators. Jonathan always writes well, if quirkily – his short bio gives an indication of this: “Jonathan first wrote about conservation ethics in 1982 when he was young and his views were rigid and idealistic. He is now older.” His premise is that there is not one set of ethics that fits all conservation decisions and that we should tolerate diversity.

But it is the chapters on the ethical considerations around the conservation of contemporary art that particularly caught my attention. What DO you do when trying to ensure the long term preservation of an artwork when it is made out of, wait for it, film, video, photography, self-lubricating plastic, Vaseline and salt (Matthew Barney or parts of a Jeep Cherokee, peanuts, bottle caps, balsa wood, mai tai umbrellas and aspirin (Sarah Sze)? The answer seems to be to establish a different time horizon, i.e. where conservation normally tries to preserve things in perpetuity, the lifespan for such contemporary artworks might be more like ten years.

I was reminded of the conservation dilemmas around the Anish Kapoor molten wax artwork I saw last year at the Royal Academy in London. Kapoor has just won the gig for a 115 metre high major sculpture outside the new London Olympics stadium. Interestingly he pipped Andy Goldsworthy to the post, and Goldsworthy is featured in this book for a clay installation he undertook in 2007 called White Walls, as an example of an anethical installation. Anethical? I think they mean beyond ethics by which to guide the conservation i.e. neither ethical nor not ethical. Doesn’t help me as a word, I must say, but what I love about it is the story.

Goldsworthy conceived of the idea of plastering a large room with c 8,500 kg of wet porcelain clay, the idea being that the room would 'deinstall' itself, as the clay dried and cracked and gradually delaminated from the wall. The clay would then be recycled and reinstalled in future incarnations, thus linking the successive installations and the memory of each activity. What actually happened is that a process expected to take some weeks started immediately and was almost complete in five days. With it the clay also stripped off five and half years of paint layers, revealing traces of previous installations by other artists. Not only did this create a quite different form of art work, but the large lumps of clay falling with a dull thud became a shocking but compelling piece of kinetic art in themselves.

Now there is a conservation challenge.

Curators, curators

I always enjoy a good obituary, and there was a great one published on March 11th in the Times on Lionel Lambourne, former Keeper of Paintings at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Lionel was clearly one of the old style of curators that used to make museums such attractively quirky places to work, and sadly no longer exist. To give you a taste of this, Lionel was apparently equally at home discussing the work of Arts and Crafts deisgners (his specialist area), as the history of the circus or the depiction of the giraffe in art. He lectured under the maxim "a good lecture or exhibition ought to contain something to offend everyone". The achievement of which he was most proud was the creation of the V&A staff pantomine. Get the picture?? As the obituary concludes "few great scholars and curators can have left such a legacy of laughter". Vale Lionel Lambourne and all that you stood for. Do dig out his full obituary - it is well worth the read.

And it got me thinking about the role of the modern curator, about which I have blogged before . Gone are the days when the curator was the top of the heirarchical museum pile, with most directors being drawn from their midst. Most curators are now generalists, often changing to positions in other parts of the sector. So I noticed with some amusement a recent article in HK-Magazine entitled the ‘Curse of the Curators’ on how poor musuem attendance in Hong Kong is being put down to the very strict way that curatorial paths progress in Hong Kong, stifling innovation.

I enquired of Andrew Simpson, who directs the Musem Studies Program at Macquarie University how many of his graduates are finding employment in the sector. He replied that at least 60% of post grad students are finding sector work within a year of completion, but the numbers are not so good for graduates. Andrew believes this is partly due to the rapid rise of museum studies programs in Australia over the least decade (second only to biotech degree programs apparently) and also interestingly to some resistance to professionalisation in some parts of the sector. I must explore this resistance more, as apparently there are some papers on it.

In the US there was an article in a recent post-gazette entitled "A fuzzy picture: US jobs projections for curators leave museums scratching their heads". In summary, data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics suggest curators are among the professions projected to show much faster than average employment growth. But museum directors cannot see how this growth is going to be funded as their budgets are being almost universally cut. Curators have even been laid off by the Met and the Getty. In addition there is a view that, courtesy of the net, much of the work of curators can now be undertaken from their desk rather than traveling the world researching and organising exhibitions, so if anything, fewer curators are needed. The discrepancy partly seems to come from the fact that the data was gathered pre GFC and was predicated on museums remaining financially healthy and visitor attendance good.

Are museums the lesser for the diminution of the role of curator? Certainly their internal knowledge base is less, but the reality is that it is all a numbers game these days, and if directors do not need specialist curators to keep the visitors coming through the doors, then the curators will get sidelined.

Curatorship

I come (just) from the era when curators were top of the pile in the museum hierarchy. And I remember well when Elizabeth Esteve Coll, as director of the V&A Museum, London in the early 1990s took a broom to that hierarchy and restructured the staff, demoting the all powerful ‘keepers’, as head curators were called at the V&A. She was roundly condemned and ultimately hounded out of office, but she had started an inexorable process.

Bear in mind these were the days when there were no visitor services staff, probably no marketing staff or education staff, and certainly no Heads of IT, but today’s museum/gallery curator does not carry anything like the clout he or she would have done 20 years ago. Whilst there remain highly erudite occupants of curatorial roles in collecting institutions throughout the country, there is a move to generalist curators as against the specialist, with the result that technical in-depth subject knowledge is now more likely to be found at a university than at a museum.

So what is the role of the modern curator? I fell upon a recent article in the English National Trust’s ABC Bulletin entitled "The Curator: No-sayer, custodian, interpreter, impresario or host?" particularly as it involved a conversation with the Chairman of the Trust, Simon Jenkins. Jenkins is a most interesting bloke , a journalist and former editor of The Times and author of the popular 1000 Best Churches and 1000 Best Country Houses. He had been somewhat critical of the Trust before becoming Chairman, including describing their curators as "no-sayers, keepers of screens, blinds and padlocks".

But his comments in this article on the role of curators is positively inspiring. I quote: “The Latin root of curator is intriguing, a mix of care, anxiety, management and love. The curator liberates the sprit of a property and is the person most likely to understand its genius. The curator by virtue of background and education brings to a property an educated eye. In the case of fine houses, it must be hard for those without that eye fully to read their genius loci. Only the curator can release their stories. It takes confidence to grasp a room and so present it as to make it a moving experience for a visitor to walk through. Impresario is the right word, implying the skills of stagecraft.”

To my mind this approach applies equally to curators in museum and galleries as historic house museums. Curators are the conduit to the knowledge about the collections for which they care, and it is their responsibility to open up and reveal the stories that these collections tell. Freed of most of the management responsibilities that curators had twenty years ago, they must now be all about maximising access to their collections whether through exhibitions or on-line, and telling their stories.

Museums in the UK and Australia – is the scene that different?

One of the publications that I always look forward to is the monthly UK Museums Association Museums Journal. It is a much easier read than the rather densely packed American equivalent, Museum produced by the American Association of Museums. And the Australian equivalent produced by the Museums Association of Australia I am afraid to say is downright boring. One of the issues I find intriguing is where we are as a profession in Australia compared to the UK.

The immediate position is one of economic hardship big time in the UK, which at least in ‘avoiding-the-technical-recession’ Australia is not the present case. Councils across the land are laying off staff from local museums, the free admission to museums government policy is under threat (despite a massive impact on visits ranging from the Imperial War Museum up 75% to the V&A up 156% and the National Museums Liverpool up 240%) and the National Trust for Scotland is reducing its staff by one third. Overlaying all of this is also the cost of staging the London Olympics in 2012, which is sucking money out of the arts/culture sector. And then there is the problem of any spare cash being used to save art for the nation, the most recent being the serious money spent on Titian’s Diana and Actaeon jointly purchased for the small sum of £50 million by the National Galleries of Scotland and the National Gallery in London.
Against this of course are some great programs, one of the most successful being the Renaissance in the Regions which has had a massive impact on the regional museum scene.

So it is interesting to read the experience of Sara Holdsworth from the Manchester City Galleries who has just completed a three week exchange at the Art Gallery of NSW. In summary she found that:
· AGNSW was much better resourced (twice the staff and six times the budget for about the same size of collection)
· It was more collection focused and much less interested in diversity and audiences
· She couldn’t get over the cultural and social phenomenon of the Archibald and the amount of income it generates for the Gallery
Interesting stuff to ruminate on – we may be financially more fortunate at present but our horizons may also be more limited.

Conservation research – where’s it all heading?

I am the joint editor of the Australian Institute for Conservation of Cultural Material’s (AICCM) Newsletter, a quarterly publication which I see as basically about ensuring the conservation profession in Australia stays connected. It’s hard work at times as no one ever volunteers any feedback, so one has to guess whether the content is what people are after. But one regular feature I particularly enjoy is an interview that I undertake with a conservator. I tend to choose someone who has trained or worked outside Australia as I believe it gives them a particular perspective on the Australian scene, which I am always keen to ensure is unpacked in the interview.

For the next edition I have interviewed Michael Marendy. Michael is a rare breed in Australia, holding a PhD (from Griffith University) in the history of costume collecting (and its conservation) in Brisbane. Talking to Michael got me thinking about where else you could undertake a doctorate in materials conservation. I discovered that the University of Melbourne would entertain the idea, and has one graduate undertaking one, but that in the entire US only one conservation course ( at the University of Delaware) offers a PhD, and that is restricted to a maximum of 3 a year. Research in conservation is not very popular it would seem at present. But then it may be because conservation courses themselves both at undergraduate and graduate level are also under threat. London's Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) and the Royal College of Art have confirmed plans to close their joint post-graduate conservation training program. This comes not long after the University of Southampton announced the closure of the Textile Conser­vation Centre (TCC).

And to add to the malaise, I participated in a depressing panel discussion with the AICCM NSW branch last week . We were meant to be talking about key issues in conservation at present ( I was busy exhorting the room to get behind serious study and engagement with the issues of relaxing environmental standards and reducing energy use in museums and galleries) , but the evening turned out to be a good old whinge about how little traction conservators have in their institutions on the big decisions. I heard the same refrain when I started in conservation 25 years ago, except that at the time we were on the ascendant and it was all about how we get engaged. Now unfortunately the profession seems to be on the descendant. Funding cuts, lack of resources, and only objects for exhibition display being conserved are all making working in institutions pretty tedious at present. Neither the Powerhouse or the Art Gallery of NSW even have heads of conservation at present, i.e. the job positions have been abolished.

Where to from here? My view is that this is all about active engagement - getting conservators to force dialogue around the issues they know something about, including those that are museum wide such as reducing energy costs whilst still ensuring the preservation of collections. By doing so they can get back into mainstream thinking at museums, and prove they are as vital a part as any of the core functions. Having a component of the profession that is actively engaged in research is going to help our cause no end.

Real paintings vs virtual?

There used to be a regular refrain from museum curators resisting the online display of their collections that the web would destroy museum visiting. Happily the opposite seems to be the case, with research in France (why have they alone bothered to check this out?) showing that the more people look at art on line the more likely they are to decide to go and see the original.

We all know what a poor second best art is on line, from very ordinary colour rendition to a complete lack of texture. Attempts to jazz it up have always to my mind been about the technology rather than the aesthetic experience. In that vein, I remember being shown a 3D rendition of a vase at the V&A ten years ago, which turned right round as if on a turntable, thanks to a myriad photos stitched together.

So when I saw that Google Earth has teamed up with the Prado in Madrid to put 14 images on line able to be inspected in microscopic detail, my first reaction was ‘who wants to look at them that closely’. It may be an amazing feat of technology to stitch together 8000 photographs with a resolution of 14,000 megapixels for every painting, but I am not sure who is going to use such a facility.