This Blog Has Moved!

This blog is no longer being updated at this address. For the latest posts, visit reganforrest.com

Review: GoMA, Brisbane

While I was in Brisbane last week, I was surprised to learn that I was sharing a city with Australia's most visited museum in 2010: the Queensland Art Gallery & Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA), twin museums which together drew crowds of some 1.8 million visitors last year.

Once I found that out, I had to drop by and see what all the fuss was about. GoMA in particular came highly recommended, with its 21st Century: Art in the First Decade Exhibition which dominated the museum's three (I think!) vast levels.

Rather than give a comprehensive review of such an exhibition (when others can do it far better than me), I thought I'd just take the chance to share some images and general observations.

View of the entrance lobby: the space immediately opens up across multiple storeys, feeling bright and open but also dramatic. The display on the right hand side is a wallpaper made up of NASDAQ figures, and is part of a piece making commentary about the Global Financial Crisis. Beyond are twin slides - and you ask yourself: could I really ride these?? This is an art gallery here!! (You can; but I didn't)

First off, the fact that I can share images at all is probably worthy of a comment in itself: art galleries in particular are often loath to allow photography (usually for copyright or conservation reasons). This might be understandable, but also confers a type of 'hands-off' reverence to the experience.

As a society, I think we're becoming more accustomed to documenting and sharing our experiences through photos via social media and other networks; this ability to share becomes often becomes an integral part of the experience itself. I wonder if this relatively permissive attitude to photography is a contributing factor to making the museum feel more open and welcoming, and consequently appealing to a different type of audience (I think I saw more teenagers in the space of one afternoon than I've seen in all my other previous art gallery visits put together - and no they didn't look like a school group).

Teenage girls at a display which allowed visitors to apply bindis to themselves

Another thing which was unusual in the context of an art gallery: queues. While queues to enter a whole exhibition are common enough, these were queues to see particular exhibits or take part in certain experiences which were only available to small groups of visitors at a time.

I'm usually a studious avoider of queues - probably a sign of an impatient temperament - but since I was on no fixed timetable and was feeling perfectly content to happily wander and lose myself amongst the displays, I did something I almost NEVER do: join a queue when I don't know what it's for:

Almost alone in the centre of a large gallery, the brilliantly lit spheres are surrounding a reflective black box that is almost lost in the darkened room; it makes a kind of infinity mirror for the spheres surrounding it. Notice the queue lining the far wall.

The queue was to enter the box in the middle of the room (4 at a time) which closed and surrounded you in a reflective UV space:

The view from inside the box: the floor is a small peninsula surrounded by a layer of water. The UV reflective (ping pong?) balls are suspended by fishing wire.

This was just one of several immersive exhibits, for instance the 'swimming pool' which was more than it first seemed:

School children at the bottom of the pool. . . .?

The view from the other side: the water is only an inch or two deep and the rest of the pool is accessed by an almost secretive rear entrance.

As well as the room filled with balloons:

The Balloon Room, or to give it its proper name: Work No. 965: Half the air in a given space (purple) by Martin Creed

This one in particular got me thinking about the blurred boundaries between interactive science and interactive art (in many cases, it's all in the interpretation). I happened to overhear a young girl say as she left the room: "you could really feel the static electricity in there", thus spontaneously articulating something which science-based balloon shows have long demonstrated (and may she's seen that before and made the connection?)

Overall, these exhibits created a sense of fun and delight which you seldom see in the hallowed ground of the art gallery, and in some ways reminded me of the spirit of the science centre. This creates its own challenges - art isn't made to be bulletproof the same way interactive exhibits are - as was demonstrated by this exhibt made from plastic bags, and which school children couldn't resist getting under:

The school children loved getting under this installation and pretend to be holding it up while one of their friends took a photograph

But this was one of the few exhibits I saw which was keeping the security guards busy as they tried to direct the enthusiasm of the school kids into non-destructive outlets.

Not all exhibits allowed photography, but I'll mention just one of these: From here to ear by Celeste Boursier-Mougenot. This installation contained a couple of dozen live finches in a room which incorporated a series of perch structures made from wood, coathangers, harpsichord strings and a sound system. It's a bit hard to describe but here's the label which was at the entry to the exhibit:

And that label leads me to my final observation: the technology side of things. The whole museum had free wi-fi access and several exhibits were accompanied by QR codes (like the example above) which allowed you to access podcasts and short movies about particular works. Before this exhibition, I'd never actually got around to experimenting with QR codes. But thanks to the available wi-fi, I managed to download a QR reading app and found it very easy to use. This options also gives you the opportunity to save materials on your phone for future reference.

The 21st Century: Art in the First Decade exhibition closes on April 26. While I wasn't sure which exhibits were part of that particular exhibition and which might be there on a more permanent basis, I'll definitely want to visit GoMA again for a second look next time I'm in Brisbane.

(This review was originally posted on Regan Forrest's blog site: http://reganforrest.com/2011/04/gone-to-goma/)

New site

This blog has migrated to a more permanent home at reganforrest.com - see you there!

Museums as "Unstable Organisations"

This is how Glenn Lowry, Director of New York's Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), described his institution at a recent talk at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI).

Titled Museums in the 21st Century, Lowry presents some interesting ideas about what it means to be a modern art museum. That's where the 'unstable bit' comes in. MoMA considers itself as an organisation under perpetual change: every 10-12 years or so, the building undergoes some major reconstruction, frequently in parallel with a total reconception of how the museum should operate.

To cease doing this, Lowry contends, would mean to cease being a Modern Art museum and begin being something else. They have to continually change and adapt in response to changes in the art that they collect, display and interpret.

One example: at some point in the past, the MoMA building was laid out as a linear sequence of joining galleries, like beads on a string. This works great for nice neat linear stories showing chronological developments in art history. But modern art often doesn't fall very neatly into chronological or stylistic boxes, so the string of linear galleries was an uncomfortable fit. The current layout is more open, apparently allowing more organic juxtaposition of ideas and narratives.

There are also practical reasons to make radical changes to the building - some of the art that MoMA is procuring simply can't fit in the current building, either due to scale or gallery configurations. But this doesn't stop MoMA collecting what it thinks is important - it changes its building to accommodate (I marvel at an organisation that has the resources to do this!).

Lowry also made some interesting observations about how they have been changing the way that audiences interact with the art and each other in their spaces. He mentioned the MoMA's PS1 site, an exhibitions and events space which attracts a far more youthful and diverse audience than the average MoMA audience. In fact, in recent years the overall audience demographic has changed from being 55+ and predominantly female, to around 40 with a nearly even gender split.

Yet another reason why I have to try and get to New York!

A "restless and disgruntled visitor" writes in The Monthly

What's the point of museum objects?

It's not all that often that an article on museum practice shares column inches and prominence with articles on Barack Obama and female infanticide. But that's what's happened in the latest edition of The Monthly. In an essay entitled "The Absent Heart", novelist Amanda Lohrey laments that "so much exhibition design is pedestrian, or worse, confused and at some times chaotic".

The core of her criticism is the "fetishising" of the object ahead of a wider story or narrative: "I come away with the impression that our curators are more conserned about the preservation of the artefact than they are to give any account of the history that produced it. Where is the passion for meaning, for making sense of the world? Where is the desire to create an experience for the visitor?"

As someone from an interpretation background, I can find much to agree with in this quest for wider meaning. Interpretation is all about answering the question “So What?” – and for this author at least, that question has not been adequately answered.

The essay challenges a lot of shared assumptions in the museums sector, and raises some intriguing questions:

1. Have we reached the limits of letting people 'make their own meanings' in exhibition spaces? How much evidence do we have that this is a successful strategy? (And in some cases is 'let visitors decide' being used as a convenient fig leaf for avoiding controversy and not venturing an opinion?)
2. From the point of view of storytelling, how important is the 'real' object? Lohrey makes the point in relation to showing the size of Phar Lap's heart: "if you are concerned with meaning then a model will do, but if you are in the market for fetishising objects as magical tokens - "the real thing" - then it seems that only the pallid tissue of the original will suffice." Here I could easily present a counter example: the Apollo capsule in the Smithsonian would be nowhere near as compelling if it were just a model, and not the scarred and burned vehicle that safely brought three men back to Earth after an incredible journey. But all this proves is that the value of the object is completely dependent on the point you're trying to make.
3. There seems to be an implicit assumption in the essay that an exhibition should follow a single specific narrative (at one point Lohrey observes that "the visitor is wandering along no clear path at all . . . " Is this the prejudice of a novelist, whose chosen medium is by definition very linear, or is it of wider concern to visitors in general? Is it unrealistic to expect that a three-dimensional environment will easily lend itself to a single linear narrative?

In reading this article, it reminded me of a passage that really leapt out at me from the book “Thriving in the Knowledge Age” by John Falk and Beverly Sheppard (p127): " . . .our collections bring value to the museum in direct proportion to the “knowledge” they provide. The objects do not “speak for themselves”. The intellectual value of a museum’s collections is directly tied to the use of these objects to provide answers to questions society finds valuable."

This seems to reflect well the overall point of the article – what socially relevant questions is the display of these objects addressing?

Bottom line is that this article raises several legitimate questions, and I'm not sure how much evidence we have as a sector to properly address these questions. More research into how different audience groups relate to the exhibition environment is definitely needed.