ReachingOut contemporary art and sustaining learning communities in the art gallery

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1、Reaching-Out: contemporary art and sustaining learning communities in the art galleryLearn what aid the community needsand fit the museum to those needsJohn Cotton Dana (1917)Pam Meecham Institute of Education, University of Londonp.meechamioe.ac.ukThis paper argues that building sustainable learnin

2、g communities in museums, art galleries and cultural centers will require a holistic overhaul of the institution rather than just develop work with outreach itself. Such an overhaul will require consideration of building, display, education and outreach. Creating a learning institution that has the

3、needs of diverse, sometimes conflicting, communities at its core, as we have in England, may mean adopting more heterodox museum approaches. Such changes present challenges to naturalised notions of authenticity, evidence and even a reconsideration of learning itself: research is key here. This pape

4、r also argues that art collections should be, on and off-sites for learning, going beyond being historical relics or contemporary fetish to become a source for future employment (Stanley 2007: 1). Art is currently being used to create cultural renaissance in disenfranchised communities, this paper a

5、rgues however change can only happen if organizations adapt and innovate beyond their traditional remit as the authoritative voice, to include increased agency from within communities themselves. I am taking as my guide the American John Cotton Dana (1856-1929) a pioneer of museum and gallery educat

6、ion who was organizing outreach programmes before the First World-War. For Dana stewardship, pedagogy and recreation were key to a museums success. Opened in 1909 his Newark Museum emphasized the ordinary and the everyday, rather than the rare and precious. Dana famously displayed domestic ceramics

7、from the dime store: none of which cost more than 25cents to demonstrate that beauty was not the preserve of the wealthy elite. His museum, unburdened by the weight of a permanent collection, would remain relevant to the citizens of Newark and not be for an educated elite but rather for the general

8、citizen and not the subject expert. He wanted to avoid becoming a storehouse to please and educate curators rather than to entertain and instruct the public. Entertain is important here and a recurring theme of this paper.The manifold ambitions of the museum sector over the last fifteen years are cl

9、early signaled in the frantic building, rebuilding and refurbishment of museums and art galleries across the globe. The not uncontroversial, international cultural franchises of museums to outposts whether Tate to St Ives, Cornwall or Guggenheim to Spain, bear witness to international, national and

10、local reinvestment in museums and art galleries as indicators of cultural ambition. More than mere talisman of cultural capital and signifier of permanence in a rapidly changing global world however, the museum is also lauded as an agent of social change and key to community development. Often a pre

11、condition to post-industrial urban regeneration programmes, the great shape building or recycled power or railway station proffer kudos and tourist revenue at the same time as acting as markers of progress. Similarly the ubiquitous virtual museum, gaining a fillip from the development of Second Life

12、, is not merely an alternative museum site but is firmly attached to a mantra of digital democracy, empowerment and user-generated knowledge. And yet there are tensions in this urge to build high-profile museums and develop meaningful relationships with local communities. The arrival of the Guggenhe

13、im Museum in Bilbao provides a salient example: after the hype was over surveys of local residents in Bilbao whilst recognising the economic impact and value for the middle class minority, found little value attached to the museum in terms of quality of life, social cohesion, regional identity or go

14、vernance. After an initial boom, visitor numbers amongst locals is declining (DCMS 2004:13) DCMS was the Department for Culture, Media and Sport . In contrast to Bilbaos acquisition of an iconic, large-scale cultural facility, Barcelonas far more successful cultural programmes emphasised the charact

15、eristics of each of its districts and attempted to continually refresh its offering to both visitors and inhabitants (DCMS 2004: 14). The two approaches taken in Spain might alert us to the potential pitfalls and benefits underlying strategies for regeneration that make naturalised assumptions about

16、 what and who comprise communities and crucially what constitutes legitimate culture.I want to draw on the history of Liverpool, a non-metropolitan area and my own personal involvement with the city since the1980s to see how effective and sustained change can take place against the grain. Regenerati

17、on can be defined as the positive transformation of a place-whether residential, commercial or open space-that has previously displayed symptoms of physical, social and/or economic decline (DCMS 2004: 8) and Liverpool a casualty of post-industrial decline has had more than its fair share of regenera

18、tion projects: the latest in 2008, as European City of Culture. Neighbourhood renewal however is not necessarily achieved by the imposition of a gallery designed by an international guru and one of the notable successes in the past-twenty years in Liverpool has been the regeneration of the Albert Do

19、ck (a set of disused warehouses) into a range of museums and galleries. However the Tate in particular, with its ambitions to be an apologist for the international avant-garde community, initially found it self at cultural odds with a truculent, politicized population who would not be patronized by

20、a perceived Metropolitan elite. For instance, when Tate Liverpool opened just over 20 years ago as a London outreach project some staff were unconvinced by contemporary arts relationship to school art, (or indeed local artists) declaring that they had nothing to say to each other and that the job of

21、 the Tate was advocacy for its collection. Avant-garde art seemed to conflict with the school curriculum and local community needs. Moreover school teachers were advised by the first Director that pupils should not get in the way by being in the gallery when the public were there. Education, not for

22、 the last time, was used to broker between museum and public. The education department developed the Tate outreach bus designed by David Hockney that quickly became a recognizable sight in areas of the city unfamiliar with contemporary art. Going to visit the nude tarts in the Walker Art Gallery (th

23、e much valued Victorian Museum) had always been an alternative or addition to football. Diverse working class audiences should not be pathologised as lacking interest in art. However, the Tate arrived with political problems to overcome not least a public skeptical about the merits of Carl Andres Eq

24、uivalent Eight or the pile of bricks. Moreover, also hindering community cohesion in response to civil unrest in the 1980s was Tates presumed historic association with the slave trade. Further its part in the docks regeneration scheme was perceived as an unwelcome Tory Government intervention into l

25、ocal politics and not far off let them eat cake when jobs were needed. Education had huge hurdles to overcome and the outreach bus went to places others could or would not. The artist as outreach worker is important here with Antony Gormelys Field for the British Isles (a community based participato

26、ry project) bringing to the gallery people from St Helens. Such projects also created a climate of acceptance for contemporary art. Eventually Gormelys Other Place was adopted by the local community who raised funds for it to stay in the Mersey Estuary. But perhaps the most successful initiative set

27、 up by education Toby Jackson the first Head of Education at Liverpool was a pioneer in gallery developments such as Young Tate. was Young Tate that began as outreach with 13 to 25 year olds. Skeptical, I believed at inception it was tokenism but Young Tate quickly established itself as a core activ

28、ity of Tate Liverpool, members sitting on committees, working on exhibitions, making informed decisions with curators and representing Tate on local radio. Currently with blogs, apprenticeship schemes and workshops they recently created a Young Tate alternative Turner Prize with the winner selected

29、by 3000 online voters. Participation not patronage has been the key to community success: Young Tate spawned a Tate Modern equivalent in Raw Canvas. There are now many important young peoples forums such as the South London Gallerys Art Assassins. Although it can be argued that technology enables pa

30、rticipation and keeps audiences at a digital distance (and out of the gallery) it does enable user-generated activity. Moreover given the hostility to the school curriculum at Tate Liverpools inception it is noteworthy that currently during the Saatchi exhibition, there is an online space where scho

31、ols can display their pupils artwork and an art-room where under 17s can make and display art online. The gallery has come a long way since it banned school art from its chic white cube. Between 2000 and 2003 I worked as a researcher on The Visual Paths to Literacy project, (with pupils from East Lo

32、ndon primary schools). Childrens writers such as Michael Morpurgo, Jamila Gavin and Anthony Browne created writing workshops inspired by artworks in a project hosted by Tate Britain and Tate London. The impact of such projects was huge with many children bringing parents unfamiliar with the Tate col

33、lection to look at favorite paintings at the weekend. (The project did raise many issues about how to work with art works across disciplinary boundaries. The final report Visual Paths to Literacy: understanding the impact of the project on young peoples learning. is available via email if anyone is

34、interested let me know). Part of the problem of creating successful outreach and community projects is an assumption about what counts as legitimate culture and therefore gains official sanction. The complete commodification of culture should not inure us to counter-culture activity and that culture

35、 is diverse and pluralistic, not readily counted or coerced into a target setting ethos. It would be expected therefore that the arts if not reflecting at least acknowledge a lack of consensus in what cultural activity can be. It is also the case that the much lauded collapse of distinction between

36、high and low culture renders many of the assumptions about regeneration through particular establish beacons of cultural practices redundant. It is noteworthy that while paying lip-service to culture at the heart of regeneration the examples often touted by official bodies such as DCMS are likely to

37、 be recognizable names and products. Like many I am skeptical of the target setting culture and patronizing attitudes to so called hard to reach groups and the socially excluded but I am totally committed to museums and galleries being accountable, accessible, public institutions that work creativel

38、y with a range of communities. This means recognizing that targeting Chinese communities in 2007, the AfricanCaribbean community in 2008 because government wish to celebrate the bicentenary commemoration of the Parliamentary abolition of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade will not create sustainable com

39、munities as communities are much more diverse than the overarching ethnic label AfricanCaribbean connotes. It is timely given the centenary celebration of the American Newark Museum and its community ethos to note that community is no longer just around the corner but global and that learning what a

40、ids your community as Dana argued is now a complex business. Dikshana Turakhia a student on the Institute of Educations Museums and Galleries in Education MA remarked in her research that a Community is for Life not just for Christmas. She also noted the difficulty of defining what and who community

41、 might be. Dikshanas remarks are also a salutary reminder that we are not social workers and often stray into areas that while laudable need caution.Barriers to exclusionIn Britain there have been the obvious routes to working with communities by for instance asking how diverse communities would lik

42、e to be defined and addressed. The Science Museum following focus group meetings with Chinese Community leaders on a proposed Chinese Medicine exhibition changed events initially called Being Chinese: East West Matters and Being Chinese: Eat Your Way to Health to Chinese Traditions because many Chin

43、ese people identified themselves as British-Chinese. Again Dhikshanas research found that marketings increased role in museums could become a barrier to exclusion. Museums are not prone to rapid change. Rather they are subject to what has been termed punctuated evolution: that is rapid change follow

44、ed by long periods of stability (Sloan 2003:234). It is worth recalling just how far the new 21st century museum has transformed from origins in the 17th century cabinet of curiosities and roots in Princely collections. A visitor to the Tradescants John Tradescants, Elder and Youngers Ark in London

45、eventually formed the basis of the Ashmolean in Oxford the first public museum in England. early 17th century Ark, (an early collection of rarities) described seeing a piece of wood, an apes head, a cheese all kinds of shells, the hand of a mermaid, the hand of a mummy, a very natural wax hand under

46、 a glass, all kinds of precious stones, coins, a picture wrought in feathers, a small piece of wood from the cross of Christ (Sloan 2003:80). The early museum was bounded by terms such as wondrous, rarities, curiosities and artificial and natural discoveries. The eclectic objects were displayed by p

47、oetic association in the wunderkamer without recourse to systematic classification. Such collections were evidence, in Baconian philosophy, that knowledge itself is a virtue and that amateur enthusiasm was key to Enlightenment. If such wondrous collections lost their curiosity as scientific explanat

48、ion rendered the mythic mermaid obsolete (except in Denmark), museums gained in knowledge from professionalized systematic scholarly activity but lost enchantment, magic and hoax. In brief, some way from the cabinets of curiosity and display of the worlds wonders, by the 19th century, the museum bec

49、ame an apologist for nation-state values and enmeshed in conservation and curatorial scholarship with education the domain of under-qualified women and the volunteer. If the pursuit of knowledge had been an early organizing principal of random collections, the taxonomies surrounding the contemporary

50、 new museum are significantly different. Since at least David Andersons ground-breaking A Common Wealth: Museums in the Learning Age, (1997 and 1999) the mausoleum has been re-conceptualized in social terms as agents of social change, progenitors of regeneration, brokers in creating community and na

51、tional cohesion and sites for active citizenship. Such imperatives can be read out of the titles of numerous recent books and reports prefaced by terms such as reshaping, reconstructing and reconfiguring that refer to the engaging, responsive See Woollard, Vicky, John Reeve and Caroline Lang (2006)

52、The Responsive Museum: Working with Audiences in the Twenty-First Century Ashgate or discursive museum moving beyond the mausoleum to be a catalyst for community development. If some museums have become more like genre-crossing shopping centres, a place to meet up and drink cappuccino, or buy a desi

53、gner bag they have also taken on a serious role as places to regenerate traumatised communities as outlined above. In more extreme re-conceptualisation museums are places of reconciliation, memorial sites for atonement witnessed in Daniel Libeskinds Jewish Museum in Berlin. Less overtly in the Austr

54、alian National Museum in Canberra, and museums in post-apartheid South Africa they are sites of reconciliation between communities historically difficult to reconcile. These new taxonomies are an indication of an overhaul of the museum as repositories for the worlds rare and precious objects, to bec

55、ome sites for social justice. Ironically collections termed Trophies of Empire have been overwritten with potent emancipatory possibilities as the self-reflexive museum adjusts to a new world order. Such changes have however opened up a Pandoras box as communities unfamiliar with the rituals of muse

56、um visiting or indifferent to the power of relics are targeted as hard to reach communities and subject to funding initiatives. Despite the UK governments policy changes, rhetoric of access and inclusion, and free entrance to most museums visitor numbers are declining from 28% of the population in 1

57、992/3 to 22% in 2002/3. With significant exceptions such as Tate Modern and the DCMS sponsored museums with stringent performance targets linked to funding agreements where there have been increases in so-called excluded groups, audiences figures show a decrease in young people visiting. Moreover, t

58、he historic overall trend of more A-C1 visitors rather than C2s, Ds and Es remains The UK defines social class in terms of occupation: A: professional occupations B: managerial and technical occupations C1: skilled occupations-non manual C2: skilled occupations-manual D: partly-skilled occupations E

59、: unskilled occupations. Educational achievement is still a significant factor in defining the museum visitor See in particular Pierre Bourdieus surveys of the 1970s and 80s although with the caveat that they were very culturally specific and now rather outdated.Recent museum reform stems from the t

60、heoretical admonishments of the often Foucaldian driven New Museology (the title of Peter Vergos 1989 publication) that insisted on a re-conceptualisation of the power-relationship between communities of users and the benighted traditional museum authorities: perhaps too easily vilified as gatekeepe

61、rs intent on maintaining elite cultural hierarchies wedded to obscure scholarship. The officially sanctioned custodians and interpreters of artifacts have been challenged to reinvest in access and inclusion beyond the museums long-established audiences supposedly intent on leisure and the acquisitio

62、n of cultural capital. Therefore as indicated above in the last decade the museum and art gallery have (under funding agreements) returned to their core historic role, education, ousting the primacy given to collecting, conservation and the acquisition of taste. Perceived as elitist institutions and

63、 required to put their house into New Labour order, funding initiatives have ensured that the traditional custodians of artifacts are in the vanguard of the access and inclusion debate. However, in tandem with a recalibration of the role of the museum as a fulcrum for the regeneration of communities

64、 is a growing unease that life-long learning may mean an overhaul of cherished values. As technology is increasingly used to broker between new audiences and the authentic experience of the thing itself museums and galleries are embroiled in rapid change in an arena that prided itself on its attachm

65、ent to Enlightenment values and the authentic experience of silent communion with actual art and artifact. As communities are brought together though outreach, physically or via technology, opportunities open to explore how learning communities might be established and sustained. Sometimes under fun

66、ding duress some museums and galleries have reshaped their priorities to establish learning communities in social groups historically hostile or indifferent to what is currently packaged as a cultural offer. The charge of philistinism and dumbing-down inevitably followed and yet there are outstandin