Michael Armitage, The Fourth Estate, 2017, Photo by White Cube/George Darrell
Introduction
Museums nowadays focus on serving the whole public which is unlike the past that was mainly established for a small group of aristocrats. Hence museums started to pay more attention to organizing public programs and communicating with audiences in recent years to build an intimate relationship with the public. Weil (2002) has clarified the relationship between the museum and the public in his book, stating that the purposes of a museum are to promote the understanding degree of the public and to improve viewers’ level of appreciation. For today’s museums and galleries, practical communication between visitors and the museum which is mainly manifested in the form of public programs can benefit museums’ curating process.
As one of the most attractive art galleries in the world, the Art Gallery of New South Wales has over 1 million visitors every year which makes the Gallery is more than an institution just for viewing the artworks. It’s also a place for the public to enjoy various recreational activities and participate in education programs. Another representative museum that value communication with the public is the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA). There are diverse programs of exhibitions targeting at a range of audiences’ access to contemporary art and ideas. This essay will analyse twoprograms from the Art Gallery of New South Wales and the MCA respectively. It will focus on the objectives of the programs related to the exhibition’s curatorial premise.
Guided tour for Michael Armitage: The Promised Land at MCA
Michael Armitage: The Promised Land is the artist’s first exhibition in Australia, presenting his new paintings that reflect on the recent Kenyan elections and the political meetings as well as dissidence that followed. Kenya is facing the impact of colonization and to the erosion of aboriginal social values and traditions. Armitage’s artworks show inwards to his own culture and outwards to the whole world.
The exhibition is at level one north of the MCA which is generally the first exhibition hall visitors may visit when they enter into the museum. The exhibition hall is simply a square room with white wall and the paintings are orderly hung one by one making a clockwise path for viewers. Different from most exhibitions, wall texts in Michael Armitage: The Promised Land are replaced by leaflets at the entrance for visitors to take by themselves. As leaflets are put close to the introduction at the beginning of the exhibition, there is a large part of visitors go forward to the artworks directly and fail to see leaflets. A guided tour arranged every day can help these people to understand artworks easier and help the other part of visitors that have kept leaflets in hand to know deeper about artworks. The exhibition is from an artist who grows up with Kenya background which means that there is a wide cultural gap between most visitors and the artist. Information of paintings on leaflets is restricted due to space, so it is difficult for every visitor to understand completely about this exhibition only from the leaflet. Therefore, the guided tour is a necessary event for educating the public in this exhibition.
The guided tour is led by volunteers with different nationality backgrounds which means that every volunteer will bring unique perspectives to the exhibition when giving public tours. Approximate 5 minutes before the starting time of the guided tour, the volunteer stood in front of the exhibition room holding a showy green board in hands and talk to people around. Due to the specific location of the museum that is on the edge of Sydney Harbor, there is a large number of visitors are foreigners who are not familiar with Australian culture or even language. The guided tour was started with a brief introduction of the MCA as well as the artist as the group people were from a diverse background of culture and age. And then the volunteer led the group to appreciate each artwork by viewing order with some interpretation. The presentation of the tour guide primarily introduces the creative backgrounds of each artwork rather than tells audiences the meaning directly. The degree of interpretation is moderate that still can leave some spaces for audiences to think and understand by themselves. As Weil (2002) argues, the major destination of visiting a museum exhibition for visitors is not to absorb new information, but to enhance and extend their existing knowledge. What the MCA has interpreted in the volunteer guided tour is a good example to enrich visitors’ view.
There are also some shortages of this education program. First is the lack of communication in the process of the tour. In the communication model of Hodge (2011), while the linear model is diminishing the amount of knowledge in the process of transmission, messages can flow between experts and visitors which makes it possible to equal the information in two directions in the non-linear model of communication. The volunteer guided tour is like a linear model that the volunteer stands in the centre and audiences listen to the information. More communications should be added in the tor such as asking some questions to lead discussions between each other. Additionally, because all artworks in one exhibition room are from the same artist, the curator tried to construct a narrative of these artworks and the volunteer made efforts to tell the story. But in the guided tour, except for the relations between the first painting and others, there is no relationship between each other. The volunteer just tells visitors separate story beyond each painting instead of a complete story of all paintings. From Nielsen’s point of view (2017), constructing narratives is as important as articulating knowledge to a museum as the role of a communicator and an educator, because a vivid narrative can help visitors understanding artworks that are from a different culture easier. The museum needs to consider more about narrative constructing of a guided tour to attract audiences and make the communication more effective. Finally, the duration of one guided tour is about 1 hour for a total of ten paintings which means it takes too long for each work. If audiences hear the information for 6 minutes standing in the same place, it may make visitors feel boring and tired. So, I suggest that it would be better to cut the time in half as 30 minutes in total. Although the guided tour is a common education program for most museums, there are also many problems need to be addressed to make communication with the public perfect.
Artmaking activity for Archibald, Wynne and Sulman Prizes 2019 at the Art Gallery of New South Wales
The Archibald, Wynne and Sulman Prizes is an annual exhibition exhibit incredible artworks of finalists in three influential prizes. The Archibald Prize was first awarded in 1921 which is Australia’s favourite portrait painting award, and one of its most prestigious. Taking a variety of forms, the portrait can be everyone, no matter politicians or celebrities, heroes or artists. The Wynne Prize is awarded to the best landscape painting or figure sculpture in Australia, while the Sulman Prize is given to the best subject painting, genre painting or mural project in any material.
The public program called “Drop in and make: Face time” is a free artmaking activity for families especially for children to create their own portrait. The goal of this family workshop is to encourage children to get up close with the Archibald Prize as well as Young Archie competition and draw someone they admire. The age group of this workshop is mainly from 5-year-old to 15-year-old children accompanied by their parents or carers. There are only one or two young staffs wearing a T-shirt with “welcome” printed on it. First, they show children cardboard of several paintings from both the Archibald Prize and Young Archie competition introducing the Prize in short words. Children can choose a blank drawing paper of their preferred colour and sit down to create their unique portrait painting. During the creation period, the gallery does not give children any ideas but only provide drawing materials and a creative atmosphere. Children are not like adults that interpretation as a presentation can transmit information validly, museums should follow a basically different strategy to communicate with children (Tilden 1977) such as specific workshops to arouse their interest of art. Like what the Art Gallery of New South Wales has done in this education program, through a personal experience of drawing portrait, children may understand more about the exhibition artworks and the aim of the Archibald prize which is to draw someone who brings our country to life. This artmaking workshop not only increases children’s artistic creativity but also raise the participation of the whole family to create artworks which means the program can benefit both adults and their children.
However, in this program there still have some aspects can be improved. First of all, the communication between the staff and participants is not effective enough. Before painting, the staff only introduce the exhibition with pale words. As the target group of this program is children, how to make them enjoy the artworks and how to try to let them know more about the exhibition in an interesting way need to pay more attention. Therefore, the starting words are supposed to add more inspiring language to encourage children to draw the person they admire and enjoy the creative process. Second, there is only a limited number of chairs and tables for both children and accompanying adults which result in a long waiting time for some families. The Gallery can prepare more chairs and tables or select a larger place for workshops. In the end, the selection of location needs to be reconsidered next time. The location of this workshop is at the entrance court of the Gallery. It is no doubt that visitors can notice this activity easily as they enter into the Gallery which may increase the possibility of family engagement. But the court is also noisy because of the large flow of people which is not good for creation and may also cause distraction. Beyond that, the exhibition room is at the lower level 1 which is a certain distance from the program place. Follow the usual visiting order, there may be fewer visitors first viewing The Archibald, Wynne and Sulman Prizes exhibition at a lower level 1 and return to the ground level to join in the workshop. So, there is a large number of children and their families in the workshop group have not visited the exhibition before attending the event that may affect the communication and education result of this program. To solve this problem, the museum can consider both the exhibition and the related programs when selecting the exhibition room. It is better to hold the workshop in a relatively isolated area and locate it near the exhibition or at a lower level than the exhibition hall in terms of the general viewing order of the Gallery
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Conclusion
The museum in the modern world is always regarded as an educational institution besides schools or universities, it is also a community space for the public where visitors can engage in activities and discussions, and to bring out and share ideas (Kaitavuori et al. 2013). The MCA and the Art Gallery of New South Wales both achieve its communication and education role and promote exhibitions to some extent by leading public programs, whereas there are still exist some shortages that need to be enhanced. Thus, when planning a public program, the museum should not only consider how to make visitors participate in but also what visitors will gain from this program.
References
Tilden, F. 1957/1977, Interpreting our Heritage, University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill
Hodge, B. 2011, ‘Museums and attacks from cyberspace: Non-linear communication in a postmodern world’, Museum and Society, vol. 9, no. 2, pp.107-122.
Jane K. Nielsen 2017, ‘Museum communication and storytelling: articulating understandings within the museum structure’, Museum Management and Curatorship, vol. 32, no. 5, pp.440-455
Kaitavuori, K, Kokkonen, L, & Sternfeld, N (eds) 2013, It’s all Mediating: Outlining and Incorporating the Roles of Curating and Education in the Exhibition Context, Cambridge Scholars Publisher, Newcastle-upon-Tyne.
Weil, SE 2002, ‘Making Museums Matter’, Smithsonian Books, Washington, D.C.