Honouring spectator agency / Audience as participants

This is a note on the curatorial impulse and the relevance of curated exhibitions, but first a digression serving to contextualise the educative mission of cultural institutions vis-à-vis the broader learning landscape.

Higher education in the UK is receiving more widespread attention at the moment due to last week’s publication of a Government green paper on the proposed Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF). A theme emerging from the discourse surrounding this paper and the implications of implementing the framework and the perceived need for it is talk of consumers and producers. Now this transactional vocabulary is not new – I remember in 2007 hearing a university director and principal talk of the tendency of some students to behave like the customers of universities, and he protested that the relationship between institution, staff and students was not so clear cut – but the use of such vocabulary has become more nuanced.

For we also read in these current discussions surrounding the reform of UK higher education and the need to place more emphasis on teaching and hold it in the same regard as research about how certain corners of academe are dominated by a producer-driven culture that is ultimately self-serving. This is apparently most pressing in the humanities and social sciences, where too little attention is given to the consumers (let’s leave aside the lexical analysis and etymological theorisations for that word for the moment) of research in those fascinatingly broad disciplinary areas. Whatever the subtleties of the broader discussion intensified by the green paper that I have yet to become better acquainted with, I confess to a certain sympathy with this pro-consumer attitude: why should those who consume humanities and social sciences research outputs be disadvantaged by the motivations and also often the forms of their producers?

In late March 2013 I visited the recently redistributed collection at the Tate Britain and made some notes on my thinking about curation as a praxis and wrote some initial raw responses to Tate’s re-curation. On a page headed ‘Curatorial concerns’ I noted the following six items in the order they apparently manifested themselves to me: environment/space/ambience; sustainability; audience; material to curate (‘content’); current debate/theory about the content; innovation and development. Following these I observed:

Curating must be futuristic, which is to say forward looking or motivated by a displaced acquisitiveness: participants must be encouraged to GAIN from the experience. So: either new approaches and adjacencies are explored, or an unfamiliar or currently unnecessarily out-of-favour artist is brought under scrutiny (e.g. Barocci at the National Gallery at the moment).*

When I re-read these notes today for the first time I was put in mind of those aspects of the TEF debate that call for a greater consumer focus because I perceived some resonance there. Accordingly, I would wish to introduce into that debate the possibility that we are not calling students (or participants in exhibitions) consumers to fix them in some transactional matrix of capitalism, but to acknowledge that there is a binary relationship surrounding any content: she who speaks of it produces something for a consuming interlocutor; he who refashions it produces something for a consuming recipient. It follows, then, that the pro-consumer discussion serves to rebalance an uneven relationship and to invite – if not perhaps to coerce – the consumer into co-production. Properly equipped with articulacy, knowledge and sensitivity, this co-producing consumer would be an active participant in the relationship surrounding any content: in other words, the self-critical community of knowledge producers (who must therefore understand if only implicitly that they are at once consumers as producers) expands to include anyone willing and capable to participate. And this will involve new forms of interaction that exceed and therefore complement the traditional modes of dissemination and sharing (e.g. books and closed conferences), to broaden the audience as far as possible in order to capture interest and inspire new ways of knowing, including forms of action.

Museums and galleries are indubitably leading the way in this with their recent consistent focus over the last ten years on the audience and in finding innovative ways to create relevant relationships surrounding any content. The National Gallery’s Barocci: Brilliance and Grace is a germane case in point, and not least because it concerns a Renaissance artist (read: traditional and irrelevant to younger audiences) at an established cultural institution (read: traditional and irrelevant to younger audiences). Aside from the accompanying engagement programme’s breadth, including musical performances and commissions specially chosen for the show, I remember being particularly impressed by the video at the end of the exhibition itself, which inspired me to note that it aided a visitor’s appreciation for context and extended her understanding of the works on show. One of the sections of the video was titled ‘Tradition and Innovation’, which in itself was a clever way of breaking the prejudice surrounding tradition, and opening visitors’ eye to the reality that today’s traditions in many cases were yesterday’s innovations. All this helps to revalorise knowing about content as a relationship surrounding any content; showing that it is not an object to be transferred but a site of possibilities for knowing about content and generating new content.

* In this respect, the National Gallery seems to have succeeded: quite accidentally I performed a search for 'Barocci' in Google UK, and the first returned item of 438,000 was http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/barocci-brilliance-and-grace.