Tate Modern

Tate Modern website



Interview with Matthew Gale


by Valentina Rossi



V.R: How much influence, if any, have the practices of Institutional Critique had in the new reorganization of the collection? I am referring for instance to the categories of the museum setting in the work of Marcel Broodthaers or the rearrangement of the collection of the Museum Bojiman curated by Hans Haacke?

M.G I don't think that there is consciously, but of course we are aware of Broodthaers and the importance of his work. He worked in London for many years, and so there is a sort of legacy of Broodthaers in the air. But I don't think that anyone sat down and said, "Well, Marcel Broodthaers did this. Let's follow that". I think something about the mechanics of how we work might be helpful here. It is not just one person making a decision about everything in the building. There is a big team of curators who bring their own perspectives, and we have an overarching scheme that works across the building. Each room will be dealt with by different people in conversation in the group. So there will be people who are fascinated by institutional critique, there are others who know about Broodthaers, there will be others who are concerned with other things. That's what makes it rich. So I don't think that we take up a single route to come to the enrichment of what we do. I can't quite imagine how one would play out Broodthaers' idea across the whole of Tate Modern with all the other things that we have to do.

V.R: In the volume Post-Critical Museology (Routledge, 2013) the notion of Britishness is frequently emphasized, how is this notion is interpreted by Tate? What is the relationship between the Tate Modern collection and British arts?

M.G: Well, that is sort of where we have been in the conversation. I think it is more subtle than that. The key responsibility of Tate Britain is to tell a story of British art from 1500 to now. But at every stage, when we get to the 20th and 21th century, we are thinking about our position in London. When we are thinking about Tate Modern we are thinking about our position in London in relation to the world, and that necessarily means we are thinking about British artists as well. But I suppose in terms of hierarchies of activity, the level of where things need to be sorted out, our commitment has to be to international art here at Tate Modern, because there is a commitment to British art at Tate Britain. And maybe that volume is concerned with Britishness because it is an interesting question at the moment for British culture.

V.R: It's like postcolonial studies, in a sense?

M.G: It is, but it is also why there is a question about museums that are based around nationhood. So it is a question that the Whitney has for itself in New York. And actually when one looks at it there are relatively few institutions around the world that are simply dedicated to their own national place.

V.R: In your text in a book Tate Modern the handbook you talk about the "responsibility of the curator". Even here you point out the concept of "paradigm shift". What do you mean?

M.G: There are two different things. The question there is about our responsibility as mediators between the art and the public. That's what I considered to be the curatorial responsibility — to allow that conversation to happen as openly as possible. And that can be seen in a number of ways. To try to make it as direct as possible between the visitor and the artwork, to provide some support where people need it, which is why we have texts and people who will guide you around the museum, but if you don't want that you don't have to have it. But also because we are talking about a collection rather than an exhibition, there is a longer term responsibility to the artwork, because it is here forever; we don't sell works. So it is the national collection, and we have a responsibility, but also a sort of creative responsibility to show the work and to think of other ways in which it can be shown, I think. The question of the paradigm shift is really about what our displays are doing right now, which is that at the centre of each of those wings, as we call them — the different parts of the floor — we have a gallery that focuses on a moment where something significant changed in art practice. So you have that around surrealism, but you have that around 'anti-form' and Arte Povera. That is really a very simple explanation of what that means, but that space is a sort of generator for the galleries around it, where works seem to be in response to that moment. Maybe developing from it, maybe anticipating it, maybe ignoring it but being in the same moment. That is the organizing principle for the displays at the moment.

V.R: If Alfred Barr was taken as the starting point for the creation of collections, and then later for their modernist exhibition, what can we take as a reference point in the post-modern? And in the hypermodern times we are living in?

M.G: I'm not sure about Alfred Barr. Because I think the way in which Barr has been positioned is rather reductive. He has been seen simply through the diagram of Cubism and Abstract Art, whereas in fact his practice as a director and a curator was much more diverse than that. You only have to open a book on Alfred Barr and you'll learn that straight away. I think that he has been set there as a target and that is slightly unfair to him.

V.R: But I think Alfred Barr has anyway had a strong influence on the museum until maybe the sixties, and then Pontus Hulten too. They opened the new ways for museum practices. What do you think?

M.G: Maybe they're talking about Alfred Barr also because there is such a financial strength there behind the Museum of Modern Art that key works entered the collection and they became the canon for that period of creativity. When you start unpicking what they acquired, then you start to see that the canon has holes in it. One example would be how with the influence of Greenberg they were buying Pollock but not De Kooning. So their holdings of De Kooning are quite weak.

V.R: I was also reading the biography of Leo Castelli, and it was really interesting to learn about the relationship between galleries, buyer and also Alfred Barr. And for example also Nicholas Serota - as well as everybody in the new and old museology - talks about Alfred Barr. Could you point out any reference in the last century?

M.G: I think much of this is a group activity. We all bring different points of reference. You find those shifting from Malraux to Benjamin, and more people who are looking at practice, perhaps, than practitioners. But everyone has their heroes and also targets to focus on. I suppose I don't really see it in that way, personally. We are trying to do something that is different.

V.R: Exactly, in fact everybody is now talking about Harald Szeemann, for example. He did the first historical exhibition. So everybody now wants to work following his style.

M.G: Of course all of those things come in whether deliberately or subliminally. You see an exhibition and you think it has really transformed the way you think. But, as I said, because we have got, maybe, at any one time 8-10 people discussing where we should be going, everyone is bringing their own influences to that conversation, and from that comes something different rather than specific to any of us.

V.R: I was in Amsterdam in March 2014 for a conference named "Collecting Geographies" and everybody discussed the 1989 exhibition in Paris called "Magiciens de la Terre", twenty-five years ago. Was it a model to which you have referred? What other shows have you taken into account? I'm also thinking of Pontus Hulten's exhibitions at the Pompidou.

M.G: I think all of these things have converged. This is not answering your question, I am afraid. But I am interested how "Magiciens de la Terre" has moved from being critically attacked to being critically celebrated, and that's an interesting historical trajectory for a particular exhibition. And I suppose insofar as it has an influence on what we are doing here, we are trying to break that hierarchy. We are trying to think if we are showing Chen Zen, he should be treated in exactly the same way as Pascali. We are not treating Pascali as more important because he is more familiar to us, or making Chen Zen into a sort of mystical, spiritual figure. I think that is an important leveling, and that does run through what we are trying to do at Tate Modern. And it reflects how the Tate collection is being built more widely, that it is increasingly international. And we are trying to make those connections to international artists that make sense, and introduce new people whose practice seems valuable. V.R: When it was decided to rehang the collection of Tate Modern abandoning a chronological approach in favour of a thematic one, Tate also broke with the classifications by technique, school and movement. For what reason was this decision taken? Was this new type of approach favoured to prevent any emphasis on the gaps in the collection? How did you reach the decision to take the works on loan for some set-ups?

M.G: Well, those things go together, obviously. To break chronology means that you break schools; schools now seem such an old thought, don't they? I think Tate Modern reflected thinking in art historical scholarship over a twenty-year period before the building opened. People were thinking much more internationally, thinking about breaking down the categories, rethinking the sense of sequences and influences and trying to open up history, and when working towards this building it became apparent that there was an opportunity to make a big leap there. What was significant about doing that was to be able to show familiar things but in new ways. And that has laid out the possibilities of then making other changes later on. Rather than saying, "We have an orthodoxy, a set of values", we were saying, "Things are more flexible, we have to think about now and so our response will change over time".

V.R: Nicholas Serota wrote in this book (Experience or Interpretation: The Dilemma of Museums of Modern Art 1996) about the idea of history imagined by T.S. Eliot. What do you think?

M.G: That was given as a lecture, so one has to contextualize that piece of writing. I guess he goes to Eliot as something that his audience will be able to understand, opening up possibilities by bringing a different point of reference. I think that's one of our strengths at Tate. We try to look outside the enclosure of a particular art world, to see how things can be conveyed to people, how we can make them understandable through other points of reference. We were talking earlier about breaking the classifications. Tate Modern was seen as a particular opportunity. It has that grounding in University Academia around art history, but it was also something that was happening, something in the sort of Zeitgeist at that time. Look at what the museums of modern art were doing at that moment, the Centre Pompidou, for instance. They were rethinking a way to show their collection. And so at that moment a thematic rethinking of the collection was something that a lot of curators seemed to be thinking about.

V.R: It was a really big decision. Because when the museum was born the first thing that it had to do was show the collection in a "learning" way. And this is quite the opposite, without history, chronological lines, no more movements, no more techniques. It was interesting, because it seems the museum is leaving the didactic way to display art.

M.G: We were trying to make other possibilities occur to people as they encountered art. We wanted to break with that sense of "This is the big voice of the institution telling you what you should do when you are standing in front of a work of art", and to open up the possibility for you to see things for yourself. That's why it was important to provide information, as well, so that the people who needed help could have it. We were trying to open that up.

V.R: But the visitors may need much more help to understand the new re-hang of the collection. Otherwise they will have to be ready before they come to the exhibition. What do you think?

M.G: I understand what you are saying, but that is an end result that you are anticipating the visitor having to get to. Another way of looking at it would be the experience of stepping into that space and thinking about what you will see in front of you if you have no sense of who de Chirico is, for example, which is an experience we all feel at certain times. And those first rooms in particular serve a purpose a bit like a book cover, so that you are going, you look and maybe you do read the text panel that tells you that this is setting up the possibilities across time.

V.R: In the museum theory at the time of Globalization there are two main tendencies, on the one hand we observe the making of an international culture, while on the other the museums asks questions about cultural identity. Where do you position the work of the Tate Modern?

M.G: Somewhere between the two, I think. Clearly we are concerned with the building of an international culture, but we are questioning that at every stage. We are looking at those networks of connections around the world that have allowed these artists to become well-known, but at the same time we are looking at the local context that they fit into. I suppose that it is broadly about an international culture, but you can't just absorb that, you have got to question it at the same time.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


 

 

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This interview was made on October 2014

 

postmedia UNI _ altri titoli

Infrasottile _ L'exforma _ Arte fuori dall'arte _ Artisti di carta _ Il pragmatismo nella Storia dell'Arte _ Roberto Daolio _ Il museo come spazio critico

 

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