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art : features Chris Stevens Karl Musson: I would like to start by asking you about the origins of the Tate and specifically why the Tate family wanted a gallery for the benefit of the public. Chris Stevens: I think it started with Sir Henry Tate of Tate and Lyle, who was a great collector of what was then contemporary British art, late Victorian painting and sculpture, and I think he saw a sort of intuitive resistance to contemporary art. The National Gallery was still based around the old masters, and I don’t know if there was a particular nationalist dimension to that, but the old masters were almost exclusively not British. The idea of the British school was just about the eighteenth century, so he [Sir Henry Tate] offered his collection to the nation. And I think it wasn’t particularly warmly received, but then he offered to build a separate building to house it, even though it was part of the National Gallery, so he funded the building of the gallery, which was then a fraction of what it is now, on the site of the Millbank Penitentiary, so it was very much in a bad part of town. I think it was, like so many around the country, built as part of a mission to educate and the belief that an appreciation of art would improve public morals and behaviour and so on. The way it developed is that at some point in the 1920s there was a perception that the national collection needed to be collecting modern international art as well, by which they meant Impressionism, so that became part of the Tate’s role as well. KM: With regard to the mission to educate, which seems like quite a Victorian idea, the Tate is a finite space with a very large collection of work, therefore there is a need to rotate the collection. How would you say that over time, the criteria for this rotation has changed from the Victorian, pedagogic idea of the mission to educate, to a more contemporary idea of a product to supply a demand? CS: It’s a balance between the two, if anything I suspect a revival of the sense of, not simply to educate in that way. The idea that educating people through art you’ll improve society is possibly not so purely held on to, but I think that there is a sense that what the Tate is, is a collection and everything else is peripheral to that. So there’s a kind of duty to make that collection available to the people who own it. But attached to that I think that there’s a sense that you can no longer just say, well, here’s a picture of a wall and either you get it or you don’t. The Tate’s stated mission is to collect and display but also to promote the understanding of art. So I think the two go together. There probably was a period some time ago where there’s much more the idea that art is simply put on the wall for those who appreciate it. I think now, while that still exists, there’s also a greater desire to try to communicate it, to reach people and make it accessible to people who maybe don’t yet come to art museums. KM: That coincides very neatly with the fact that the Tate has very comprehensive accompanying texts. That in itself is an interesting question. How would one edit an accompanying text, for something like Turner, or Carl Andre’s Equivalent VIII? A very different explanation is required but the language used has to be the same. CS: Yes, the language used is always the most challenging thing because we’ve got to pitch it at a level which is meaningful to a wide range of people. So we try to avoid specialist terms and jargon. But what you actually say in an individual with a work is also partly determined by the context in which you show it. With the displays, the Tate Britain and the Tate Modern, each room tries to articulate an idea. The Tate Modern is more likely to be an idea about art at a certain moment, or a certain time, or a certain theme in art. At the Tate Britain, the idea of the collection displays is to try to explore the relationships between art and Britishness as part of the need to rationalise isolating the art of a country. So what do you write about the Turner? What we try to do is make it non prescriptive. I hope the texts don’t say, "this piece is about this". Rather it might raise some questions or tease out one or two things to try to draw people into looking at it for themselves. But if it's in a room that’s about the sublime, then what you would tease out would focus on the sublime. But if it would be in a room about, for example, the construction of national identity, it would be about something different. KM: So that example of the sublime would follow into things that happen above the collection, which, I suppose for want of a better expression, one would call intelligent curation, so for example Mariele Neudecker in the context of Turner, whereby placed next to anything else, or next to anything other than Turner, they would have a different effect. CS: Exactly, and the hope is that by bringing the two together, you get something that you don’t get from either in isolation. And of course you get the sense that the sublime continues – people who love Turner but don’t understand contemporary art might then find something in the Neudecker and visa versa. KM: Would that also be the sense in which public talks and lectures are set? CS: Yes, I think that, although they have come from two different parts of the Tate (the Tate Britain and the Tate Modern), there is a sense in which the programme encompasses everything we do for the public, so that would be collections, displays, exhibitions, talks and tours. So the talks might be about something that’s only tangentially related to art, there is a series of talks about Derrida for example. But of course, it is a part of the large cultural intellectual field art occupies. KM: Do you think it is a part of Henry Tate’s original remit that the Tate Britain continues to house the Turner Prize, in terms of how that would sit between two extremes such as Habermas and Bourdieu, the idea of symbolic capital and education on the one hand, and on the other, that things will be understood if they’re important to the listener? CS: The Turner Prize is continuing Henry Tate’s idea, promoting contemporary British Art. Where it sits between Habermas and Bourdieu I’m not sure. I suppose we try to square that circle in a way, or to find a position between the two extremes. It’s primarily what it means for the viewer that generates understanding, at the same time we try to facilitate that understanding and to give as many people as possible something to get a handle on so that it means something to them. And even if they hate it, then much better they hate it for a good reason that just an innate resistance to anything new. KM: So does that give more of a political than visual edge to the decisions which inform the choice of rotation of the collection? CS: The rotation of the collection is driven by a whole range of impetuses really. The thing which Nick Serotta introduced when he came here in ‘89 was the annual re-hang. I think 1990 was the first re-hang and until then the idea was that each Director would hang the collection and that was it, and what changed were the temporary exhibitions. I’m sure there were smaller things going on but Nick introduced this idea of an annual re-hang of the collection, which I don’t think was ever universal across the board, not everything changed. I think the two crucial things are: the desire to show more of the collection, particularly in the modern and contemporary field where a lot of large works never saw the light of day. But also I think it came at the end of the 1980s at a time when it no longer seemed possible to tell a single art historical narrative, there’s a recognition of a much more diverse history which the collection reflected but the display didn’t. I’m a specialist in mid 20th century British art and I can remember coming here for the first re-hang and there was a room of neo-romanticism in the 40s, such as John Minton, and there were artists who hadn’t been shown at the Tate since then (the '40s) because they were seen as marginal to the story of modernism that dominated at that time i.e. Nicholson, Hepworth and Moore through to Bacon and '50s and '60s. So I think it had an important art historical and intellectual dimension as well as the simple desire to show more of what the Tate had. Those two still prevail. When we hang the collection displays, which happens each year, there’s a rolling programme and a point in the year where we say that’s the new display. So even though maybe we’ve done a room a week for several months, there are certain works which we’re expected, or we want to keep on display. If you take down Millais’ Ophellia there’s a public outcry, so the changes are built around those works that need to be up, and certain artists that you need to have on show. We can’t really, at the Tate Britain, not have Francis Bacon on show for a year. So there’s a certain kind of structure that determines what you do, and it’s the same at the Tate Modern, there are certain works you have to have on show. I think it would be very hard for them not to have a Rothko room. But within that we try to insert rooms, whether they’re single artist rooms or historic or thematic rooms that bring variation to the story as well. This coming year we’ll keep a room of '30s abstraction and a '20s pastoral, Spencer so on, but then we’ll have a room of FN Souza, an artist from the '50s who you hardly ever see. At the Tate Britain we’re getting to a point where there will be a number of rooms which just stay put because I think the price you pay is that there are certain constituency visitors who get very cross when every time they come their favourite picture has moved. We’ll have certain rooms which just stay in place but then around those we’ll annually change and obviously in the contemporary area there will be much more change than in the historic where the history that is reflected in the collection is simple. KM: I was very interested that you said that the idea of an annual re-hang, as opposed to a re-hang on the basis of a new Director, coincides with the point of view that there cannot be a single narrative of the history of art, or a single history. Would you say that the Tate Liverpool and the Tate St Ives are also related to that? CS: Yes. I think they’re both slightly different. Liverpool was set up as part of that sense of duty to present the collection to the people who own it and the recognition, just as now, that it shouldn’t be just the white middle class who go to art galleries. Similarly it shouldn’t just be people in London. That was the spirit which led to the opening of Liverpool. There was a point when there were tentative ideas of opening a Tate in Norwich but that got superceded by the relationships to other galleries around. For the last five or six years, the Tate has had an exchange programme with Norwich, Sheffield, Kendal and Stoke. St Ives was partly driven by that but also driven by that very peculiar circumstance that St Ives had been in the history of art. I’m sure it’s not coincidental that it was dreamt up under the directorship of Alan Bowness who was very much a part of that St Ives phenomenon. I think its mission statement was to present the story of art in St Ives. But with also, contemporary art that conjoins with that in a constructive way. So contemporary art that they show has some relationship to the art of St Ives in the '40s,' 50s and '60s. So they all have slightly different missions but it is essentially to get the collection seen by as wide a range of constituents as possible. And so it is necessary that neither of those [Liverpool and St Ives] are seen as not having access to the best work. KM: So is it as much the case that the whole collection moves between Liverpool, St Ives, Tate Britain and Tate Modern, as the four are permanent places for four collections which rotate within themselves. CS: Yes, in theory, the area where the four gallery remits overlap. There are no fixed points. Any work could appear in any of the four places. I have to say that Liverpool and St Ives have to fight very hard for certain things but that’s generally driven by a perception of visitor’s expectations. There’s a feeling that a visitor to the Tate Modern could quite reasonably expect to see Picasso’s Weeping Woman and therefore except on exceptional occasions, it’s not really desirable to the visitor for it to be in St Ives for six months. Though they might need to negotiate a different Picasso. And similarly the Francis Bacon Three Studies we try to keep here because there is an association between that work and the Tate Britain. KM: Similar to the association between certain works and this building, do you think that it’s possible that in the eyes of some visitors there is an association between visiting London and this building which perhaps doesn’t exist with the Tate Liverpool? So might it be the case that some visitors to the Tate Britain are visiting because it's one of the things one does in London whereas visitors to the Tate Liverpool might be going there to see particular paintings? CS: I don’t know about the Tate Liverpool. We’ve done research on the London Tate galleries. I suspect that the Tate Liverpool has a very active community programme, a lot from local schools, youth groups. But I think you’re probably right, it also works more like somewhere that houses temporary exhibitions, and if you’re in the north of England you’ll travel to Liverpool to see a Richard Wentworth show just as you’d travel to Leeds if that’s where it was. I don’t know about what tourists do in Liverpool. In London we’ve found that the Tate Britain has a much higher percentage of repeat visitors and also people who come here for some intellectual, spiritual or aesthetic experience. Whereas the Tate Modern, because it’s new I’m sure, and because it’s so dramatic, and because its location is different, has a much higher percentage of a) first time visitors, and b) people who are going because it’s a destination. So I suppose there’s a certain percentage of tourists who would have gone to the Tate, now go to the Tate Modern but don’t come here. KM: How useful in terms of Henry Tate’s ideal, is the Late Tate and being open at weekends in the context of most people having to work Monday to Friday? CS: The Late Tate here, we open late the first Friday of every month and its structured and marketed as a much more distinct thing. And it seems to have established its own audience, which is remarkably different from the day time audience. Aged 25 to 30, because there’s normally music on. Whatever we do needs to fit into what we do but there’s normally some music which hopefully relates to art or Britain or something, and so the place has a completely different buzz and it does seem to bring in a mass of people who are much younger than our average visitor. KM: Possibly another strand of the Turner Prize ethic? CS: A similar audience to the Turner Prize. It’s a very successful way of reaching out to different audiences. |
Interview: Tate's
Head of Collections
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