Feature preview
Dea Birkett, director of Kids in Museums, gives
THE OTHER POINT OF VIEW
I became quite excited recently when a press release landed in my email inbox. ‘National Gallery lowers paintings for those with specific needs,’ read the subject line. Great! Here, at last, a major museum seemed to be taking this issue seriously and making their collection available to disabled people.
But then I read further. Only three iconic paintings – Van Gogh’s Sunflowers, Constable’s The Hay Wain and Monet’s The Gare St-Lazare – were being lowered ‘enabling visitors in wheelchairs to examine the paintings at close distance.’ Well, I thought, three’s better than nothing. Then I read still further. The paintings were being lowered on one evening, for just two and a half hours. By the following morning, they’ll be hung at their full height again.
Surely this quick fix can’t be good for the paintings nor good for the walls. But more importantly, this short-term concession to access is only acceptable if it’s the first step on a roadmap to creating an inclusive institution. I was curious to discover if this were the case, so contacted the National’s Head of Education, Colin Wiggins. He said the evening was an experiment, ‘to see what the reaction is and learn what the needs are.’
But I wanted to know why this wasn’t the first step in a programme of developing an inclusive approach to hanging work – all of the work? And why just these three paintings at least couldn’t be left at the new, accessible height? Wiggins was adamant. ‘If we left them at that height, we’d have to employ someone to answer all the complaints from people who came in and would have to stoop and bend double and have slipped discs to look at the paintings.’ And how many paintings are on display in the National? ‘Around 2300.’ There would still, therefore, be 2297 left for non-disabled visitors to enjoy without having to bend in the slightest bit. I suggested that over two thousand works of art is surely quite enough for anyone – disabled or non-disabled – to take in on a visit.
But slipped disks aren’t the only perceived (and unproven, unless the museum has conducted medical research in the area) risks the National have associated with allowing disabled visitors access to even this tiny percentage of their collection. The notice about the access night advises that ‘booking is essential’. This would, I pointed out, inevitably exclude those who might just want to drop in. The Head of Education explained that the gallery had to restrict the evening to bookings-only, so not too many attended. ‘If we were to be swamped with thousands of wheelchair users, we’d be in trouble,’ he explained. Trouble! What kind of trouble? The answer was, predictably, ‘security and evacuation procedures’. But surely if the collection were accessible every day, not just on one night, there would probably never be more than a handful of wheelchair users in the building at one time. It’s only because the National had set up an exclusive evening, that they were in danger of being, in their words, ‘swamped’.
This evening is being specially hosted by the National Gallery’s new-ish Director Nick Penny, in conjunction with an organisation called Access to Art. Access to Art admirably works mainly with older people in London, enabling them to visit museums and galleries by providing transport and volunteer support. They have a more pragmatic approach to the one-off event.
‘On the whole, paintings are there for the standing public,’ says Jane Turner of Access to Art. ‘This is a start. It’s never been done before. I hope this is going to happen in other galleries.’
But other galleries have other hopes, which involve not more one-off events but long-term commitment to inclusive practices. ‘At times there’s the impression that the nationals, in an act of largesse, put on an event or an exhibition for the benefit of that section of the masses which they have identified as being deserving of their favour,’ says Tim Desmond, Director of the Galleries of Justice in Nottingham. ‘In the 21st century, galleries and museums should have a social agenda which runs through all their work, where accessibility is the right of all and is not limited to one evening, for which you need to apply.’
Will one night with a lower Hay Wain make any difference to anyone, except those few who are lucky enough to attend? I don’t believe so. I don’t believe that a few dozen people being able to see a few works of art for two hours can count as access. What will make a difference is if institutions work towards being inclusive – for everyone, for always. Young and old, disabled and non-disabled. So we can all enjoy the opportunity to admire the great works that belong to us.
www.kidsinmuseums.org.uk
AI Profile – John Cassy, channel director, Sky Arts
Monday’s “unveiling”, if that’s what it can be called, of Antony Gormley’s One & Other on the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square is probably the biggest public art project to date, in terms of participation and of audience.
You know how it’s going to work: every hour, 24 hours a day for 100 days, individuals who have applied with an idea of something they want to do will take their place on the plinth and do it. They’ll be people like David Rosenberg, a London designer, who wants to pedal his pink bike to generate enough energy to make him glow in the dark. Or Heather Pringle here, who will celebrate her 20th birthday on the plinth. Or 83-year-old Gwynneth Pedler who wants to signal with semaphore flags (if she can find some).
It’s also the point at which reality television and art meet, because every minute is going to be covered by Sky Arts.
“We want to engage with arts audiences on air but also on the streets, and we think this a very democratic way of getting them involved in the arts” says John Cassy, the channel director.
After five years the sponsorship of ENO is ending, and the Fourth Plinth is part of Sky Arts’ next big thing in sponsorship.
They will go live on line from the plinth on Monday from 8.15am (the official start is 9) and you get it at www.oneandother.co.uk
This is part of the channel’s “evolution”, as Cassy puts it. For three years it has sponsored and covered the Hay Festival, and the Gormley marathon is only the beginning of a three-year sponsorship of Artichoke, the creative company that brought London the Sultan’s Elephant in 2006 and Liverpool the giant automaton spider La Machine last year, and is organising One & Other.
In defence of commerce in culture
Earlier this month, the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge turned down a grant worth £80,000 from the Art Fund because it refused to display the donor’s logo next to the artwork bought with its support. This in turn triggered the loss of a further £45,000 from the V&A and the MLA Council towards the acquisition. It’s director, Dr Timothy Potts, argued that “logos are the currency of marketing and commerce and this introduces a promotional element into the galleries that we regard as an unnecessary and unacceptable distraction - no matter how worthy the object of promotion”.
In response, CultureLabel’s Simon Cronshaw champions uniting culture institutions with mainstream consumer culture.
We may or may not disagree with the particular design or colour of logos, but without thinking or blinking, as modern cultural consumers, we understand the messages - the values, the heritage, the story - to which they provide a visual short-cut.
The Art Fund logo represents the democratic “people power” of 80,000 supporters saying that this painting is a national treasure worth saving, that individuals have gone to the effort of digging into their pockets to pay for it. Modern cultural consumers can handle – and perhaps even expect – to see messaging of this kind.
The current exhibition is a hit, but it hasn’t always been funny getting the Cartoon Museum established. Now, it’s developing.
“Time supposedly heals all wounds yet somehow the wounds inflicted on the body politic by Margaret Hilda Thatcher are still raw and after 30 years still suppurating. This may be because the narrative generated by her period in office which swept away all before it and was partly delusional still prevails to this day” - Steve Bell.
“How will the muse of history assess Margaret Thatcher? A unique phenomenon, nominally Conservative but more a believer in self-improvement and personal responsibility as the guiding principles from individual to find their way through life. The state should have a limited role and the market was a better way to resolve the distribution of resources and rewards. Such views led her to being both loved and loathed. Few can deny her achievements. She changed the political weather. – Kenneth Baker.
These are the diametrically views of two commentators, each distinguished in different ways, of the subject of the current exhibition at the Cartoon Museum, Margaret Thatcher. Both are trustees of the museum, showing that there are no biases in the journalism of the cartoon, nor in the museum devoted to it.
The exhibition, Maggie! Maggie! Maggie! which runs until July, marks the 30th anniversary of Mrs Thatcher becoming prime minister, and as the illustration here show, no holds are barred. The Guardian cartoonist Martin Rowson calls his profession “voodoo journalism”.
At the Royal Society of Arts in 1949, H M Bateman said, “Is it not high time that some official recognition of the worth of comic drawing was made? A permanent collection of some of the best examples should be got together and housed under one roof, forming a sort of National Gallery of Humorous Art. It is a fine art and a big industry, but it has no central home or headquarters, as every other art and industry on the same scale has, where the best is preserved and made available to the student and the general public.”
Quebec’s artists are a global phenomenon, from Celine Dion to the Montreal Jazz Festival, thanks to a unique government policy that values the arts as a major industry. Colin Hicks, the province’s London director of cultural services, tells Simon Tait how it works
You’ve never heard of it but, in its way, it’s one of the most powerful arms of the government. Conseil des Arts et des Lettres sounds like a quaint provincial French club for aesthetes, but without it we probably would never have had heard of Robert Le Page, Cirque du Soleil, La La La Human Steps or even Celine Dion.
For this is the Conseil des Arts et des Lettres de Quebec, the Canadian French-speaking enclave’s arts council, and all these international names started with the CALQ. The government is the provincial one sitting in Quebec City for which the CALQ acts as Arts Council, British Council and arts investment bank. It nurtures artists, supports them, promotes them, and then takes a cut of their financial success as well as standing back with the rest of the world and applauding.
“It’s a kind of a mixture of the francophone way of doing things, which is to put your cultural money where your cultural mouth is, and the North American ‘can do’ society” says Colin Hicks, Quebec’s British director of cultural services in London for the last 17 years.
With a population of 7.3m, the CALQ has an annual subsidy – or investment as they prefer to call it - of C$636m, or C$80 per head of population. That translates as £354m and compares with our own ACE’s £417 million for a population of just over 50m, or a little over £8 a head. The money comes from Quebec’s culture ministry, the only culture ministry in the world which combines the “condition of women” in its remit.
Next week a modern flat in Bethnal Green will be inaugurated as their first subsidised artist’s studio in the UK. The first tenant is Christian Quesnel, a comic strip artist in his 40s, who leaves behind in Montreal a wife and two daughters and who will have six months living and working here on a government subsidy. He will be creating new work, maybe even exhibiting if it’s appropriate, but his most important task will be more discreet: to network.
While culture in this country has only quite recently been recognised for its export value, Quebec’s artists have been seen as its chief export since the ministry was first set up in 1961, explains Hicks, a Brit who, before taking up his present post, worked for our Arts Council as the deputy director of South East Arts. As well as from the CALQ, Quebec’s touring artists also have the support of the Canada Council, the national equivalent of the Arts Council. “Because 22% of the Canadian population live in Quebec, 22% of the Canada Council touring budget goes to Quebec artists” Hicks says, “and since Quebec is a powerhouse for Canadian culture we spend a bigger share on touring – next comes Ontario and after that British Columbia.
“Quebec produces a lot of stuff, success breeds success, and Montreal, Quebec’s largest city, has become a magnet for other Canadian artists.”
But CALQ has also developed as a unique two-headed arts council: one is a conventional subvention agency, the other is an investment bank which puts money into cultural enterprises and expects to take a profit which can be reinvested. And with enterprises such Celine Dion selling 25m CDs a year, the tax return alone on any investment is impressive. Two years ago Cirque du Soleil, still based in Montreal despite its global presence, paid back its start-up subsidy is full; about 20% of Robert Lepage’s funding is still from the state, but in 2001 he gave something much more back in the form of La Caserne, his Montreal “Center of Creation” which is a rehearsal hall, workshop, flexible space, and collaborative creative centre that is also home to half a dozen companies which has been an inspiration in this country in the notion of “centres of excellence”.
The status has been politically hard fought for, and the Quebecois approach to culture is now at odds with the Conservative Canadian government’s, which is cutting its arts subsidy.
But a community that boasts 52 dance companies in Montreal alone knows that art, and particularly performance, has become a national expression. “Since 1994 cultural policy has been cross party, and has benefited hugely from not ever being a political football – which makes my job a lot easier because I don’t have to play politics and we can concentrate on the art” Hicks says. “It’s been fought for and the general populace of Quebec, not just the professional sector, do feel their culture is very much part of who they are.”
The Pleasance is 25 years old, its founder 70, but the Edinburgh venue has London sister that will take the brand to new heights
It takes time and a lot of determination, not to mention enough imagination to change your mind, to turn what started as little more than the consuming hobby of a former schoolmaster into a pillar of Fringe theatre, but it can happen. Look at the Pleasance.
It was the light in Christopher Richardson’s eye when he first went to the Edinburgh Festival in the 70s in the company of a few interested young men – Rowan Atkinson, Richard Curtis and Howard Goodall, to be precise – and decided to become a part of the Fringe.
In 1985 he and his team of volunteers created a theatre and bar out of a building he rented from Edinburgh University’s Students Association which had once been a hostel for fallen women - “I’ve always loved the thought that this was the place where they fell” - in a narrow street called The Pleasance. It now has 28 spaces with over 200 shows scheduled this year and close on 250,000 visitors, and a London Pleasance that is going to outgrow it. Pleasance is a brand.
This week the Pleasance is celebrating both its own 25th anniversary and Richardson’s 70th birthday, and it marks a new push to establish Pleasance London, in Carpenter’s Mews off the Caledonian Road behind King’s Cross as well as the 2009 Edinburgh season.
Richardson’s career is a famous theatre story. Born into an army family and a child of the public school system, he first designed a set at Wellington College where Nicholas Grimshaw, the president of the Royal Academy, and former Edinburgh Festival director Brian McMaster were his schoolmates. After a skirmish with the army, he studied furniture design under Hugh Casson at the Royal College of Art, and then went on to teach, first at a prep school and then at Uppingham where he taught Stephen Fry.
As well as sets he designs theatres, especially for schools like Roedean, but also the Young Vic in its version before Steve Tompkins’s transformation, Jersey Opera House and the Theatre on the Lake in Cumbria.
Pleasance Edinburgh became a test tube for talent, and still is. Frank Skinner and Steve Coogan shared the stage in the first year, Skinner far outshining Coogan in Richardson’s opinion, but Jack Docherty, Arthur Smith, Graham Norton, Fascinating Aida - back this year celebrating their own 25th anniversary - and even the playwright Patrick Marber (“Yes, he did stand up – what better way to hone your lines or work how to deliver them than to work as a stand up?”) all started there.
Imposingly over six feet tall, mercurial, often testy, but commanding undying love and loyalty from those who work with him, he made Pleasance Edinburgh into one of the cornerstones of the Fringe. He dresses like a retired colonel on holiday, and he once successfully disguised himself in his own theatre by the simple expedient of not wearing his panama hat. His friend Bill Burdett-Coutts, who runs another Fringe cornerstone, the Assembly Rooms, says he is an omnipresent image. “It’s tempting to think him eccentric, but in fact he’s not” he says. “What he has is a vast enthusiasm for supporting the talent that emerges through the Fringe. He also has a unique spirit, which has driven him through the years to keep the Pleasance the remarkable place it is.”
Richardson had a London flat in Caledonian Road and in 1994 he took over a nearby former omnibus shed, a vast space that had been the HQ for Circus Space. There was already a bar-restaurant downstairs, and he created a 250-seat flexible theatre space and braced himself for a surge of enthusiastic audiences.
“You see, I’d seen the railway coming (the development of the King’s Cross area just to the south), but unfortunately I was ten years too early” he admits. Under his successor it is about to blossom.
Richardson retired in 2005, handing over to another former pupil of his at Uppingham, Anthony Alderson, but is still a presence, like a favourite and indulged uncle. Alderson, who has acquired a large new space next to the theatre Richardson crated 15 years ago, has given his hopes for Pleasance London forward jolt.
“Christopher was the Pleasance, he built it and its atmosphere and then made it into a charity which was a brilliant move, but the organisation he created was always going to be bigger than he is, so it’s moving on” says Alderson. “There’s a new energy in the programming. It needed some young blood in the thing, so it’s changing a lot.”
Last year they presented Steven Berkoff’s On the Waterfront, this year the find is likely to be the Comedians Theatre Company version of School for Scandal, or possibly A British Subject, a play by the actor Nichola McAuliffe and her husband, crime reporter Don Mackay, about Afghanistan. Stand-up still has its place, and Al Murray will be back.
But outside of festival time, Alderson’s focus is going to be on Carpenter’s Mews, which he says is going to eclipse the Edinburgh operation before long.
The London Pleasance will be available for rehearsal, a convenient and flexible space for theatre, TV and film use. But principally it will be the launch pad for new work produced by new writers and directors – Rufus Norris and Edward Hall both started at the Pleasance. And beneath there is the restaurant which is requisite to successful venue management today.
“We’re going to be a kind of revolving door – people will come in doing one thing and leave doing something else because of what’s happened here” says Alderson. “And there’ll be no restrictions, only one proviso: whatever happens has got to be good. Christopher’s Pleasance is a brand now, and we have to live up to it.”
AI Profile – Munira Mirza, director of cultural policy, London
We are in the midst of the Story of London, the first major undertaking of Mayor Boris Johnson’s young and bird-like director of cultural policy, Munira Mirza.
At the launch photoshoot at the Tower of London a couple of weeks ago she seemed lost beside the bulk of the mayor and the traditionially built Beefeaters – the photogenic Wesley Kerr, seasoned broadcaster and HLF London chair, and TV historian Tristram Hunt could barely hold their own in front of a lens in such company – but this is really her show.
She says coyly that it’s just been “one of the things that’s going on, but one of the more interesting ones”, but if it’s the success that it looks like being it will be it will be down to her for conceiving, organising and bringing in the essential partners, HLF and English Heritage. This being Volunteer Week in London, one of those tings is going down to the Arts Depot in Finchley for a day’s volunteering – “well three-quarters of a day to be honest, I’m pretty busy”.
Dea Birkett, director of Kids in Museums, wants to put children where they belong – with the rest of us
Who doesn’t want more for kids? Eureka!, the National Children’s Museum in Halifax, is hoping to develop a children’s museum for London in the developing King’s Cross area.
I know it sounds like an odd position for the director of an organisation called Kids in Museums, but I prefer places which aren’t just for the young. There’s a difference between more opportunities for children in museums, and more children’s museums. I personally believe that kids have the best time in a museum when there are also lots of adults there, also having a good time.
PLUS
The Great North Museum opens
AI Profile - Margot Heller, director of the transforming South London Gallery
Rolemop - drama and technological games to help the unemployed
20 Minutes with Geoff Rowe, creator of the Leicester Comedy Festival
Ann Petherick’s Rant
Simon Tait’s Diary
Making our young people creative is crucial to the nation’s future, according to a reborn Creative Partnerships, but too many key players in the arts, politics and education are not yet convinced, reports Simon Tait
Cultural heavyweights – the likes of Nick Serota, Ekow Eshun, Vikki Heywood and Carole Souter - were out in force in the lecture theatre of the RSA a month ago for the launch of a paper entitled Get It: The Power of Cultural Learning, produced by something called the Culture and Learning Consortium, a new name on the scene. In the front row, looking not a little proprietorial, was the chief executive of another new name, Creativity Culture & Education.
He is Paul Collard, who until the start of April was director of Creative Partnerships, the sometime controversial creativity programme for schools set up nearly seven years ago under the Arts Council with, in that time, an accumulated £110m of revenue funding. Since then it’s worked with almost a million young people and 5,000 schools across England, liaising with artists, arts organisations and local authorities to bring programmes to young people.
CP has now enlarged itself into CCE and the advents of the new organisation, the new consortium and the paper are all connected with the fact that, for all its cash, its 200-odd staff and its successful initiatives, the CP message still hasn’t been getting all the way home.
Some government departments, schools and even the arts and cultural institutions themselves, says Collard, have not entirely bought into the fact that creativity is, in effect, the fourth R. Unless we all get it we are doomed, he says, it’s as fundamental as that.
Vanessa Swann was appointed chief executive, Cockpit Arts in 2002, and since then she has transformed the organisation from a managed workspace to a creative business incubator. In June she launches a new campaign to support designer-makers.
How did Cockpit Arts come about, what does it do and what is the origin of the name?
Our Holborn incubator is located in Cockpit Yard, WC1, which is the site of a former 18th century cock fighting pit frequented by nobility and at one time owned by a cabinetmaker. Cockpit has grown from its small beginnings in the late 80s as a volunteer-run initiative, involving just a few designer-makers, to become the UK’s only creative business incubator for designer-makers. There has always been an informal cross-fertilisation of skills, contacts and ideas in the (mostly) shared studios, but today we offer a package of services to help designer-makers grow successful businesses. Presently there are 165 businesses across the two sites, including a healthy mix of start up businesses, second career designers and established businesses seeking to move to the next stage of growth. We provide them with affordable studio space, intensive in-house business development support, a rolling programme of workshops and seminars, and access to finance schemes and selling and promotional opportunities, as well as office and IT facilities.
What is “Maker Difference”?
Our new campaign to raise awareness of, and encourage support for, UK designer-makers. We want to spread the word that buying beautifully crafted work is a sustainable alternative to throwaway shopping culture and can even have investment potential. Most importantly, it is also hugely satisfying and can be great fun. To get people involved, starting from June 12 we will be running lively open studios events. Visitors can see behind the scenes and meet designer-makers and there will be special attractions such as tours, screenings, activities for children and adults and pop-up cafes. There are more events to come later in the year as well as lots of great online content at www.cockpitarts.com.
