Talk:
Chris
Durcon
Art Gallery of NSW
July 13, 2013
“I know
something and you know something else”
This is the
maxim of Chris Durcon, Director of Tate Modern, London, who was in Australia
this week to talk to Sydney and Melbourne audiences about the lecture title: The 21st–century museum.
Durcon typifies this new breed of the polymathic museum directors with hybrid
accents and lucrative personal brands that they bring to their posts. This puts
them more into the frame of the ‘roving curator’ than the static directorships
of administrations past.
Thanks to the
increasingly powerful arts muscle that is Kaldor Public Art Projects audiences
received an intimate presentation from Durcon, free of charge. A sort of BorisGroys meets Richard Branson, he is relaxed, sagacious and infectious in his
quest to open up, enliven and activate a public museum model that is fit for
the 21st-century.
The lecture explored
what audiences should expect from their museums and what museums shouldn’t give
to their audiences. (And by ‘museum’, he means what we would locally refer to
as galleries.)
The 21st-century
audience is the primary stakeholder in these civic-minded spaces. In the
Western, secular society the museum is a platform for community congregation.
The museum site is meeting place that invites the audience to be part of the
experience, shifting the historic model from consumer to contributor. Enabling
what Durcon calls the “collective production of memory”.
Durcon also advocates
a return to the original meaning of curator, as a person who ‘takes care’. But
in this instance they are stewards for the public good rather than public goods. This again reiterates the quickly
changing role of the 21st-century museum from an object-orientated
site to an experiential place.
Durcon also
assigns new responsibilities to audiences, as they must learn how to make
decisions for themselves in order to become part of the new museum experience. He
also raised the point of imposed “self-denial”, by not showing audiences what
they want to see. I assume this comment is directed at the marathon, tea towel
merchandise-friendly exhibitions that finance the briefer, edgier shows. I
found Durcon’s analogy “you know what happens to a sponge that stays wet for
more than a month” rather helpful to summarise that insight.
In light of
Durcon’s lecture, what I think we all know
is that the Art Gallery of NSW is an institution on the move. Given that the ‘existingbuilding is ill-equipped to meet the needs of the 21st century’ and ‘stifles
the Gallery’s ability to attract visitors, stage major exhibitions and fulfil
its role as the principal art museum serving Australia’s global city’, the
plans for the Sydney Modern expansion seem suddenly very pressing. While the expansion’s
main emphasis is on increasing the gallery’s physical space, Sydney Modern will
allow Australia to participate on the global, shared platform of cultural
production.
