The ideal museum ?
Main Photo Credit: Empathy Museum, 1001 Books, photo Cat Lee
Describe your ideal museum
Sasha
If you had no budget or conceptual restrictions, what would your ideal museum be?
Clare
I think it would be a mixture of a space of communing people, discussion, storytelling, listening, dialogue, community building. It would also be quirky, have a very strange collection, involve people from all art forms plus chefs, farmers, anthropologists, brain surgeons… There would definitely be a massive food growing area and a restaurant… How about you?
Sasha
… I would definitely try and get as many people from different specialisms and disciplines in there as possible, especially as artists are so often expected to be quasi social workers as well. It would be really fun to have… therapists, social workers, community activists everyone and anthropologists all in the mix.
Also, different people… from all kinds of backgrounds… different walks of life, from different sensorial perceptions. I guess I’m trying to make the Ideal Museum with Gerry’s Pompeii and this road is basically the museum space as much as anywhere else…
Clare
Actually, we haven’t said anything about climate… in my ideal museum I’d have a big space that’s around participatory democracy, and I’d want to address climate issues.
Sasha
… I’d also have like a giant playground in the middle of mine as well.
Clare
Oh yeah, yes. I would come to yours.
Sasha
Yeah, I’d come to yours.
Clare
A playground for adults.
Sasha
A playground for all ages. What else would there be?
Clare
Jokes…we haven’t talked about the role of play or humour, but I think probably both of us think that that’s really important.
Sasha
Why do you think it’s important for you?
Clare
I think play is about curiosity, about imagination, about freeing something up, about not saying that because you’re experiencing a piece of art it has to be like really serious – that it can be fun… It allows you to interact with other people, because playing’s about working with people. … And I think humour is also a way … of coping with the world….
Sasha
…I agree. And it gives permission in a way that nothing else does. It brings people together … Contagious laughter, that’s what I try and elicit.
Clare
I once went to the V&A when I had really young kids and we went into the room with all the jewels in it…. It was quite dark and almost like a sort of church – and they’re very beautifully lit. And I think one of my children was shouting, or making noise, and they literally told us that we had to be quiet. Why do you have to be quiet because you’re looking at jewels?
Sasha
I think that’s one of the problems with the contemporary art world… you basically feel that you’re being watched and therefore you can’t respond. So that needs to change.
What inspired you?
Sasha
Was there a particular moment or experience that … led to how you work with participants or communities or spaces ?
Clare
I really like people…. I think people are extraordinary… I grew up with a massive sense of community. I’ve always been passionate about public space and the spaces that aren’t… formalised as spaces for cultural exchange. … so things like Guy Fawkes Night or, those kind of moments where people gathered again in public spaces. And then a whole load of artists who were working in ways that I couldn’t imagine that people would have worked in…
Then coming across the whole community art scene and working in community theatre, working on Carnival, working with people and sitting in rooms late at night and listening to someone who’s a bus driver, or a chartered accountant, read a poem that they’d written. And I just totally believe in everyone being an artist and everyone being extraordinary. I think maybe it comes from that.
Sasha
I feel also everything that you said is what I would have said … about people and the spaces in between and everyone having a contribution to bring…
Clare
What about you though? What do you think has led you to work in the way that you work? Because you could… have become a curator in a major museum or gallery and gone down a more commercial art route.
Sasha
Well, I thought I was going to do that … work at an auction house or a gallery… That’s what you do with History of Art. I had an amazing … mentor called Paul Nesbitt, who used to run the Inverleith House and the Botanical Garden in Edinburgh.
He would never allow me to just sit passively with my book invigilating in the gallery space. He’d come in and say, what are you doing? You’ve got to go and talk to people, you’ve got to interact with people, you’ve got to tell them about the art… So that, I think, started my whole fascination with how to communicate art, and also trying to understand contemporary art, which I definitely didn’t understand before working there.
… And then when I moved to Russia, we worked with this amazing curator called Kasper Köenig and when I saw him on the phone with artists, talking about what their projects were going to be in Russia, somewhere that they’d never been, most of them,… the intensity of the conversations and the trust that he put in the artists to develop whatever they wanted to do, I think that was what really determined me to work with living artists and be a part of the process.
What’s the working process?
Sasha
How to do best practice…? It would be interesting to hear how you think you … create that environment.
Clare
I do think it’s about trust… let’s say it starts with an idea.
Then it becomes about how you trust that idea yourself. Is that idea simple enough to explain, good enough for you to love it? And do you trust that in yourself?… Then it will be about the trust in the team that comes together, that you want to work with in order to honour that idea.
And I think then, if you’ve got the trust going through the idea, through you, through the team of people, then you’re carrying that trust to the moment that you’re inviting whoever it is to come into the space with you.
And I do think I could talk a lot about the art of the invitation, because I think that’s really, really important as well, and you have to trust that too. And then you have to have an authentic thread that runs through the entire thing. And if you’ve got that, and you’ve created this whole thing of trust, I think then it’s easy. And I think you have to leave space…
Earlier on in my life, I felt like you needed to fill the space and to do things that were going to entertain people. And actually, I began to realise that if you genuinely are inviting people to participate in something, A) you have to listen, and we don’t listen very well, and B) you have to leave space.
Sasha
Can you give an example of an invitation to one of your artworks or gatherings ?…
Clare
Well, at its most simple: We’re going to close a bridge over the River Thames. We’re going to spend a year working in allotments, community gardens, school playgrounds, growing food, and we’re inviting you to come sit on a closed bridge and eat together and talk to people that you might never have met before and dance and sing and make merry.
Sasha
And who did you invite?
Clare
Anyone. The whole of London.
And then also the other lesson is that people don’t do what you think they’re going to do. You can come up with a thing that you’ve really curated, and you really think that people will come… and they’ll do that. And they don’t do what you think they’re going to do…
They bring something that you won’t have thought of, and they enrich things.
Sasha
Is there a good example that you can think of?
Clare
Again, on the bridge I built this hay bale like auditorium for children… and adults / anyone to listen to this storyteller talking about the Thames….
And this one kid just started picking up the hay and throwing it at his friend. And I was really tired, because I’d been awake all night, and I just went, please could you stop doing that because that’s not in my plan. And I had to go for some reason and walk down to the other end of the bridge, and when I turned back, everyone was having a massive hay fight, like two hundred people just throwing hay at each other.
And then at the end of the evening people were leaving and going, oh the hay fight was great, we’ll be back next year for the hay fight. And I was like, no, no, no, no, no. And then I began to kind of like embrace it because it was just amazing to see all these sort of urban public playing together in this space that’s normally got traffic on it.
Sasha
Such a good project, I love that project. And all the growers, how did it work? Was it that all the things were grown in the allotment… for that feast?
Clare
We normally had a theme, so one year we grew heritage wheat across allotments and community gardens and school playgrounds, and I think there was more biodiversity in wheat in South London than there was in the whole of the rest of Europe put together.
We had cycle-powered mills, and people could come and grind the wheat. We had bread ovens, so we made bread all together on the bridge from the wheat that had been grown. But one year we grew pumpkins, and we just made a huge soup. We didn’t feed 35,000 people from what we’d grown.
Sasha
35,000 people?
Clare
Yeah!
Sasha
Oh my gosh. That is wild. Oh my gosh.
Clare
Aren’t allotments the most amazing thing?
Sasha
Yes, they are… Because they’re all artworks already. Yeah
Clare
And they’re so generous. … Again, it’s about those spaces, like common space that are outside of anything else. A lot of them are protected, well should be protected. Although they are disappearing. But, they’re just such spaces of generosity, and story, and skill sharing, and food sharing, and diversity.
It’s unbelievable the different people who are into growing food.
Sasha
Yeah, it’s serious. And the one where I was doing a show was in Highgate (Fitzroy Park) with my collaborator Mick Rand who’s the allotment King – it’s hilarious. It was a kind of socialist enclave, where none of the kind of rich Highgate community are allowed in. And so they, they hate it.
We tried to do a speed dating night on the allotment as part of Jonathan McCree’s work called Pick Me, I’m Juicy: Be paired up with the apple of your eye. And I got complaints from the Highgate Residents Association because they were worried that perverts were going to descend onto the allotment….they could have all come, it was open.
But… how did your allotment project come about?,
Clare
I think I was interested in food growing, and a lot of the environmental issues around that. And then… I thought, actually what if we paired with a primary school, and a bunch of artists and a chef – and over the course of a year, planted, grew, harvested, and cooked an alternative school dinner. And then saw if we could key in teaching the whole of the curriculum through growing a school dinner.
Sasha
Wow! The whole of the curriculum?
Clare
Can you teach maths through growing a school dinner? Can you teach – whatever the subject was through growing a school dinner?
At the beginning people were like, – Ugh, carrots come out of the ground, they’re disgusting! By the end of it, they’re merrily cooking beetroot for their parents.
Sasha
That’s so amazing.
Clare
But I think …that it’s interesting when you do something that’s a really simple idea – grow a school dinner on an allotment, but actually you’re looking at the relationship between the producer and the consumer. You’re looking at childhood obesity. You’re looking at health. You’re looking at organic farming methods. You’re looking at food production, etc..
But … you don’t have to say all that. You can just say the invitation is to grow a school dinner, and then to cook it.
Clare
And how do you decide the artists that you’re going to work with?
Sasha
I research around the subject. I choose the subject, or the place, I… think that this would be an interesting place to do something… Then I talk to a lot of people, and lots of people recommend people and then I just do some research about themes that might be relevant… I find the more I talk about a project, the more information I get back from people, and then it kind of develops like a domino effect.
Clare
Yeah. And is it mainly with artists? Or it could be with boat builders or gardeners or historians or…?
Sasha
Yeah, both… with the Touch Show, there was 26 artists, but then I developed a team of… art mediators, which was a mixture of a couple of blind and partially sighted collaborators that I found – specifically because I was trying to find people with different sensorial perceptions of the world.
One’s an anthropologist who was blind from birth called Harshadha Balasubramanian. And one who is a poet / writer, he’s also blind, called Joe Rizzo Naudi, and then a sighted dancer / choreographer called Gen Reeves, and a sighted puppeteer called Kyle Berlin, and then we all together developed this kind of experimental mediation process where we were with the different artworks and talking to different artists trying to develop ways of being with the artworks in a more interactive, collaborative and multi-sensory way.
So everyone that came into the show was given a kind of mediated tour but not in a didactic way – more in a kind of, let’s all be with the work in this kind of different way…. So it was a kind of team within the team.
Sasha Galitzine
How do you evaluate a project?
Sasha
What kind of methods have you found that are better than the whole: how much did you enjoy the experience? On a scale from from1 to 5. Good, very good. Etc?
Clare
I’ve just found making little films, Vox Pop type things about the experience, or building in the feedback into the creative process.
So, in A Mile In My Shoes, where you come in and you walk a mile in someone else’s shoes and you listen to their story, – afterwards you’re invited to describe what it was like to walk in someone else’s shoes and then to have a conversation with other people around that.
And it’s capturing that sort of data… it began to happen quite spontaneously, and I hadn’t thought about it. I thought, oh we’ll have a relationship with people who are telling the stories and hopefully that’s a positive and cathartic thing for those people. Then we’ll have a relationship with the visitor who will be then connected with the person who’s told the story. But it hadn’t occurred to me that people would then really, really want to talk about the experience. And so, we now try to build-in a social space as part of that experience.
Sasha
And then things happen…. as Richard Wentworth says ‘Making luck’… the adrenaline that happens when you keep making luck…,
Clare
That’s a very nice phrase. Making luck. Yeah.