Artists Working in Museums at the V&A, 12/10/12 (Part 1)
I attended the first day of a 2-day conference at the V&A entitled Artists Working in Museums
This conference will bring together artists, curators, historians and museum professionals to explore the history of the artist as museum professionals, the museum environment and archive as the content of artistic production, the hidden subjectivity of the many artists working in museums and galleries alongside their practice and dynamic roles they play in 21st century museums and galleries.
Speakers include: Charles Saumarez Smith, Susanna Avery- Quash, Calum Storrie, James Putnam, Martha Flemming, Zandra Ahl, Beatrice Von Bismarck, Teresa Gleadowe, Sally Tallant and Neil Cummings.
In collaboration with the Museums and Galleries History Group.
Histories of the Artist as Museum Professional
The keynote paper was from Charles Saumarez Smith (Chief Executive, Royal Academy of Arts) on The Artist as Curator: General Thoughts. He raised some historical but also very current problems within higher education as to whether art students should be taught art history alongside practice or purely taught how to make art. He outlined a 19th century shift to combining the practice and study of art and also a late 19th century shift in the role of the curator which called for more professional qualifications for curating over ability to paint. Cantering through a more recent history, Smith also mentioned the artist as their own curator and that the role of a curator relationship in these instances is more akin to a sounding board for the curatorial decision making of the artist.
Christopher Marsden (Senior Archivist, V&A) presented a paper on Godfrey Sykes and his studio at the South Kensington Museum
Marsden’s interests appear to lie within the realm of architecture and he talked about museums as socialist buildings, Oscar Wilde’s testimony that museums should be accessible to the working class, truth to materials and two architectural approaches of building the shell first then fitting the contents in and building the interior fit for purpose and then decorating.
Susanna Avery- Quash (Research Curator – History of Collecting, National Gallery) spoke on The significance of the Artist as Director: the case of the National Gallery
This paper covered some similar ground to Smith’s keynote on artist as curator but focussing on artist as museum director. She examined the practice vs theory argument histrionically in recruiting a director. Artistic ability vs scholarly/critical expertise and artists vs experts (professors or dealers) has been a long standing debate of this key appointment, and noted as a contradistinction to continental practice at the time.
