Last week I printed out and went back through all of my blog entries from this academic year. I did this as I was beginning to feel I had lost a sense of direction with my work and was in a lot of confusion as to what to do next. It was a really useful exercise and helped me to settle on two ideas I want to carry forward towards the degree show. These ideas involve the floor plans of my gallery designs, which I shall talk about in more depth in a later blog this week. And the use of gallery guides.
When I first began looking into the gallery space it was through gallery maps. I was thinking about the safety of the gallery, and the way in which the gallery space controlled and directed the visitor. I found the maps problematic, as my view of a museum or gallery was somewhere that should be wandered aimlessly and becoming immersed in the surroundings. Right at the beginning of my research I came up with the idea of a handbook for a gallery, telling you how to act and what to do within the space. I searched on the internet to find the right kind of text so that I could learn the language used in handbooks. I then stumbled across ‘Art for Dummies cheat sheet’ by a former director of the Metropolitan Museum New York, Thomas Hoving (see link below image of the book). This ‘cheat sheet’ seemed incredibly one sided and contained the jem, ‘art and politics never mix’ which being on a critical theory course made me laugh (this book is oblivious to Ranciere’s ‘Art and Politics’ in which he claims all art is political, or to Joseph Beuys’s role in founding the Green Party).
I then became distracted from this idea by my gallery designs. It was only when just over a week ago I was going through the mound of print-outs on my desk at uni that I rediscovered the cheatsheets. I have since bought the book ‘Art for Dummies’ and began reading it yesterday. I have used the cheat sheets to make a very rough mock-up of my idea to transform them into a gallery guide, looking like the maps that I have collected from galleries. I also want to make my own version and the two would be handed out together.
I am not yet sure what to do with my guides. Talking to my tutor yesterday has given me the idea that I could use them to make the visitor act in an abnormal way, such as taking their shoes off, walking backwards or not talking at all within the space. I quite like the idea of making them do the opposite of Hoving’s guide. I hope that I replicate the type of friendly and light hearted, yet slightly condescending language of the handbook.
