Leeds Museum Discovery Centre Visit

This morning, students from Art Gallery and Museum Studies have returned from their first visit of the semester. Leeds Discovery Centre is the main store for Leeds Museums, and houses 1.3 million objects in accessible storage. Gemma Pollard, a member of the Front of House team gave us a fantastic tour, even I saw bits of the store that I'd not been to before...

Distant Drumbeat at Lyme Park

With my new found hours and hours of leisure time, having submitted my PhD on 28th September, I finally managed to recall that actually going to heritage sites ought to be something that I did.

So, with that in mind, last week I headed off to Lyme Park in Disley to see their contemporary art intervention Distant Drumbeat by the architect Sean Griffiths. Of course given the enthusiastic ways in which contemporary art has been taken up by heritage sites, it is clear that most are not 'interventions', but fully part of many museums' interpretation strategies.

In this case, Distant Drumbeat is part of New Expressions 3 programme to '[unlock] the creative potential of museums'.

I hadn't done any research about it before I set off so I didn't really know what I was going to find. Once inside the formal garden, it did take me a few minutes to locate, but it was a really sunny day so I didn't mind wandering about slightly aimlessly, until I spotted it at the top of the garden.

Like many of these installations, some thinking about what the 'work' actually is, is inevitable. I could describe the wooden structure with an electronic drum kit installed, but of course, the 'Lantern' belvedere to which it is connected must also be counted as part of the work. The Lantern (installed during Lewis Wyatt's nineteenth century redevelopment of the site) lies at one end of an important sightline, the other end being the house, or perhaps more accurately the dining table of Lord Newton. When gazing at the Lantern at breakfast, he would assess the clarity of the view, before deciding whether it was a good day for hunting. I digress... (although isn't part of the purpose of these to aid historical understanding?)

Griffiths has connected the drum kit to a set of lights installed in the Lantern so that, when the drums are played, the lights change colour. So, what else to say... well, I guess I was mildly underwhelmed. I had fun, yes, working out which drum was which colour, but already I can't quite remember whether the drums, being electronic, had much sound themselves. It was a very sunny day so I couldn't see the lights that well. The wooden structure itself was quotidian and 'shed' like; so I momentarily wondered whether, instead of paying the entrance fee, I should have walked up to the Lantern itself to get a closer look, but a necessary part of the 'work' of course, is interacting with it. I did reflect on the relationship between light, sound, landscape but found myself more interested in the question of whether artworks such of these should engage with the history of a site, or whether they can simply be playful ways of 'being' in the landscape.

Watching others interact, it was clear that the very simplicity of playing the drums was really popular with the very young, and the not so young. Without straying into ACE audience segmentation, the term 'cradle to grave' came to mind. Distant Drumbeat was clearly very engaging. I 'chatted' to lots of visitors.(1) They were all very enthusiastic, and several discussed the need to change 'the offer' so their interest was renewed. One comment has stuck with me. One woman I spoke to said that she would never venture to Tate Modern, but she loved seeing art in NT properties. Given one aim of these projects is to offer those not so familiar with contemporary art the chance to engage, clearly this is working. Though I did want to spend more time chatting to understand why Tate wasn't for her, but this was.

I still feel the need to think more carefully, to tease out some of the resonances of this work, but a week or so later, it has grown on me.



1. Peter Howard suggests lots of good research is done through chatting. Howard, Peter, Heritage: Management, Interpretation, Identity, (London: Continuum Books, 2003) p.122.