Gallery Wall to Hyde Park Floor, ‘What the flock?!’

Hi everyone I’m Alex and this is my first blog. Where better to start than a trail of stenciled sheep, each titled ‘What the flock?!’ The trail lead me through Hyde park yesterday morning to a full flock of cardboard cutouts stuck on sticks and some hanging in the trees. Projects like these are now a normal site to behold when walking through cities and parks. Over the last 50 years art has slowly moved away from gallery and museum walls, and now pretty much anywhere constitutes an art space. There was no sign of an artist or establishment, which made it ever more intriguing. If I had seen this in a gallery or museum situation my experience would have been somewhat different. The spontaneity of time and place allowed me to look at, think about and make conclusions (or not) about the ‘piece’ without any preconditions. I think seeing art outside gallery walls brings new dimensions to a work as it engages with the environment and the minds of those who would not usually encounter art. All in all it got my brain ticking (which at 9.30 in the morning is quite an achievement) and gave me a cheap giggle on the way to uni. I am excited to see more of this kind of thing next week at Leeds Light Night!

Alex

MGHG Conference in Leeds

The Museums and Galleries History Group Conference, 'Museums and the Market' took place at the new Leeds City Museum last weekend (10th-11th September). It was considered to be a great success by all attendees and speakers! You can read the conference programme in an earlier post on the Blog, but the event was buzzing and there was lots of debate...I just wish it could have gone on longer!
Thanks to all the people that came along, and the speakers (from USA, Germany, Belgium and across the UK)...and of course to our Keynote Speaker, Helen Rees Leahy....I'll load some more pics from the conference soon.....
I'm off to Antwerp later this week, for another Conference/Workshop...this time on the 'Location of Value'.....more anon!
Mark

Curator, there's a butterfly in my fruit

This week I managed to put down my bucket and spade long enough to see what the many and various museums of Brighton and Hove had to offer. The Royal Pavilion was showing a particularly interesting installation/intervention of three thousand black ceramic butterflies by Clare Twomey called 'A Dark Day in Paradise'. It teetered quite efficiently between decorative and distressing, the play between theme and variation was satisfying. I'm not sure of the stability of their significance, I was reminded occasionally of the treasure hunts galleries and museums stage for children in that, paradoxically, concentration can become distracting. Also surprising that they weren't also for sale in the gift shop!

New Design Template...a new Blog-o-sphere

The Blog has been a bit quiet lately, with only the valiant efforts of Rebecca to keep the lamp burning...(Thanks Rebecca!)....I've been a little bit preoccupied, writing some stuff I'm supposed to be delivering soon...(more anon.).
But anyway, I thought, in order to breath some more life into the embers I'd redesign the webpage...(well, it's more of a pret-a-webpage, rather than me actually fiddling about with photo-shop...and that comment demonstrates that I'm really not up-to-date with these techy things.....)...so what do you think?...or should we go back to the old design?

Anyway...thanks Rebecca for a really provocative post...and you're right, these 'traditional' museum displays are quite romantic...(in a positive sense, I mean....as in the poetics of history....)..and are part of the heritage of museum displays..maybe there should be a new body to protect museums from being re-displayed?....maybe we should develop a Grading for Museums...as they do for Architecture etc...?

More blogging to come...
Mark

In Praise of Independent Museums

I think this might be the best one room, one pound museum I've come across on my recent travels. I thought these dioramas from Marazion Museum were really worth sharing. It's easy to be disparaging, but museums that lie outside centralised funding structures and formal accreditation can perhaps pursue more interesting, or eccentric, or alarming, modes of classification and conservation. At their best, independent museums seem to disrupt the ways in which the museum professional is figured, even revealing their efforts as just a little turgid. Or perhaps I'm being unintentionally condescending in implying an enthusiastic amateurishness at work, in a similar way to the contemporary perception of 'outsider art'?

MGHG Annual Conference

Hello,
here is the programme for the annual Museums and Galleries History Group conference. Hope to see you in Leeds...you can book at
mghg.org

Mark


Conference Programme

Friday 10th September 2010

9.15 - Conference Registration
10.00 - Welcome
10.10 - Welcome to Leeds: John Roles, Director, Leeds City Museums
10.30 - Conference Keynote: Dr Helen Rees Leahy, Director of the Centre for
Museology, University of Manchester

11.10 – Coffee

11.40 – Conference Session 1: Commerce & Consumption
Steven Miles (University of Brighton) Contrived Communality: the gallery and museum as a themed space for post-industrial consumption
Christine Guth (Royal College of Art) Blockbusters and Museum Merchandise: Marketing Hokusai’s “Great Wave”
Gareth Williams (Royal College of Art) On Design Art

13.00 – Lunch Break

14.00 – Conference Session 2: The Formation of Taste
Julia Courtney (The Open University) ‘The stuffed animals will have to go’: Alderman Jacob, William Chalkley and Dr Cottrill
Stephanie Schumann (The Drawing Centre, New York) (title tbc)
Louise Tythacott (University of Manchester) The Power of Taste: the dispersal of the Berkeley Smith collection of Chinese ceramics at Cheltenham Art Gallery & Museum (1921-1960)

15.20 – Coffee

15.50 – Conference Keynote: Professor Jos Hackforth-Jones, Director of Sotheby’s Institute of Art, London

16.30 – Optional Guided Tour of the Leeds Discovery Centre

Saturday 11th September 2010

9.30 – Parallel Conference Sessions 3 & 4

Conference Session 3: Philanthropy
Andrea Meyer (Institut für Kunstwissenschaft und Historische Urbanistik, Berlin) Museum directors as money makers: a reinvestigation of the history of the National Gallery in Berlin
Jozef Glassée (The Catholic University of Leuven) Buying Art for Ghent: The Ghent Museum Friends and the European Art Market (1897-c.1930)
Martin Weiss (University of Leiden) ‘With a Little Tacit Encouragement’: Teylers Museum’s Paleontological Collection

Conference Session 4: Circulating Commodities
Savithri Preetha Nair (Independent Scholar) The Rise of the Natural History Dealer in Colonial India
Sam Alberti & Christopher Plumb (University of Manchester) The Beastly Marketplace: Animal Commodities in Shops, Museums, and Other Sites of Display
Lina Tahan (Leeds Metropolitan University) The role of the Lebanese agents and dealers in the development of the Louvre Museum near Eastern Collections

10.50 – Coffee

11.20 - Parallel Conference Sessions 5 & 6

Conference Session 5: Regeneration and the Cultural Economy
Susannah Eckersley (University of Newcastle) Regeneration by Museum? Case studies from Germany
Patrick Haughey (Wentworth Institute of Technology, Boston) Hamilton’s Classroom: the museum of American Finance and the education of a market citizen
Mariam Al-Mulla (University of Leeds) Heritage in Qatar: an example of culturally-led economic regeneration



Conference Session 6: Museums and Identities
Natasha Degen (University of Cambridge) A National Type of Imagination: Nation branding and the museum
Uta Protz (Kunsthalle, Bremen) Modern French Painting and the Musee du Louvre: the impact of the studio sale of Gustave Courbet 1881
Annalea Tunesi (University of Leeds) An enigmatic façade: Palazzo Mozzi-Bardini in Florence

12.50 – Lunch Break and MGHG Annual General Meeting

14.00 – Conference Session 7: Leeds in Perspective
Mark Steadman (University of Leeds) Mail Order Museums: Recovering the market forces behind Nineteenth-Century Natural History collecting practices
Rebecca Wade (University of Leeds) ‘A Love of Truth even in Trifles’: the exhibition of art and manufactures in mid-nineteenth century Leeds
Geoffrey Forster (The Leeds Library) William Bullock in Leeds

15.20 – Coffee

15.50 – Conference Session 8: Museums and the Art Market

Esmée Quodbach (The Frick Collection, New York) ‘Trying to catch a rising star’: Vermeer on the Art Market 1870-1920
Anne Helmreich (Case Western Reserve University, Ohio) Strategies of Display: the museum and the commercial art gallery in nineteenth-century Britain

16.50 – Closing Remarks: Alan Crookham, Chair, MGHG

Art workshop at Gallery experiments with virtual exhibitions in Second Life

Next Saturday, 10 July, the Stanley & Audrey Burton Gallery is running an innovative new adult workshop, led by artist Hayley Goodsell. Hayley has been inspired by the Haunch of Venison's much talked about show, 'Shoebox Art,' which invited some of the country's top artists to decorate a room within a shoebox. Hayley is inviting her participants to do the same, creating a bedroom from their past, a dream or one from a photograph. Then, the works will be photographed and re-created in a virtual format online, in Second Life. Thus, anyone in the world will be able to visit the resulting artworks!


Second Life (for those of you as tech-savvy as I was a few weeks ago) is an online 'virtual world' where users - represented by avatar characters - can build their own environments and interact with other avatars. The University has leased some 'virtual land' for researchers to experiment with this phenomenon and many different projects have resulted. The virtual island where the University of Leeds and other sister organisations are based is called 'Education UK'. If you log into the programme online, you'll know you've found the right place if you spot our iconic Parkinson Building in virtual form! You'll also encounter the results of various research projects, including artificially intelligent beasts and a hip disco. (To get a sneak peak at the Education UK island, watch this You Tube video - though this is 3 years old and many new things have been added since!)

The workshop runs from 11-4pm on 10 July (with lunchbreak). Materials fee is £5 or £4 student concessions. To book, please contact Hayley by email: hayley@hayleylouisegoodsell.com