The Voice of the People
If visitors could decide, what would be exhibited in a museum of contemporary art? This is a question posed especially by people who want to draw attention to the gap between contemporary art and the taste of the lay public.
In a museum, the power of decision usually rests exclusively with experts. The collection exhibition to be opened in Kiasma in the spring – Love me or Leave me – is built in a slightly unusual way. It is ”curated” by visitors to the museum – without their knowledge. The show consists of the public’s favourites or works that have inspired comments from them. The exhibition works are selected through interviews with museum attendants and comments gathered by contact guides.
But the exhibition also gives a real opportunity to influence the next display. A ”voting machine” allows visitors to pick their personal favourites and most hated works from among some one hundred images of items in the museum’s collections. The visitors’ selections and their comments will be used to make an exhibition to be presented in the autumn. Of course, freedom of choice is restricted in the sense that the visitors cannot decide which works are purchased for the collections, the options are determined beforehand – for example, you cannot suggest your own work be included!
AT HOME IN A MUSEUM
A museum is an academic institution and an expert community, where only a certain kind of taste, knowledge and professionalism are the accepted coin. At the same time, a museum is a public institution, a place for people, for all people. Without an audience, a museum is a warehouse. Art museums, just like all cultural institutions, must balance between the narrow specificity of expertise and popular appeal.
Not all people feel at home in a museum. While museums elicit feelings of belonging and spiritual ”ownership” in some people, they make others feel excluded. Different people have different motives for visiting museums or engaging in any cultural events in general. People also have different reasons for not visiting museums. For some people cultural activities are part of their lifestyle and seem quite natural, for others the threshold of entering a museum is quite high and requires some specific reason.
In Finland, museums have recently been often referred to as living rooms, a term used to express the idea, or rather the wish, that museums might belong to all people, and that all might feel at home there. Other public places, too, have been analysed as living rooms, in which case the term has also referred to their semi-open structure, where the boundary between interior and exterior is fluid, and the walls often made of glass. Many such sites have sprung up in Helsinki. The most famous example is the Sanoma House, among museums Kiasma, of course.
But the term living room is not unambiguously inviting: it is ultimately the hosts who dictate to whom and how the invitation is extended. The living room discourse has even attracted some ridicule, yet the thinking within cultural institutions does stem from real efforts at democratisation and attempts to respond to the perceived narrowness of the audiences: the term living room implies a shifting of attention from museal values, the collecting and upkeep of art, to the audience. For instance, from the very beginning, the principle in Kiasma has been to ”lower the threshold” for people to come to the museum. This aim is implemented in various ways, from the architecture down to opening hours, admission price policy and investment in museum education.
GETTING YOUR OWN WORKS ON THE WALLS
Museums, then, invite people to be their audience, but it might be interesting to consider the ways in which people outside the professional community are empowered in matters pertaining to the affairs and programme of an art museum. Consideration of such things or even experimenting with them does not necessarily entail the horror of all curators: inept and bad art, in the name of levelling democracy. The art community is an expert community, and it should, indeed must, maintain and value its own special competence. Yet within the profession it is possible to offer channels or places for other voices, too.
Many museums have designed new ways to give greater weight to visitors’ experiences and interpretations inside the museum itself. In Kiasma, such places are the Rear Window on the ground floor and the subURB festival. The Jyväskylä Art Museum supports young people’s activities within the museum setting, presenting results of non-professional artists within its walls. The pioneer in this area is the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin with its community programmes comprising long periods of art-making that end with an exhibition of the results. Kiasma in turn has staged young people’s live inter-pretations and children’s views gathered using a method called story crafting. Giving a voice to the audience can also produce surprises, and as it opens up, the museum institution puts itself at the risk of unorthodox interpretations, even criticism!
Sometimes visiting curators are invited to organise exhibitions in the museum. From the perspective of policy, the most radical invitational exhibitions are those where the curator comes from outside the art world. For example, the Boymans van Beuyningen museum in Rotterdam gave a group of children carte blanche to pick out the exhibition’s works from its collections. Kiasma’s own Love me or Leave me also listens to the non-professional audience.
WHO ARE WE TALKING TO?
The issue in audience participation is not only content, it is also communication – whose language is spoken. Accessibility thinking has taught us to also take into account the manner and the channel whereby information reaches the recipients, and the modes of communication each group understands. It is a way, not only of writing, but also of thinking. A museum may be close to the academic world, but it should speak to non-academic audiences as well. Thus its communication is beset on one side by academic language, by common language on the other. Within the museum institution, writers often have a need to speak to their colleagues, yet at the same time they should also be popularisers, which is no way to earn merit in the academic world.
Some museums have appointed panels with representation from different audiences, such as young people (Tate Liverpool, Walker Art Centre), who translate museum-speak for their peers, or sometimes virtually create their own way of regarding the museum and its offerings. Advisory groups have also been used for a long time in the development of services for groups with special needs. One interesting solution for giving voice to the needs of museum visitors is the establishment of the office of an ”audience advocate” at the Science Museum in London. The advocate works as a representative of the visitors, examining the institution and its programme through different sets of ideas, commenting on their functionality from the audience’s point of view.
Measures like these have their restrictions, but along with other museum operations they can reveal something about the institution’s aspirations. Can an exhibition be a place for thinking and discussion? Can an institution discuss its own role with the users?
Kaija Kaitavuori
