A New Home for a Growing Collection Dawn Ades British Academy - Flipbook - Page 7
SS: For the Fellowship as well, it
must be an amazing gift when they visit
the building.
DA: The building must be our
primary concern, but yes, we must do
the best we can with our resources.
There are a few priorities: staff, the
events for the public, and the work of the
Fellows’ Room. So, the question of what
the building is used for has really
become quite important. Sometimes our
more ambitious – or difficult – works are
not the most popular from the point of
view of different visitors.
SS: Of course, you have a very diverse
audience and a potentially difficult, but
creative context to curate within. The
Nash interiors pose an interesting
context in moving beyond the white wall
gallery space. We’ve made a distinct
choice not to go ‘pure white’ but to use
the architectural heritage and
authenticity. Some of the prompts were
about the challenges of placing artwork
into quite a difficult setting in terms of
scale, of the existing architectural
language.
DA: Yes, well there’s a huge variety
– from the grand rooms upstairs, to
Fellow rooms, to event spaces. Very
different scales.
However, to come back to the ‘white
cube’ legacy – that was a reaction in the
20s against the traditional, ‘Salon’ hang
c. 1860 where you could hardly see the
works on view. The idea of giving each
work its own space was seen as very
important.
I was reading yesterday about an
interesting history of an exhibiting and
collecting society - of the Société
Anonyme in New York which started in
1920 with Duchamp and Man Ray and
Katherine Dreier They put on their first
show in Brooklyn in 1926 – well, first
major one. Katherine was extremely
ambitious. Rather eccentric, extremely
determined German immigrant to New
York who loved everything modern. She
bought Duchamp, El Lissitzky. She
wanted people to also have smaller,
domestic scaled spaces within it. She
wanted variety. Spaces within spaces.
There are different ways of showing
paintings, she showed people that
through her ‘experimental museum’ for
modern art.
SS: I think the architecture of these
two buildings we are sat in, which are
actually two very different houses and
buildings with varied architecture, is
interesting to think of too in relation to
that. When you put the artwork in,
that’s one thing. But when you put
another layer with the modern
Collection, it creates shock, delight,
surprise – it’s quite playful really. People
react incredibly positively, whether they
like the art or the content on its own. The
overall visual stimulus and joy as they
take in the Collection throughout the
building is wonderful.
SM: That’s credit to Dawn. Things
like the Hew Locke have been
transformational. The plan was for it to
go downstairs and for it to be the
showpiece of the new spaces. But now it
is where it is on the stairwell. Hew loves
that. There’s something so great – a huge
piece, absolutely confronting
colonialism. In Gladstone’s former
staircase.
SS: I think the piece is doing what is
sometimes difficult – but what I think
lots Fellows want to see - to put the
social history of this building out there
for assessment. I think Professor
William Whyte’s recent article on the
social history of the building was
amazing - in a similar way it captured
that with humour, without being too
provocative. Looking at what was here,
and where we are now. The Hew Locke
does that impactfully, in real time, in a
very succinct way. In public, it gets the
conversation going.
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