Spending time with my Contemporaries
One of the good cultural phenomena that came out of the new millennium was the growth of contemporary art galleries and collections across the UK. With the advent of big Lottery funding and the boom in funding for big capital projects from other arts bodies, a number of exciting new spaces have appeared in the last decade. If Tate Modern was sorely needed in London, then so were the Baltic in Gateshead, Turner Contemporary in Margate, Nottingham Contemporary in Nottingham, and so on. This month’s Museums Journal features an excellent interview with the Baltic’s current director.
I’m ashamed to say that I had visited none of these regional contemporary collections, until today when I went to Nottingham Contemporary. If this is indicative of the other new galleries, then I am hopeful for the future of both contemporary art and regional spaces. Nottingham Contemporary, in its eye-catching, purpose-built, gold and green building has the luxury of starting with the kind of visitor facilities which older institutions are putting expensive work into creating. The entrance hall is filled with an attractive shop, stocked with well-designed and affordable objects as well as a good selection of books. The ground floor provides a trendy bar/restaurant with an enviably good menu and a friendly vibe. On a Sunday afternoon it was full of groups enjoying leisurely lunch or tea. Likewise, large windows in the stairwell showed me a large flexible events space, and open-plan offices. The importance of such facilities to attracting the right kind of visitor cannot be over-estimated. While we don’t want ‘an ace caff, with quite a nice museum attached,’ these are clearly helping to pull in the crowds to Nottingham Contemporary’s shows.
And the shows on today were equally impressive. The four galleries currently present two complementary shows ‘If you leave me I’m not coming’ is a solo show by the German artist Klaus Weber; and ‘Already There!’ a collection of objects borrowed from other collections which he has curated. I went to see these, because of a talk that I will be giving in the gallery in December on how ‘Already There’ fits into the history of collecting and classification, so more on this will feature in a later blog. Suffice it to say that the two shows make interesting relationships between contemporary art and more ‘traditional’ museum objects, older means of display and interpretation, and contemporary curating. A third small show features old ‘cabinets of curiosity’ with drawers filled by a commissioned artist, for the next 6 months Ruth Claxton and Andrew Wilson. Claxton’s selection of art postcards, from which she has cut and bent layers to create rays emanating from the people pictured are truly striking.
With the Turner Prize due to be hosted at the Baltic this year, only the second time it has left London, I’m hopeful of more rewarding time spent with my contemporaries.