Partner
Martine Derks

Achtergrond
The British Council schreef vanwege haar 75-jarig bestaan een wedstrijd uit voor curatoren. De opdracht was een tentoonstellingsvoorstel te schrijven voor de Whitechapel Gallery waarbij de collectie van The British Council uitgangspunt is. Samen met Martine Derks maakte ik dit voorstel. Helaas zaten we niet bij de vijf genomineerden. Toch zijn we nog steeds trots op ons voorstel. Misschien kunnen  we het in de toekomst in gewijzigde vorm ergens anders realiseren.

Exhibition Proposal
In our exhibition proposal Workshop British Council Collection we would like to combine the advantages of seeing the British Council Collection on the Internet with the advantages of seeing its art objects in reality. We’d like to present one physical work of art from the collection for a whole week in the Whitechapel Gallery. Every single day of the week a different guest will be invited to question the work. After this week another work will be shown for one week, and different guests will be invited to question it. Furthermore, we’d like to hang on display more than 8500 A4 paper prints, each showing one work of art from the collection as it can be seen on the digital permanent library on internet.

Permanent gallery
“The British Council Collection is widely regarded as one of the greatest collections of modern and contemporary British art in the world. It includes over 8500 works by artists living or working in Britain, and the majority of the works are shown in exhibitions around the world. […] The Collection has no permanent gallery and has been referred to as a ‘Museum Without Walls’” Because of the loan policy and the amplitude of the collection it seems impossible to assemble all the works and make it accessible for the public. However, there is a place where this is possible. A place which can be considered the permanent gallery of the British Council Collection: the website of the British Council collection has registered every piece of the more than 8500 works.

Benefits of the digital (Internet) permanent library
Digital representation of the collection on the Internet offers the advantage that it is visible and accessible for everyone at any time. Furthermore, the Internet provides the opportunity to display the entire collection. With the help of the search engine the visitor can narrow down the entirety to a smaller amount of hits. The fact that the context of use does not always make sense can be seen from the results in the example of misspelling the artist’ s name ‘Moore’. ‘More’ links works of John Blakemore to Damien Hirst’s ‘There is more to life than making jam and having kids’ to five of Sir Howard Hodgkins works (from his portfolio ‘More Indian Views’ ). This highlights another positive characteristic of the Internet, namely, the convenience of moving from one point to another. In this way, the visitor generates connections, totally different from the initial context of use which advance the associative thought process.

Benefits of presentation of physical objects
Contrasting the benefits of digital presentation are the benefits of presenting actual or ‘physical objects’ . The physical characteristics are visible: the measurements, the use of physicals, the brush strokes, the foundation but also the base, the back with maybe even its loan history. All these elements contribute to the fact that the physical works need more attention and invites to look more closely at them.

> In our proposal we would like to combine the advantages of presentation of the British Council Collection on the Internet and presentation of the physical collection. We present the entire collection, as visible on the Internet during the period of the exhibition and opposed to that one physical work from the collection that will be exhibited in the Whitechapel Gallery for one week.

Selection Criterion
The choice which physical work to represent the entire collection will be decided upon by sound data (statistics) monitored on the Internet: the works with the least hits by visitors of the British Council website will be shown. Through this selection criterion, we emphasize the value of the works for the collection and we also establish which works have been viewed least.

Workshop
To make the least visible works visible for a broad public, they will not only be displayed. For us, the Whitechapel Gallery will be a workshop during the exhibition. It will be a place where the displayed works will be thoroughly examined by guests of various backgrounds. Every single day a different guest will be invited to question the work. Guests are chosen based on the associative way of moving on the Internet from one work/theme into another. The guests in their turn will attract visitors, which might not have come to the exhibition. The choice for the specific guest will be triggered by something enclosed in the particular work of art. This associative way of choosing guests contrasts the way the works have been selected, namely hard facts. An example of a week’s program of guests for one work can be found in appendix 1.

Presentation
The magnitude of the collection and the fact that it entails digital files will be exemplified by printing all 8500 files and hanging them on display. A visual impression of how this will look is attached in appendix 2. The physical work is placed centrally in the exhibition space and will be surrounded by the 8500 prints.

Publication
At the end of each day, a visual / textual presentation is made in PDF with the days’ findings. This will be presented on the website of the British Council and will be available for every one. Eventually, of each displayed physical work seven different PDFs will be realized (since the work is presented for a week and every day a different guest is asked to question the work). These seven PDFs can be printed and bundled for publication. This publication will be completed with set elements such as foreword, theoretical framework and a reference to the 8500 digital works (by presenting them as thumbnails covering each other). Since the length of the exhibition is thirteen weeks, there will be a series of thirteen publications.

Appendix 1 Week program Guests
During the process of writing our proposal we did not yet have the sound data (statistics) on the user-clicking habits of the visitors of the British Council Website. Therefore we have chosen for a fictitious example; hits for James Allen’s 1978’s work Lagan II are sparse when just searching name and title.

Day 1
The artist himself, James Allen, considers his own work. In 1977 he founded the Arts Council of Northern Ireland’s Print Workshop. With this expertise he can show and explain the etching process in the exhibition space. [Association: etching techniques]

Day 2
The popular gothic band Within Temptation performs in the exhibition room in front of the works of art, playing songs they seem fit for the setting/ambiance of the works. [Association: dark, romantic gothic ambiance]

Day 3
Gavin Preror-Pinney, author of the best-seller The Cloudspotter’s Guide lectures on cloudspotting and the clouds in the work of art. Besides that discussion, the clouds of the day will be watched and compared with clouds on the work. [Association: clouds]

Day 4
A fish-expert will tell about the fish and the underwater world of the River Lagan in Northern Ireland. His story will be exemplified by a sweet water aquarium of considerable size in the exhibition hall. At night, there will be a special dinner  (registration required). The fish from the Lagan will be the ingredients of the meal. Dinner and setting will be provided by food artist Marije Vogelzang. [Association: River Lagan]

Day 5
(Market) Stands with different sorts of honey by apiarists from London, traditional candle-makers and products of resin and asphaltum. The public can taste, feel, smell and buy. [Association: materials used with soft ground etching]

Day 6
The British colour-expert Victoria Finlay, author of Colour: Travels Through the Paint Box tells about black and its cultural history (black is not a colour). She will, by means of testing samples show how different various shades of black can be. Furthermore, the exhibition hall will have several copying machines on which the public can  copy reproductions of Lagan’s work in different shades of black and take them home. [Association: black]

Day 7
A display of  a movie related to the work of James Allen with the introduction of a film-expert linking the movie to Lagan II by James Allen.

Important to consider is that the guests of this exhibition can be very divers stretching from a British Premier League player juggling with the ball around a sculpture to internationally known Rembrandt specialist Dr. Ernst van de Wetering closely examining several works. From the local worker to the director of the Whitechapel Gallery and the British Council. Some guests will literally examine the works with x-ray beams whilst others will focus on the use of colour or just small details of the work. Also, specifically the back, or bottom of a work can be a source of inspiration or not when looking at the physical work of art.

Appendix 2 Visual impression
The magnitude of the collection and the fact that it entails digital files will be exemplified by printing all 8500 files and hanging them on display. The physical work is placed centrally in the exhibition space and will be surrounded by the 8500 prints. Impression made by Hans Gremmen.