Art Intervention, Ceredigion Museum 2011
Art Intervention, Ceredigion Museum 2011‘Read the label, if there is one.’
Second year students at the Aberystwyth University’s School of Art, were given the opportunity to work with a social history collection held at Ceredigion Museum. The county museum is based in the Coliseum, Aberystwyth, a former theatre and cinema. This is where art and history came together.
For the second year running staff at the museum have collaborated with the University School of Art. The students created a series of new art works. For three weeks the team worked together exploring the possibilities of juxtaposing contemporary art with historic artifacts. Why?
The remit for the project was to examine and re-examine history, interpretation, and artefacts in the light of current cultural related issues. Using a cross- disciplinary approach the resulting interpretation was presented to the public by using installation, performance, sound, video, found or constructed objects etc. depending on which medium best suited the message. The concept was to challenge, intervene, respond to and disclose aspects of the museum collection or respond to the museum’s historic building. This would give visitors a new way of looking and experiencing the collection.
So what happened? Each of the twenty students produced a professional piece of work that sat either blatantly or discreetly in the displays. Visitors to the museum were able to discover the works on all three levels of the public galleries.
The range of work included many stories and some of these questioned the notion of truth in interpretation.
How do we know what is true when we read a label? What do we feel when we experience a work of art?
Artist Camilla Gambari decided to make up a story about a ghost that haunted the building. She stated that the ghost appeared occasionally in the attic space above the main auditorium. By producing a convincing photograph and suitably framing it she accompanied her object with an elaborate story. Through her fabricated investigations she disclosed information about an actress called Beatrice ‘Bibi’ Roscoe that had meant to star in August Stingberg’s Miss Julie at the theatre but had mysteriously died. Bibi has come back to haunt both Camilla and the building. Both text and image suggested something that we as an audience were willing to half believe standing in the old theatre.
Joe Harris inserted her own toys into the museum display including a small teddy bear with a withered arm. ‘Plum’, was given to Zoe as a present by a boyfriend when she was five and used to hold a heart saying ‘I Love You’. The label accompanying the bear read, ‘His head has been sewn back on and he is missing his left arm due to the fact I used to suck my thumb and hold onto the arm to sniff him for comfort.’ We can tell that this was a truthful label and believe the writer when they explain about the loss of the arm. It is a universal truth.
In the work of Joel Taylor we found much more of a humorous take on the way in which interpretation can be used. By producing a child’s tricycle called The ‘Icycle’ 1982-1985 he accompanied his glamorous glitzy crystal encased tricycle with a tongue in cheek statement which joked with the way museums present their information:
‘Logistical issues, fundamental to the bikes function were to cause controversy among consumers in the winter of 1983. The thoroughness of the diamond encrusting process has effectively forced the pedals to remain static, meaning that the ‘Icycle’ could not achieve motion, even to the slightest degree’.
Similarly Ashley Ferguson used humour in her work. She chose to dress up some of the taxidermy animals displayed by creating paper hats and decorative jewelry and bow ties with which to adorn the ‘morbid’ creatures. With more than a glance at the grotesque Victorian world of Walter Potter these examples had a more fun element. Her labels have a similar authentic museum twist to them and again we were half taken in by the professional approach to the way in which they characterize the usual museum label. The yellow canary was described:
‘This species is most well known for their bright plumage and distinctive accessories, often sporting gold chains and cap.’
Artist Madelain Anstey-Maggs was more subtle in her approach to the intervention and placed her interpretation a little away from the exquisite witches hair brush that she inserted into the Victorian sewing display. She accompanied her piece with a story suggesting the tale of a witch from South Ceredigion as though it were fact. We were left not knowing whether this to be an actual story or one which the artist had invented. The items on show added to the story and therefore made us want to believe this to be true:
‘The most unusual of the finds is a hair brush with human hair instead of bristles and matching mirror, both believed to be inlaid with the hair of Clara Du herself. The collection also includes a ‘witch’s bottle’ which bears a runic symbol and has been sealed with wax. It is thought to contain urine and sharp objects such as nails and pins.’
The power of various museum labels and signs was picked up by Paige Pearce who decided to indulge in inserting over one hundred symbols of male and female stereotypical activity into the museum displays. Questioning our acceptance of these roles in our lives the artist produced small symbolic signs and placed them alongside museum displays that contained references to male and femaleness that we might not necessarily have thought about. This use of symbols also overcame the dilemma of using two or more languages in text which so often leads to problems when designing museum displays.
While some of the young artists worked specifically with one chosen area or theme at the museum Pearce took in the whole idea of the museum and how messages are put across.
Another artist who took a more general view of the notion of what the museum was about was Marta Wysocka. Her video pieces related to time passing and the effect we all have with each action we take in life. There was no accompanying label to explain this piece.
We were presented with sound and moving image.
Here we heard the dripping of a rhythmic drop of water and saw the reflection of the artist distorted and rippling out in an ever increasing circle when the drip fell onto the reflection. Placing this piece of work alongside the museum ticking clocks gave the sound and images a meaning and purpose which became incredibly powerful in the space. The drip could be heard throughout the museum.
Her hour long performance on the stage during the opening of the display also left a memory shadow in the building and this too added to the power of the piece created tying in well with the idea of the theatre being a place full of past performances and yet having a profound effect on those who have experienced them. Her performance consisted of her dripping water from her mouth into a metal bowl on the main stage of the old Coliseum theatre in which the museum is housed.
Mention must also be made of the stunning pieces by Augustina Trijonyte, who created an exquisite spiders web of gold thread and miniature bells on one of the main stair cases, and also a ‘dusty moth come flower’ construction, installed in the seventeenth century display, by Alice Mary Isaac. Both of these works sat quietly in the museum and glowed. Both responded to the notion of what the museum displays could be about. Both were thought provoking and yet needed no explanations or labels. Both were simply the truth.
Perhaps this then leads us to the conclusion that whatever labels accompany objects in museums the objects themselves are the real truth and the labels are always interpretation which might lead us away or in a different direction from that truth.
Our response to the art is the purest and most honest emotion and for some of these works it was a matter of engaging and indulging in the idea.
Joe Scott produced a copy of the ready-made by Marcel Duchamp of a bicycle wheel on a kitchen stool but with a subtle twist. Here Scott changed the wheel by inserting strings where the spokes should have been and invited the viewer to pluck them.
His only label simply asks his audience to take part. Duchamp would have enjoyed the way in which this piece needed the final action of the viewer to complete the work. It was placed between the harp and the penny farthing bicycle in the Ceredigion Museum permanent displays. The final note was played by the visitor.
Stuart Evans