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Museums, Discourse, and Visitors: the Case of London's Tate Modern

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Museums, Discourse, and Visitors: the Case of London's Tate Modern Museums, Discourse, and Visitors: The Case of London's Tate Modern Seph Rodney Thesis submitted for A PhD degree in Humanities and Cultural Studies to Birkbeck College The London Consortium Programme June 2015 ABSTRACT This thesis examines the conceptualization of the visitor within the discursive construction of the contemporary public art museum. It takes the rhetorical formulation of the interaction between the theorized visitor figure and the discursively rendered museum to constitute the ‘visit’. This work argues that the position of the visitor within museum discourse has radically shifted in the past generation; the primary claim being that the visit is reconceived as a personally customizable experience less oriented toward the transfer of information from the curator (regarded as expert and educator) to the visitor figure (regarded as ignorant pupil), and more oriented toward meeting the particular needs and preferences of the visitor. This conception currently appears in museum discourse and in the minds of influential actors who shape this discourse. To analyze this claim, this thesis draws on the institutionalization of the visit via a case study of the Tate Modern museum, which provides the primary empirical evidence demonstrating the above claim. The resulting study relates the questions, structure, and findings of a systematic investigation into the historical, social, and museological conditions necessary to an institutionally manifested personalized, visitor-centered visit. The conceptual development of the visitor figure is traced through implicit accounts of the visit within academic studies of the museum, institutional records, marketing reports, advertisements, and the public discourse convened around Tate Modern’s opening thematic displays that served as an extension of Tate’s marketing and audience development programs. This visitor figure is now coextensive with and conditioned by a neoliberal participatory agenda that trades on the notion of personal agency and enlightened cultural consumption, which is, in turn, undergirded and conditioned by the intertwined forces of consumerism, marketing, and branding. TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS____________________________________________________ Chapter 1 Introduction 7 Subsection Creating Your Own Collection 7 Subsection An Emergent Phenomenon 12 Subsection Surveying the Discourse 15 Subsection Research Strategies 17 Subsection Organizing the Inquiry 20 Subsection The Case Study 25 Subsection Research Design 30 Subsection Evidentiary Sources 32 Subsection Analytical methods 35 Subsection Order of the Argument 36 Subsection All Change 39 Chapter 2 The Changing Nature of the Visit 41 Subsection Introduction: Museum Literature and the Enlightenment 41 Subsection The Private and the Public 47 Subsection In the Museum’s Shadow 52 Subsection The Birth of Visitor-derived Meaning 58 Subsection A New Museology 64 Subsection Implicit Views of the Visit 68 Subsection The Humiliating/Validating Visit 70 Subsection The Civilizing Visit 75 Subsection The Ritual Visit 79 Subsection The Personalized Visit 83 Chapter 3 An Interpretive Museum 90 Subsection Introduction 90 Subsection Prologue to the Reports 94 Subsection Tate Reports 96 Subsection Chronology 98 Subsection The Tate Gallery in the 1960s 99 Subsection The Tate Gallery in the 1970s 102 Subsection Best Practice for Public Service 106 Subsection Inclusion and Interpretation 112 Chapter 4 Marketized Visitors 117 Subsection Audience Research and Audience Development 117 Subsection Audience Research Documents 120 Subsection Analysis of Tate Through Visitors’ Eyes 125 Subsection Analysis of Tate Online 134 Subsection The Marketized Museum and Relevant Economies 144 Subsection Losses and Gains 151 Chapter 5 Branding, Advertisements and Partnerships 155 Subsection The Visitor in Branding and Advertizing 155 Subsection Tate’s Brand Formulation 155 Subsection Brands’ Relation to Advertisements 161 Subsection The UBS Advertisements 164 Subsection Tate Etc. Magazine 167 Subsection Couple in the Turbine Hall 167 Subsection Interior and Exterior View with Couple 172 Subsection Couple Facing a Screening Room 178 Subsection The Campaign 181 Chapter 6 Tate Modern Displays 185 Subsection The Thematic Displays 185 Subsection Curatorial Intention 189 Subsection The Fraudulent Visit 193 Subsection The Pleasurable Visit 202 Subsection The Democratic Visit 205 Subsection A Promise 212 Subsection Marketing 215 Chapter 7 Conclusion 219 Subsection Aims and Findings 219 Subsection Future Study 229 REFERENCES_________________________________________________________231 APPENDICES__________________________________________________________254 Appendix A The ‘I’m Hungover’ Collection Poster Appendix B The ‘I’ve Just Split Up’ Collection Poster Appendix C Tate Collections Marketing Society PowerPoint Presentation Appendix D UBS Advertisement: Couple in Turbine Hall Appendix E UBS Advertisement: Couple with a View of the Thames Appendix F UBS Advertisement: Couple before a Screening Room ACKNOWLEDGMENTS First, I thank my mother, Sarah Rodney, who has been a source of emotional and financial support longer than she could reasonably be expected to have been. She has never given up, and partly because of this, neither could I. I do acknowledge the generosity of both of my supervisors. My primary supervisor Marko Daniel gave an attentive eye to my work. My second supervisor, Gordon Fyfe was indispensable. He is as rigorous a scholar as I could have wanted and I deeply appreciate his hard work at helping me to pull clarity and coherence out of my uncertainty. Dr. Fyfe in particular has influenced me to say what I mean. I partly owe my knowledge of the museum field to his guidance. I thank John Tu, for a generous grant he made so that I could begin my studies in London. He renewed his support one year later, and I am very grateful for his support. Without these funds I would have likely not been able to complete my work. I also thank my friend Lawrence Harding, who let me sleep on his couch for more than a year and a half while I worked on the previous iteration of this thesis. Finally, this study was aided by a grant from the Central Research Fund. The grant was made in 2009 to support my travel to New York to conduct research on MoMA, and I am grateful to have received it. S. Rodney Museums, Discourse, and Visitors: The Case of 7 London's Tate Modern ! Chapter One: Introduction Creating Your Own Collection In September of 2005 Tate Britain launched a marketing campaign that invited visitors to ‘Create your own Collection’.1 This campaign presented the results of a competition in which participants figuratively assembled their own ‘collection’ of up to six works of art in Tate’s permanent collection and on display in Tate Britain.2 The chosen ‘collections’ were published in leaflets for other visitors to use and consider while visiting the museum. At the competition’s conclusion the campaign had generated twenty new ways of seeing and navigating the items. According to Tate’s own estimates, increases in visitors’ numbers directly resulted from the campaign, with a twenty-two percent increase in the first month, and a fifty percent increase within six months (Tate, 2008). These visitor-devised selections promoted by the museum in outdoor posters, including the ‘I’m Hungover’, and the ‘I’ve Just Split Up’ compilations, adopted works in the permanent collection to explore, elaborate, or illustrate a psychic state or corporeal experience of the visitor now standing in as curator of its own visit. The campaign came to this author’s attention, because, more than being a commercial success it gestured toward a categorically different way to experience the museum than the conventional tracking of an art historical narrative developed by the curator. This campaign, essentially an innovative marketing ploy, indicates the institutional development of a visitor- centered experience that represents a rethinking of a visit to an art museum, and by extension, the roles the curator and visitor can play in defining and shaping this experience. Tate Britain’s campaign brings to light a particular configuration of the visit, institutionally generated by Tate’s marketing department and produced through an essentially creative act of textual and dialogic !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 1 Descriptions of two collections: the ‘I’m Hungover’ collection, and the ‘I’ve Just Split Up’ collection are included in the first appendix along with copies of slides 1-3 and 14-18 of 18, of a 2008 PowerPoint presentation made to the Marketing Society that relates the plans, intentions, and results of this campaign. 2 Visitors were invited to create a list of their favored artworks drawn from the permanent collection, a list that constituted the visitor’s own ‘collection’ arranged according to preferences, situations, or feelings. The list constituted a guide; the permanent collection was not rehung in accordance. S. Rodney Museums, Discourse, and Visitors: The Case of 8 London's Tate Modern ! engagement. 3 This type of visit publicly and explicitly underwrites the visitor’s capacity and (presumed) desire to consciously shape an interaction with art with limited curatorial intervention. What the term ‘visit’ means in this context is the rhetorical formulation of the visitor’s timed experience in the physical space of the museum (as opposed to its virtual spaces) and its possibilities, particularly as bracketed by the polar conceptualizations of the visitor
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