Becoming Public(s): Practising the Public Programme in the Contemporary Art Institution Marianne Mulvey PhD Royal College of Art 2020 1 Declaration The work presented in this thesis is my own 11 December 2020 Signed Date Marianne Mulvey 2 Acknowledgements This thesis would not have taken place without the generous funding and support of the Arts and Humanities Research Council’s Collaborative Doctoral Award scheme. I am grateful to my amazing supervisors Dr. Ben Cranfield, Dr. Richard Martin and Dr. Marko Daniel: your knowledge, precision, willingness to think with me, and expand kernels of ideas made this thesis what it is. Thank you for understanding what I was saying when I did not, and pushing me forward. Though not directly involved in this work, Prof. Gavin Butt’s training in flirtatious study is written all over it. All my Tate Colleagues deserve a special mention. I am grateful to everyone I worked with in the Adult Programmes / Public Programmes team (2009–16). Each one of you impacted my thinking on this weird and wonderful practice, and made it so enjoyable: Madeleine Keep, Liz Ellis, Sandra Sykorova, Marcus Dickey-Horley, Nora Razien, Dr. Olga Smith, Dr. Sonya Dyer, Michele Furier, Emily Stone, Anna Murray, Luisa Ulyett, Joseph Kendra, Isabella Nimmo, Rosie Burley, Jo Bradshaw, Dr. Paul Goodwin, Dr. Victoria Walsh, Eleanor Clayton, Gracie Divall, Sarah McCarthy and Dr. Alex Patterson. Tate Learning and Research colleagues Dr. Emily Pringle, Dr. Maggie Matich, Mark Miller, Adrian Shaw and others have inspired and encouraged my research on the job, and made me laugh (a lot) in the office. Hat tip to all the artists, programme contributors and audiences I have worked with as a public programme curator who provided such enormous inspiration, especially Dr. Aaron Williamson; the students I shared this research with who asked such brilliant questions; all those who hosted, or participated in, my research workshops, particularly Anna Colin at Open School East. I am extremely grateful to Kimberley Chandler for her proof reading and moral support in the final stages. Special thanks go to my parents, Amelia and Paddy who took me to all the galleries and museums South Wales had to offer, answered all my ‘why’ questions, encouraged my creativity and never told me to get a proper job. My sister Flossie has always supported my study with lots of good humour, and told me when to give it a rest. My nieces Lily and Seren have been consistent with love and cheekiness. Aunties, uncles, cousins, dear friends old and new have regularly asked how the PhD was going, and just told me to keep going. Without all of your love, support and belief I would not have written the first word, nor completed the last. I am grateful to London Contemporary Voices and The Cheek Of It for nurturing the performer in me and providing creative outlets to cushion all this brain work during 2016–19. * * * During my final year (2020) I completed this thesis in a tiny home office in Tottenham, North London. There was a global pandemic and everything shut down. The activity at the centre of my study – public programming – immediately ceased. Togetherness, in all its forms, had to evolve. I hope to have said something here to support this transition. My final thanks goes to all the awkward situations I have found myself in. 3 For Paddy and Amelia 4 Abstract: Becoming Public(s): Practising the Public Programme in the Contemporary Art Institution From the informational to the informal, the practical to the performative, what a contemporary art institution’s public programme includes is seemingly limitless. Despite the increasing visibility of this practice, it remains side-lined in institutions and discourse. Yet, I argue it offers a unique vantage point from which to explore publicness, as it is produced by the art museum and its extended spaces – the contemporary art institution, art school and performance festival – in a manner distinct from exhibition making and other forms of the curatorial. I ask in this thesis: what can the space of the public programme tell us about what it means to become public in the contemporary art institution? It is my contention that publicness is both spatially and temporally constructed; we must observe and quantify the feelings, responses, actions of ourselves and others to truly understand it. Through a combination of queer theory, theatre and performance studies, I attend more fully to the sensuous, affective and felt dimensions of publicness, and trouble the abstract, singular public found in the construction ‘public programme’. Challenging pervasive spatial metaphors of publicness that curatorial discourses often have recourse to, I then argue for an alternative understanding of publicness as an emergent becoming. My understanding of ‘becoming public(s)’ emerges from the art museum and how it has been tied to publicness in rather uncomfortable ways, alongside close readings of specific moments during events I have programmed or attended that left me feeling uncomfortable, awkward, or uncertain how to respond. My findings are taken back into practice in a series called That Awkward Stage: Private Workshops for Public Programmers (2018–19). Inviting participants to share moments of discomfort in their double role as programmer and audience, I analyse anecdotes shared to answer my final research question: what could reframing publicness as a process of becoming do to our understanding of the public programme in the contemporary art institution? This thesis argues for embracing the discomfort around publicness as a way to rethink the space of the public programme in ways that no longer take becoming public for granted. 5 Presentation Conventions All citations in this thesis follow the Harvard referencing system. Where text has been cited or summarised from the same source and page number over several sentences, an intext reference appears at the end of the relevant section. Where text has been cited from an online source, the intext reference will be (name date). Where text has been cited from a webpage and no date appears, usually in the case of organisations, the intext reference will be ‘(name of organisation/person n.d.)’. Where text has been cited from an online book with no page numbers, the intext reference will include the chapter and/or section number. Titles of events, performances and artworks are italicised, with the date in the first instance of citation, and the artist’s name where relevant. All quotations, from text or direct speech, are in single inverted commas. Quotations within quotations are given double inverted commas. I used two methods of recording speech: digital recordings of interviews, that I transcribed and kept on file for reference; hand-written notes in research workshops, where I took down short, verbatim quotations of direct speech as well as made observations, which are kept on file for reference. Quotations from interview material and written notes on direct speech in the workshops will either be referenced in the text, or have the name of the person quoted in parentheses and the year. Everyone quoted has given their consent, but for full anonymity, all interviewees, attendees to workshops and informal conversation partners whom I have quoted have been given pseudonyms and there is no direct reference to their place of work in the thesis. Where areas of discourse are referred to for the first time, they appear in lower case and in single inverted commas, such as ‘the curatorial’ and ‘the educational turn’. British spellings are used throughout, except in quotations from published texts wherein Americanised spellings are used. In these cases, the text is quoted verbatim. I use the present participle ‘practising’ when referring to the rehearsing and performing of the practice of public programming. When using ‘putting into practice’, I refer to both the practice of public programming, and the activity of practising – rehearsing or performing something. I outline and refer to the development of the museum as foundational to my object of study. But I use the terms ‘museum’, ‘art museum’ and ‘contemporary art institution’ interchangeably throughout, to trace the practice and development of public programming across all kinds of art organisation, unless I am referring to a specific, named place. I use ‘the public’ to denote the singular. I use ‘publics’ to denote the plural. I use ‘public(s)’ to speak about both the singular and the plural, holding onto both notions at the same time. However, it is important to say that these notions are often blurred. 6 Contents Prologue – A Public Programme in Five Acts 11 Introduction – Public Problems 14 Practice-led Approaches to Materialising Publics Theoretical Approaches to Materialising Publics Summary of Methodological Approaches Chapter Synopsis Introduction Conclusion Literature Review 30 Working Knowledge Museum and Exhibition Studies The Curatorial Public Art as Process The Educational Turn New Institutionalism Participation and Community The Bourgeois Public Sphere Biennialisation The Neoliberal Institution 7 Problem Public(s) ‘Publics are queer creatures’ Intimate Relations Getting Specific Opportunities and Theoretical Approaches for Materialising Publics Chapter One – That Awkward Stage 62 Failure as Performance Art The Lecture Performance as Genre Smoothness Holding Space Hold Ups Awkwardness That Awkward Stage Awkward Stages and their Retelling Flexi-time Just Doing my Job Conclusion – Collapsing Lecture, Becoming Public(s) Chapter Two –