A Room With a View

CATHY SHANKLAND and DEAN MELVILLE discuss the Robert Mapplethorpe exhibition at the Inverness Museum and Gallery with Kenny Mathieson, and sketch out the ongoing implications of the Artist Rooms project for the Highlands & Islands

KENNY MATHIESON: Cathy, let’s start with an obvious first question – what is Artist Rooms?

CATHY SHANKLAND: It’s a series of exhibitions based on the collection of post-war art made by the art dealer, Anthony d’Offay. He sold his collections to the Tate and the National Galleries of Scotland last year, who now own it jointly. He sold it for the price that he had paid for it, although it was obviously worth much more than that now, so it was in considerable part a donation. He has stayed on as a curator for the project.

KENNY MATHIESON: And this was a very large collection?

CATHY SHANKLAND: There are over 700 works in the collection as a whole, but the concept of Artist Rooms is that each artist is featured in a solo exhibition, so there won’t be any group exhibitions as part of this project. That allows each artist’s work to be studied in depth, and a number of artists – including some very iconic figures and a number of living artists – are represented by very substantial bodies of work in this collection.

Bill Viola - Ascension, 2000, Color video projection on wall in dark room (photo - Kira Perov )

KENNY MATHIESON: This must be the first time that a national collection has been shared and shown so widely across the UK?

DEAN MELVILLE: It’s nationwide across Britain, from the Pier Arts Centre up in Stromness to the Tate St. Ives in Cornwall. There are eighteen venues involved this year, and twenty-five are interested for next year. In Scotland this year there are four – we are showing the Mapplethorpe portraits, the Pier have Bill Viola, Aberdeen have Ron Mueck, and the Tramway in Glasgow have Bruce Nauman. And of course, the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh are showing several Artist Rooms.

We felt that we didn’t want to include things just on the grounds that they might be controversial

KENNY MATHIESON: So how does the distribution of exhibitions work – did you get to chose what you wanted to show?

CATHY SHANKLAND: We had a choice to make from what was available, so you go through all of that and then make your request, and if it is available they will usually let you have it. Robert Mapplethorpe was our first choice – when we got the chance to be part of the scheme we sat down and wrote down the names of the artists we were most interested in from the collection, and Mapplethorpe was on all our lists. Dean was especially keen.

DEAN MELVILLE: I spent three years living in the USA between 1989 and 1991, and there was a show of Mapplethorpe’s work on in Cincinnati at that time, with the large scale portraits and a broader range of his work. It got a lot of news coverage, and was an important exhibition in many ways, and left a big impression on me.

I always liked his work anyway, so when the chance to have it here came up I was delighted. It is a different set of work to the one I saw in Cincinatti, obviously, but d’Offay’s collection is supposed to be second only to the Guggenheim in New York in terms of its holdings.

KENNY MATHIESON: And you went for the portraits theme from what was available?

CATHY SHANKLAND: We felt it gave us a cohesive exhibition, and most of the works in the collection are portraits anyway.

KENNY MATHIESON: What were your selection criteria in putting the Mapplethorpe together?

DEAN MELVILLE: It would have been possible to go for a very different group of pieces, or to group them within the exhibition in a different way. We could also have gone for more of spread of works, but we felt that the strength of the portraits held it very tightly together, and made it more coherent.

Eva Sarandon/ Amurri by Robert Mapplethorpe

KENNY MATHIESON: Presumably you could also have gone for a more controversial selection of his work, say from his S&M period – there is really only one in this show?

CATHY SHANKLAND: We did have that option, yes, but we felt that we didn’t want to include things just on the grounds that they might be controversial. We were drawn more to thematic groups within his portraits, things like the writers and artists or the children. We wanted to show people what a great portrait photographer he was, without getting them distracted by all the S&M stuff.

DEAN MELVILLE: It would have been an easy choice to go for the more controversial pictures, and doubtless people would have flocked to see them, but we wanted to show how well versed he was in art and photography, and that can get clouded when you focus on the S&M and so on. He trained as a sculptor, and I think you can see that clearly in his work. And these works we have are harder to find and see anyway.

KENNY MATHIESON: How much of a dilemma was the final order of hanging them?

DEAN MELVILLE: I’ve had quite a bit of experience of hanging work, but it turned out that I wasn’t here for the physical hanging because my partner was having our baby at the time! But we did try a lot of different possibilities on this one. There is always potential to do it differently, but in the end you have to stop somewhere, and we made our decisions to hang it as you see it.

We could even have reduced the number of pictures, but we felt what we have is right. The people of Inverness rarely get a chance to see this work, so we wanted to include as much as we could without crowding the walls. There are a lot of subtleties in his work, and we have had a lot of people coming back two or three times to absorb it.

KENNY MATHIESON: Why were you selected to take part in the project?

CATHY SHANKLAND: We have a relationship with the National Galleries in Edinburgh that has built up over the years, and through that they offered us the chance to be part of it.

DEAN MELVILLE: Although this show is only on in Inverness, I think that the fact that we are also operating as touring unit was a factor in being offered the chance to take part, and I think they are looking at how we might develop this project beyond the Mapplethorpe exhibition.

CATHY SHANKLAND: We have the potential to roll the project out to other venues in the Highlands in subsequent exhibitions, although that is going to require even more work, because some of the other galleries have not yet been checked out as being suitable from a security point of view and environmental conditions and so on, but it is our aim to roll it out if we can.

Bill Viola - Silent Mountain, 2001, Colour video diptych on two plasma displays mounted side-by-side on wall, 102.1 cm x 121.9 cm x 8.9 cm (40.25 in x 48 in x 3.5 in), Performers: Nathalie Canessa, Ken Roht (photo - Kira Perov)

KENNY MATHIESON: Can you just remind us how the Exhibitions Unit works as a touring operation?

CATHY SHANKLAND: The Unit runs the Highland Council galleries, which is basically four galleries, or five if you count the IMAG spaces as two. There are galleries in Thurso, Wick and Kingussie, and the exhibitions change every four to six weeks, and generally tour round each of the galleries, although that isn’t the case with the Mapplethorpe.

KENNY MATHIESON: Do you have links with galleries that aren’t run by Highland Council?

CATHY SHANKLAND: We do to some extent, and we are looking to develop that further in future, working with galleries like The Lime Tree in Fort William, for example. We also work with spaces that aren’t galleries, and with schools.

KENNY MATHIESON: The education side of your activities is an area that some people feel is lacking at the moment – do you have plans to expand on that?

DEAN MELVILLE: The education side is something we would like to develop, yes. Although we don’t normally work with education as part of our brief – and that is partly down to the amount of time it takes to do everything else – the Mapplethorpe show has been a bit of a gift in that respect.

We are commited to running an education programme as part of Artist Rooms, and that was very much part of Anthony d’Offay’s thinking as well. We have the show here for two months, which is also unusual for us, but it gives us the opportunity to plug it into education and work with the schools. We would love to do more of that.

CATHY SHANKLAND: Generally we have looked to link up with other people who can deliver that programme for us, and that will be starting in June. We got some funding from the Scottish Government and the Art Fund as part of Artist Rooms to do the education project, and there will be material coming out of that which will be available in future Artist Rooms exhibitions elsewhere. Beyond this one, the education element of Artist Rooms is also a three-year project, and that is very much focused on young people from 15 to 26.

KENNY MATHIESON: Is the Pier Gallery working independently of you in the Artist Rooms project?

CATHY SHANKLAND: Yes. We all met up initially and discussed the project and the things we would like to do, but each gallery was then able to go away and make their own choice and apply for it. By and large we got to do what we wanted, and they have given us much more freedom to do what we wanted than we have had with previous projects here from the National Galleries.

KENNY MATHIESON: So what is next in terms of Artist Rooms?

CATHY SHANKLAND: We have to decide on a request for next year, and have a huge shopping list, but at the moment I think we would like to try something three-dimensional and colourful next time, something that will give people a different dimension to their experience of Artist Rooms.

We have to draw up a plan for what we would like to do for the next three years, so we are working on that, and of course, we are in competition with twenty five other galleries. It’s been very much a pilot, not only for us, but also for them. We are the first exhibition to open outside of the Tate and the National Galleries, so we are all learning lessons from the experience.

KENNY MATHIESON: And you are hoping to roll some of the work out beyond Inverness in the course of those three years?

CATHY SHANKLAND: We hope so. We would like to have at least one Artist Rooms exhibition here at IMAG for each of the next three years, and also roll another out across the community. In general I think the way we would go about it is that we would be looking to put something two-dimensional together to go out to other venues.

Andy Warhol by Robert Mapplethorpe

KENNY MATHIESON: Would you like to tempt us with some names?

CATHY SHANKLAND: I don’t want to name names at this stage and give people expectations that we may not be able to fulfil, but we would love to have Warhol here …

DEAN MELVILLE: I have to say that the people working on this at the Tate and National Galleries have been very supportive and very thorough.

CATHY SHANKLAND: What has also been nice is the way in which we have been able to link up with colleagues around the country through this. Up here you can feel a little bit isolated from what is going on elsewhere, and this has been a great a opportunity to make contacts and swap ideas and see what people are thinking.

KENNY MATHIESON: You are going to be limited by the size of the gallery space here at IMAG, aren’t you?

CATHY SHANKLAND: Inevitably that will be case. We did think about taking Ron Mueck for here, for example, but I’m not sure we could get the work through the doors. Some of those pieces are huge.

KENNY MATHIESON: All the more reason to keep the pressure on for the proposed new gallery, and to get it right when it happens.

CATHY SHANKLAND: I think they are still looking for a site, and we hope that this Artist Rooms project will help to maintain interest in keeping that project on the table. We have the potential to do a lot more of this kind of thing if we had the gallery space and facilities that we currently lack. The National Galleries are keener than ever to get work out, but we need to have the right facilities.

Cathy Shankland will resume her duties as Head of the Exhibitions Unit at IMAG when her current secondment to the now deleted post of area cultural officer for Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey ends in June. Dean Melville is Exhibitions Officer at IMAG.

Artist Rooms: Robert Mapplethorpe, Portraits is at the Inverness Museum and Gallery until 27 June.

Artist Rooms: Bill Viola is at the Pier Arts Centre, Stromness, from 19 June until 5 September 2009.

© Kenny Mathieson, 2009

Links

• Inverness Gallery & Museum
• National Galleries of Scotland
• Tate