Sometimes the gods are smiling, and sometimes they’re just having a good laugh. Two days travelling through Argyll exposed me to the best and worst of weathers. On Wednesday, driving back north from Inveraray through Glencoe, the sunshine was glorious, and I’ve never seen the Glen looking so lushly green. But just the evening before, staying in Oban, the town was so crammed with visitors that I had to walk the length of the front to find somewhere to eat. Later, filled with excellent fish pie, I stepped out into the kind of relentless soft West Coast rain that soaks through everything, and had to walk all the way back to my hotel. I was thoroughly drookit.

I was down in Inveraray to visit that remarkable open air museum, Auchindrain Township which gives a unique insight into the way Scottish rural communities lived and worked before crofting. Auchindrain’s Development Manager is an old friend and colleague, Bob Clark. Back in the early 90s Bob had been working for the Scottish Museums Council (now Museums and Galleries Scotland) when I was working for the Scottish Arts Council, but we hadn’t seen each other in the intervening years as our careers had taken us in different directions.

In the two years he’s been at Auchindrain, Bob’s already started introducing the arts on to the site as a powerful tool in helping to interpret its history. The Walking Theatre Company produced a site-specific piece that included the (true) story of Queen Victoria’s visit to Auchindrain, and co-opted the present Duke of Argyll to step out of the audience to play his ancestor greeting the Queen. And Bob’s had local fiddlers playing informally, outside one of the cottages as they might have done when the site was still a living community. He’s even had the local shinty team learning the old skills of their predecessors in order to be able to play on an ordinary rough field that had not had the benefit of years of heavy-duty rollers to smooth out its irregularities!

Twenty years ago, Bob and I were effectively the means of liaison between our two national agencies, and that kept us pretty busy. This was a time when the relationship between the arts and museums sectors was a particularly close one. Large and small museums the length and breadth of the country were willing bookers of a wide range of touring exhibitions which were being created and circulated by SAC client galleries and arts centres. Such exhibitions were often a godsend to museums in helping them to encourage repeat visits, or develop educational projects. In my previous role as Director of the Crawford Arts Centre in St Andrews we’d regularly produced such exhibitions, touring them to museums from Kelvingrove to Shetland. It was a helpful source of income, but more importantly it would justify the expenditure of funding and resources on the exhibition in the first place, and knowing it could have several showings would make it worth investing in a printed catalogue or some audio-visual aids.

But the links between arts and museums went much further than just circulating exhibitions. Scottish Arts Council funding, for a few years, supported a wide range of innovative arts projects in museums, from performances by dance, music and drama companies, to artists’ residencies, and from new commissions to creative learning projects, in schools and with adults.

It was something of a halcyon period in Scottish culture. When the SAC helped to bring a new nationwide photography festival , Fotofeis, into being, many museums were ready and willing to be involved, and indeed some of Fotofeis’ most successful projects were hosted in regional museums like the Dick Institute in Kilmarnock. The climax of this inter-agency collaboration was the preparation of the Charter for the Arts in Scotland, published in 1993, and led by the SAC, but with full participation by the Scottish Museums Council, and also by the Scottish Library and Information Council. That ground-breaking document, the result of copious consultation, set the agenda for arts funding in Scotland for the next decade.

And yet, it didn’t last. By the mid 1990s the dedicated funding schemes had dried up, and, on the whole, museums stopped being venues for imaginative arts events. The process of Museum Registration (now Accreditation) came to dominate the thinking and the time of many Museum Directors and Boards. The rise of the Curator meant that SAC-funded galleries were often more concerned with offering highly distinctive programmes that boosted their own identities, and the interest in sharing touring exhibitions diminished. I think we were all the losers.

Of course, it’s not all bleak. The National Galleries of Scotland have had a long-standing outreach programme, and the Exhibitions Unit of the Highland Council has been one of their most consistent partners, resulting in such treats for Inverness as the Venus Rising exhibition back in 2005  . More recently the Artist Rooms programme, a collaboration between the Art Fund, the Tate, the National Galleries of Scotland, and collector and curator Anthony d’Offay, has brought some of the finest 20th century art not only to Inverness but also to Helmsdale, Thurso, Stornoway and Orkney.

Our own Crafts Development programme, led by Pamela Conacher, has had a highly successful partnership with the Highland Council Exhibitions unit, resulting in substantial summer programmes of exhibitions, small and large, in Inverness Museum and Gallery, both this year and in 2010. Those seasons have given terrific opportunities for those makers involved in our Making Progress mentoring programme, not only by showcasing their own new work, but also by putting it in the context of some of the best contemporary crafts from across the UK.

Detail from Caroline Dear's 100 Ropes, Making Progress Exhibition July 2011

My short tour of Argyll this week also included my first visit to Dunollie, the home of the chiefs of the Clan MacDougall since the 12th century. Most people who know of Dunollie at all would know of it only as the broken tooth of a black keep which the Mull ferry passes as it leaves Oban harbour. But just inland is a fine mansion dating back to the 18th century, the earliest part of which dates from 1745, and will shortly open as a museum and visitor centre .  The Project Director, Catherine Gillies, has bold and ambitious plans for involving the arts in Dunollie, as an absolutely integral part of their remit. So perhaps the pendulum is swinging back once again, and we’ll soon have as productive a relationship between arts and museums as existed twenty years ago, back before Bob Clark or I had any grey hairs.

© Robert Livingston