New ways to court the public
Leslie Geddes-Brown discovers what museums can offer in this year of lifelong learning You may not be aware of it — I cer- tainly wasn't — but 1996 is the European Year of Lifelong Learning. This is Euro- babble for adult education, and, I suspect, more by coincidence than forethought, a committee looking at ways of improving education in British museums is about to give tongue. This was set up when Peter Brooke was Minister for Fun what seems like light years ago but, in fact, was only in 1993. David Anderson, energetic head of education at the Victoria and Albert Muse- um, is the author of the committee report which ought to see daylight sometime dur- ing this year of lifelong learning. He has so far talked to 566 museums but their responses spring few surprises. Lack of funds being the main reason cited for lack of education services and the fact that regimental museums do not make kid- dies their priority are not very vital statis- tics.
That Anderson has been chosen is, how- ever, good news because, while we have all been castigating the V&A for being part of an ace caff, it has quietly produced the sort of education programme that others should copy. It is varied, flexible, lively, good value and imaginative. At one end, it currently offers two year-long courses on late medi- aeval and early Renaissance art and the visual arts in the 19th and 20th century of which you can do a full three terms for £1,000 or, if time, money or inclination are in short supply, you can pick a single term for £350. This summer, for instance, you get the second half of the 15th century, or architecture and design in the West from the 1940s to 1980s.
On the other hand, you can learn how to carve a Chinese seal for your personal chop or signature, or how to make thumbnail sketches from objects in the galleries if you can face sketching badly in front of stu- dious women in droopy skirts and hordes of school children. Another great, if unlike- ly, success has been a three-year project whereby Indian women from Dubai to San Francisco have set up groups to embroider panels for a Mughal tent which should have a grand unveiling in the Pirelli Gardens next year.
The other big three London institutions must envy the V&A — not only does it have a collection which is huge, not too precious to handle and suitable for hands- on work, it also has the space to allow the public to muck about learning Chinese fan dancing and making felt yurts (yes, really). Meanwhile, the British Museum has virtu- ally resigned itself to the fact that the British Library may not vacate the space intended for its workshops until the millennium after this, while its very success means that the galleries are so teeming with visitors that the lecturer is inaudible.
The National Gallery, with virtually all its paintings already on the walls and a def- inite hands-off policy, has the new Sains- bury lecture hall for serious scholarly talks but plans for a space where people can learn to draw and paint are nothing but a gleam in the eye — and a rather jaundiced one at that, considering the way funding is going.
You would think, however, that the Tate could be a bit livelier — after all many of the paintings and sculptures in its galleries are by people who could come along and try to explain them — but the problem is that the audience is likely to heckle or worse. Sylvia Lahav, the adult events organiser, says it is her passion to get artists to speak about their work. The prob- lem is that so few can. Even the Tate's events brochures (sorry, printed resource) need a degree in artspeak.
Of the four, the Tate is predictably the loser. As well as being politically correct, its series of lectures and events appear mind-bogglingly dense or dull. I say `appear' because they just may be a barrel of laughs but titles like 'An illustrated Gloss of Art Terms' and 'Between Presen- tation and Representation' are not likely to get new bums on seats though 'Ladies and Mistresses: Sex and the Single Girl in 18th- Century British Art' has possibilities.
Compare and contrast with the National Gallery's resoundingly successful 'Making and Meaning' exhibitions, the scholarly but quirky 'Saint of the Week' talks (last month Saints Januarius, Genevieve and Apollonia, Thomas Aquinas and the Virgin as painted by Luca Giordano, Cranach, Honthorst and Sassoferrato respectively) and the recent introduction of 10-minute talks on new acquisitions (the Picasso lent by Andrew Lloyd Webber this month).
The gallery has recently asked the public how it was doing and, as a result, from September will increase the number of `Way In' talks which, for around £50, offer sessions of three to five Saturday morning classes for serious laymen on such subjects as the Renaissance Altar. Realising that quite a few people now don't work (unem- ployed, redundant, early retired) more classes will be held on weekdays from September, and more general talks, like `How to Look at Paintings', will appear.
I feel ashamed of how little I knew before setting to work on this article. I knew, of course, that the British Museum had end- less scholarly talks and debates (Stelae from Deir el-Medina, for example, or Ickworth: an Earl Bishop and a neo-classical gasome- ter, both in April) but had never heard of the film events. How about Blackmail, Hitchcock's first talkie, chosen for the famous chase scene through the museum's Egyptian galleries or That Hamilton Woman with Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh, or Basil Rathbone and Louis Calhern in The Last Days of Pompeii, both linked with the March to July show on Sir William Hamilton's collection, as is a three-day scholarly conference on the man who was far more than Emma's cuckolded hus- band?
The message seems to be that if a muse- um goes out to court its public, the people respond. The British Museum, for instance, has managed to switch the public's obses- sion with Egypt and Greece to interest them in the Near East and Islamic art, while 'men in suits and women in fur coats arrive from the City to listen to talks on Old Masters when they wouldn't come for Anglo-Saxon archaeology', says John Reeve, its head of education. And David Anderson has seen a rise of more than six- fold, from 20,000 to 133,000, in people tak- ing part in his department's events. The next stage, as he sees it, is to provide peo- ple with museum CD ROMs to learn about objects in their homes. The V&A is work- ing on a prototype about silver whereby you learn how chalices, say, fit into our his- tory. Then, of course, you rush to the museum to see the real thing.
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