ARTS
Museums
The Chinese in context
Sir John Pope-Hennessy's autobiogra- phy Learning to Look is a remarkable record of an individual's intellectual history written in a lapidary, occasionally chilling fashion. The author, unattractively, admits to no failures, no mistaken judgments. Character sketches are sharp, the pen is often dipped in vinegar. His most acid remarks are directed at his successors at the V & A and they have encouraged some reviewers to re-open the great V & A debate. But it is very difficult for outsiders Dish of glazed porcelain, Longquan ware, 130-1400, Yuang-Ming dynasties to know what goes on in museums — Pope-Hennessy himself appears to have left the V & A to take charge of the British Museum in 1973 as much out of curiosity as anything else. Of course the V & A has been under special scrutiny since the sack- ing, voluntary redundancies and restructur- ing of 1989. For example, we can consult the Save the V & A Campaign Newsletter, which manages, despite its partisan origins, to be reasonably fair. The latest (March 1991) number points out that the trustees
of the museum on the whole remain an undistinguished bunch and that the curato- rial staff have a diminished role in policy- making. On the other hand, the old structure of the departments remains intact. Their curators are paid at a lower rate than the keepers whom they replaced and therefore, in monetary terms at least, appear to be less valued by the trustees. This is a contrast with, for example, the Louvre. There, mindful of the rival attrac- tions of university and commercial art world careers, every effort is made to reward and recognise curatorial staff and the curators exercise ultimate control over every aspect of the museum, right down to the items sold in the museum shop.
Nonetheless the signs are that the V & A is recovering its dignitas — it would be hard to imagine an exhibition like Sock Shop or the Kaffe Fassett knitting display of two years ago being promoted now, or anything like another Ace Caff campaign. Recent achievements have been more solid. Last autumn saw the complete refurbishment of Room 41, renamed the Nehru Gallery of Indian Art, and this week sees the opening of the T.T. Tsui Gallery of Chinese Art. This latest permanent display has been publicised by the museum — in its new bread and circuses fashion — as a gallery based on market research which eschews an art historical approach and which has built-in video screens. In fact the gallery turns out to be a serious attempt to make a remote and inaccessible culture compre- hensible to a general audience. The curator Rose Kerr was determined to go beyond satisfying the 20 or 30 other experts in her field, but, as she points out, the alternative need not be Disneyland.
For instance, the Far Eastern Depart- ment's use of market research has demon- strated that there are questions which the public ask over and over again when look- ing at objects, and each is made the subject of a display case. One case introduces us to substances like jade and lacquer which need technical explanation simply because they are so remote from materials com- monly used in the West and therefore add to our sense of the mystery and unfamiliar- ity of Oriental art. Another case, devoted to types of artist, introduces us in quick succession to an aristocratic grand amateur, to a court artist, to artefacts from a large factory run on mass production lines and those from a small, family-run workshop. The public's favourite questions — who made it? what is it made of? what does it mean? — lead us to investigate materials, attribution, iconography and provenance, a sophisticated way to begin looking at any collection.
The main displays are thematic and therefore quite different from the old Chi- nese Gallery which covered art and design from roughly 3000 AD to the present chronologically. The new display covers the same daunting time scale but under head- ings like 'Burial', 'Eating and Drinking' and 'Ruling'. In fine art and design terms such an arrangement is controversial. Using objects to illustrate a culture has always been regarded as the province of the British Museum. Contextualising a group of objects to create what amounts to tableaux — the aesthete's writing desk, the collector's cabinet — is also fraught with scholarly minefields. But in this instance it seems to work. The objects have primacy in the gallery; connoisseurship is not in abeyance. For instance there are Tang and Song ceramics in several sections — we view them as wine containers in the section on Eating and Drinking, as grave goods in the section on Burial and as desirable art objects sought by European art lovers in the 1920s in the section on Collecting. By the 20th century Tang and Song were viewed as fine examples of pure form and clearly appealed to a modernist aesthetic — their original function no longer seemed relevant. This sort of scholarly contextuali- sation which traces the fortunes of an object through time is hardly ever attempt- ed in museum displays. I certainly have never seen it done before.
The T.T. Tsui Gallery is one of the V & A's Art and Design galleries, which means that it brings together all the art forms of a particular culture (the Materials and Techniques galleries focus on a partic- ular material or art form — ceramics or sculpture, for example). They are meant to be accessible but the more traditionally set out Art and Design galleries can leave the visitor intimidated. Take the shabby-look- ing Italian Renaissance Galleries. Labelling is wildly uneven — some labels are extend- ed scholarly little essays, others are myste- riously laconic. It is assumed that visitors will have a grasp of arcane terminology — intarsia, pax, monstrance, bianco sopra bianco. The T.T. Tsui achieves a new stan- dard here with labelling which is clear but not simplistic. My only criticism is that the book which accompanies the new display leaves the reader who wishes to pursue the subject stranded — there is no reading list, not a footnote.
What is particularly interesting, in terms of museum management, is that Mr Tsui, a Hong Kong collector and businessman, was prompted to fund the Gallery so generous- ly as a direct result of his contact with the curatorial staff of the Far Eastern Depart- ment, who impressed him with their dedi- cation. This rather suggests that trustees who are appointed simply because of fund- raising expertise or supposed savvy in the 'real world' are really rather redundant. It is the curators who are most likely to make the contacts that matter and it is the cura- tors who bring objects to life through dis- play, labelling and publications. They naturally have to work with trustees, administrators, designers, conservators, educationalists and so on. But their role should be supreme. The T.T. Tsui Gallery demonstrates what, given the time and the cash, a group of committed scholars can achieve.
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