ARTS
Art
Light in our darkness
James Hamilton looks for a hero to defend the cause of touring art exhibitions In February I wrote about the threat posed to the funding of travelling exhibi- tions by the Wilding Report, which had recommended that the Musems and Gal- leries Commission's Travelling Exhibitions Unit be closed down. Since the general election, however, the future of the unit is beginning to look more secure. If The Spec- tator can take some credit for this turnaround, the top prize for good sense must go to David Mellor, Secretary of State for National Heritage. Now, however, the touring of visual art exhibitions seems in turn to be under threat. A recent report commissioned by the Arts Council on the state of the touring of the performing and visual arts in Britain has the title Where Do We Go Next?, reflecting the fact that arts touring has reached a crossroads. How well equipped the existing system may be to negotiate these crossroads depends not only on money and political will, but also on a proper grasp of the priorities. Cur- rently, the imbalance in favour of the tour- ing of the performing arts is extreme: the Arts Council spent around £25 million in subsidy for performing arts touring in 1989/90, and only £2 million for touring visual art exhibitions.
The performing arts are well equipped to put their own case for money. The British love a good show, be it Les Miserables, National Music Day or Pavarotti in the Park, and tend to turn out for it. What is more, the theatre lobby has Sir Peter Hall to stand on a table in the middle of a min- isterial reception and demand more money for theatre — and get it. There is a distinct lack of people with Hall's presence and style, however, who are willing to misbe- have and make a scene like this for the visual arts, and as a result art exhibitions now come a poor last in the pecking order for national subsidy.
Touring art exhibitions around the coun- try should be a natural consequence of the making of art, just as the distribution of eggs to shops is the proper consequence of the labour of the hen. Since the late 1940s the Arts Council has been the most effec- tive national distributor of art exhibitions to regional galleries in England, and for the last six years the service has been trans- ferred to the South Bank Centre. Similar services grew up in Scotland and Wales, though these have since withered and died. From its earliest days, the Arts Council brought some of the best and most topical of contemporary and historic art before the eyes of the generation that had been starved of art by the war and rationing, and of those generations since. I remember as a boy in Derby in the 1960s seeing in an Arts Council touring exhibition a sculpture by
Barry Flanagan consisting of a group of sand-filled sacks and ropes, with, nearby, a group of febrile wire wall sculptures by Nigel Hall. I found this early brush with modernism to be terrifying because it upset all my prejudices about what artists are and what art should be. It did, however, help me to begin to build the kind of structure that I needed to draw enjoyment from con- temporary art, and through it gain some understanding of the contemporary life I was being forced to embark upon. I shall never cease to be grateful to this Arts Council exhibition, to Derby Art Gallery and to Barry Flanagan and Nigel Hall for giving me so necessary and timely a kick in the visual pants.
Until 1978, the responsibility of touring art exhibitions was shared with the V & A, whose Circulation Department made art and artefacts of the highest quality avail- able even to the smallest public museum space, the most remote from the metropo- lis. Before Circulation was cut under Sir Roy Strong's directorship of the V & A, it was one of the most effective, democratic and generous cultural services to the regions of Britain, and has never been ade- quately replaced. We have to be reminded of what we have already lost, in case we start to contemplate with equanimity the possibility of losing what remains. The report suggests inter alia that the South Bank Touring Service be reduced to
virtual non-existence by being restricted to touring exhibitions from the Arts Council collections, the money saved being handed out to regional galleries for them to tour exhibitions of their own making. Are we really so poverty-stricken in ideas or energy as to believe that we should be forced to choose between these two? The South Bank Centre exhibitions, during Joanna Drew's custody of the service, have set standards of presentation and selection that have encouraged complementary high standards in the regional galleries that receive them, in spite of the financial cuts that beset there. Two major Arts Council exhibitions of the early 1980s, Great Victori- an Paintings and Landscape in Britain, delighted thousands when they were shown in Sheffield, Leicester, Bristol and else- where, and in the case of the Great Victori- ans made A crucial contribution to the knowledge (and sale-room value) of Victo- rian art. Both shows were also instrumental in the development of contemporary figu- rative painting in Britain in the 1980s, clear evidence of the vital role that exhibitions of historic art play in the development of the art of today. Art feeds on art, and has always done so.
More recently, Woodblock Prints of Shiko Munakata, The Reitveld Schroeder House and Exotic Europeans are just three exam- ples of superbly mounted and enthralling exhibitions that toured Britain from the South Bank Centre. To suggest that at a time of heavy recession in local govern- ment regional galleries should do without South Bank Centre exhibitions and rely on exhibition systems cobbled together between them is as crass as expecting a farmer to increase his egg production and kill off half his hens.
According to the report's figures, the government subsidy for the 16 million peo- ple who attended performing arts events in 1989/90 was £1.50 a seat. By contrast, the subsidy for the six million gallery visitors over the same period was 30p per visit. If the £2 million subsidy were as little as dou- bled, this would undoubtedly increase attendance figures to the extent that the subsidy per visit might only rise to 40 or 50p a head. Can we not afford this? Are we as a nation so dismissive of the visual arts, the art we see by light, that we give it less than one tenth of the subsidy that we give to the performing arts, the arts that we generally have to sit in the dark and in silence to see? For the first time publicly, the South Bank Centre exhibitions are being talked up as the National Exhibition Service, and as such it has raised £1 million sponsorship from British Telecom. This is no time to cut it back. We need a national touring service for exhibitions just as much as we need the National Theatre, the Royal Ballet and the Royal Shakespeare Compa- ny. The South Bank Touring Service is the equivalent of these great companies, and it should bang the drum and say so. We need another Peter Hall to misbehave and make a scene to save the visual arts from a decade in the dark.
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