Sydney Crochet Coral Reef

Image courtesy of Institute for figuring

Not long ago I wrote about the Museum presenting the Sydney Crochet Coral Reef</a> as part of Ultimo Science Festival in August.

Well the Institches Collective will be in the museum this Sunday March 29 from 3-5pm running a workshop.  Wether you are an experienced crocheter who wants to be part of this global phenomena or an inexperienced crocheter, the workshop will cater for you.

To take part simply turn up at the Powerhouse on Sunday, normal Museum entry applies but this will also let you come back to workshops each month and into the exhibition in August.

All workshop participants will have the opportunity to submit completed coral pieces for possible inclusion in the exhibition.

Future workshops

April 26, May 31, June 29, July 30
3-5pm
Powerhouse Museum
Free with Museum entry

August 8th
Exhibition 10-2pm
Workshop 12-2pm
Powerhouse Discovery Centre
Cost:  TBC

Re-use, collaboration and cultural activism from Indonesia

Image: Duto Hardono, Untitled (detail), 2006. Collage, acrylic, mixed media. Courtesy of the artist.

Currently showing at UTS gallery is an exhibition of artworks created from other people’s rubbish. Ranging from childlike drawings on discarded used envelopes to a life-size skull constructed from bent nails, SISA helps us consider waste, art and social impacts.

Sisa is the Indonesian word for ‘remains’ or ‘leftovers.’ Located somewhere between folk art, design, and public intervention, much of this work generates new forms of expression from the rejection of hyper-consumption and over-development.

This an exhibition of diverse pieces that would not be out of place in any museum exhibiting on sustainability, or the art activism boundary. I was moved by the complexity and effort that had gone into turning $0 scrap into intricate and often beautiful figures and images.

As a practitioner I often wonder why we don’t see more of this in galleries and museums – something that web 2.0 practitioners, Cath and others often write about here and other places. The social or self-made museum.

Museum theatre in education

Collaborating to perfection… Lyn Beasley, Manager of School Visits at the National Museum of Australia, describes her work with Peter Wilkins, Drama Coordinator at Narrabundah College.

Museums have an opportunity, indeed a responsibility, to enable students to learn in ways that differ from but complement their school learning. Even before it opened, the National Museum of Australia regarded performance as a key element. In a paper he wrote for the Museum, Peter Wilkins, Drama coordinator for Narrabundah College, said:

Schools offer an invaluable resource to national institutions. Similarly the National Museum offers the opportunity for interaction with all subject areas of the curriculum …

Collaboration between schools and the National Museum provides a unique experience to interpret and present ideas that reflect the Museum’s collection, at the same time as presenting the talents of young people who participate in the performing and creative arts.

Peter and I began to collaborate in 2004 with a production called Stranded. Based on the story of the Mozart Vienna Boys Choir in the Horizons Gallery at the Museum, it also drew on emotive themes in the Eternity Gallery. Stranded was performed at two conferences in Canberra in 2004 and 2005, and elicited very positive responses. We decided to collaborate again in 2006.

In January 2006 I went to the National Gallery of Victoria to see Exiles and Emigrants and think about what programs we might develop when it toured to Canberra. I found the images extremely evocative and felt they could inspire a performance piece. Peter had seen the exhibition too, and agreed that it had great potential for theatre.

As the exhibition was due to open in Canberra in April, we had not left ourselves much time. And because it is not a National Museum exhibition, our access to the background information was more limited than it had been for Stranded, however generous the curator, Patricia MacDonald, was (and she was, extremely).

We used the exhibition catalogue to choose stories, images and characters. A trip to the National Library supplied letters and newspaper clippings, and from there we developed the synopsis. Letters with dramatic interest formed the basis. We added pieces of poetry and songs to create a poignant, atmospheric work called Exile. Sue Webeck, the director, workshopped with the students to produce the dramatic outline, while Cati McCarthy and Michael Caesar worked up the musical numbers.

The production used no set and minimal costume. Paintings from the exhibition were projected as backdrop. The students used extracts from letters and poetry to tell the story, and song and dance to evoke the emotion and passion of the paintings. Exile was performed three times while Exiles and Emigrants was showing at the National Museum, to both school groups and the general public. Both audiences received it enthusiastically.

The piece was then taken to Melbourne, to a national forum on performance in cultural institutions. There, the audience was overwhelmingly enthusiastic. I don’t think it is going too far to say that these museum and theatre professionals were absolutely blown away by the talent, dedication and sheer presence of this group of young people. Earlier in the conference, one speaker had delivered a paper on what he called the eight P’s of interactive theatre. In closing the conference to a close Patrick Watt spoke of the ‘ninth P’ – the perfection of the performance by the students of Narrabundah College. While in Melbourne, the students also performed twice a day at nursing homes and schools – in seven other venues.

Peter and I look forward to our next collaboration. We are exploring the possibilities of stories currently featured in the Museum as well as looking at upcoming temporary exhibitions for inspiration.

Stone art on the beach

World beach is a project of the V&A Museum, in which people on beaches all over the world are invited to make a drawing in stone and photograph the result, the people who made it, and the beach itself.

Read how it started, and keep up with where it’s headed at Concealed, Discovered, Revealed, the blog of artist-in-residence Sue Lawty.

[wondering when I can next get to the beach...]

Reading the textbook is not enough

Here’s an idea I like:

Students should not read textbooks; they should write them.

Bruce Tognazzini said it in the 1990s, and David Weinberger considers it in a story in The Filter, published by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School.

Weinberger was initially ambivalent, but since the advent of wikis he has warmed to the notion. He describes how the collective, collaborative – and no doubt contentious – act of crafting a coherent, accurate wiki on the subject of study is itself educational:

Let them argue about how to organize it. Keep the discussion pages up. Keep the differences visible. Let them fill it with links. Let them connect with other students in other schools creating related wikis.

A class’s wiki is not going to be as complete, well-grounded or well-written as a good textbook. But students will learn more by writing one than by cribbing and cramming from a professional textbook.

In my (by now, predictable) view, the same principle applies to museum exhibitions and websites. If you’re only ever engaged in a passive way, as a consumer, it’s hard to remain interested. But if you have the chance to think through the issues of what to put on display, how to arrange and describe the items, and what they mean, it’s a faaaar more interesting experience. A journey, rather than a sushi train of neatly prepackaged ideas. At 5 to midnight, my metaphors are failing me, but I hope you know what I mean.

I’d like to see more programs that work on that principle. I’d love to hear about yours.

(Thanks to Mal for the pointer.)

A good exhibition is…

What constitutes a good exhibition? Last week I attended a seminar on this topic presented by Stephen Foster, an adjunct professor at the Australian National University, and former general manager with responsibility for content at the National Museum of Australia.

It’s a deceptively simple question. To answer it, you can draw on exhibition development guidelines, or you can think about the kinds of things people say in reviews, to come up with a list of criteria for evaluation. It seems a valuable exercise, and long overdue.

What I found interesting about the criteria tabled at this event was that, although some of them were about visitors’ experience, there was no mention of what those Assembling here might consider central to the mission of museum exhibitions – educational value. I’m not thinking here about how well an exhibition lends itself to having a non-formal education program built around it. I mean that an exhibition is itself a program for informal learning.

In that sense, a good exhibition is one that constitutes a good learning program. And for me, whether an exhibition/program is satisfying or deadly dull often depends on whether it involves its audience in the process of meaning-making – rather than simply presenting one thing after another, after another. To rate well in my book, an exhibition needs to generate a dialogue with its visitors. How it does that depends on the:

• content of the exhibition
• creativity and nous of the exhibition developers

But for me, an exhibition should have some kind of in-built audience participation. So that’d be my two-cent answer to the question. (To keen readers seeking a higher-cost rumination on this theme, I offer my doctoral thesis.)

One thing to clearly emerge from the seminar is the need to cultivate a culture of critique around museum exhibitions, comparable to – if distinct from – that around fine art, books, and film. The current paucity of critique contributes to the uncertainty over what constitutes a good exhibition.

In that light, here’s an idea: perhaps we should take inspiration from art mobs. Perhaps Collections Australia Network should offer to publish unofficial audio guides to Australian exhibitions. I’d like to see that. And my hunch is that an unofficial guide would add value to an exhibition or, in other words, help constitute its goodness.