On an early April afternoon, about 20 people settle into small rows of chairs to watch three female inmates of Estrella Jail dance with their young daughters via Skype.
The mothers are in a jailhouse pen in West Phoenix; the daughters and audience are in the Turk Gallery of ASU Art Museum in Tempe. Video cameras serve doubly to connect the dancers and to document the experience.
The workshop, called Mother-Daughter Distance Dance, is part of the larger Social Studies project, which itself is part of a larger shift by the museum toward rethinking its role and function in the 21st Century.
Not everyone knows what a museum is anymore, but some certainly think that whatever it is, it’s not for them. Folks at ASU Art Museum want to break that perception and get more people engaged in their activities, like the Social Studies projects; their other innovative and institution-challenging exhibitions; and the aptly titled lecture and panel series “Rethinking the Museum.”
Did you get all that? If not, then maybe all this museum stuff is still flying above most people’s radar. That, say those involved with the museum, is their main challenge — not only getting more people through the door, but keeping them interested and involved in what museums do.
Today’s audience waits as museum staff fiddles with video cables, trying to make the connection between jail and museum. Next to the audience is the gallery’s South wall, which has been turned into a message board of sorts. Any museumgoer can write or sketch on the wall, and many have already left their mark on the exhibition:
“Freedom Rebellion Love” … “Nobility is not a birthright it is defined by your actions” … “Time for Change.”
Some of the messages seem to touch upon larger themes within the ASU Art Museum, as if the writing on the wall is trying to predict the success or failure of its efforts to adapt to a rapidly changing world.
“DON’T THINK! DO!”
It’s not just black and white by local artist Gregory Sale is the sixth project in the museum’s Social Studies series. An artist-in-residence is given an empty gallery to fill with work they make on-site, with help from the public during the creative process.
His three-month project uses the gallery as a base camp to create dialogue about Arizona’s criminal justice system, through events like creative writing workshops with prison educators and organized tours of Tent City for the public.
Sale says his impetus is the urgency of the topic, combined with the need to ask questions about a museum’s place in society. In order to continue getting donations and expand the collection, he says, museum staff “sometimes end up catering to a wealthy community” in a way “that might make some other folk [feel] less comfortable here.”
That’s why Sale arranged for sentenced inmates in ALPHA, a substance abuse treatment program, to paint the exhibit’s walls (in black and white prison stripes), accompanied by guards in “quasi riot gear.”
“When you bring that into this site, it shakes something,” he says. But Sale says another, more human aspect of his work, has been his time on the ground, connecting with research entities, grassroots organizations, inmates, and government offices. The goal: “to give them a reason to come here.” Hopefully, Sale continues, this begins “creating a framework” for other groups of people to enter museum space, and to think they have a purpose within it.
This includes the Mother-Daughter Distance Dance, which brought the doubly excluded female inmate population into the museum fold.
ASU Art Museum has been taking such risks since at least 2007, when the Social Studies project began, says the museum’s public relations manager Deborah Sussman. “Even though there’s something now called ‘Rethinking the Museum,’ this particular museum has been ‘rethinking the museum’ for a long time,” she says.
The traditional museum model is outdated for many reasons, says Sussman, creating a need to adapt to a changing society. This is especially true at a university museum, she says, where there is a unique opportunity to combine interdisciplinary research, artists, and an intelligent and diverse community.
“The role of the university art museum, and I’d hope, the role of any museum […is] to understand that a museum is not just static pictures on a wall,” Sussman says. “Any museum that is not rethinking itself … is not realistic.”
Some version of “Rethinking the Museum” is going on at most every art and cultural institution in the country, says Timothy Rogers, director of Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Arts (SMoCA). ASU Art Museum is just tackling the issue more publicly and aggressively, he says, which fits well given its location on a public research university campus.
Still, Rogers says, the nature of institutions is that changing them is a slow and difficult process. If they want to see success, he says, museums need to create environments that reach the people who live in their communities — while at the same time retain their role as a destination for those who want to appreciate artistic excellence.
“I don’t want to lose that experience,” Rogers says of seeing fine art in a quiet space, “but I also recognize that some people are intimidated by museums.”
The Social Studies projects and “Rethinking the Museum” events try to change this perception in exciting new ways, Rogers says, though he thinks the best solution is somewhere in between their experiments and the traditional model.
“The upside is definitely involving more people in the discussion and process of making art,” he says, but “ultimately people do come to the museum with the expectation of some kind of finished product.”
As an example, Rogers recalls the time he went to visit Sale’s exhibition. There was no event scheduled at the time, and no one in gallery. So he encountered an empty space with an explanatory essay — “and it was good, I read it” — but nothing else.
“There was no aesthetic insight or moment, because I didn’t have anything to interact with, except for the stripes on the wall,” he said. “What is really in the space? What is there to sink your teeth into?”
The Mother-Daughter Distance Dance is running 15 minutes late now. Side conversations echo around the large room as feet tap on the wood-panel flooring. Organizers tested everything the night before, but technical difficulties come when you least expect them.
Sale, the artist, suddenly appears on screen, and the video delay gives his movements a glitchy, yet almost ballerina-like, swiftness. Behind him is a grainy broadcast of an outdoor prison yard, buffeted by wires. It blends surreally into the prison-striped museum walls; the prison space and museum space case mirror-image shadows of one another on-screen.
“DOWN with Patriarchy forever”
“There are no essential qualities to a museum,” declares the director of ASU’s Museum Studies program from his office in the anthropology building on Tempe campus.
Richard Toon might not mind if you call him out, and say it doesn’t make sense for a scholar of museums to think that they basically do not exist.
“Museums, they’re interesting because they’re full of contradictions,” he says.
Most artists and curators want to reach a broad audience with their work, yet the museum comes off as a “higher culture” institution that doesn’t quite welcome everyone. Herein lies what Toon calls “the built-in contradiction” of art museums: They try to be “elitist” and “democratic” at the same time.
“[Art] is not simply just the same as popular culture, so almost by definition … it’s some particular group’s culture,” he says. Even a program like “Rethinking the Museum” may not dispel this perception, because the museum is still addressing problems within its walls as the world spins ‘round outside them.
“It’s the other 95 percent [of people] who don’t go to museums that we want to engage,” Toon says. “But they can’t tell us how to fix the museum, because they don’t go.”
“We’re probably not the ones who should be rethinking the museum,” agrees ASU Art Museum’s curator, John Spiak. For the museum to best ask these questions, he adds, it needs to place the discussion in a larger social context by involving more people outside the arts community.
The key is to let everybody know that they are welcome in the museum setting, and that it’s an active part of their community. But, like any public institution, museums will never be loved by all. Here we find another contradiction (Richard Toon would be proud): If someone has already decided that art museums aren’t for them, how do you convince them otherwise?
There must be increased engagement on both sides for any “rethinking” to be successful, Spiak says. “People that engage with any of the Social Studies projects really get something out of it,” he says. “But if you come in and just look at the space, you don’t get it.”
The Mother-Daughter Distance Dance finally begins. Three mothers and their three daughters take turns dancing, reading creative writing to one another, and performing a few pieces together: “Fingers in the Finger Pie,” “Beautiful Phrase,” and “Happy Dance.”
Then, as the mothers begin their dance solos, their image disappears and is replaced by a message: “Connection Lost.” The video feed is quickly recovered, but the audience is reminded of the fragility and realness of this moment.
The event causing this reaction is happening in a museum, and was dreamt up by someone who identifies as an artist. Is that what it takes? Is the Mother-Daughter Distance Dance “Art”? And will people get more involved in this type of “Art” than in something like the Mona Lisa?
“FREE YOUR MIND”
Since becoming the museum’s director in 2010, Gordon Knox says he’s been trying to draw in new people by offering family programs, community activities, and of course, the “Rethinking the Museum” series. (ASU Art Museum is already the only major museum in Valley that doesn’t charge daily entrance fees.)
The starting point for all changes or innovations in the museum, he says, must have the same goal as the rest of the New American University: excellence, but also access.
“It seems [now] like an elite discussion with museum types, but really where we want to go is to have the same conversation with people who don’t even think of themselves as intellectuals,” says Knox. “It’s not elitist, but it does require curiosity.”
“How to you promote excellence and access?” Toon, the museum critic, asks. “You do it just as this whole university is trying to do it: You assume that everyone is quite capable of understanding and comprehending this stuff.”
Some museums are fine with towing the modern museum line, especially in cities like San Francisco and New York City where they’re popular and financially supported. But ASU Art Museum, islanded on a desert university campus, has extra motivation to innovate and try on new hats.
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Victoria Polchinski, a first-year finance major, says she used to go to museums all the time while growing up in Washington, D.C., which has a much stronger museum culture than Tempe.
Since coming to ASU, she’s visited the art museum here three times, enjoying some shows and not others. But Polchinski says the Social Studies projects seem to create stronger work, because the artist can focus on the ideas and issues they care about. The community’s open access to the artist is also a good way to help people understand the art, she says.
Yet, Polchinski says she feels the student body doesn’t know about the art museum’s innovations, probably because of poor branding in a crowded marketplace.
“There is so much stuff going on around campus,” she says. “Any organization needs to figure out how to make itself stand out [at ASU].” This is especially true for a campus fixture like the museum, which might blend into the scenery for some students.
“You just expect it to be there,” Polchinski says.
Students might get more engaged with the art if it brought the Social Studies projects and discussions outside the museum walls, says landscape architecture freshman Meredith Pilcher. She says it would feel more natural and fun for students to participate in the art museum’s efforts if they created a more visible campus presence.
Pilcher gives her definition of “museum” as simply “a public space that shows art.” In that spirit, she says ASU Art Museum should also hold more socials and (not strictly art-related) events to get people in the doors.
But if there is no art in the galleries to hold these projects together, Pilcher says, then people might feel more confused than engaged.
“I think you have to have a mixture between … well, nothing [in the gallery space] and something physical you can go see all the time,” she says. “Otherwise, people will go in there and not understand.”
Students will respond well to the art’s message if ASU Art Museum can find innovative ways to strike this balance, Pilcher says.
“Art is creating a moment,” she says. “It’s a statement. It’s your voice. And if you’re getting your point across, however you’re doing that, it’s fine.”
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Gregory Sale’s It’s not just black and white will conclude in late April when fifteen high-schoolers from Arizona Department of Corrections detention centers enter the museum, talk about their possible futures as university students, and help Sale destroy the wall with the writing on it.
Like most everything else going on in ASU Art Museum, it’s a gesture that can be read many different ways. Maybe tearing down walls, both concrete and figurative, will open up the museum’s intellectual treasures to more people; maybe the gesture will be lost on all but a select few. Some people want the museums to be more interactive, accessible, and socially aware, while others just want a quiet place where they can go see things that make them think.
Call it “rethinking,” or call it whatever else you’d like. The ASU Art Museum is just trying to stand out in the midst of all this change, and if that kind of thing interests you, the exhibits are free for anyone who walks through the door.
Reach the reporter at trabens@asu.edu, or via Twitter @TheRabens.
