This post features reflections on my recent visit to The Museum of Old and New Art or MONA in Hobart, Australia. I discuss the ‘O,’ a custom-designed mobile experience for museum visitors that replaces traditional wall-mounted interpretation texts.
Last month I travelled to Tasmania to checkout MONA’s latest exhibition, The Museum of Everything. The show features an array of works by artists who ‘fall outside the confines of the art world proper, the work of ordinary people, working far from the cultural metropolis’ (MONA website, 2017). After visiting MONA for the first time in 2014 and LOVING IT, I was super excited to return to see their new stuff.
MONA is the lovechild of David Walsh, a professional gambler and art lover who opened the museum in 2011. Built underneath a cliff-face that overlooks the River Derwent, the museum has exhibited an array of controversial and thought-provoking art including Patricia Puccini’s Skywhale, Egyptian mummies and a giant cloaca (poop) machine. Yes, you read that correctly.
The MONA building was also designed to naturally flood as the River Derwent rises over the next 50 years. When questioned about this in a 2014 Guardian article, Walsh said:
“It will be an evaluation of whether it has actually achieved anything. If everyone says, ‘Ah f*%$ it, let’s leave it – let’s just let the ground floor flood,’ that would be a good result because it would mean whatever the structure or system that makes choices – which I assume will be someway democratic in 50 years – has expressed its opinion.”
I feel like this quote somehow embodies the museum’s ethos. Regardless, MONA has been a monumental success for the Tasmanian tourism and the Australian art world.
At the museum, there are no wall-mounted texts in the galleries. Instead visitors are given a mobile iPod devise containing a custom-designed audio-visual app called The O. As people walk through the galleries, the O uses a wireless positioning system to locate artworks in close proximity. The app features content such as curator’s discussion of works, artist interview, music and David Walsh’s rambling thoughts. Each artwork features three levels of content which can be grouped into:
“Art wank’ (look for the cock-and-balls icon, you can’t miss it); ‘Gonzo’ (Walsh and curators go Hunter S. Thompson on yo’ ass); ‘Ideas’ (little chunks of info, for those with a short attention span); and interviews with artists… Once you’ve visited the museum, you’ll be able to continue using the O app at home. Like Tinder, but with more art and stuff.” From the MONA website.
Visitors can also select whether they ‘love’ or ‘hate’ a particular artwork (check out the pic above). Whilst walking through The Museum of Everything I used the O continuously. I tried out the object summaries, curator’s wank, Gonzo and ideas. I found the title ‘curator’s wank’ kind of misleading as the content was pretty standard and straight forward curatorial information. There were certainly more personal references and a much more conversational tone to what you would normally have on wall-mounted exhibition texts but overall, I wouldn’t say the ‘curator’s wank’ was fundamentally different to anything I had experienced previously. Or maybe this is because ‘wank’ is the standard talk in galleries, lolz.
I absolutely loved the room with Pat Brassington’s photographs in it! Above: ‘Curiouser and curiouser’ (2017)
I really enjoyed the ‘ideas’ option on The O, especially the music tracks. I always listen to music while walking through exhibitions and it was cool to have someone else’s thoughtful selection of beats to guide thinking in new directions. I also found the music encouraged me to connect more emotionally with the art.
The thing I loved most MONA was that it encouraged me to make and explore relations between myself and art from outside the traditional thinking of major institutions. As I live in England, a country that seems to have such a class system and establishment, it felt refreshing to experience art from a new and fundamentally different perspective.
This post is coming to you from sunny California! I absolutely love this part of the world. Yesterday I visited a very fun ‘Noguchi Playscapes’ exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The exhibition explores the sculptural playscapes of Japanese-American artist Isamu Noguchi (1904-1988). This post presents some of the key artworks and themes from the show including the role of public sculpture in bringing art and creativity to everyday living.
An image from the exhibition at SFMOMA
“Noguchi’s desire was to bring fine art into the context of everyday living. His lifelong involvement in the design of playgrounds and “play sculpture” stemmed from this ideology and belief in the educational potential of sculptured forms for physical use by children” (Larrivee, 2011).
“The playground, instead of telling the child what to do (swing here, climb there), becomes a place for endless exploration, of endless opportunity for changing play. And it is a thing of beauty as the modern artist has found beauty in the modern world” Isamu Noguchi (1967).
Noguchi Playscapes revisits the work of pioneering artist and landscape architect, Isamu Noguchi. The exhibition presents a myriad of Noguchi’s designs, sketches, models and archival images used to construct his sculptural playscape. These colourful, quirky and even downright wacky works explore his ‘vision for new experiences of art, education, and humanity through play’ (SFMOMA website, 2017).
Noguchi strove to create public spaces that sparked imagination through people’s interactions with different forms, surfaces, textures and shapes. Children’s play served as a creative and experimental process for engaging with these spaces. The role of sculpture in the urban landscape allowed for Noguchi’s playscapes to bring together the powerful combination of aesthetics, functionality and human’s ability play.
Noguchi believed that: “sculpture in the public realm is an aesthetic and cultural tool capable of reconciling social inhibitions and individuality. This shaped his vision for the democratisation of art, leading him to devise outdoor play structures that encourage creative interaction as a way of learning” (Noguchi Playscapes, 2017).
Noguchi also understood “creative play as a way of learning about and participating in the world, emphasising imagination, especially that of children, given that they represented the future that would be rebuilt by the fractured postwar society” (Garcia & Larrivee, 2016).
Playscapes such as ‘The U.S Pavilion Expo” (1970, pictured above) bring together re-moulding of the earth with sculptural play equipment. I found designs that were devoid of equipment such as ‘Play Mountain’ (1933, pictured below) particularly thought-provoking. In the absence of swings, slides and see-saws, the design proposed moulded and hollowed earth that created slopes for rolling, sliding and sledding down.
Children’s experience in the playscape would therefore be driven by physical exercise such as running, jumping and climbing over the organic forms and geometric shapes of the earth (Larrivee, 2011). ‘Play Mountain’ was a radical proposition for children’s play in 1930’s New York with nearly all public playgrounds being produced from mass-constructed, pre-designed equipment. The design was unsurprisingly rejected by New York Parks Commission and never realised into an actual playscape.
I was surprised to discover that only two of Noguchi’s public playscapes were actually realised in his lifetime – one in Kodomo No Kuni park in Yokohama (this was torn down one year after it was built) and the second in the Piedmont Park in Atlanta, Georgia (pictured below). Out of all the wacky models and sketches of playscapes featured in the exhibition, ‘Piedmont Park’ seems one of the simplest and least extravagant. Perhaps it was also one of the more straight forward and least risky designs to build. Fed-up with government bureauracy, Noguchi chose to work the rest of his career on largely private commissions liaising with architects, musicians and theatre designers as a way of escaping the restrictive health and safety regulations of creating public play spaces (Larrivee, 2011).
Noguchi Playscapes is on display at SFMOMA from July 15 – November 26, 2017. You can also visit The Noguchi Museum in Long Island City, New York to view a more comprehensive body of work by this amazing artist.
Art. Play. Children. Pedagogy. will be on holidays for the next couple of weeks. The next post will make its appearance on Friday September 1, 2017.
Piedmont Park park, Atlanta. Built 1975-76 from basswood. Image: hermanmiller.com
References
Garcia, M & Larrivee, S (2016). Isamu Noguchi: Playscapes, RM/Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo; Bilingual edition.
In this post, Simone Kling gives her top picks from the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art’s Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art for Kids (November 21, 2015 – April 10, 2016). Simone is an artist and gallery educator who has worked in the learning departments at the Denver Art Museum (USA), The Ipswich Art Gallery (Australia) and the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art (Australia). Prior to pursing a career in gallery education, she worked as an art educator across primary schools in Queensland.
A family play in Justin Shoulder & Bhenji Ra’s Club Anak (Club Child) at APT8. Image credit: http://2sporks1cup.com
Since 1998 the Queensland Art Gallery (QAG) has been working with artists to develop art projects, programs and interactive installations especially for children and their families. In 2006 the Gallery opened its second site, the Gallery of Modern Art (GoMA), home to the internationally renowned Children’s Art Centre. The children’s program at QAGOMA aims to connect children with contemporary artworks and the creative processes of artists. The Asia Pacific Triennialof Contemporary Art is QAGOMA’s much anticipated flagship display and celebration of contemporary art from the Asia Pacific region. Its most recent iteration, APT8, is a six-month exhibition featuring the work of over 80 artists and collectives who explore the theme of performative art through mediums such as photography, kinetic art, figurative painting, film and installation.
A major draw card at APT8 are the 12 children’s activities featured in the APT8Kids program, all of which have been developed collaboratively between contemporary artists and the gallery team. A unique aspect of QAGOMA’s programme is its approach to working in partnership with artists. This is done through a process whereby the Children’s Art Centre teamwork closely with particular artists in the development and design of the children’s spaces and programs. This not only fuses a stronger connection between child and artist, but also allows artist’s practices to be an integral part of the institution. The activities range from interactive creative spaces, multi-media hands-on installations and play-based environments that expose children and families to different cultures, histories and religions from the Asia Pacific region. All children’s activities are free and open daily 10am-5pm. A sample of the APT8Kids programme is featured below:
Choi Jeong Hwa – The Mandala of Flowers (2015)
Hwa is interested in mass-produced plastic objects and how they can be transformed from the mundane into something with inspiration and beauty. He encourages visitors to make mandala shapes out of various sized bottle caps, which at times of peak visitation, produces a collaborative kaleidoscope of shape and colour. The materials used are incredibly simple and accessible, which makes the activity enormously desirable for teachers and parents to replicate outside of the gallery. Out of all the activities on display at APT8Kids, Hwa’s space has appeared to be appealing to the widest age range. The tactility and overall sensory exposure provides not only children and adults with experiential and play-based encounters, but babies and toddles seemed to be just as captivated with the activity.
Angela Tia Tia – Looking Back (2015)
Tia Tia’s Looking Back installation is made up of four interconnecting spaces where cameras film different aspects of ones body as they pass through. Tia Tia is interested in the visitors seeing themselves in an unconventional way, which at times can become disorientating as the face is intentionally almost always out of view. With the ‘selfie’ obsession so prominent, this space encourages children to interact with a potentially unfamiliar aspect of themself and experiment with their own image. The activity forces children to physically interact with the space, engaging their whole body in a unique way.
Yelena Vorobyeva and Viktor Vorobyev – I Prefer (2015)
Yelena and Viktor’s I Prefer interactive installation features six fruit or vegetable templates and is accompanied by a video of the artists painting a green tomato to appear as a watermelon. Participants are encouraged to do the same with the templates, transforming the mundane into endless possibilities. The activity encourages children to explore creative possibilities within everyday objects, and prompts storytelling through drawing and imagination. Whilst observing the space, I saw many toddlers and parents working together on their templates, extending the age barrier and providing avenues for parents to collaborate in and facilitate their child’s learning.
Justin Shoulder and Bhenji Ra – Club Anak (Club Child) (2015)
Club Anak taps into every child’s infatuation with creatures and monsters. With various paper templates of fingers, eyes, body parts and miscellaneous shapes all designed by the artists, visitors can create a mythical avatar with the option of taking it home or displaying it in an immersive glowing environment. Adding the Club Anak room to the activity provides younger children with a kinaesthetic and tactile element to their experience as they crawl around the room acting like a monster, and provides older children with the validation of displaying their creations. Not too surprisingly many children decide to add their work to the room, making the space more alluring as it fills with imaginative creatures.
Heron, D & Cull, T 2005. Artists Collaborating with Kids, Artlines, Dec 2005, pp. 28 – 33.
Queensland University of Technology (QUT) Museum Collaborative
In addition to the Queensland Museum, the Queensland Science Centre and the Ipswich Art Gallery (formally known as Global Arts Link), QAGOMA was a partner of the QUT Museums Collaborative’s research group (1997–2004). The collaborative worked alongside gallery curators and educators to study young children’s responses and participation in exhibitions and learning programs. The publications and findings from the QUT Museum Collaborative have formed the most significant body of research into early years learning in museums and galleries to date. Please see below for a list of publications.
Anderson, D., Piscitelli, B., Everett,M. (2008) Competing Agendas: Young Children’s Museum Field Trips. Curator: The Museum Journal, 3, p. 253-273.
Piscitelli, B., Weier, K., & Everett, M. (2003). “Museums and young children: Partners in learning about the world”. In Wright, S. (Ed.) Children, meaning making and the arts. Sydney: Pearson.
Anderson, D., Piscitelli, B., Weier, K. Everett, M & Tayler, C. (2002). “Children’s Museum Experiences: Identifying Powerful Mediators of Learning”, Curator, 45 (3), 213-231.
Piscitelli, B. & Weier, K. (2002). “Learning with, through and about art: the role of social interactions”. In Paris, S. (Ed.) Perspectives on object centred learning in museums. New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Piscitelli, B., & Anderson, D. (2002). “Young Children’s Perspectives of Museum Settings and Experiences”.<http://www.fed.qut.edu.au/ec/museums/JMMA-2001.pdf> Museum Management and Curatorship, 19 (3), 269 – 282.
Piscitelli, B. (2002). Young children’s interactive experiences in museums: engaged, embodied and empowered learners. Curator, 44 (3), 224- 229.
Piscitelli, B. & D. Anderson. (2000). “Young children’s learning in museum settings”, Visitor Studies Today, 3 (3), 3 – 10.
Piscitelli, B. (1997). “The challenge to enjoy: Young children as visitors in museums”, Journal of Museum Education, 22 (2 & 3), 20 –21.
Piscitelli, B. (2006) “Keeping Queensland museums and galleries on top and out-in-front with programs for children and young people”, Artery, 2 (1), 3-6.
Piscitelli, B., Weier, K., & Everett, M. (2003). Enhancing young children’s museum experiences: a manual for museum staff. Brisbane: QUT.
Piscitelli, Barbara, F. McArdle & K. Weier (1999). Beyond Look and Learn: Investigating, Implementing and Evaluating Young Children’s Learning in Museums. Brisbane, Queensland University of Technology.
This post features a case study of the children’s exhibition programme at the Ipswich Art Gallery in Queensland, Australia.
From 2011-2015 I worked as a children’s curator at the Ipswich Art Gallery in Queensland, Australia. The Ipswich Art Gallery is a special place for children’s creative learning with a well established and renowned children’s exhibition program. The city of Ipswich is home to a very diverse and predominantly low socio-economic community. The art gallery is currently one of the most visited in regional Australia. In my work and travels across Australia, America, Europe and the United Kingdom I have never come across anything quite like it.
Over the past 15 years the Ipswich Art Gallery has developed and presented over 40 in- house children’s exhibitions. The programme is informed by a set of guiding principles which include; children’s exhibitions are curated forchildren not adults and learning begins with creative play. The Children’s Gallery is open daily from 10am-5pm with almost all programs being free of charge. New exhibitions are presented between every 4 – 12 weeks meaning that that there is continuously new creative experiences on offer for young visitors. In many ways the Gallery is more of a children’s art gallery than an ‘adult’ art gallery. At the same time, it is quite distinctly different from the American children’s museum movement. I often thought of the children’s exhibition programme as a combination of a Reggio Emilia atelier, the creativity/art slant of a children’s museum and an art gallery.
During my time at Ipswich, I worked as part of a creative team of curators, designers, artists, educators, academics and arts practitioners on the conceptualisation, development, and delivery of the children’s programme including exhibitions, baby and toddler workshops, school programs and children’s art festivals. A sample of these projects are featured below:
Wild Thing (2012)
Featuring Troy Emery’s colourful taxidermy animals and Nicole Voevodin-Cash‘s giant grassy hill, children created their own crazy costume and turned into a ‘wild things’ for some fun kinesthetic play. The exhibition also featured a dedicated play space for babies and toddlers.
Light Play (2013)
Children (0-8 years) used light as a creative material for making ephemeral art using overhead projectors, light boxes, shadow sculptures and reflective materials. Light Play! was presented across three different programs: a 75 minute workshops for kindergarten and early primary students, baby and toddler workshops and drop-in sessions for the general public. The exhibition was influenced by the Reggio Emilia philosophy which promotes creative play through experiential and discovery-based learning. Image credit: top left/bottom: Ipswich Art Gallery, top right: peacefulparentsconfidentkids.com
Children (6-14 years) worked with conceptual artist Briony Barr to create collaborative ‘expandable’ drawings out of electrical tape. These sessions were run as 90 minute workshop in which children learnt about rules in art (Sol le Wit, Jim Lambie, Richard Long) and rules in nature (bifurcation, Fibonacci sequence) and how rules can be used to make unpredictable works of art. Children were then introduced to the medium of electrical tape and set a series of challenges to create 2D and 3D drawings that covered the room using rules. A video of a similar project to what was presented at Ipswich can be found here.
Construction Site (2007, 2009, 2013) In Construction Site children unleashed their inner-engineers to design and build cubby houses using foam blocks. The 2013 iteration of the exhibition included a giant ‘Ball Run’ in which visitors used tubes and recycled materials to create tracks for balls to roll down.
Image credits: far left weekendnotes.com.au, far right brisbanekids.com.au
Electronic Art (2015)
Children made squishy play-dough sculptures and wearable art pieces using electrical circuits and flashing LED lights. Throughout a 90 minute workshop children were introduced to the basics of electronics and electronic art including contemporary artists using circuitry in their practice. They were then able to use conductive play dough (5-11 year olds) or textiles (11-14 year olds) to make a fun artwork to bring home. The program combined interdisciplinary skills from visual art, technology and science in a creative art making workshop.
In 1968 the Moderna Museet, Stockholm and artist Palle Nielsen staged The Model, a radical social experiment involving 20,000 children, an indoor playground and no rules. Within the ‘exhibition’ the act of children playing was used as an instrument for social and political activism. This post features a study of The Model and Nielsen’s work as an artist, educator and social activist.
Palle Nielson (1968) The Model. Image credit: http://th3.fr
In 1968 Danish artist Palle Nielsen exhibited a giant adventure playground in the main gallery of the Moderna Museet, Stockholm. The Model – A Model for A Qualitative Society was a free play zone in which children could jump off bridges into a foam pit, swing from tyres, make things out of DIY tools such as hammers and saws, climb rope swings, paint, wear dress-ups and use turntables to mix music being played on loudspeakers. From September 30 – October 20 1968, the exhibition saw 35,000 visitors with 20,000 of them being children. The artist intended to reject an elitist concept of art and art museum through the ‘creation of a collectivist human being.’
Palle Nielsen (1968). The Model. Image credit: http://th3.fr
“I wanted to deconstruct ‘the white cube’ as the idea of an art museum… The idea of an art museum was to be changed by the live presence of active, playing children in the museum.”
The exhibition was free to all visitors under the age of 18. Kindergartens and school groups from all over Stockholm were invited to visit the exhibition in a grand attempt to integrate new members of the community into the gallery space. The Model sat between a pedagogical project, a process- driven art installation and political protest against the art gallery as a space for the social elite.
Prior to creating The Model, Nielsen had been building unauthorised adventure playgrounds in disadvantaged areas of Copenhagen. A practice which he saw as the mobilisation of children as agents of democratic activism through play. After a period of fundraising and negotiations with the Director of the Modern Museet, Nielsen constructed The Model with the assistance of children and anti-Vietnam War activists.
Scandinavia in the 1960’s and 70’s saw the rise of a progressive child-centered education movement that dismissed the idea of children as passive beings in the community. Whilst the movement had strong roots in left-wing politics, the intention of the education reform was not radical social transformation but to create a new social framework that valued children as active beings and creators of their own lives. At its core, Nielsen had created a space which unleashed the anarchic act of creative play as a tool for the activation of children’s right to freedom of expression. However unlike the anti-Vietnam war demonstrations of the time, The Model empowered children though its ability to connect individuals with themselves, their environment and others in the community. The exhibition statement read:
‘The idea is to create a framework for children’s own creative play. Children of all ages will work on developing this framework. Indoors and outdoors – in all kinds of play – they should have the right to communicate their capacity for self-expression. Their play is the exhibition. The exhibition is the work of children. There is no exhibition. It is only an exhibition because the children are playing in an art museum. It is only an exhibition for those who are not playing. That’s why we call it a model. Perhaps it will be the model for the society children want. Perhaps children can tell us so much about their own world that this can also be a model for us. We hope so. Therefore, we are letting the children present their model to those who are working with or are responsible for the environment provided for children outside – in the adult world. We believe children are capable of articulating their own needs. And that they want something different from what awaits them.’
Following The Model Nielsen was shunted from the Danish art academy where he was completing his PhD in architecture. After continuous criticism from critics and increasing isolation from the art world he left the academy to become a teacher in adult and community education centers in Denmark. In 1998 he was contacted by art critic Lars Bang Larsen who was writing a paper on The Model for an art journal. In a wave of resurgent interest in his art practice, Nielsen agreed to donate the documentation of the project to Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona. The documentation was exhibited at MACBA (2010) and Tate Liverpool (2014). A replica of The Model was presented at the ARKEN Museum for Moderne Kunst, Denmark from February 9 – December 7, 2014.
The MONA building was also designed to naturally flood as the River Derwent rises over the next 50 years. When questioned about this in a 2014 Guardian article, Walsh said:
Art. Play. Children. Pedagogy. 