What is a gallery for?

Questions about the future of the Museum Wales's arts collection, with reference to John Berger.

The recent controversy over the funding cuts to Museum Wales (the national museum organisation made up of seven venues across the country) has had me thinking about what the answers for the beleaguered institution might look like. I am of course, a distant flickering diamond in the sky away from the rooms where greater minds are also thinking on this subject, and further still from the moments when decisions regarding this might be arrived at. But in the spirit of BRG, here are some of the thoughts that I’ve been having.

Firstly, it seems in CEO Jane Richardson, Museum Wales has a very sharp operator. She is media-savvy, and even more importantly, evidence now suggests she understands social media and she understands the Welsh in a way that matters. The number of redundancies impacting Museum Wales has been common knowledge for months, although you might be forgiven for thinking the figure of 90 has just been announced. Perhaps the human sacrifice not quite getting the attention it deserved is why she came out to let people know the flagship museum in the capital was falling down around her ears, when that has been an ongoing sadness that stretches back much further than the shadow of redundancy.

But, as I wrote last week, the symbol of the building gained powerful traction, and questions were asked in the Senedd of the new culture minister Lesley Griffiths. Griffiths was forced to defend what has widely been regarded as a disappointingly dismissive response of newly elected First Minister Vaughan Gething, who said in his first press conference that he had no intention of helping Museum Wales out of its difficulties.

But the other thing that has impressed me about Richardson is that she is also a pragmatist. She has not gone begging to anyone, she simply, evocatively, explains the situation. That buckets line the corridor outside her office, that her staff are well-trained in the protection and preservation of priceless artworks that need to be taken down from the museum walls in heavy rain. This is the reality, Richardson says. Is anybody going to do anything about it?

In another sign of pragmatism, Richardson spoke in the Guardian a month ago of this being an opportunity to reimagine what a museum actually is. “…you spend a lot of time thinking about to fix the roof,” she said, with a hint of the metaphorical. “It’s time for brave and creative thinking.”

I have some kinship with people who feel a cold chill down the spine when an executive uses the words “brave and creative thinking”, as it normally means doing more with less.

I wonder if these conversations will see us move further away from Frank Lloyd Wright’s concept for the Guggenheim in New York as a “machine for having seen pictures in”, or will the future be something more pleasing to those who John Berger identified as crying museums to be “the philistine enslavement of art to historicism!”

It was in Berger’s 1966 essay (which I have just reread because of this recent Welsh affair) “The Historical Function of the Museum” that I was reminded of the fundamental idea that the role of the curator is to present the work and all of that work’s inherent messages. Berger asks (albeit in the 1960s) “What then constitutes a modern attitude?”

First it is necessary to make an imaginative effort which runs contrary to the whole contemporary trend in the art world: it is necessary to see works of art freed from the mystique which is attached to them as property objects. It then becomes possible to see them as testimony to the process of their own making instead of as products; to see them in terms of action instead of finished achievement.

Already conversations in Wales about the affects of a neglected building are concerned with “the collection” and what is the best way to look after these works that are owned by the nation of Wales. But before we decide on what constitutes bravery, and what we mean by creative thinking, perhaps we should discuss what we mean by “ownership”.

Wales is a country small enough to be fleet of foot when it comes to innovation. That it lags is often down to a preoccupation with bureaucracy and officiousness. Richardson seems like someone who is prepared to write her own rules when it comes to the familiar obstacles. Let’s see if she has what it takes to reinvent not just the bureaucracy of Museum Wales, but the very idea of how art can be experienced.

Gary Raymond is a novelist, author, playwright, critic, and broadcaster. In 2012, he co-founded Wales Arts Review, was its editor for ten years. His latest book, Abandon All Hope: A Personal Journey Through the History of Welsh Literature is available for pre-order and is out in May 2024 with Calon Books.