#and even that's only because i got so bored invigilating last year that i read the handbook front -> back six times

[hairtusk]

accidently got too good at my job and now i have to invigilate 1:1 mock exams all day tomorrow because i'm the only person who passed the JCQ exam

[artsinsociety-blog1]

Interview Transcript: Merryn Stanger

Interviewer: Kate Armstrong Interviewee: Merryn Stanger Mode: Skype Date: January 12 2017

Begins: 11:45 January 12, 2017

KA: Thanks for agreeing to this interview Merryn and thanks for making the time to Skype with me

MS: No problem, I have a wine so I’m ready to go..

KA: Okay perfect! Haha, so I’m going to ask you a series of questions influenced by my research. Both the research and this interview are leading up to an exhibition which I already explained you in our previous correspondence,

MS: Yes…

KA: I chose a text as the starting point to my questioning it’s called Issues in Curating Contemporary Art and Performance, don’t know if you know it… but it’s a collection of writings edited by...Judith Rugg and Michèle Sedgwick. It’s actually a course text and I found it really interesting as a whole and later, after you introduce yourself I want to reference an essay by Jane Rendell called CRITICAL SPATIAL PRACTICE: CURATING, EDITING, WRITING... Okay so first, can you give us your elevator pitch - who are you, what do you do?

MS: Ok sure, I’m Merryn, Stanger and last year, or 2 years ago; 2015 I graduated from an Arts Administration Master at COFA in Sydney. Since then I have worked as an invigilator at the COFA Galleries and as a research assistant at the Art Gallery of New South Wales and I was also teaching curatorial techniques at Sydney University for some classes in their Department of Architecture, Design & Planning and I also curated an exhibition for them.

KA: Perfect, thank you - so let’s get started with Jane Rendell and her essay CRITICAL SPATIAL PRACTICE: CURATING, EDITING, WRITING in which she suggests that there is a stigma around multi-model and interdisciplinary exhibitions; she says they can be viewed as ambiguous. This lead to me to question how a curator actually makes sense of or clarifies disparate elements of a show and how or maybe IF your role is making the incoherent, coherent.

MS: Well, and I take this opinion mainly from my studies; the role of the curator isn’t to make things coherent. The curator should be the *mimes quotation marks* invisible hand - there is a theorist whose name I can’t bring to mind, but you can look it up later...

KA: I can look it up after...

MS: yeah, do - well yeah the concept is that the ‘curator’s touch’ should be seen in an exhibition but you should never see the ‘hand’ let’s say. The role isn’t to be didactic but to present an opportunity for the audience to engage and interpret. The curator’s roles isn’t to impose their thoughts on the audience it's to guide them I guess…

KA: Right, so with this idea of non-didactic methods in mind….can you talk a bit about the role of text in exhibitions? Should text be displayed with works or…

MS: Okay, this is a really big debate actually its always the discussion in contemporary curation, how much should you influence or even guide the audience as a curator...I mean it’s kind of what we were just talking about, you have the mid 20th Century curators like Clement Greenburg who were way more prescriptive but the more contemporary trend is for the curator to be heard but not seen like I said before. So it’s the same concept for text, if you’re including an essay of text, even a short amount, it can influence the way the audience reads the artwork. I guess in some cases it’s necessary to include dense text, like wall plates or explanations and other times I think it’s kind of industry habit...okay, an example...When I was working at the Art Gallery of New South Wales the Asian art galleries, you know on the top level at the far end…

KA: Yeah…

MS: well they have really in-depth wall texts and have lots of explanatory text, whereas the 19th Century collection doesn’t have much,

KA: Oh, really?

MS: Yeah yeah, I mean, it’s always a bit like that...

KA: So you’re saying that the AGNSW think that their public know less about Chinese art? I mean they feel they have to aid in the translation process - this is really interesting for our exhibition, because you know as it’s about cultural translations

MS: Oh yeah, of course…

KA: So do you think that's the deal,

MS: What, that people know about 19th century art? Hmmm I think it’s a general assumption that Australians have more knowledge about Western Art…

KA: It is also a value judgment as well as an assumption?

MS: Yeah, perhaps….I mean in school in, curatorial studies we focused a lot on the Western Canon. We did discuss people like Edward Said and Orientalism but there was a general, I don’t know, bias toward Western Art...

KA: But do you think that major schools like COFA focus on the West because in the industry there is an audiences driven demand or institutional demand….or….?

MS: Well, i can only speak for an Australian perspective but yeah, maybe both...but I’d say it is a cultural bias, a general social bias…that maybe isn’t reflected on as much as it should be. But I do think a change is coming, slowly but it’s coming...You know, some of my classmates did a course called Aboriginal Perspectives; I couldn’t get into it as I’d already done too many electives and I wasn’t even allowed to audit it, anyway….now, it’s part of the Post-Grad program as a required subject...

KA: But wait, before it wasn’t?

MS: Haha, yeah...no…

KA: Oh wow, but you did post-colonial studies?

MS: A bit, in the class - wait, let me get something…

(Merryn leaves the interview, returns with a book)

...this is the program of the class, well, it was called ‘Queering the Canon’ but when I’m looking…(flips through book) Yeah, okay it’s more like Gender and Marxism, there is one class on Orientalism...but yeah, anyway it’s kind of lumped in with the other constructs.

KA: Do you think it’s also reflected in the programming that works with gallery shows - like do non-western shows require more didactic programming?

MS: Um….not sure, do you mean to be more politically correct or?

KA: No more like, well I went to see Ben Quilty speak about a piece he created for an Indigenous Artists show at AGNSW and he spoke very didactically and the talk was part of a really extensive educational program...I don’t think you’d see this at a 19th century collection show….?

MS: Hmmmm, I guess different programs are created for specific audiences and perhaps the people going to see your classic representations of the Western Canon are more into classic un-provocative programming, hehe...not sure

KA: Ok cool, well following on from that, talking about adjacent programming, I want to ask you about the exhibition catalogue?

MS: Oh yes, I love exhibition catalogues…

KA: I thought so…

MS: Haha, I have so many!

KA: Oh perfect, so as someone who likes and reads catalogues can you talk a bit about their function?

MS: Well for me, the catalogue is the perfect place for the curator to explain their curatorial premise. You know I was saying about the curator being the invisible hand - you don’t want to impose your ideas on audiences, but the catalogue is almost a separate but connected space where you can really tell the story of the exhibition. I’m always unsatisfied when I go to an exhibition and the catalogue is just, name, title, date of all the works and a picture, it’s such a missed opportunity for the curator to tell their story and have a voice - it should be more informative and subjective…

KA: And is it fair to say it’s almost a legacy of the show and it’s concept…?

MS: Yeah for sure, I mean I collect catalogues and yeah, they become not only like a souvenir but a timeless extension of the exhibition.

KA: Lovely, so they have a real place in the curation of a show

MS: Absolutely

KA: Great, well I’d like to move on to discuss the most recent show you did which is coming back to the idea of interdisciplinary exhibitions...it was for Sydney Uni right?

MS: Yeah, it was a show for Sydney University Department of Architecture and Design and it was held in conjunction with a Design conference put on by a well known guy from the design world, John Alsop...he’s from the Design Computing world, it’s a bad name for what he does I think, because it’s more like wearable tech and gadgets, but um the show was called ‘Web Directions’

KA: ...and it was held in a gallery?

MS: No, no, it was held in a public space in the foyer of the conference and had all sorts of different things in it, lots of apps and there was a drone for farmers to track sheep - that sounds a bit boring but it’s actually really interesting and got lots of funding because you know these farmers in the desert have to use helicopters to track their flocks but this device makes it much easier...But anyway yeah all of the works were around the theme technology for social good, so they had to have an aspect that benefited wider society - like one guy had this cute backpack that worked as an indicator for your bike and was controlled by your iphone, like on the handle bars. Yeah. There were lots of different items - including portfolios and posters.

KA: So there were a lot of variables; various items, lots of different sizes, participation, opportunities for people to linger to read or even watch a video; also the fact that it was in a thoroughfare….I mean, I’m interested in how you controlled the flow, the interaction of people in the space, is it even possible?

MS: I have some really great resources on this that I’ll send you, about how to create space and define the actions of audiences. There is this American theory that in Australia is actually the opposite, it’s that people by nature turn right when entering a gallery space, because by habit they vear right, like on the road or using escalators…

KA: Oh yeah it’s like when you go to Europe and go to pass someone in the street and you habitually step to the left and they step to the right and...haha...you end up crashing

MS: Haha, exactly, yeah you really have to think about the use of space fairly subconsciously actually because well, people using it are everyday people. There are a set of let’s say ‘manners’ or an etiquette that can be followed, like how big text should be and how far away viewers stand from the wall but it’s all developed around human behaviour. Also talking about wall text and the correct number is in the slides i’ll send you but there's also a certain number of words that people are willing to read standing at an exhibition before they tune out...so that's also interesting to note and I guess also where the catalogue in the format of a book becomes useful...we’re used to reading long texts in the pages of a book.

KA: Yeah, that's true.

MS: So yeah there is a lot of human nature and common sense that goes into designing exhibitions

KA: ...and then, how do you, for want of a better word…’control’ viewers, like if you have video and books and texts and spaces that will encourage loitering and other spaces that require traffic flow…

MS: Well first you consider the elements and try to space them accordingly, like separate all the apps and all the films so they are not all together, and then well, you obviously would try to keep thoroughfares clear and the works that require more hang-time in areas of less activity. It’s difficult, I like to work with a working floor plan with multiple options and trial them in the space. It’s best to access the space to see how it operates, for instance I went to visit the foyer when it was both in use and not, to see where people naturally gravitated and what the actual user experience was.

KA: So you mocked up a floor plan or a diagram?

MS: Just a simple floor plan, well a few and then by hand sketched out where things could go.

KA: And if this was a public space, how did you go about security or artworks and tech?

MS: Urgh, security is so difficult, especially when you don’t have resources - for this design show there were so many apps on display we ended up having to sign-out ipad mini’s to the designers who wanted to show their apps and they had to take responsibility for them, they had to hold them the entire time.

KA: Oh wow, so you didn’t have holders? Like at the apple store or something?

MS: No...well the line-up changed so many times that by the time everyone confirmed what they needed it was far too late to work out specific security for the space and the risk was fairly high being a public venue. I mean when I was working at the College of Fine Arts Galleries it was located in the University and they had so many resources to be able to make the specific holders out of that plastic stuff, what is it…?

KA: Plexiglass?

MS: yeah right, so they’d make special holders,

KA: A frame?

MS: ...with yeah a frame over the top and the Ipad behind all screwed in with a hole for the on/off button and the cord plugged in all the time underneath. They made them for all the shows. I think if you’re at a gallery with resources it’s fine but generally it’s difficult and expensive…

KA: Like how expensive?

MS: Well we got quoted $2000 for that Design exhibition and that was before everyone decided to have iPads, so yeah it’s pricey.

KA: Okay well we’re nearing the end of the interview, but I have one more question, a bonus question that’s a little more off-the-beaten-track…

MS: oh good, ok…

KA: I was reading an article on news.artnet.com about the relevence of curators and how there is a trend away from using the work curator; pepole are instead using ‘Exhibition Organisor’ or just ‘Organised by…’ Do you have a comment about this…?

MS: Yeah I do, I actually was discussing this with my boyfriend just the other day, about how the word curating is so grossly overused. You know, you have people who ‘curate’ instagram feeds and community curators and curated collections of things...but you know where the word curator comes from? Fom a Latin word which means to take care of, so it’s a position of custodianship or someone who is the keeper of a collection. I think originally many art collections were held by churches too and so the word also has religious connections, or connotations. It’s not a word that just means organising, so yeah maybe these people are organising exhibitions but gallerists are closer to being curators in the true sense.

KA: So there’s a place for both?

MS: Yeah for sure, but maybe it’s better, Instagram feed organiser, haha…

KA: oh for sure. Well thank you so much for this Merryn, I really appreciate it and your insights have been very useful.

MS: Thanks for asking me!

Ends 12:22 January 12, 2017