Last December, an advert was circulated on websites and noticeboards dedicated to arts professionals. "The Manchester Museum wishes to engage an artist to inhabit a hermitage in the tower," it read.
The museum's director, Nick Merriman, and his team had targeted their advert at artists with, as he puts it, "an interest in isolation". Three hundred and fifty applications later (65 of them serious), the London-based artist Ansuman Biswas got the tower job.
At the end of this month Biswas will ascend the spiral staircase to his new home for 40 days and 40 nights. To heighten his perception, he will be fasting for the entire period. He will also produce tangible artefacts - "Words, sounds, visual objects and responses," he says.
"I will be engaging with all the objects and curators." He won't come out until 7 August, although he will be linked to the outside by web cam, a blog and regular face-to-face meetings with museum staff.
"I'm very excited," Biswas says. "I'm not intending to kill myself, but there is an element of the unknown about this. It's not something that many sane people do."
This quarantine will be the longest durational performance that Biswas - whose CV includes two weeks shut up in a box at the South London Gallery in 1998 and a four-day stint as an ornamental hermit at Shugborough Historic Estate in Staffordshire in 2002 - has made.
His temporary home is the size of a large studio flat, with a kitchen and a bathroom below. "Cramped," he says, "but better than a box. It's the next step on the housing ladder."
For all Biswas' self-deprecation, the Manchester Hermit Project is a serious one. Biswas' practice draws on a deep involvement with Buddhism. At the centre of his art are questions about the place of the individual in culture, society and history.
"The point of fasting is to treat my body as an archive and use up that past, just as the museum is a cultural archive," Biswas says. "I'll be living off the past in the present."
A house for Mr Biswas
Merriman is certain that Biswas' work is timely. "He will be engaging the public in a debate online about loss and extinction," Merriman explains. "He will be looking at why we seem to tolerate entire species becoming extinct and how that relates to the work we do in collections."
For all the spectacle of the Manchester Hermit Project, it is in essence an extension of the residencies that museums and galleries have always offered artists. It also reflects the growing willingness of artists to tackle subjects outside their usual remit, allowing them to produce work highlighting topics such as climate change.
Hannah Redler, the head of arts projects at the Science Museum in London, is convinced that artists' residencies can amplify the mu-seum's messages.
"Hitherto, the story of science has been delivered in an authoritative tone of voice," she says. "Artists speak with a very different tone - one that we as curators can't always use. Artists have a licence to be provocative."
Redler points to the Listening Post, an electronic work by Ben Rubin and Mark Hansen. Bought in 2008 with £110,000 from the Art Fund, the post uses real-time data from the internet to create what Redler describes as a "dynamic poem".
"It is a new way of imagining communications," she says. Listening Post provided the starting point last year for another resident, writer Tony White, to explore what Redler calls a "steam-punk science-fiction genre", which developed Prince Albert's vision of South Kensington's museums quarter, Albertopolis, and resulted in a short book being published, Albertopolis Disparu.
Ruth Lloyd, the residency and displays coordinator at the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A), is also enthusiastic about the benefits of bringing artists in: "It is still early days for our residency programme, but the benefits we are already experiencing include seeing new and exciting ways of interpreting museum objects through contemporary art and design practice and developing new relationships with the creative industries."
Inspiring artists
Lloyd thinks the fillip residencies give is significant and reaches into the education programmes as well as "inspiring audiences to be more confident with their own creativity and to use the collections for learning".
With the new Sackler Centre for arts education opening last year, the V&A has impressive facilities - including workshops and media labs - for artists that have so far included jeweller Dorothy Hogg and new media practitioner Jo Lawrence. They have been followed by Singapore-born print-maker Mona Choo and Chinese product designer Lao Jianhua.
Jianhua, the V&A's HSBC designer in residence from November 2008 to April this year, says contact with the museum's collections opened up his ways of working. "Before I came to the V&A, I mainly did commercial design," he says. "The residency has allowed me to think about what I really want to do."
But despite the growing popularity of artist residences there are few formal schemes in operation. With a few exceptions, residencies are still created on the hoof and their existence at all owes much to committed curators.
At smaller galleries such as the McLean Museum and Art Gallery in Greenock, residencies have grown from existing relationships. "Maggie Bruce, an artist interested in digital work, had exhibited with us before," says curator Val Boa. "Her work had something to offer us and she was interested in our collections. Working with her was a way of exploring our collections anew. And, importantly, we got on."
Finding the money
But funding is problematic. It is piecemeal, arriving from many sources. At the McLean Museum, Bruce was, explains Boa, "paid expenses in kind". At the Science Museum, Tony White's residency was funded from the operating budget while the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea covered last year's dancer in residence, Athina Vahla.
At Castlefield Gallery, the Project Space Scheme, which began in 2006, has had three-year funding of £56,000 from Arts Council England (ACE), the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation and the Granada Fund.
"We'd like to continue the scheme after it ends in 2010," says programme manager Clarissa Corfe, "but it is difficult to predict what might happen."
While ACE continues with its Grants for the Arts scheme, smaller initiatives, such as the time-limited Artists' Insights programme have now closed.
That said, the Leverhulme Trust stands out for its willingness to engage with artists. "Our scheme started about eight years ago," says assistant director Anne Dean.
"The principal idea is we want a contrast between the artist and the residency: for example, a fine artist working with cancer patients in a hospital ward, a poet in the Freud Museum. We make between 15 and 20 grants for a 10-month academic year of £12,500 per artist, with an extra element available for expenses."
Funders provide more than money. Alongside ACE and the Leverhulme, the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation has been a major player in developing the Natural History Museum's (NHM) arts programmes, says the museum's contemporary arts curator Bergit Arends: "We couldn't do without them."
The NHM does not have an artists in residence programme, but it does bring artists in to work with the collection. Arends cites the example of Tania Kovats' TREE, which was unveiled in March as part of the NHM's Darwin bicentennial.
"Underlying everything are two questions: how can the museum gain a fresh perspective on its collection, especially from non-scientists, and embed its collection in a cultural perspective? How can the museum's science be brought to the fore?" she asks.
"Kovats was interested in how artists and scientists permeate the surface. She got hard facts from the experts here. She used imaging techniques that she couldn't get elsewhere."
Sometimes it is the artists themselves who make the first move. "We don't have a residency programme as such, but in the last two years artists with an interest in our collections have approached us," says Zoë Hendon, senior curator at the Museum of Domestic Design and Architecture, a specialist collection within the University of Middlesex.
Sculptor Grace Adam and the performance-based outfit Kitchen Antics and Appliances were two such artists. "We had to think about what they would bring to our core audience," says Hendon. "The general lesson we learned was that if a museum is to control something, it must control the financial side."
Louise Gray is a freelance journalist
The museum's director, Nick Merriman, and his team had targeted their advert at artists with, as he puts it, "an interest in isolation". Three hundred and fifty applications later (65 of them serious), the London-based artist Ansuman Biswas got the tower job.
At the end of this month Biswas will ascend the spiral staircase to his new home for 40 days and 40 nights. To heighten his perception, he will be fasting for the entire period. He will also produce tangible artefacts - "Words, sounds, visual objects and responses," he says.
"I will be engaging with all the objects and curators." He won't come out until 7 August, although he will be linked to the outside by web cam, a blog and regular face-to-face meetings with museum staff.
"I'm very excited," Biswas says. "I'm not intending to kill myself, but there is an element of the unknown about this. It's not something that many sane people do."
This quarantine will be the longest durational performance that Biswas - whose CV includes two weeks shut up in a box at the South London Gallery in 1998 and a four-day stint as an ornamental hermit at Shugborough Historic Estate in Staffordshire in 2002 - has made.
His temporary home is the size of a large studio flat, with a kitchen and a bathroom below. "Cramped," he says, "but better than a box. It's the next step on the housing ladder."
For all Biswas' self-deprecation, the Manchester Hermit Project is a serious one. Biswas' practice draws on a deep involvement with Buddhism. At the centre of his art are questions about the place of the individual in culture, society and history.
"The point of fasting is to treat my body as an archive and use up that past, just as the museum is a cultural archive," Biswas says. "I'll be living off the past in the present."
A house for Mr Biswas
Merriman is certain that Biswas' work is timely. "He will be engaging the public in a debate online about loss and extinction," Merriman explains. "He will be looking at why we seem to tolerate entire species becoming extinct and how that relates to the work we do in collections."
For all the spectacle of the Manchester Hermit Project, it is in essence an extension of the residencies that museums and galleries have always offered artists. It also reflects the growing willingness of artists to tackle subjects outside their usual remit, allowing them to produce work highlighting topics such as climate change.
Hannah Redler, the head of arts projects at the Science Museum in London, is convinced that artists' residencies can amplify the mu-seum's messages.
"Hitherto, the story of science has been delivered in an authoritative tone of voice," she says. "Artists speak with a very different tone - one that we as curators can't always use. Artists have a licence to be provocative."
Redler points to the Listening Post, an electronic work by Ben Rubin and Mark Hansen. Bought in 2008 with £110,000 from the Art Fund, the post uses real-time data from the internet to create what Redler describes as a "dynamic poem".
"It is a new way of imagining communications," she says. Listening Post provided the starting point last year for another resident, writer Tony White, to explore what Redler calls a "steam-punk science-fiction genre", which developed Prince Albert's vision of South Kensington's museums quarter, Albertopolis, and resulted in a short book being published, Albertopolis Disparu.
Ruth Lloyd, the residency and displays coordinator at the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A), is also enthusiastic about the benefits of bringing artists in: "It is still early days for our residency programme, but the benefits we are already experiencing include seeing new and exciting ways of interpreting museum objects through contemporary art and design practice and developing new relationships with the creative industries."
Inspiring artists
Lloyd thinks the fillip residencies give is significant and reaches into the education programmes as well as "inspiring audiences to be more confident with their own creativity and to use the collections for learning".
With the new Sackler Centre for arts education opening last year, the V&A has impressive facilities - including workshops and media labs - for artists that have so far included jeweller Dorothy Hogg and new media practitioner Jo Lawrence. They have been followed by Singapore-born print-maker Mona Choo and Chinese product designer Lao Jianhua.
Jianhua, the V&A's HSBC designer in residence from November 2008 to April this year, says contact with the museum's collections opened up his ways of working. "Before I came to the V&A, I mainly did commercial design," he says. "The residency has allowed me to think about what I really want to do."
But despite the growing popularity of artist residences there are few formal schemes in operation. With a few exceptions, residencies are still created on the hoof and their existence at all owes much to committed curators.
At smaller galleries such as the McLean Museum and Art Gallery in Greenock, residencies have grown from existing relationships. "Maggie Bruce, an artist interested in digital work, had exhibited with us before," says curator Val Boa. "Her work had something to offer us and she was interested in our collections. Working with her was a way of exploring our collections anew. And, importantly, we got on."
Finding the money
But funding is problematic. It is piecemeal, arriving from many sources. At the McLean Museum, Bruce was, explains Boa, "paid expenses in kind". At the Science Museum, Tony White's residency was funded from the operating budget while the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea covered last year's dancer in residence, Athina Vahla.
At Castlefield Gallery, the Project Space Scheme, which began in 2006, has had three-year funding of £56,000 from Arts Council England (ACE), the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation and the Granada Fund.
"We'd like to continue the scheme after it ends in 2010," says programme manager Clarissa Corfe, "but it is difficult to predict what might happen."
While ACE continues with its Grants for the Arts scheme, smaller initiatives, such as the time-limited Artists' Insights programme have now closed.
That said, the Leverhulme Trust stands out for its willingness to engage with artists. "Our scheme started about eight years ago," says assistant director Anne Dean.
"The principal idea is we want a contrast between the artist and the residency: for example, a fine artist working with cancer patients in a hospital ward, a poet in the Freud Museum. We make between 15 and 20 grants for a 10-month academic year of £12,500 per artist, with an extra element available for expenses."
Funders provide more than money. Alongside ACE and the Leverhulme, the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation has been a major player in developing the Natural History Museum's (NHM) arts programmes, says the museum's contemporary arts curator Bergit Arends: "We couldn't do without them."
The NHM does not have an artists in residence programme, but it does bring artists in to work with the collection. Arends cites the example of Tania Kovats' TREE, which was unveiled in March as part of the NHM's Darwin bicentennial.
"Underlying everything are two questions: how can the museum gain a fresh perspective on its collection, especially from non-scientists, and embed its collection in a cultural perspective? How can the museum's science be brought to the fore?" she asks.
"Kovats was interested in how artists and scientists permeate the surface. She got hard facts from the experts here. She used imaging techniques that she couldn't get elsewhere."
Sometimes it is the artists themselves who make the first move. "We don't have a residency programme as such, but in the last two years artists with an interest in our collections have approached us," says Zoë Hendon, senior curator at the Museum of Domestic Design and Architecture, a specialist collection within the University of Middlesex.
Sculptor Grace Adam and the performance-based outfit Kitchen Antics and Appliances were two such artists. "We had to think about what they would bring to our core audience," says Hendon. "The general lesson we learned was that if a museum is to control something, it must control the financial side."
Louise Gray is a freelance journalist
Moving in
Conrad Shawcross joins the Science Museum in September to develop skills as a Leverhulme-funded artist/curator with a particular interest in the museum's mathematics and computing galleries.
Preston-based artists Rebecca Chesney, Robina Llewellyn and Elaine Speight are working on an initiative called Pest as part of Castlefield Gallery's Project Space. Pest is a series of three limited-edition publications that explore how artists appropriate, intervene and work within different places, spaces and contexts.
Lucy and Jorge Orta - the two artists who make up Studio Orta - take up residence in the Natural History Museum in 2010. They will be travelling to the Amazonian rainforest this summer for research.
Mary Butcher becomes the maker in residence at the Victoria and Albert Museum in July for six months. Her residency is a partnership with the Crafts Council. Butcher, a trained zoologist, hopes to develop work with new skills and materials.
Conrad Shawcross joins the Science Museum in September to develop skills as a Leverhulme-funded artist/curator with a particular interest in the museum's mathematics and computing galleries.
Preston-based artists Rebecca Chesney, Robina Llewellyn and Elaine Speight are working on an initiative called Pest as part of Castlefield Gallery's Project Space. Pest is a series of three limited-edition publications that explore how artists appropriate, intervene and work within different places, spaces and contexts.
Lucy and Jorge Orta - the two artists who make up Studio Orta - take up residence in the Natural History Museum in 2010. They will be travelling to the Amazonian rainforest this summer for research.
Mary Butcher becomes the maker in residence at the Victoria and Albert Museum in July for six months. Her residency is a partnership with the Crafts Council. Butcher, a trained zoologist, hopes to develop work with new skills and materials.
