Everyone seems to know what we did last summer. We did that exhibition by graffiti artist Banksy, the one where he invaded the museum without anyone knowing, the one that Chris Moyles campaigned to make permanent, the one with the seven-hour queues.
On 13 June, staff at Bristol Museum and Art Gallery turned up for work to find the museum transformed, the collection "remixed". An entire gallery was hung with new stencil works and paintings; the museum's front hall was transformed into a crumbling urban square and the rear hall had become a darkened and twisted menagerie of caged automata.
Banksy put his work in the permanent galleries as well: modified oils nestled among Renaissance masters; a gypsy wagon seemed to have been clamped by an overzealous traffic warden; and Assyrian reliefs looked down on a model of Jerusalem populated by plastic soldiers and security watchtowers.
Over 300,000 people visited the show and Bristol's economy boomed as a result. The exhibition was quite simply the single biggest event in the history of the service.
This astonishing success was almost entirely down to Banksy. So what was our role? Put simply, we helped create the environment that made it possible. We took the risk and managed it, we prepared the ground by developing the values that stressed new approaches and doing things differently. This meant we were able to give up control and to justify this to ourselves, to senior managers and to the city council.
Giving up control is anathema for an organisation such as ours. Museums have built their reputations on their reliability and authority. Professional ethics, procedure and academic rigour have provided a comforting cushion between users and staff and often mean that even with the most inclusive projects we still ask our collaborators to work within our boundaries rather than genuinely offering up control.
Our world is full of constraints that many find baffling, and the result is that we tend to work with the same people, create the same projects and attract the same visitors.
The rewards for giving up control were that we had lots of new visitors, and even our regular visitors seemed to appreciate a new-found freedom, seeing the museum and its collections in a new light. We seemed to have enabled our visitors to engage more closely than before with the collections and with staff.
There is of course the risk that some people will now believe that chicken nuggets are really hatched daily from eggs but at least for one summer we and our visitors were able to behave and think differently.
Tim Corum is the deputy head of Bristol's Museums, Galleries and Archives.
On 13 June, staff at Bristol Museum and Art Gallery turned up for work to find the museum transformed, the collection "remixed". An entire gallery was hung with new stencil works and paintings; the museum's front hall was transformed into a crumbling urban square and the rear hall had become a darkened and twisted menagerie of caged automata.
Banksy put his work in the permanent galleries as well: modified oils nestled among Renaissance masters; a gypsy wagon seemed to have been clamped by an overzealous traffic warden; and Assyrian reliefs looked down on a model of Jerusalem populated by plastic soldiers and security watchtowers.
Over 300,000 people visited the show and Bristol's economy boomed as a result. The exhibition was quite simply the single biggest event in the history of the service.
This astonishing success was almost entirely down to Banksy. So what was our role? Put simply, we helped create the environment that made it possible. We took the risk and managed it, we prepared the ground by developing the values that stressed new approaches and doing things differently. This meant we were able to give up control and to justify this to ourselves, to senior managers and to the city council.
Giving up control is anathema for an organisation such as ours. Museums have built their reputations on their reliability and authority. Professional ethics, procedure and academic rigour have provided a comforting cushion between users and staff and often mean that even with the most inclusive projects we still ask our collaborators to work within our boundaries rather than genuinely offering up control.
Our world is full of constraints that many find baffling, and the result is that we tend to work with the same people, create the same projects and attract the same visitors.
The rewards for giving up control were that we had lots of new visitors, and even our regular visitors seemed to appreciate a new-found freedom, seeing the museum and its collections in a new light. We seemed to have enabled our visitors to engage more closely than before with the collections and with staff.
There is of course the risk that some people will now believe that chicken nuggets are really hatched daily from eggs but at least for one summer we and our visitors were able to behave and think differently.
Tim Corum is the deputy head of Bristol's Museums, Galleries and Archives.
Links
Tim Corum will be speaking at Banksy vs the Museum, a session at the Museums Association annual conference, London, (5-7 October)
www.museumsassociation.org/conference
Tim Corum will be speaking at Banksy vs the Museum, a session at the Museums Association annual conference, London, (5-7 October)
www.museumsassociation.org/conference
