The Craft and Design Gallery, the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool
I have enormously high expectations of new exhibitions and displays: I imagine they will be seductive, reveal hidden depths, and add up to more than the sum of their parts. When friends describe single items they have come across in exhibitions, I wonder what added value the curator brought to their experiences - quite apart from making the items accessible in the first place.
Making good exhibitions isn't just about showing collections of objects per se, but about constructing and communicating narratives around them. And, given that public funding has done so much to emphasise the educational roles of museums and galleries, it follows that visitors ought to be able to expect explanations of what's being shown and why.
Having initially been directed to the wrong entrance of the new Craft and Design Gallery, I missed any orientation and found it surprisingly hard to work out what the display was about. I wandered around a bit and took in some absolutely stunning, if rather densely packed, objects.
I certainly wasn't the only visitor to be wowed by the objects, but I was probably the only one determined enough to find the beginning of the display by following the case numbers backwards. Starting over from the right place was certainly better - but not a 100 per cent better.
The gallery's introductory panel invites you to 'explore the ways that decorative objects have been styled, made and used'. The displays focus on the domestic; the nature of decoration and the origins of style, and there's a somewhat anomalous fourth section on fashionable clothes, 1770-2003. There's also a small group of new acquisitions.
A range of interpretive devices are provided: the usual wall panels and captions; various kinds of interactives: touchscreen displays; questions addressed to the visitors; pull-out drawers under the display cases.
Sometimes examples of contemporary design are shown alongside historic objects to encourage visitors to reflect on their own use of decorative objects, and consider how much things have changed.
The odd, quirky caption presumably serves much the same function - as well as demonstrating that the curators have a sense of humour. The text for a salt-glazed stoneware spirit flask in the form of a house reads: 'You could fill it up with gin and literally drink the house down.'
It's memorable, if nothing else. The captions also focus on things manufactured in Liverpool, taken from the city's demolished buildings, bought in its shops or simply resonant of the city itself. The most iconic of these is John Lennon's 1963 grey mohair Beatles' suit, displayed with a pair of Chelsea (aka Mersey) boots.
However promising these approaches are, they fall short of delivering a satisfactorily meaningful experience. The apparent emphasis on Merseyside is diluted by references to items made elsewhere or intended for other places.
The questions posed in the captions are only ever going to elicit limited responses: 'Which chair would you choose?' the visitor is asked of two very different 1991 designs; 'What do you drink your beer out of?'
Visitors are repeatedly encouraged to refer to the computers and look up 'words written like this, in italics' as well as designers and makers whose names are given in bold. But what kind of logic dictates that you explain what an italic is, yet assume that visitors are already conversant with the Wiener Werkstaette?
In spite of various forms of interpretation, the information available is limited for a gallery that invites visitors to 'explore' the collection for themselves. I was much taken by a pair of early-19th-century Wedgwood inkstands in the Home Entertainment section.
They were designed in the form of boats - one in Egyptian style, the other in Roman style. But neither the captions nor the computer explained why a firm would have been producing items such as this in 1810 - let alone their appeal or symbolic value. Such questions were also avoided in the style section, the primary function of which was to show that crafts and design objects have traditionally been subject to a number of influences.
The display was let down by interpretation in other ways too. It is evidently assumed that a Game Boy, shown in the same case as the inkstands, needs no introduction. But convention dictates that there has to be a caption and this one reads: 'Nowadays the skill involved in playing electronic games makes them fun'.
The grammar expert Lynne Truss would have a field day with it - the implication being that electronic games used not to require skill to make them fun. Even if the curators were trying to express something different, the irony of Game Boys being designed to be enjoyed away from the home was completely lost in a section devoted to the domestic.
Whether you think, like me, that the new display needs tightening up conceptually or that it offers a variety of openings for people's individual explorations, there's no doubt about one thing: the gallery has tried to squeeze a quart into a pint pot.
However well lit or elegant the new installation is, it doesn't detract from the fact that a fabulous and wide-ranging collection has effectively been squashed into a cramped back room.
Sara Selwood is the editor of Cultural Trends
www.culturaltrends.org.uk
I have enormously high expectations of new exhibitions and displays: I imagine they will be seductive, reveal hidden depths, and add up to more than the sum of their parts. When friends describe single items they have come across in exhibitions, I wonder what added value the curator brought to their experiences - quite apart from making the items accessible in the first place.
Making good exhibitions isn't just about showing collections of objects per se, but about constructing and communicating narratives around them. And, given that public funding has done so much to emphasise the educational roles of museums and galleries, it follows that visitors ought to be able to expect explanations of what's being shown and why.
Having initially been directed to the wrong entrance of the new Craft and Design Gallery, I missed any orientation and found it surprisingly hard to work out what the display was about. I wandered around a bit and took in some absolutely stunning, if rather densely packed, objects.
I certainly wasn't the only visitor to be wowed by the objects, but I was probably the only one determined enough to find the beginning of the display by following the case numbers backwards. Starting over from the right place was certainly better - but not a 100 per cent better.
The gallery's introductory panel invites you to 'explore the ways that decorative objects have been styled, made and used'. The displays focus on the domestic; the nature of decoration and the origins of style, and there's a somewhat anomalous fourth section on fashionable clothes, 1770-2003. There's also a small group of new acquisitions.
A range of interpretive devices are provided: the usual wall panels and captions; various kinds of interactives: touchscreen displays; questions addressed to the visitors; pull-out drawers under the display cases.
Sometimes examples of contemporary design are shown alongside historic objects to encourage visitors to reflect on their own use of decorative objects, and consider how much things have changed.
The odd, quirky caption presumably serves much the same function - as well as demonstrating that the curators have a sense of humour. The text for a salt-glazed stoneware spirit flask in the form of a house reads: 'You could fill it up with gin and literally drink the house down.'
It's memorable, if nothing else. The captions also focus on things manufactured in Liverpool, taken from the city's demolished buildings, bought in its shops or simply resonant of the city itself. The most iconic of these is John Lennon's 1963 grey mohair Beatles' suit, displayed with a pair of Chelsea (aka Mersey) boots.
However promising these approaches are, they fall short of delivering a satisfactorily meaningful experience. The apparent emphasis on Merseyside is diluted by references to items made elsewhere or intended for other places.
The questions posed in the captions are only ever going to elicit limited responses: 'Which chair would you choose?' the visitor is asked of two very different 1991 designs; 'What do you drink your beer out of?'
Visitors are repeatedly encouraged to refer to the computers and look up 'words written like this, in italics' as well as designers and makers whose names are given in bold. But what kind of logic dictates that you explain what an italic is, yet assume that visitors are already conversant with the Wiener Werkstaette?
In spite of various forms of interpretation, the information available is limited for a gallery that invites visitors to 'explore' the collection for themselves. I was much taken by a pair of early-19th-century Wedgwood inkstands in the Home Entertainment section.
They were designed in the form of boats - one in Egyptian style, the other in Roman style. But neither the captions nor the computer explained why a firm would have been producing items such as this in 1810 - let alone their appeal or symbolic value. Such questions were also avoided in the style section, the primary function of which was to show that crafts and design objects have traditionally been subject to a number of influences.
The display was let down by interpretation in other ways too. It is evidently assumed that a Game Boy, shown in the same case as the inkstands, needs no introduction. But convention dictates that there has to be a caption and this one reads: 'Nowadays the skill involved in playing electronic games makes them fun'.
The grammar expert Lynne Truss would have a field day with it - the implication being that electronic games used not to require skill to make them fun. Even if the curators were trying to express something different, the irony of Game Boys being designed to be enjoyed away from the home was completely lost in a section devoted to the domestic.
Whether you think, like me, that the new display needs tightening up conceptually or that it offers a variety of openings for people's individual explorations, there's no doubt about one thing: the gallery has tried to squeeze a quart into a pint pot.
However well lit or elegant the new installation is, it doesn't detract from the fact that a fabulous and wide-ranging collection has effectively been squashed into a cramped back room.
Sara Selwood is the editor of Cultural Trends
www.culturaltrends.org.uk
