Not too many years ago, finding a major new space devoted to the arts within the confines of the Science Museum would have seemed unlikely, about as plausible as seeing a display of farming dioramas at the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A).
The early 20th-century split in the South Kensington Museum put the V&A firmly in charge of the artistic half of Prince Albert’s vision. Nevertheless, since the late 1990s, art has been creeping into the Science Museum via residencies, commissions for new galleries and participative projects. Coming across a work by David Shrigley or Yinka Shonibare in a Science Museum gallery is now par for the course.
The opening of Media Space, a major new gallery devoted to photography and media arts, under the directorship of the museum’s long-term head of contemporary art programming, Hannah Redler, feels like both a culmination of this trend and a new departure.
The gallery, which opened in September with Only in England, an exhibition of photographic works by Tony Ray-Jones and Martin Parr, and an installation by Universal Everything, is impressive in every area.
It boasts more than 800 sq metres of exhibition space, making it one of the largest venues dedicated to photography in the UK. It is located next to a new cafe on the second floor of the museum in an area previously used for temporary exhibitions and offices.
It provides a space not only for the Science Museum to explore its growing interest in the arts, but also to collaborate with its sister institution, the National Media Museum in Bradford. This gives the London museum the chance to display some of the highlights from the media museum’s National Photography Collection of more 3.2 million images.
Changing Britain
Only in England divides the main gallery into three rooms. The first is devoted to some of the works of Ray-Jones, an English photographer active in the 1960s.
Ray-Jones brought to the UK the New York sensibility of street photography, practised by the likes of Garry Winogrand, substituting the English seaside and fairground for the crowded American street.
There are awkward deck chairs on pebbly beaches, carnival strongmen, and middle-aged couples separated by newspapers, as well as more disturbing images of blacked-up “coconut dancers” in Lancashire.
His view of England was neither caricatured nor sentimental, and his photos also show the extremes of wealth and poverty in 1960s Britain: a run-down market in Silvertown and students at Eton.
Ray-Jones’s influence on English photography is probably most evident in the work of Martin Parr, and the second room takes a look at Parr’s first major project, The Non-Conformists. Parr moved to Hebden Bridge in Yorkshire and spent a year photographing the life of a small Methodist chapel in nearby Todmorden.
The portraits of a small and ageing community lay bare the idiosyncrasies of their subjects, but lack some of the satirical sheen of Parr’s later and better-known colour work.
In the third room, Parr re-examines Ray-Jones’s work in the context of his own, delving into the museum’s archive of unpublished photographs, contact sheets and notebooks, exposing Ray-Jones’s working process and the formation of his understanding of photography.
Revolution
Only in England stands well by itself as a major photographic exhibition. But if you were looking for a connection between Ray-Jones’s photographs and the rest of the Science Museum, you could go back 50 years to Harold Wilson’s 1963 “white heat” speech.
The prime minister spoke of a scientific and technological revolution that would transform industry and society, and the museum’s galleries of computing and telecommunications pay tribute to the progress made by industrial technology in these realms. But advances in productivity and better wages were also giving rise to the culture of enjoyment that Ray-Jones photographed in the 1960s.
This is a connection that Ray-Jones himself was very aware of: his notebooks show an impressive list of theoretical reading on the subject of leisure and society. His artistic genius was to show the emergent leisure time of the English in its half-formed state, struggling to be modern in a society that was not yet fully transformed.
Only in Ray-Jones’s later photographs of music fans heading to a concert on the Isle of Wight do we get an inkling of the interweaving of technology, popular culture and leisure that we now take for granted.
Breaking barriers
The most contemporary form of that mixture is on display in the second part of Media Space, a studio for interactive artworks. The installation, Universal Everything & You by art and technology group Universal Everything, is more typical of the kind of media art you might anticipate at the Science Museum.
Presence, a four-screen video installation, uses motion-captured dancers to present an evolving performance around the outer wall of the space. In the centre of the space, a circle of screens display 1000 Hands, an interactive artwork that projects shapes generated by visitors onto screens. Visitors can download an app that enables them to create a shape and share it online.
The overall effect in the space is of movement and vibrancy; small contributions produce a complex, moving, whole. Nevertheless, the experience lacks some of the emotional impact of the (non-interactive) digital work Listening Post, which is on display elsewhere in the Science Museum.
Whether Media Space will attract existing Science Museum visitors to art and photography, or bring a new art-oriented audience through the doors of the museum, remains to be seen.
But its launch is encouraging on two counts. It demonstrates the continuation of a recent confidence in experimentation at the museum, seen in public history projects such as Oramics to Electronica, which invited the public to share and interpret artefacts.
More importantly, it shows an enthusiasm for breaking down the barriers that separate art museums and their audiences from museums of social and natural history, science and technology.
Danny Birchall is the digital manager at the Wellcome Collection, London
There are two things I’m really proud of with Only in England. Firstly, the ways in which by focusing in part on the work of living legend Martin Parr, we were able to bring new thinking to Tony Ray-Jones’s work and his lasting influence. Secondly, the way we managed to carry this strong curatorial narrative into the broader interpretative design elements.
We always work with many experts for our heavily constructed permanent science galleries, but it was a challenge to apply the same thinking, with a significantly lighter touch, to a temporary photographic show. Interior designer Drinkall Dean and graphic designer Graphic Thought Facility became heavily involved in the content narrative of the exhibition.
Both were struck by Ray-Jones’s incredible ability to create complex and multi-layered compositions. This is reflected in a scheme that employs layering of textures, subdued colours and complementary materials along with multiple sightlines. As with Ray-Jones’s work, strong diagonals in the exhibition structure create drama and a sense of place.
By leaving elements of the structure unclad, unusual views are created throughout the space, generating unexpected associations. The colour scheme and slightly anarchic hang signal a deviation away from a classic photographic hang, while also remaining respectful to the works and to the viewers. This is very much in the spirit of Parr and Ray-Jones.
All of the photographs in the show have humour, often mixed with melancholy or awkwardness but always with a lot of humanity. I’m really pleased with the way the design supports this.
Hannah Redler is the head of Media Space
- Cost £4m
- Main funders Michael and Jane Wilson; Virgin Media; Albert R Broccoli Foundation
- Head of Media Space Hannah Redler
- Interior design BKD
- Exhibition design (for first three exhibitions) Drinkall Dean
- Graphic design Graphic Thought Facility
Only in England runs until 16 March, (£8, adults)
The Science Museum, London, offers free entry to temporary exhibitions for Museums Association members