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Aaron Blecha talks about his display Aliens, Zombies and Monsters! The Weird World of Aaron Blecha. Currently at Hove Museum
This is a legacy story from an earlier version of our website. It may contain some formatting issues and broken links.
When you visit an exhibition, do you think about how everything got there? I don’t just mean how the work was made – although that is certainly something to consider too – I’m talking about how the work was installed.
Obviously, there is a lot of planning and organising that goes into an exhibition, but I know I hadn’t given much thought to how it actually gets put into the gallery space.
All that changed when I was lucky enough to get to go behind the scenes of the Gilbert & George exhibition and see the installation. There were crates that the pieces had arrived in, all kinds of tools and ladders, and of course a team of technicians working really hard to hang the work.
Getting the galleries ready for Gilbert & George
Gilbert & George’s work is quite big, but it’s made up of individual frames that all have to be unpacked, condition checked and hung in a predetermined order. I am glad I got to see behind the scenes, but I am even more grateful that I did not have to install ‘Balls: The Evening Before the Morning After – Drinking Sculpture ’(1972) which consists of over 100 individual photographs that have to be arranged in a very particular place.
I have so much respect for the installation team because there must be so much pressure and responsibility that comes with handling the work and they were still in high spirits. They did a great job and the exhibition looks fantastic.
There’s so much that happens behind the scenes that make an exhibition possible. Next time you’re in one, particularly if the work is really big or made up of individual parts, spare a thought for the people who had to install it. It’s not an easy job, but someone’s got to do it.
Charlie – Member of the Museum Collective
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Young people from the Hangleton & Knoll Project’s Young@Art group have used Hove Museum’s Contemporary Craft Collection as inspiration for their creative work which is on display at the Museum currently.
The young people visited Hove Museum, talked about the Contemporary Craft; things they liked, didn’t like and their thoughts on their local museum in Hove. The group then made their own carved clay tiles and textile collage, inspired by Kate Malone and Alice Kettle respectively, at their youth centre sessions.
Young@Art then created pinched and thrown pots during a workshop at Shoreham Pottery. Working with professional ceramicists was a new experience for these young people and a great opportunity for positive challenge. Handwritten notes on display show the young people’s thoughts on these artistic experiences.
The group said the project “challenged them to develop new skills” and they “enjoyed trying new activities.” Aaron, a young leader on the project, said “It was an inspirational project and helped me develop skills. It was also good it was a smaller group as some people don’t like big noisy groups. It was more chilled.” Robbie, also a young leader, noted “It was a good project to work on as it helped build my skills as a young leader.” He continued, “the Potter’s Wheel was therapeutic and it was a nice sunny day and good to go somewhere new.” TJ enjoyed using the Potter’s Wheel too but the best and favourite thing he made was the clay pineapple at the pottery studio.
Kelsey said “I liked the pottery place where I made a clay dogs head – I made a dog because I have one” she also felt it was important that they could “do whatever we want” creatively. Arwen’s best bit was also “being creative.” Tori noted “I’m going to go the museum with a friend now” while Lucinda said her best bit was “talking to people and getting out.”
The group thought it was great to have their artwork on display at the Museum and were excited to see members of the public looking at their work. The ImaginativeCoolCrafts exhibition continues at Hove Museum until 17th May. It will then be on display at My Place – part of the Brighton Festival’s Your Place Hangleton 19th – 20th May and then at B.fest, Brighton youth arts festival, 26th May – 2nd June.
Young@Art was supported by Royal Pavilion & Museums’ Youth Engagement Team. Please contact Sarah Pain for more details sarah.pain@brighton-hove.gov.uk / 07833 483245.
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With the support of the Heritage Lottery Fund, through its Collecting Cultures scheme, Brighton Museum & Art Gallery has acquired a set of garments created by Clive Rundle, one of South Africa’s most important designers.
The garments, part of a collection entitled AFRIDESIA, were originally presented at the New York Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week in 2003. They now join the Museum’s Fashioning Africa collection which documents aspects of post-1960 African fashion identities.
In February 2018 the designer made a visit to London to attend the opening of the inaugural Commonwealth Fashion Exchange design exhibition at Buckingham Palace. I was fortunate to meet Clive Rundle during his stay and to learn more about his practice and the pieces acquired by Brighton Museum.
The three items – a leather jacket, a pair of leather trousers and a silk chiffon blouse – are typical of Clive’s practice, which has been described as ‘constructivist’. Rather than being motivated by a desire for glamour or luxury, Clive is interested in technical construction. As he noted in conversation, his starting point tends not to be illustrations but technical drawings. The choice of materials and finish comes later.
Clive Rundle garments are complex structures. The jacket that the Museum has acquired, for example, is spiral cut, making the fitting of the numerous pocket flaps that cover it extremely challenging, especially given the insertion of a vertical zip at its reverse. In addition to the complex structural nature of the garment, the materials used are taken through many intricate processes, for example cutting, hand-dying, hand-printing and elaborate embellishment. As such each piece is unique and not easily reproduced.
Clive Rundle clothes are worn by businesswomen seeking to make a statement across South Africa and further afield. They have also featured in the work of visual and performance artist Steven Cohen, whom Rundle describes as the closest that any person has come to being his muse. Given the complex and intricate nature of Clive Rundle garments and the sense of spectacle they convey, I asked the designer whether he has considered making pieces for the gallery rather than for the catwalk. On the contrary, he said, it was the discipline of making garments to be worn on the body that motivated him.
Like many prominent Africa-based designers, Clive Rundle’s work is well-known on the continent but less familiar to fashion followers in Europe and North America. Through initiatives like Fashioning Africa, we hope that this situation will change in the future.
Helen Mears, Keeper of World Art
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In advance of our upcoming Gilbert & George exhibition at Brighton Museum, a member of our Museum Collective writes about their use of swearing in their art. Please note that this post contains language that some might consider offensive.
I’m Charlie and I’m part of the Museum Collective at Brighton Museum. We’re working on a project for the upcoming Gilbert and George exhibition, and back in January we took a trip to London to see some of their work in the White Cube Gallery.
The exhibition we visited was called ‘The Beard Pictures and Their Fuckosophy’ and involved some very large pieces of work featuring the artists with beards made up of all kinds of things, as well as a list of over 5,000 phrases containing the f-word printed on the walls.
One of the reasons we had gone to see the work in person was to get a sense of the scale of Gilbert and George’s work since that can be hard to get across in pictures of it. Some of the work is almost billboard size, and it’s not until you are stood in front of them that you can start to take in every detail. All of the Beard Pictures feature their faces and in some of them, it felt as though they were staring back at you.
My favourite part of the exhibition was the Fuckosophy. This list was displayed floor to ceiling on several of the walls of the gallery. There were far too many to read in the time that we were there, but it was fascinating to see which ones drew your eye. For a word that is considered to be taboo, there certainly are a lot of phrases that it’s used in. It made me think about how some words can cause such offence, and what is it about those particular words that we’re so offended by. I don’t have the answers to these questions, but the more I research into Gilbert and George’s work, the more I think about them.
Charlie meets Gilbert and George
Right at the end of our visit, we were discussing which phrases were our favourites, when two people came through the door that everyone’s eyes immediately turned to. At first we joked that two gentleman had come dressed up as the artists because they were such big fans, but as they got closer, we came to the realisation that they were in fact the real deal. We were at a Gilbert and George exhibition with Gilbert and George! What a moment that was. One of the braver members of the Collective, An, even went and struck up a conversation with them. They were lovely and took some pictures with us and other visitors in the gallery.
As we got on the train back to Brighton, I think it’s fair to say we were all in a state of disbelief. It really was the perfect end to a wonderful day.
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A look back at our digital work in 2017-18 by Kevin Bacon, Digital Manager.
Much of my time this year has been spent on infrastructural work rather than public facing projects. With the prospect of a potential move of Royal Pavilion & Museums away from the Council, and the new GDPR legislation governing data protection, my main focus this year has been on information management work.
As a result, our more visible digital innovations in the last year owe much to a wider group of colleagues.
Thanks to our Digital Marketing Officer, Nicola Adams, we have made our first forays into live broadcasting.
Still of Paula Wrightson from a Facebook Live stream
Facebook, like most social media platforms, is becoming increasingly pay to play. But live video streaming, through Facebook Live, does reach sizeable audiences: to date our videos have been watched over 25,000 times. That figure has to be treated with some caution, as many of these views are for just a few seconds, but these videos do receive plenty of comments. It is also relatively easy to deliver: all our videos have been shot through a mobile phone.
Live broadcasting may not seem a natural medium for a museum with mostly static objects, but it is a great tool with which to capture talks by curators and other staff, and even join behind the scenes tours of our buildings.
Of course, many people dislike Facebook and at the time of writing the company is the target of an active boycotting campaign. So if you really don’t want to share your data with Facebook, but want to see some of our Facebook Live videos, you can view the archived clips on our website. We’ll be adding more Facebook Live clips to this archive thread throughout the next year.
Following our work last year in publishing 3D models of the Royal Pavilion Estate, we have set up a Sketchfab account to show off some of our 3D digitised collections.
Prior to using Sketchfab, we relied on useful but fiddly tools like 3D Hop. But Sketchfab does for 3D models what YouTube did for online video several years ago, by making the publishing process as simple as drag and drop, and providing a channel for enthusiasts to search and share.
While we still lack the time and skill to regularly produce 3D models of objects in our collection, Sketchfab is likely to remain our primary platform for this content.
Ancient Greek coin depicting the head of the goddess Hera, c360BC
My colleague Andy Maxted, with the support of the University of Brighton’s Cultural Informatics team and several volunteers, has been working on an alternate approach to 3D with our coin collection. The resulting Coins, Medals and Badges website brings a new perspective to objects that most people will think of as flat. But the ability to look closer at these items, and change the light source in order to reveal details in the relief, makes these coins accessible in a way that could never be replicated in a gallery.
In my last Digital Review, I wrote about some of my thinking around online collections, and how our Digital Media Bank might ‘evolve into a well-used repository and access point for our digitised collections’.
That evolution is underway: while the number of users has grown by a modest 6%, changes to the structure and tagging have increased the depth of engagement, and views of our digitised collections have more than doubled. The site is also regularly shared on Facebook and Pinterest, and very little of this is through our social media channels; most of it is almost certainly due to individuals and groups such as the Brighton Past Facebook group sharing our content.
There is still much work to be done with Digital Media Bank, and in the next few months we should be ready to launch some new publishing processes that will enable us to get more of our collections online much sooner. We are also experimenting with new features, such as a crowdsourcing tool that will allow members of the public to add location data to some of our collections (please get in touch with me by commenting below if you would be interested in contributing). But the initial success of the Digital Media Bank at this stage is vital. As part of our new 2018-22 round of Arts Council National Portfolio Organisation funding, digitisation will be a bigger part of our digital activity, and there is also likely to be more national work in promoting online collections, as outlined in the recent Culture is Digital report.
Much of this future work will rely on technically sophisticated means of dissemination through multiple partners, such as through our collection data API, but sometimes this will be through smaller projects. Subject specialist portals or aggregators can play an important role here, especially for a civic museum service with eclectic collections like Royal Pavilion & Museums. One example we worked with in 2017-18 is the Minim-UK site, which brings together musical instrument collections from throughout the UK, including over 160 from our own collections.
One new use of our Digital Media Bank this year has been to make some of our historic Brighton newspapers available online. These were digitised from microfilm copies held in the old Brighton History Centre in Brighton Museum. While the visual quality of this material is variable, we have been able to process these with optical character recognition (OCR) so that it is possible to search for not just individual newspapers by date and title, but also by keywords. (Click here to see 19th century copies of the Brighton Herald that mention the word ‘kitten’.)
We currently have over 4,600 newspapers available to download, covering a period from 1806 to 1920. Searching through these newspapers can throw up some suprising facts. For example, did you know that before setting up a permanent home in London, Madam Tussaud’s waxwork collection was once exhibited in Brighton Town Hall? This advertisement from the Brighton Herald tells the tale.
Advert for Madam Tussaud’s waxwork display, Brighton Herald, 30 March 1833
It takes about 15-30 minutes to OCR process each newspaper, so adding these all to the Digital Media Bank will time, and there are copyright restrictions that wil prevent us from making many 20th century newspapers available. But in addition to the Brighton Herald, we are planning to add more local newspapers, such as the Brighton Gazette and Argus, later this year.
Our main website is now three years old, and is likely to be redeveloped or substantially refreshed in a couple of years’ time. While major work on thisis still some time away, we continue to iteratively improve the site. One change that you may not have noticed — but have probably already benefited from — is the new server that hosts our website. We experienced reliability problems with the old hosting server late last year, so in January we moved it to a new host. This has not only made the website much more reliable, but has also dropped the average load time for each page by almost two seconds.
Once we come to review the website, one area we will focus on will be the rich content we can share about our collections, buildings and stories. Based on the user research we conducted prior to the previous redevelopment, the website is shaped around our museums rather than the services we offer. While there are very good reasons for that, this approach can marginalise our offer which does not directly relate to one museum or another, and we need to think more carefully about how we do this.
Annoted version of 1803 plan of Promenade Grove
One successful feature we will certainly build on is our blog. Views of our blog have grown by 11% to over 77,000 views a year. In many ways, the blog perfectly captures the diverse nature of our museums and our work, as can be seen from some of the posts published in 2017-18:
The most popular new post of the year was this piece on the orientalist fantasies of George IV’s sisters, by one of our Royal Pavilion curators, Alexandra Loske. But a special round of applause should go to my colleague Paula Wrightson at Preston Manor, who has been our most prolific blogger, telling an array of unexpected stories about this Edwardian manor house.
As you can tell, I’m a huge fan of blogging, and I have helped encourage others to take it up. In additiion to training sessions with Royal Pavilion & Museums staff, I worked with the the South East Museum Development service to deliver two workshops on blogging and social media in Kent and Oxford alongside Alec Ward of the London Museum Development Service.
I was also fortunate enough to be able to share digital skills with museum practitoners in Greece last year. As part of the British Council’s International Museum Academy programme, I worked with Graham Davies of National Museum Wales to help deliver workshops lead by Anra Kennedy of Culture 24 in Athens and Thessaloniki last autumn.
I was also invited to work with the Fresh Start community group in Portslade on the creation of a new walking tour of this area on the west of Brighton. The tour has just been released at http://www.portsladehistory.co.uk/, and features the contributions of local residents and school children. As a personal highlight, it also gave me the opportunity to give some training on digital heritage in a gazebo in Easthill Park without a computer in sight — a first for me.
We continue to work with a variety of universities on our more experimental or research oriented work in using digital technology. Particular thanks go to the University of Brighton’s Cultural Informatics team, who have supported much of our work in 3D digitisation, and are helping with the new archaeology gallery that will open in Brighton Museum later this year.
But we also work with academic partners outside of Brighton & Hove. One highlight of the year for me was a chance to show off a crank machine developed at the University of Lancaster as part of its Physical Social Network project. Along with our regular Remix the Museum programme, this was one of our contributions to the 2017 Brighton Digital Festival. Having spent some time earlier in the year working with a student researcher to look at public perceptions of touchscreen interactives in museums, it was fascinating to see how people responded to a digital device with an old fashioned mechanical interface.
This year also saw the start of two major research projects, in which Royal Pavilion & Museums is a partner. One is the GIFT project, lead by the Centre for Computer Games Research at the IT University in Copenhagen. This project is exploring how museums can create playful and personalised experiences for visitors. While this is an area we have explored through past projects such as Murder in the Manor, Stone Age Quest and Story Drop, getting these experiences right is difficult and risky, and I hope GIFT can develop a framework of approaches and resources that museums can use to design these.
GIFT also provided an opportuntiy to work with internationally renowned Portslade based artists Blast Theory. Back in July 2017 we gave Blast Theory and other GIFT partners space in Brighton Museum to develop a prototype gifting app that will be released as open source later this year. As well as an excuse to work with Blast Theory, it was useful to have a chance to step back and see how others might build a digital experience in the museum, and how rapid prototyping can work at this scale. While I still have little idea what the released version will look like, or whether Brighton Museum will even adopt it, I look forward to seeing how work has developed since the summer.
The second major research project we have partnered in is One by One. Lead by the University of Leicester and Brighton based Culture 24, this AHRC funded project is examining digital literacies in the museum sector. What I particularly like about One by One is that it has a very simple research question: government and funders often demand improved digital skills from museums — but what are those skills? Although the project is in its early stages, some of the initial research is already very promising, and has prompted new thinking on my part about how Royal Pavilion & Museums develops its digital capacity over the next few years.
Certainly, improved digital literacy across the whole museum service will be key. If there is one conclusion to be made from this Digital Review 2017-18, it is to recognise how many of my colleagues are essential to our digital activity. Even if staff and volunteers are reluctant to use video cameras or content management systems or 3D technology, the willingness and ability to tell a story is still vital to our online presence.
Kevin Bacon, Digital Manager
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In its early days, the Brighton Herald was dominated by advertisements for medicines. Many of these could also be bought at the newspaper’s offices.
This 1807 advertisement for Dr Henry’s Specific Pills identifies an ally of sexually transmitted diseases: delicacy.
‘Delicacy has been the utter destruction of many youths who have been infected with a certain disease. Natural modesty, and the desire of concealing the ailment, not suffering them to communicate to a practitioner in time, the disease rapidly gains ground…’
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Inspired by Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species, a Brighton Herald editorial of 27 March 1863 turned its attention to the ‘Extinction of Species’ — in this case, the Great Auk.
This flightless bird became extinct in the mid-19th century, but you can still see a stuffed example at the Booth Museum of Natural History.
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Britain may have been embroiled in the First World War, but local artist Clem Lambert and Brighton Museum curator Herbert Toms found time to announce an unusual discovery.
While sketching the famous ‘Goldstone’ in Hove Park, Lambert noticed from his sketches that the rock bears a striking likeness to a human face. Reported in the Brighton Graphic of 27 March 1915, the phenomenon was dubbed the ‘Rockerfeller’, after the American oil tycoon John D Rockerfeller.
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An editorial from the Brighton Herald marks the end of the First Boer War in South Africa. The British had been fighting Boer settlers in its colony for almost four months, but a treaty signed on 23 March had granted self-government to the Boers in the Transvaal.
From the Brighton Herald, 26 March 1881.