One of the most prominent funding bodies for the visual arts in the UK, Arts Council England (ACE), works primarily,

‘…to enable everyone to experience arts that enrich their lives. To help achieve this we work in partnership with artists, arts organisations, local authorities and others to find new ways to excite, engage and inspire people.’ 1

A recent study by ACE, entitled Arts Audiences: Insight, suggests there are now thirteen distinct groups of audience segmentation and hopes to provide a new understanding of how and why these audiences connect, interact and, ultimately, engage with art. Undoubtedly, it is our role within the art museums and galleries to successfully “engage” these thirteen audiences whose demands are now far higher, the central question being, how do we do this consistently and succinctly through the writing and construction of interpretive contextual texts?

Within the last year, due to my varied job roles in employment, I am, on a weekly basis, back and forth between the realms of curating and marketing. Moreover, after recently attending several marketing networking events, training sessions, and from speaking to various colleagues, it has become apparent that there are many professionals within the art museum and gallery domain whose job descriptions necessitate their taking on many different roles without additional training – the role of the curator, the marketer, the interpreter and the educator.

From personal experience, I have seen further how institutions can and have become transfixed in routine, habitual methods of writing, where recurring rifts and differences of opinion occur between departments as to how we write, construct, format and display these interpretive texts. The rifts to which I refer are written styles, linguistic paradigms and simple methods of interpretation, with the latter being understood as a dynamic and supposedly fluid process of communication between the art museum or gallery and the public audience. It is the means by which the art museum or gallery delivers its content and context through a variety of visible and discreet forms and media including exhibition texts, guided tours, websites and web pages, press releases and publicity material, guides, leaflets or pamphlets, educational workshops and programmes. However, if all of this media is written by more than one voice, how are they all perceived and understood, thus, how can the audience even interpret without confusion if all these dialogues are in play?

Curators, like myself, often undertake additional roles such as that of the marketer with more limited knowledge of that realm. In my case, after a very steep learning curve and brief introductory training in marketing, I became instantly aware of how each department functions differently. Written press and publicity material differs immensely to that of curatorial and exhibition texts. Curators are seen to produce texts for the more art informed, academic and philosophical audiences versus the marketers who are, by obligation, to present direct, clear-cut and jargon-free statements often in layman’s terms to send out to the press. Words are pulled in different directions for different media and different audiences, the curators wanting to take them one-way, the marketers another and so on, and we must not forget the artists who, if given the opportunity bring a whole new set of demands to the interpretation table. This simultaneous play of the descriptive against the factual can often present conflicting outcomes and contexts making it difficult to retain continuity. How do we compromise? Or does it go unnoticed in the hope we are doing the right thing as each department defends what they deem as good interpretation?

This compromise, I feel, comes from the removal of the physicality of writing, which has been passed on from the simple pen to the typewriter to the digital era of the computer. The texts do not always reflect the vision of the writer and author as, instead of coming forth with new information and new perspectives, previously published texts, scripts and books get re-worked, re-phrased and re-worded to create ‘new’ interpretational texts making them ultimately become institutionalised presenting, as I have coined it, “falsely-massaged” information.

From curators to marketers to educators, information descends through different professional levels, methods and minds, each with an individual style and approach to how these texts are constructed and presented. It will always be an issue to try and implement one specific way to construct this information.

In my opinion, one clear and simple method used to understand any artwork or exhibition is through the spoken word. The way words are constructed when typing or writing direct from the writer themself is very different to how one communicates verbally to someone else. The spoken word accesses immediate literary knowledge straight from the senses, without the intervention of any electronic machine or notion of transcribing breaking down formal barriers of language and writing styles, giving way to more colloquial, emotive traits and individual personalities. This ‘individual’ aspect also helps to build a more personalised relationship with the reader.

Each resource has its own set of advantages and limitations, all striving to reach the same goal. Communication should be taken back to basics. By talking to a curator or relevant professional, recording their thoughts and transposing information in this way, we can take it back to a verbal means of translation through discussion and debate, bringing forward the personal and placing the institutional voice in the periphery, whilst building relationships. This, I feel is perhaps not considered because of its possibility of involving an additional staff member or extra time when note-taking and transcribing.

Consequently, if you are an art gallery or museum professional caught in the same dichotomy as myself, take a moment to see if you can change the conventional linguistic routines within which many institutions are entrapped in. Take a step back from staring at the computer screen, researching and reading books, take time to talk about art, take hold of a pen and write down someone else’s thoughts. We need to make sure that the context doesn’t get lost in context itself. Bring interpretation back to basics.

1 Arts Council England (2008) Arts Audiences: Insight, Accessed 24th March 2009, http://www.artscouncil.org.uk/audienceinsight/home

email@rachelmarsden.co.uk

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