The touring challenge

When the Arts Council of Great Britain was established in 1946, it inherited from its war-time predecessor, the quaintly named Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts, a touring exhibitions service dedicated to circulating art around the ‘provinces’. Just as orchestral and theatrical productions were toured to enhance the cultural life of the country as a whole – reaching those parts where resources were scarce – the great network of Victorian museums and galleries was provided with a rolling programme of exhibitions, of Old Masters and contemporary paintings and sculpture. 

The Arts Council’s Annual Reports of those early years make fascinating reading, not only because of the extraordinary range of masterpieces that were cheerfully packed into vans, wrapped in blankets, secured with ropes and ferried from town to town, but for the high-minded assumption that great art should be widely seen and that it was the duty of the state to provide access to it. The mission was paternalistic, perhaps, but also realistic, in acknowledging the massive imbalances of cultural wealth prevailing in this highly centralised and class-ridden society.
Maximising impact
Today touring remains essential to the exhibitions economy, albeit in a much more sophisticated and heterogeneous environment. While there has been a proliferation of excellent new – or refurbished – art galleries nationwide, thanks largely to the Heritage Lottery Fund, many local authority funded galleries still have meagre resources for continuous exhibition programmes. Exhibitions are expensive and time-consuming to organise and it makes sense to maximise their impact through multiple showings, so curators tend to collaborate, sharing the costs and administrative burdens with like-minded colleagues in other galleries.
Southbank Centre’s Hayward Touring exhibitions, funded by Arts Council England, are intended to support and complement these activities. Acting as a laboratory for ideas and nurturing new curatorial approaches, we collaborate with independent and gallery-based curators on a thought-provoking mix of shows of international contemporary art. Exhibitions range in scale from the British Art Show, an ambitious multi-site survey of recent work presented in different cities every five years, to small graphics and photography shows that tour to smaller venues, including arts centres, libraries and schools in virtually every town in the country. The touring programme regularly draws on the extensive collection of post-war British art in the Arts Council Collection, managed by The Hayward.
Audience development
Every publicly funded gallery has the imperative to attract a wider public and to appeal to diverse local constituencies. Admission is invariably free, so the criteria have less to do with income generation than the quality of presentation: a lively, informative and engaging exhibition should provide an opportunity for people – including those entirely new to art – to encounter work on its own terms – in other words, on the terms intended by its creator, while allowing some mediation of that experience by a sympathetic curator. A commercial gallery can afford to show difficult art uncompromisingly, without any concessions to the viewer, who may have no idea of the artist’s past work, their present intentions, or where this work fits within the broader historical and international context. For a public gallery, the responsibility to elucidate and contextualise is paramount.
Group exhibitions, focused on a communicable theme, are one way of engaging people who may not have heard of any of the artists but who do relate to the subject. A large-scale survey exhibition like the British Art Show, which introduces a new generation of artists, is another. Here the unifying theme is the artists’ contemporaneity, the fact that they are all producing work here – in this country – and now. Research conducted in Bristol during the last British Art Show revealed that a third of people who saw the show there were first-time visitors to the venue in question (the show was spread across six, from the City Museum to Arnolfini to small artist-run spaces). Likewise, the majority of the 25 artists in the exhibition had never shown in Newcastle-Gateshead, Manchester, Nottingham or Bristol before. 
Complex logistics
The British Art Show is the most ambitious Hayward Touring project and it stretches our administrative and technical resources to the limit. Although smaller shows may include complex video works, installation and delicate sculpture that require the artist’s presence to set up, the logistical undertaking is usually far easier. Working closely with the curators in each venue, tasks are divided between our own team of organisers and driver-technicians and gallery staff. Turnarounds between showings are usually tight, but distances are rarely very great, and an exhibition taken down on Monday in one gallery can be delivered and installed to open at the next at the end of the same week.
Installations work best when there is a good rapport between the Hayward Touring organiser, who is familiar with the work, and the local curators, who know their space and what works well, and how the public tend to behave in it. Everyone’s views should be taken into account: sometimes a stray passing suggestion to try a particular work in a different place can be the making of a show.
The same exhibition can thus appear completely transfigured from one showing to the next, with new, unexpected relationships discovered between the works, rather like the various possible permutations in a social gathering with the same group of people. And because the exhibitions are conceived to tour, rather than with any single space in mind, no one showing is privileged over any other. This mutability and perpetual renewal is what makes the job rewarding. The aim is to make every work look its best on its own terms, while preserving the integrity of the whole, in every new situation.
Collaboration and respect
One possible criticism of a centralised touring service is that it can seem like an imperialistic exercise, imposing a view from ‘above’ without sufficient concern for local involvement or sense of ownership. The old-fashioned model of a touring exhibition implies, perhaps, that venues are merely passive receivers of a ready-made package; the exhibition may give the public access to works of art they would otherwise not have the chance to see, but offers little scope for professional development within the host gallery. (You don’t learn to cook by eating take-away meals.)
For ambitious, imaginative curators, the hired-in exhibition may seem too easy an option. On the other hand, for smaller galleries, with a curatorial staff of just one or two, the occasional touring show offers useful support, complementing and reinforcing their efforts and providing different perspectives and fresh expertise. The Hayward’s touring programme is not conceived as a platform for our own curatorial projects, but as a vehicle for a multiplicity of initiatives, some emanating from regional galleries, others from ‘independent’ curators, artists and critics.
The touring exhibition of the future will entail more elaborate variations between showings; it will provide the occasion for more local interventions, as happened in Bristol during the last British Art Show, where major new commissions by several artists in the show were organised by the curators in the host galleries. It will also be more intensely collaborative, and more creatively challenging for everyone involved.