How it feels when I’m included…

On 23 March, the Centre for Critical Studies in Museums, Galleries and Heritage research group took part in Art Gym at Tate Liverpool, curated by Tate Collective with support from Assemble, recent Turner Prize winners.

Art Gym was a kind of ‘creative workout’. It was ‘inspired by a traditional gym, Art Gym offers visitors of all ages and abilities the chance to make a personal training programme, designed to learn new creative skills or develop existing ones’.

The Centre’s contribution to this was to run a Zining Day, led by one of the Centre’s PhD researchers Jade French. Jade is using zine-making as a methodology in her Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded (AHRC) Collaborative Doctoral Award.

Jade said:

“As my PhD is practice-led and involves working alongside people with learning difficulties, capturing the research group’s process in a participatory and inclusive way is a key concern for me.  Zines have always featured heavily in my own artistic practice but during my PhD zines are now becoming key in my methodology for working with my research group as a way to trace key questions, approaches and challenges of their personal curatorial process.  What has resulted is a series of zines titled ‘Ask the Curator’ in which they pose questions to themselves as a point of departure.

“Taking part in the Art Gym was really helpful in further thinking about this practice as an inclusive methodology for exploring complex ideas.  It was fantastic that my research partner Bluecoat’s Blue Room project was able to join us ― as well as research participants from my own project ― to contribute the zine, further exploring the specific ways zines can be a participatory tool for people with learning difficulties.

“The focus of the Zining Day was the Centre’s current research theme Status of Inclusion, through which we are probing the histories of inclusion in art galleries, museums and heritage through a careful focus on the practical task and skills of ‘participation’, the methods and interactions through which museum staff and publics collaborate.”

Julia Ankenbrand, who is currently working with the British Museum on her PhD research (also through an AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Award), reflected on her experience of being an active maker as part of the Art Gym workshops:

“Based on ideas about social equality, inclusion means feeling welcome, sharing the same rights, having the possibility to express ones opinions and being heard ― all of which are fundamental democratic qualities.

“Public museums and galleries, as institutions belonging to everybody, are built on these concepts of accessibility. Creativity and the arts are forms of expression lending themselves to practicing inclusion, to connecting, opening doors and communicating in colourful and alternative ways. But they can equally be perceived by groups and individuals as exclusive, as not for them. This shows that inclusion is a two-way process. It is about giving a voice as well as listening and consequently adapting. Eventually, this means sharing power. Only if we create spaces for conversation, to listen to each other to find out what makes us tick, we can create conditions where everybody feels included.”

One key issue the Centre’s research group has in common with Sufea Mohamad Noor, the key contact at the Tate for developing the workshop, is in innovative and experiential ways of exploring the quality of visitor engagement in art galleries and museums.

Sufea had developed two interventions in the gallery to gather audience responses and reactions:

“One step to achieving inclusivity is to allow people to voice their opinions about a programme and find a way to address these comments so that our work in the future can be further improved.

“The evaluation for Art Gym is an open approach that allows exhibition participants to give unfiltered comments about the exhibition and Tate Liverpool. It’s important to note that the feedback about any participatory programme should hold the same level of importance as the actual participation.

“Working with a number of artists, I developed two evaluation activities that were integrated into Art Gym so that feedback is seen as an ongoing reflection and a part of experiencing the exhibition rather than a separate, sometimes an afterthought, task at the end. These two activities differed in the levels of engagement required to accommodate for different time commitments and interests.

“For example, one activity asked participants to quickly spell what they liked and disliked about Art Gym while another activity was based around asking participants to slow down and to take their time to complete a creative diagnosis and sew positive values as a way to reflect on how they engaged with the exhibition.”

For Tate Collective, these evaluation activities were used to track the success of the exhibition. Equally, it allowed the exhibition participants to gain an active awareness of their Art Gym experience; what they did, made and thought about while they were in the gallery.

Joanne Williams, who is in her final year of her AHRC-funded PhD, reflected on the connections between the Art Gym’s creative approaches to evaluation and the zine-making process in terms of ‘knowing about’ visitor engagement:

“My research is centred around what and how we can 'know' about visitor engagement with art, and so the zining workshop was a fantastic opportunity to experience a hands-on method of generating feedback and exploring ideas. I have found that language can be challenging to visitors when they are asked to articulate their reactions to art works, and that there can be a pressure around knowing the 'right' words to use ― using images and phrases and being able to play with them creatively seemed to break down this pressure and allow a communication of ideas that may not have otherwise been possible.

“The Art Gym space was a friendly and relaxed environment that really facilitated play and interaction, and it was great to see how the Collective had experimented with evaluation methods that encouraged visitors to consider their own motivations and what they wanted to achieve or take away from their time in the gallery.”

The final version of the zine can be seen here.

Warm thanks to Sufea and all at Art Gym for hosting us!