Combing your hair in a washroom at the Art Gallery of Ontario today is not quite the simple act it usually is. The same goes for pitching that wad of gum you've exhausted into a garbage can there.
Those previously unthinking moments are now thinking moments, thanks to the intervention of British-born philosophers/authors Alain de Botton and John Armstrong, curators of a new … well, exhibition isn't quite the right word. How about "experiment" or "experience"? "Project"? "Argument"? Whatever it is, they're calling it Art as Therapy and it officially starts at the AGO this weekend for a run lasting until next spring.
A similar ambition seems to be at work, in utero, at the AGO. In
the last 17 of his 44 years de Botton has earned an international reputation –
in some quarters, disreputation – as an intellectual gadfly with a
relentless, often irritating propensity for prescribing improvements to
seemingly everything under the sun – the news business, airports, architecture,
hierarchies of prestige, the practice of atheism and, yes, the appreciation of
art. It’s his thesis (and that of sidekick Armstrong) that the art museum is in
crisis, its presentation strategies, though accepted by “the artistic elite,”
are largely “frightening,” “boring,” “intimidating,” “underwhelming” to the
common viewer. Art can be good for you, ennobling even.
Indeed, as de Botton and Armstrong state in Art as Therapy, the
$39.95 hardcover manifesto (published last year) that underpins what they’re up
to at the AGO, “the true purpose of art [is] ‘the reform of life.’” Too bad art
professionals have made such a muck of it, particularly in the last 150 years
or so. Pshaw on “art for art’s sake”! Art’s a tool, like a good sharp knife,
and if wielded properly can relieve all manner of what de Botton calls
“psychological frailties.”
The AGO is the first North American art museum to let de Botton and
Armstrong loose, albeit modestly so. (An iteration of Art as Therapy recently
opened at Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum and another is set for the National Gallery
of Victoria in Melbourne, where Armstrong is a university professor.) It’s
because the AGO, since reopening in expanded digs in November, 2008, has
striven to recast itself as “a visitor-centred institution,” says David Wistow,
the gallery’s interpretive planner. While the gallery has had several
successful shows in the past five years, its annual attendance has yet to cross
the one-million threshold various parties have hoped for, believed in and
argued for as achievable. (Attendance in 2013-14 was 862,000.) The big
question, says Wistow, is “What role do we want the AGO to play in the cultural
life of the city?” And to answer it the gallery is willing to entertain all
sorts of “experiments.” Giving Art as Therapy a year-long residency, he said,
should generate some interesting data on audience engagement.
De Botton was asked just how big his ambitions are for realizing the therapeutic art gallery. In Art as Therapy, there’s an axonometric drawing of London’s Tate Modern reorganized “according to a therapeutic vision,” with floors containing galleries devoted to themes such as fear, compassion and suffering. Is he interested in seeing an entire gallery based on the therapeutic model? Or would he be content to just see parts of it adapted that way?
“Look,” he replied, “I can see the real value in having the standard collection, as it were, arranged on library shelves in a pretty ordinary way. You kind of know where to find it on the library shelf. But I can also see the virtue of occasionally picking works out and laying them out in a different way, playing with the collection. I think you almost need both.” So there won’t be an Alain de Botton Museum of Art?
“I don’t know. Who knows? We’re playing. Let’s see how this goes. Let’s see what people enjoy looking at thematically. [Each pod is equipped with interactive panels and digital pens for the audience to write comments.] Let’s see what the AGO thinks.”
Art as Therapy opens May 3 at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto and
continues through April, 2015 (ago.net).
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