Tate Encounters: Britishness and visual culture
 

Programme:

Research Fieldwork
Between April 2007 and April 2009 a number of fieldwork 'projects' were undertaken in order to generate a body of material from which the research team could develop an analysis of the ways in which Tate Britain understood and related to its audiences. The fieldwork was carried out according to a research programme developed from methodological perspectives derived from the Social Sciences. The fieldwork used a variety of approaches to recording responses to the experience of working in or visiting the museum, including auto-ethnography, filmed and audio interviews, online media, documentary and anthropological filmmaking and the recording of panel discussions. Much of that material is available to view on the project's archive website accessed at http://process.tateencounters.org

After two years of fieldwork the project has reached a preliminary analysis stage where it can report upon how, over a 'snapshot' period of two years, Tate and Tate Britain organisationally produced itself within the public realm and how it has constituted real and imagined audiences. Following our research programme we have divided our reporting into three related strands. Firstly the report will discuss what kind of work is performed by art historical scholarship and curatorial practice in relationship to the constitution of the National Collection of British Art. Here there is a focus upon how notions of Britishness are lived and practiced in relationship to exhibition and display practices. Further, it will illuminate some of the ways in which interpretation, education and media understand their work in relationship to the social experience of art. Finally, it will show how marketing mobilises the operational definitions of audience for the institution.

Secondly, the report will focus upon the experience of the visitor and non-visitor, framing the account of contemporary viewing positions in terms of cultural difference and the emergent authority of cosmopolitanism, with its stress upon narrative, memory and identity. This section of the report will locate the specific discussion of viewing in the larger context of understandings about the experience of the work of art in terms of both aesthetics and social and cultural history. It will seek to demonstrate how such understandings become present in curatorial and museological practice and how they position the viewer and define audience interest. A supplementary interest within this part of the research will focusupon how personal media and online media ecologies currently relate to the art museum experience and how how museums are thinking about the use of new media in relationship to audience. Thirdly, the analytical account will focus upon the ways Tate Britain has responded to cultural diversity policy and the ways in which diversity policy framed definitions and practical responses to the ongoing processes and problematics of racialisation in relationship to sameness and difference. Part of this account will involve a reflexive analysis of the project's reframing of race and ethnicity in terms of diasporas and new patterns of transmigration, which still points to conceptual limitations as well as significant problems in recognising difference within cultural practices.

Outputs
A project report, following the guidelines for AHRC reporting will be submitted in March 2010

A book based upon the Tate Encounters research project entitled Critical Audiences: Locating  the Public in the Art Museum is in preparation and will be published in 2011

Conference Papers and Presentations

Since the start of the project in April 2007, the research investigators have given a number of presentations and papers on key dimensions of the project in various relevant contexts.  A full list of events is given below:

'Tate Encounters', Strategic Partnerships and Impact in the Arts and Humanities Conference, Leeds University, 22 & 23 September 2009 (Andrew Dewdney)

'Technologies of Seeing: Painting, Photography and the Art Museum', Photography, Archive and Memory, Roehampton University, Friday 5th June 2009 (Andrew Dewdney)

'Into Transmission: Tate Encounters and new approaches to Museum Practices', Zurich, April 2009 (David Dibosa)

'Emergent Findings: Contexts, Framework and Methods', AHRC - Diasporas, Migration, Identities Programme, Leeds, 19-21 November 2008 (Full team)

'Black History Month Presents Tate Encounters', Presentation to cultural sector for Department for Culture, Media and Sport, 27 October 2008 (Andrew Dewdney, David Dibosa, Mike Phillips)

'Tate Encounters', The Impact of LSBU Research on London and Londoners', London South Bank University, 18 June 2008 (Andrew Dewdney, Victoria Walsh)

'Issues of Cultural Democracy and Democratising Research Practices', Democratisation of the Research Process, SPUR jointly sponsored with InHolland University,  17 September 2007

Tate Encounters Programme [PDF format, 9MB]

This document describes the research programme and projected outputs of the Tate Encounters project. It is based upon the research outline contained in the original Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) application and remains consistent with the aims and methods proposed, but now contains a concrete and detailed account of the work to be undertaken and the methods to be employed. The document has been produced primarily for the benefit of the research team but will be of value to research participants, colleagues at Tate and the AHRC research community interested in learning more about this stage of the project.

Original application summary - case for support [PDF format, 60KB]

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