What Does Participation Mean
to You?
Footfall, Anonymity and
response in the Tate Modern.
When someone told me recently that the Tate Modern was the
most popular art gallery in the world I wasn’t really surprised
.
Anyone who has visited it on a Friday afternoon must have observed escalators
brimming with school kids, businessmen on lunch breaks and tourists donning
ponchos outnumbering the odd art student who has wandered in. Its sheer scale suggests that it has the
capability to accommodate as many visitors as can be thrown at it. That said,
it did occur to me that maintaining a relationship with each visitor and
opening up avenues for communication and forum is something of which the team
at Tate Modern can be proud. Their simplistic and stylish approach to feedback
is worth studying for anyone who has ever wondered what the audience really
thinks of their efforts.
Take for example this wall (above) in the recently opened Tate
Tanks: an exhibition space dedicated to performance and participation. The
visitor is invited to post comments using sticky notes in response to the
question “
what does participation mean to
you?” Simply put, it is an analogue version of the Facebook wall.
Thinking aesthetically, the more comments posted, the better
it looks. Enigmatically, the question posed is displayed as a light projection
– it is not physical and seems to have less gravitas than the written paper responses.
That the audience can physically and deliberately interrupt the question by
placing their comments on the screen also indicates a careful exploration of
the hierarchy between the established gallery and the transient audience.
Of course, what is most interesting about this corner of the
Tanks is what visitors choose to write. I asked myself as I spent a
considerable amount of time perusing the notes: Can you tell anything about the
audience from what they write? Are the notes stuck on the bottom added by
children and the ones at the top by giants? Can you tell just by the
handwriting what age they are, what kind of education they have had? Are the
ones on the periphery more valuable than the ones in the middle? What happens
if I steal some notes and take them home?…..
In the end it is probably more interesting for you to look
at them yourself. Below are some of the comments that caught my eye. Please
bear in mind that I’m only 5ft 2in and that this variable has coloured my
overall reading of the wall.
Comments read left to right:
