2.4 The Experiential Turn in Museums

suggested that they offered an alternative to the blockbuster, high impact, large scale loan exhibitions which could be difficult to get into and which were often criticised for being overcrowded. Late events can be viewed as a more accessible, social, experiential and affordable alternative or complement to visiting an exhibition. As the report authors claim; “Over the next fifteen years, if the sector is supported, it could be as normal to walk through the doors of a museum at night as it is to enter a theatre.”222

2.4 The Experiential Turn in Museums

As museums responded to new pressures in the sector to attract visitors and generate income they started to look towards their competition. During the early 2000s the cultural sector was influenced by a more general shift towards an experience economy as a way to attract, engage and retain customers. The experience economy is a theory that underpins the understanding of customer experience. Although the concept was initially focused on business, it has crossed into many other areas including retail, leisure and the cultural sector.

The term was first proposed by a Harvard business text published in 2011, The Experience Economy, in which the authors B. Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore explore how today’s economy has developed from one based on the exchange of goods and services to one that is driven by the exchange of experiences:-

“So let us be most clear: goods and service are no longer enough to foster economic growth, create new jobs, and maintain economic prosperity. To realise revenue growth and increased employment, the staging of experiences must be pursued as a distinct form of economic output. Indeed, in a world saturated with largely undifferentiated goods and services the greatest opportunity for value creation resides in staging experiences.”223

222

A Culture of Lates, Report commissioned by the Arts Council England and Culture24, 2018: 2.

223

Joseph B. Pine and James H. Gilmore, The Experience Economy, Boston: Harvard Business Review Press, 2011: ix.

For Pine and Gilmore, consumers are attracted not only by the goods sold but also by the store experience. Providers of services are under increasing pressure to stage compelling experiences in order to guide vital transformations for their customers. Businesses now compete not only on the quality of their products and services, but on the quality of experiences their brand can offer. Crucially, an experience needs to be memorable. Pine and Gilmore’s suggestion of two dimensions of the experience are particularly interesting; those of “customer participation” and “connection” which encompass both absorption and immersion:-

“When a person buys a service, he purchases a set of intangible activities…but when he purchases an experience, he pays to spend time enjoying a series of memorable events that a company stages - as in a theatrical play - to engage him in a personal way.”224

Pine and Gilmore suggest that there are many examples of “staged experiences” in the entertainment industry. Staging an experience is not simply about entertaining a customer but about engaging them. An experience may engage on any number of dimensions from passive to active. The authors offer a model of “experience realms”, which they list as entertainment, education, escape and aestheticism. All are mutually compatible domains that often merge to perform uniquely personal encounters. The authors employ two scales to construct them; Participation, a scale from passive (someone watching a performance) to active (someone involved in constructing their experience). Connection is a scale from absorption (the experience is brought into the person’s mind, occupying their attention) to immersion (physically becoming part of the experience). The emphasis is placed on engagement which occurs whenever an experience connects with an individual in “a personal and memorable way”. A combination of all four dimensions is seen to achieve optimum engagement.

Pine and Gilmore interpret the exhibition as having the potential to offer all four experience realms, allowing a connection with the visitor on both an

224

Joseph B. Pine and James H. Gilmore, The Experience Economy, Boston: Harvard Business Review Press, 2011.

intellectual and emotional level.225 Pine and Gilmore’s research reveals that this idea has been circulating since the 1950s with the proliferation of theme parks and experience-centred initiatives such as Disneyland which they cite as an example of an orchestrated and staged customer experience.226

Pine and Gilmore’s research has implications for the contemporary museum and, in many ways, reflect changes to the way in which exhibitions were conceived and presented during the 2000s. In an era where culture is consumed by a wider public than ever before, and when museums are competing for their audiences with other experience realms, they are no longer perceived as merely repositories for objects but as active sites of experience. In 1994, educational theorist, Eilean HooperGreenhill identified this shift when she suggested that a new role had to be found for museums as they entered a new and rapidly growing world, that of the leisure and tourism industry dedicated to pleasure and consumerism. In a series of studies about the changing relationship between museums and their audiences, Hooper-Greenhill argued that, with the development of a very varied and professional leisure industry, it was possible to re-articulate a purpose for museums and galleries:-

“If museums are now clearly placed within the leisure industry, the public sees the form of leisure that museums represent as closely connected to learning, and linked to worthwhile and valuable experiences rather than trivial short-term thrills.”227

She identifies that there is a clear and consistent demand for a close and active encounter with objects and exhibits and a physical experience using all the senses. At a time when companies could no longer rely on competing simply on the quality of their products and services, they also had to compete on the quality of the experiences they offered to their

225

Joseph B. Pine and James H. Gilmore, The Experience Economy, Boston: Harvard Business Review Press, 2011: x.

226 Ibid.: x.

227 Eilean Hooper-Greenhill, Museums and their Visitors, London: Routledge, 1994: 2. 141

customers. Consumers were understood to desire explicitly designed and promoted experiences, the more memorable the better. This concept filtered down to the museum experience which started to offer a new kind of encounter, in which visitors were exposed to highly designed encounters, often incorporating performative and theatrical presentations.

During the 2000s, a number of exhibitions and installations at museums and galleries were notable in the way they created experiences which often brought the exhibition closer to a piece of immersive theatre. In 2004 the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern, London was transformed into a public space in which artist Olafur Eliasson presented an installation that created an extraordinary optical illusion. The Weather Project was the fourth in a series of commissions for the Hall by Unilever. It took the subject of the weather as the basis for exploring ideas about experience, mediation and representation. At one end of the hall was fixed a vast, semicircular disc made up of hundreds of mono-frequency lamps, with yellow and black as the only colours visible. This form was reflected upwards in hundreds of small mirrors that were hung from the ceiling to give the impression of an entire sphere of extraordinary luminosity. Each mirror was offset fractionally so that the upper edges of the form appeared blurred, tricking the eye into thinking that the effect was related to the light or the heat. The boundary between real and fictive space was further eroded by means of a fine mist that permeated the space, which seemed to be seeping in from the nearby River Thames. As visitors wandered through the space, they sat or lay down flat on the floor, either alone or with friends, in order to engage more fully with the experience.228

228

‘The Unilever Series: Olafur Eliasson: The Weather Project’, Tate website. Available at: https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/exhibition/unilever-series/unilever-series-olafur-eliasson-weather-project (Accessed 20.07.11).

Fig. 20: The Weather Project: Olafur Eliasson at Tate Modern, London, 16 October - 21 March 2004. The installation viewed from the ground level of the Turbine Hall.

In 2012, Rain Room at the Barbican Centre, London offered visitors a similar weather-related experience, a simulation of real rainfall. The exhibition was created by Hannes Koch, Florian Ortkrass and Stuart Wood, three design graduates from the Royal College of Art, London who went on to establish their own design studio, ‘Random International.’ In the Barbican’s exhibition space, ‘The Curve’, viewers of the exhibition walked through a one hundred square metre space of pouring rainfall, that operated through a digital simulation of the sounds, humidity and visual experience of rainfall, but without getting wet - the installation’s sensors shut off flow when they detected bodies below them. The audience’s response becomes a crucial part of the installation, as the rainfall responded to their reactions through motorised mirrors, and the audience becomes the subject of the artwork.229

229

‘Rain Room, Random International’, Barbican website. Available at: https://www.barbican.org.uk/rain-room-random-international (Accessed 20.07.11).

Fig. 21: Rain Room: Random International at The Curve, Barbican, London, 4 October 2012 - 3 March 2013.

The exhibition prompted unprecedented interest from the media with one critic describing it as an example of “how the role of digital technology is taking audience participation, response and interaction to the next level within the world of art.”230 Rain Room had a powerful social media presence, with more than 30,000 images and videos posted to Instagram with the hashtag #rainroom. The exhibition subsequently toured to New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, where tickets completely sold out.

In an article in Art Forum in 2013 Felicity Scott, Professor of Art and Architecture History at Columbia University, suggested that the popularity of Rain Room was due to its ability to “harness and reflect contemporary desire for seemingly direct ‘participation’ and spectacular forms of

230

Lucia Ruggiero, ‘Rain Room at London’s Barbican’, in Digital Meets Culture, 2012. Available at: http://www.digitalmeetsculture.net/article/rain-room-at-londons-barbican (Accessed 20.10.12).

exposure.”231 Other commentators also noted this shift towards accessibility and questioned whether smartphone photography was getting in the way of people looking and thinking about the art in front of them. Philip Kennicott, art critic for The Washington Post commented that such exhibitions invite visitors to treat them superficially because they are looking at the art through their phones rather than focusing on conscious, in-person deliberation. Ken Johnson of The New York Times, writing in 2013, remarked that Rain Room seems “little more than a gimmicky diversion.”232

Installations like The Weather Project and Rain Room support the view that increasingly exhibitions that encompass spectacular, immersive experiences are changing the museum experience, by offering a communal experience and a personal one. They translate into immediate photo opportunities on social media and it has been suggested that taking photographs of artworks and uploading to Instagram or Snapchat can be interpreted as a way for people to want to share what is important and meaningful to them.233 As the earlier discussion relating to learning theories explained (2.2), different people will achieve their most meaningful experience in a museum in various ways and social media can attract people who might otherwise rarely set foot inside a museum. The installations are also examples of exhibitions that are participatory in the sense that, through sound and movement, visitors are able to engage more closely with an artwork. They also show how the conditions of a given space provide the impetus for creating immersive experiences.

231

Felicity Scott, ‘Limits of Control: Rain Room and Immersive Environments’, Art Forum, September 2013. Available at: https://www.artforum.com/print/201307/limits-of-controlrain-room-and-immersive-environments-42636 (Accessed 20.11.13).

Philip Kennicott, ‘Newly scrubbed Renwick Gallery opens Friday’, The Washington

232 Post, 12 November 2015. Available at: https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/ museums/newly-scrubbed-renwick-gallery-opens-friday/2015/11/12/cd486116-88ad-11e59a07-453018f9a0ec_story.html?utm_term=.e86303ddf1c8 (Accessed 15.12.15).

233

Ken Johnson, ‘The Natural World: Here, It’s Had Work’, The New York Times, 30 May 2013. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/31/arts/design/expo-1-new-york-atmoma-ps1-and-other-sites.html? _r=0&mtrref=www.nytimes.com&gwh=C7AC2C06E3A37CB3C93C568F5C7CFA66&gwt= pay (Accessed 15.12.15).

In 2010 an exhibition on the work of British architect and designer John Pawson opened at the Design Museum, London. John Pawson: Plain Space (22 September 2010 - 30 January 2011) celebrated Pawson's career with models, film, photographs and architectural elements relating to some of his most important projects including the Cistercian Monastery of Our Lady of Nový Dvůr in the Czech Republic, the Sackler Crossing at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew and the Calvin Klein store on Madison Avenue, New York. Often described as a ‘minimalist’, Pawson is known for a rigorous process of reduction that creates designs of simplicity, grace and visual clarity.234 As well as the more conventional curated content of an architectural show, the design incorporated subtle changes to the gallery space itself to create an overall atmosphere that communicated Pawson’s aesthetic. In an interview for Dezeen shortly before the opening of the exhibition, Pawson said, “through the exhibition the viewer will get an in-depth look at my design process - from sketches and study models right through to a full scale installation.” At the heart of the exhibition was a site-specific 1:1 full-sized installation designed by Pawson which offered a direct ‘experience’ of his work, the first such installation at the museum.235

Fig. 22: 1:1 installation in John Pawson: Plain Space at the Design Museum, 22 September 2010 - 30 January 2011. Curated by Gemma Curtin. Exhibition design: John Pawson architects.

234

Design Museum website. Available at: https://designmuseum.org/designers/johnpawson (Accessed 15.12.15).

235

Rose Etherington, ‘John Pawson: Plain Space at the Design Museum’, Dezeen, 16 September 2010. Available at: https://designmuseum.org/designers/john-pawson (Accessed 15.12.15).

The exhibition attracted positive reviews and praise for the way in which the museum had attempted to solve the perennial problem of exhibiting architecture in a museum. But for one reviewer the installation, consisting of a blank white space with a barrel-vaulted ceiling fell short; “Its gauzy diffused light creates a cone of silence for introspection, but that falls apart when you sit on the benches. What are we supposed to do here? Stare at the person opposite you? Stare at the ground?”236

These new interventions in the museum and gallery space represent a new approach to curating exhibitions. Art critic, Boris Groys has discussed how art installations can be interpreted as Gesamtkunstwerks that are experienced only from within. The term, ‘Gesamtkunstwerk’ meaning a total work of art, was first introduced by the German composer, Richard Wagner in 1849.237 As Groys comments, this idea can be applied to the experience of being within an installation that “erases the border between stage and audience.” It transforms the viewer from being the “viewer” to being a part of the installation itself. The viewer experiences the piece from within, rather than experiencing the piece from the outside looking in.238 The new interventions also reference a cultural shift by museums towards an experience economy as a way to attract, engage and retain their visitors an as a way to reach new audiences. As Lisa Roberts has argued, they represent the notion that entertainment is not simply a stepping stone to education but a progenitor of the receptive state required for authentic learning to occur.239 The curator is constructing visitor experiences that promote engagement and which generate personal connections between visitors and the content of an exhibition.

236

Jennifer Kabat, ‘Reviews: John Pawson’, Frieze, 1 January 2011. Available at: https:// frieze.com/article/john-pawson (Accessed 15.12.15).

Boris Groys, ‘Entering the Flow: Museum between Archive and Gesamtkunstwerk’, e-

237 flux Journal 50, December 2013.

238

Ibid.: Available at: https://www.e-flux.com/journal/50/59974/entering-the-flow-museum-between-archive-and-gesamtkunstwerk/ (Accessed 15.12.15)

239

Lisa C. Roberts, From Knowledge to Narrative: Educators and the Changing Museum, Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997: 79.