ANOTHER WHITE ELEPHANT BITES THE
DUST
I visited the New Art Gallery in
Walsall recently and was disturbed to hear that its continued existence is
threatened. It wasn’t the fact of the art works having to be rehoused, an
expensive and insurance-demanding exercise, since the Garman Ryan collection is
housed in several small rooms on the ground floor and could be found a site
elsewhere, but the vast empty walls and spaces the gallery contains and the
sheer expense of maintaining such large heated spaces. What will happen to
them?
The building won awards for the
architects Caruso St John and cost 21 million to build. Much of this was public
funding. It opened in Jan 2000, so it was very much a Millenium project.
Sixteen years later it seems set to close, or change from a gallery into –
what?
When I visited there were thirty
staff employed, they told me, which outnumbered the visitors by three to one.
We visited midweek, during a school holiday, and all the people there seemed to
be in the coffee shop. In the atrium, a vast, unused space, I had a feeling the
place was already closing down. The architects made a feature of the lofty
proportions of their design but I saw only a huge waste of space.
The exhibits
occupy only a tiny amount of the wall and exhibition space. Cosy it’s not, but
I didn’t expect that. I did expect to be able to find my way round the
galleries, and was irritated to find that the stair bypasses the second-floor
gallery (or was it the first floor?)
Either way, I found it confusing and
impersonal, under used and having little to say to the local population. I’m
told that students do use it, and so they should, for the Garman-Ryan
collection alone, which has some very fine Epsteins as well as Sally Ryan’s
beautiful bronzes and artifacts from all over the world. It also contains work
by Freud, Monet, Van Gogh, Picasso, Modigliani, Turner, and Degas among others.
But it needs more. The atrium is
underused, I’d say, and maybe health and safety would object to items suspended
from the ceiling, but surely a mobile or two or a neon installation might make
the place seem less dead. Minimalism
has had its day, I’d say. Let’s bring a bit of life back to Art – maybe even
humour, texture, content – and see what happens. I saw nothing there that would
make me want to come back for a second look, beyond the central collection.
I hope this white elephant can be saved from
the knacker’s yard, but I fear the worst.
