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Archives & Museum Informatics
2000

New Voices, New Links: Artist-Museum Collaborations on the Web

Session: Not Just the Collection Database: Deeper Different Stuff

This presentation will reflect on the value of the artist interview on the Internet as primary research in the context of the National Gallery of Canada, and suggest its pertinence in animating and interpreting works of art by living artists. These ideas come out of a process of developing content related to the post-1960 and contemporary collections for the Gallery's new multi-media Web and on-site project, CyberMuse.

Recorded interviews with artists are not new to the museum context, but their distribution has always been marginal. Their greater accessibility on the Internet could integrate the artist more thoroughly into museum programming, so that the interview is no longer a videocassette collecting dust on the shelf. Internet technology allows the audience to engage with artists on different levels as they explore the permanent collection. This step towards providing a sense of process can be seen as extending out of the artist's talk tradition, but with its content and form adjusted to provide an interactive experience for the viewer.

On CyberMuse, as on many museum sites, material is not evenly developed, but has pockets of depth. I will illustrate the CyberMuse context within which the artist interview is situated and show selections from interviews with Claes Oldenburg, James Rosenquist and Renee Van Halm. I will also describe practical issues related to the time and resources required to produce artists' interviews and comment on preparatory research, production time-lines and post-production issues. The presentation will include a comparison with other sites, such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York where a series of telephone interviews with contemporary artists are available.

Links to artists' sites and to other institutions have the potential to complement the artist interview by providing additional interpretative material about contemporary works of art. Like the interview, a link to an artist's site is a way of giving the artist greater voice in the critical discussion of his or her work. I will present some samples of Web sites created by artists in the National Gallery's collection and suggest how these might be integrated into the CyberMuse context. I would also like to spark discussion about other forms of relationship that technology could promote within the museum, such as support for the production of new on-line artworks.

The final section of this presentation will explore the potential of the artist interview and related collaborations to enable a more fluid relationship between artist and museum and to enhance the viewer's understanding of artworks and their context.