Ancr
	Interview with Peter Jenkinson, 18.08.98
	PJ I'm Peter Jenkinson, the Director of The New Art Gallery Walsall.
	AP What we would like you to do Peter is fill us in on where The New Art Gallery came from and what it is?
	PJ The New Art Gallery has got a really long history and its been nearly a century in the making. The first plan for an art gallery was in 1903, when a very grand Town Hall was built. It was a National Architectural competition, won by a London Architect and if you look at the plans in the local history centre now you will see a very grand art gallery as part of that scheme. But it never happened, we don't know why. In the 1960's there was another plan for an art gallery, an art centre, and that was built next to the library, which is a Carnegie funded building of 1908. But within a very short amount of time what was planned to be a very forward thinking art centre soon became mainly a library. Another attempt occurred in the mid 1980's. At that time the then Labour administration in the Local Authority had a very visionary plan which was called Walsall 2000. So they were already thinking of the millennium in the mid 1980's and they mounted one of the most consultative programmes that a local authority in Britain has ever undertaken and bravely, I think, they went out and asked people what they were doing, how they had a good night out, what they wanted in terms of culture for the future and it took a very long time. Two key results came out of that in terms of infrastructure. One was a new arts and media centre, which was to be based on a cultural industries model, which would not just accept the top down culture that we've become use to in Britain for many centuries, but would actually encourage the creation of cultural product by local people in Walsall, in terms of photography, visual arts, fashion and textiles. But more interestingly in terms of the new industries, or relatively new industries, of music and new technologies. And a sister or brother project of that was a New Art Gallery and that's when I first came in in 1989 and that was my first job. Within a few months we mounted an architectural competition by invitation and eventually appointed some London based architects called Levitte Burstein to develop a scheme, opposite the existing gallery, which was to take an old merchant's house, a leather merchant's house - because Walsall is the home of the British Fine Leather industry - and to build a new home behind that. The key reason for wanting that gallery was to create a new home for this extraordinary collection in Walsall, the Garman Ryan collection, which is like an A to Z of European art. Its got work by Van Gogh, Monet, Manet Matisse, Picasso, Pissarro - the list is quite amazing. People can't believe that Walsall has these things of quality, because of the kind of place it is seen to be in the outside world. But apart from this list of grand names, what is really special about it is that its a family collection and its based on the family of Sir Jacob Epstein. It was created, unusually, by two women. Most collections are created by men, and its a very domestic, intimate, very personal collection that includes all of the children of Epstein, in sculpture, and the grandchildren and even the family cat and dog, which gives a very intimate kind of atmosphere. And all the friends and very close friends of Epstein are also in the collection. So that was the main thrust of the gallery then. Sadly, the Garage Arts and Media Centre opened and within a very short time was closed. Walsall is a choppy sea when it comes to politics - it does tend to change political administration very often, between the Labour administration and the Conservative administration, and this was the result of political change that the Garage closed. Equally, the New Art Gallery at that time was developed to a final design stage, we have piles and piles of plans and was ready to build and the notorious poll tax came in and it was postponed.
	AP Postponed is another word for....?
	PJ Killed. But you can already see that throughout the century there has been a sense of wanting to do something about the art gallery.
	AP Could you tell us something of the impetus behind that art gallery that they wanted to build in the 19th century and the art gallery that you are building now, the New Art Gallery that you're building now?
	PJ I think its completely different. The current gallery has come about through a coalition of many agendas and many people who don't normally agree actually agreeing on something and it was at the forefront, to begin with, of Walsall's bid for Government regeneration cash, under a Conservative administration in the early 1990's - and that was City Challenge. It was basically a challenge fund which was intended for the local authorities to have £37.5 million over five years to generate private sector investment of several hundred million to get a very large scale regeneration project under way. Unusually Walsall put the Gallery right at the front of the bid to the then Conservative Government and it won. So, regeneration, from the very beginning, has been a very important part of the New Art Gallery and there are many people, particularly in the business community, who see the development of it as being crucial to changing images about Walsall as a place and about increasing the attractiveness of the Borough and the town as a retail and business place for investment. And we can see just a few years later with the Gallery under way that that is actually happening - its almost a model of regeneration in terms of the way that the gallery has kick started debate and investment and its the trigger for that.
	It has to be said that Walsall has a very negative image nationally and regionally and is seen very much as industrial and dirty and in fact these kind of terms that are applied to it are far removed from the reality of the place. But we all know that it takes a very long time to shift perceptions of places. The Gallery, in a sense, with its focus on a forward looking, almost radical, scheme in terms of architecture and design, is stepping away from the heritage mould which has characterised views of Walsall in the past. But there are many other agendas, one of the key ones, from the Gallery staff, is changing peoples perceptions of what galleries can be. For the last decade the team here has pioneered initiatives in increasing access to the arts for a broad range of audiences and we often say that Walsall's gallery reaches the audiences that many other galleries don't reach. Because if you were to go there any Saturday you would see the most amazing range of people in there, young and old, black and white and so on - its fantastic and we are only just beginning to go along that road. We don't believe any longer that galleries are just for the few. For most people, in this country at least, galleries are an alienating experience and for most people they choose not to use them, even today. We don't believe that is the case and believe that people are much more sophisticated and much more capable of dealing with very challenging art and with the experience of galleries, if the context is right - and if there are ways of mediating the experience within galleries. We've particularly focused on children as a very high priority audience we believe that young ones in this country have a very, very poor experience culturally and galleries can contribute quite significantly to their lives. And so children for the last six years have been our top priority. Two years ago we held Britain's first Art exhibition, interactive art exhibition, for 3 to 5 year olds. The funding system rejected it initially, and now everyone is trying to catch up on it. We had 14,000 children through in 10 weeks. Two staff went down with chicken pox as a result. It was quite fantastic but it just showed that even the youngest citizens of this country can engage with the visual arts if approached in the right way. That show took 3 years to develop. Currently we have an exhibition that's the follow up, that's looking at contemporary art and social history for the very young again, but for ages 3 to 103. Because we then realised, in doing this, that actually children will bring parents and carers and grandparents and there's fantastic cross generational work going on.
	We believe very strongly in people's rights to culture and the United Nation’s declaration which says everyone has the right to culture. We are nowhere near that, and we are also very strong supporters of Article 31, the United Nation’s declaration on the rights of the child, which again says that all children will have access to culture. I think that in Britain and across the world this is nowhere near the case. Of course, there has to be a sophisticated debate on what we mean by culture. That's the kind of gallery perspective on what we wanted. We realised that we were in a building that was way past its sell-by date, access is appalling, you have to push - if you have a child in a pushchair, or you use sticks, or you have heavy shopping, or you're a wheelchair user - you have to push through seven sets of heavy doors to get to a lift which is so tiny a lot of people can't get in it. There are stairs throughout the building, there is no dedicated education space, or space for interactivity. There is very little storage and so on and so on. A tale of woe. We did consider staying in the building, but after a long study decided we had to move.
	The other agenda that's very, very strong is the community agenda in Walsall. As a Borough it has pioneered the moves over the last few decades to bring local government closer to local people. The council itself recognises that it has a very, very long way to go in that, and we've only just had elections where the turn out was 27%, so a lot of people are saying that the council doesn't matter, that we don't believe in local democracy. But it was the first council in the country to set up neighbourhood offices, it was the first council in the country to set up community associations, which were schools and community centres in the same building, and a lot of the resource traditionally has gone out to local level. Currently its going through a big change where its now setting up local committees and local democracy is going deeper and deeper. Deeper than any other borough has ever attempted in this country, so it is very interesting. From the very beginning then, community was a very important aspect of the Gallery and one of the ways in which, particularly the Labour members of the local authority, could begin to understand how an art gallery might contribute. Again, education was one of the biggest areas of that. We undertook a very broad consultation, both formally and informally, over several years in advance of finalising the funding package and one of the biggest questions was what about the kids? What are we going to do about the kids? And we can now answer some of those questions.
	So we've got the business agenda, we've got the Gallery agenda, we've got the community agenda, which I could go on for hours but I won't - clearly, we also have a peer group and a funding system that also had to get on board, if you like. And they all have their own criteria for choosing whether to invest in something or not and in developing the Gallery we had to be aware of that - and I'm not just talking about the lottery rules, although they are interesting in themselves. From the beginning, because of all these different agendas and people who normally didn't talk to each other, we realised that we had to get people to talk together to make things go forward. The experience, particularly of the Garage Arts and Media Centre, where it became a political football in one particular election campaign, was one that was very, very painful and one that we didn't want to repeat. So from the beginning we began to encourage people from different political parties and from different social positions to try and come and join with the project. We set up an advisory group that tried to do this with members of the business community, members of the council, educationalists and community representatives and it took the project forward to some extent, in steering it for several years from about early 1994. Without that I think we'd have been in trouble, if we'd just gone along one track and tried to do that.
	From the beginning the brief for the gallery was that it would be about excellence. That we would not accept second best any longer and we can see in Walsall's post war infrastructure the physical reminders of that classic British compromise that always happens, the cutting corners, the cheapening. We always accept second best - we have chosen to do that. What we wanted here was something that was genuinely world class, of international significance, that in a sense put Walsall on the map, that was quite extraordinary in what it was trying to say, in what it was trying to achieve. An interesting comparison can be made with the Town Hall that was built in 1903. Its an extraordinarily expensive building. We couldn't afford to build at that quality today, I mean its just amazing, and why did they build this building? They were saying that Walsall matters, its an important place. Nicely all the workers of the borough are carved around the building, so it also has a sense of place - the leather worker there with the saddle and the glass maker and the metal worker, they are all carved in there. Men and women workers. Really important, and its still here today. We want this building, the New Art Gallery, to be around for a century at least and still be there. And the way its developed I think it definitely will be, its so strong. So excellence, not second best. But equally, part of the brief was that it would be a national model of accessibility to the arts and that it would demonstrate how people of all kinds could engage with the visual arts in ways that we now know about and ways that we don't know about because we haven't tried them yet. And that is a really exciting journey to go on, because we are only just beginning to understand what is possible. And a lot of people would say you can't put excellence and access together because it immediately suggests that you are dumbing down, that you're reducing the experience. And we reject that completely and would say that despite the protestations of politicians of all parties and, sort of, burnt out critics, we are very ill served in this country by critics of the arts and of architecture perhaps. That people are engaging with visual arts and with galleries in greater numbers than ever before. More people go to galleries than go to football matches and particularly in younger generations the numbers are increasing very dramatically. We have all got stories of, say the Tate Gallery in London having to close its doors because it just can't get people in. Its a very exciting time.
	AP That happened to Walsall once didn't it?
	PJ Yes, well that was Boy George, can you remember that? Queuing to get in. Having to let them in 20 at a time, this was brilliant, police control, 20 in at a time.
	AP Its great though, because it was Brenda and Other Stories.
	PJ Yes, it was an exhibition on HIV and AIDS, yes.
	AP And HIV tests went up in Walsall.
	PJ 30%. At the Manor Hospital, yes, it was amazing. I think that's important. Because it is important that we don't shy away from issues in society. The gallery can also play a role in raising issues that are difficult to raise in other places. The exhibition on HIV and AIDS is a classic example of that. So we want to be provocative, we want to be challenging. I think there is a sense when we talk about access people imagine that everything is going to be happy clappy and cuddlable. It doesn't have to be that, I think we can also be quite stimulating and kick out some of the cobwebs.
	I just want to talk about architecture as well because I think that's interesting in terms of access and excellence. There was a very early aspiration to have architectural distinction and the site that was chosen for the Gallery, which has been a corner stone of this regeneration programme in Walsall's Town Centre, was basically a blank canvas, it could have been anything. The developers had made a model of the retail scheme at the top of Walsall's main street and they put the gallery next to it . A very low, flat, squat building, with a kind of 1980's atrium, allowing a view through to the canal basin. We knew we didn't want that. We had no idea what we did want. Very early on there was this commitment to open it up to competition and the brief makes it quite clear that we wanted to encourage new ideas, we wanted to work with architects who would work with us to develop the ideas. But it was this idea of wanting to achieve architectural distinction at that stage that was another key area of the foundations of the development of the gallery.
	AP That's one of the things that I wanted to ask you, you've got various agendas. But how do you translate those into a brief to create a building and how do you decide how to chose your architects?
	PJ Exactly. I think we in some senses abandoned that 19th century cultural missionary position about wanting to convert the masses to art and, you know, by bringing people into the gallery you thereby make them a better person. I think we have abandoned that approach because it didn't work, it just didn't work. However, we can look at all the agendas, all the people that we have to try and excite or interest or gain the support of for the Gallery and begin to imagine the ways that each of those sectors, each of those groups of people would choose to come into the gallery and use different spaces. To some extent I think we have achieved that, but we have also made priorities in the space. It’s no accident that the education spaces, the three storey children's house, is the first thing that you see as you come in the doors. That's quite deliberate because we wanted to emphasise the - broadly speaking - educational role of the Gallery. Its as much an educational as it is cultural project. In the 19th century when they still had the missionary position, the steps up and the columns and the rotweillers behind the desks, there were no education spaces. In the 20th century what has had to happen, as education has become more important, is that they've carved out informal store rooms and offices in the basement, places that are now education spaces. They've got hosed down surfaces because children are smelly and dirty, and they've got lights that burn your hair off - there are no windows, its a second class experience and we really wanted to reverse that in the New Art Gallery and bring it upstairs and put it right in your face. Then we know that the home for the collection is absolutely core to the Gallery and that's on the next level and then the education space is on the top level. This multi-functional space, with the restaurant and the conference space and the winter garden and the roof top terrace - which at that level is of most interest to the business community, who are desperate for somewhere to show off, somewhere to take clients, somewhere to have receptions and parties, a product launch. But on the other hand we will be using that for children's parties not so that we're competing with McDonalds but, you know, we'll get a wedding licence for the building and you can throw your bouquet off the roof top terrace. You can have your retirement party there. You can use the building in all kinds of ways and to me that's the beauty of it. You can play with this building and people can use it just as they want to.
	AP But that is this building. What I am interested in is how you made a choice that is was this building, because you actually had 80 plus submissions from architectural practices? So you must have decided that there was a process that you were going to follow in order to make the choice of who would build the building and you must have thought about that. What did you think?
	PJ We weren't alone and again, in the spirit of partnership, we had made a selection panel and it took six months, the architectural competition. We tried to have a range of expertise and local accountability within the architectural competition. At that stage Walsall had a hard left administration and we had three Labour councillors, we had the architect of the Royal Opera House Jeremy Dixon and another architect David Chipperfield, a Professor of architecture from Birmingham University Oscar Nanamier, and an architect from the local authority Ken Siddle, the Countess of Arlie, who is the niece of the co-founder of the Garman Ryan collection Sally Ryan, David Carver, a local industrialist, myself... essentially, it was a very broad range of people - the artist, Bill Woodrow was another one. A very broad range of people coming to look at these submissions, all with differing levels of architectural and design expertise. And it was an ideas competition so that's what we were most interested in, was the expression of ideas. We didn't necessarily want to see wonderful sophisticated models and virtual reality simulations, we wanted ideas. And by saying that and by actually not allowing a lot of the usual display media that are used in architectural competitions we enabled younger and lesser known practices to come through. Because some of the larger practices will have big competition offices, or competition teams in their offices. They are used to doing competitions, they put people on to it. In some of these practices that we had there were only 2, 3 or 4 people in the practice. They can't afford to enter these competitions. Very often they are unpaid. So, we wanted to enable that to happen, and we were very interested in what people wrote. From the first stage we selected 6 people for the second stage of the competition and they were then able to go away and work up their ideas in more detail. Really exciting ideas. There was one practice that talked about having a 24 hour bar-cafe, a tattoo parlour, a laundrette and artists allotments on the roof - and then you come along and throw your washing in the washing machine and go and see an exhibition, or have that emblem of regeneration, the cappuccino in the roof top restaurant.
	But we didn't choose them. We chose Caruso St John because they were so responsive to the brief. They were particularly responsive to the Garman Ryan collection. They were very interested in the ideas of interactivity and education and they really responded to Walsall as a place. A lot of the architects initially had turned their backs on the retail, as if it was somehow this awful, ugly thing that they didn't want to deal with. It was somehow art and every day life should not mix and they literately turned their backs on the retail and built the gallery away from it. Caruso St John didn't do that, they actually embraced the idea of an art gallery at the top of the town as part of every day life and what we now see, which they were first to propose, was a gallery of many windows, which, without being forced about it, makes a connectedness with the town and with the wider area. Which is something that I think is fantastic about the Gallery, as well as flooding the Gallery with natural light, which also, even when you walk around it now, in its early stages, makes it feel so much fresher and a completely different experience to many other galleries that block the light out. We were convinced by the approach of Caruso St John, because it was the approach we were looking at, as well as the ideas. They did come forward with some very bold ideas and the model they bought forward for Stage Two of the competition is very similar to what we see today - but we were quite convinced that they would be able to work collaboratively with us. As soon as they were appointed in the Autumn of '96 we began a 6 months period of briefing sessions where we would go, with the gallery staff and Caruso St John, through the building, stage by stage, talking about what we wanted to happen in each area, what kind of things would happen, the opening hours, what kind of furniture, equipment and so on. Just to get a sense of what would be happening, how things interconnected and so on and so on. And things changed. The exhibition galleries were initially on the first floor and the Garman Ryan galleries were on the second and third floors. We swopped those around. The idea of the Children's House has changed and become more prominent. So some things have changed, but in general the big ideas have stayed the same.
	AP And this sense of a team, that really is a team, rather than islands connected but not actually working in any integrated kind of way. That’s very important?
	PJ Very, very important. And its also been important to have architects who listen. Caruso St John committed very early on to talking to the public and there were some public meetings where they shared their ideas and they agreed to come back and tell them what the results were. Because again consultation has been a very important part of the project. But its critical to say that - there's consultation and consultation isn't there? - and you can very often consult just to get the answers you want and we may have done that, but I don’t believe we did. But when we consulted it wasn’t consulting on design, and we made that very clear at the beginnings of the meetings that Caruso St John participated in, that we were not prepared to talk about design - in terms of the overall design of the gallery. Because why, otherwise, had we been through this long, long process of an architectural competition to bring in architects who were to have the skills, the expertise, the experience, the imagination to design a gallery for us. And there's a cliche that you can’t design by committee, but if you open up the idea of what the building is or it’s design to ten people, they'll have ten different views, quite often, and the pitiful lack of architecture and design education in schools, and further on, means that, very often, we don't have the tools to discuss architecture, other than on a very basic level. And we would have just laid ourselves open to the most unhelpful debates for everyone. It would have been, “Oh, its just modern, its like a tower block”. You can just imagine. What we did want to consult on was how people felt they would like to use the building, what they would want to do in it, the opening times. All of those things affect very significantly on the design and that was really interesting that they were prepared to listen and they were at the more focussed sessions on education, access and so on.
	PJ Well I am amazed there has been no huge public debate. I imagined, particularly, as the Gallery rose into the sky, that there would be at least some people who chose not to like it. And I am very disappointed to find there's been no big fuss about it, because that would have been quite exciting and the kind of comment there has been, certainly locally and, of course there has been massive national coverage of it already, has been immensely supportive and excited. And I think it comes back to that, kind of, trying to root the gallery in Walsall in these different kind of constituencies of interest. But why, I don’t know why. I can imagine what I would say if I wanted to start a debate going. Maybe its still to come.
	AP What would you say?
	PJ Well, the concrete tower block one would be the first one. Like, not another one, you know. The way people used to use the word modernist, or, its like the l960’s again and so on and so on, you know, those kind of dead end debates.
	AP I know this is completely subjective, but I think what happens to people when they see the building though is that the whole pursuit of excellence has paid off because people are so gob smacked by how beautiful it is and the people of Walsall I've talked to are just so proud of it, already.
	PJ We advertised this one tour to take people around, and it is lucky for us that the builders are allowing public tours. We have already booked it out eleven times and the phone has not stopped ringing. People really want to come through. And they're really not just people piling in who know about architecture. These are genuinely local people who are coming through, which is just fantastic.
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