News Review Storr Lecture

One clear message from Robert Storr

A brief review of some main points from Robert Storr's Deutsche Bank Lecture, 2004 Walters Prize, Auckland Art GAllery, October, 2004.

(We don't need huge art exhibitions that leave us collapsing exhausted onto the gallery café table.)

How amazing it was for all concerned to have New York curator, artist and academic Robert Storr blaze into New Zealand for what was effectively about a 60 hour visit to judge the 2004 Walters Prize.

Acknowledging the tenacity of AAG director Chris Saines in securing his visit to New Zealand, Storr took the opportunity while he was here to see galleries and studios, present the Deutsche Bank Lecture and meet artists and collectors.

The day after announcing Et Al. had been awarded the Walters Prize, Storr gave his lecture to a packed gallery of people, in which he implored the art audience to slow down and take time to look at art. "To see beauty," he says, " take the time."

With over 700 galleries in New York alone, the huge growth in large scale and world wide biennales, with the art market growing so fast, with more and more happening, with the art world becoming increasingly inclusive and opening up to previously segregated groups, but with "no one yet satisfied", Storr asks one question.

"How do you deal with this dilemma?"

The easy position, he says, is to state that something has got to go - but what? It might seem natural, he claims, to chop the very things you will not miss. So painters who feel crowded out by new media say, for example, 'let's get video out of museums.'

But Storr believes you cannot take this position. The issue, he says, is more with TIME than SPACE. The decision to take is where to spend your available time when so much is on offer.

He states quite clearly his position is this: "Don't skip the difficult - avoid chopping the things you dislike. It is best to be a painter looking at the best video art on offer than a painter looking at the 3rd or 4th best painting on offer… It's a question of quantity vs quality."

He thinks it is fine to come into a gallery and find only one thing you like, while you dislike the rest because, he says, the next time you visit you might rediscover that the thing you didn't like looks better now than the thing you first liked.

"Let's make exhibitions people can actually see," he says. "Choose fewer things that demonstrate the rule and include some exceptions to the rule as well."

He supports the creation of exhibitions with form and focus so that viewers do not collapse exhausted to the café table, beaten by the infinity of choices offered to them in the fun fair of the over sized art exhibition.

"Let things sink in," he says. Allow and encourage visitors to linger, rather than dart about, moving in packs. "We want people to meander," he says.

"People shouldn't come to museums to be quiet, they are public places where debates can occur in the presence of art objects, to discuss, accept or reject proposals, to engage in dialogue."

His comments were fitting at the time of the Walters Prize announcement, as the aim of the event is to encourage debate and discussion. The presentation of the Walters Prize exhibition itself, with four complete and independent installations, I suspect, would have also pleased Storr. He is a curator who enjoys the multiplicity of art practice and the opportunity to interact with art, to see something fresh, to think and work through engaging issues.
The Walters Prize is on at the New Gallery, Auckland Art Gallery, Kitchener Street, Auckland until 28 November 2004.