Te Hīkoi Toi: packed to the rafters

This article about Unhinged: Opening the Door to the Dowse Collection was first published in the Dominion Post.

The Dowse Art Museum in Lower Hutt is inside out. A third of its art collection, normally snug in dark crates behind closed doors, is exhibited in its ground floor galleries. Paintings hang, sometimes three or four layers high on the walls; ceramics cluster on plinths; and sculptures drop from the ceiling.

The new show, Unhinged: Opening the Door to the Dowse Collection, is a radical solution to an organisational problem. The Dowse is refurbishing and improving its collection storage and, because so much of the collection was out of its cases and needed to stay out while the work was finished, they decided it would go on display.

When and how to exhibit the works in an art collection is an ongoing, complex question for museums and galleries. When Te Papa opened in 1998 – at the time a controversial amalgamation of the National Art Gallery and the National Museum – it was criticised (amongst other things) for the small number of artworks from the collection that were on display at any time, and their diluted presentation amongst exhibitions of wider material culture and social history.

Conversely, university art collections, such as those at Te Herenga Waka Victoria University and Auckland University often have works that are permanently on display, constantly seen by many eyeballs, and their exposure to light and bodies has to be carefully managed.

I live near the Dowse and visit all the time; I feel a local’s affinity to its collection. Works from that collection are often curated in a theme for the excellent kid-focussed galleries upstairs, or are displayed in a succinct sliver in a corridor-like gallery downstairs. These small exhibitions riff off one idea or specific medium – drawing, photography, artists from a specific period – and bring them together into a tightly focussed show.

Unhinged is, by necessity, the opposite to this style of curation. There are more than 1000 works packed into many galleries – sculptures and paintings and fashion design and jewellery and ceramics – all from different time periods.

In many of the spaces the works are grouped into aesthetic categories. The ‘Room with a View’ gallery brings together landscape paintings, and ‘The Enchanted Garden’ includes floral-themed works. Everywhere, there are wonderful works to discover: a bright, geometric carpet by Gordon Crook, or the spiky beauty of Lonnie Hutchinson’s sculptures.

In the main gallery, this curatorial structure falls away and this space is simply, ‘Everything, Everywhere, All at Once’, with sculptures on the floor, hanging from the ceiling, and paintings and photography packed on the walls, salon style. This large gallery hums with activity; there’s so much to look at that it’s hard to see anything.

I recognised some works, but many were new to me. Because of the number of works on show, there are no wall labels. To find the name of an artist or work, you have to go to the catalogue that hangs at the entrance to each space. I soon gave up going back and forth, preferring to simply stand and look.

What is a collection item? Is it solely the object itself? Or is it also its provenance, described by metadata: date, creator, materials, the context of creation? Interpretive words usually crowd around art in galleries, but in Unhinged, the works are stripped of their contextual information and instead gather meaning from the works that jostle around them.

The effect is to depoliticise the collection in favour of a bustling, unconventional hang that prioritises aesthetic. But, an art collection is political. Whose work is collected? Whose work gets shown? And alongside what? Whose money paid for it? Was an object stolen from another country or culture? And should it be given back? I missed this context, and having access to this would have enriched the show.

Western galleries around the world are negotiating the fact that their collections are mostly made up of art by white men (a peer-reviewed 2019 study of data from 18 major US museums, for example, found that 85% of the collected artists were white, and 87% were men), and this fact is often foregrounded in recent collection rehangs. A recently opened collection show at the Tate Britain has made much of its representation of women artists and, closer to home, Christchurch Art Gallery’s current collection exhibition, Perilous: Untold Stories from the Collection, is marketed as “making room for fresh voices, untold narratives and disruptive ideas”.

Unhinged runs counter to this curatorial current. There are no troubling statistics, revisionist pronouncements, or narratives uncovered by this show. There is, undoubtedly, a lot of fantastic art. A full third of a civic art collection on display is a gambit that raises many questions about the nature of art collections, but it is also a unique visual spectacle, freewheeling, slightly wild, and really fun to look at.