Art Gallery’s Role In Society

Press, Volume CV, Issue 30998, 2 March 1966, Page 18

Art Gallery’s Role In Society

A survey had shown that more people visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York than all the baseball stadiums combined, said Mr G. Docking, the recently-appointed director of the Auckland City Aid Gallery, in a public lecture last evening.

Mr Docking, whose lecture was entitled “The Public Gallery and the Public,” is in Christchurch as judge of the 1966 Hay Prize. He said art galleries were finding it increasingly difficult to satisfy the needs of the gallep'-going public. “Galleries are finding themselves in the position of contributing towards conflicting values and the scattering of experience.” With science and technology as their chief source, new images kept pouring into the world, but art gallery policy tended to exclude them, remaining devoted to “true” art—the “Sweet” or the representational. “Haven From Stresses”

“Rather than a force for shaping life, the public gallery has become, for many people, a haven from stresses,” Mr Docking said. The split between the arts and the sciences, which indicated “the basic schizophrenia of society,” had seeped into the gallery from a thousand outside sources.

To the “absolutist” notion of a gallery containing only “true”art, he opposed the pragmatic view, which saw

the gallery’s function as “to serve us here and now."

This, he said, was a living gallery, holding the past and the present together, and not imposing the past on the present. “A living gallery provides us with the means to keep our experience of change and movement coherent and unified.”

Such a gallery was not, in shape, a Baroque palace, nor a pared-down nineteenth-cen-tury version of it. The architecture of a living gallery adapted itself to each period it represented.

The living gallery could be used to help bring into focus the “bewildering blur” of a rapidly-changing world. “Such galleries are evolving in many countrites, but in New Zealand none is yet taking shape,” Mr Docking said.