Standards for touring exhibitions / Museums & Galleries Commission.

  • Great Britain. Museums and Galleries Commission.
Date:
1995
Catalogue details

Licence: Open Government Licence

Credit: Standards for touring exhibitions / Museums & Galleries Commission. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    9/128 (page 7)
    The Standards are concerned with what action needs to be taken and, to a limited extent, with why that action is necessary. How to carry out the action is a much larger task than can be attempted here. In general, advice and information on how to achieve these standards will be available in the Touring Exhibitions Group’s forthcoming Manual of Touring Exhibitions, which is designed to complement these Standards and which will be published by Butterworth-Heinemann in 1995. The Touring Exhibitions Group is a membership body affiliated to the Museums Association. It aims to improve the status, provision and standards of touring exhibitions, by campaigning and lobbying and by publishing and improving the exchange of information about exhibitions. DEFINITIONS Artist means living practitioners and subsumes craftspeople and other people who consider themselves as ‘exhibitors’ with a close interest in the way that the objects they have made are displayed and interpreted. The artist is considered largely as a lender [24], rather than an organiser of exhibitions (which is covered by Debbie Duffin, Organising Your Exhibition, The Self-Help Guide, 1992, AN Publications, Artic Producers Publishing Co Ltd, PO Box 23, Sunderland, SR4 6DG). Exhibit means the individual items which comprise the exhibition (and not the whole exhibition, as in American usage); it distinguishes the artefact or specimen from the display and packaging materials and equipment, which are also integral parts of an exhibition. Lender has been used mainly from the point of view of public collections, but should also be relevant in a wider sense by providing general guidance for commercial organisations and private individuals lending to exhibitions. Museums should be expected to meet the standards laid down for lenders, but other types of lender may also aspire to many of the procedures. A lender may not be the owner. Organiser has been used to indicate the institution responsible for any aspect of an exhibition outside its own place of showing. Where a tour is a collaboration, ‘organiser’ is used to signify the institution taking the lead or responsibility for a particular aspect of the exhibition. When dealing with a lender, the organiser is clearly a borrower, but this word has not been used to avoid confusion. Touring has been used, in preferenceto ‘travelling’ or ‘circulating’, to indicate exhibitions that are designed from the outset to be seen in premises other than the organiser’s. The term ‘touring’ is intended to cover equally the major exhibition shared with perhaps one other place of showing, and the low-value exhibition which circulates to a large number of small venues. Venue has been used to denote the recipient who hosts an exhibition from another source; in a collaboration where work is shared, it means any partner not directly responsible for the area under consideration in that Standard.