The Goodison Room hosts three special displays per year. These adopt different approaches to the rest of the Collection displays and address a different range of issues, including questions of interpretation and manufacture of artworks and assumptions about art, art history and the museum.
This display was devised by Germaine Greer, and developed from some of the ideas presented in her recent book of the same name. It looked at ways representations of young males have been used by artists as symbols of innocence and ideals of beauty.
Donald Rodney was one of the most innovative and versatile artists of his generation. Born and raised in Birmingham, he was profoundly affected by encounters with artists such as Keith Piper, Eddie Chambers, Marlene Smith and Claudette Johnson, who were re-examining social and historical narratives from a black perspective.
His work became increasingly politicised, appropriating images from the mass media, art and popular culture to explore issues associated with history, representation, masculinity and the pernicious nature of racism. He later became interested in examining his experience of sickle cell anaemia, which he used as a metaphor for wider social and political ills in contemporary society.
This display marked Tate Archive’s acquisition of Donald Rodney’s papers, an extraordinarily diverse collection of sketchbooks, correspondence, audio-visual material, and printed ephemera documenting the artist’s work from the early 1980s.
During the Anthony Caro exhibition, the Goodison Room was used as an interpretation space complementing the exhibition that dominated the adjacent Duveen galleries.
John Berger's Ways of Seeing was a series of four television programmes broadcast by the BBC early in 1972 and a book published in the same year. Addressing issues of class, sex and cultural value head-on, Ways of Seeing made a vital contribution to contemporary thinking about art, and has been a crucial influence on generations of artists, critics and cultural commentators. It opened the way to a more politically aware experience of art for everyone, and raised questions which remain relevant today. This display presented a rare opportunity to see the original programmes, and presented archival materials to explore the creation and reception of this historically significant broadcast and publication. It coincided and was coordinated with a Berger season on the South Bank.
Tate Archive recently acquired the archives of the Outsider Art collection. To mark the occasion, this display drew on that archive and on the collection itself in order to address the concept of ‘outsider art’ and introduced works which have been defined as being beyond the bounds of ‘high art’ and the art museum. The display simply asked the question, What is Outsider Art? and sought to broaden the visual culture presented at Tate.
Calouste Gulbenkian was an Armenian, born in Istanbul in 1869. He lived much of his life in London and was an avid collector of the fine and decorative arts. In his will he left his collections and fortune to a foundation, based in Lisbon, where he had lived since 1942. The Gulbenkian Foundation’s collection of modern British art, held in the Centro de Arte Moderna in Lisbon, is one of the largest outside the UK, with a particularly strong focus on the 1960s. A selection of works from the collection were displayed during the Tate Triennial 2006 exhibition. Artists represented in the Goodison Room installation included Mark Lancaster, Ian Stephenson, Hamish Fulton, Harold Cohen, Tim Head, Roger Hilton and Alan Davie.
