Theme: Curating Kettle's Yard

It was very all-pervading as a job, there was almost no privacy. My flat was where my… when Roger joined as the invaluable, wonderful number two, that was where we had our coffee together. My bedroom was actually the security route for getting in and unlocking the burglar alarm so I couldn’t even sleep in if I was having a day off because somebody else had to track through the bedroom in order to get the alarms off and that, in a silly, little way… a big, little way… that’s an indication of how the place had never been designed or conceived to work as a… as anything other than a house, where the purpose of living there was to operate the house, for its public purpose. People would be talking Kettle’s Yard as they walked past, sometimes accurately, sometimes inaccurately, there were times when I longed to rush out and berate them but it was quite funny what one heard through that door. Roger Malbert arrived and, like me, he was… well, at the time I was 6’2” and had a 28” waist and Roger’s build was pretty similar and I did once hear somebody standing outside the door saying, “oh yes, you just pull this bell and a thin, young man comes out”.

You went past the person on the door and then you were on your own. Now, I do realise that… I mean, in retrospect, I gradually discovered that that was particular to that moment but, at the time, that was one of the great joys of it. The job of the person down at the door, I later discovered, was to establish that the person was welcome, sign the book, any routine things like, ‘Would you like to leave a bag and a coat?’ Later on we introduced a photo permit. The overwhelming impression was of it being quiet and free of people. You might meet one or two other people there. Quite often the people that one met would be people who, like me, would just find somewhere to sit and sit there, maybe read a book, maybe bring a book with them to sit and read. The invigilator down at the door might occasionally, if they felt confident, go up and have a walk around and see where whoever was in the house had got to, but of course if you did that you got too far away and you couldn’t hear the bell. What worried one was that someone would turn away if the door wasn’t opened straight away so you tended to stay by the door.

Since there was no stated policy or range of parameters for the collection, the way in which it could have grown without Jim would have been really tricky under any circumstances, I think, and the fact is it is now reverted to being this moment frozen in time, commemoration like the John Soanes Museum, it’s kind of, nobody would think, you know, we must get some more antique sculptures into the John Soanes Museum, it would be mad, the place represents that life and vision and moment in time and I think Kettle’s Yard now, people feel that’s the correct way to treat that house and the collection. There’s no point in adding to it, except for, you know, in fringe ways. The gallery is the place, I began to feel quite soon, and where I got my satisfaction in a way in the job after the initial bliss of being in this beautiful environment had worn off a bit. My creative satisfaction was acquired through the exhibition programme in the gallery where I felt there could be a little bit of even tension and kind of opposition to the overall harmonising aesthetic of the house.

As Paul [Clough] will have told you, on Thursday mornings we went down before 9 o’clock to the WI stall to buy flowers and we’d do all the flower arrangements and it had to be those, kind of, cottage flowers, it wasn’t formal, it was cottage flowers which went with the cottage garden, if you like. So, obviously a lot of my time was spent organising exhibitions. I would organise the show, I would drive the van to collect the works of art, I would organise the insurance, I would paint the walls of the gallery, I would sweep the floors, hang every work of art, with my assistants obviously. I drove as far afield as St Just in Cornwall to collect works for an exhibition and back again. It was exhausting actually. I can remember taking works by Eric Gill back after an Eric Gill exhibition that we had. I dropped off some works at the Tate Gallery, then I drove onto Weymouth, where I dropped off something else, then I went on to Totnes in Devon – the exhibition had been organised by the Dartington – dropped off some things there, I was with Mike Tooby at the time, then we went on to St Just to collect works by Karl Veschke for the next exhibition and we were back within two days. Painted the gallery, hung the show and it opened by… so the whole thing took place over seven days. We’d shut an exhibition on a Sunday, we’d strike it on a Monday, we’d deliver it all back on the Tuesday, collect the next stuff Tuesday or Wednesday, we’d be back in the gallery Thursday, hang it, off we went, and we did everything.

Well, my letters from Jim started off full of enthusiasm and it went very well and I quite enjoyed writing to him and telling him what I was doing but things began to break down after a while when I had a set of bookshelves constructed. The library, when I arrived, consistently simply of that set of shelves that is opposite you as you walk into the extension. There was to the right of it a chest of drawers that was stuffed full of catalogues which nobody was able to look at or consult. I started to go through them and thought, there are some really interesting things in here. I thought the only way to deal with this was to build some more shelves so all the shelves that are on the right hand side that go under the window were built on my instructions and I took great care to sculpt out the window. Jim didn’t like that because of course his chest of drawers had been moved and it wasn’t something that he had done and Kettle’s Yard was his work of art, he wouldn’t say so, but it was his work of art, he saw it like that. And worse was yet to come because I moved the sculpture by Gaudier called Caritas from the oval table and put it in the niche by the window because I thought it looked rather nice there, in my innocence. I subsequently realise I actually was wrong. I think it is better where Jim had it on the oval table. But at the time, I thought it looked quite dramatic silhouetted against the daylight. And all hell let loose then. So there were endless letters putting pressure on me to move it and I began to dig my heels in and wouldn’t move it. In the end, I did relent, I think, and I did put it back. The letters would become more and more emotional and more and more he would be receiving reports, I have no idea who from, but from people who had visited or people who lived in Cambridge who were friends about this, that or the other, which I had or hadn’t done. They might have been true and they might not have been true and it just cranked up the whole emotional thing. I continued to read the letters and I continued to respond to them but a lot of the letters were pressurising to do this, do that. ‘You don’t take people round anymore, you don’t do this’, you know, ‘Why do you need an office? Why won’t you put Helen’s bedroom back as it was?’ But actually, before I left, we did re-open Helen’s bedroom with furniture that I think Jim provided.

We did occasionally lend to other exhibitions of course so that would require re-thinking a space and then on the level of the none art, as it were, the pebbles, feathers – damage, loss – would require re-thinking. Sometimes we ran this past Jim, other times we just did it and told him, other times we just did it and didn’t tell him. But there would be a process of debate, I think, and Jeremy had a different kind of passion to me about the need for it to be just so. We, probably like a lot of people very intimate with Kettle’s Yard, we probably each had our own idea of what that meant and that’s where the analogy I was meaning about the performance of the piece of music comes in. Let’s take the spiral as the best example, or the dark to light pebbles. We would constantly remake that. And then the precise nuance of the relationship between that and that and that, whatever it might be, might be just slightly different. Another would be the angle of the Hamilton Finlay in the plants area. And of course the fact that the plants changed. I remember a huge schmozzle about the dizygotheca down below by the piano in the lower area and the Buddha. Because of course the dizygotheca covered the Buddha and the Buddha sat under the tree but eventually this thing became too big, it grows, you know, plants grow! So how high this should… and Gerard Hemsworth of all people, he was in a show that I curated, and he got really interested in Kettle’s Yard and he offered to find a dizygotheca of the right height. So, in other words, you might be passionate about exactly where it was, whatever it might be or what you’d got to know, but of course the irony was that it could never be exactly that.

This whole tussle between, you know, should the collection grow or should the collection stay static and to what extent should works be added? There were some particular works that were wanted to be donated to Kettle’s Yard and I think work came about through Alan Bowness really and, you know, how you integrate… I think this donation in the end ended up in Helen’s bathroom so it didn’t actually disrupt the… but I think that represented one of the dilemmas for Kettle’s Yard and I remember at the time suggesting to the committee, though I didn’t really have the experience or the drive to take it through, that maybe one way round this was to actually create Kettle’s Yard as a centre, a sort of archival centre for, you know, English… St Ives School and the artists around and that funding maybe could be found to build it up as a proper centre of excellence for that. You know, that did seem one way round trying to preserve the holistic nature of what existed at Kettle’s Yard but actually also keep it alive and keep the intellectual understanding and the historical knowledge around it going. How do you keep it alive and make it relevant without destroying it?

I felt that part of the Arts Council money there was to broaden the audience for contemporary art and one of the ways of doing that was to make the links in the programming with the house and so we did try to programme things… sometimes inviting artists to make work in response to the house or programming things that seemed to chime with the house. One of the very first exhibitions that I programmed was an exhibition of drawings by John Cage, which seemed to fit very much the ethos of the house and in fact when the show went up to Edinburgh, John Cage did actually go and meet Jim Ede. I think it was perhaps not the meeting of like-minded individuals that one might have seen, but perhaps exposed the differences between two men that might believe in the beauty of silence or the meanings of silence but actually from very different perspectives. One being a rather, sort of, lively American seventy-year-old with a very active brain and very focussed on the experimental and Jim perhaps focussed very much on something that was more reflective.

There were one, two, three, four curators before I came. Two were women who had been appointed to… on Jim’s instructions that his successors should be young, which I wasn’t, and I think his instructions included the assumption that they would be male and that the job they would be doing would be called ‘resident’ and Jim of course had seen Kettle’s Yard as a home, as a place where he lived, and he imagined that his successors would do likewise and in the beginning that was so. The first curator lived here – good heavens – but with my appointment the thought was that Kettle’s Yard was developing. If you look at the map of Kettle’s Yard and think of the cottages to start with, it’s spread itself over the years and at that stage in the early nineties there were plans for further development and it was becoming an organisation which was taking on more and more and the thought was that it needed somebody with a little more experience and somebody longer in the tooth and that’s when I appeared on the scene.

[Eggebert]: It was about living in his artwork and disrupting it. It was also about the fear of breaking things or moving something out of place. For example, with the table, because we knew that in the kitchen there had been red gingham curtains and part of my activity there was to remake those curtains, we decided we’d get a red gingham plastic tablecloth, so it would go with the curtains in the kitchen and to have this over the table. So we did take the candlesticks and the other objects on the table off, and said ‘well, we had to eat somewhere’. So we put this red gingham tablecloth… and one of the invigilators just couldn’t bear this, it just horrified her, because that particular space is sort of a green, dark, soft space and the red just clashed. So there was something about the whole aesthetic encounter of the space. That was the kind of thing, that we were conscious of us, just physically, what we wore might clash or where we stood might disrupt the balance or where the cot was and so on. [Walker]: That was very much the space where we took possession of the house every morning. Because, remember, we weren’t staying overnight in the house most of the week so we’d get up, about 7 o’clock, and we’d walk to Kettle’s Yard and we’d sit down then we’d take it over, in this almost ritualistic way really, and we’d have breakfast and Freddie [their son] would shout and want to get out… did he have a high chair? yeah… it would bring noise into the place, it would bring different colours into the place, it would bring probably the concept of youth into the house as well, of people of a younger age, into the space and using the space, because not many children go in there, it’s one of those places where you can feel the fear and anxiety of parents as they take their children around the place that they’re going to smash everything up. I didn’t actually feel that worry about breakages because I don’t have a problem with breakages which, you know, was actually part of the work that I did there, was breaking stuff up. Not in a, sort of, aggressive way but that was incidental to what I was doing there. But I did feel very much that I was an intruder.

There is always the difficulty, what can you possibly bring into Kettle’s Yard? How can you possibly dare to move something around in Kettle’s Yard? So that would have been a kind of project which would have been very difficult, would have framed me entirely within Jim’s aesthetic, but to get the chance to do something in the gallery as well, meant that I could show where I got to with my thinking and also have a conversation with Kettle’s Yard and that was wonderful, absolutely wonderful and it’s been by far the most complicated and stimulating exhibition I’ve ever had to do and it’s moved me on in lots and lots of ways. What I wanted to do was to reflect my own experience of the house so there were three or four different experiences I wanted to bring out, my own conversation with the house. So, for instance, one of my great conversations with Kettle’s Yard is about reading, reading and pots, so that the piece in the library was very much about… instead of sitting down and reading a book, you sat down and had a pot there instead of a book.

It is difficult to retain that sense of this being a house, especially as time goes by. It’s quite complicated to make it look as if it’s a lived-in space because it’s looking older and older, it’s not just because the furnishings aging but it’s in general the taste that’s looking old. It’s more and more like a bit of a time capsule in a sense. Things like the rugs and the actual building, the floors and walls and, you know, wear and tear in general, wherever visitors get and that’s where we have a problem, and the artwork of course. One of the main problems is the fact that Jim put a lot of importance on the presence of daylight and how it interacts with things in the house and that obviously means that we have to allow a lot more sunlight into the house than it would be normally acceptable in a museum environment. It can be controlled and the damage minimised but it’s still not ideal so that is really one of the big conservation challenges.