More with less
- 1 Oct 2014
Aileen Burns and Johan Lundh from the Institute of Modern Art discuss a few strategies for diversification and growth……
The Institute of Modern Art (IMA) is nearing its 40-year anniversary and entering into a phase of critical self-reflection, future planning, and projection. We arrived in Brisbane in January of this year to lead one of Australia’s oldest non-collecting public galleries into its forth decade. The IMA is an institution that has a remarkable history, having commissioned extraordinary bodies of works such as Queensland artist Vernon Ah Kee’s cant chant, which went on to be presented in the Australian Pavilion at the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009, and subsequently be collected by the National Gallery of Canada.
The IMA’s original mission, to promote “research and experimentation” by ‘local, Australian, and overseas artists’ is still relevant today. The organisation has introduced seminal practitioners such as Chinese artist Yang Fudong or British Turner Prize winning artist Simon Starling to wide audiences. The IMA has also helped to develop the language of art through its extensive program of publishing, which is unrivalled by galleries of its size in Australia.
In order to continue to offer a leading program of exhibitions and events, the IMA has to ground itself with a dynamic and responsive business model that includes crucial support from the public sector, strategic partnerships with private businesses, and the development of philanthropic enterprises. Since we are new to the context, Arts Queensland’s aggregated data 2005-2012 has given us a snapshot of the sector and helped us to develop some new strategies for growing audiences and income streams without compromising our commitment to artistic quality and experimentation.
One statistic that has been of particular interest to us in the process of transforming our business model, is the ‘Activity Income as a % of Total Income’, which has increased from 29-32% between 2005 and 2012. Relative to the average statistics provided for the Small to Medium (S2M) sector, the IMA has been better supported by granting bodies such as the Australia Council than our peers, and less competitive when it comes to generating income from our activities. We believe that we can achieve two crucial aims by working to improve on the activities percentage for our organisation: we will grow our audience and participation numbers and at the same time start to generate some earned income.
This spring, we will launch a series of affordable workshops for emerging artists and curators to develop their skills in crucial areas such as curating, grant writing, and installing exhibitions. In order to keep the costs of delivering these workshops low, we will engage artists, curators, and technicians who are either based locally or who we are bringing to Brisbane for reasons relating to our program. For example, the Van Abbemuseum curator Annie Fletcher, who also teaches curating in Amsterdam at De Appel, will be at the IMA in December for the launch of an exhibition that we have worked on together. We will take advantage of her presence by offering an intensive workshop for emerging curators. In taking this approach, we can keep the costs of participating in the workshop under $150.00, increase skills in for the next generation of curators in Queensland and at the same time generate much-needed earned income for the IMA.
There is a trend in the data collected by Arts Queensland, which we find especially troubling: the decrease in fulltime employees working in the sector from 285 to 130 between 2005 and 2012. Working in the arts is challenging and fulfilling and it is in the S2M sector that the necessary skills are developed in the future leaders of arts management and industry innovation. Sadly, the current trend indicated by the statistics may mean that there is less entry-level employment for those who are driven to develop the skills and knowledge necessary to help arts flourish in Queensland in the future. Furthermore, since the figures gathered demonstrate an ever-increasing output of activities for growing audiences, the reduction of fulltime employees means that fewer people are being asked to deliver continually improving outcomes.
As the sector as a whole grows, so too should the opportunities for employment within it. In spite of reduced state resources and in contrast to the statistics, the IMA has a mid-term plan to increase staff numbers. In order to do so, we are testing remuneration models from the commercial sector such as commission-based salaries and initiating partnerships with businesses such as the Berlin-based art bookstore Motto, who can bring expertise onto our team while we build our in-house commercial capabilities. We are wholly committed to careers contemporary art and will do our part in ensuring the sector’s vibrancy in Queensland improves.
Aileen Burns and Johan Lundh
Aileen Burns and Johan Lundh are Directors of the Institute of Modern Art where oversee all aspects of programming and organisational development. Burns and Lundh joined the IMA in 2014 from their previous post as Co-Directors of the Centre for Contemporary Art (CCA), Derry, Northern Ireland. During their tenure at CCA, they produced exhibitions featuring artists such as Goldin+Senneby, Jesse Jones, Anja Kirschner and David Panos, Raqs Media Collective, Hito Steyerl, and Haegue Yang. At CCA, they organised the first Curatorial Intensive in Europe with Independent Curators International, From ‘Official History’ to Underrepresented Narratives. They were also part of the curatorial team for the 2013 Turner Prize as part of Derry’s City of Culture celebrations. Burns and Lundh’s writing has appeared in periodicals such as Art-Agenda, Art Papers, Fillip, Journal for Curatorial Studies, Kaleidoscope, Metropolis M, Mousse, Reviews in Cultural Theory, as well as exhibition catalogues and books.
Feature image: ‘Seeds’ by Ian Lawlor, University of Auckland Library via DigitalNZ