Just in time to greet its new Director, Tristram Hunt, former Labour MP for Stoke-on-Trent, the Victoria & Albert Museum has opened a rather grand new Amanda Levete designed exhibition space. It is sunk into the ground, under a courtyard formed where the old Victorian boilers used to be, which in turn offers a new, rather posh entrance from Exhibition Road. All of which is likely to offer new scope for the museum’s ongoing exhibition programme – temporary exhibitions formerly having had not nearly enough space to expand and spread their wings, without seeming to jostle the permanent collection aside.
“This is the Museum’s largest architectural intervention in over one hundred years and the start of a new chapter of expansion” – Tristram Hunt
At a time when big institutions such as the V & A have been under more and more pressure to draw people in, through attention-getting, see-it-now-or-miss-it, once-in-a-lifetime exhibitions, this is surely a good thing, and the new space, designed by Practice, AL_A and christened the Sainsbury Gallery, with a cafeteria leading off the entrance courtyard, and with educational add –ons downstairs plus the obligatory gift shop, is surely a good thing.
What amuses me slightly is the decision to present this cavernous new facility, before it begins to serve its intended purpose, as a work of art in its own right. Go now, and you’ll find nothing there but a big angled bench, where you can plonk yourself down and contemplate the wonder of it all, with the help of a droning ambient soundtrack and some flickering forms making random appearances in the ceiling skylights.
This is part of a tendency that has also manifested itself in large areas of the vast new expansion recently added to Tate Modern. The subliminal message, present but perhaps not fully intended, is ‘Hi, kids – who really needs art in any substantial physical form? Come here to get away from it all, and we may from time to time entertain you with a performance or two – a.k.a. as charades, but don’t call them that. And when you’ve watched those, and stayed long enough to calm down a bit, you can buy yourself a nice cup of tea before you need to plunge back into the urban maelstrom outside.