When towns and cities around the world looked at what Frank Gehry’s Bilbao Guggenheim did for what had previously been a nondescript industrial port in northern Spain, they famously rushed to try to replicate it. There are Guggenheim wannabes all over the world, and particularly in American cities people tend not to visit much.
Denver has its Daniel Libeskind art museum; Minneapolis has its Walker Art Center, by Herzog and de Meuron, famous over here for Tate Modern; Cincinnati has its Zaha Hadid; Milwaukee has its Calatrava. All well and good. But can this exciting-art-museum thing work in Middlesbrough? The cheekily named Mima — Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art — opens on January 27. It is a £19.2m building, the first in Britain by another international big name, Erick van Egeraat of the Netherlands, and includes a new, organically sculpted town square outside by another star Dutch outfit, the landscapers West 8. Cheeky because it obviously sounds a bit like Moma, the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Well, a cat may look at a king. Nobody is pretending that Middlesbrough’s 3,000-strong collection of contemporary art and sculpture is going to worry Manhattan, though the opening temporary show, Draw, pulls together some big names, pairing Damien Hirst with Francis Bacon, Chris Ofili with Matisse, Warhol with Gavin Turk and so on.
The cautionary tale here is the black-and-pink contemporary art centre in West Bromwich, known as the Public, by the architect Will Alsop. Alsop duly built his building, but when costs hit £54m last year, the organisation behind it went into administration. The Public did not open.
It seemed that community arts projects (this was meant to be something rather more than, or different from, a traditional gallery) just could not be bigged up to that level. It was never especially clear what was meant to happen inside it. There was certainly nothing so conventional as a collection for people to go and see.
A successor organisation, Multistory, now answers the phone, and tells you it has nothing to do with the building. The council has invited bids for “facilities managers” to run the place. When you contact the council, it sounds a little vague as to what these facilities managers are expected to do.
That is a rare exception: on the whole, the new regional galleries, though prone to financial wobbles, are doing all right. The New Art Gallery in Walsall, opened in 2000, hoped for 100,000 visitors per year, got 250,000 in its publicity-rich first year, and has settled at a comfortable 120,000- 125,000. Its director, Stephen Snoddy, who has been director at the little Milton Keynes Gallery and the mighty Baltic, in Gateshead, says that the pattern is always the same: the first year, assuming the publicity is right, will get double the numbers that come in after about 18 months.
He thinks Middlesbrough might hit 200,000 in 2007, so would be wise to aim for 100,000 thereafter (the official projection is 110,000). Who knows? Walsall benefits from having the strong Garman Ryan collection at its heart, on permanent display, while Middlesbrough’s 3,000- piece collection is more diffuse, including ceramics and jewellery. There will be a “collection show” once a year, with the pieces kept in publicly accessible archives the rest of the time. Walsall is also near Birmingham, and has the vast catchment area of the West Midlands. Middlesbrough, is, well, Middlesbrough — rather more out on a limb.
So, would you go there? Obviously, location is important: the Baltic, in Gateshead, an enormous art space in a former flour mill with no permanent collection, has suffered from a succession of directors and a patchy programme since opening, and has seen its visitor numbers fall from nearly 1m to close to 400,000, which is still respectable. But then it is in pole position on the city’s bustling quayside, right next to the Stirling prize-winning bridge linking it to even more bustling Newcastle. It is also near the new Foster-designed Sage concert hall. Although the smaller galleries would kill for Baltic’s location and footfall, there is a growing feeling that this big bruiser of the regional arts scene is in trouble unless it gets its act together under its latest director, Peter Doroshenko.
As an “arts factory” devoted to cutting-edge contemporary art (it does not go in for visitor-friendly blockbusters), Baltic needs continuous heavy funding, and so will always be vulnerable. But despite that, it tells you plenty about how to go about the tricky business of cultural regeneration.
Rule number one: a building is not much use in isolation. You need to build a critical mass. West Bromwich, take note. The new Pallant House gallery, in Chichester, which opened last year, exemplifies rule number two: have a decent collection. In Pallant House’s case, it’s a decent collection of modern British art, conventionally hung, always there.
But, seven years after the millennium and all the lottery riches that brought most of these art buildings into existence, there seems to be no slowing down in the rate at which they are arriving. After Mima, we will have the £16.5m Firstsite gallery in Colchester, a smaller but still ambitious banana-shaped affair, designed by the American superstar Rafael Vinoly. In Margate, overambitious plans for the new Turner Contemporary were axed before they got to the West Bromwich stage of overspending (£48m was when the council bailed out), but the town is going ahead with a smaller, £15m scheme, designed by David Chipperfield. There’s still plenty of hope out there.
I expect you want to know if Erick van Egeraat’s Mima is any good. It is his first completed building in Britain, after all, following his disappointment in having his plan to rebuild the RSC in Stratford-upon-Avon axed. It looks as if the RSC had a lucky escape. No doubt he had to wrestle with a smaller budget, but this is not nearly as good as Walsall. Where Caruso St John’s New Art Gallery was an exercise in refinement and restraint, Mima is all about flash. All the money appears to have been spent on the main facade facing the square, which is a strange mixture of glassy tension-wire high-tech and postmodern random stonework. Inside the main, full-height foyer, a great staircase links the levels through a gash in a rough-cut stone wall that is — get this — hanging from the ceiling.
It’s impressive, in a way, but you rather wonder what the point of it all is. The rest of the building behind that wall is a simple rendered box. The gallery spaces are white, neutral, perfectly okay. There is one very tall one. The landscaped square outside, by West 8, is nice if unexceptional — an affair of grass and weaving paths — and has some fine public benches.
Altogether, it is a building that is hard either to love or to admire, because, while it does the job and helps to stitch the city centre together, it is more than a little silly. Buildings that try a bit too hard to be icons are always suspect. While I have returned to Walsall at intervals since its opening, I would need more than this to get me back to Middlesbrough. This badly wants to be a Teesside Guggenheim, but Teesside has not found its European Frank Gehry; nor does it have the power of the Guggenheim brand name. Perhaps it will make up for all this by putting on fantastically good shows. You can always hope.
