What happens when you enter Tate Modern?

Before we set off I told some of my students that I would ask them that question when we returned from our trip to the venerable gallery.

So extraordinary were the answers I got back that I started to use this as part of the prelims to all the trips I arranged – The National Gallery, Madame Tussauds and the V&A – you know the sorts of places.

I think the success I had with the question in stimulating serious thought was twofold. First of all, I found it interesting (and so I wanted to follow it up), and secondly, it forced students to focus on their feelings and emotions from the very moment they entered any of our great galleries and museums.

(Some have since told me they still ask themselves this question on entering a gallery for the first time – so it really did have an impact).

Above all, it helped make some of my students (one never has success with everyone!) pause and think. Why is this place here? What’s the point? What does it say to me? If I am not moved, is it me? Or is it the building, or what’s inside it?

In a sense the question must be the sort of thing that an artist must ask him/herself when contemplating the chance of exhibiting in the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall. What can I do here? What can I do to this space to make the visitors think differently about themselves?

It is, in effect, the other side of the coin. What have the builders, designers and curators done? How do I interact with this?

Profound questions indeed.

Of course, I don’t always get profound answers – in fact generally I don’t get answers at all – but I do get some thinking which otherwise would not have happened. Such as the A level student who said, “I had no idea how I could ever leave.” Maybe she had just read Boswell, with all the Johnson commentary about no intellectual ever wanting to leave London.

And so it is that I am now involved in organising Art & Design Excursions to the National, Tate Modern, Madame Tussauds and the V&A.

My little idea isn’t an integral part of the tour – it is just something that worked for me. The key point, of course, is offering your students opportunities to compare and contrast a range of artistic works in a number of galleries and museums in the city.

How you channel their knowledge is a matter of for you – some choose to consider the historical, social and cultural contexts of the art and the buildings, some look to develop an understanding of the relationships between society and art, some focus on the city’s history and culture that have provided the context for much of the artistic works.

But whatever way you approach it, you might care to set up a single question before the trip, along the lines of "what happens when you enter Tate Modern?" If you use my idea then, if nothing else, you will at least have set a question that cannot be answered by typing it into Google. (I just tried – there’s nothing there).

If you are interested in organising an Art or Design tour for your students then why not contact us.