Day #2: Tate Modern and Tate Britain

The morning at the Tate Modern was very chilled. To start off we have an informal chat with the Young Programme Manager, someone in the Education Department and a Gallery Educator. The internship opportunity is split between the Tate Modern and the Tate Britain, so the differences and similarities between the two are quite important.

We then move up to the current Dali exhibition in the Tate Modern to have a look around and do some group work with the gallery educator. It's a little patronising, but still a lot of fun. I really recommend the Dali exhibition. You have to pay (but not too much) and it runs until 9th September. There are lots of studies for the dream sequence in Alfred Hitchcock's "Spellbound", as well as a video of the sequence itself. The images are really haunting, especially the giant eye dripping over a desolate landscape, and I've been convinced to watch the rest of "Spellbound" at the next available opportunity.

After that we have some lunch (food at the Tates is always brilliant), and then it's time to catch the Tate-to-Tate boat (which a lot of the staff take daily) to the more traditional Tate Britain.

At Tate Britain we first have a more formal talk given by Caroline Collier, head of national initiatives and someone who asks exactly the right questions.

The Tate consists of four galleries serving the country (Britain, Modern, Liverpool and St. Ives) with a mission of increasing public knowledge, understanding and enjoyment of art. The Tate website (www.tate.org) is, apparently, the number one art site worldwide, getting 18.5 million hits a year.

Something really interesting is the fact that all of the Tate buildings are rebuilt, re-used, defunct or derelict buildings. The Tate Britain used to be Millbank prison (apparently when they changed it into the Tate all the prisoners were sent to Australia. This is supposed to be the origin of the term "pom" - Prisoner Of Millbank.), Tate Modern is an old power station, Tate Liverpool and old dock building and Tate St. Ives a former gas station.

One thing that I've really taken away from this talk is the role of place in the display of art - some people argued that the art work is the art work and would mean the same thing and have the same effect whether it was in the Tate or stuck on the side of a London building. I'm not so sure: obviously the work is important and elements of it remain constant, but surely the context and space it is shown in will alter it's effect and meaning. Won't an installation on the tube lend a different meaning to a work than that same installation in a traditional gallery?

This kind of ties into the other Tate Britain talk from Christina Bagatavicius, head of interpretation, about her work on the 1807 room (very interesting links drawn between Blake, radical thinkers and the slave trade). Interpretation is basically the art of deciding what objects to include in an exhibition, how they should be set out and what information should be available about them. So they decide the story that an exhibition tells, the links that are drawn and how everything is presented.

Trawling through all of this archived material to pull out useful information and then presenting it in a way that is understandable sounds fascinating.

I'm not sure the Tate internship is for me (it sounds a tad too much like shadowing), but the Tate itself sounds a lot of fun. I'm going to look into the Raw Canvas scheme, which lets "young people" like me act as mini curators to put together events for other "young people".

Petrie Museum tomorrow.