Laureation address: Frances Mary Morris
Honorary Degree of Doctor of Letters
Laureation by Professor Frances Andrews, School of History
Friday 28 June 2019
Chancellor, it is my privilege to present for the degree of Doctor of Letters, honoris causa, Frances Morris.
The career (so far!) of Frances Morris has been spent working at the heart of the contemporary art world, but not in auction houses watching art prices skyrocket. In 2016 she became the Director of Tate Modern, the extraordinary gallery on the River Thames in London that has done so much to transform the world’s understanding of what modern art is and what it can be, how art can challenge ideas and how we might ‘collect the uncollectable’.
Frances’s history with Tate goes way back. She joined as a curator in 1987, becoming Head of Displays at Tate Modern when it opened in 2000, a landmark moment in the history of museums and the part of her career of which she is most proud. The famous Turbine Hall and the new Blavatnik Building are her every day, her ‘office’. Along the way, she has curated several landmark exhibitions, including major retrospectives on women artists such as the French-American Louise Bourgeois in 2007, the Japanese Yayoi Kusama in 2012 and the Canadian-born American Agnes Martin in 2015. These were stand out successes, but they were also part of building up the representation of women in the collection – and internationalising it. Frances Morris has become one of the most respected voices in the arts, while also championing diversity in a creative community including women.
It is clear that Frances is pretty passionate about removing borders. As she says, Tate Modern is a place where you don’t need a visa to walk between Beijing and Berlin. But Tate removes other borders too: between media – whether film, sculpture, painting or live art – and between gender and ethnicity, allowing us ‘to celebrate the whole range of creativity’ and also to network globally. Great art is fuelled by conversations between people with diverse positions and types of practice. So, Frances wants Tate Modern to be a place where there is plenty of powerful art on show, but those walking into its spaces feel they can hang out: not a gallery where you look and whisper, reflect quietly and leave, instead a place to experience great art in the context of living life, seeing friends, having fun. Anyone who has been there will know that she is succeeding beyond measure. Frances Morris’s Tate Modern is an international hub, a platform working at the boundaries between the local and the global, between physical and virtual contact, promoting connections and in touch with the rest of the world.
If this is not your standard image of an art gallery, then it might interest you to know that Frances’s thinking about borders begins with transgression. Where borders seem immovable, a first step is to transgress them, both institutionally and, probably more importantly, personally. ‘Whatever anybody tells you about your prospects and skills’, she says, ‘always push a little bit further. It is always worth opening the next door or looking around the corner… because often the most generative, creative and dynamic things actually are on the margins: exciting things very often happen slightly out of view’.
Frances’s own career has been happening very much in public view since she took over at Tate Modern. But she herself grew up in South East London, with the National Maritime Museum at the end of the street and the Bethnal Green Museum of Childhood nearby. It was in these great public institutions that she learned the power of objects to speak about (and to) people’s lives, and was also very drawn to history. She attended a state secondary school in New Cross, from where she won a scholarship to Cambridge, going on to achieve First Class Honours in History of Art, followed by a distinction in a Masters degree at the Courtauld Institute in London.
Frances is a great role model, and this is not just because she is a woman who has reached the peak of her profession, while helping break some of the conventional canons of ‘Art history’. The first exhibition she curated and organised was in the summer of 1993, focused on avowedly her favourite period in art, Paris Post War. It was a major undertaking, the work of three years; 26 years later her catalogue is still selling on Amazon. Yet at the time it was not well received; reading the press reviews must have been painful. As she now says, the hostile reception was an experience through which she built resilience. To succeed you have to learn to take criticism on the chin.
No career is without regrets. Frances loved Rotring pens as a child and sometimes wishes she had studied art rather than art history. But had she made that choice I fear we might not have had the benefit of her leadership at Tate Modern. Being Director of one of the world’s great contemporary art museums involves a lot of hard work with funding bodies and bureaucrats, politicians and the press. Her directorship has so far coincided with the difficult debates over Brexit. But she is still working with artists, still making exhibitions. She is still building the collection through connections, still thinking about how we can collect the uncollectable.
Chancellor, in recognition of her major contribution to the world of the arts, I invite you to confer the degree of Doctor of Letters, honoris causa, on Frances Morris.
Frances Morris's response
Chancellor, Principal, Master, Professors, graduates, distinguished families and friends of graduates, this is truly a great honour.
Frances that was such a wonderful, wonderful speech I only need to correct you on one point, I’m afraid the catalogue on Amazon is sold out, but there is one copy available on eBay. Should you wish to participate.
So I was taught art history at a time when people still spoke of great masters, believed that there was a fixed canon of western art, and actually felt that this art was intrinsically more important, somehow more essential and more advanced than what lay beyond.
But as I made my way in the world after graduation, in the 1980s, in the wake of the first wave radical feminism, the first post-colonial revisionist assaults on history, and alongside the beginnings of the new art history, my generation began to realise that much that we’d been taught, much of the value system we had inherited, was in fact contingent, historically conditioned, framed by structures of race, gender and class.
The humanities, the arts and sciences - the subjects I love, those that you have been studying led the way replacing criticism with critical theory. Contesting values, rather than merely confirming them. Broadening and diversifying our histories. Taking down those borders.
I became director of Tate Modern as Frances said just weeks before the Brexit vote. How ironic it felt to be launching my new career, the new Tate Modern with the brave vision of the interconnectedness of contemporary global cultures. Of a museum, metaphorically, without walls. Just as the people of our four nations voted to withdraw to the periphery of Europe. How strange and troubling for you, students of the arts and sciences, to graduate today into this world of seemingly diminishing horizons and flattened perspectives.
You’re graduating at a time when those values that have underpinned your endeavours here at St Andrews - curiosity, open-mindedness, honesty - values that universities exist to foster, seem especially vulnerable outside these walls. At a time when borders, of geography, wealth, race and faith are more present and corrosive that at any time I can remember.
Even so, and you can see today that you’re righty full of hope, John Berger, the writer and critic of that great book Ways of Seeing which, back in the 1970s, shaped my own understanding of culture, understood the importance of hope. “Hope” Berger wrote, “is not the form of guarantee, it’s a form of energy, and very frequently that energy is strongest in circumstances that are very dark.”
And I’ve been reminded of that paradox again and again over recent months and days, seeing the work of colleagues across the UK, visiting artist’s studios, colleges, schools, my visit over the last two days at St Andrews. Witnessing the activities of communities, of grassroots organisations, scholars, in and around the cities of the UK, as they confront both Brexit, and now, imminently, and most-scarily, climate extinction.
All of us, graduates of the arts and sciences have here an extraordinary opportunity. How amazing it would be, if you, if we could rebuild trust in culture. How could we get down from our ivory towers, exit our echo chambers. Relinquish our exclusive vocabularies. And that, as I see it is the challenge for you as you leave the university as graduates, in moving from thinking outside the box, to acting outside the box.
So, break the rules, challenge the conventions. In the words of my absolutely top favourite artist, the great Louise Bourgeois: “Do, undo and redo. If I can collect the uncollectible, you can think the unthinkable, you can do the undoable and make it happen for you, for others, and for the world.”
Thank you.