Gregor Muir on making the ICA great again

Gregor Muir, the new director at the ICA, leads me out onto a second floor terrace in the fine Nash building overlooking The Mall and Horse Guard’s Parade. Beyond, practically all of affluent London’s landmarks can be glimpsed, from Buckingham Palace and Admiral Arch to The Shard and Westminster Cathedral; the sun is shining brightly and a party is taking place on a nearby roof terrace, even though it’s not yet 11 in the morning. Muir, an affable and engaging sort, observes merrily:  ‘Not too bad a place to work, is it?’

If the idea behind Muir’s introduction to the ICA had been to offer some rather effective symbolism, it certainly didn’t go amiss. Under the previous curator, Ekow Eshun, and a board that included Alan Yentob as its chairman, the ICA had run into substantial financial difficulties, prompting rumours that it would lose its Arts Council grants altogether and might have to close. After Eshun resigned in August 2010, it seemed that the only way of saving the institution would be to appoint someone with more level-headed commercial expertise and so Muir, previously the director at Hauser & Wirth, stepped in. Some might call it a visionary attempt to set the ICA back on a course that’s both commercially viable and artistically respectable; others might wonder why he left a prestigious commercial gallery to work in a notoriously fickle environment.

However, if Muir is feeling the strain, he certainly shows no sign of it today.  He’s been in post now for five months – ‘I’m the new boy’, he says, wryly – and he’s starting to get into his groove. ‘It’s an enormous privilege to be director of this extraordinary institution, given that I’ve been coming here for over 20 years in one capacity or another. Twenty years...’ he whistles. He’s hardly a stranger to the ICA, having organised several of its programmes, but this ascension to the heady heights is both welcome and, one feels, a slightly unexpected sideways progression from his earlier and more commercially minded career, which began when he left the Tate’s collections department for Hauser & Wirth in 2004 (‘an eyebrow-raising move’).

Muir is clear-sighted about what needs to be done in his regime. As he puts it, ‘The ICA exists to challenge the foundations of contemporary art, and we have to be clear about what we can produce and present with the resources that we have. We can’t be all things to all men.’ He sighs, and shakes his head, presumably remembering earlier quarrels. ‘We can’t just present music for the sake of it, but we need to look at the way in which music, and other art forms, co-exist with one another. We’re committed to offering  a multitude of art forms, which is central to the ICA’s perspective, but we need to look at offering conversations between artists, rather than just having them in their boxes.’

It’s heady stuff, and this dedication to ‘conversations’ is elegantly articulated through the current exhibition; Pablo Bronstein’s ‘Sketches For Regency Living’ offers – faithfully to its unambiguous title - a combination of quasi-Regency architectural sketches and, of all things, ballet performances, presumably giving the lie to the adage that ‘talking about music is like dancing about architecture.’ The ICA, as Muir notes, was founded as a formation of living arts, by artists, ‘and these – rather ambitiously – included things like opera, television and etching’. Therefore, one of the things that his regime will be exploring is more interdisciplinary collaborations. Certainly, this seems to be going down well with the Arts Council; as Muir says, ‘Alan Davey and his colleagues have renewed our grant, which is a vote of confidence in what we’re doing.’

He’s under no illusions that he was hired merely because of his artistic vision. ‘I’m here because I have both curatorial and commercial skills, both of which I’m going to bring to bear on the ICA. ’ Undeniably, he says, things have changed in the art world. ‘We’ve left the Utopian post-war period, and we’re in a world of new financial models’, he says, the last phrase uttered in such a way that  one can almost hear the inverted commas. ‘We’re not in a world any more where the Lord taketh, and the Lord keep on taketh.’ Of course, the arts world in its entirety is on edge about cuts, and Muir’s attitude is ‘wait and see’ rather than to condemn the coalition out of hand. After all, as he notes, ‘when Thatcher’s government didn’t invest in the arts, we saw a massive boom, so we see the way in which uptown buys from downtown.’ 

Of course, he’s famous for his association with the YBAs such as Sarah Lucas and Damien Hirst, a period that he wrote a well-received memoir about, ‘Lucky Kunst’. ‘It was a personal version of events of a, ahem, swashbuckling time’, he sighs, nostalgically. Quizzed as to whether he thinks that there’ll ever be a renaissance of YBAs, in the same way that Britpop seems to be coming back into vogue, he is equivocal. ‘I think that we’re not looking at the East End any more for the art world, but the Far East End.’ I wonder, for a moment, whether Muir means the birth of a new scene in darkest Dagenham or Epping, but he quickly moves to talk about the way in which Delhi and China are becoming synonymous with artistic growth, as the recent outcry at the arrest and detention of Ai WeiWei on dubious-sounding charges of tax evasion attests.

Spending time with Muir, it’s hard not to warm to him. He might have the demeanour of a jolly schoolmaster or a favourite uncle rather than a tortured artist, but he’s admirably clear-sighted and passionate about what needs to be done with the ICA. There’s a sense of energy and drive about the building now under his watch, which was sorely lacking towards the end of the previous administration, but also of fun, hence the gentle hints that the building-bothering ballerinas aren’t to be taken in a po-faced, chin-stroking fashion.

Asked how he’d sum up the future of the ICA in three words, Muir pauses for what seems like an eternity, considering every nuance of the idea. Then he smiles and, as if spreading good news, he says ‘At the forefront’. Let’s hope it stays that way.

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