Mike Tooby
Born 1956 in Warwickshire and grew up in Coventry. He read Archaeology, Anthropology and History of Art at the University of Cambridge, Magdalene College, from 1975 to 1978. Mike joined the Kettle's Yard Society in his second year and undertook some voluntary work there. Helped Jeremy Lewison (also interviewed) with installing exhibitions. Mike was appointed to the Assistant Curator post when Roger Malbert (also interviewed) left. He went on to be the first curator at Tate St Ives. At the time of interview he was Director of Learning and Programmes at the National Museums of Wales.
Interviewed: 2009-07-23By: Robert Wilkinson
Length: 0 mins
Media: On Two tracks on CD with summary
Interview id: MYKY41
Placing objects and the impossibility of keeping Jim's version
View: Transcript Theme: House as gallery
We did occasionally lend to other exhibitions of course so that would require re-thinking a space and then on the level of the none art, as it were, the pebbles, feathers - damage, loss - would require re-thinking. Sometimes we ran this past Jim, other times we just did it and told him, other times we just did it and didn't tell him. But there would be a process of debate, I think, and Jeremy had a different kind of passion to me about the need for it to be just so. We, probably like a lot of people very intimate with Kettle's Yard, we probably each had our own idea of what that meant and that's where the analogy I was meaning about the performance of the piece of music comes in. Let's take the spiral as the best example, or the dark to light pebbles. We would constantly remake that. And then the precise nuance of the relationship between that and that and that, whatever it might be, might be just slightly different. Another would be the angle of the Hamilton Finlay in the plants area. And of course the fact that the plants changed. I remember a huge schmozzle about the dizygotheca down below by the piano in the lower area and the Buddha. Because of course the dizygotheca covered the Buddha and the Buddha sat under the tree but eventually this thing became too big, it grows, you know, plants grow! So how high this should... and Gerard Hemsworth of all people, he was in a show that I curated, and he got really interested in Kettle's Yard and he offered to find a dizygotheca of the right height. So, in other words, you might be passionate about exactly where it was, whatever it might be or what you'd got to know, but of course the irony was that it could never be exactly that.
Direct link to audio: .mp3
Continuing Jim's routines after the Edes left in 1973
View: Transcript Theme: House as home
I think for a lot of people, me included, he was a ghost, a kind of presence and we constructed what it must have been like and we, very quickly through talking to Betty [Thompson] or whoever, would pick up the things that they remembered about Jim being there so, like, selected people being invited to stay after four, and they would sit round this table here, and the crockery was still in the kitchen so we used to make cups of tea and people would say, 'I used to come here when Jim was here and we did this, that and the other', and you'd pick that up. Of course you then had the people who one gradually felt to be the guardians of the true flame who would come in and say, 'Op, I see that's moved three inches to the right', or whatever. Of course, people who were much closer to Jim that I was would come in, having visited Jim in Edinburgh, and bring back reports or questions and occasionally stuff.
Direct link to audio: .mp3
Visiting with only one staff member and invigilating in the mid 1970s
View: Transcript Theme: House as gallery
You went past the person on the door and then you were on your own. Now, I do realise that... I mean, in retrospect, I gradually discovered that that was particular to that moment but, at the time, that was one of the great joys of it. The job of the person down at the door, I later discovered, was to establish that the person was welcome, sign the book, any routine things like, 'Would you like to leave a bag and a coat?' Later on we introduced a photo permit. The overwhelming impression was of it being quiet and free of people. You might meet one or two other people there. Quite often the people that one met would be people who, like me, would just find somewhere to sit and sit there, maybe read a book, maybe bring a book with them to sit and read. The invigilator down at the door might occasionally, if they felt confident, go up and have a walk around and see where whoever was in the house had got to, but of course if you did that you got too far away and you couldn't hear the bell. What worried one was that someone would turn away if the door wasn't opened straight away so you tended to stay by the door.
Direct link to audio: .mp3
