Lisa Le Feuvre is obsessed with failure – she’s even edited a book on the subject.
It is, she argues, something to be embraced rather than feared.
As the Californian conceptual artist John Baldessari puts it: 'Art comes out of failure. You have to try things out.'
Le Feuvre is all for trying stuff out. She’s not the type to be content with everything being OK, with just trundling along.
She exudes urgency and energy. She wants to get things done.
The curator and academic has been at the helm of the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds for less than six months. In that time she’s been taking stock, assessing the shape the organisation is in. (She’s also been curating her first show for the Institute, featuring the work of Italian Arte Povera sculptor, Mario Merz).
Le Feuvre says she likes what she sees at the Institute. Of course that doesn’t mean she hasn’t got change, and maybe a bit of disruption, on her mind. You sense that she has. Although she believes the organisation is very good at what it does, she wants it to be even better.
Hers is a big job to take on, and as head of the Yorkshire arm of the Hertfordshire-based Henry Moore Foundation, one that carries substantial cultural heft.
The history and influence of Henry Moore can seem like an unscalable edifice, an imposing repository of the real and the imagined.
The sculptural forms he created have become part of our visual language, once shocking, riveting, now familiar, even comforting.
Yet viewed in the context of the time he was working in, Moore was an artist forever pushing boundaries, questioning and breaking the ‘rules’ of sculpture. It is this legacy that Le Feuvre wishes to embody as the Institute’s new director. (Her actual job title is Head of Sculpture Studies, but even she admits this is a confusing mouthful.)
Le Feuvre has the right pedigree to succeed in her aim. Appropriately, she’s steeped in academia and was previously Lecturer in Curating at Goldsmiths. From 2005-2009 she was Curator of Contemporary Art at the National Maritime Museum and before that Exhibition Curator at The Photographers' Gallery. She is engaged with the art of the present as well as that of the past.
Her role as co-curator of British Art Show 7: In The Days of the Comet is emblematic of this. She took up her new position at the Institute in the same month that the show, a survey of British art made in the previous five years, opened in Nottingham. Currently at The Hayward Gallery until April 17, it then tours to Glasgow before reaching Plymouth, its final destination, in September.
It’s a major curatorial undertaking and Le Feuvre continues to juggle her ongoing commitments to the show with the demands of her new job. Her eye, though, is on the prize of making the Henry Moore Institute the first place people think of when it comes to sculpture, not just in Britain but internationally.
In the process of pursuing this, she will no doubt be trying things out, flirting with the f-word that so obsesses her. But ultimately, along with the thoughts of John Baldessari, this focused, driven director is as likely to have the words of another American – Apollo 13 flight controller Gene Kranz – ringing in her head: ‘Failure is not an option’.
©Chris Sharratt, April 2011
Watch the rest of The Director's Cut series on Axis
More Information
For information on the Henry Moore Institute's programme of exhibitions and events, visit www.henry-moore.org/hmi
The following exhibitions were showing at the Henry Moore Institute during filming:
Dear Henry Moore: Connections and Correspondence, (Mezannine Gallery) 3 February - 26 June 2011
Henry Moore: Prints and Portfolios, 3 February 2011 - 3 April 2011
British Art Show 7: In the Days of the Comet
Credits
The Director's Cut is a collaboration between Axis and Creative Times in association with Lumen.
Concept, Interview and Art Direction: Chris Sharratt (Creative Times)
Editor: Lucy Bannister (Axis)
Camera and titles: Phil Slocombe (Lumen)
Sound production: Stuart Bannister (Lumen)
The video and The Director's Cut series is also available to view on creativetimes.co.uk
Watch the rest of The Director's Cut series on Axis
