Gallery opening spurs a fading city's artistic revival

The Turner Contemporary in Margate in the UK demonstrates how a new art venue can transform a town.

The Turner Contemporary in Margate, Kent, aims to celebrate JMW Turner's art as well as contemporary works and also give a nod to the surrounding landscape.

A major new gallery on England's south-east coast is promising to revive the fortunes of a seaside town, bringing international art to a place better known for its arcade games and battered cod. Turner Contemporary, in Margate, opened in mid-April with the artist Tracey Emin and the musician Jools Holland giving speeches at the launch.

"Margate should feel so proud," Emin said to the crowd gathered by the sea front. "This is a tremendous, fantastic, important day. Art is going to be the best thing that ever happened to this town." Ed Vaizey, the UK's minister for culture, taped a speech in which he described himself as a "passionate supporter" of the gallery, and Holland told its employees "Her Majesty the Queen wishes you the best."

Designed by the award-winning architect David Chipperfield, Turner Contemporary is made up of a series of jagged blocks that face the sea. A 10-minute walk from the train station, the £17.5 million (Dh105m) building stands on the site where the Victorian painter JMW Turner lived towards the end of his life.

There's no permanent collection, but a series of temporary exhibitions will display Turners borrowed from the Tate and elsewhere, alongside new work (including commissions) by local and international artists. An opening programme of concerts, talks, performances and interactive events helped make the launch a success - around 15,000 people turned up on the first weekend - and demand should remain high, especially as access is free, due to funding from sources including Kent County Council.

"As far as the government are concerned, it's a regeneration initiative," said the curator Lauren Wright. "As far as we're concerned, it's about bringing the best possible art to the people in Kent." Using art to bolster the reputation of a struggling city isn't a new concept in the UK: when Tate Liverpool opened in 1988, unemployment in the city was high and its economy was shrinking. Since then, Liverpool has been named Capital of Culture (in 2008), and tourism has become a major industry.

Of course, it's not just struggling areas that can benefit from new art venues. When Spain gained the Guggenheim Bilbao it transformed the city into a must visit for cultural tourists. Similarly, Saadiyat Island promises to make Abu Dhabi into a cultural hub in the Middle East.

But Margate has been in dire straits. Wright, who has been studying Margate's history, told us, "There was a long period of decline from the 1960s, but especially in the 1990s. When Margate's amusement park, Dreamland, closed, that was the final blow." She explained that in Georgian times, the town had been "a very posh resort" but had latterly become a more working-class tourist destination.

Now there's an initiative to reopen Dreamland in 2013, with restored heritage rides. Meanwhile, in the Old Town (a central crossroads of shops on narrow cobbled streets) new artists' studios, galleries, cupcake shops and delis are opening, giving the place a quaint, and rather upmarket, feel. The Old Town, where Turner went to school as a young boy, is just a few streets away from the new gallery.

While Turner Contemporary is doubtless doing its job of attracting tourists to Margate, its critical reception has been mixed, particularly with regard to the strange concept behind it. Turner died in 1851: his links with contemporary art are tenuous at best. And while a forthcoming exhibition, Turner and the Elements (opening in January) will show dozens of his paintings and drawings, the opening show, Revealed, has only one work by Turner: his vivid night-time landscape The Eruption of the Souffrier Mountains.

Based on another person's account, the painting of a blazing volcano was a work of Turner's imagination, and so the contemporary works on show are linked back to it with placards explaining that the artists in question, like Turner, were fascinated by science, or nature, or worked using their imaginations, or that they too had a soft spot for Margate. It makes for a muddled theme, although it fulfils the Turner Contemporary's remit in both being about Turner and contemporary art, and throwing in a few nods to the surrounding landscape at the same time.

The highlight among these new works (and perhaps least connected with the overriding theme) is Conrad Shawcross's installation Projections of a Perfect Third. The young Londoner, whose work was bought by Charles Saatchi when he was barely out of art school, has installed three works centred on the idea of a musical chord.

The mathematical relationship between one note in this chord and another was expressed in three ways: by drawings created by an oscillating machine, by a sculpture rendering these doodles in 3D, and by a moving installation with lights and rotating arms. The effect is not only visually striking - the moving sculpture dominates the room and throws dancing shadows on to the walls - it's also profound, drawing viewers' attention to the connections between maths, nature and aesthetics.

Also satisfying, in a more understated way, is the first artwork visitors are exposed to as they enter the building, which is also easiest to miss. Borrowing and Multiplying the Landscape by the French conceptualist Daniel Buren is a brand-new, site-specific piece that looks like part of the architecture: stripes of blue paint traverse the gallery's huge front window, with a circular space left for the sun to pour in. On the walls on either side of the window are mirrors that bounce around the yellow sunlight and the blue from the sea and the stripes. As the name implies, it draws attention to the outside world rather than distracting from it.

There are four other contemporary artists in the exhibition: Californian Russell Crotty has created hanging globes covered with seaside landscapes in biro and watercolour alongside maps of constellations; Brooklyn-based Ellen Harvey has put together a video of waves crashing, an illuminated sign reading "ARCADIA" and a shed housing backlit etchings of Margate; Miami-born Teresita Fernandez, has fastened an abstract pattern of graphite rocks to a wall and attached tiny beads to a painted surface, which glitter as you peer at them; and the Turner Prize winner Douglas Gordon has recreated his text work Afterturner, on the gallery's main stairs.

It's a promising and varied exhibition, although with the limited space it would perhaps have worked better to have a more clearly-defined sense of narrative running through it. A visitors' leaflet says that the show "explores imagination, discovery, wonder and creativity", abstract nouns that could be linked to pretty much any artwork. Turner Contemporary's next, youth culture-oriented exhibition, Nothing in the World But Youth, looks more focused.

Whether or not the gallery is a success depends on its aims. It's not going to rival nearby London's cultural institutions, although it will attract day trippers. In the past four years, ambitious contemporary art galleries have opened in Eastbourne (Towner), Nottingham (Nottingham Contemporary) and Middlesbrough (Mima). Later this year, there will be further openings in Wakefield (The Hepworth) and Colchester (Firstsite). There's clearly an appetite for new art outside the UK's biggest cities, and Turner Contemporary is helping fulfil it admirably. It does look as though it's going to generate income, jobs and kudos for Margate, and if the local throng there on a recent weekday is representative, it's going to be a brilliant local resource. As Emin told the local press, if this had been around when she was a teenager she "would have been here every day, would have been trying to get a Saturday job and would have been doing anything to be associated with it".

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