A Companion to Australian Art. Группа авторов
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deliver a profit, and in many cases boards of directors have been content to approve internal “break-even” budgets. There have been, however, many exceptions which delivered welcome profits, such as the NGV’s hugely successful post-redevelopment “Impressionist Masterpieces from the Musée d’Orsay” exhibition in 2004, with which it inaugurated the new “Melbourne Winter Masterpieces” program with 375 000 visitors, breaking the national attendance record for a ticketed exhibition. In 2009 the NGA in Canberra exceeded that record, with 478 000 visitors to what was effectively its sequel, “Post-Impressionism from the Musée d’Orsay.” More recently, the NGV has reported an attendance of 420 000 for its 2017 ticketed Van Gogh exhibition.
The “Melbourne Winter Masterpieces” program received additional grants from the government of Victoria on the basis that it be marketed as a major event for Melbourne alone, and that the state government’s financial support was contingent upon single venue exclusivity, driving inward cultural tourism, based on estimates of overall economic benefit. In many ways, this development broke the long-standing convention of imported exhibitions travelling to two or more venues in Australia, but it was perhaps inevitable in a rapidly changing world, with the historic sense of the remoteness of Australia as a key driver in the planning process no longer an inhibition. Having said that, one of the key factors in ensuring the generosity and high quality of global loans is the continuing validity of the argument that Australian audiences cannot travel to see major artworks in situ, as readily as Europeans and Americans can.
New Projects in the Twenty-first Century
A key factor in public art museology in Australia today concerns “competitive” funding by state governments in attracting cultural tourism, and the economic benefits delivered, as well as satisfying a kind of local pride – and the traditional competitiveness between Melbourne and Sydney is the key example.
Art museum building projects always come in phases. We have seen that in the nineteenth century the NGV in Melbourne led the field – established in 1861, but with a major building expansion in the 1870s – with the other colonies creating their own “national” galleries in the 1880s and 1890s. A new phase of building, and re-thinking how the art museum could play a more relevant role in the post-war community and society generally, was inaugurated with the project to build a new NGV in Melbourne, planned in the early 1950s under the aegis of Sir Keith Murdoch and opened in 1968, and this spectacular addition to Australia’s cultural infrastructure soon stimulated other major building projects in Sydney, Brisbane and Perth.
Then – again, leading the field – the NGV embarked upon a further ambitious redevelopment and building program in 1999–2003. This project essentially doubled available space for collections and exhibitions. The project, designed by the Milan-based Mario Bellini, not only reorganized the existing main building into a space for both the international, non-Australian collections and for temporary exhibitions (NGV International), but also delivered a significant new building exclusively dedicated to Australian art (The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia). Designed by LAB Architects nearby in Federation Square, as part of the architects’ new urban civic center project, and in stylistic terms reflecting aspects of the work of Daniel Liebeskind, it delivered to the center of Melbourne a fine example of the global architectural avant-garde. Both buildings have proved significant successes, with constantly rising visitor numbers over the 15 years since they opened, now totaling well in excess of 2 million visitors per annum.
Since then, many similar projects have been delivered, or are in a planning stage, and debates around modernity and contemporaneity remain a major focus of attention. When the government of Victoria announced its support for a redeveloped NGV in the mid 1990s, an old debate about the need for a dedicated “Gallery of Modern Art” was reignited. Artists and dealers, critics and collectors, and many members of the general public promoted a campaign to argue that the new, additional building which the NGV badly needed should be a “Museum of Modern Art” for Melbourne. By then the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) had opened in Sydney (1991), financially supported by the University of Sydney and the Power Bequest,24 specifically to offer Sydney more access to Australian and global contemporary practice and more experimental museological approaches, consciously different from the more established “universalist” requirements of the multi-purposed AGNSW. A key issue, of course, was the fact that in Melbourne the substantial income of the Felton Bequest, supported by further generous private philanthropy, made major international acquisitions possible, something historically less achievable in Sydney, which led, therefore, to a greater emphasis on Australian art.
The debate had raged in Melbourne for a long time, centering not only on the need to acquire the global avant-garde in a courageous way – never easy with the innate conservatism of governments, trustees and even directors – but more particularly on the local artists’ community, who constantly complained about a lack of consistent, serious patronage from the NGV, and its predictable exhibitions record. A Contemporary Artists’ Society (CAS) run by artists for the benefit of artists, above all as a commercial sales outlet, was established as early as 1938 (at the height of the ultra-conservative, anti-modernist directorship of James MacDonald), and even after the arrival of the more open-minded Daryl Lindsay, followed by the even more supportive Eric Westbrook in 1956, the modernist group in the CAS felt more action was needed, leading to the concept of an independent Gallery of Contemporary Art, eventually set up in 1956, though still essentially as a commercial venture.
John Reed, a Melbourne lawyer who was chairman of the CAS and who had, with his wife Sunday, maintained for many years at their outer suburban residence an informal studio (and often refuge) for artists, and for debate on modernity,25 moved in 1958 to establish a more formal Museum of Modern of Art of Australia (MoMAA), but for a range of reasons, financial, personal and political, it never prospered, and its two descendants in Melbourne today can be identified as the Heide Museum of Modern Art which occupies, through the will of the Reeds, their house with significant new gallery spaces attached (established 1981, with the most recent extension opened in 2006) and the Australian Center of Contemporary Art (ACCA) established in 1983 to promote cutting edge Australian and international visual and performative practice, with a new, architecturally edgy government-funded building (designed by Wood Marsh and opened 2002) adjacent to the NGV. Both have strong followings, and produce significant exhibitions and programs, but are different in size, ambition and approach from the MCA in Sydney.
The 1990s debate on the opportunity for the NGV to create at last a museum/gallery of contemporary art was settled by the government of Victoria, which declared that it was only willing to provide funding for a new building conceived to celebrate the centenary of Federation, and therefore dedicated to Australian visual arts practice of all periods, not a general museum of Australian and global modern art. The concept has remained alive and has been much discussed, and in 2018 the then (Labour) government of Victoria announced its support for a gallery of contemporary art to be constructed to the west of NGV International as part of a broader new arts precinct potentially costing $1 billion. After the government’s pledge of $250 million, a fundraising program to secure substantial private philanthropy for the NGV element of it was quickly inaugurated.
In Brisbane, a similar concept was brought to fruition in the early twenty-first century, with the Queensland Art Gallery moving, with government support, to create a new Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA), dedicated to the visual culture of the late 20th and twenty-first centuries, covering Australia, the Asia-Pacific and the rest of the world. Announced as a Millennium Project of the government of Queensland in 2000, it opened in 2006, to coincide with the 5th Asia-Pacific Triennial of contemporary art, a hugely successful initiative launched by director Doug Hall in 1993, which instantly gained international attention and support. GOMA must be classified, in terms of the size of the building and its programming, as Australia’s first significant government-funded museum of contemporary art.
Global trends, reflecting the growing focus on contemporaneity by museums, the art market, collectors and rapidly growing, especially younger, audiences (cashed-up, mobile and more connected through social media than any generation before them), have brought a new focus to the public consumption of contemporary practice in Australia’s public art museums.
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