with a sub-committee, the Visual Arts Board, taking a special interest in the potential for supporting incoming major exhibitions, and working with the short-lived Australian Gallery Directors’ Council.22
From this point, Australian audiences came to expect major exhibitions of global stature, and since the late 1970s a huge number, many of exceptional quality, have been generated. This process continues, with an inevitable evolution of type and methodology.
To support this new phenomenon23 a management vehicle, the International Cultural Corporation of Australia (ICCA) was established, and this in turn, after a difficult period of instability, evolved in the early 1980s into Art Exhibitions Australia (AEA) with the well-known and respected Bob Edwards as CEO. To ensure a high level of professionalism nationally the federal government granted AEA a monopoly on access to federal government indemnity/insurance, without which large, ambitious exhibition projects could not proceed. This monopoly was maintained until 2009 when, after a government enquiry, it was felt that Australia’s major public art museums had reached a position where, in the field of exhibitions management, they had acquired sufficient expertise and specialist staff to act alone, should they choose to do so, and receive federal indemnity support directly. Since then, a hybrid system has operated.
The new phenomenon of blockbuster exhibitions, which transformed the way in which an ever-increasing number of Australians participated in public museology, could not be easily accommodated, as there were no dedicated permanent spaces for large temporary exhibitions. The new NGV in Melbourne had been designed just before the age of the imported blockbuster, and even Australia’s newest major public art gallery, the Australian National Gallery (rebranded as the National Gallery of Australia from 1993) was designed in the early 1970s, meaning that it opened in 1982 without a dedicated temporary exhibitions facility.
The need for the provision of such spaces necessitated, in due course, a new round of building projects, beginning with a special temporary exhibitions wing added to the NGA, opened in 1996. This was also one of the key drivers for the huge redevelopment project for the NGV, undertaken in the years 1999–2003. The provision of such spaces has been a key element of all museological planning in Australian galleries ever since, tied as it is to cultural tourism, and therefore to broader income generation for a city or state extending well beyond income from ticket sales, and these arguments have been central to all subsequent discussions with government and bureaucracy about arts infrastructure funding. The high costs of importing large, complex exhibitions into Australia (an issue shared with major art museums in East Asia) has meant that not all exhibitions have been able to 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
