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.
The visibility of institutions like MoMA in New York (founded 1932), and its many building projects, led throughout the twentieth century to a plethora of other institutions inspired by its success, and imitating its name. The Pompidou Center in Paris, designed in a revolutionary modernist/clean industrial style by Piano and Rogers (opened 1977) has exerted a similar influence. From around 2000 the phenomenal success of Tate Modern in London and the parallel Guggenheim franchise in Bilbao, Spain (with its signature Frank Gehry building), and dozens of related projects, including new kunsthallen, from Berlin to Sao Paolo and Beijing; and in Australia David Walsh’s private Museum of Old and New Art (MONA) in Hobart have established contemporaneity as the most popular and essential aspect of new art museology, and this has not been lost on Australian governments and bureaucracy. These debates and projects have always run in parallel with awareness of the burgeoning number of global art fairs and unending announcements of new biennales, and the creation of the world’s third major biennale in Sydney in 1983 was undoubtedly influential.
Recent and current developments can be summarized thus:
| 1981 | Creation of Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne, on a relatively small scale, with partial state government funding. |
| 1991 | Opening of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney. Not funded by the state government; major refurbishment and extension largely privately funded ($58 million) opened in 2012. |
| 2006 | Opening of the Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane. Funded by the state government; $107 million. |
| 2015 | Beginning of the Sydney Modern project at the AGNSW; co-funded with government as principal funder, and private philanthropy, revised cost $344 million, with state government contribution of $244 million, with $100 million from private non-government sources, reduced from initial estimate of $450 million. |
| 2016–2018 | Competition for a new building for Adelaide Contemporary, as part of AGSA; estimated cost $250 million. |
| 20182020 | Victorian Government announcement of the development of a new arts precinct on the Melbourne “Southbank” with a new, proximate museum of contemporary art (NGV Contemporary) with seed funding of $250 million.In late 2020 the government announced, as part of its post-COVID infrastructure building program, a funding increase to $500 million, as part of an overall arts precinct budget of $1.46 billion. |
These, and other projected museum developments, currently total billions of dollars in value, and state governments are, for the most part, open to persuasion by the economic arguments for investment in future cultural tourism. Given the timeframes, it is unlikely that any government could ever be held responsible for actual outcomes, no matter how ambitious the claims made on behalf of museums and galleries by their own, or government’s, consultants. Not all the ideas listed above will necessarily be delivered as first proposed, as governments come and go and each reviews and revises its predecessor’s commitments. In mid-2018 a new, incoming government in South Australia has expressed doubts about its predecessor’s commitment to the Adelaide Contemporary project, preferring instead a “National Aboriginal Arts and Culture Gallery,” while at exactly the same time a similar – and more logical – concept is being actively pursued by the Government of the Northern Territory for Alice Springs.
A National Gallery for Australia
Australia’s new national administrative capital – essentially a compromise between the ambitions of Melbourne and Sydney, with a separate capital territory (ACT) carved out of NSW in 1909 – was named “Canberra” in 1913, and planning began under the aegis of the modernist American architect, town planner and landscape designer Walter Burley Griffin, in partnership with his wife Marion Mahony Griffin. Two world wars, with the Great Depression between, meant that, notwithstanding the federal parliament physically moving to Canberra in 1927, housed in a temporary parliament building, with foreign embassies and high commissions following gradually, Canberra only came into its own in the 1960s and 1970s. Gradually, national institutions were constructed: the National Library (opened 1968), the High Court of Australia (opened 1980) and a new Australian National Gallery opened in 1982 (ANG, but renamed the National Gallery of Australia (NGA) in 1993). The NGA is an essential part of a campus of key institutions flanking the south-central shore of Lake Burley Griffin, within the parliamentary triangle, which might be described as a kind of smaller equivalent to the Mall in Washington DC.
In 1967 the government of Australia accepted a report26 handed down the previous year recommending the creation of a national gallery, and construction began in 1975 (the year of the Act of Parliament creating the ANG/NGA as a national institution funded by government). It opened to the public in 1982. The founders of the NGA were determined to create a national institution which reflected a national and international cultural agenda, with collecting policies quite distinct from the major galleries in the state capitals. In addition to a requirement to acquire and display definitive collections of Australian visual culture, it would also concentrate on the modern period, meaning the late nineteenth century, and the twentieth century. The collections should also reflect global developments, including recent and contemporary art from both Europe and North America. But what was radical and visionary about the foundation document was the requirement to collect the visual culture of Australia’s own region, the Asia-Pacific, with an emphasis on south and especially south-east Asia, with less emphasis on China and Japan (given the strength of those collections in Melbourne and Sydney), and a particular requirement to collect the visual culture of the
