A Companion to Australian Art. Группа авторов
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 Pacific.
The NGA was vested with a special responsibility to share its collection with the nation, and since its opening hundreds of generally medium-sized exhibitions drawn from the collections have traveled around Australia, often displayed in small regional towns. By the end of 2018, 11 million Australians living in regional, and often remote, areas had participated in the program.
Since the early 1990s, the NGA has displayed dozens of major blockbuster exhibitions drawn from around the world. Conversely, it is increasingly lending exhibitions of contemporary Australian art, particularly the Indigenous schools to overseas venues, as part of the government’s informal program of cultural diplomacy. With strong government financial support for acquisitions, and many private donors nationwide, the NGA has built up the largest fine art collection in Australia with rich holdings of global distinction in painting and sculpture, prints and drawings, design and decorative arts, photography and the moving image. In the 1970s, under the guidance of its inaugural director James Mollison, the New York School became a special focus with exceptional collections built up representing all its key participants, and subsequent movements, from Pop to Minimalism and beyond, making it one of the finest anywhere outside the USA itself. The 1973 acquisition of Jackson Pollock’s masterpiece Blue poles 1952, for the highest price ever paid for an American work of art, ensured global attention. The collection of mid-late twentieth century American prints, generously supported by American master printer Ken Tyler, is close to definitive.
A new wing, completed in 2010, provided a suite of large galleries dedicated to displaying the contemporary Indigenous art movement, from the first central desert paintings of the early 1970s to now, and the NGA holds the largest and deepest collection anywhere. Its educational outreach is significant and national, and it has become a key destination for school groups from around the country visiting the national capital. The 2010 wing might be considered de facto as the national collection of contemporary indigenous art, and the National Museum of Australia, (opened 2001) also has distinguished collections, though with different emphases; the NMA shares its lakeside site with the National Centre for Indigenous Studies.
Over the years, proposals for a separate national museum of indigenous visual culture have been suggested for Canberra, but have never gained ground, given the large costs involved, and the current generous provision. It has been noted above that similar proposals are being floated (in 2018) for a national Indigenous art center in both Alice Springs in the Northern Territory, and in Adelaide in South Australia.
The NGA has conceptual plans, awaiting federal government approval and financial support, for a new wing, which will provide double the existing spaces for the collections, dedicated not only to Australian art, but also with a significant provision for global contemporary practice.
A National Portrait Gallery (NPG) for Australia was established in 1998, originally occupying space in the vacated