Done already? Well, don’t get cocky. This is a high-risk venture. Politicians and philanthropists are slippery and will always levy an impost on their generosity, and the architects are going to need constant attention. That $5,000,000 contribution may yet go up in a puff of political smoke and mirrors, and the bewitching scale model on your desk could end up as a structurally quirky and museologically dysfunctional space. The public, too, is fickle and funds perennially tight. If that’s not keeping you up at nights, remember that the true test of all this effort won’t come until five years after your new museum has opened and you continue to grapple with ongoing staffing and running costs combined with the need to generate yet more funds and excitement now that the initial glow of the building’s opening has faded. In short, and as the recent staff cuts and belt tightening at the Guggenheim Museum enterprise have demonstrated, the global culture of contemporary museum projects constitutes a truly Darwinian ecosystem. There are a number of examples to be found throughout the world of grand museum schemes passed out on the beach like so many stranded whales as the tide of fashion, funds and demographics ebbs away from them. Most of these institutions may not be carcasses yet, but a number are going to need more than well-wishing directors passing buckets of water to sustain them in the long run.

As anyone with even a passing interest in cultural institutions will know, the twin coming of the new millennium and centenary of Federation greatly accelerated this process in Australia. A small number of projects have yet to be completed; others have trickled through, rather belatedly, afterthoughts to the Y2K brouhaha. The Queensland Gallery of Modern Art, for instance, is not due to open until the year’s end, even though it forms the centrepiece of the Queensland Government’s $308.5 million Millennium Arts Project. The National Portrait Gallery has likewise only recently announced its decision to relocate to a new gallery designed by Johnson Pilton Walker, following a competition held in 2005. This firm was also responsible for one of the largest recent art museum renovations in New South Wales, the Art Gallery of New South Wales’ elegant New Asian Galleries, which were completed in October 2003.

Victoria has had the lion’s share of recent museum projects. Looking back, now that the dust has begun to settle, one cannot but be struck by how much the state, and Melbourne most particularly, seems to have felt the need to prove itself when it comes to cultural capital investment. The recent chronology is frankly staggering, particularly when one factors in some of the less spectacular projects that tended to get lost in the media glare reserved for the bigger institutions. First off the mark was the Melbourne Museum, which finally relocated in 2000, following much debate, from the State Library of Victoria to a huge purpose-built building by Denton Corker Marshall in the Carlton Gardens. The following year witnessed the completion of Karl Fender’s renovation of the Bendigo Art Gallery, with the opening of a new café and a gallery for works on paper. Later that same year, the Museum of Modern Art at Heide announced the completion of its initial stage of redevelopment (thereby setting in train a sequence of projects that is now at last imminently due for completion). Next up was the Monash Gallery of Art, which commissioned Sanderson Cox Architects to update and extend its original Harry Seidler-designed building. The year then ended with a bang with the completion of no fewer than three major projects: the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, which opened in a new building by Wood Marsh at the city’s periphery, next to the old Malthouse Theatre; and the opening of both the Australian Centre for the Moving Image and the National Gallery of Victoria: Australia. These last two institutions now form the principal public elements of the huge civic undertaking that is Federation Square, as designed by Lab Architecture Studio, in association with Bates Smart.

Nor did things abate in 2003. The redeveloped National Gallery of Victoria: International finally reopened after a four-year closure and a complete redesign by the Milanese architect and designer Mario Bellini, in association with the local firm Metier 3. At the same time, a smaller new museum opened at the far reaches of outer Melbourne: the TarraWarra Museum of Art, designed by Allan Powell to display the private collection of Eva and Marc Bessan alongside their vineyard in the lush setting of the Yarra Valley. The next year  saw the opening of the newly fitted-out galleries at the State Library of Victoria (following the departure of the National Gallery of Victoria, which had been exhibiting there temporarily awaiting its new premises). Finally, 2005 brought the reopening of the University of Melbourne’s Ian Potter Museum of Art, the opening of the new Centre for Contemporary Photography by Sean Godsell Architects, the closure of the National Gallery of Victoria: Australia’s Response Gallery and then the reopening of this same space, over the course of the last few months, as the site for the new home of the National Design Centre.

What broad themes can be divined in all this frenzy? Do any of these new spaces indicate a shift towards any fundamental changes in the ways we engage with art at the beginning of the twenty-first century? Or do they, rather, represent a further proliferation of more of the same when it comes to the design of art exhibition spaces? The answer to these questions is a qualified Yes – and also, it must be said, No. A clear sense of the distinctively new emphases found in this current crop of projects can be gained by considering briefly the National Gallery of Victoria: International redevelopment in the light of the museological aspirations of the original building that served as its template.

This first building was considered the height of museological modernity when it opened to the public in 1968 as the NGV’s new home, after it had outgrown its original location in the old Victorian State Library complex and moved, appropriately enough for our current purposes, to the old site of Wirth’s Circus across the Yarra River. We should not forget that it was also bold, entrepreneurial and museologically innovative in ways that have done great credit to the vision and foresight of the architect, Roy Grounds, and to the then director, Eric Westbrook. For one thing, the 1968 building signalled a strong sense of engagement with Asian and Pacific cultures, both in its architecture and through the layout of its collections (it reserved an entire courtyard, for example, for emphasising what it termed ‘Asian and Ethnic art’). Its entrance lobby was equally designed to facilitate the rapid and efficient circulation of visitors (to the extent that some conservatives decried the foyer’s escalators as being more appropriate to a department store, which was precisely the point). It also contained a series of greatly expanded temporary exhibition galleries and a vast new Great Hall, with signature stained glass by Leonard French, which represented a hitherto unprecedented emphasis on the ancillary roles in the contemporary museum of functions and performances.

This last feature might have seemed excessive to some, yet how prescient it has proven over the years as museums have come to place increasing emphasis on corporate sponsorship and on the need to generate additional funds via room hire. The Great Hall has for forty years provided an area for children to roam at large, temporarily released from the baleful gaze of the attendants, in an extraordinarily ‘free’ space that allows them to sprawl on the floor and generally charge about the breadth of its 2590 square metres of open expanse before being reined in and escorted through the much less spatially accommodating galleries themselves. As an unintimidating introduction to the lifelong rigours of visiting art museums, its importance thus cannot be overestimated.

At the same time, other aspects of the 1968 NGV have not withstood the test of time so well. Foremost among these is the huge expanse of the exterior’s windowless bluestone wall and the surrounding moat, which creates a rather unwelcoming late-modernist expression of the museum as a temple of culture set apart from the everyday world. Even the official commemorative publication of the 1968 building could not disguise this when it noted its outside appearance as ‘a well-tempered, calm-mannered fortress’.¹ This was putting a positive spin on things, particularly given that this emphasis was just beginning to be questioned and would soon be superseded by the growing impetus towards the alternative model of the museum as a more open-ended and avowedly visitor-friendly forum.

Bellini could go only so far in offsetting these architectural preconditions, particularly once a public campaign scotched any plans he may have had to remove the entrance Water Wall (always a problem this, since it further screens off views into the building). Yet the most obvious instance of the new emphasis at the revitalised NGV is what Bellini was able to achieve at the entrance foyer and central courtyard. The old entrance may have resembled a department store, but it was nonetheless always paternalistically linear in terms of the straight and narrow circulation routes that it allowed visitors. The new NGV does away with this in one fell swoop. In place of the axial formality of Grounds’s design, the renovated building has been overlaid with a much more informal – one might even say buzzy – multiplicity of entrance and circulation points around and within the internal spaces themselves. This has been achieved through the virtual evisceration of the original galleries and the complete transformation of the Sculpture Courtyard at the heart of the old building. Although based on the great traditions of the Renaissance to neoclassical sculpture courtyards at the Vatican and beyond, this courtyard was never particularly sympathetic, it must be said, other than as a rather windswept expanse that seemed best suited to those gallery staff and visitors in search of a convenient place to smoke. Now it has been glassed over and opened to the public as a vast entrance and visitor orientation space that is reminiscent of Norman Foster’s much larger Great Court, situated at the heart of the recently renovated British Museum.

Both these spaces, then, make similar pronouncements concerning what the new, improved twenty-first century global museum feels it should be emphasising to its visitors. Here, the institutions’ energies are focused, not so much on the technical subtleties of how to design the galleries themselves as on presenting to the public a spectacular image of the museum itself as an infinitely welcoming yet whirringly efficient facilitator of social interaction, popular entertainment and public knowledge.

All of which is certainly impressive. But where has the art gone exactly? The NGV’s old lobby at least hung a mobile by Alexander Calder to reassure us that this was, after all, an art gallery that we were entering. Now a certain relentlessness has crept in: we are not, in fact, allowed to see the exhibits until we have completed the necessary inductions. We are greeted by a hugely expanded cloakroom screening off our vision to the right, followed by a large visitor information booth directly ahead. This leads to the cinema-like ticket booths to the further expanded temporary exhibition galleries. Above us is the café. To our left, we cannot now escape the NGV shop set alongside the exit, busy with merchandise.

And what of the galleries themselves, which I have thus far neglected to mention? In fact, they represent a wonderfully elegant reframing of the permanent collections in ways that should offer both first-time visitors and seasoned members alike countless new avenues for engagement in the years to come. But herein lies the conundrum posed by the NGV renovation and by the global sweep of new museum projects more generally. The mainstay elements of the permanent collection can become all too easily lost in the increased prominence that these rebranding exercises tend to place on the lure of the new and on the more glamorously spectacular aspects of the refashioned institution itself. At its most extreme, this results in the construction of new buildings that supplant the artworks inside them to become the major attractions in themselves. (Frank Gehry’s Bilbao Guggenheim provides the prime example of this; it is now so canonically famous that no one seems to feel the need to ask whether the art inside is actually worth a visit, let alone whether or not the building succeeds in presenting the exhibits to their greatest advantage.)

These challenges, created by what we might call the bread and circuses effect in contemporary museums, are most keenly felt in the area of the temporary exhibition. These are a real issue for the NGV: International since entrance to the permanent collections is now free and the reasons for wanting to visit the building, at a local level at least, have been mostly removed (given that contemporary international art has never been a major strength of the NGV’s collections, and since Australian art has also moved to Federation Square, in terms of both its historical and contemporary holdings as well as its indigenous art). So the NGV: International needs something new to keep the public coming back for more – paying money all the while – and in order to convince them that it is not just the place for all the ‘old’ stuff on permanent display across the river. The answer, of course, lies in the international blockbuster exhibition that has returned with a vengeance. Since its reopening, we have thus been treated to a bevy of superlatives: first to Caravaggio, followed by The Impressionists: Masterpieces from the Musée d’Orsay, then Dutch Masters from the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, and, imminently, the biggest modern master of them all: Picasso, who is arriving this June in a travelling roadshow, courtesy of the Musée Picasso in Paris.

These last three exhibitions form part of an innovative new funding agreement reached with the state government that has been branded the Melbourne Winter Masterpieces programme. This scheme provides the NGV (in the first instance, with other institutions potentially to come) with increased funding on a scale normally reserved for major tourist or sporting events. The trade-off, though, is a significant raising of the stakes in terms of factors such as visitor attendances and demonstrable economic benefit to the state. In order to help ensure the success of these requirements, the exhibitions are further locked into a treadmill of marketing, hyperbole and political rhetoric (resulting in scads of media releases stressing words such as ‘world’ and ‘first’ and ‘class’).² The exhibitions become, in other words, ‘events’, with all that this entails.

Nevertheless, the results do speak for themselves. The Impressionists netted a total of 380,000 visitors, making it one of the most popular exhibitions in Australian history. There has also been, it needs to be said, a commendable attempt to leaven the overseas ‘masterpieces’ in these exhibitions with selected highlights from the permanent collections. Overall, though, the prevalence of these overseas ‘rental’ blockbusters cannot help but introduce a certain ‘off the rack’ feeling to the institution’s exhibition programme. More importantly, perhaps, they clearly narrow the options for other worthy but nonetheless less glamorous projects, and they take energy away from the curators’ potential to do further work on and around the permanent collection itself.

Yet the circus must go on, and circuses can’t exist without the public. Even the most adroit ringmaster, as the NGV assuredly is, needs to be able to juggle numerous, often conflicting, priorities: the need to advance scholarship, on the one hand, versus the imperative of access, on the other; the need to introduce audiences to new areas, versus the necessity of luring them in with instant brand recognition, on the other. Nobody said it was going to be easy, and the effect of too much bold museological innovation can be disastrous.

The new Australian Centre for the Moving Image in Federation Square is a case in point. ACMI represents an extremely innovative, virtually unprecedented, Australian leap into the field of large-scale, new media institutions. A major part of its programming has accordingly been an ongoing series of exhibitions that have included some of the most memorable shows of recent years: particularly Ross Gibson’s Remembrance + The Moving Image; an exhibition on the art and culture of the Ngarinyin Aboriginal people staged via an elaborate audiovisual installation entitled Ngarinyin Pathways Dulwan; and a recent exhibition on the relationship between abstraction and the moving image, entitled White Noise. Here then, finally, is an answer to the question posed at the outset: a recently instituted gallery that truly does represent a new way of engaging with art at the onset of the new millennium.

Yet ACMI has had problems of its own. These have involved much institutional soul-searching and the raising of some fundamental questions concerning its definition and future direction. Just what is ACMI exactly? A cinema? A virtual portal? A new media gallery? A library? An archive? A games centre? An industry advocate? An education and production centre? All of the above? This multiplicity of complex elements, any one of which is potentially innovative and difficult to explain to the public, let alone manage successfully, has proven extremely difficult to sell. The institution has accordingly experienced a rough couple of years, weathering senior management changes and a major government funding bailout in the process.

Teething problems were nonetheless to be expected for such an institution, and ACMI has certainly not allowed itself to become one of the beached whales. Still, its recent history demonstrates the challenges faced by all these new museum projects. Will there ever be a time when it will be possible to say that these institutions have definitively overcome these challenges? Will the sense of spectacle and the raised audience expectations that have been created by the myriad openings and reopenings over the past five years be allowed to come down a notch or two to more reasonable levels? Perhaps. We are surely reaching the end of an historically unprecedented cycle of museological change. On the other hand, though, and as the relocation of the NGV to the site of the old Wirth’s Circus perhaps foreshadowed all those many years ago, there is always room for yet another circus to roll into town.

Endnotes

¹ Patrick Tennison and Les Gray, Meet the Gallery, Melbourne: Sun Books, 1968, p.14.

² Arts Victoria announcement by the Premier, Steve Bracks, media release dated 21^st April 2005 (http://www.arts.vic.gov.au/arts/news/media/26ImpressionistsClosing.htm): ‘Melbourne’s world class cultural institutions like the National Gallery of Victoria, provide first class venues for world class collections like those of the Musée Picasso.’