Entries Tagged 'ARCHITECTURE' ↓

What is wrong with this photograph? In its relentless quest to trivialise its treasures, (vide the moving wallpaper effect of projecting fragments of its Aboriginal Art collection on the walls at night) see how the National Gallery of Australia represents itself with a fragment of Jackson Pollock’s Blue Poles on the parking signs. Not only a crass concept of branding, but turning the painting into a three dimensional object? Whoever thought of that should creep back to whence they came…

Wouldn’t you love to see the request letter to the Pollock-Krasner Foundation?

Imagine my surprise when I was shouted at for attempting to photograph the new architectural extension at the National Gallery of Australia! There are no signs forbidding such activity. Just an ambiguous little pamphlet you could ask for at the desk. “I wish to photograph the space, so that I can critique the architecture” I said. No way! came the reply… So you’ll have to make do with my drawing of the core structure of the building extension (by Andrew Andersons).

The two story main gallery contains a cylindrical form which appears to hang from the ceiling above the Aboriginal Memorial, containing a dome to echo the Turrell outside. The access ramp separates the Memorial from the outside world. Upstairs the cylinder provides the structure to contain the quadruply unfortunate corridor gallery in which are hung the Gallery’s collection of early Papunya boards. Quadruply unfortunate for (a) the colour of the gallery, (b) the unavoidable view of the fixtures behind the boards on the convex wall, (c) your inability to get a long or comparative view, and (d) the claustrophobic sense that you’ve got to keep moving down the tunnel. Like the entrance to the Musee du Quai Branly. We’ve heard Norman Day on ABC Artworks, but other reactions to the facelift have been few and far between. So who out there would like to write a comprehensive critique of the building in its new guise?

Here’s the NGA’s own view of itself…

And here is a NGA photograph looking the other way.

And notice the subtlety of the ring of circular airconditioning ducts embedded in the gravel which encircles the poles? Framed by invisible sculptures! I wonder who thought of that?

And this is how it currently appears on the Tourism Australia website… Which gives you a sense of how the design was virtualised to the Gallery at an earlier stage of decision-making.

This and other images of The Aboriginal Memorial can be found on the NGA’s Flickr feed.

P.S. For an example of the positive spin, read Christopher Menz’ commentary in the ABR.

“…the galleries are rooms consciously and unapologetically designed for the permanent collection of Indigenous art, not for anthropology…” Thanks to Breakfastpolitics, here is the full text of Ron Radford’s speech at the opening of the NGA. Given that his Senior Curator’s first degree is in anthropology, and most of the insights into the meaning and values of the art on display derive from the work of anthropologists, Ron’s creation of this particular straw man seems bizarre…

As I’ve observed previously, the Aboriginal Memorial has been dramatically re-framed by the National Gallery of Australia. In its new location it is the jewel in the crown of the NGA’s new extension where it sits (at last) all by itself in its own gallery. This is how the architect Andrew Andersons envisaged it…

The NGA has been using the Aboriginal Memorial in all its advance publicity, including this depleted “virtual” view, but it has only just been shown in its vulgar new “frame” – the roughly crushed black basaltic rocks from the Monaro high plains (“Nimmitabel Blue”) on which the 200 burial poles are now situated.

Normally, museums of this stature go to extreme lengths to exhibit their treasures in their original frames. In this case, the Aboriginal Memorial was first exhibited on red sand at the 1988 Biennale of Sydney, echoing the way the poles are seen in their original locale in Arnhem Land. When the designers came up with this new idea, was there nobody brave enough to say “this is appalling”? “The conservators won’t allow sand” seems to be the excuse of the day. What? Surely anything is possible in the museum of the 21st century? However in this case even the normally outspoken conceptual author of the Aboriginal Memorial, Djon Mundine, seems to have gone to ground. Ouch!

Seems like if the NGA can present a work as contemporary art they can install it however they like by pushing the bounds of moral rights and the artist’s original intentions. However if it’s sacred art, surely there are limits to what you should do with it? The addition of dramatic new material qualities to the work, notwithstanding the cultural origins and potentially alien significance of such materials, is a significant transformation of its reference to the place of its origins. As has always been signalled by the form of the Glyde River, dividing it in two. And so my question is, what is this work, re-framed, now saying?

This is how the NGA first began to trivialise its Aboriginal Art collection in 2007.

The projections continue today. Like moving wallpaper. In 2007, such projections of the Aboriginal Memorial seemed like one more step along the path towards the desacralisation of the work. It is, after all, a memorial. It represents the unrepresentable, in Jonathan Bordo’s words: “[it] is the public sign of an unrepresentable practice – the Aboriginal dead lie outside this domain, outside representation”. (See his essay The Witness in Contemporary Art in Paul Duro: The Rhetoric of the Frame: Essays on the Boundaries of the Artwork, Cambridge 1996, p.187.)

On Saturday 16th October the Canberra Times has published a promotional supplement which features the begravelled Aboriginal Memorial on its front cover. In addition, there is a short article by Djon Mundine culled from material he has published before. No comment on its design transformation…

In a bizarre twist, it seems the whole extension is framed by this ugly basalt rubble. In the gap between the old and new, there is a window which marks the transition from the old children’s gallery to the new Indigenous galleries. And there, hey presto, we find a box gutter full of the stuff. It beggars the imagination to think that it’s OK to use the same material to re-frame the Gallery’s most sacred and significant work of Indigenous art, and at the same time use it to mark the transition between the old and new buildings, or just to improve the look of a gutter visible from the galleries inside…

…is not looking too good in Canberra this morning. Last night the Spacedome and Planetarium was burnt. But at least the escape vehicle survived!

P.S. there is some relevance for Art Historians in this post: the Flying Saucer was built by Kym Bonython Enterprises in Adelaide in the 1960s…

as it never was… see Sperone Westwater’s new building at 257 The Bowery via ArtDaily Photo: Nigel Young Foster + Partners.

enjoy the images by Alain Delorme

Now this is what we call foresight. This is how Within without, the new James Turrell at the National Gallery of Australia, looked in November last year. This is an aspect which will only be of forensic interest to architecture students now that the work is completed. For a survey of other recent Turrells, go to designboom and fuel your curiosity…

I have to share this site (of architectural “abortions”) with you-all…

Imagine! Canberra could have had one of these in its city centre! The Serpentine Pavilions are available for sale. This is where the Gehry pavilion ended up.  Here’s where it could have been. Be warned. Iconophilia will never give up! See the slide show on designboom, and weep.