After twelve highly-successful years at the helm of the National Portrait Gallery and a long career in fine art galleries including the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Newcastle Region Art Gallery and the National Gallery of Australia, Andrew Sayers took up a new position as Director of the National Museum of Australia in June 2010. I caught up with him to talk about his dramatic change and his vision for the NMA.
Your background has so far been in fine art institutions and you were quoted earlier this year as saying that “there is a divide in the Australian cultural world between museums and galleries”. What did you mean by this, and will you try to bridge this divide at the National Museum of Australia?
Andrew Sayers: I think I am trying to bridge the divide. What I was reacting to [in the quote] was a sense I picked up that people thought I was leaving galleries to go to the ‘strange world’ of museums. Museums, in many peoples’ minds, have tended to be associated with natural history and ethnography – two very nineteenth-century ideas of museums.
I think this has created a certain professional divide in the sense that the core professional staff of natural history museums are research scientists. They have certain things in common with curators – they develop collections, do fieldwork and research – but the world in which they work is very different from the world ofthe art museum curator.
All of the state museums tend to be a kind of mixture: some natural history, somesocial history, some ethnography and some technology, so you get an experience that jumps around from trains and cars to dinosaurs, rocks, mounted animals and historical displays. To each one of these things you have to bring a different perspective.
Art museums are much more coherent in their expectations of the visitor, but there is always criticism that they don’t show the works in their particular context.For example, take all of the things that used to be called ‘tribal art’. Museums would see as an important element in the display of such material the giving of as much context as possible. Art museums usually privilege the aesthetic experience rather than the context of the object.
If we look at the natural history museum or the social history museum, there are different ways in which the viewer is invited to look at objects. Some of the objects are collected and displayed for their role in social history, others because they have a collecting history, and often that history is regarded as the object’smost significant history. Museums tend to want to tell the object’s story fully in an attempt to recover context.
Autobiographically, two things I did before the National Museum of Australia [NMA] point to breaking down of this polarity in my own work. One was a 1994 book, Aboriginal Artists of the Nineteenth Century, which originated in my work as curator of drawing, but ended up being a biographical examination of visual culture within particular circumstances – it is an exploration of the lives of people across the nineteenth century and their experience of cultural dislocation.In a way that book started from the study of objects but ended up dealing with history, in particular the history of individuals, rather than aesthetic concerns.
Secondly, I ran the National Portrait Gallery [NPG] for twelve years. I used to say that although the institution has “gallery” in its title, a portrait gallery has, in effect,more in common with a museum than a gallery. Particular artefacts are collected in order to illuminate lives – not looked at principally from an aesthetic point ofview. In a portrait gallery, works of art fulfill a function not dissimilar to paintings or sculptures in a war memorial – to cast light on particular set of historical circumstances.
The NMA has been criticized in the past for its representation of Australia’s colonial history. How will these issues be approached under your leadership and what do you think the role of a museum should be in encouraging historical debate?
To take the second part of the question first, the fundamental role of a museum is to connect the contemporary world with the past and to ask: ‘How did we get here?’
A museum has a role in talking about things that people are concerned about in contemporary society. The National Museum in its early days had some real difficulties with issues around historical balance. There was a whole range of viewpoints and ultimately the question came down to the limits of the historical record. That was at the heart of the ‘history wars’ debate.
The Museum took a view that the nature of power-relations being what they are, not every voice in history is equal and therefore the historical record is inevitably skewed. One of the Museum’s roles is to look beyond that – to uncover the realities of people’s lives. You can’t just look at the written record to create history or to create a particular sort of display; it’s naive to think that you can.
I think that the role of the Museum is to propose alternative views of history and it has a duty to do that. There will inevitably be discussion and disagreement and debate and that’s all fine – the Museum should never shy away from that. There’s an obligation for us to be as accurate as possible in terms of the material that is presented, but we know that history can never be recovered in all of its complexity, so therefore we must always understand the limitations of what we’re dealing with.
In terms of the Museum’s early difficulties with these issues, at least in part it was due to the fact that the governance – the Museum Council was internally divided about these things and with the professional staff and that became public. So it wasn’t just about subject matter, but about a range of disattisfactions or disappointments with the Museum. In that context public debates can become very corrosive.
I’m confident that now we have a very good Council, and it’s one that’s happy and prepared for the Museum to have a much higher profile in people’s consciousness, [for it to be a place] which captures national imagination; a place where interesting things are said and done. These might be controversial from time to time. Art galleries are different sort of spaces – there is a neutrality of voice, a kind of authoratative whisper heard in the ‘white cube’.
To return to the the NPG. There I started with the question: “if you think about a National Portrait Gallery, what immediately springs to mind”? The answer was “a rather dull parade of portraits – chocolate and honey coloured – of blokes in gilt frames”. So it was important I think to give the Gallery a very contemporary flavour. We were able to use the one unique characteristic of portrait galleries (shared by the Australian War Memorial) – their tradition of commissioning works for the collection. Most galleries would say that it is not their role to create new works of art, but portrait galleries have traditionally commissioned new works. In the time I was at the NPG we commissioned 40 artists to create works that captured peoples’ imaginations and we were able to get works by leading contemporary artists who weren’t portrait painters.
I think there’s such a thing as a ‘portrait culture’ – prizes, portrait artists’ societies, commissions undertaken for universities, medical schools etc. I wanted to step outside this portrait culture and look at what portraiture can do in terms of its representation of identity. For example, there is a lot of contemporary art that is aligned with portraiture but not aligned with that semi-official portrait world. There’s no reason why portraiture can’t be contemporary.
In terms of the NMA, we’re not starting from a particular preconception. What we’re starting from is a certain vagueness of definition of what a museum is or does and what people’s expectations of us are. So I would like to start from a solid understanding of what are we here for. Once we agree on that and define that – and it’s to do with our capacity to tell stories –then we’ll start to get a much more coherent face on the Museum that we present to the world. A lot of people at present scratch their heads and say “what is a national museum all about?”. That’s one thing I want to change.