Museums and Risk
Thursday, 1 December 2022 at 12:00:00 am UTC
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Session Convenors
Associate Professor Christopher R. Marshall, University of Melbourne
Dr Georgina S. Walker, University of Melbourne
Session Speakers
Anna Lawrenson, University of Sydney
Associate Professor Christopher R. Marshall, University of Melbourne
Mark Friedlander, University of Melbourne
Dr Georgina Walker, University of Melbourne
In March 2022, the Director of the Kharkiv Art Museum in Northeast Ukraine informed The Art Newspaper that the Museum had been able to keep its collections safe: “however the very definition of ‘safety’ today is relative”. This session invites us to consider the implications raised by the multiple risks facing museums and art galleries in an increasingly unstable world. Museum risk assessment policies tend to focus on the immediately definable dangers that are posed by such natural and socially determined threats as fires, floods, theft, vandalism, terrorist attacks, etc. Yet this session will also ask participants to consider the less tangible – but no less pressing – risks facing museums today. How, for example, can museums best present challenging ideas in a safe environment? What are the risks – as well as the benefits – involved in the increasing emphasis on private branding and other forms of individual and corporate sponsorship in museums? And what risks should museums be prepared to take as they seek to redefine themselves in the wake of the Covid pandemic and the multiple sources of social, political, natural and economic uncertainty in the 2020s. The session aims to explore these and other issues through a range of contemporary and historical case studies and in relation to both art institutions as well as other museum settings in the private as well as the public sectors.
“Persuasive voices of political propaganda”: The influence of funding on content in Australian museums and galleries
Anna Lawrenson, University of Sydney
In 1975 the Museums in Australia report noted that museums can be “persuasive voices of political propaganda: more persuasive, perhaps, than most Australians realise.” This perspective is reflected internationally with literature noting how, even though the public inherently trust museums to be “non-partisan, and unpolitical… unbiased”, they are far from neutral. With the corporatisation of museums – and the need to self-fund activities through revenue generation, sponsorship and grant funding – this partisanship raises ethical questions about how museums are funded and in turn the content that they present. This paper will examine recent Australian cases studies to draw a line between funding and content arguing that the current funding models result in risk aversion and conservative approaches to exhibitions. It draws on survey data collected by the presenter to reveal the complex interrelationship between funding, exhibition content and risk taking. Are museums still safe spaces for dangerous ideas?
Double Trouble: Ivan Durrant versus the National Gallery of Victoria
A/Prof Christopher R. Marshall, University of Melbourne
On the 28th May 1975, Melbourne’s long-standing love-affair with the international blockbuster was launched with the opening of the National Gallery of Victoria’s Modern Masters: Manet to Matisse, organised by MoMA. Two days earlier, the celebratory media coverage generated by this exhibition was temporarily disrupted by an “art happening” by Ivan Durrant that involved the slaughtering and public exhibition of a Jersey cow named Beverley. In response – following the placement of the cow’s carcass on the NGV forecourt during the Modern Masters press preview – the Gallery labelled the exhibition “sick and disgusting” and authorised staff to testify in support of Melbourne City Council’s litigation against the artist, which found Durrant guilty of obstructing footpaths and roadways and fined him $100 plus costs.
This paper will consider Durrant’s Beverley the Amazing Performing Cow in relation to the performative context created by the recently completed forecourt of the NGV itself. It will also analyse its relationship to other challenging contemporary art exhibitions mounted in the shadow of Modern Masters. These include Stelarc’s Event for Amplified, Modified, Monitored Man at the Ewing Gallery, and Domenico de Clario’s Elemental Landscapes, which was partially dismantled and removed from the NGV’s Australian Galleries on 11th August 1975. The paper will also link Durrant’s cow happening to a 1979 NGV survey of his work. Durrant’s major new painting for this exhibition, Big Pig’s Head, 1978, attracted significant media attention after it was discovered to have been slashed 10 times with a knife during the exhibition’s opening. Durrant’s and the NGV’s ultimately unsuccessful attempts to broker a resolution to the controversy created by this incident added a yet further layer of complexity to the NGV’s high-risk interactions with Durrant - and with contemporary art more generally - during this period.
(w)hole/organisation
Mark Friedlander, University of Melbourne
I'm on a journey to activate the museum's risk management procedures; to bring form to the bureaucracy that, my research suggests, quietly shapes the works of artists. To do this I am proposing to make a hole in institutions. It will be a negotiated hole, drawing the institution’s bureaucratic processes to act on my intentions; revealing their systems that shape works of art and artist’s practice: to grow the current concerns that impact the bringing of art into the real world.
“The name Bührle sounds a bell in Switzerland” – Foundation E.G. Bührle Collection and the Kunsthaus Zürich
Dr Georgina S. Walker, University of Melbourne
German-born collector Emil Georg Bührle (1890-1956) moved to Switzerland in the mid 1920s to pursue a career as an industrialist in Zürich. Bührle’s holdings were impressive given that he was building a private collection at a time when most of the significant works of art by the artists he collected had already made their way into public museums. He did not harness any specific long-term cultural aspirations, other than to publicly display his art collection at the Kunsthaus Zürich. The inaugural exhibition at the Kunsthaus was to correspond with the opening of the museum’s new exhibition wing in 1958, that Bührle himself had funded. Although the Exhibition Hall was intended to house the collection, his unexpected death altered these plans.
A long-term loan agreement between the Foundation E.G. Bührle Collection and Kunsthaus Zürich was signed in 2012 and is in place until 2034. Around 166 paintings and 25 sculptures from Bührle’s collection are on permanent display as one, and will sit alongside the museum’s own holdings, within the Bührle family funded wing in the new $220 million David Chipperfield wing that opened 9 October 2021. Installing Bührle’s collection in a public museum was always going to be a problem due to the collector’s complex and controversial business dealings during the war years and the contested provenance of works within the collection.
This paper will consider how the permanent display of the Bührle art collection at the Kunsthaus seeks to establish the collector’s legacy as an important art collector and philanthropist in Switzerland. The relocation of Bührle‘s holdings to the museum, nonetheless, carries significant risks for the Kunsthaus. It raises a host of questions that move beyond fiscal and aesthetic considerations to encompass deeper ethical and political concerns. These highlight, in turn, the delicate balance of often-competing interests that museums are now more than ever required to negotiate as they increasingly enter into new and entrepreneurial partnership arrangements of these kinds.
Biographies
Associate Professor Christopher R. Marshall, University of Melbourne
Christopher Marshall is Associate Professor in Art History and Museum Studies in the Faculty of Arts, University of Melbourne. His publications on museums and curatorship include the edited volume Sculpture and the Museum (Routledge/Ashgate, 2011) and contributions to Museum Making; Making Art History and Reshaping Museum Space (Routledge: 2005, 2007, 2012). His publications on Neapolitan Baroque art include Baroque Naples and the Industry of Painting (Yale UP, 2016) and chapter contributions to The Economic Lives of Seventeenth Century Italian Painters (Yale UP, 2010) and Mapping Markets in Europe and the New World (Brepols, 2006). His research distinctions include two years support from the Australian Research Council, the Paul Mellon Visiting Senior Fellowship (Centre for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art, Washington DC), a Senior Research Fellowship at the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds, a Research Fellowship at the Museo Poldi Pezzoli, Milan, and Visiting Senior Lecturing Fellowships at the Hubei Institute of Fine Arts, Wuhan, and the Department of Art and Art History, Duke University, Durham NC.
Dr Georgina Walker, University of Melbourne
Georgina Walker is a Teaching Associate in Art History and Curatorship at the University of Melbourne. Her monograph entitled, The Private Collector’s Museum: Public Good Versus Private Gain (Routledge 2019) is the first study to connect the rising popularity of private museums with new models of philanthropy, collecting and complex inter-relationships between private and public museums. Georgina has two books under contract with the Routledge Research in Museum Studies series that will examine the emergence of the private museum in parts of Asia and the Arabian Peninsula. Her forthcoming monograph, The Rise of the Contemporary Private Art Museum (Routledge) will offer the first in-depth survey of an unprecedented period of private museum building in parts of Asia and the Arabian Peninsula. Other publications include the co-authored bibliographic resource for Oxford Bibliographies in Art History, “Museums in Australia”, published by Oxford University Press on 26 November 2019 and an article with The International Journal of the Inclusive Museum, “A Twenty-First-Century Wunderkammer: Museum of Old and New Art (MONA) Hobart, Tasmania, Australia” (2016).
Dr Anna Lawrenson, University of Sydney
Dr Anna Lawrenson is located in Museum and Heritage Studies at the University of Sydney. Her research considers how the history, funding and administration of museums and galleries shapes their approach to public engagement. She has published in academic journals including Museum Management and Curatorship and Museums and Society and co-authored an important monograph on blockbuster exhibitions in Australian museums and galleries (Routledge: 2019). She has been commissioned to conduct research within the museum sector producing reports that have been used for advocacy and funding. Together with O’Reilly she is Associate editor for Exhibition Reviews for Curator: The Museum Journal.
Mark Friedlander, University of Melbourne
Mark Friedlander is an artist based in Melbourne (Naarm), Australia undertaking their PhD with the University of Melbourne, within the Faculty of Fine Art and Music. Their research questions is: To what extent and in what kinds of ways do management of risk and other associated bureaucratic procedures shape the production, reception, and interpretation of works of art? With a broader practice that considers the affordances of materials relative to a practice that is interested in the correspondence of objects, and in architectural space.