Makeover negatively provincial
In 2000, Palmerston North’s Te Manawa was born – an amalgamation of the Manawatu Art Gallery, museum and science centre, with a rugby museum thrown in.
The gallery’s director and curator were dismissed, and the new entity was operated by the Te Manawa Museums Trust.
What had been an outstanding regional gallery, like Whanganui’s Sarjeant, became a shell of what it once was. Identity and national standing were lost – it was like watching the blood drain from a cultural body to become an art zombie.
Manawatu¯ citizens have campaigned to see the gallery brought back from the dead, to be given back its own governance.
The beginning of that story might sound familiar.
Last week, leaks came of Experience Wellington’s ‘‘confidential’’ plans to restructure, dismissing senior staff across City Gallery and Museums Wellington, among other spaces.
To say they are proposing to bring together their ‘‘teams to further enrich our cultural institutions’’, as Experience Wellington CEO Sarah Rusholme does, is disingenuous PR speak.
There’s nothing enriching about cutting specialised positions in quite different, geographically dispersed institutions.
Meanwhile, Rusholme’s wish, in this welcome time of colonial cultural callouts, to better embrace te ao Ma¯ ori is welcomed and necessary, yet the lack of wider consultation smells of it being familiar neo-liberal justification for rationalisation and restructuring people out of jobs.
In a city proud of its contemporary creative walk, that the mayor can pass the proposal off as an ‘‘operational matter’’ rather than worthy of more scrutiny is an insult to ratepayers.
That these institutions might be separated from public scrutiny by being managed by a trust remains worrisome.
City Gallery Wellington connects us nationally and globally to contemporary art and ideas.
Without independent resource and identity, it is not able to persuade the world’s collectors, galleries, sponsors and artists to treat it seriously.
It’s a balancing act: the gallery can be a safe space for unsafe ideas, which challenges everyone.
But who holds those spaces and what they do with them also deserves scrutiny.
It’s not an independent contemporary art space, it belongs to the city.
That balancing act has been getting increasingly precarious.
Adversarial debate between defenders of the insulated gallery against cultural vandalism and those asking us to get real about museum finances in the Covid era is now to be expected.
But reality is more mixed. We’re in a time of pretty radical cultural change, and we face major crises. A shakeup and new vision are actually welcome, and that means rigorous discussion on what that change should be.
Talented staff in both City Gallery and Wellington Museum have been in senior positions for a long time, with diminished room for other curatorial voices.
The shows are strong, but they come from particular approaches, not to all tastes. Other perspectives are needed.
In fact, Wellington Museum and City Gallery both had more diverse programming 15 years ago (the directors might point to having had more resources).
It’s a different City Gallery now from the one that in 2000 mounted Parihaka: the Art of Passive Resistance in partnership with Parihaka pa¯ .
With City Gallery, there have been concerns its perspective hasn’t been better balanced with the indigenous and local. Critics have spoken of racially problematic approaches, myself included.
This came to the surface in 2018, with protests at a Theo Schoon exhibition.
In 2009, the gallery established a Ma¯ ori and Pacific Island curator to complement a position devoted to Wellington artists, with dedicated gallery spaces attached. These were, a few years later, quietly shelved.
That was never going to work out well, and the gallery management haven’t had, of late, the bargaining chip with its public governors of popular blockbusters bringing in big crowds.
Let’s then grasp the opportunity for progressive rather than reductive change, and not be afraid of new ways of working. That’s something both City Gallery and Wellington Museum have a proud history in.
Let’s have a contemporary art museum of the Pacific, rooted in this place but connecting outwards. Let’s commission artists to be radical and adventurous in opening out discussion on local concerns and environment – work that befits Te Nga¯ kau Civic Square today.