Change of art for a grand old dame

In the heart of Perth, three grand old dames have stood resolutely together as the guardians of the city’s cultural life for more than a century. But even the most redoubtable of dowagers falls prey to the predations of time and technology. Last year, with much fanfare, the WA Museum Boola Bardip showed what a $400 million makeover could deliver. With its feet firmly in the past but with its face turned towards the future, the museum attracted world attention for its design and won the hearts of West Australians. Next month, the State Library will look on again as the Art Gallery of WA parades a $10 million renovation of its rooftop, interior changes that will fill it with light and a clear-eyed vision to take it into the 21st century. The budget may have been far less but gallery director Colin Walker is as buoyant about the future as his soccer-loving English counterpart next door at the museum, Alec Coles. Walker emigrated with his wife and two young children from Liverpool 15 years ago. “Does your recorder come with subtitles,” he asks as he considers the gallery’s future. “Institutions need to change,” he says. “There’s no real hierarchy of culture for audiences anymore, whether it’s fashion, music, design, visual arts. One of my biggest jobs is to show people that there’s nothing difficult about art.” It’s on the renovated rooftop that you get the best view of the road ahead. Designed to attract a wider audience to the gallery, it has beautiful views of the city and the Hills, a bar, new gallery spaces and room to host a range of events. The centrepiece is a 34m-long mural by Indigenous artist Christopher Pease. “The scale of it is astonishing,” Walker says. “I mean, it looks big from a distance but when you’re underneath it ... Kids are going to love it.” It is a multimedia delight with lighting effects changing its face as day turns to dusk. “It’s just revealing the culture that was here, the culture that has come since then, in a really, really spectacular way,” Walker says. “I think it stands as a metaphor for everything that we’re trying to do in the gallery. It’s really ambitious, it’s experiences on lots of different levels. It’s like a really, really well-written protest song in many ways, sort of like Mississippi Goddam by Nina Simone or, you know, Elvis Costello’s Shipbuilding or even John Lennon with things like Imagine. You can just enjoy the melody of it ... or the more you go in, the more you see.” There is also a nationally significant sculpture walk dotted with pieces from the vast State Art Collection. Other physical changes are subtle but complete the effect of bringing the city into the gallery, a feature of both Perth Stadium and Boola Bardip that works to great effect. “The lights in the gallery will change completely because I think previously it’s just felt a little bit confined, a little bit dark,” Walker says. “We’ve opened up entrance ways and windows at each level that have been covered for the last 25 to 30 years.” The shop will sit next to the cafe and open onto the cultural centre to help make the gallery more approachable. Plans for the opening day on Saturday, November 6, also signpost the road ahead. The View From Here will be the gallery’s biggest exhibition of WA art, featuring more than 230 artists and 361 artworks, 111 of which are new commissions. At its heart is Collective Ground, a showcase of some 60 works acquired from Indigenous artists across WA. “We thought ‘what exhibition are we going to do for the reopening?’,” Walker says. “Do we take the greats from our historic collection, do we do a survey of our senior artists, what do we do? I decided that I wanted it to be a celebration of the talent in the State. We’ve got really massively talented people and I’m just going to put them on the platform that’s equivalent with everywhere else.” The work of Instagram star Sarah Bahbah will stand shoulder to shoulder with that of acclaimed Indigenous artist Ngarralja Tommy May, with the graffiti work in the 100 Vandals exhibition, the post-pop art of Joanna Lamb, the sculptural works of Tarryn Gill and the designs of emerging artists Abdul Abdullah and Tyrown Waigana, who has painted a new mural in the renovated foyer. Walker had never been to WA before crossing the Indian Ocean to Perth. His job in Britain as the director of an organisation that created partnerships between the private sector and the arts — think Jaguar, Dr Martens and Levi’s — took him around the world and his wife decided that she, too, wanted to experience living in another country. “We came here because we were watching A Place in the Sun, it’s one of those lifestyle shows where people do tree changes, and we were like let’s go to Australia then.” Walker admits to having a soft spot for reality TV and people often tell him he looks like Ant Middleton from SAS Australia. Perth became home after a process of elimination — he had lived in Sydney but it was becoming too expensive, Melbourne was just another European-style city, they didn’t fancy Brisbane and Adelaide wasn’t even on the radar. “The idea of the isolation of Perth was really, really quite fascinating,” Walker says. But you can’t take all of Liverpool out of the boy. His brief flirtation with the AFL ended about the time Chris Connolly left the Fremantle Dockers, back in 2007. He is too polite to say much more but talks enthusiastically about Perth Glory signing former Liverpool striker Daniel Sturridge. It was wise not to get him started on Liverpool’s revered manager Jurgen Klopp. “I am quite chatty,” he says. “I’ll sit at a bar and talk to anyone until they are bored.” Walker was working as the State Government’s executive director of culture and the arts when his predecessor, Stefano Carboni, left in July 2019. Carboni had led the gallery for 11 years after being appointed from New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and forged his reputation with big exhibitions such as Picasso to Warhol, Van Gogh, and Dali and Beyond. In 2017, he won over a younger audience with The Rise of Sneaker Culture and Heath Ledger: A Life in Pictures. But by the time he left the number of gallery visits had hit their lowest number in a decade — 272,236 in 2018-19, 100,000 fewer than in 2017-18. Walker was asked to hold the reins while an international search was launched for Carboni’s replacement. “You know a lot when you’re on the board but you don’t know everything, so I found it quite a fascinating challenge,” he says. “I clearly love the arts, as you’d expect, so I just decided to apply for the job.” COVID was starting to bite and audiences were still in decline when Walker got the permanent gig in March 2020, his first time leading a gallery. “We were sitting on a fairly large cash deficit so it would have been fairly easy just to go a different way,” he says. But he was attracted to the potential of the place. “I could see how the policy work for the film studios was going, what was going on with the museum and knew the Perth Cultural Centre was going to get a fair bit of development. It was a good opportunity for the gallery to sit into all that.” Building an audience is Walker’s great challenge. For the past year, he has worked with homegrown guest artistic director Ian Strange to reimagine the gallery. Blockbuster exhibitions will still be part of the menu but he says research shows that if that’s all you do, people don’t come in between times. He wants the gallery to feel like a festival, where there are constantly different things to experience. “You can’t keep showing the same things in the same way over and over again and still expect people to come and see them,” he says. “You’ve got to be constantly out of the ordinary, constantly innovative.” He wants the gallery to create its own blockbusters and export them. “What makes us different from being an art gallery anywhere else? Part of it has to be about the talent and the stories we’ve got here.” There is a new ground-floor gallery dedicated to contemporary Indigenous art and a range of events programmed through to April. Walker will also dust off more of the State’s historic art collection, which dates back to 1895 and features more than 18,400 works worth an estimated $333 million. In the past decade, art galleries around the world have increasingly turned to immersive technologies to attract new audiences. The Tate Modern’s Modigliani retrospective allowed visitors to become immersed in a 3-D model of the artist’s Paris studio, London’s Victoria & Albert Gallery led patrons down the rabbit hole with Alice as part of its Lewis Carroll exhibition while the National Museum of Singapore’s stunning installation Story of the Forest features three-dimensional animations that visitors can interact with. “Give me a few hundred million dollars to work with and I definitely have a few ideas,” Walker says. He has funding for a five-year program that will allow him to find the artists “who are working in these clever little spaces”. It’s the big vision for the gallery when the technology becomes cheaper but it will still cost serious dollars. “Money follows good ideas,” he says. “To take people there we’ll start with what we are doing online. Videos, documentary type, to draw people into the stories.” The gallery will have extensive new digital and film and television offerings. Art lovers who want to contemplate quietly will always have a home at the gallery. “But we have to be part of the entertainment industry at some point,” Walker says. “People see it as a trade-off, you know, you have to do popular stuff in order to be commercially successful. And I don’t think that’s necessarily the case. If people just want to grab a snack or a cup of coffee, knock yourself out, if they want to spend all evening buying cocktails that’s great because that allows me to do some of the other things we want to do — and what I want to do is to give them a reason to come back.”