Museum pieces highlight the entertainment appeal

By GILBERT WONG

The outrage of members of the Wellington arts community at the appointment of two Aucklanders to review Te Papa was drearily predictable.

Chris Saines, the Auckland Art Gallery director, and Rodney Wilson, head of Auckland Museum, along with former Australian Museum head Des Griffin have been briefed by the Culture and Heritage Ministry to examine Te Papa's operating practices.

Wellington City councillor Alick Shaw called the appointments an "Auckland jack-up" and former National Art Gallery director Luit Bieringa predicted a "hatchet job."

The critics failed to note that New Zealand is not overwhelmed with major and significant cultural institutions and appointing Saines and Wilson allows practitioners rather than Coopers and Lybrand or KPMG to take on the job.

Perhaps wisely, neither Saines nor Wilson will be drawn into the slanging match which tends to deny the pair any sense of public duty or professional objectivity.

But what judgments have the pair made of Te Papa? In public, at least, Saines has not been vocal.

Wilson, who has made comparisons between Auckland Museum and Te Papa, did produce his views on the relative merits of the institutions in the Global Arts 2000 conference in Auckland last year. The following remarks come from his speech.

On Te Papa's displays:

"The displays are energetic. They are liberally laced with multimedia, bright lights and action. The graphic design is busy in the manner of an entertainment centre rather than the quieter, stepped-back quality of most museums. The object, at times, its specialness, its ability to breath within its own space and be intimate in its history, is reduced.

"Te Papa is, in musical terms, a romantic symphony full of national identity ideas, but a piece in which it is sometimes hard to recognise the sound of the individual instruments or to retire from the fervour of the orchestration."

On the architecture of Te Papa:

"Te Papa occupies a new building. The building has its supporters and its detractors. It is a building assembled from formal materials and which asserts a monumentality. But it is not a formal building in the sense that Auckland War Memorial Museum is. Nor does it have the dignity or the locational presence of Auckland.

"That is not a quality statement or judgment. It is simply a statement of fact, and a reflection on the different purpose of a building which would house a museum that wished to dissociate itself from many aspects of its past."

On Te Papa's future:

"Te Papa has deconstructed the old National Museum and National Art Gallery, and has reassembled it in an eclectic post-modern way. It has largely pitched its interpretation at a single audience, with a single interpretive proposition.

"It has appealed especially to children, families and entry-level museum-goers. The appeal to children and the need to develop new audiences is fundamental to the future health of a museum, but how successful the Te Papa experiment will be in longer terms has yet to be established."