Calder at large: It's Our Place and she's proud of it

By PETER CALDER

Here's a game you can play at home. Close your eyes and think for a moment about the national museum. What immediately springs to mind?

The virgin in a condom, perhaps? The thumbprint logo that cost $200,000? The exhibition of a work by Colin McCahon alongside a fridge? The widely derided pastel block design of the building? The New Statesman article by Theodore Dalrymple that compared it to a giant amusement arcade, called it "another temple to the short attention span" and "the institutional exemplar of the lowest common denominator turned into official cultural policy?"

Or do you think of cutting-edge museum theory, a storehouse of shared narratives, a repository of culture as something that belongs to everyone - rather than the preserve of a dusty academic elite?

Dame Cheryll Sotheran would not be surprised if you belonged in the first group, but she hopes that you have spent some time in the second. Or at least that you will soon.

The chief executive of The Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa - to give it its full title - has not shrunk from the criticism the museum has faced since it opened. That has meant facing more than a little personal vilification but she says she understands that.

"People have got to have someone to blame," she says. "It's a little hard to criticise an institution."

Her often stern and unsmiling countenance has been the museum's face during almost three years of operation - it celebrates its third birthday on February 14 - answering the invisible critics in a tone that sometimes seemed to verge on the exasperated.

But it is with a genuine smile that she says she has "broad shoulders, as broad as they need to be," and makes it plain that she's looking forward to year four.

I had planned to talk to her as we walked around the museum. The idea was that we might meet in her natural habitat, so to speak, rather than in a sterile office or boardroom - and that what we saw might prompt what we talked about. But it soon became plain that that would be impossible. The tweet of recorded birdsong from overhead speakers was playing havoc with my handheld recorder.

The idea that a museum might be a difficult place to conduct a quiet conversation seemed perfectly symbolic of the critics' concerns, and as we move to a small empty space overlooking the harbour, I make a mental note to remind her of Dalrymple's complaint about "cacophony" and "constant sensory stimulation."

But in the end, it proves unnecessary. Virtually our entire conversation revolves around the idea that the museum represents what she calls "a conceptual shift" - which may look like, but is not intended to be, a slap in the face to the traditionalists.

"Te Papa was always going to be controversial in the way it absorbed national collections into a museum which had a completely different concept.

"But what we did was not wilful or perverse. It was a strategic conceptual shift to an approach which is not about discipline or media but rather about narratives of culture and place.

"Telling stories using all of our collections, natural and cultural heritage, was a big conceptual shift. But it is a great opportunity to open up the stories and treasures of New Zealand to a much broader audience.

"That paradigm shift did create a fantastic new audience. But then along came the debate that said we had sacrificed quality and standards."

Dame Cheryll, who has a background as an academic art historian and tired of "teaching bored teenagers about the Renaissance," stresses that she has plenty of respect for those criticisms.

"But I don't think that some of the people who express them are as rigorous as they should be about addressing issues like class and race."

Those critics are easy to find, in Wellington and beyond. They complain that the museum doesn't have enough old stuff in it, or that it lacks a coherent vision of itself.

Yet Dame Cheryll finds fault with the idea that a museum should speak with one voice.

"Te Papa is a complex site with many voices," she says. "For some people that is cacophonous and confused but for the vast majority of people that is not the experience they have. They see it as an opportunity for inspiration and discovery. People can say it's a theme park - but there is something happening here. I'm not inventing that."

Which is not to say that the museum has not made mistakes. In the end, the woman at the helm reckons Te Papa's most famous exhibit - a small plastic Madonna figurine over which a condom had been unrolled - was in the wrong place.

The exhibition, Pictura Britannica, was "a fairly conventional art show and the little work itself was a bit too naive and ingenuous to carry the debate, which was about cross-generational attitudes to sex and reproduction. But I'm pretty sure that if it had gone into a traditional art museum it would not have aroused such controversy."

"Trying to accommodate an exhibition like that into an institution which had branded itself for a broader audience really didn't fit."

Dame Cheryll's idea of a museum as a storehouse of narrative inspires even small, standalone exhibitions. A top-floor show about Frances Hodgkins illustrates her very thoughts.

Hodgkins' comment that she loved Renoir's etchings because she "admired the glamour in his touch" sits alongside a Renoir etching. She writes that she's feeling "as frail as a Paul Nash watercolour" and one duly appears.

It seems faintly presumptuous, I tell her - cultural history for people who read captions, an approach that undermines the power of objects to tell their own stories and to tell many different ones.

"The charge that we no longer respected meaning is a criticism that can be levelled. The vast majority of our visitors understand the experience and are inspired by it precisely because the objects are placed into contexts they can understand and relate to."

This month, work began on a $5 million project to expand gallery space by 3000 sq m, most of which should be finished by next spring. That comes on top of the museum's $25 million annual running cost, but Dame Cheryll says Te Papa enters its fourth year in good heart.

There has been what she calls "incredible take-up" of the brand - Te Papa - which is "up there with New Zealand and the All Blacks, internationally. And I have to say that we would never have got there if we had been called the Museum of New Zealand."

The mention of the branding makes me cringe slightly and remember the 1.1-tonne granite ball, supported on a column of water, that had greeted me in the foyer. Cool and smooth to the touch - we were invited to touch it - it was emblazoned with the names of the museum's founding sponsors. It was at once irresistibly attractive and repellent, pure and faintly tainted.

Dame Cheryll smiles - and there's possibly a trace of indulgence in the smile - when I tell her.

"I can understand people cringing but ... all museums have to look at earning some of their operating costs. Some see it as a burden; I see it as an incentive."