The NGV Triennial (review)

The National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) opened the St. Kilda Road building in 1968 showing The Field, an exhibition of works by emerging Australian artists.¹ Previously, Australia’s cultural sphere had consistently seen Australian works deprioritized in exhibitions and collections, so many aspiring artists of earlier generations left for Paris, London, or New York City to develop their practice amid greater opportunities for innovation and recognition. For them, Australia’s parochialism and conservatism, generated by its colonial origins and profound isolation from major Western cultural centers, were insurmountable barriers. This was one result of processes associated with Australia’s cultural cringe.²

This deliberate orientation of The Field’s rationale toward a positive and experimental exhibiting future for Australian artists demonstrated a clear intention to escape the NGV’s reputation for conservative strategies in both exhibiting and collecting artworks. The Field showed significant artistic departures from the New York influences shown in Melbourne and Sydney the previous year in Two Decades of American Painting.³ Both of these popular exhibitions also generated a large cultural shift in Melbourne audiences’ understanding of art⁴ and can be seen to bear a relationship with a gradual easing of the cringe.

Fifty years later, it might be a similarly bold gesture to attempt a triennial for Melbourne in 2017. The city’s history of experimentation with landmark exhibitions has yet to generate the impetus for an event comparable with the ever-spreading tradition of Venice’s Biennale. For example, Signs of Life in 1999 was promoted as the Melbourne Biennial.⁵ Encompassing many Melbourne venues (although not the NGV), it generated high attendance numbers with a strong program of mostly Northern Hemisphere artists.^{6, 7}This biennial was not repeated.

In 2014, the NGV’s Melbourne Now took a different approach. In a similar manner to The Field, it confidently and successfully presented a survey of Melbourne artists into both the NGV’s Australian and international buildings.⁸ The gallery’s director, Tony Ellwood, describes the exemplary quality of works in Melbourne Now as a “mandate” from which the NGV Triennial “expands” globally.⁹ This is difficult to reconcile, as the NGV Triennial can be easily perceived as a reversion to the gallery’s long-standing practice of largely importing the content of most of its major exhibitions, bringing “the world” to a remote cultural center. The positive example of Melbourne Now might better have been built into a series of more integrated collaborations, commissions, dialogues, and community practices to more reciprocally “reflect Melbourne’s unique perspective on the world.”¹⁰ Instead, the NGV Triennial largely replicates NGV’s habit—importing blockbusters—and repeats the curatorial mix of 1999’s Signs of Life, without that exhibition’s citywide, expansive engagement.¹¹

Although it is trite to note intercity rivalries, nonetheless it seems discernible from Ellwood’s catalog foreword that an impulse not to build the success of Melbourne Now into a repeating event was based on a more ambitious imperative. The need to differentiate the NGV Triennial from “the many other recurring large-scale contemporary exhibitions” suggests a consciousness of Melbourne’s lack of such an exhibition and a strategic need to be competitive in that arena.¹² Has Melbourne been suffering under a marketing-led brand crisis now that audience engagement is king? A triennial cringe?

In Australia alone, Sydney, Adelaide, and Perth have held their biennales, biennials, and triennials consistently since 1973, 1990, and 1993, respectively. Ellwood’s “concerted effort to showcase work from countries that have not been strongly represented in our region”¹³ is possibly inevitable, considering that these other events have already demonstrated such clear rationales for their own representations, especially the Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art at Queensland Art Gallery & Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA). David Walsh’s MONA¹⁴ in Hobart further exemplifies a competitive drawcard, with a clear brand showing uniquely focused content.

Meanwhile, the NGV itself already has a very strong track record of successful large-scale exhibitions to its credit...