Malaysia - Armed with decades of experience in the art world and countless visits to world-renowned museums, our writer checks out the newly refurbished National Art Gallery.
AFTER remaining closed for 10months, a 10-month closure for renovations, the National Art Gallery (NAG) reopened just in time to celebrate Merdeka with a few exhibitions. Unfortunately, the show stealer at the gallery is not the exhibits on the walls but the “floor show”.
Unusually for a purpose-built gallery, the flooring in all six sections is a shimmering carpet of glazed tiles. These not only distract from the art on the walls but also pose safety concerns.
I‘ve never seen such visually challenging reflections at any of the art museums I‘ve visited, including the Nacional Museum Bellas Artes (Buenos Aires), Prado (Madrid), the Metropolitan Museum and Museum of Modern Art (New York), Louvre (Paris), Vatican Museum (Rome), Victoria Art Gallery (Melbourne), Millesgarden (Stockholm), Rijkmuseum (Amsterdam), J. Paul Getty Museum (Malibu), and Fukuoka Art Museum, just to name a few.
The renovations were urgently needed after a serious termite infestation of parquet flooring in at least two gallery spaces came to light, adding to other existing problems such as leaks – a malaise of many Malaysian public buildings of late! – and plumbing issues in the toilets.
Strangely, leaks were still observable as last minute touches were being put to the Malaysia@50 exhibition in Galeri 2A, though these were duly rectified. But for how long will the repairs hold? It‘s unnerving to think of irreplaceable artworks being splattered with water or soaked.
The fact that such a major renovation had to be undertaken of a relatively new space – thebuilding is barely nine years old – says much of this country‘s maintenance record when it comes to public buildings, which is why one can be forgiven for worrying about how long these leaks will remain dripless....
Improvements made
The fact that what was once a large gallery space has been closed off with easily dismantled partitions reveals that the administration and management space behind the partitions is not meant to be permanent. There are plans to build a two-storey block in the adjacent car park in two years to house the administrative staff.
There are also plans for a souvenir shop, an alfresco cafeteria and what is termed a Laman Santap, a kind of loosely organised activity place for artists.
The ground floor of what used to be an admin hub and storage area will be turned into gallery spaces – almost 10,000sq m (100,000sq ft) of it.
Elsewhere, the changes are not so major. The slate slabs that flaked from the façade of the front enclosures have been padded with cement, the escalator that was a later addition has been fitted with sensors, and the breakable roof canopy has been replaced with a more solid structure.
Changes have been made before to the original building, at the gallery‘s own costs: the front ramp walkway was made less slippery, an escalator with canopy was added, and a raft of artwork-sensitive lighting was installed.
Problems remain
The timing of the structural problems could scarcely be worse. With Malaysia celebrating its golden jubilee of independence, and with this being Visit Malaysia Year, the country is crying out for an array of visual arts blockbusters. During Visit Malaysia Year in 1990, for instance, there was the hugely significant Robert Rauschenberg exhibition at the gallery‘s previous premises, the former Hotel Majestic in Jalan Sultan Hishamuddin.
While these renovations were being carried out, from October last year until July 30, the gallery‘s main activities were restricted to the organisation of two art camps, one in Sabah and the other in Malacca.
When the old NAG was undergoing renovations under then director Wairah Marzuki (she is now chairman of the board of trustees), she had the gumption to farm out exhibitions to spaces like Galeri Petronas, then at Dayabumi.
Indeed, many of her innovative projects, like the Laman Seni (an open air, London Covent Garden-type art fair held on the first Saturday of every month), public outreach programmes, Artist-in-the-Box, musically tinged evenings and exhibitions (including collaborations with foreign cultural institutions), and sponsorship of Malaysian artists in major shows overseas, are no more.
This is unfortunate because we are losing out to other galleries in the region, such as the Singapore Art Museum. That space has played host to exciting and internationally significant exhibitions, such as Leonardo da Vinci: Scientist, Inventor and Artist, The Origins of Modern Art in France: Monet to Moore and sculptor Fernando Botero‘s works.
We‘re not going to see such exhibitions at the NAG any time soon because, security-wise and in terms of climate control, conservation and storage (remember the missing artworks StarMag wrote about in 2005?), our national gallery does not command confidence.
At the end of the day, though, it‘s not how physically imposing a country‘s National Art Gallery is, it is what the gallery does, with the shows and scholarships, that adds to the story of the creative impulses of a people and time.
And in this area, NAG seems to have come up short, as it has not had any definitive, defining exhibitions in this most significant of years in Malaysia‘s history.
And where are the major contemporary Malaysian art exhibition overseas to support Visit Malaysia Year?
It has been left to individuals and private art spaces like Tajuddin Ismail‘s tj Fine Arts and Valentine Willie‘s Valentine Wille Fine Art to show Malaysian works in Germany (Abbey-Preum) and Australia (Sydney) respectively.
For two years now, the NAG‘s role has palpably, considerably and frighteningly diminished. Even if most artists don‘t depend on the NAG nowadays, it is the national gallery, after all, and should justify its existence at the very least if not to set the pace and direction.
Now that the gallery is without a director – Dr Saharudin Ismail recently left the position – there is a chance again to appoint someone who knows about art.
Source: www.thestar.com.my (3 September 2007)