The National Museum of Australia as Danse Macabre: Baroque Allegories of the popular

Abstract

Ashton Raggatt McDougall’s architectural design for the National Museum of Australia (NMA) has had a reception as heated as the institution itself. In many ways the buildings and institution are identified, one with the other, to an extent that would seem praiseworthy if not for the fact that this identification is most often made by the NMA’s vehement critics. Those who oppose the museum’s presentation of Australian history see the buildings with their various symbols of atonement as built proof of what they take to be the deleterious effects of relativism in historiography. Meanwhile some architectural critics find that the building’s general uncertainty as to its own status as an object ought partly to be blamed on postmodernist museology with its sometimes Jacobinical disavowal of artefacts and collections in favour of affects of citizenship to be found in a flux of pixels. Our aim in this paper is introduce a gap between the institution and its architecture, to describe and to speak for the buildings as significant cultural works in their own right. We claim that to understand the NMA as a whole it is necessary not to see the buildings as equipment, as hardware on which to run the institution’s software, or as a form that naturally and necessarily expresses the content of the museum, but rather to understand the buildings as art. The architecture of the NMA is a mimesis of the institution where the museum’s problems are rearranged in semblance and extended into crisis by hyperbole. With the licence of art, the buildings can and do conduct a discourse with less constraint, and less responsibility, than the institution housed. Here we are making a supposition, that the category ‘art’ and architecture understood as art have a particular role in social history museums in presenting what is otherwise unpresentable, because of lack of evidence, lack of agreement, horror or ennui. We aim to show that what non-architects might construe as matters of the discourse of cultural policy – that is, the meaning and value of the popular and of curatorial practice, and the occasioning of interpretation on the part of visitors – also become the material of an aesthetic logic in the buildings of the NMA.