Art Gallery of Western Australia Has a Problem
(Perth, November 2025)
Western Australia’s art collection was once housed in the lovely Byzantine-style Jubilee Building but in the 1970s, it was moved to the present Bauhaus/Brutalist pile, having fewer windows than a casino, and designed by someone from the Public Works Department. The treasures within are even more depressing, although, in fairness, when we visited (the second time – we arrived on Tuesday, when it was not open), quite a number of the galleries were closed, for reasons unclear.
There was virtually nothing on show that might hearken back to days when artists knew how to draw, but we’ll concede that a handful of items were worthy of a second look:
“My Heartland” by Graham (Swag) Taylor
“Possum Dreaming” c. 1988 by Janganpa Jukurrpa
“Kira Kiro spirits” (2018) by Mrs. B. Bundamurra
And we rather fancied the ‘toy cupboard’ in a children’s interactive room, which included a rare window.
However, the rest was complete tosh, a sorry parade of incompetence, Agitprop, laziness, pretension and quackery; a paean to anti-art:
Can’t we set free the bears? By Paola Pivi, who seems, somehow, to be a darling of Art Gallery WA
“Thalarut Pool, Pannawonica” by Wendy Hubert of the Yindjibarndi people (2021)
HALE TENGER / BORDERS / BORDERS: Jam photographs together, to make it more crowded than Frith’s “A Private View” at the royal Academy = ‘de Profundis’!
“Balloons on the Sea” by Denizin Üzerinde Balonlar (2011) – “Created during the outset of the Arab Spring…[it] creates a paradoxical sense of hope.” Where’s my blunderbuss?
“Works” by Paola Pivi
“On the Swan” by Elise Blumann (1938)
“Barking Owl” by Amanda “Mandy’ White of the Yamatji people (2020); “Flamen Jaffa” by Gordon Hookey of the Waanyi and Waanjiminjin peoples (2000) and “Painted car door” by Mavis Petyarre of the Anmatyerre people (1990)
“THE DUNES (how good is Australia)” by Ryan Presley of the Marri Ngarr people (2021)
“Maralinga the big bomb” by Noreen Parker of the Pitjantjatjara people (2020)
“The Great Heads” by Dianne Jones of the Ballardong Noongar people (2017)
“The Great Clock” by Dianne Jones (2017) “I am not a tourist here on Noongar land” she cries
“Gina Rinehart and me II” by Vincent Namatjira OAM of the Western Aranda people (2017)
Why?
An idea for a portrait: “Portrait of Elise Blumann” by David Gregson (1982). Blumann did the horrendous landscape (see above)
In sum, an inverted truth:
Where some see art here, we see politics, or worse, political moralizing.
Apropos of nothing, and certainly not citing him with reference to the WA Art Gallery, other than the words in bold, Robert Hughes once wrote: “Some collectors are noble, philanthropic and educated; others are swindling bores who would still think Parmigianino was a kind of cheese if they didn’t have the boys at Christie’s to set them straight…There is just no generalizing about the moral effects of art, because it doesn’t seem to have any.”*
[*Robert Hughes, Culture of Complaint – Art and the Therapeutic Fallacy (1993), p. 177.]Leave a comment...
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