MCA REOPENS
The mademoiselle of Circular Quay, the Museum of Contemporary Art, is getting on a bit – this year she turns 21. And what better age for a facelift and a touch of botox.
With fresh new works, a cubist-inspired building upgrade and a minimalist terrace cafe with views of the Harbour Bridge, the Opera House and a site-specific sculpture from Hany Armanious, the old girl has never looked better.
The big drawcard so far has been a 24-hour screening of Christian Marclay’s The Clock; a collage of more than 3,000 film excerpts, whose every scene references a time of day.
“Because it’s synchronised to the time that you’re watching it, it’s a timepiece as well as a piece about time. So it has this uncanny duality,” senior curator Rachel Kent explains.
There are echoes of the piece two floors up, on level three, in Kent’s companion exhibition Marking Time. Elisa Sighicelli literally rewinds time through the medium of film, un-exploding fireworks back to pinpricks of light, and Edgar Arceneaux’s drawing removal installation explores what he calls “a meditation on the plasticity of memory, as well as geography”.
But the guts of the new-look MCA are in its Collection: Volume One, an ambitious hang that brings together 280 pieces from the Museum’s vast vaults.
Asked if there are any pieces that just missed out, curator Glenn Barkley is sanguine: “Perhaps, yes. But look – as we always said when we were setting it up, we’ve got the next 20 years or more to think about this.”
There are no obvious ties that bind Volume One, other than that it is made up of contemporary works – though with pieces that now date back a good few decades, even that is up for debate.
There are some big names you’d expect to see here – Rosalie Gascoigne, Ah Xian, Tracey Moffatt – but there are plenty of surprises, too.
“The other thing you can see in the rooms is that there’s quite a mix of ages, as well. From Bob MacPherson, an artist who has been making work for 40 years, to Rebecca Baumann, who is literally at the start of her career,” Barkley says.
“That whole idea of mixing: mixing artists across generations, mixing methods, and also there’s a great mix between indigenous and non-indigenous. . . that’s very important for me as a curator, that idea of dissolving those barriers – because I think they’re artificial.
“I don’t think artists think like that, and I don’t think institutions should think like that either. Those days of placing people into silos are over.”
Museum of Contemporary Art, Circular Quay, Sydney, free entry
