Media, museum

In a Weekend Australian in late August, Christopher Allen reviewed an exhibition being held at the National Museum of Australia. The review (of Yiwarra Kuju: The Canning Stock Route) is pushed to the end of a long spiel on the 10 year old building that surrounds it.

Those familiar with The Australian’s slant on things postmodern wouldn’t be too surprised that he belatedly laid into Ashton Raggat Mc Dougall’s building for being ideological.

…the museum building is an example of a particularly repellent style of postmodern political symbolism in which the whole shape of the building is meant to convey a message and which inevitably falls into the most teeth-grating kitsch.

The structures of such institutions, their development, and the struggles between competing interests and ideals are proper subjects for non-partisan reflection. Ideological thinking, on the other hand, is inherently partisan; and it is intellectually dishonest because truth and complexity are sacrificed to the supposedly higher priorities of propaganda. In an institution of learning such as a university or a museum, ideology is intellectual pollution; and eliminating it can be as hard as restoring any site contaminated by toxic waste.

So architects should look but not see?

Allen underlines his position by referring to the braille signage above the Garden of Australian Dreams and its occasionally political messages – now long obscured/censored by the addition of extra dots.

Miranda Devine “revealed” fragments of the translated braille in the Sydney Morning Herald in April, 2006. Hers is the first mention of the “forgive us our genocide” phrase that I can find, and she doesn’t state her source.

Devine states in this 2006 article, that the NMA was, “conceived by architect Howard Raggatt as “one in the eye for John Howard” – as one critic put it”. In another article in 2008 she shortened this to, “conceived by its architect, Howard Raggatt, as “one in the eye for John Howard”. Two months later the SMH retracted this and apologised to Raggatt.

SORRY?

The mainstream media has picked up on the braille more than once, maybe due to their familiarity with text rather than form. Last year Rosemary Neill from the Australian visited the NMA, to look into falling visitor numbers, and again spends many column inches discussing the braille panels. The guide told her the panels didn’t say sorry at all, they said, “Sorry mate”. Neill then says, “In fact, the braille characters did once say sorry.”

Presumably referring to Devine’s articles, she wrote, “It’s also been reported that the original braille said “forgive us our holocaust”, but [director Craddock Morton] stops short of confirming this.” Hmm.. what does “stops short” mean?

I wonder if Devine and Neill had taken the time to peruse the 2002 publication, National Museum of Australia: Tangled Destinies. In it, the (apparently) full text of the panels is printed in more legible English on page 48. Sorry mate appears three time, but a solitary Sorry appears not once. Nor is their any sign of Forgive us our genocide. Raggatt does use the word Sorry and the phrase Forgive our holocaust, but it is in another section of the book (p.42), where he attempts to explain the NMA’s roof plan representation of Libeskind’s Jewish Museum. It looks like the NMA censored “Sorry mate”. A sorry saga.

Tangled Destinies at Google Books

Australian Baroque, AA 2001

NMA

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Thought I would do a quick check from an old happy snap of mine:

This braille translates to: Mate. Resurrection City. Mate Mate Mate Mate Mate Mate Mate Mate Mate Mate Mate Mate Mate Mate Mate Mate Mate Mate Mate Mate Mate Mate.

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Posted by Peter on 11.10.10 in buildings