It's a weekday morning in late October at the National Gallery of Australia and, on the surface, the place feels exactly as peaceful and calming as one would expect from an institution devoted to showing art. Visitors stroll thoughtfully through the vast spaces, speak softly and soak up the civilised atmosphere. All is under control out here.
But behind the scenes, stress levels are at fever pitch. In just over a week (at the time of writing), the current major exhibition – a retrospective by the provocative Australian artist Mike Parr – will close. The works will be taken down, installations dismantled, video screens switched off. The surfaces will be repainted. Some of the walls will even be moved. False walls will be made, and ceilings, and doors. New lights will be fitted, cabinetry installed.
In the space of a few weeks, the Temporary Exhibition Space, as it's officially called, will be thoroughly transformed, from a confronting, raw and tough series of works by an artist who loves to shock – creepy prosthetics, scribbled diaries, fake blood, etc – to a glittering, gilded, elaborate evocation of the Palace of Versailles.
Having covered the NGA's big exhibitions for the past five years at least, I'm often stunned by how seamlessly these things happen – even up to the last literal minute before the director steps up to the podium to launch the show. It's hard to describe how profound the transformation is each time, or how efficiently it will happen. And it's a process that happens at least twice a year in the NGA (although the contrasts are not always this extreme). The shows are planned meticulously to the last minute, months and even years in advance. One show closes, an army of curators, couriers and contractors will converge, new signs go up, and ta-da! The doors open again to yet another perfectly contained new world.
And all without any one of these poor, blissed-out gallery-goers ever being the wiser.
Meanwhile, upstairs, in his office overlooking Lake Burley Griffin, gallery director Gerard Vaughan is filled with nervous energy. Crates will start arriving from Versailles in the next few weeks, and staff from both institutions will have exactly 10 days to put the show together. Ten days! But Vaughan, and, indeed, the majority of the gallery's long-time staff, has been here before.
"We've done enough exhibitions to know that things move very, very quickly towards the end," he says, partly to himself. "All the crates have arrived ... unpacked, you've got the design, and the design does get changed during the installation, because what looked in theory like a wonderful arrangement doesn't quite work, and you move things around a little bit, you all agree on it, you disagree, you agree ... and then suddenly the lighting guys come in and it's done and you're ready to open!"
Easy done; when you work at the gallery, that 10-day period in the lead-up to the opening can seem like nothing and everything at the same time. Since the days when the late, great Betty Churcher was at the helm in the 1990s, NGA blockbusters have been as much a part of Canberra's summer as trips to the south coast and Summernats. They're big, and they're flashy and yes, they cost a lot. And why shouldn't they? If the NGA isn't going to spend big and put on a truly ambitious show each year, with all the marketing and construction and negotiating and shipping and insurance this requires, then who will?
But in these days of relentless cutbacks and endless calls for efficiency, money, it seems, does matter. The NGA, like all major cultural institutions, is losing government funding and needs to find other ways to make money.
And so, says Vaughan, it's time the rhythm changed. Rather than one blockbuster a year, the gallery plans to hold three large, ticketed shows (Vaughan dislikes the word "blockbuster") over two years.
"If you do three paid shows, that's a bit more money coming in, and that's actually quite important for us – with reduced government funding we're looking for new ways of earning money," he says.
"This is an experiment we'll do for a number of years, and see how it goes. And I think if you were to go round all the state galleries, because we're all in the same position, there's a bit of experimentation going on with the traditional rhythm of shows, if I can put it like that."
The move will involve some serious logistics when it comes to borrowing items, particularly from multiple sources, and the shows – he won't say what they will be – will attract entirely different audiences respectively, but Vaughan is confident it will work.
"When you think about it, in Europe, in the northern hemisphere, most of the big exhibitions are neither summer nor winter – they're spring and autumn, aren't they?" he says. Here in Canberra, they'll be in summer and late autumn. The gallery has done two blockbusters in one year before – the Turner from the Tate over winter during Canberra's centenary year. But winter in Canberra is still a hard sell.
So too is the fevered speculation about the next show, the tenor of the negotiations, and the vast amount of money required to put the shows on. Cost is a constant underlying theme when it comes to blockbusters, at least in the media. But, as more than one person has pointed out over the years, why dwell on the money?
I can't help but agree with this sentiment every time money comes up. If the national collecting institution doesn't spend millions on painstakingly putting together a different show each year that lots of people are going to see, then what's the point?
And besides, the exhibitions are so wildly different each year that it's almost meaningless to put a dollar figure on it. Last year's big show was the contemplative, pastoral works of the great Australian painter Tom Roberts – a sleeper hit that was one of the gallery's most successful ever. The year before that, an actual living genius – the American light artist James Turrell – was on hand to oversee his complex vision taking shape via new walls, cornices, projectors and lights. The year before that, thousand-year-old treasures from dug-up graves in Peru were displayed in darkened corners. In 2009, some of the world's most famous French masterpieces were being couriered across three continents to get here. Need I go on? Insurance is expensive, and no one would expect anything less than the best of everything when it comes to creating these exhibitions which must withstand daily crowds of visitors moving through.
And, in a roundabout way, the effort and expense is the very reason why the shows come here in the first place. It helps, of course, that the director of the Musee D'Orsay got tears in his eyes when, back in 2009 at the NGA, he saw Van Gogh's Starry Night properly lit for the first time in its life. It helps that Australians have demonstrated an almost insatiable appetite for all things French.
And it's not for nothing that the chief curator of Versailles insisted that Canberra could borrow one of its largest paintings, as long as the gallery had the wherewithal to get the damn thing here.
It did, by the way: Francois-Hubert Drouais' portrait of the Sourches family, painted in 1756, will be arriving here shortly on what is possibly the world's largest freighter plane – minus its elaborate frame (it didn't fit), and with 3 centimetres to spare on each side.
Where there's a will, there's a way. But to spend money, it seems, we first have to make money. And if that means another sparkly blockbuster to contend with in the Canberra calendar then – sigh – so be it.