Elizabeth Ann Macgregor

She's Scottish. Her father was once the bishop of Sutherland and she grew up in the Orkneys. Now she is director and prime mover behind the extraordinary success of Sydney's Museum of Contemporary Art. The Big Mac speaks to Alex Chidzey

We’re at the MCA on Sydney Harbour yet we’re in the shadow of the Cahill Expressway. What do you think of the plan to knock it down?
Fantastic! I think it’s a great idea! Sydney’s problem is we’ve blocked the harbour at key points. Knock that out and it would connect us more closely to the city. It’s incredibly important to remember that Sydney isn’t just the bit around Circular Quay.

Which is why you’ve started the C3 West project in March…
Sydney has a large and very active hinterland – the fabulous Casula Powerhouse in Liverpool, the Penrith Regional Gallery, Campbelltown Arts Centre. These are organisations the MCA should partner because the stereotype that people in the west aren’t interested in art is complete nonsense. I don’t want to operate in a cultural desert.

So what needs to change in Sydney?
We’re on the verge of a dysfunctional city – one thing is the transport and the way our public space is dominated by the car. We’ve got to use arts to make the city function better – that means giving more opportunities to artists, creating more spaces like Green Square and the big development on Broadway where artists can live and work.

And how do we do that?
Art should be part of everything. Every company should have an artist in residence or on the board of their corporations. Artists are visionaries – they imagine the city. I firmly believe creativity is what is going to drive the economy in the future. That’s why, in America, they’re sending their executives to fine arts courses instead of MBAs. And the more people live with art, the less we’ll need the shock-horror of dead horses.

That work (Novecento) has drawn complaints. Was that the plan?
People get quite hot under the collar about animals and they’re wearing leather shoes! Novecento is a dead animal – a horse that died of old age and would have ended up at the knackery. Yet as art it’s an extraordinary piece – the immobility of it, the fact it’s looking back at the 20th century and the revolutions that went nowhere. Nobody complains about the stuffed hide of Phar Lap…

So you’d never show a controversial work to stir up controversy?
No, but it is in the back of my mind. I’m always careful not to do things for the shock value because people very soon see through that. That said, at the MCA for Biennale we’ve got how to make a bomb, the Cattelan horse, Jesus Christ on a bomber – any of these things could trigger a discussion, a debate, outrage or controversy.

Where do you stand on the Bill Henson saga?
Henson’s work, is triggering apprehension in the community at the moment yet five years ago it didn’t and in five years time it might not. I believe very strongly in what that artist is trying to do and I’m prepared to defend it. The whole Henson issue was about the police actually seizing the work. But in my opinion, 20 police going into a small gallery and seizing art already cleared by the classifications board as PG, is an overreaction.

First Bill Henson and now the police investigating the Mike Parr video of a chicken being killed on Cockatoo Island. Is the art world under threat by a police state?
No, absolutely not. If there’s a complaint the police have to investigate. I mean, I’m not suggesting they shouldn’t do their job. We actually have a very good relationship, we have the Rocks police station next door, and as a matter of courtesy inform them about any works they might get complaints about so at least they know.

The concern is for young people, and I think it’s a very real concern, is that somebody rang the police and said “There’s a man chopping heads off chickens out on Cockatoo Island!” I mean it wasn’t – it was a 20-year-old video. Biennales are meant to provoke discussion, so I don’t think it’s any different. We go through these waves, and its not particular to Australia either, its happening all over the world. I don’t think we’re any more or any less repressed than any other part of the English speaking world.

What’s your favourite piece in the Biennale?
I love the Jimi Hendrix piece with the hammocks and Jimi Hendrix’s music – you have to go and lie on the hammock! There’s works like that and of course I love the Sex Pistols ladies, and also the fact we couldn’t get any blokes to do it – they’re all women and the artist wanted men – so there’s another inversion there, which its really fabulous. The mobiles: the Alexander Calder and the Olafur Eliasson, the piece with the searchlight going round and round and round. He’s a really wonderful artist. We’re doing a big show of his next year, so it’s lovely to have a preview of the work by such an important artist.

Why was a whole room given to Attila Csorgo’s small photo Slanting Water?
Carolyn (Christov-Bakargiev) wanted to leave moments where you weren’t bombarded by works. There’s another gallery on level three that’s also quite sparse, you could argue that you could put more works in there. In particular that work (Slanting Water) she wanted to focus on that one, that a slight work can actually fill a whole room, and I think it does. You know you come from the front gallery with the powerful symbol of the Ferrari which just stays in your retina and you walk through into that space and it almost allows you to let the Ferrari fade and then focus in on a different level so its about pacing through an installation and I think she’s done it really wonderfully.

What about the perception that Sydney is a city of beach bum philistines?
When I first came here, the MCA was bankrupt and had for a whole range of reasons lost touch and disconnected from a wider audience. Someone said to me we’d never get support for a contemporary art museum in Sydney because Melbourne was the city of ideas and Sydney was the city of beach goers. We’ve already proved them wrong.

And so what does the future hold for the MCA?
We’ve got plans to build on the site next door and make the building much more transparent, shifting it into a more informal experience. I want the MCA to be somewhere everybody in Sydney come and check out at least once in their life. In the end, contemporary art has to be a social experience that stimulates debate.

The MCA has been described as claustrophobic, not the ideal place to exhibit art. What do you say to this?
There are two issues there. I think it’s a fantastic place to exhibit art because the galleries are very flexible. We can go from the latest video installation to wonderful paintings very quickly and when you don’t have a lot of money, changing around the exhibitions quickly is important. What is a problem is the circulation: people never know where they are in the building. We’ve got these two levels, two entrances: George Street and the Quay. Its not a building that is comfortable to access so what we want to do is improve the circulation and access so that as you go through the building it’s a thrilling experience – you can have a view out to the Opera House, go and see an exhibition, come out, and sit in a nice café overlooking the harbour. So, the critical thing is to add a different circulation and access in a more contemporary style that complements the old building and that in a nutshell is what we’re trying to do.

Do you make art yourself?
I can’t even draw.

Life & times

1958 Born in Dundee, Scotland, the daughter of the Bishop of Sutherland. Grows up in the Orkney Islands.
1979 Completes an MA in Art History at Edinburgh University, Scotland.
1980 Receives diploma in Museum and Gallery Studies at Manchester University. Macgregor then spends three years as both curator and driver of the Scottish Arts Council's moving gallery, organising and driving exhibitions throughout Highland villages, schools, inner city estates, factories, hospitals and prisons.
1985 As visual art officer at Arts Council of Great Britain. Macgregor is responsible for funding regional galleries and sets up a new program to encourage and assist galleries outside of London to promote the work of living artists and develop educational programs.
1989 Promoted to director of Ikon Gallery, one of the UK's leading contemporary art galleries.
1999 Becomes director of Sydney's Museum of Contemporary Art. One of her key aims is to develop broader, new audiences.
2000 Macgregor's objective is realised when MCA drops general admission charges to free entry, with select ticketed exhibitions.
2001 Macgregor successfully negotiates long-term funding for the MCA from NSW government.
2003 Awarded Centenary Medal for services to Australian public and contemporary art.
2007 MCA is named Sydney's favourite museum in the annual Chamber of Commerce survey, visitors having increased threefold to over 400,000. Macgregor is awarded Significant Innovation Category in Equity Trustees Not for Profit CEO award.