MEETING Stefano Carboni, the new director of the Art Gallery of Western Australia, brings out a strange impulse.
You feel tempted to abandon the topic at hand -- what he plans to do with the state's art gallery -- and just listen to the man whose knowledge of Islamic art is unmatched by anyone on this continent. He's an authority on Islamic glass and an expert in the ornate styles of Islamic calligraphy. He speaks and reads Arabic, one of seven languages in which he can converse. He's written books and articles on the fertile art trade between Venice and the Islamic world, from Persian and Ottoman miniatures and ceramics to calligraphy, textiles and woven carpets.
He helped raise international concern over the looting of Iraq's museum treasures during the 2003 allied occupation. So what does he make of Islamic art's trajectory, from pinnacle of achievement in the ancient world to beleaguered art form in modern times? More to the point, given his impressive scholarship, what on earth is Carboni doing in Perth?
We first meet over lunch in a city restaurant, and then in the foyer of the AGWA a few days later. The charming, cheerful Italian actually arrived in town last October with his wife and two young sons. But he shied away from substantial interviews for a time; perhaps delayed shock had set in after making the transition from curator of Islamic art at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, a post he held for 16 years, to his new job in Perth.
Shock is not the word Carboni uses, but onesenses that he has found it sobering to confront the gallery's strengths and deficits asthe economic crisis deepens. Last May, when he was formally selected from 16 national andinternational candidates, such hiccups had barelysurfaced.
His problems back then were delays in getting immigration papers and a snap state election that held up disclosure of his appointment. Not long after he had settled in, the new Barnett Liberal Government ordered spending cuts across all portfolios and froze building projects, including spending on cultural infrastructure such as a desperately needed new state museum.
"I'm an optimist in general and I wouldn't have come here if I didn't think I could make a difference," Carboni says in his pleasantly accented English. "But it was before the global crisis, so the challenge is now much stronger. It's not even much about having open talks with the Minister of Culture or the Premier. It's about talking to Treasury."
Even before Western Australia's boom went bust, Carboni's predecessors suffered as a result of state governments' lack of vision. Long-serving director Alan Dodge, who brought blockbuster Russian, impressionist and Islamic art exhibitions to Perth, lobbied hard for extensive funds to refit an ageing AGWA and install an Indian Ocean Rim sculpture precinct. Neither had been secured by the time Dodge retired in December 2007.
So, will Dodge's successor have any more luck? And who exactly is he?
"I come from a family of art historians, although my father grew up in World War II and had to work as a civil servant," Carboni says. "My father studied in Padua with professor Giuseppe Fiocco, one of the great experts in 18th-century Venetian paintings. He used to take me to museums and art galleries."
For a budding art historian such as Carboni Jr, Venice offered the best of everything, from medieval church frescoes to Renaissance paintings, from refined glass workshops to the avant-garde art of the Venice Biennale. "My upbringing is in the Western world but then I moved intoan aesthetic area that is very different," Carboni says.
He studied Arabic and Islamic art at the University of Venice's school of Oriental studies. Then he moved on to the London School of Oriental and African Studies. Before the ink on his doctoral thesis had dried, he was offered a curatorial job at the Metropolitan Museum in New York. He spent 16 years in "the most fantastic encyclopedic museum in the world". A short walk away, on the other side of Central Park, Carboni's wife Maria Yakimov worked as chief registrar at the American Museum of Natural History. "Before our sons came along, we used to meet on a park bench at the Great Lawn for lunch," Yakimov recalls. "The boys (Giacomo, 8, and Emil, 6) would talk about Mum's museum and Dad's museum."
Carboni was asked recently to nominate his six favourite art treasures for an article in Australian Art Review, and his choices are as revealing of his life story as his art preferences.
His first choice is the Basilica di San Marco, "which speaks about Venice's longstanding relationship with the Byzantine and the Islamic world, which I feel is part of my own heritage".
The mosaics and "crescendo of light and reflection" inside its Eastern-inspired domes makes it one of the most beautiful interior spaces in the world, he says. "I can compare (it) only to the inner spaces of the Great Mosque in Cordoba and the Suleymaniye Mosque in Istanbul."
His second choice is a pointillist painting by French artist Georges Seurat, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. Carboni wrote his first art essay on Seurat's obsessive study of colour: "I must have delivered a convincing paper since the teacher told me he thought I had the makings of an art historian, something that sounded entirely silly to me as a 16-year-old."
Moving to New York exposed him to US artist Mark Rothko's abstract compositions, his third choice. "I always find myself spending more time in front of one of his paintings than any other 20th-century works."
Carboni says Rothko wanted viewers to look beyond his trademark vivid colours to the big emotions he set out to convey. "One cannot miss the point when you sit in the middle of the Rothko Chapel in Houston or in front of any of his more sombre, dark paintings."
Two more choices come straight from Carboni's career in Arabic art. He chooses a page of exquisite gold and ink writing, a 14th-century version of the Koran made for a Mongol ruler. "Calligraphy can be a vehicle for superb artistic achievement," he explains. "True, it is much better if one can actually read what is written, so I might be a bit biased about Islamic calligraphy. But I am truly convinced that everyone can appreciate and admire the fluency of forms, the relationship of the text with the rest of the page, the qualities of the ink, gold and lapis lazuli against the white burnished paper, and the overall harmony of the composition."
His fifth choice is the Corning Ewer, a 10th-century glass jug from the Middle East with animal figures in high relief cavorting around its fragile exterior. Carboni discusses this object with genuine reverence. "One of the greatest moments in my curatorial career was when I handled it. It's light as a feather, one of the most sublime achievements in glassmaking because they brought it down to less than 1mm in thickness. So ancient and so modern at once, you stare at it for hours in awe and admiration."
Carboni was head of the Met's curatorial committee at the time of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Rumours flew that thousands of ancient artefacts had been looted from the country. Carboni investigated and reported back to the Western art community that reports were exaggerated, but there had been losses.
"Syria recently returned some objects that had been seized, but a large number of objects found their way into the European and US market and were never recovered. There wasn't a proper photographic record of all the objects, so it's almost impossible to recover them," he says.
"The museum in Baghdad was mostly pre-Islamic (art), so my concern was mainly with Mosul in the north, because that had a great collection of medieval Islamic art. A few great works were burned and some disappeared.
"That's where the stupidity of politics really comes in," Carboni adds. "The blowing-up of the Bamiyan Buddha statues wasn't about iconoclasm but because (the Taliban) wanted to teach a lesson to rivals within Afghanistan. It's a tragedy but it happens, and the Western world is not immune. Think of the way the Catholic Church has behaved in the past."
When Carboni came to Perth for his job interview, he stood in AGWA's vaulted foyer with its sweeping, circular staircase and was impressed. "It's quite beautiful in some ways, a little Guggenheim."
Closer inspection has brought him face to face with the gallery's less endearing traits. The roof terrace is off-limits due to faulty flooring; the top floor exhibition space is packed with large crates (no storage space), and prismed gallery walls veer off at unorthodox 60 and 120-degree angles.
"It's a challenge," Carboni says, looking around affectionately as we stand in the foyer, "but it's what distinguishes this building from others. And it creates interesting spaces, which the curators have mastered."
He motions upward. "I would love that top floor to be used for exhibitions and the roof terrace to be open to the public. It would give the art gallery a more dynamic image and a way to say 'stay two nights in Perth instead of one'."
Too few people in Perth even know where the art gallery is located, he says. "It must be a much more exciting exterior, perhaps with a total reclad of the surface, either a wide reflective surface to project things or create a colour."
That needs money. For now, Carboni is focused on smaller changes, such as relocating the permanent collection on the ground floor so visitors walk through it before heading upstairs to temporary exhibitions. "In the long run, I'd love an additional building here," he says, pointing through a glass window to Dodge's favoured site for the Indian Ocean sculpture precinct, which is at present a staff car park. "It was Alan's idea and it's a no-brainer, frankly. It's a problem that we have only 2 per cent of the entire collection on view at any one time; the Met has about 8 or 9per cent out, and that's a goal everyone should have. Having an additional building is the only way to make thispossible."
In 2003, the Met paid a record $42 million to buy Duccio di Buoninsegna's famous Madonna and Child painting. "It wasn't a big deal finding the money," Carboni says. By contrast, AGWA has only $230,000 a year to spend on new work, although BHP Billiton, National Australia Bank, Wesfarmers and Woodside have pledged $4.5million in coming years under a state government incentive scheme.
Carboni says: "I've asked the curators to study the strengths and weaknesses of the collection, to fill the gaps or to say, 'Let's stop moving in thisdirection.'
"The Met's identity is as one of greatest encyclopedic museums in the world," he says. "This art gallery lacks a specific identity; I don't know if it's to do with the eclectic way the collection was assembled in the past. I want totarget more clearly, but also I want to make itknown much better. We should start researching properly what we have, with a detailed, pictorial database.
"This is a state collection, so Western Australia must be at the core of what we do. The second concentric circle is Australia, then moving out to a bigger circle is the next body of land we hit, from South Africa to India and Indonesia. Basically the coast of Asia and Indian Ocean Rim.
"In Brisbane, their art gallery moved very quickly and brilliantly into collecting Asian art 15years ago, when Asian art was up and coming but not expensive," he says. "I regret that in Perth they didn't do it, because it would have been the most natural thing to do. Now it's quite late to go after important artists."
Another legitimate question is why, in March, one of the biggest, most meticulously curated indigenous art collections left the state. The Canning Stock Route collection -- hundreds of paintings, videos, audio recordings and artefacts -- traces the history of black-white relations along the 1800km Canning Stock Route in the state's desert region. For a mere $800,000, it was acquired by the National Museum of Australia inCanberra.
"I'm not aware of efforts made to try to (buy) it," Carboni says when asked for his views. "But I certainly would have considered it very seriously because it's a representation of the art of Western Australia."
He adds: "I must say our indigenous art collection is one of the best in Australia, hencethe world. I think we should come up inthe short run with a very good, visually stunning, academically valid exhibition. Surely people will be very surprised at the high quality."
As a glass expert, Carboni is enthused by the gallery's impressive collection of contemporary Australian glass art, built up as a result of the Perth-based Tom Malone acquisitive glass prize. "Every year we have a great way of acquiring glass objects, and Australia is an up-and-coming country in this respect."
The question lingers: what made Carboni decide to leave behind a prestigious institution and a career in Islamic art for Perth? One reason is personal. The Carboni family has visited Australia often in recent years, spending holidays with Yakimov's Russian-born migrant family in Melbourne. "The children felt a sense of freedom in Australia that they don't feel anywhere else," says Yakimov, who admits that she misses her high-powered job and is adjusting to Perth's slower pace.
Then there's the attraction of moving closer to the world's largest Muslim population in Indonesia. "It's one of the things that excites me most," Carboni enthuses. "From Perth, in three hours one can be in Melbourne, but one can also be in Jakarta."
More broadly, Carboni felt he'd reached "the coronation of my career" in 2007 when he curated Venice and the Islamic World, a landmark exhibition at the Met. He drew from 65 different institutions, gathering items that covered the period from AD828, when Venetian merchants carried home stolen relics from Alexandria, to the fall of the Venetian Republic in 1797. "This job gives me a splendid opportunity to broaden my horizons," Carboni says. "I've been an art historian, educator, curator and I'm now moving into a role of manager and leader, someone who has to come up with ideas and energies for the art gallery. I think I'm very well placed in that respect."
That Carboni has found inspiration in his new job shows in his sixth choice of favourite art objects. It is Drying Wildflowers in Summertime, a large Emily Kame Kngwarreye painting from AGWA's collection. "I like the fact that it looks like a window over a limitless space," he says, "with the same creative intent of Islamic artists drawing repetitive geometric or vegetal patterns as a confined sample of infinite expansion."
