MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA.- Through this March 7, 2004 Ugo Rondinone’s Clockwork for Oracle will continue at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art in South Melbourne.  Naomi Milgrom and John Kaldor are on a mission to bring provocative art to the masses, writes Gabriella Coslovich. John Kaldor and his partner, Naomi Milgrom, one of Australia’s most powerful businesswomen and owner of the Sussan Corporation are notoriously private. They are here to talk about art, specifically, about Kaldor Art Projects, and not much more if they can help it. Not to deny Kaldor his due - his contribution to the Australian art scene deserves to be loudly applauded.


"His importance lies in that he was as much an activist as a collector," says Chris McAuliffe, artistic director of the Ian Potter Museum of Art.

"He wasn’t just purchasing art works, he was starting projects, underwriting activities ... he tried to do more than buy art, he tried to trigger change."

In the late 1960s, when most of the nation was still fixated on the landscape tradition and artists such as Fred Williams and John Olsen, Kaldor was being seduced by the overseas avant-garde and dared to bring the most adventurous of them to Australia’s conservative and isolated shores.

In 1969, aged 33, the Budapest-born fabric designer launched Kaldor Art Projects with an audacious venture - the wrapping of Sydney’s Little Bay by American artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude. It was a bold gesture and one that encountered much skepticism. But the move was embraced by many younger artists who felt alienated by the country’s obsession with abstract expressionism and the likes of Williams, Olsen and a wild, rising star named Brett Whiteley.

A young architecture student who went on to become one of Australia’s leading artists remembers Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s arrival as a pivotal moment in his creative life. Imants Tillers was among the volunteers who spent three weeks helping to wrap the rugged coastline of Little Bay in one million square feet of fabric.

"It was certainly inspiring ... the Christo experience alerted me to the fact that there was more going on than I was aware," Tillers says.

Kaldor followed the Christo wrapping with equally novel projects, bringing out eccentric English duo Gilbert and George in 1973, and conceptual performance artists Nam June Paik and Charlotte Morman in 1976.

As late as 1995, Kaldor was still making headlines, this time with American artist Jeff Koon’s giant, terrier-shaped topiary, simply called Puppy. Milgrom was one of the thousands who fell in love with the floral pooch the instant she set eyes on him on the forecourt of Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art.

"Puppy was my first experience of Art Projects, and it was the most wonderful thing I’d ever seen.

"It just made me so happy ... everyone walking past would just turn and smile at it, and I just felt it gave so much to the public that they could not have had without John’s generosity and great love of contemporary art."

So deep was Milgrom’s affection for Puppy that she began talking to the former Kennett Government about buying the piece for the banks of the Yarra. The Spanish city of  Bilbao beat Melbourne to the cause - the huge pup-posy is now the beloved mascot of that city’s famed Frank Gehry-designed Guggenheim Museum. The second and only other edition of Puppy belongs to a private American collector.

Last year was a big one for Milgrom, daughter of retail and property tycoon Marc Besen. She became the sole owner and chief executive of the Sussan Corporation, buying out her parents and siblings. She also added Kaldor Art Projects to her formidable list of commitments - she’s also the chair of the Melbourne Fashion Festival, and a trustee of the National Gallery of Victoria and the Jewish Museum of Victoria.

The couple was met by Gabriella Coslovich
at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Arts, in South Melbourne, where they are staging their first joint Kaldor Art Project. Their protégé is 39-year-old, New York-based, Swiss-born artist Ugo Rondinone, who works in a variety of media - sculpture, video and painting. His master stroke at ACCA is a monolithic, X-shaped sculpture, six meters high, seven meters wide and a meter deep. The colossal work is a godsend for the photographer, but Milgrom has other ideas. She wants to be snapped in front of Rondinone’s hypnotic target painting, part of her private collection. Milgrom gets her way.

Her friends describe her as strong, courageous, inspirational, no-nonsense, with a good sense of humor and keen intellect, but little patience for fools or time-wasters.

Kaldor is reserved and softly spoken, perhaps surprisingly so for someone who had the tenacity to pull off the Christo stunt back in 1969. Measured, urbane, articulate and generous with his thoughts, Kaldor’s is a quiet determination. Ask how difficult it was to get the Christo project sewn up, and he responds with a leisurely laugh.

"Do you have a day and a half?"

Jeanne-Claude and Christo weren’t the problem, they readily accepted the young fabric-maker’s invitation to Australia - but their desire to wrap a coastline was not an easy concept to sell.

"The coastline around Sydney is either government-owned or army or navy-owned, so ... very systematically I went around ... making appointments to see the appropriate person, telling them I’d like to borrow a piece of their coastline because we wanted to erect a sculpture. And they’d say, ’Oh, what kind of sculpture?’ We want to wrap it.

"Now, you can imagine with my Hungarian accent, long hair and beads, they either thought I was absolutely crazy, ushered me out or laughed me out, and this went from office to office, it was getting more and more hopeless. But I kept going."

Eventually, the Prince Henry Hospital in Little Bay agreed, and reaped the benefits of the admission costs.

"It took about a year out of my life to make it happen, but it was probably one of the most exciting things I ever did, besides meeting Naomi," Kaldor says.

"Don’t print that, don’t print that," Milgrom interjects.

Kaldor has a mischievous streak, which Milgrom, for all her protests, clearly enjoys. Ask what attracted them to each other, Kaldor replies, "I like redheads," and punctuates it by rising from his chair, walking over to Milgrom and planting a kiss on her lips.

These days, Kaldor wears a suit, his hair is neatly trimmed and beads are no longer a wardrobe staple, but something of the young rebel remains. Those who know him as a retiring, almost detached man, remark on the ease of his relationship with Milgrom and their open affection for each other.

"It’s the perfect contemporary relationship," says Karen Webster, director of fashion at RMIT University, and a board member of the Melbourne Fashion Festival.

"They are dislocated geographically, they both have a major commitment to their own businesses, their own lives, their own families, but they still find time for each other, and when they are together it’s very intense. I think they teach each other a lot, they challenge each other".

Kaldor has three children from a previous marriage, and four grandchildren, while Milgrom has three children from her former marriage, all at home.

Like Kaldor, Milgrom has had a long-standing association with the visual arts. She comes from a family of collectors - her parents, Marc and Eva Besen, last year launched Australia’s first privately funded public art institution, the TarraWarra Museum of Art, built on their Yarra Valley winery. In business and philanthropy, Milgrom is following their lead, although her tastes in art could fairly be described as more adventurous, influenced in part by Kaldor’s unwavering appetite for the new.

One of Milgrom’s latest acquisitions is a work by American video artist Bill Viola, which bemuses visitors to her Toorak home.