The Museum of a World Forgotten presents “Where Popular Stopped Being Pop”. The museum is actually some frames pasted up on Sutherland Lane, off La Trobe Street. The cook standing at the back door of the restaurant sends his assistant across the lane to pick up one of the A4 pages documenting the exhibition. He doesn’t look at the documentation for very long – it is all art student bullshit.
The Museum of a World Forgotten, Sutherland Lane
“9. In a world which really is topsy-turvy, the true is a moment of the false.” (Guy Debord Society of the Spectacle, Debord’s emphasis.)
There is so much that is false in this urban intervention: the paintings are false, the exhibition is false and the documentation is false.
Some of the paintings are dross landscapes, obviously found in some opportunity shop; the others are prints of classic ‘Australian paintings’. The paintings images of a ‘real Australia’ detoured to an urban laneway; landscape painting is always emphasized in a history of Australian art. When did this type of landscape cease being popular? There are a couple of shows on Channel 31 that will teach you how to paint more like them.
The documentation for “The Museum of a World Forgotten” is actually the first five entries from Guy Debord’s book, Society of the Spectacle. The documentation’s layout of the pictures does not represent the actual layout of paintings; the numbers are also false. The only thing that is true about “The Museum of a World Forgotten” is that it is an intentional situationalist action.
I have often commented about street art and situationalism because there are some obvious connections. There are many other aspects of the Debord in street art including the graffiti slogans on the streets of Paris. In talking about street art we need to discuss Debord and the Situationists further: the detourement of images, psychogeography and the flâneur exploration of the city. But it is also sad that a philosophy developed in the 1960s in France when, post Stalinism, the revolution needed to reinvent itself is being repeated in Melbourne endlessly by sophisticated art students (like reciting verses from the Bible).
Ace Wagstaff writes about some of these connections in his article: “Duchamp, Nietzsche and the Spectacle of the Live Creative Act”. Wagstaff writes about the public enjoying the spectacle of a legal graffiti performance at the NGV.
Meanwhile is the ‘true’ revolution starting in the Melbourne’s city square?
Black Mark 