Hosier Now (All Your Walls)

Peril and Adnate were the just finishing their work around 6:15pm on Friday 29^th November. Paris’s piece was cutting into Adnate at the other end and now Peril was asking Adnate to do a bit of fill with over-spraying just under his piece. There were lots of collaborations in Hosier Lane its side branch, Rutledge Lane. For weeks 120 artists, 11 crews, of Melbourne’s best graffers and street artists went a painting all the walls. All the walls? Yes, all your walls.

At 6pm the public had been invited to view the results and this was a Hosier Lane like you have never seen it before – All Your Walls is part of the National Gallery of Victoria’s exhibition Melbourne Now. Two bloggers, Dean Sunshine (Land of Sunshine) and Fletcher Anderson (Invurt) along with Toby (Just Another Agency and who formerly ran 696) organized the event.

Fletch Anderson’s eyes light up when he talks about Melbourne’s street art. He really believes that he is living in the right place at the right time in art history. He really believes that Melbourne’s street art is up there with New York, Sao Paulo, Berlin and Los Angeles. Fletch (aka Factor) is such a believer that he made his dream come true. There were teenagers and old school old hands all painting together. Dean Sunshine told me that there were crews that absolutely hated each other painting at the same time in Hosier Lane.  There were no beefs between the street artists and the graff crews.

“No bullshit, no politics, no problems.” Fletch gives a great quotes when inspired by his vision of an urban paradise of paint.

Hosier Lane was closed off to traffic for the evening. Normally there are a lot of people walking around taking photographs in the lane but this evening capped them all. There were artists, academics, art collectors, hoodie-wearing people, office workers on their way home, residents, street artists showing their kids their work and people who use the social services located in the lane.

The lane got its name because it was originally part of the Melbourne’s garment district. Now the former rag trade warehouses in the area have now been converted to gallery spaces and apartments and the laneway’s walls are Melbourne’s iconic centre for graffiti and street art.

It would have been an urban paradise evening if it weren’t for the freezing cold wind that was ripping through Melbourne. It is hard to be convivial with all these fine people when the cold is rising from the old bluestone cobbles.

In completely repainting the lane they started with an undercoat of black, buffing all previous work in both Hosier and Rutledge. Black… I said something about this colour in my review of Melbourne Now. There is a stencil quote on the laneways from Leonardo da Vinci advocating black as an underpainting.  This was followed by scissor lifts and repeating of the upper levels and finally the lower levels, the areas assigned to various artists marked on the wall.

It is not just aerosol art; there are plenty of paste-ups and installations. Junky Projects has attached an enormous work of junk art to the wall, a Dada/Futurist wet dream. It is one of his largest and most abstract works yet. Lego construction workers by Pop Gun (or “Pop Cap”?) stand on a miniature beam high up on the laneway’s wall. Phoenix has a large cluster of political paste-ups and his Dali butterflies up on the walls.

The walls speak for themselves.

In 2010 people speculated what would happen to Melbourne’s iconic Hosier Lane post-Amac when long time resident and un-official curator of the lane, the cowboy hat wearing, Andy Mac (aka Amac) moved out. They were concerned and had good reasons to be Amac had been there in the 1990s at the start of the graffiti and street art in the lane. He added to the lane with the Citylights Project light-boxes and Until Never gallery. Amac was there to tell writers not to tag significant pieces and he organized the painting other pieces.

Post-Amac there were a few problems in the lane – CCTV, RIP Jill Meagher, and endless angry capping. Some people may even consider Doyle’s Empty Nursery Blue as one of the problems but it really cleared the way for All Your Walls. In his piece, Calm comments on Empty Nursery Blue with a gnu buffing with blue.

Calm, All Your Walls

The problems in Hosier Lane have been solved with the good will of the residents, Hosier Inc., the City of Melbourne especially City Engineer, Gordon Harrison, the artists, bloggers, the Alley Chats group of interested parties… lots of people are concerned for this lane and its art.

Now the NGV have joined the party including All Your Walls in it’s Melbourne Now era defining exhibition. There have been major exhibitions of street art in major museums around the world but Hosier Lane offer the opportunity for the exhibition to come out of the gallery, and conveniently Hosier Lane is just across Flinders Street from the NGV at Fed Square.

All Your Walls is an era defining moment; it is the first time that all the walls of Hosier Lane have been painted before in such a co-ordinated effort with so many major crews, notable writers and artists. It creates Melbourne’s very own graffiti wall of fame. The major names in Melbourne’s street art scene now have work in Melbourne’s iconic Hosier Lane. In the past you would have to go to Brunswick or Fitzroy to see AWOL’s work, now it is up, high up in Hosier. Old school Melbourne aerosol writers, Paris and Peril and the KSA crew have not been forgotten.

This is going to have implications for the future; such a definitive exhibition promotes ossification. Artists were already talking maintaining their work, about keep their space in the lane as perpetual territory, and their plans to deal with taggers. There is more space between the pieces than there was in the past when the competition was so intense.

When it comes to the future of Melbourne’s street art and Hosier Lane I am not a visionary. I can’t see the future and make it happen but I do know that just as Melbourne Now is a must see exhibition, an era defining moment of Melbourne’s art history, so is All Your Walls.

Advertisement

Who Pays For Public Mistakes?

Many public sculptures are mistakes, very few are really successful. Given that permanent public sculptures are expensive due to the cost of materials like bronze and marble. Given that a sculptor creating public sculpture has to learn from experience the question must be asked who should pay for these public mistakes?

Micheal Menzaros, The More We Know, bronze, 2013, Melbourne University

This question came up when I was examining the recent sculpture The More We Know 2013 by Melbourne sculptor, Michael Meszaros. It is located out the front of the entrance to the Medical Building at Melbourne University, near the corner of Grattan Street and Royal Parade.

The More We Know is about the advance of medical knowledge and it commemorates Melbourne Medical School’s 150th anniversary. It is the idea of a group of nine Melbourne Medical School alumni from 1972 who last year commissioned the sculpture from Meszaros. The sculpture represents progress in the increasing complexity of the figure including the gaps in the figures; the more we know the more aware of we are of the gaps in our knowledge.

The statue is not only expresses how medical knowledge, practice and technology evolve but also the evolution of Meszaros’ sculpture. The linked group of figures is a development from his earlier sculpture, further down Grattan Street outside of main entrance of the Royal Women’s Hospital. The figures go towards and away from the hospital; there is doctor with a stethoscope, a pregnant woman, a woman holding a baby, a nun like nurse, a woman with a nametag.

Michael Meszaros’s sculpture at Royal Melbourne Hospital

The profile faces in The More We Know are a development from metal outline profiles in Meszaros’ Distant Conversation, 1992 that once was in the lobby of the Telstra building. All of this far more complex than Meszaros’ earliest public sculpture in Melbourne, his 1978 realist figure of John Pascoe Fawkner at 447 Collins Street.

In 1979 in The Age the critic, Robert Rooney described Meszaros’ John Pascoe Fawkner (and its companion, Stan Hammond’s John Batman) as a “miserable pair of bronze nonentities”. Former Age art critic Peter Timms was more forgiving saying that it “shows a need for social coherence which we all desire; a sense of hierarchy and order. But I guess we all acknowledge that that’s not the reality anymore – so is sculpture the way to achieve it? I don’t know.”

Michael Meszaros (b.1945) is the son of the Hungarian born sculptor and medalist Andor Mészáros (1900-1972). Michael Meszaros studied architecture at Melbourne University before turning to sculpture. He is still working in the same studio in Kew that his father built. He is a former member of the Visual Arts Board of the Australia Council and was also instrumental in the original push for legislation to recognize the artists’ moral rights. Meszaros’s niece, Anna Meszaros is also a sculptor, notable for her fourteen relief sculptures depicting the Stations of the Cross outside several of Melbourne’s inner city churches.

There are many sculptures by Michael Meszaros in Melbourne. There is his memorial to William Guilfoyle, curator from 1873 to 1909, a cluster of bronze sprouting seeds with large acorns at the Royal Botanic Gardens. His copper birds at 350 St. Kilda Road and the others that I have mentioned in this post.

I started writing this post with some sympathy towards Meszaros, not because I admired any his sculptures but I did appreciate his development over his 43 years of working as a sculptor. However I lost what sympathy I had when I read his public submissions to the federal Minister for the Arts Review of Private Sector Support for the Arts 2011. Meszaros’ submission exposes his anti-intellectual, conservative position and demonstrates that while he might be good at getting sculptural commissions ranging from small medallions to public sculpture he lacks training in both diplomacy and a greater understanding of the art world outside his own studio.

In the submission Meszaros complains about ephemeral artists, performance ‘sculptors’, sound sculptors, etc. claiming that they alienate the public. This raises the question if Meszaros’ own sculptures engage or alienates the public? I’ve never seen the public interact with any of his sculptures aside from people using the plinth of his figure of Fawkner as a seat. No one touches the sculptures even though they are at street level and no one takes selfies with them. Meszaros’ Telstra figures Distant Conversation, 1992, have been alienated from Telstra’s lobby and ultimately the from Telstra; the sculpture was finally acquired by Grollo Australia. Café tables in the lobby of 565 Bourke Street now surround his Rainbow, 1990. After a while his sculptures just fade into the background of the city and are ignored.

Michael Meszaros, Rainbow, steel, 565 Bourke Street

Meszaros complains in his submission that: “In may (sic) circles, commissioned artists are looked on as a lower form of commercialised life. By that definition, Michelangelo was a commercial sculptor.” In cherry-picking evidence Meszaros disdain of education meant that he didn’t realize the irony of this comment as Michelangelo found many of his commissions annoying.

To prospective clients each commissions looks like a triumph because they are not an absolute disaster. A sculptor working on commissions doesn’t have to rely on repeat customers, he just moves on to the next commission. In this way organizations pay for his development as a sculpture and have to live with his mistakes. That said; Michael Meszaros has built a reputation through commissions involving Melbourne University, for decades, he received commissions for portrait medals of retiring Melbourne University academics.

Paul Yore Justice Delayed

On Monday the 25^th of November at 11am there was meant to be a mention hearing for Paul Yore in the Melbourne Magistrates Court. On Saturday 1st of June police had raided the Linden Centre for Contemporary Arts and removed 7 collage works by artist, Paul Yore alleging that the art was child pornography. There were about four or five journalists in Court Room 7 from before 11 am.  There was no sign of Paul Yore or the Informant, Snr. Cons. S. Johnson of Victoria Police.

Paul Yore, “Fountain of Knowledge”, 2013

Paul Yore is young Melbourne artist who has work on exhibition in Melbourne Now currently on at the National Gallery of Victoria. 2013 has been a strange year for Yore along with multiple exhibitions and the police raid, he was thrown out of Sydney Contemporary at the last moment and won the $8000 Wangaratta Contemporary Textile Award. Through all of this Paul Yore has been keeping silent and a low profile. This was the tactic that spin doctor, Sue Cato recommend to Bill Henson and Roslyn Oxley when the media storm blew at them. Yore’s team has adopted this same tactic.

It has been difficult to get information out of either side. Senior Sergeant Brens, the Acting Senior Sergent of the Media Unit of Victoria Police wrote on the 30^th August: “The investigation is ongoing and there is no update. I’ve been advised there may be some progress in a couple of weeks so please check in again after 13 September 2013.” Then on the 7th of September, the day of the Federal Elections, news that Paul Yore had been charged with producing and possessing child pornography came out the in Murdoch owned media.

Australia has a poor history of philistine persecutions of artists; the exhibition that the police raided at the Linden Centre, “Like Mike” was a response to the Australian artist, Mike Brown. In 1966 Brown was convicted of obscenity and was sentenced to three months hard labour that was reduced to a $20 fine on appeal. Since then the Australian police and censors have been intermittently and unsuccessfully tried to prosecute artists. It is a repeated pattern and questions need to be answered about the police censoring the arts in Australia. Moral panic over the depiction of children is currently being used as an official cudgel to beat artists. Bill Henson has already withdrawn from 2014 Adelaide Biennial after a SA police detective urged Premier Jay Weatherill to stop Henson’s participation. Sydney Contemporary’s Director Barry Keldoulis uses a lawyer to determine if artists can be shown in NSW.

It was former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd who promoted attacking Bill Henson’s photographs in an appearance on breakfast television. Not that the Australian government is any kind of example of benevolent treatment of children. Not that the police seizure of Yore’s art has much to do with moral panic it is more about the police being used by some right wing politicians trying to destroy the Linden Centre’s funding model. The story has no traction except for commentators like myself.

The silence and delays have not been good for the Linden Centre’s staff. In October 13 The Age reported on claims that gallery staff were bullied into quitting. The silence and delays have not been good for Paul Yore. The silence and delays have not been good for the public who desperately want a resolution to the long running art censorship debate in Australian culture. There have been glum expressions around Melbourne’s art world for the last half-year whenever Paul Yore’s name is mentioned. Bill Henson was in Sydney and was already a big name but Paul is in the same position of many of Melbourne’s artists. Glum expressions are not what Yore’s art is about; it is funny, irreverent and ribald. The silence and delays only assists the retreat of the conservative forces and a petty right-wing troll who is seeking to destroy the Linden Centre.

Back in the crowded courtroom number of 7 of Melbourne Magistrates Court the 3 rows of seats were full. The magistrate was trying to keep cases moving, there were adjournments and more diversion orders. Slowly the seats were emptying and the journalists were getting restless. Court adjourned and the media finally finds out that Paul Yore’s case has been delayed until 10^th of January 2014.

After half a year of waiting for a resolution to the police raid and we can only speculate at the reasons for the delays. It only took the NSW Police two months in 2008 after they raided Bill Henson’s exhibition to return the photographs without laying any charges.

(For more on the Paul Yore case see my post: Police Raid Gallery and Political Motivation Behind Police Raid.)

Moreland and Art

Moreland Summer Show, the last show in this year’s season of exhibitions at the Counihan Gallery is an exhibition of 40 artists who live and work in Moreland. Don’t fear the community art show; there is no bad café art in this exhibition. None of the art is so terrible that it never should have been exhibited. Most of the works are in traditional media, oils, acrylics, photography, etc. Charlotte Watson’s hard edge abstraction Sans Two in cutaway layers coloured wax showed that innovation in media is not absent. Elwyn Murray used the Oxford English dictionary’s new word of the year #selfie for a backlight outline of a figure taking a selfie on their cell phone etched on mirror; a motion sensor switched off the light showing the viewer their own image. Julian Di Martino had a painting and reference sheet tallying various types of people, 2013 with references. One albino a summer does not make; as the Surrealist proverb goes.

Julian Di Martino, 2013 with references with Julian Di Martino in front making a reference.

Good ideas; I mean that, but nothing exceptional in the final analysis but I don’t want to write a boring blog post reviewing the Summer Show piece by piece. That’s not the point of the exhibition. This is not a display of talent/contest demonstrating the glory of Moreland’s artists. This is not about the being biggest, the best or the most innovative.

If we want to get into hyperbole… the opening of Summer Show on Thursday night was one of the most important cultural events in the northern suburbs this month, maybe even this spring. The arts in the northern suburbs art are saving it from becoming a post-industrial wasteland zombie dormitory. As I’ve said it thousands of times (quoting Gregor Muir) – artists are the storm troopers of real estate in transforming urban areas.

There were plenty of artists at the opening meeting up, not just artists in the show, lots of local artists, all networking, catching-up, and general chitchat talking. People kept on starting friendly conversations with strangers asking: “Are you one of the artists?” This is important; it makes the local art world go round.

I was working the room too; glass of red in one hand, pen and gallery list in another. Julian Di Martino was laughing telling me: “The theme of current tendencies is one of the broadest themes for a group show that I’ve seen in a long time.” I talk to the curator, Victor Griss; check that I’ve spelt his name right because I want to give him credit for a good exhibition hanging given the diverse variety of artists and styles.

Where did Benjamin Sheppard go? He was just talking to someone in front of his drawing. I wanted to talk to him because I’ve already written about a hundred words written about his last solo exhibition at the Counihan before I ran out of steam. His very large drawings with multi coloured biros on paper are a great take on ideas about high and low art; the whole idea of illustration and of art media and non-art media, that sort of thing.

See you the same time next year.

Melbourne Now

Thirty-three years after that tumultuous turning point in Melbourne’s culture when Ron Robertson-Swann’s Vault (aka “The Yellow Peril”) was installed and then removed from the City Square. Melbourne Now is yellow; the exhibition’s logo is yellow, at the launch of the exhibition the Minister for the Arts, Heidi Victoria was dressed in yellow complete with yellow nail polish. Back in the 1980s Barry Humphries suggested that Melbourne should be called “the big Orange”, in reference to NYC moniker, “the big Apple”, but the orange trams are no longer on Melbourne’s streets. In Peter Tyndall blog post for 21/11/13 (reproduced in Melbourne Now) Tyndall suggests that Melbourne’s colour is black – that appeals to me (ha ha).

Thirty-three years ago it would have been impossible to have an exhibition of the quality and scale of Melbourne Now. There were not enough quality artists or gallery space in Melbourne then. Now Melbourne has become the city that Robertson-Swann’s sculpture anticipated, a city where the arts and design flourish.

Daniel Crooks, A garden of parallel paths, 2012 (still)

Melbourne Now is huge exhibition covering 8000 square meters of gallery space in both of the NGV galleries, and extending out of the galleries into the sculpture garden at the back of the NGV International and onto Melbourne’s streets. It is all free and will occupy most of a day; it took me over three hours to just to get an impression of the exhibition. I’m sure that I must have missed something and I will happily to go back for another look.

The exhibition includes so much – painting, sculpture, drawing, art publications, design, architecture, fashion, music, and dance. I will try to focus on a just couple of aspects.

Parents take your children to this exhibition; later in life they might thank you for it when it is mentioned in Australian art history and there is plenty to keep kids engaged with this exhibition at the present. Children’s activities include making experimental music with The Donkey Tail Jr. on the mezzanine gallery of the NGV (St. Kilda Road) and adding silhouette bird stickers to the sky of Juan Ford’s huge work You, me and the flock. The Dewhurst Family supported both these features of the exhibition. Much of this exhibition is interactive; you can also make your own jewellery, design your own shoes out of cardboard or sketch in the beautiful room of taxidermy work by Julia DeVille (sketching materials: black paper, gold and silver pencils and boards provided).

Street art is a major part of Melbourne’s current art scene and the influence of street art, graffiti and tagging is clear in Melbourne Now. There is Ponch Hawkes photographs of tree tagging, Stieg Persson’s paintings, Reko Rennie’s paintings, Ash Keating’s video and Lush’s installation: Graffiti doesn’t belong in the gallery? It is typical of Lush to get his tag up everywhere. Daniel Crooks’ a great video installation A garden of parallel paths and a Rick Amor painting Mobile Call also present views of Melbourne’s graffiti covered laneways. The walls of Hosier Lane, with All Your Walls, are also part of Melbourne Now. (I will write about All Your Walls in a later blog post when the project is complete on Friday 29^th of November.)

Some of the artists in Melbourne Now

Finally with such a large collection of contemporary artists it is worth doing a bit of statistical examination: 56% of the artists are men, 44% are women and 11% identify as indigenous Australians. Indigenous Australians are well represented in the exhibition given that, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics “Victoria had the lowest proportion of people of indigenous origin at 0.6% of the total state population”. I only counted individually named artists and not groups. Compared to statistical break down of the artists to be included in the 2014 Whitney Biennial with only 32% women and 7.6% artists of African descent (see Hyperallergic “The Depressing Stats of the 2014 Whitney Biennial”) Melbourne Now is very balanced and representative.

2Do @ An Art Museum

What do can you do in an art museum/gallery/institution besides look at art?

Some art museums are destination architecture – so you can look at the architecture and take a photo. The Guggenheim Museum in NYC started the trend of museums as destination architecture. The Guggenheim is an interesting experiment in art gallery design by Frank Lloyd Wright. It is a real mutant but not one with successful progeny, in that no other galleries have followed this new and curvy design. There is a fountain on the ground floor, a blank white pool with a single jet. There are also planter boxes with green indoor plants on several of the floors. After a few levels it was a relief to walk on a flat floor again but by the 5^th level my calves and ankles felt oddly stretched. The Guggenheim in Bilbao is landmark architecture by Frank Gerrey and the photogenic equal of the New York building. However its curvy design does not extend floor to ceiling and the galleries are basically the same as other art museums.

New Museum NYC

Buy an entry ticket. The tickets, this is often a necessity for the institution to have some income. Generally you get a ticket and often a little metal tags or sticker that you to put on your clothes.

Put your coat and bag in the cloakroom. The cloakroom is necessary for your comfort and gallery security.

Toilets Boston MFA

Go to the toilet. A necessity but galleries have turned this into a design display. In the best art galleries in the world there are baby change facilities in the men’s toilets. I don’t know how many men take their babies to art galleries but the facilities are there for them in many of major museums.

Sit down. The seats are another necessity as people do need to rest their feet and can be in high demand. Seating also allows the viewer to look at the art for longer. This presents a problem for contemporary art installations where a seat in the gallery may be interpreted as part of the art.

Eat at the cafes. This might look like a side earner, but it is another necessity in large art museums that take at least a day to see. The Boston MFA and Louvre have several scattered around the gallery. The Vatican Museum has one of the worst museum café, as it is located directly above their new toilet block. Jeff Lee of Recent Items has a post about the Tate Modern’s café.

Read in a reading rooms or library. The reading rooms in contemporary art galleries reading rooms are likely to be digital, but hopefully in no way resembling MOMA’s “O” (see my post O No). The pod overlooking harbour at the Boston Institute of Contemporary Art is cool, relaxing and informative.

Listen to music, musical performances are the most likely entertainment in an art gallery. Listening rooms, well I’ve been in one in a Neue National Galerie Museum in Berlin. The museum had a collection of music and headphones in a seating area, again very relaxing.

Play, mostly only for children, although adults can even play a boardgame in the reading room of the Isabella Stewart Gardener Museum. There is a need for a dedicated children’s activities area for the younger visitors in major galleries.

Go to the Cinema. Tate Modern and a few other large galleries have cinemas with programmes co-ordinated with exhibitions.

Sketch. Sketching in US museums is encouraged. Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum supplies pencils, paper and boards for sketching. The Frick Collection has regular sketching Sundays. This is in contrast to the NGV’s attitude to sketching (See no sketching).

And, in the words of Banksy, … exit through the gift shop.

Calm Collected

This is a story about a shy suburban guy living the suburban slumber of the sedated lifestyle waking up. He doesn’t go wild and try to stay wide-awake all the time. He just calmly looks around at what is going on in the big picture, tries to find a voice and then uses his voice get involved. What more can be expected in a life?

Calm Toucans

Calm found his own voice with first with a mock Neighbourhood Watch poster featuring a Planet of the Apes gorilla and the slogan: “control the human pests”. He has gone on to more paste-ups with his pertinent satire in Melbourne streets.

Calm is a Melbourne street artist who has been working on the street for the last three years. Married with three children, unlike many other street artists he does not have an art school or design background. He is still refining his spray-painted multi-layered stencilled techniques that often does on paper before pasting them up in the street. He has been in a few group exhibitions mostly for charities and was involved with CHD’s Trojan Petition in 2012.

It isn’t often that you hear an artist talk about the work life balance, sometimes you are just amazed that they have a life. It is not that Calm is prolific, he doesn’t do massive runs and paste-up everywhere, but the quality of the work makes it stand out and he is happy with the balance in his life now. There is a balance in his art, it is not all political, there is also his Toucan spray-cans.

Calm – Captain Assange

Calm – Wanted Paul Watson

Calm’s pop political posters of current political figures satirize and comment on the media’s current cast of heroes and villains. The simple form and the few colours keep the design clear and concise. Calm’s satire doesn’t preach or rant but has a cool, wry and ironic quality. Often there a few different angles; referring to his Bradley Manning in football uniform, Calm points out that there are a few quarterbacks named Manning in the NFL.

Calm – Bradley Manning All-American

Calm – Murdoch Swine

When I mentioned that his Murdoch swine was a bit vicious compared to his lighter touch with other work, Calm replied, “Sometimes you’ve got to do it.” It was saying what everyone was thinking of Murdoch after News of the World.

Calm see his street art as a way of breaking the advertising monopoly on public space and the public conversation. Calm’s images are like single panel editorial cartoons on the pages of the city.