ASV Sculpture Awards 2015

The Association of Sculptors of Victoria’s Annual Awards Sculpture Exhibition is located in a suitably grand location, the marble and glass foyer of Bourke Place, 600 Bourke Street, Melbourne. There were hundreds of people at the exhibition opening, a classical quartet, cheese platters and wine (I was enjoying the Kooyonga Creek cab sav from North East Victoria). All the usual hype of an awards night.

ASV exhibition 2015 at Bourke Place, Joel Gailer’s Mirror State on left.

And all of this couldn’t happen without sponsors and donors. “Artists make difficult business decisions all the time,” ASV president Jan Indrans told the audience as he thanked the sponsors and donors.

Internationally known sculptor and land artist Andrew Rogers made a speech encouraging the exhibiting sculptors not to give up, to enjoy it and “dream a little.” Rogers always reminded the audience that sculpture is always a team effort and acknowledged the Meridian Foundry, the association and the all the other people involved in sculpture.

Sculptors have alway mixed business and the arts for their mutual benefit, symbiosis is a more dynamic relationship than domestication or master and servants. Sculpture is a very expensive art form to work in, there are expensive materials, the expense of transporting them before the sculptor starts to work.

With a 130 sculptures in the exhibition there is a huge range of sculptures by amateur and professional sculptors. There are sculptures in traditional material of cast bronze or carved marble. Modern sculptures in steel or ceramic. Contemporary sculptures in polycarbonate plastics or found materials.

The exhibition is only on to October 16 and it is worth seeing for a survey of the variety of current sculptural practice. Not the academic avant-garde vision of the future of sculptural practice but current practice with all the long tails of various styles. From the corny, traditional, kitsch, the visual equivalent to hyperbole, subtle, elegant there are sculptures to suit and offend everyone’s taste.

I was amazed by Andrew Bryant’s Moods7 because it moves, a lozenge of limestone rotates on a stainless steel pivot. I don’t think that I’ve seen a stone sculpture that moved before.

Daniel Worth, My Nose

Daniel Worth’s My Nose is a marble and granite memorial to all the missing noses on classical sculptures.

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Life in the Fast Lane

“Graffiti writers don’t read. They just look at pictures.” The author told me when he dropped his book off. Film maker, musician, graft writer and now author. I first encountered “S.D. Rokkatansky” (SDR) five years ago watching his Graff Hunter videos online. At the time he was only living a few blocks away and I’m happy to call him a friend. This is his first novel but I’m not going to pull my punches with this review.

Road to Redemption – Life in the Fast Lane is a youth crime novel set in Melbourne in the mid 1990s. The worst thing about this novel is the title that sounds like a Christian story of hope when it isn’t and there are so many other books called Road to Redemption. I really hate the title. But that is judging the book by its cover and so is bitching about the appearance of poor copyediting and clunky book design.

Still on the subject of the book’s cover what is the parental advisory logo doing on the cover? It not a legal requirement, maybe it is a marketing code to attract the teenage readers, the very kind of readers who should read this book.

So why did this novel need to be written at all? Not just because some teenagers would buy it. Firstly, there aren’t enough low level crime novels, people are always writing about murders and major crimes as if those crimes happen everyday. Shoplifting, tagging, selling weed, stealing cars, breaking and entering happen everyday and these are the crimes that the central characters are committing. There aren’t enough novels written about doing graffiti (why I paid my money for the Pozible campaign). There aren’t enough novels about living in Melbourne’s outer suburbs and the war on teenagers has been a continuing feature of society for decades.

Graffiti writers are prone to boasts and exaggerations about their deeds but the story didn’t strike me as false (or redemptive). The story was more Ancient Greek with nemesis punching the protagonist Tommy hard in the solar plexus for his over-reaching hubris.

SDR was in that scene in the 1990s doing graffiti and probably other shit so there are good details about the formulas for ink markers, the popular brand clothes, the brands of perfume and dog food but I wanted more descriptions.

I also wanted more descriptions of the characters because it was hard to keep the relationships between all the characters in mind, they needed more of a backstory or an explanation and not expect the reader to work so hard. Tommy is a bit too much, it was hard to keep him in focus with his diverse activities: rapping, graffiti, cars…

Too often characters have their “mouth agape” as if they are all a bunch of slack jawed yokels. SDR is nowhere near as good a writer as Irvine Welsh and SDR’s novel is written in the third person rather than Welsh’s superb first person stream of consciousness. But it did remind me of Welsh’s drugsploitation novels, the narrative alternating between the group of young men and young women. The young women are a lot more serious than the young men. The seriousness of the young women is contrasted to the young men who regard life a series of drinks, drugs and other escapades.

S.D. Rokkatansky Road to Redemption – Life in the Fast Lane (Carry Case Publishing, 2015, Australia) soft cover, 286 pages.

Coburg Carnivale – on authenticity and robots

This post about Coburg fades in and out of focus because I am jet lagged but read on and forgive me for my omissions and digressions because this is a local story about authenticity… and robots! There is a robot pushing baby carriage with a baby robot in it…

… Where am I?

I am in Coburg, the suburb in Melbourne, not the city in Germany. It used to be called Pentridge but that became the name of a prison, so it was changed to Coburg to make it sound more like the British royal family but that’s not important now. What is important to me now is to eat some Lebanese cheese pies and drink fruit juice at the Lebanese bakery overlooking the parking lot. Mulberry juice tastes great, just one of the benefits of living in a neighbourhood with a large Muslim population is that you have a great selection of fruit juice available…

… What is going on in the parking lot and Victoria Mall?

The Coburg Carnivale (sic.) presented by the Coburg Shopping Precinct and Moreland City Council. I always seem to be jet lagged during the Coburg thing or whatever it is called… no, it is definitely called the Coburg Carnivale (sic? Or if it was in italics would that make it all right? Is it important?)

It is also included in the Melbourne Fringe Festival (not a curated festival) to market to the hipsters. The Coburg Carnivale is definitely curated, it has a community, arty vibe to it and none of that carny festival feel. I suppose that the Coburg Shopping Precinct didn’t want anyone honing in on their trade.

Wow! The parking lot at the back of Coles in transformed, there are more people enjoying it than when it is full of cars. It should be a plaza all the time rather than another ugly carpark. Why do Australians believe in the right to free parking and no vehicle emission standards? I’m digressing, focus, focus …

… There is some art work around; public seating, like Callan Morgon’s Switchback deserves serious consideration as social sculpture. More gold is being applied by Alica Bryson-Haynes and Ria Green, see my earlier post about it.

Alica Bryson-Haynes and Ria Green, The Golden Opportunity Shop

… What time is it?

Saturday 26 September about 1:15pm, the sun overhead and it is pleasantly warm. Eid Mubarak to all my brothers and sisters of Moslem faith or “Bayramınız mübarek olsun” to my Turkish neighbours; I was reminded of this because I flew on Royal Brunei airlines. It is worth noting this fact because it was conspicuous by its absence at the Coburg Carnivale. I can see why, even though Coburg has many Moslems living here for generations, a mosque and a private Islamic school providing primary and secondary education, it is not something that you would advertise for a festival …

…. Okay if this is Coburg, then why are there so many South Americans around?

You are right. There are a lot of South Americans. It is Mosaik Experiences, a social enterprise providing authentic Latin American cultural experiences. But is that really authentic to Coburg’s population? When is a local festival not a local festival? How to unpack and explain that? The inauthentic authenticity of the festival is beginning to make my head spin as I am still having difficulty with reality due my jet lag…

Kranky

I have to write about this new and very prolific street artist in Melbourne because they specialise in street art sculpture. Kranky, a crank version of Banksy?

Kranky, Rats

Mixing toys, plastic rats, rat traps, lego men, fake turds, fake CCTV camera; Kanky’s small assemblages are often jokes with references to art and graffiti. Simple, basic, crude but effective visual jokes. It seems to me that Kranky is often making a joke about Banksy’s style, it is so easy, just put a Barbie doll’s head in a rat’s mouth.

Kranky’s Selfie Three Businessmen (photo courtesy of Kranky, taken on his cellphone.)

I knew that I had to write about Kranky and this was reinforced when I saw StreetsmART’s photo of Kranky’s alteration to The Three Business Men… in early September. The non-destructive alteration of an existing public sculpture is a right of passage for a street artist working in three dimensions from Banksy’s wheel clamp on Bodacia’s chariot to CDH’s Atlas Intervention.

This iconic Melbourne sculpture by Paul Quinn and Alison Weaver, The Three Business Men who brought their own lunch; Batman, Swanston and Hoddle is one of the most photographed sculptures in Melbourne. People are always taking photographs posing with these metal men. Kranky attached lanyards with selfie photos on iPhones on each of the corresponding sculpture’s face. Kranky explained that “it was a privilege, to stand back and observe, the tourists/city visitors/CBD workers, taking a selfie with the sculptures and their selfie. Which was the exact interactive response that I intended.”

Kranky’s work is amongst the most ephemeral of street art sculptures. His works are quickly stolen and only the square bases, with the simple signature mark in san serif capital letters, remain behind. The theft of these pieces shows that someone really wants them (even though they destroy it for others and loose the signature in the process) and Kranky just produces more, individual pieces and multiples. Kranky’s highly ephemeral assemblages stands in contrast to the Junky Projects and casts objects by Will Coles that are covered with many layers of aerosol paint after surviving on the street for years.

Kranky, Barbie doll

Kranky, Catch the Graffiti Police

Kranky, Dollar skull

Kranky, Miss You Frida