Greg Johns’s large (4m high) rust-red corten steel geometric creations from 2008, Swirling Mandala (Cataclysm) and Pattern Wavering, are on the corner of Market and Cecil streets. South Melbourne Central is an inner-city suburban shopping precinct. There is a discount liquor store, a fabric craft store, and a supermarket. The SPG Group (Spotlight Property Group), the owners of South Melbourne Central, gave them to the city.
Johns plays with complex geometry, rotating shapes on their axis to create elegant forms. Both sculptures have an empty space in the middle. You can look through both sculptures; they don’t obstruct the view. They are for the public on the move, walking or driving past the sculptures; the angles keep changing just as the sculptures do.
Johns is an Australian sculptor with other public sculptures in Australia, SG, and NZ. They are all big metal sculptures in the international modernist style, which continues to morph along with architectural fashions.
Johns has an artist’s statement about the two sculptures on the shopping centre’s website. It is full of bland statements about the corten steel reflecting the colours of the Australian landscape, Swirling Mandala (Cataclysm) influence of fire and its influence on the Australian landscape, and Pattern Wavering is “counterpoint” to it.
There is no reference in Johns’s artist statement to the shopping centre or the car parking just behind them. Or the sculpture’s role in traffic management, in drawing attention to the shopping area by threatening the driver with large pieces of steel. There is a culture of pretending cars don’t dominate every aspect of Australian cities, but there are public sculptures acting as bollards.
Fortunately, they have not been hit by any cars. It is also fortunate that these are not site-specific sculptures, and their dynamic geometry of rotations will mean that, in more enlightened times, they might grace a pedestrian plaza.
I’ve written before about the art at shopping centres: Barkly Square, Melbourne Central and Southbank.
Black Mark 