In the stars

Celestial Ground 2016 by Colleen Boyle is a geometric sculpture about astronomy. Boyle is a Melbourne-based artist fascinated with outer space (I must have seen one of her exhibitions over the years as she has exhibited in galleries I regularly visit, like the Counihan Gallery, Blindside and First Site). 

Detail Colleen Boyle, Celestial Ground 2016

The sculpture forms a constellation of its own in front of a building in the Docklands with low plinths, information panels along the wall and extending into the footpath. The folded metal plates are etched with images of the southern night sky and mirror polished plates, reflecting like a telescope. The pentangles and hexagonal steel plates and their low hexagonal concrete plinths painted Payne’s grey reference a type of carbon (C60) found in space. The plinths are also the right height for seats so you can get comfortably close to the images of the constellations.

Commissioned by Wonderment Walk Victoria in collaboration with RMIT University and Victoria Point. (What is Victoria Point apart from a residential suburb southeast of Brisbane? Perhaps it is the building’s name.) This is the second sculpture I have seen commissioned by Wonderment Walk Victoria; see my post on John Olsen’s Frog sculpture. 

Boyle and Olsen are not primarily sculptors. Why does Wonderment Walk choose artists who are not primarily sculptors? Wonderment Walks commissions public sculptures and installations that combine science, mathematics and art. This certainly includes Boyle and some of the other sculptors, but that concept gets stretched to the meaningless to include portraits by Vincent Fantauzzo and kitsch sculptures by Gillie and Marc. It seems in many cases star power is more important than science, but not for Celestial Ground.

Celestial Ground is not the only piece of public art in Melbourne with references to the stars. Another is World Within, World Without (2010) by Helen Bodycomb, a mosaic on the south bank of the Yarra depicting the time at which former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd made his national apology to the ‘Forgotten Australians’ represented by the constellations above Victoria at 11 a.m. on 16 November 2009.

Detail Colleen Boyle, Celestial Ground 2016

Current Activities 2024

What have I been doing apart from going to art galleries? I had an intense interview, researched local art crimes, organised a hyper-local book fair, and lived life. I’ve been visiting artists at their studios (shout-outs to William Eicholtz, David Wood, and Joel Gailer), painting my fence black, eating at various establishments around Coburg, and enjoying the other good things in life.

photo by CV

I still do a lot of walking, but I haven’t written about psychogeography for a while. We all did so much walking during Melbourne’s many COVID-19 lockdowns that I didn’t think my readers would want to read about walking. Maybe psychogeography is useless until you consider it in relationship to radical action. Consider the University students renaming buildings after murdered Palestinians: Hind Hall at Columbia, Mahmoud’s Hall at Melbourne Uni, and the Refaat Alareer Library at Berkeley. These are great examples of the psychogeographical practice of not allowing the names of places in the city to be dictated to you.

The idea of walking, reading, looking at art, listening to music, or dancing as therapy is wrong; these activities are part of normal life, and if you do not do them regularly, you do not have a normal life. I’m still regularly visiting Hosier Lane and other street art locations, but you can find street art on a trip to the hardware store. I’m still going to galleries; I’m just not writing as many reviews.

In strange circumstances, the Upfield Urban Art Critics Collective interviewed me. They had hunted me down at the NGV like stalkers because they were mistaken about the meaning of a word in my review of their work. Sensing the situation could become violent, I appeased them with food and talked my way out of it like I was channelling Saul Goodman and Jacques Derrida.

I’m still selling copies of my book, The Picasso Ransom (you can buy a signed copy from me here). But I’d like to sell more so I thought what I need is a place to sell books, like a local book fair. It would only work if other people were there selling books to attract enough people.

More art and crime writing are on my horizon. I continue to take notes on art thefts, forgeries, and vandalism in case I can find enough for a “Picasso Ransom 2,” but give it a few more years. In the meantime, I’m writing a book about people doing art in prison in Australia, starting from when art was transported from Britain like a convict to the present day when artists with criminal convictions are deported back to Britain.

In order to sell more copies of my book, I came up with a brilliant idea that created a bit more work for myself but that I had to follow through with because it is simple and an alternative to the conventional book fair. 

The Merri-bek Book Fair is a hyper-local book fair featuring books by local authors and publishers. It is a free event at Schoolhouse Studio on Sunday, 25 August 2024, from 1 to 5 p.m. It is about the location as much as it is about books. The plan is to have twenty local authors and local organisations that publish books, like the local history societies, give short presentations and sell their books.

I have found a bit over half the local authors that I need for the event: local fiction, nonfiction, local history, biographies, zines and how-to books. I also need to find a volunteer to coordinate the publicity for it, someone who is local and active on more than two social media platforms.

That seems like enough.

George Decapitated

A king lost his head in Melbourne on the official royal birthday holiday this year. William Leslie Bowles’ bronze statue of the monarch on the King George V Memorial was decapitated. The sandstone and granite memorial was sprayed with red paint, and the words “the colony must fall” were written at the base. The activists released a video of their decapitation with a Sex Pistols song as the soundtrack.

William Leslie Bowles, King George V Monument, 1952, prior to decapitation

2024 has been the year of the guerrilla removal of statues honouring colonials in Australia. Six statues have been knocked down, cut down or decapitated so far this year, not including the ones that have been sprayed with paint. Six statues and the year is only half over, for there is no reason to believe these actions will stop. The people doing it are working in a target-rich environment of statues of colonials and royals, especially if restorations put the same statues up again in parkland with twenty-four-hour access.

It has been nine years since the Rhodes Must Fall movement was started by students at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. It has been seven years since the anti-colonial ‘statue wars’ became news around the world. Five years ago, students at Sydney University campaigned to remove the statue of William Charles Wentworth (see my post). Four years ago, the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement gave these campaigns extra momentum by emphasising the fatal consequences of institutionalised racism.

A few statues of colonial figures have been removed in an official process in Australia this century. The statue of Captain Cook making a Nazi salute in Cooktown and the statues of John Batman and William Fawkner in Melbourne were removed to make way for new buildings. The statue of the body snatcher,  William Crowther statue, in Hobart, was planned for removal, but due to a court appeal over its removal, it was removed earlier than scheduled by unknown persons who had grown tired of waiting.

The people cutting down these statues are clearly very patient people who have waited to see if Prime Minister Bob Hawke’s promises of a treaty from the 1980s would occur in their lifetime—certainly not in Bob’s. Without a treaty, these statues as symbols of the occupation are legitimate targets for any resistance. Still, these patient people held out hope that the next government would be better than the previous conservative government only to find out it is more or less the same. Patient people are now taking direct action and trying to make up for lost time.

This is the first year that anti-colonial activists in Australia have cut a statue down this century. Previously, they were just splashed with paint. Statues have been damaged to further other political agendas, like the Gandhi statue (see my post); others have been damaged by apolitical vandals, like Adam Stone’s Fallen Fruit banana sculpture (see my post), while others, like the theft of Chomley, the dog in Anne Ross’s sculpture, Not without Chomley, from Gasworks Park in November 2023, have been stolen for their value as scrap metal.

The monument has been cleaned by a graffiti removal team, and George’s head will be reattached, but nothing will be done to change the structure that inspired the decapitation. Considering that other countries, like the US, have been able to negotiate solutions, as in removing the Robert E. Lee Memorial, Australia has a serious lack of political will or imagination.

Ives and Rhodes’s Pop Surrealism

I was crawling the art galleries of Flinders Lane and going, meh, at the bland exhibitions when I came to 45 Downstairs. “Well, this is definitely a thing,” I said to Catherine, reserving my judgment until I could further assess the eye-popping sight of the exhibitions of Ives and Rhodes.

Stephen Ives, Chained to an Idiot, installation view

The first thing I thought about “Chained to an Idiot – Paintings, drawings and sculpture by Stephen (Stefano) Ives” was that it looked like something out of Heavy Metal, an American science fiction magazine that some of my slightly older friends used to read. I guess it was the number of naked breasts, along with the intensity of details and apocalyptic styling, that gave me that impression. (I was amazed to learn Heavy Metal ceased publication in 2023, like discovering the last dinosaur just died).

Ives usually exhibits at the Beinart Gallery in Brunswick, but his paintings were nicely paired with the equally surreal and fantastic paintings of Melbourne-based artist and interior designer Katrina Rhodes. 

Rhodes’s exhibition, “Prescription windows and magic beans”, is full of mock-baroque surreal images. What are they trying to say? Why are there blue squares on their inscrutable faces? What is the point of the anachronisms in the paintings? There is no way into the transparent boxes around the heads of the isolated individuals in her paintings. Is this all elaborate obfuscation and mystery-mongering, hoping the viewer will reach some conclusion the artist lacks?

Katrina Rhodes, installation view

Perhaps the elaborate frames with sections of different varnishes and gilding, the roped-off mantlepiece, and the high-backed armchair with cushions to match the painting were some of the best parts of the exhibition. They presented an image of impressive opulence and quality without any function.

Catherine was taking photographs of me observing art, like the Vedic definition of consciousness of two birds, one bird watching another bird eating fruit. So this is what I look like looking at art: standing back and surveying the work before striding in for a closer look. Next, I take a few photos of the installation and individual works before returning to research the artist and consider the images some more. My final opinion: ‘meh’, three-stars.

Upfield Urban Art Critics Collective

A laminated card is attached to the wood panel. Like those of all of the didactic cards that explain the art in art museums, the method of attaching is discreet; one suspects some kind of adhesive. The wood panel to which it is attached has various tags in various colours from marker pens and mops dripping ink. There is a drawing of a carrot character with a crown. The panel is blocking a window on a brick building in a Brunswick laneway. Both the bricks and panel have been painted grey, which is currently a fashionable colour.

Imagine the world’s largest museum, where everything is in the collection and on exhibition. That place exists; it is called the world. Now, imagine that this museum has curators like the UUACC. The Upfield Urban Art Critics Collective provides mock curatorial panels with information and comments about pieces of street art scattered across Brunswick and Coburg. For example:

“Carrot King

Artist name, 2023

Spray-paint on weatherboard

“Within the confines of the dystopian realm posited by this piece, a content carrot becomes a surreal sovereign, challenging the very essence of governance and the transient nature of constitutional monarchy in Australia.”

“As the monochrome Apiaceae asserts its dominion with a jaunty wave, viewers are beckoned into a cerebral odyssey, to navigate the similarities and differences between Carrot King and King Charles III. The only conclusion the artist offers is they may very well be interchangeable.”

I checked the UUACC’s website again about Carrot King, and it states: “Sadly, this piece is no longer in our collection.”

The UUACC’s text is humorous and political, cheerfully aware of art speak and art theory. It is not an original action, but then again, nothing is these days. Melbourne street art’s mad scientist CDH “street art reviews” did it in 2013. In his notes on his project, CDH refers to another guerrilla curatorial group, New York’s ongoing The Street Museum of Art.

These guerrilla curatorial panels treat the street as a gallery. The point is to make a curatorial comment on street art and graffiti, not removed from the street in a blog (like this), but immediately and adjacent to the original Carrot King drawing. Curatorial support, with all the implied authority, for graffiti and street art stands against the authority of the lawscape of property. The authoritative language of the panels creates an ironic contrast to the anarchic direct actions of the city’s surfaces that the panel refers to. Guerrilla artists and curators suggest guerrilla cataloguers recording everything in a laneway, and guerrilla archivists storing it in a warehouse as large as the world.

The author is not now, nor has he ever been, a member of the Upfield Urban Art Critics Collective. Nor am I a fan of curatorial panels in art galleries; the minimum data is the artist’s name, title, date of creation, media, and provenance. This final item, provenance, is lacking in both UUACC’s text and, more significantly, that of most major Australian art galleries. Knowing the history of a work’s ownership helps prevent art theft and forgery (having previously been owned by Subhash Kapoor or Douglas Latchford now rings alarm bells). Ownership of street art and graffiti is a more complex question but one that the ethically responsible curators at the UUACC need to address.