Going Underground

There are many children’s stories of subterranean life with the Wombles, Fantastic Mr Fox or The Borrowers that have inspired the “Going Underground”. This is an exhibition at the Dirty Dozen, the display cabinets in the Degraves Street underpass.

Anna Walker, detail from “Marvelous things will happen”

“Going Underground” is the perfect location, underground in the underpass to Flinders Street Station. It is a perfect school-holiday time for a child-friendly exhibition, even though the height of the display cabinets may not be friendly to the shorter viewers.

It is worth looking at if you have ten or fifteen minutes before catching your train home. Many of the vitrines have been transformed into fantastic underground worlds of imagination with keyhole and cross-section views to magical worlds. These wainscot worlds occupy the unseen parts of our world, like the Borrowers living behind the wainscoting. They have a parallel existence to ours instead of being separate, alternate universes.

Anna Walker imagines charming and humous scenes beneath the garden. Tai Snaith creates a floating home for polar bears inside an iceberg. Twee scenes of a miniature world of Mole Creek created by Cat Rabbit. Other artists have ceramics or textiles with images and designs inspired by these underground dwellers.

Curator Meg Rennie has created something extraordinary, bringing together local artists: Evie Barrow, Pey Chi, Maddison Haywood, Tegan Iversen, Isobel Knowles, Yan Yan Candy Ng, Beci Orpin, Min Pin, Cat Rabbit, Meg Rennie, Tai Snaith and Anna Walker. These designers, ceramists, illustrators, and sculptors embraced the theme. And the quality of the work is outstanding, making good use of the depth of these display cases.

Anna Walker

Cat Rabbit

Anna Walker

Min Pin, I’m Underground

Heroines Petticoats @ Dirty Dozen

A dozen surreal installations tell a history of Australian women. “Heroines in Petticoats” by Kelly Sullivan, Kirsti Lenthall (Empire of Stuff), Gigi Gordes and Liz Sonntag (Tinky) is an engaging and accessible exhibition that has a coherent and relevant theme.

The height and depth of the dozen vitrines in the pink tiled Campbell Arcade, the Degraves Street underpass to Flinders Street Station has been used to great effect. Too often the Dirty Dozen has been occupied by art students who have alienated the general public, forgetting or ignoring that this space is very public at Melbourne’s central metropolitan railway station. There were several people paying close attention to it when I saw it around midday on Thursday.

The vitrines create a timeline of the lives of Australian women from the colonial era to the present. The heroines of this timeline are not specific women, heroines to represent an era but women in a general non-specific way. This absence of specificity meant that the artists tended to represent white suburban women.

As well as, the timeline there were specific causes associated with specific eras from the anti-conscription movement of the 1910s to the domestic murder rate of today. There was no mention of the temperance movement, as it was a women powered movement, but it is not longer seen as righteous.

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Although each of the cases is labelled as the work of specific artists there is a coherent look to the whole exhibition. There are differences Kelly Sullivan’s collage, Kirsti Lenthall’s ceramic decals on plates and impressively on quartz rocks, or Gigi Gordes’s disembodied body parts; hands typing, the eyes on the glasses, mouth on the mug, mouth on the phone (I don’t know why the objects are covered in crochet) and, a few cabinets later, the hands on a glass of wine.

It was Tinky’s work that drew my attention to the exhibition as I know Gigi and Tinky’s art from the street. However, Tinky’s puns were the weakest elements of the exhibition. Written on paper and the little titles didn’t match the style of the rest. Unfortunately her puns give meaning to her tableaus and without them they would just be some odd HO scale model train figures.

Skunk Control @ The Dirty Dozen

Has it only been half a year since Platform closed and the dozen glass vitrines in the tile lined underpass at Flinders Street Station were left empty? The artist-run initiative Platform ran the space for twenty years and I regularly wrote about their exhibitions. Now Melbourne City Council’s Creative Spaces program have taken over management of the dozen vitrines in Campbell Arcade. They have rebranded them The Dirty Dozen because, as Creative Spaces’ Eleni Arbus puts it, ”It’s a pretty grungy site”.

The Dirty Dozen brings a new direction for the vitrines, filling them with the work of what Eleni Arbus calls “creative practitioners” rather than artists. Hopefully this will make the exhibitions more engaging for the commuters who use the underpass. The work of many contemporary artists failed to produce site specific art and failed to speak to the thousands of people who continued walking past.

The first exhibition at The Dirty Dozen, Prevaricated Frequencies by Skunk Control, a team of engineers and scientists from Victoria University demonstrates what Arbus means by “creative practitioners”. The vitrines were full of a forest of animatronic blooming flowers and caves of crystals, both with prismatic light effects from rotating polarised screens. Another vitrine contains a motorised kaleidoscope and another, rotating tanks of liquid. The attention to detail to create these complete other worldly visions is impressive.

Parts of this exhibition is similar to what was seen in Rose Chong’s display window last year when Skunk Control won the People’s Choice award at the annual Gertrude Street Projection Festival for Pestilent Protrusions. That People’s Choice award is an indication of engaging beauty that Skunk Control produce. The elegant engineering and science are used to present engaging and intriguing work rather than lecturing the audience.

Skunk Control was formed in 2012 by Nick Athanasiou a lecture at Victoria University in the College of Engineering and Science. There are a surprising number of engineers in Melbourne creating exciting art, including the street artist CDH. I wish that more artists today, instead of doing their Masters or Doctorates in Fine Arts, studied something else, something apparently unrelated to their art, because this would improve both the content and the art. I am looking forward to seeing what other “creative practitioners” will next be exhibiting at The Dirty Dozen.

Readymade in 3 Minutes

I guess that my art work will be finished when Alan Adler retires. Alan Adler is the man who ran the photo booth business in Melbourne for forty years. His analogue black and white photo booth machine is at Flinders Street Station.

In September 1925 in New York City on Broadway Anatol Josepho opened the first photo booth machine. (Näkki Goranin American Photo Booth (W.W. Norton & Company, 2008, New York). The photo booth was a common modern experience that inspired many people in the pre-digital world to play with portraying their identity.

My own relationship with photo booth goes back more than forty years. I was just two when I had my first photo taken in one. My parents took me to a department store in Canada and inside the automatic glass doors, next to the gum ball machines was a photo booth. It made a profound impression on my young mind. I thought: “Modern.  Everything done by machine.”

Since 1984 I have been working on a project using photo booth machines, documenting my life with a strip or two of black and white photos every year. It started fooling around in London; the machines were everywhere because a weekly tube pass required a photograph.

Mark Holsworth, 1984, London

I was aware of the history of art and photo booths: the Surrealists, Francis Bacon and Andy Warhol.

Francis Bacon’s photo booth photos are reproduced in David Sylvester Interviews with Francis Bacon 1962-1979 (Oxford, 1980) (p.42).

In 1990 Warhol exhibited several hundred photo booth photos at the Robert Miller Gallery in New York. In a review of the exhibition Hilton Als wrote, “What these photographs do suggest is what gesticulating – smiling and relaxing – into the void looks like.” (Artforum March 1990)

Louis Nowra “Grins to silent screams: the influence of photo booths” Art and Australia V44 #1 2006

I delighted the strip format, like a comic book panels, in the limitations and the errors made by the mechanical processing. What you can and can’t control. Curtain or no curtain? How do you dress and position your body with in the confines of the small booth.

The photo booth photo is always taken on the way to or from somewhere, it is a pause on a journey. You step out of the public space into a private booth, draw the curtain, insert your coins and pose for the photo before stepping out into public again to await the finished results three minutes later. I went to the photo booths at Flinders and Spencer Street Railway Stations to take photos on the way to friends, to Geelong, Bendigo.

My project will come to its natural, or rather, technological end when this last machine stops working.

Lindy Percival reported on Adler and his photo booth machines two years ago in The Age.  Local artist Marty Damhuis has a blog, flyingtale about his photo booth work; I wish that I’d seen his and Nadine Allen exhibition of photo booth photos at Platform in August 2009. See photobooth.net for more about photo booths including some of the artists who have used them.

P.S. The remaining black and white photobooth has moved a few metres further along Flinders Street station near the entrance to Platform 1.

P.P.S. 29/7/23 The photobooth is still at Flinders Street, however the price has gone up due to the sanctions on Russian manufactured photo paper after the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Interior of Photo Booth at Flinders Street.

Ghost Signs of Melbourne

On the corner of Flanigan Lane there is the hand painted sign stating: “New Theatre”. Jeff Sparrow and Jill Sparrow give a short history of the New Theatre in their book Radical Melbourne. The sign dates from around 1937 when the New Theatre occupied “an old tin-doffed loft above a dishes garage next to the Duke of Kent Hotel on La Trobe Street.” (Sparrow and Sparrow Radical Melbourne p.28). The New Theatre was established by the Communist Party in 1937 and  continued into the 1990s. The theatre at Flanigan Lane saw the first performance of Bertolt Brecht in Melbourne. In 1939 the theatre was declared unsafe and closed down but the sign remains on the stone wall.

There are plenty of other ghost signs in that small network of lanes but the new theatre was the only one that I researched. The interest in finding and photographing ghost signs grows. My own take on it is less about the hand painted signs and more about the history and culture that the sign represents.

The “Do Not Spit” signs at Flinders Street Station tell of a past Melbourne with an expectorating population that had to be told not to. The metal “telephones” sign in the Degraves Street underpass points to a locked door behind which banks of telephone booths once stood before mobile phones made them obsolescent. The boomerang shaped sign from former Brunswick continental supermarket on Lygon Street and Australian identity; for more see Our Fading Past – Our History in Old Signs.  I have not been able to find out anything about the sign for Balkan Club in Melbourne, but there has always been a Balkan Club somewhere around the city.

I am suspicious of the ghost signs from around Chinatown like “Commit No Nuisance” Heffernan Lane in Chinatown. These signs looks too good, perhaps they were restored in an earlier revival of interest in ghost signs. I saw them listed as number 4 selfie spots in Melbourne.The aesthetic popularity of ghost signs is leading to some being purposely revealed, restored or rectified.

After the collectors, the fans and the academics, comes the photography exhibitions of ghost signs. Stephanie Stead’s “Signs of Our Times” at the City Library in July was the first of these that I’ve seen but I’m sure that there have been others. Stead’s silver gelatine prints are black and white except for the signs that have been hand coloured in oils. This old fashioned technique matches with the old signs producing beautiful nostalgic images.

Orphan Sculptures

In researching public sculpture in Melbourne I am a little surprised to find orphan pieces; ‘orphan’ are pieces left out of the catalogue or a catalogued items with very little information. It is surprising that something as large as a sculpture is forgotten or lost in the records. But I’m only a little surprised it is not as if there is a catalogue of all the buildings, sculptures, fountains and things that are in Melbourne or any in any other city.

unknown orphan sculpture, possibly Lyndon Dadswell, 118 Russell Street

Most of the statues owned by the City of Melbourne come with a brass plaque set into the pavement that states the sculptor, title and date. But this is not the case with privately owned sculpture on public display. Many of these sculptural works were commissioned for private commercial buildings in Melbourne, like or the base relief on 118 Russell Street. The art deco figure of Mercury could indicate that it might have something to do with communications and would help date the piece.

Likewise it is not known who made the many figures on the facades of Melbourne’s buildings, like the Atlas figure on the former Atlas Assurance Building on Collins Street, the Druid on the Druids Building on Swanston Street or the metal motif of a rather skeletal modern merman on the outside wall of the Port Phillip Arcade on Flinders Street.

The rust covered corten steel sculpture out the front of The Domain (1 Albert Street) has been identified as Robert Jacks but there are more works of unknown or unidentified sculptors. Who made the three masted sailing-ship atop the weather vane that was installed c. 1919 at the Mission to Seamen. And who made the “French Fountain” a bronze fountain with granite plinth, from the International Exhibition of 1880 at the east entrance of the Exhibition Buildings?

The stories of these pieces have been lost to history. These orphans need help – if anyone has any additional information on these sculptors could they please comment or contact me (melbourneartcritic at gmail dot com).

Not the Usual Places

I’ve been keeping my eyes open on the look out for Melbourne’s street art. And I’ve been seeing street art everywhere. I’ve been looking in the usual places in the city and seeing it some unusual places.

Hawksburn burner by ??

I’ve been out to Leonard Joel auction house in “the impressive heritage listed former Hawksburn Primary School in the heart of South Yarra” to look at the Andy Mac Collection – “street and fine art from Citylights Project 1992-2012”. I will write more about that in a future blog post after attending the auction this Sunday. (Hi Lorraine from Melbourne Street Art.)

I saw some incidental tags and a Junky Projects in the photographs of Jesse Marlow on exhibition at Anna Pappas Gallery. Not that these tags are the focus of Marlow’s photographs but it would be hard to photograph the streets of Melbourne and not include some tags or a Junky Projects tin can face. “Don’t Just Tell Them, Show Them (Part 3)” by Jesse Marlow is a photographic exhibition that looks at the strange beauty found in urban details. Marlow’s photographs are beautifully composed images but she can’t control every detail of what she finds in the street.

Flinders Street with painted carriage

The first painted train carriage in Melbourne that I’ve seen in ages pulled into Flinders Street Station on Wednesday. I hurriedly pulled out my camera. It is not that unusual according to my contact in Metro. They must have been desperate for train carriages to fill the timetable. A contributing reason to why the carriage was run with graffiti might have been that the pieces didn’t cover up too much of the train’s windows.

Continuing with my theme of unusual places to see street art in Melbourne. Street artists have now been hired to decorate part of Melbourne Central (Vetti reports on Melbourne Central) or the Myer Basement (ArtGraffarti reports Myer). And today Keith Haring made the Google home page in celebration of his birthday. If only he hadn’t died in 1990 and had lived to see the street art of Melbourne today. (See my post about Keith Haring in Melbourne.)