Hosier Lane’s two sides

Looking at that famous Melbourne laneway of street art and graffiti now is like a portrait of the city post-lockdown. It has two sides.

On one side of Hosier Lane is Culture Kings, purveyors of designer streetwear and their wall painted by some hired gun aerosol painter. Further down that side of the lane are pieces by artists with @Instagram names painting anything they think will make them popular. Another set of wings to pose in front of for a selfie to bore your friends by El Rolo (aka Carlos Mejia, a graphic designer specialising in “illustration, packaging and commercial art”). El Rolo has been painting more than his fair share of walls in Hosier Lane for over a year, and I try to ignore it. His art is slightly less shallow when he collaborates with another South American artist also based in Melbourne Oskr who does calligraphic work — or what he calls “calligraffiti”.

Oskr & El Rolo

On the other side of Hosier Lane is The Living Room providing aid for the homeless and the homeless in their genuine streetwear. The walls on this side are painted in a mixture of styles and techniques. On this side of the lane, the art is wild and free. On the wall opposite Culture Kings, there is a painted protest with placards calling for “free weed,” “dry socks,” and simply “change”. This seated man is a reference to Melbourne stencil artist Meek’s Begging for change 2004, an image of a seated man with a placard that reads “keep your coins, I want change.” Further down, another artist has preserved a paste-up by Barak, bringing it into the literally hand-painted and hand-printed landscape. 

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Trying to decipher this gestalt graphic of the two sides of this laneway, illustrating the contrast between those that see the city as a place, like home, and those who see it as a commercial opportunity. In several places a stencil of “IF” in large Times Roman font has been sprayed.

Meanwhile, AC/DC Lane, just a few lanes up from Hosier, remains the place for quality street art.

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Homeless @ Hosier Lane

The aerosol painted walls of Melbourne’s Hosier Lane did not occur by accident. Nor are they entirely there by design, at least, not in the way that Flinders Street Station is painted yellow by design. For Hosier Lane exists in a strange symbiotic relationship with the city council, building owners, artists and many other people.

US artist Mows putting out the welcome mat in Hosier Lane.

It is a delicate urban ecosystem frequently about to tip into catastrophe. It is maybe a delicate urban ecosystem but, unlike an art gallery or a theme park, it is not an enclosed system, real world problems effect it. Looking at street art and graffiti keeps raising a wide variety of real issues; issues like private and public property, freedom of speech and currently, homelessness.

It is used by a strange mix of people: from artists, international tourists to local homeless, residents, office workers, delivery drivers and now construction workers. The lane is used as access to Rutledge Lane and from between Flinders Lane and Flinders Street. As well as graffiti and street art the laneway itself is used for wedding photos, advertising shots, school groups, graffiti tours and the homeless.

Melbourne’s homeless generally have a positive attitude towards street art and graffiti.  And the street artists and graffiti writers are generally supportive towards the homeless. There are enterprises in Hosier Lane supporting disadvantaged people, like the Youth Services, the coffee shop and the occasional, shoe shine stall.

In August there were reports in the media (Herald Sun, Channel 10, 3AW) of drug use in the lane, mostly smoking marijuana. This is basically it what many Australians do in their own houses but when you are homeless you are doing it in the street… in front of international tourists.

Problems for the homeless in Hosier Lane increased when demolition work commenced on the old Russell Street Theatre that backs onto the lane. Part of this involved boarding up the alcoves on the Russell Street side of the lane. The hip-hop group, Combat Wombat, took direct action cutting through the boarded up alcoves so that the homeless could use them again; see their video.

As if there is a specific solution for Hosier Lane. Specific solutions ignor the fact that the problems are symptomatic of a far larger planning and social issue. Melbourne’s Mayor Robert Doyle is talking about CCTV for the lane again, as if there is any evidence to suggest that will be a solution, because he doesn’t have much of an imagination.

The Hosier Inc are looking at every option, from CCTV to buffing the whole lane and moving the street art and tourists on to another location in the city.

Every year there seems to be an 2017 the existential crisis to threatening the existence of Hosier Lane. This year it is homelessness which being real makes a change from last year’s invented crisis for the media.

John Jones in Hosier Lane

Painting Techniques & Subjects

“London Works” by James Cochran at Lindberg Galleries are portraits of homeless men. What is remarkable about these paintings is that they were created primarily with aerosol paint. The faces and hair are made up of hundreds of dots of aerosol paint, each dot with its own small drip. Cochran’s paintings are like pointillism with a spray can. There are lots of drips in the paintings – drips are currently very fashionable in street art. James Cochran (aka Jimmy. C) is a veteran street artist from Adelaide. It is remarkable for how far street art techniques have permeated mainstream art in the last decade.

Cochran’s paintings are obviously clever, technically excellent but superficial and sentimental. These are the kind of paintings normally seen in commercial galleries located in the foyer of five star hotels. Perhaps the paintings could even hang in part of the hotel, a private dinning room; a place where the homeless men depicted in the paintings would never be admitted. The sentimental depiction of homeless by artists over the centuries has not helped changing the conditions that lead to homelessness. I suppose the homeless make cheap models.

You need more than one trick to make good art and technique will only get you so far. The second trick, the right subject for the art, has to work with the technique. At Flinders Lane Gallery there was an exhibition of paintings with more than one trick – Margaret Ackland “Histories”.

Margaret Ackland’s main trick of painting transparent fabric, lace, tissue paper and even plastic wrapping, with light paint strokes. Her compositions on the dark background make the cloth and paper glow like old masters. Some are dynamic flows of fabric are static and meditative. Ackland’s other trick is her references to the history of fashion; her sense of the histories that clothes tell. Not that all her clothes are old fashioned, there is a beautiful painting of an empty plastic dry cleaning bag and clothes hanger. I particularly enjoyed her paintings of pictures partially unwrapped from tissue paper that have a sense of the rediscovery of an archived image.

Both Cochran and Ackland have excellent painting techniques but Ackland does better paintings because of her choice of subjects.