Paramor at Moreland Station

The prime location beside busy Moreland Road is a car park because the massive LXRP project was all about a hypothetical increase in traffic flow. The priorities are evident and the Louise Paramor’s sculpture was installed not to be seen but to art-wash and tick boxes. It is not a hostile installation, just not very friendly as it is only visible from one side of the new railway station and isolated from most people in the area. Basically, a waste of a good sculpture.

I’ve seen faster installations of Paramor’s sculpture, see my blog post about installing Ursa Major. The landscaping around the sculpture took months with the sculpture isolated behind temporary fencing and bollards.

The sculpture is a substitute, having destroyed the Gandolfo Gardens and its mature trees. Adding to evidence that the sculpture is a substitute, it was born with a plastic spoon in its mouth. It is part of a larger group of sculptures that Paramor has been working on for years.

Studies for a Boomtown (2016) were intended as studies or maquettes for future large-scale sculptures, were made from found pieces of plastic, steel, and wood. Scaled up and fabricated in steel from on a model made of readymade plastic parts, the knitting needle, the wig stand and some kind of squeeze pump.

Visitors to the NGV may be familiar with Paramor’s Noble Ape in the sculpture garden, but it is different because it is beside a train station in Melbourne’s inner north. Melbourne’s train network rarely uses the arts for placemaking. There are few sculptures near train stations, but only Fleur Summers’s Making sense at Jewell (see my post) and FIDO in Fairfield (see my post) are visible from the train. 

The best views of the sculpture from the areas with the most people

What does it mean? The intention of public art as a provocation for the public’s imagination seems lazy and optimistic. Ambiguity is often overrated, and it will take time to judge how it has provoked the public. However, public sculptures are successful where the public completes stories of the sculpture. As Duchamp noted: “the onlooker has the last word, and it is always posterity that makes the masterpiece.”

Not that the onlooker is given any information about the new sculpture. No plaque, no title. Not even the name of the artist and Paramor does have the moral right of the artist to be acknowledged. 

Writing about architecture or public sculpture just after its installation is like writing about a battle plan before engaging with the enemy. It is too sympathetic towards the intentions of the architect and sculptor. It doesn’t care about the people who use the space. Only after they engage with the architecture or sculpture and make it their own, often renaming the sculpture in the process, can its qualities be fairly assessed. If a public sculpture is only known by one name, it hasn’t engaged with the public.

Writing about the recently installed Paramor sculpture at Moreland Station might be a mistake. It is a mistake that would favour the sculptor and commissioning process and ignore that it is a public sculpture. Sure, I could ask a few passers-by about their opinion or take some quotes from social media, but that would be merely anecdotal, not a representative sample. Nor is this fair to the randoms because these are just initial reactions, and they have been given no time or experience to form an opinion.

At least it is a sculpture by an established artist. In the past, there was a preference in Melbourne for the commissioning of emerging artists because it was cheaper to ‘foster emerging talents, ’ resulting in many second-rate sculptures. We are also fortunate that we are not living in an earlier time when a statue of Premier Dan Andrews or some other white Christian male would be erected like an unsolicited dick pic.

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Louise Paramor @ NGV

I first saw a sculpture by Louise Paramor when her Noble ape was exhibited in Melbourne Now 2013; it is currently installed in the garden at the back of NGV International. Other people might know her from her Panorama Station sculpture beside the freeway in Carrum Downs. Then I saw Paramor’s sculpture, Ursa Major being installed in Federation Square for the Melbourne Prize 2014. I hadn’t seen any of her previous twenty or so years of exhibiting sculpture.

Louis Paramor, Noble ape, fiberglass, plastic and steel

Currently the NGV is exhibiting Paramor in two large spaces on the third floor of the Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia with a specially commissioned installation of new paper sculptures and a survey of her recent colourful plastic assemblages.

Palace of the Republic is a series of massive paper sculptures. Honeycomb paper decorations on a scale that will leave you awestruck. It is a reference Paramor’s earlier artistic practice before she started to collage found plastic objects.

Louis Paramor, Palace of the Republic, paper, steel, aluminium and plywood

Unlike the personal art of Del Kathryn Barton, exhibited on the same floor to the Potter Centre, Paramor’s sculptures inspires no interest in the artist. There is nothing that I can tell you about her that will help you make any more sense of her art, so I will tell you nothing. Likewise you don’t need to know the history of art, anything of biochemistry or French to make sense of her art. Partially because her art makes little sense; her sculptures are cool and humorous and I know this by the smile that they grew on my face when I saw them.

A curator explains them noting that they “combine formal concerns with a pop-inspired sensibility.” That is arranging found plastic in an asymmetrical way makes them look silly and funky.

Studies for Boomtown is a series of maquettes for sculptures that demonstrate Paramor’s seemingly inexhaustible creativity. Perhaps it is inexhaustible due to the supply of plastic objects in the world.

Louis Paramor, Studies for Boomtown, 2016, plastic, steel, wood

Installing Ursa Major

I was a bit too early on Monday morning for the Melbourne Prize for Urban Sculpture 2014 as some of the sculptures had not yet arrived. The information stands were up and installation was underway but for a while the only thing that I could of the finalist’s sculptures were Geoff Robinson’s coloured poles (“spatial markers”) that are part of his work, 15 locations/15 minutes/15 days. Then I saw parked on the Russell Street part of the square, where the tour buses pick up passengers a polar bear on the back of the truck and the name of business: J K Fasham Pty Ltd.

J K Fasham Pty Ltd in Clayton South is a firm that specialises in architectural metal fabrication, mostly windows and doors. They have also fabricated and installed sculptures for over four decades and have done work on public sculptures for Inge King, Anthony Pryor and Deborah Helpburn. Moving a large sculpture is an expensive operation it itself and can be a major item in the budget for a sculpture.

The polar bear was the most recognisable object in Louise Paramor’s Ursa Major, 2014, another one of the finalists in the Melbourne Prize. The sculpture is an assembly of unlikely objects, a chance encounter of the surreal kind in the warehouse that allows “industry, novelty and domesticity to collide”. The bear is seated on a stack of palettes, with a table balanced on its head and a slide on his back.

Considering the size of the plastic and fibreglass sculpture of the polar bear and objects and compared to some of the other sculptures that they have installed this was not going to be a demanding job. However, it was worth watching to observe a professional installation of a temporary public sculpture.

The sculpture is installed in a little used part of Federation Square at the back of the Atrium overlooking the Yarra River. It was a precision operation carried out with care, attention to detail and professional experience. The sculpture was attached to the concrete base with long steel bolts.

It was installed by two men, a truck with a crane, a pallet jack and another small crane. The second crane was a fantastic little piece of machinery, with retractable bracing legs that lifted the single track vehicle off the ground. It was perfect for the small pedestrian space.

Everything went smoothly. Louise Paramor, the artist was watching and photographing the process.

“We can still move it, if you want.” I heard one of the men say to Louise.

In the end the biggest problem was where to put the laminated “Do Not Climb” sign and how to attach it. It was a problem for the artist and Melbourne Prize organiser, Simon Warrender; the two men from J K Fasham Pty Ltd were packing up the small crane and moving it back to their truck.

Louise Paramor with her Ursa Major