Schoolhouse Studios Coburg

Tom Civil has painted many murals around Melbourne, but this was the first time he had a party thrown for one. On Saturday, 2nd April, there was a band, a DJ and a couple of hundred people at the new Civil mural in Coburg. It was like a scene in one of his paintings with people and bicycles, only it wasn’t set in a garden but in a car park.

Schoolhouse Studios occupies the old Coles supermarket near the Coburg Station is now artists’ studios. A not-for-profit creative space located in the ugly heart of Coburg, a desolate area of car parks and utilitarian concrete blocks supermarkets. Carparks, empty tarmac or full of cars don’t make any aesthetic difference to the wasteland. It is an intersection between the inner and outer suburban north, where walkable meets automotive sewer at Bell Street.

Inside, the vast space of the former supermarket has been partitioned into small frames of little houses with clear corrugated roofs. There is also a performance space and an exhibition space. Outside, the south wall has been painted by Melbourne street art veteran Civil.

I walked past on Wednesday 9th March when Civil was about to start. The whole wall had been painted emerald green. He had only made a couple of chalk marks, trying to come to grips with how his plan will work on the actual wall. Realising that the south-facing wall is always in shadow, the colours look different in the shade but will last longer.

It took ten days working with an assistant and a scissor lift to paint the wall. First, a few trees started to appear, then, along with the outlines on the trees, some of Civil’s “stick folk”. Finally, tufts of grass and dots of rocks were added to fill out the design.

From March 22 – 31, another eight days of work for three people to paint the car park tarmac. Another local street art veteran, Michael Fikaris, helped paint the car park section.

Now the car park has become a park. And it blooms, not just with the mural but also with seats and planter boxes by Urban Commons. (For more about parklets and urban design, see my previous post.) 

Amani Haydar

In the exhibition space at the front of Schoolhouse Studios was a series of paintings and a tapestry by Sydney-based writer Amani Haydar. Her paintings of women depict images from domestic to symbolic. And her use of patterns in the background and in representing clothes is effective.

Since it opened at the start of the year, I have seen a couple of other exhibitions at Schoolhouse Studios, including “It’s in our Nature,” a group exhibition by the Lucy Goosey Feminist Art Collective about environmental and feminist issues. And I’m glad that there is another art gallery close to my home; it is the kind of exhibition space the neighbourhood needs.

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Megan Evans and murals in Northcote

There was an earlier phase of mural painting in Melbourne before the current aerosol art. Influenced by the Mexican muralists rather than any hip hop elements. They took a far more social, historical, and educational approach. One of the most important of these is the 44.27 metres long Northcote Koori Mural (aka the Aboriginal Mural, the St Georges Road Mural).

Designed by Megan Evans in 1985 with an additional three metres designed by Gary Saunders in 2013, to bring its history of Indigenous Australia up to date. The mural now faces St Georges Road in Thornbury, backing onto the Sir Douglas Nicholls Sporting Complex. It was initially on a wall opposite the Northcote Town Hall on High Street it was and moved to its current location in 1992. In 2013 it was dismantled and replaced with a refreshed, digital version, printed on vinyl.

Painted by Megan Evans, Ray Thomas (Gunnai/Barlijan), Ian Johnson, Millie Yarran (Noongar), Les Griggs (Gunditjmara/Kerup Marra), Elaine Trott and along with Aboriginal, African and European volunteers. Megan Evans would work with several of these artists again on other public art projects. She worked with Ray Thomas on Another View Walking Trail for the City of Melbourne in 1995. Later Ray Thomas painted the Northcote Civic Square Mural and was one of the artists who carved a pole for Scar – A Stolen Vision in Enterprise Park along the Yarra River.

For three years, Evans was painting a mural a year in the Northcote area. These murals are based on research, interviews, and consultation with local people that she undertook before starting the design. In 1986 Evans and Eve Glenn completed the Women’s Mural: Bomboniere to Barbed Wire on the wall Gas & Fuel Office on Smith Street, Fitzroy. Capped by the notorious graffiti writer Nost in 2016, the wall was demolished in 2019. The mural can still be viewed as a digital version online. And, in 1987 Evans painted Northcote Youth Mural, with Les Griggs and Marina Baker.

All of Evans original murals are gone due to land sales and building demolitions. Darebin Council has opted for digital preservation for all of these murals. For more on preserving and conserving murals, see my post on the conservation of street art.

Dvate’s two faces

Melbourne street artist Dvate works in two styles: one is good and the other tasteless. I prefer Dvate’s dynamic graffiti to his tame aerosol paintings of native fauna that have gone up around Moreland.

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Look at Dvate’s graffiti pieces: the calligraphy of the letterforms, the super clean lines (no drips), and an eye-popping palette of colours. There is so much more energy and other unique qualities to them than his sentimental representational work. In some graffiti pieces, he uses mortar fillers to build up sections of the wall to lift the parts of his letters off the surface of the walls, for example in this piece in Rutledge Lane that was part of “All Your Walls” in 2013.

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His kitsch works of sentimentalism are the contemporary equivalent of chocolate-box paintings, aesthetic garbage sold to a population that hasn’t thought about taste. Dvate has been doing graffiti and tags around Melbourne for decades, but he probably makes more money from his tasteless murals.

According to a Moreland Council tweet, they are: “reducing graffiti in #Moreland by commissioning #murals in areas with high tagging rates. Street artist Dvate has installed these stunning native Australian murals in Coburg, and 3 more murals are due to go up once Covid-19 restrictions ease.”

The strategy of reducing graffiti by commissioning murals is not new. It is the standard strategy and is one of the reasons why I dislike murals (for more reasons read my blog post Anti-Muralism). It assumes that graffiti and tags are less desirable than other images based on popular prejudices rather than any evidence.

If Moreland Council wants public art, then they should commission public art, if they want to reduce tagging, then they should hire cops or some other law enforcement device, and they should not confuse the two.

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Conservation of Street Art

The desire to preserve the Keith Haring mural in Collingwood was a combination of community concerns and heritage values. Horizon scanning it is clear that the conservation of street art will be an increasing issue. Although some street art is ephemeral other murals are considered permanent and people would grieve their loss.

Haring mural in Collingwood

“Conservation of Wall Paintings, Murals and Street Art – an international perspective” was presented by Australian ICOMOS (International Council on Monuments and Sites) at the University of Melbourne on 18 February 2020. It consisted of two talks by Will Shank and Antonio Rava; the two conservators who worked on the Keith Haring mural in Collingwood.

Antonio Rava presented “Comparative Studies of Outdoor Contemporary Mural Conservation”. And Will Shank, “The Conservation of Contemporary Murals: How is it different?” Both spoke about the ethics and techniques of conservation of murals and street art and their work on the Keith Haring mural.

Conservation is about saving the life of a work of art. The scientific application of techniques to preserve, arrest and reverse deterioration.

Murals need protection from the sun, rain and, even the airborne pollutants of the city. There can be problems with plaster delaminating from the surface of the building or suffusing through the layer of paint. Rain washes out the soluble material and acrylic spray paints contain water soluble material. Black lines get hotter in the summer and cracking the surface of the paint. So do not have murals, in southern hemisphere, on north facing walls because the damage to the paint by the sun.

The ethics of art conservation are based on not doing anything that the artist does not approve or would not have approved. There are also, in some cases of street art, the moral rights of architects not to have their work altered, in which case Antonio Rava advocates “let it fade”.

Between 2010-2012 there was a debate about how best to treat Haring’s Collingwood wall. Public sculpture is considered to have a renewable surface, holes in them are patched and repainted regularly, but to what extent is the surface of public murals renewable? Could it simply be repainted?

Rava outlined problems with repainting Haring murals loosing the quality of Haring’s hand movement. For it is the line that is the most important part of Haring’s work. And on the mural Haring’s red lines were particularly faded; a transparent glaze over them meant that you can still see the original brush strokes.

The conservators also faced the problem of how to clean a large rough surface. In the end artist’s gum pencil erasers were used to remove a material on the wall that had built up over the paint.

What is being done to preserve the community murals of Melbourne from the 1970s and 80s? Will Shank, who had worked on walls from the community murals movement of San Francisco, reminded the audience that are no community murals in Chicago from the 1960s.

I am unaware of any other murals in Melbourne that are being conserved like the Haring nor of any plans. Most of Melbourne’s murals, street art and graffiti are only being preserved in digital photographs. What Melbourne’s street art murals would you mourn if they disappeared? And what plans should be made to conserve them?

Makatron’s Book

Mike Makatron In Ten Cities (Trojan Press, 2015)

I read Makatron’s book, if “read” is the right word for book that is primarily photographs, over a pub lunch and two pints of cider. It is a good over-view of his work in Melbourne and around the world.

I have been looking at Makatron’s work in Melbourne’s walls for the last decade and it is easy to see why his work is popular. He mostly paints animals but there is more to his work that just reproducing a photograph in aerosol paint. Makatron’s animals are often distorted surreal creatures, giant animals with buildings on their backs, decomposing fish or stranger creations. The book doesn’t show all his work but it is a fair representation and not just a greatest hits; there are tags, straight letters and photographs of works in progress.

The text is not indulgent or boasting, fun, modest and reasonably informative although limited and containing way too many puns.

How to present the man behind the paint is a problem given that we are not going to get a photographs of Makatron’s face for legal reasons, although there are a few masked versions. There is a bit of autobiography at the end of the book. A born risk-taker Makatron was working as bicycle courier in NYC on 9/11; something that gets a random page of photographs in the middle of the book and is mentioned again at the end.

Although the structure of the book is not irritating or terrible it could be better than the almost random approach. An editor’s view could have made this book so much better than chaotic travels in time and space.

As a photo-books, street art and graffiti don’t make for great photographs; a wall square on in good lighting is the standard format, photographing street art is often more documentation than photography. John Tsialos is credited as the principle photographer but there are others including David Russell (see my post on his street art photography that brings the streetscape into focus).

I borrowed this book from Moreland Library. Like me, Makatron will have received his library lending rights money for this month for all the times that his book has been borrowed this year. Yes, authors do get paid when their book is borrowed. So go and borrow Makatron’s book (and my book Sculptures of Melbourne) from your local library.

Here are some of my photographs of Makatron’s work in Melbourne.

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  Makatron – Heart skull – Hosier:Rutledge

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Anti-Muralism

For the past three years murals, very large multi-story painted walls are the popular form in Melbourne’s street art. Murals are also very popular in advertising and with socialists. Van Rudd says that wants to revive the tradition of political mural painting in Melbourne that happened with Geoff Hogg in the 1970s.

Murals are seen as community art solution, read Tony Matthews and Deanna Grant-Smith “How murals helped turn a declining community around” in The Conversation, as well as an advertising technique. Dvate’s painted banner for The Lion King in 2015 or HaHa’s 2016-17 3MMM banner at Macaulay railway station, a favourite old haunt of HaHa when he was running around the city getting his name up. Smug’s mural on Otter Street promoting a luxury apartment development, makes gentrification cute. The popularity of murals makes for endless commercial applications.

I think that I lost a lot of my interest in Melbourne’s street art when murals became the dominate form of street art. I don’t like most murals, street art or otherwise, as I have already written about the Harold Freedman mosaic mural on the Fire Station. So I don’t feel as motivated to write about street art, although I have written about Rone and Adnate’s murals.

Rone in Collins Street, 2014

I’m not sure what it is about murals that I don’t like, after all they are just very large paintings. I do like a few murals in Melbourne. The Keith Haring mural in Collingwood but that is because I like his other work and the mural is simply a large example. I don’t think of the large walls by sprayed with fire extinguishers full of paint by Ash Keating and others as murals because they are just paint whereas a mural is about something.

Often murals are so about something that it feels like you are being lectured or advertised at. I’m not sure that I want the intended message or non-message of a mural and even if I do then what about people who don’t? The intended mass audience of a mural makes is like advertising. Whereas I like art that is aimed at a small audience rather than the lowest common denominator. The bigger the audience does not mean the better the art; size is kind of pornographic.

At other times there is so little content in a mural, like Rone’s faces, that being content free and abstract would have something more than these substitutes for content. For this reason I found Doyle’s Empty Nursery Blue to be more artistic than any and all of Rone’s murals.

I was also wondering if it is because murals lack a human scale. Murals are different to graffiti pieces in terms of scale. The reach of a graffiti writer defines the height of a piece, the arc of the curves so that a piece of graffiti reflects a human scale. Whereas the size of a mural is determined by the size of the wall and the equipment used.

Cam and Scale, Brunswick 2017

Van Rudd at Work

“I wanted to be a conservative painter but something…” Van Rudd pauses, searching for the best way to explain his life and the world. Van Rudd, the nephew of former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, is a politically engaged socialist artist who installs provocative street art sculptures, exhibits the stolen forks of the ultra-rich and parts of exploded vehicles from Afghanistan.

I wondered what he had been up to since he ran for parliament against Julia Gillard in 2010. As it turns out he is painting a mural the Trades Hall carpark.

It is hard to believe that Van was ever a conservative painter but he was shows me some photos of his early paintings, they are very good but conservative in style. In his late-teens he was painting plein air Impressionist paintings of Brisbane. He then shows me some cool paintings that he did of exploding figures in stylish lounge rooms; paintings that looked like a mix between Geoffrey Smart, James Gleeson and Brett Whitely. He tried the fine art and contemporary art audience and he didn’t get the response was looking for, so he went in search of a different audience.

Now his audience is not into contemporary art or street art. Now his audience is the union member who has no interest or time for following artists on Instagram or buying art in galleries. It is the person in the street or someone looking at the news. Van sees himself as a propagandist, even though he freely admits that the power of art is minimal compared to economic power. His art is there to support and illustrate the message.

Considering Van’s diverse art practice, from illustrating a children’s book to street art installations, I wanted to know what he did with most of your time as an artist? Did he work in a studio? He doesn’t really have one. When he is not an artist his hobby is indoor football. He also goes to a lot of left wing meetings because he finds that is a condensed way of doing research and getting information.

The carpark walls at Trades Hall are covered in graffiti and Van has had to buff back two large concrete sections. The graffiti in the carpark is a mix of the most basic tagging, by writers like Pork and Nost, along with political slogans: “Unions are part of the detention industry.”

The large mural that he is painting in Trades Hall carpark is just at its outline stage. Van says wants to revive the tradition of political mural painting in Melbourne that happened with Geoff Hogg in the 1970s.

Work progresses slowly, especially with me asking questions. Van with a paintbrush is not as fast as the street artists with their spray cans. He is critical of what he calls the “proletarianisation” and the “hyper-exploitation of street art.” The artist as sole trader has no protection, from exploitation and hazardous conditions especially the street artists working at heights. He tells me that has recently got his CFMEU white card for working on elevated work platforms; scissor-lifts, booms lifts, etc. Not that he is going to be working at height with this mural. He puts on a fume mask to protect against both the paint and car exhaust fumes and gets back to painting.