Art is considered valuable and worthy of preservation but what happens when it is not. A postman friend has been photographing and critiquing the art deposited on the nature strip outside the homes in an outer northern suburb. It was a series of Facebook posts starting Sept 23 2018 and is reproduced here with permission.
A couple of weeks before the Melbourne Art Fair (MAF) I noticed some street artist complaining on Facebook about a lack of inclusion of street art and graffiti in MAF. Bitching about how can the fair represent Melbourne art without street art. Many of street and graffiti artists are ignorant of what is on at an art fair (Peter Drew of Art vs Reality has in reality never been to an art fair). Of course, there are some artists who have work on the street at the MAF; for example, Lucas Grogan represented by Gallery Smith. As well, there was a forum about art in the street at Museum Victoria on Saturday.
Lucas Grogan in Hosier Lane
I already knew this when I stood up at the media preview and put the question to the director of art fair, Barry Keldoulis. He had already mentioned ‘break-out event’ and talked about the fair engaging with the rest of Melbourne’s art in his introductory speech.
Keldoulis responded that you can’t avoid street art in Melbourne. Visitors to the MAF were encouraged with talks and events to move beyond the confines of the Exhibition Building and would inevitably encounter street art. He questioned if street art should be brought into gallery space while noting that there were artists transitioning the two venues with prints and murals. He was certainly not excluded street artists and graffiti but that the transition from the street to galleries and the art fair is up to the individual artists.
After Keldoulis had replied Anna Papas, Chair of the Melbourne Art Foundation (the Melbourne Art Fair is presented by the Melbourne Art Foundation) approached me. She was interested in how to include street artists and wanted to know how the MAF could include more of their work in the future.
Chromatavour in Coburg
It is not that art galleries have been rejecting this art or have been anything like the worst enemies of street art and graffiti, but artists working on the street have so many enemies (police, transport officers, buffers) that almost everyone outside of their cohorts are added to the list. What graffiti and street artists really had to fear was not the galleries making them inauthentic but photographers, graphic designers, etc. exploiting their work on the streets.
I’ve been watching the interaction between street art and art galleries since I started this blog in 2008. Of, course this interaction has been going on for decades longer than that. The art world has been searching for outsider artists for well over half a century. The genuine outsider artist is now a rare individual as there are so many people, from social workers to art collectors, waiting to discover them and expose their work to the wider world.
In recent years in Melbourne art spaces have been springing up to cater for street artists, particularly in Collingwood. A kind of parallel gallery system has emerged but these are not the kind of art spaces who will be representing artists at an art fair.
Sunfigo in Melbourne
On Thursday afternoon I was walking around looking at galleries and the street art in Richmond and Cremorne. Why not they are just on either side of the Richmond train line. Well, Block Projects is further down Stephenson Street than that but there was some street art to keep me amused along the way.
Block Projects had a great exhibition by Richard Grigg. At first I thought have I walked into an exhibition by a group of intellectually challenged individuals. It looked awkward, stumbling and obvious. “It is a very brave exhibition,” Malcolm, from Block Projects told me. It is indeed; he is letting it all hang out, as they would say in the sixties. Grigg’s unconscious is so close to the surface you can see its periscope, conning tower and the wake
I walk around again to appreciate just how much Grigg’s is pushing himself in all directions. There is the crude, the childlike, the doodle-like, comic book, symbolic, text-based, graphomania, and ultra-fine drawings splashed with other stuff. Grigg’s large pencil drawing on paper are excellent, especially the sleeping crocodile being teased by branches and bladders in “tickle, tickle, I will save you” and the pile of dead animals in “after the flood”. It is all wonderfully surreal in an entirely contemporary way.
Across the railway tracks I wandered the back streets looking for galleries and street art – a few good pieces including this magnificent side of a house by Reka. Finally I found Place Gallery amid the many warehouse conversations.
Reka, house wall Richmond
Place Gallery had an exhibition by Glenn Morgan. There are 8 paintings along with 3 of the wood and tin diorama sculptures that are Morgan’s signature work. Morgan is also letting it all hang out with his art; in his large panoramas he shows the turmoil of everyday life in detail with speech balloons. There is a series telling the personal story of his relationship with his uncle.
Glen Morgan is also exhibiting a series of paintings that tell the story of Victoria’s drought. There is including one great, epic history painting, “Global Warming” that shows drought, bushfires and floods. You don’t get many history paintings anymore; they used to be so popular.
It struck me looking at Glen Morgan exhibition and considering Richard Grigg’s exhibition that Glenn Morgan doesn’t appear to be such an outsider artist anymore. It is not that Morgan’s art has changed the world has caught up with him. On the streets and in the galleries the artists are letting it all hang out.
There are several galleries devoted to the work of outsider artists, most notably the Art Brut Gallery in Switzerland and Melbourne’s Cunningham Dax Collection. I hadn’t been to the Cunningham Dax Collection before but it is one of the few galleries that are open in the first week of 2010. Most of Melbourne’s galleries are closed for a couple of weeks over the New Year period; except for some big public galleries, like the National Gallery of Victoria. The collection is named after its founder Dr Eric Cunningham Dax who in 1946 pioneered the place of art therapy in mainstream psychiatric treatment.
Above the purple entrance doors, there is the gallery sign and slogan: “art, creativity and education in mental health”. Inside the Cunningham Dax Collection there are two large gallery rooms, a small side gallery, a video lounge and a large room containing a library, research area and office. The collection itself consists of over 12,000 works, held in a climate controlled storage room.
I didn’t see the main collection, just the current temporary exhibition. Out of the Dark: the Emotional Legacy of the Holocaust is an exhibition of artwork by survivors, child survivors and the children of survivors of the Holocaust. The Cunningham Dax Collections proposes a multi-dimensional approach to their collection as a clinical record, art, historical artefact and education material as opposed to “objects of curiosity and amusement”. This is not outsider art as it is traditionally defined but creative work of people who have experienced mental illness and trauma. There are some quality works of art in the exhibition along with others were better viewed as clinical records or historical artefacts, but regardless of the quality of the work in the exhibition there was a unity of shared of trauma. Trauma shared across generations is the well documented by this exhibition.
Some of the works on exhibition are by trained artists. There is a great surreal photograph by Hedy Ritterman, who was the winner of the Linden Gallery’s 2003 Hocking Stuart Award. And the central work by Michelle Fox, “People I should have known or should have known more” 2009, a mixed media installation, was a playful, child-like response to trauma. Fox’s installation reminds the viewer of play is a thoughtful system that creates a magical substitute world. Fox has created a substitute extended family of dolls on a field of playing cards; small guidebooks provides details to the figures in this substitute world but the striking feature of these substitute people is that they are almost featureless and unknown.
There are plans to relocate the Cunningham Dax Collection to a purpose built gallery space in the Department of Neuroscience at Melbourne University’s main campus in lat 2011.
Black Mark 