Presgrave Place

A place where the art is glued to the wall.

Presegave Place 2008

Presgrave Place 2022

The picture frames glued to the brick wall were the first elements to appear. These had cheap prints of European art in them at first. The prints have long since decayed, but the frames are still on the wall and used by other artists. Over the years, more frames and more original art has been added. Frames now cover much of the wall. It is a story of accumulation because Presgrave Place has never been buffed, unlike the aerosol-covered laneways.

In 2007, the lane and its frames appeared in ABC’s Not Quite Art presented by Marcus Westbury, when Melbourne’s street art scene had been around for about a decade. In 2008 there was also Melbourne’s smallest art gallery, Trink Tank, a small glass vitrine outside Bar Americano. (My 2008 blog post on Presgrave Place.)  

Presgrave Place is a remnant of the service lanes of Melbourne, an open-air dead end trapped between several small shopping malls. A few businesses still store their bins around the corner, but it is not an unpleasant place. It is not the easiest place to find as it is off Howey Place, which is off Little Collins Street (opposite David Jones).

At the entrance to the lane, high up on the wall, there is a cast concrete sign, a geometric panel with a sign announcing the Capital Theatre and emulating the crystalline ceiling of the theatre. According to eMelbourne, the Capitol Theatre’s workshop was in Presgrave Place in 1961. Walter Burley Griffin and his wife Marion Mahony designed this piece of mid-century modernism. 

Kranky’s art and energy revived the location in 2016. (See my post Presgrave Place Renaissance.) Now, the continued presence of work by the Ninja of Street Art and many other artists keeps it active.

Presgrave Place ranks number 18 in Stephen’s 24 Best Laneways in Melbourne. I would include it in my top 10 street art locations in Melbourne’s CBD. It is the smaller, lesser-known, long-running location for Melbourne Street art, but Presgrave Place rarely disappoints. Few things change in Presgrave Place, not even the street art. The art will be left on the wall until it rots away, adapted into another work, like the original frames glued to its walls.

I have written about many artists in other blog posts: Sunfigo, Phoenix, Calm, VKM (Vikki Murray), Mr Dimples, and Facter. Other artists whose work that you might see include Manda Lane, who created all the foliage, pot plants and the wonderful paper-cut cats at the end of the lane. Crisp is the thinking person’s sci-fi fan; if anyone needs a stencil spray-painted Star Wars meme, then Crisp can supply them with added political content. Stencils of birds by Edie Black. Paste-up women by Suki. Jayeff with the smiling eye. Kambeeno’s red, white and black paste-ups… G.T. Sewell, Michael Fikaris, Vinks, Happy … it would would take hours to list them all.

If you have been breathing those aerosol fumes or straining your neck looking at those giant murals for too long, then Presgrave Place is the place to go. It is distinctly different from the aerosol paint and fame of Hosier Lane.

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  MOW and GT Sewell, Presgrave Place

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  GT Sewell, Tinky, Kranky in Presgrave Place

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Melbourne Street Art notes

Some notes about Melbourne’s street art:

Should Melbourne’s street art-covered lanes receive heritage protection? There has been no action yet, but the calls for protection are getting louder. However, how do you protect ephemeral art that thrived on neglected urban walls from change and redevelopment? 

Facter

Various

Manda Lane

There is a fun collection of images of cats at the far end of Presgrave Place. There is washing hanging on the lines of electric lights above the lane and with some of the best stencils and sculptural street art

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What is a lost form?  

A Series of sculptures, including unauthorised interventions

B Stack of three cubes with a globe one quarter sunk into a top corner

C Just some more Melbourne street art

D All of the above

Yes, they have been around for a while, and I love the sticker “Your form?” reply to them on the wall of Rutledge (off Hosier Lane).

Dan Worth, Mask Emoji

I saw a carving of a mask emoji in Hosier Lane that reminded me of the work of Dan Worth in his Social Hieroglyphics exhibition. Worth informed me that his carved stone mask emoji was “installed it on the 15th of march 2020 and coincidentally later that day we got a state of emergency announcement about going into lockdown.”  

Phoenix

VKM

Shout out to Phoenix, VKM and Kasper. Thanks to all the street artists for keeping Melbourne weird, even the silly people following that South Australian trend for sticking googly eyes. 

Feminist Street Art

I was glad to have seen Hosier Lane on Thursday. Not for the crowd of high school students milling in the famous blue stone lane. Not for the vacuous schmaltz and wastes of aerosols that the greedy el Rolo or Culture Kings spray on the walls. Not even for the aerosol paint but for the little pieces, the stickers (there is now a dedicated section of wall in Rutledge Lane), the paste-ups and the small ceramic pieces (glued to the wall with liquid nails or superglue).

Many of these little pieces espoused feminism — a doilly cross-stitch embroidery of a quote from an advocate for survivors of sexual assault Grace Tame. Street art in Melbourne is at its best when it is raising issues that are both political and aesthetic. As one of the ceramic pieces stated: “Feminism is for everyone”

“Spastic Society opposes women. Lesley Hall St. Kilda 1981. Disability is a feminist issue.” 1981 was the United Nations International Year of Disabled Persons; it was also the year that Hall went on stage at the Miss Australia Quest with that sign: “Spastic Society opposes women”. The image is from the 1981 Miss Australia Quest, where Hall’s protest pointed out the contradiction of the beauty pageant raising money to support children with cerebral palsy. The Miss Australia Quests’ idea of beauty excluded people with disabilities. For more, read Hall’s article on “Beauty Quests: A Double Disservice Beguiled, Beseeched And Bombarded – Challenging The Concept Of Beauty”. 

It also reminds me that street art is a very ableist activity. 

It was good to see all these pieces, to know that more women are doing quality work as street art should not be just for the boys. I went on to Presgrave Place, where I saw more pieces by women street artists. Stencils by artist and jeweller Edie Black, cutouts by Manda Lane and more stencil paste-ups by Vikie Murray.

Hosier Lane January 2020

“I can draw anything you like. 10 min $15 draw” His sign said. In Hosier Lane yesterday there were two people occupying two of the alcoves selling their drawings. The next step will be for a caricature  artist set up a stall to sell portraits to the tourists in the lane.

I am not going to be hysterical and apocalyptic and declare that this is end of Hosier Lane when there are so many more clear indications of doom in the world (the climate catastrophe). There has always been a commercial aspect to the paint in Hosier Lane; graffiti writers and street artists have all these commercial projects — t-shirts, leading walking tours, exhibitions and commissions. And a few metres up the lane, the shop Culture Kings has made a massive hole in the lanes famous walls to provide access for buyers of their shit.

That said, an attractive piece of commercial art was being painted opposite the entrance to Hosier Lane on Flinders Lane. George Rose was just finishing an attractive mural commission celebrating the Lunar New Year.

George Rose, Have a Grand Lunar New Year

Although the lane was, as usual for a weekday, full of tourists, the walls were not looking their best. There was a lot of text in marker pen written across many of the pieces by someone who thought that they had unique insight (it happens). There is a lot of bland work about current events. Many of pieces with an @Instagram rather than a tag showing that their creators are focused on getting ‘likes’ above everything else. A couple of relevant political pieces struggled to find space on the walls. The tourists didn’t care as they were focused on taking selfies of themselves in front of the paint covered walls.

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I was pleased to see what I took for the work of an Indigenous street artist in the lane as I don’t see enough of this. Reclaiming their country and culture by painting walls. Dot painting with dots of aerosol paint.

If you want to see more whoring for Instagram ‘likes’ there are Lush’s work in Higson Lane a few corners further up Flinders Lane. About half a dozen huge celebrity faces randomly exploiting the popularity of anyone from Baby Yoda to Julian Assange.

Lush, Julian Assange

Working in a different direction is the increasing street art in Presgrave Place. This started in 2007 when was a couple of picture frames with art prints still in them glued onto the wall of this circuitous lane. The picture frames are still glued to the wall but the quantity of art keeps growing focused on the creativity of art rather than aerosol of popularity. 

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Artistic Laneways

Walking around the city on a Saturday gallery crawl I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to walk down a couple of Melbourne’s more artistic laneways: Union Lane and Pesgrave Place.

A group of guys spray painting along the length of Union Lane, as usual there was also someone documenting it with photographs but one of the artists was videoing himself with a small camera strapped to his head. An artist eye view of painting a piece, Picasso would have loved that technology.

It was J.D. Mittmann and Amanda King who organised the first legal painting in Union Lane back in 2008 as part of the city’s Graffiti Mentoring Project. Somewhere on its walls under years of aerosol paint there are works by Phibs, Deb, Rhen, Taj, Ha Ha and many other artists. Union Lane is currently managed/curated by Signal as part of its street art mentoring project.

Union Lane is a lot narrower than Hosier Lane, it is now just a gap connecting the Bourke Street Mall to Little Collins Street; it is more about graffiti and less about street art but there were a couple of new Junky Projects, now colourfully spray painted with stencil tags.

Presgrave Place is the opposite of Union Lane a location for odd street art rather than graffiti, the op-shop frames glued to the wall are still there but most no longer have their old prints in them. There is an old paste-up by Happy of a dead Pinnochio hung with noose made from his long nose and a new Junky Projects.

In Presgrave Place there is also Melbourne’s smallest art gallery, Trink Tank, a small glass vitrine outside Bar Americano. Nicholas Smith was exhibiting “Notes on Live Night Parrot Sightings in North-western Queensland” with a model of the last authenticated sighting, a dead parrot (Pezoporus Occidentalis) found on the side of the road.