Play & Playgrounds

As I sat in the swing at Cambridge Park in Collingwood, making notes for a previous blog post, I never would have imagined it would be controversial. I sat in the swing because it was lunchtime, and there was nowhere else to sit in the small inner city park. It was also pleasant to swing gently back and forth; like a rocking chair or cradle, it is suitable for all ages. This post is about playgrounds, play, and relaxation and who is entitled to enjoy them. It is about playing in the urban environment; how is play designed for, and who is excluded?

The original swing at Cambridge Park

Public playgrounds, like public seating, are adjacent to public sculptures, as public sculptures are frequently used for one or both. Skateboard riders use Petrus Spronk’s Architectural Fragment. When I was a child, I climbed to the top of Peter Corlett’s Tarax Play Sculpture (for health and safety reasons, children aren’t allowed to do that now). Recently, I saw and climbed on Mike Hewson’s dangerous-looking sculpture/playground in Southbank.

Hewson’s playground, with its improvised and scattered appearance, looks like so many contemporary art exhibitions. It was also the least prescriptive of playgrounds; you have to work out if you want to use it rather than follow the dictates of a path. It was also less dangerous than it appeared; what looked like Southbank’s typical granite pavers were actually soft and rubbery. (Read Sanné Mestrom, Senior Lecturer, DECRA Fellow, Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney, on “This new ‘risky’ playground is a work of art – and a place for kids to escape their mollycoddling parents”)

Mike Hewson’s playground in Southbank

The Cambridge Park controversy was that the swing wasn’t a playground for just for little children. Now, the council is holding public consultations about options for adding traditional children’s playground equipment. I would have been unlikely to have sat in the swing if it was next to a four-way rocker or other children’s play equipment, for in our culture, children’s playgrounds exclude older single males and females.

“Will no one think of the children?!”

The online discourse about Cambridge Park exposes many prejudices, including those about who is allowed to play, what children need to play, and who can safely associate with children. These prejudices also affect the politics of public space. Considering demographic equality of access and declining birthrates, is the large amount of space dedicated to children’s playgrounds, particularly in small inner-city parks, currently justified?

There are anti-fun ideas in our culture that only permit children to play as part of a developmental aid to be cut off at a certain age. Should play be restricted to age? Why are they not given room to disport themselves? Should older children and adults only be allowed to exercise and play organised sports and games?

Thinking about the playgrounds in my area, little kids use public gym equipment as frequently as adults do. Next to the Coburg Senior Citizens Centre, there is exercise equipment for seniors, but it looks like a playground, only safer. I have previously written a blog post about the Wilson Avenue Urban Bouldering and noted how little kids found their own use for this adult play equipment.

They might be safe, controlled, and tested, but do playgrounds help kids’ culture, and are they more fun than a cardboard box or a ball?

Public exercise equipment for seniors in Coburg

Peter Tyndall at Buxton Contemporary

Peter Tyndall is a hedgehog (in reference to Archilochus: πόλλ’ οἶδ’ ἀλώπηξ, ἀλλ’ ἐχῖνος ἓν μέγα “a fox knows many things, but a hedgehog knows one big thing”). He knows one big thing.

He has been expanding on that one thing ever since he painted his sign over one of his colour field paintings in the late 70s. Ever since then he has named all of his paintings the same (only the date and the courtesy acknowledgement vary):

Someone looking at something is Tyndall’s big idea. It implicates that the viewer is part of the art. The viewer becomes a responder, a person who is anticipated by the existence of the work, just as a letter has an anticipated reader.

Playful, inventive and fun, Tyndall made his conceptual art visually identifiable. When turned on its side, his visual tag of a box with two lines becomes a diamond, a pattern that can be repeated across his work. Even the elevator at Buxton Contemporary had a variation of this pattern.

And there is plenty to see at his first major retrospective at Buxton. The first room shows what Tyndall was painting before his conceptual break; large colour field paintings, mostly in tan. And then the missing link, the painting modified with the inclusion of a symbol Tyndall would use for the rest of his career, the box with two lines, representing a painting hung on a wall.

The way that paintings are hung is important for Tyndall, generally with two long black wires that extend from the top of the painting to screws further up the wall. The label beside the painting became part of the art. His labels are all labelled “Label.” All his labels are identical (only the information about the date and courtesy varies) because they are all details in his single lifelong work.

A good retrospective should show other sides of the artist. There is Tyndall’s mail art, his slave guitar, cast objects, and those on his sculptural wall hangings, made for and exhibited at Venice Biennale in 1988. There are his political engagements with the world, notably his campaign to end the ban on sketching at the NGV and a piece responding to a City of Mildura Councillor complaining that they didn’t get their share of “the cultural dollar”.

But wait, there is more; as part of the retrospective, there are a series of free zines of artwork by Peter Tyndall produced as a “Graphic Design Studio 3” project by Graphic Design majors at the University of Melbourne. 

What was not shown at the exhibition was Tyndall’s blog: Blogos/HAHA. His blog is a work of art and is updated regularly. See my blogroll.

Word Made Flesh

I was asked at ACCA’s front desk if I wanted earplugs, and a jar with pairs of yellow foam was proffered. I declined; I’m all for ear protection, but I couldn’t hear anything like a band at the Tote. It hardly seemed necessary. The person then warned me about the content of the exhibition. “Yes, I’ve seen his work before.”

Installation view of the Paul Yore, Word Made Flesh

Textile and assemblage artist Paul Yore’s mid-career retrospective, Word Made Flesh at ACCA, has much to look at and examine. The sheer amount of work, labour, of stitches in time is eye-popping and impressive. And being familiar with Yore’s work, I was amazed that there was so much new work.

What is also impressive is Yore doesn’t give a fuck. He has thrown everything at it. Too often, contemporary art is an empty gallery space with a video projection of a vacuum cleaner or something. Yore fills even the five vast spaces of the ACCA to excess. There is even a room that is double-hung because there is so much.

Even a decorated car, a typical gallery space filler, is a hearse worked to excess, covered in tiles. Two electric organs on either side of it with keys jammed down emit a grinding discord. There is a media overload with images and sound in the final room. Random water-powered beaters hit bells and xylophones.

Language and wordplay are everywhere. Cut up and rearranged, like the found images that he makes collages and assemblages from. The words themselves become found materials. Language is used not as a representation of the world but as a media that has made the world. His studies in archaeology and anthropology at Monash University have been put to good use. Culture jamming, using icons, symbols and logos for his own purposes.

And it is not just the quantity of material. There are also many ideas: religion, philosophy, capitalism…

However, picking one subject and trying to summarise the exhibition is probably a mistake. There is so much to consider; it bedazzles the eyes and boggles the mind to sum it up. And excess, too, is one of those great subjects for art, for art is a way to use part of the excess in society.

Finally, Yore is doing great Australian art, not the old Australian subjects and macho bullshit but a new perspective. It has been a long-standing theme in Yore’s work. It is important because Australia is seldom a theme of contemporary Australian art, and we need an intelligent view of this subject not only the moronic patriotism of the majority. 

Art Precincts

“A media release is not a creative precinct,” said the Minister for creative industries, Martin Foley, when he announced plans to spend millions to create the Collingwood Art Precinct centred around the refurbished old Collingwood TAFE building. Arts precincts are a popular idea in urban planning. But is there anything more to a precinct than an official artwash announcement designating an area of a city and repurposing old buildings into studios or performance spaces? How sustainable are arts precincts? And what is their impact on grassroots creative precincts?

Keith Haring mural at the Collingwood arts precinct

In the past local city councils often ambitiously declared an area “an arts precinct” and hoped for the best. The City of Yarra once proclaimed the “Smith St art precinct” on one side of a block with one art gallery, a couple of designers and a community radio station.

If we were to count the Collingwood Art Precinct, then Melbourne currently has several arts precincts, the main one in Southbank centred around the NGV, State Theatre, Concert Hall, ACCA, Buxton Contemporary. Melbourne also has a Sports and Entertainment Precinct around the Tennis Centre and MCG. And there is the Brunswick Design Precinct with the TAFE design faculty and Siteworks in a converted old school building and heritage house. These different precincts raise the distinction between the arts, entertainment and design in the collective consciousness as reflected by city planners and politicians and built into the city’s structure.

The Southbank arts precinct has changed from swampland to an area for popular entertainment. Wirth’s Circus and others used to pitch their tents where the Arts Centre now stands. It was a decaying area of warehouses in the 1980s; the old police horse stables are now part of the College of the Arts, and a brewery has become the Malthouse Theatre.

Southbank only has training facilities and high-end exhibition and concert halls, cutting out the mid-level entirely. There is very little street art, no artist-run spaces, and no commercial galleries. It is a high-end attraction for the urban tourist, full of institutions exhibiting highly finished art and expensive cafes beyond the budget of the arts and music students who study there and must walk twenty minutes to find an affordable place to eat.

Performance artists in ACCA forecourt 2016

Compare this to grassroots locations that spontaneously emerge in the inner city. One such area is around the Brunswick Tram Depot, between Moreland Road and Albion Street. It did not occur due to media releases but available and affordable space. It is light industrial on the edge of inner-city suburbs with lots of warehouse space, some of which have been converted into artist studios and a gallery. Neon Park is the kind of high-end commercial gallery with a stall at the Melbourne International Art Fair. There is no public space, and the closest thing to a park is a planter box. Still, it does have bluestone laneways that are regularly covered in fresh graffiti. And there is live music and cheap cocktails at Red Betty’s in Houdini Lane.

In spooky synchronicity, an artist working in that area sends me this SMS message as I write this. “You should get really topical and investigate how the local council funding of studios in Moreland, such as Schoolhouse and Pentridge, have adversely impacted the homegrown grassroots economies of all the independent studios in the region.”

So much for the guff from the Minister for creative industries. The point of arts precincts does seem to be the media opportunity for the politician. Generally to announce funding to convert the old building (or build new ones) rather than to support the arts where it already exists.

Cozen Street Studio

Askm

Land off Ilham Lane

Looking at Urban Design

When I started this blog, I used to write posts like a diary, snapshots of Melbourne’s exhibitions and culture. I would write what galleries I went to, what I saw and what I thought. Now I try to have better-structured posts, but sometimes I miss being able to string together a whole heap of stuff together, like recently when I have been to several events about city planning, urban design and a garden show.

Mike Makatron and Conrad Bizjak’s wall at the Flower and Garden Show

Two weeks ago, I went on a picnic walk and talk led by Professor Alison Young about public space and the arts precinct. This was not a walking tour but an interdisciplinary conversation (music, architecture, criminology and art) about Melbourne University’s VCA and Conservatory as a park-like place with a pedestrian permeable campus. It is a high-end attraction for the urban tourist, with institutions showing highly finished art and expensive cafes. Cafes beyond the budget of the art and music students who study there and must walk twenty minutes to find an affordable place to eat. There are no artist-run spaces or commercial art galleries in the precinct, where even graffiti and street art are rare.

Then, last Saturday, I went to “Can parklets be reclaimed as a form of tactical urbanism?” A live podcast recording by artist Troy Innocent, urban design researcher Quentin Stevens, urban geographer Rachel Iampolski and event facilitator Kiri Delly. It was at Twosixty, a temporary public space on Sydney Road in Brunswick, with a large mural by Mike Makatron of a kangaroo bounding up an overgrown Sydney Road as the wilderness returned.

Before I went to the talk, I had no idea how small parklets are. They are the size of a couple of car park spaces, or during the pandemic, they became a common part of Melbourne’s coffee and dining experience. After the talk, we went to the demonstration parklet in Saxon Street just outside Siteworks. Young people were using it for parkour practice, and then a bunch of urban designers turned up. Good times.

And then, yesterday I went to the Melbourne International Flower and Garden Show. Amongst the many exhibits and displays, I wasn’t expecting a wall of painted foliage by Mike Makatron and Conrad Bizjak. Still, given that they have painted so many murals in Melbourne, I shouldn’t have been surprised.

I wasn’t surprised to see the Association of Sculptors of Victoria. They have been exhibiting regularly at the Flower and Garden Show for many years now. Several stands were selling sculptural garden decor, but some of the association of sculptors exhibitors were trying to do more. Even if they were carving a Dali inspired giraffe (Peter Saville, Wild Life) or creating a Claus Oldenburg inspired trio of giant blue paperclips (Madi Whyte, Rule of Three). No matter how impressive and popular a kangaroo made from a tractor chain might be, I wonder what these machine parts mean when welded into the shape of an animal or a dragon playing guitar. 

For sculptural elements in gardens looking at the shop window floral designs or RMIT fashion’s display was more aesthetically grounded than any of the garden ornaments. I continue to think about private garden sculptures (see my earlier post). My advice is to go large at home.

Peter Saville, Wild Life

Madi Whyte, Rule of Three

RMIT Fashion

Melbourne Art Fair 2022

Melbourne Art Fair has re-emerged in a new location after an eight-year break. The Royal Exhibition Building in Carlton Garden, the previous art fairs venue, is currently used as a vaccination centre. Now it is in Jeff’s Shed (aka Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre) on the banks of the Yarra. A space paradoxically less cramped than the old location but also somehow smaller. Perhaps because the spaces for the individual galleries was not in long rows. 

Caroline Rothwell Infinite Herbarium

Sally Smart

I was invited to the press preview on Thursday afternoon just before the fair opened to the paying public. The highlight was artist Sally Smart doing a remarkably concise and coherent explanation of her collage technique and its relationship to the women artists, puppets and dance in Constructivism and Dada. 

The press preview did answer my question about what the Art Fair is doing to decolonise this place. From physical: five Indigenous community arts centres were included in the galleries, a prize-winning work donated to Shepparton Art Museum and three giant necklaces by Maree Clarke. To the symbolic: the location of the galleries is listed with their Indigenous name first and the colonial name second, e.g.  Naarm/Melbourne. (But not as far as being the “Naarm/Melbourne Art Fair”?)

Maree Clarke A Moment in Time

APY Art Centre Collective installation view

The not-for-profit organisation that runs the Melbourne Art Fair demonstrates that an art fair can be more than just promoting the neo-liberal idea that private ownership of art is the cornerstone of the art world.To disrupt this perception of a trade fair for galleries, the art fair has solo shows and other “works of scale and significance”, where Maree Clarke, Sally Smart and four other artists are involved. Along with a program are events, including the Nicholas Building “Up Late”, an open studio event on Wednesday night, the international video section of the fair, and a book launch for Let’s Go Outside: Art in Public.

On the other hand, the art fair has to be financially successful for the sixty-three participating commercial galleries. The proposed art fair of 2016 never happened because of the withdrawal of several Melbourne galleries as it was not economically viable for them. I didn’t notice or hear about any damage to Melbourne’s visual arts in the years without the art fair, but I’m not looking at art galleries’ books. 

Back to the business of the art fair, bottles of Champagne Nicolas Feuillatte, the Fair’s official “champagne partner”, are on the desk of every gallery. And at the Glenfiddich Bar, the fashionable designer Jordan Gogos and Ross Blainey, Glenfiddich Brand Ambassador, discuss “the collaboration and the power of artistic experimentation while enjoying bespoke cocktails.”

Gertrude Contemporary had art for sale that parodied the relationship between art and money including the blocks of melted dollar coins by Andrew Liversidge. Ironic take or just another exclusive commodity? Take your pick, but I just walk away when someone mentions NFTs. (I should have asked about the fair’s carbon footprint.)

Something about public space

I went to see two exhibitions. “Who’s Afraid of Public Space?” at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA) and “Re-locate” at Assembly Point.

Mariana del Castillo Re-locate (photo courtesy of the artist)

Assembly Point is almost across the street from ACCA, a series of large display classes in a pedestrian way between two buildings and Sturt and Moore Streets in Southbank. Damien Vicks, Moment 2013 the red geometric flower highlights the building. There are several theatre-related offices and studios on the ground floor of Guild Apartments on Sturt Street in Southbank. A class of drama students were enjoying the fresh air, sitting half inside and half outside NIDA’s Melbourne studios. A place in between public and private space.

Mariana del Castillo is a Canberra-based artist with experience re-locating from her Ecuadorian birthplace. Re-locate creates the feeling of migration, travelling headless, carrying part of their home with them insulated in wool. The glass cases with her Arte Povera influenced tableaux progress to an unknown destination. The contradiction between the private life of an immigrant where your life is alien and public because you are the observed newcomer. Covered in a layer of wool for protection from the emotional toll of moving to another country, details stitched into this second skin.

Detail from “Gathering Space: Ngargee Djeembana” at ACCA

I am very into outdoor exhibitions in public space at the moment, for many reasons, including avoiding COVID but also my long term interest in public space. This brings me to “Who’s Afraid of Public Space?” at ACCA. Riffing on Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolfe? The exhibition has as much to do with the theatre as Albee’s play with Virginia Wolfe.

Public space is an important topic. If the exhibition is to succeed in its objective of raising issues for discussion then different questions needed to be asked. Who owns public space? What are the public allowed to do in public space? Who benefits from public space?

Starting with “The Education Space: Creating Art in Public”, which looked back to the modernism of Clement Meadmore and Ron Robertson-Swann and forward to a speculative future with an exhibition of maquettes by younger visitors. Next came “Reading Space: The Common Room”, with a collection of books and magazines on public space. (Nicola Cortese, Lauren Crockett and Stephanie Pahnis did not include my book on public sculpture, so it wasn’t brilliant.) “Project Space: The Hoarding” brought together elements from an exhibition that spilled out into many public places. Finally, or to begin with, depending on which way you entered, there was “Gathering Space: Ngargee Djeembana” in the largest space. It looked impressive with the minimalist repetition of cubes of material, but raised questions unaddressed questions about how the material was gathered, who gave permission and how this fitted with the rest of the exhibition.

Then a walk to the river and lunch. A pleasant day until it came time to go home. Who’s afraid of public transport? I am with good reason. The ticket machine took my $50 bill from me without putting anything on my card; I spent another 20 minutes making the complaint because of the “high volume of calls” they were receiving. They might put the money on my card in 10 working days time. The public transport system has not let me down; it is consistently poor. Public transport is a public space.