Kranky

I have to write about this new and very prolific street artist in Melbourne because they specialise in street art sculpture. Kranky, a crank version of Banksy?

Kranky, Rats

Mixing toys, plastic rats, rat traps, lego men, fake turds, fake CCTV camera; Kanky’s small assemblages are often jokes with references to art and graffiti. Simple, basic, crude but effective visual jokes. It seems to me that Kranky is often making a joke about Banksy’s style, it is so easy, just put a Barbie doll’s head in a rat’s mouth.

Kranky’s Selfie Three Businessmen (photo courtesy of Kranky, taken on his cellphone.)

I knew that I had to write about Kranky and this was reinforced when I saw StreetsmART’s photo of Kranky’s alteration to The Three Business Men… in early September. The non-destructive alteration of an existing public sculpture is a right of passage for a street artist working in three dimensions from Banksy’s wheel clamp on Bodacia’s chariot to CDH’s Atlas Intervention.

This iconic Melbourne sculpture by Paul Quinn and Alison Weaver, The Three Business Men who brought their own lunch; Batman, Swanston and Hoddle is one of the most photographed sculptures in Melbourne. People are always taking photographs posing with these metal men. Kranky attached lanyards with selfie photos on iPhones on each of the corresponding sculpture’s face. Kranky explained that “it was a privilege, to stand back and observe, the tourists/city visitors/CBD workers, taking a selfie with the sculptures and their selfie. Which was the exact interactive response that I intended.”

Kranky’s work is amongst the most ephemeral of street art sculptures. His works are quickly stolen and only the square bases, with the simple signature mark in san serif capital letters, remain behind. The theft of these pieces shows that someone really wants them (even though they destroy it for others and loose the signature in the process) and Kranky just produces more, individual pieces and multiples. Kranky’s highly ephemeral assemblages stands in contrast to the Junky Projects and casts objects by Will Coles that are covered with many layers of aerosol paint after surviving on the street for years.

Kranky, Barbie doll

Kranky, Catch the Graffiti Police

Kranky, Dollar skull

Kranky, Miss You Frida

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Colours of Coburg

I was in Coburg going from the library to the deli to do my shopping when I encountered Ria Green and Aliça Bryson-Haynes applying gold leaf to a telephone junction tube. Green and Bryson-Haynes were wearing matching tops in a gold fabric. As well as applying gold leaf to the normally grey utilitarian telephone junction they were also applying gold leaf to other functional and non-functional items along Sydney Road in Coburg. Green and Bryson-Haynes were also conducting a survey about the colours and styles that we wanted to see more of in Coburg.

Encountering the object covered in gold leaf made me question if I could remember it before this transformation. I must have walked passed it thousands of times but this was the first time that I actually saw it. The gold leaf was a continuation of Ria Green and Aliça Bryson-Haynes earlier work, Everyday Monument in MoreArts 2014. That time a nineteenth century iron lamp post outside the Brunswick Town Hall is covered in gold leaf.

Ria Green and Aliça Bryson Haynes, Everyday Monument, 2014

The gold leaf application reminded me of Bianca Faye and Tim Spicer’s Welcome to Cocker Alley. Welcome to Cocker Alley part of the City of Melbourne’s Laneways Commissions 2008 where gold leaf was applied to the external pipes of the Nicholas Building in Cocker Alley. In both urban interventions the gold leaf was applied to remind Melbourne that it was the gateway to the Victorian gold fields. Likewise the shops along Sydney Road grew with the gold rush.

It was part of Colours of Coburg, “an initiative by”/“collaboration” (?) with the Coburg Traders Association. There was some idea to identify ‘what colour or colours are Coburg?’ but really to create some atmosphere for the trading strip. It appears, from their Facebook page, that the choir that was singing softly in the Victoria Street Mall was also part of Colours of Coburg.

Coburg traders have been trying to create some atmosphere for the shopping strip over fifty years. At least this interactive urban intervention is more tasteful than being the location for Victoria’s first go-go dance marathon, won by 15 year old Sue Grewar in November 1966.

James Voller’s Urban Interventions

I was disappointed when Voller’s giant colour paste-ups on the public toilets came down but then MoreArts is only a temporary urban art exhibition. Voller’s paste-up on the industrial rubbish bin at the station carpark, although slightly damaged, is still clearly visible and creating a wonderful illusion. Now there is a new image of another house by Voller on the public toilets, appropriately for Melbourne’s summer, it has a stripped awning.

James Voller is a photographer from New Zealand who is now based in Melbourne furthering his studies. His urban interventions with paste-ups the cover the whole surface make powerful works of art.

In 2011 I saw James Voller’s exhibition “Constructing Site” at Beam Contemporary. Voller’s photographs his urban interventions that used architectural paste-ups the play with the size and meaning of urban objects. I didn’t get around to writing the exhibition at the time, it was just some interesting photographs and I’d seen big paste-ups before.

Now that I’ve seen Voller’s work on site regularly in Coburg, very regularly, just about any time I go anywhere, as I pass by the public toilets opposite the mall or see the bin on the way to the train station, I think they are fantastic.

What I find fantastic about Voller’s urban installations is that suburbia is often used as a metaphor for dull and unattractive and Voller is one of the few artists who can make impressive art about the subject. Public toilets are rarely seen as the site for art, although see my post on the Russell Street Sculptures, but we all need public toilets and rubbish bins.

Voller’s two installations improve this with flare. They have done so much to improve the ugly heart of Coburg, the massive stretch of tarmac supermarket parking lots around the railway station on the second block west of Sydney Road.

James Voller, Fragmented Patterns

Street Art Sculpture III

I love street art sculpture; this is my third post about it (see Street Art Sculpture and More Street Art Sculpture). Not all of the street sculptures that I’ve written about are still there; some have weathered well, some have been painted over and others have been removed. Such is the nature of all street art. But there are some new ones around, especially the rainbows by GT who saved the best one for Hosier Lane.

 

GT spectrum sculpture, 2012, Hosier Lane

This is an amazing time in the history of Melbourne’s sculpture. 40 years ago the old sculpture that Melbourne would accept were figures of people or horses made of bronze or stone and placed in a park or out the front of a prominent building. Now there is the joy of discovering a Will Cole cast squashed can or a Junky Projects hidden in the streets. It is another reason not to sleep walk through the city but to explore it.

Will Coles, can, 2011, Corner Elizabeth & Burke

Junky Projects, 2012, Brunswick

Van Rudd, Protest Sign, 2010, Collingwood

unknown, pig face, 2011, Hosier Lane

Malfunction, Leopards, 2011, Brunswick

It is hard to find space for a sculpture in the narrow laneways and crowded streets of Melbourne so some of the best current artists work on a small scale. Not everyone can pull off something as large as Crateman collective or CDH’s Atlas intervention. But more of Melbourne’s street artists like Be Free and Phoenix are thinking in 3 dimensions. Not that all street art sculpture will be successful, some of it just make me cringe.

unknown, kangola australiana, Flannigan Lane, 2011

If anyone with more information about any of the pieces or any other street art sculpture please leave your thoughts.

The Atlas Intervention

Raymond Gill in the Age (November 13, 2011) asked six curators who they considered to be the top 10 artists who “are continually pushing boundaries, investigating new methods, forging new forms of expression, influencing their peers and shaping the way artists, curators and audiences might look at art in the coming decades?”

CDH "Atlas" November 2011

Gill didn’t ask me who I would include in this list. I don’t mind; I’m one of the least influential people in Melbourne’s art world. But if I had been asked one artist that I certainly would have included is CDH, simply as a way to introduce my second blog post for the year about his art. Normally I don’t write more than one blog post about an artist as there are so many artists, galleries and other events to repeatedly write about one artists. So wanting to write a second blog post this year is an indication of CDH’s significance.

I meet up with CDH for lunch in the city at a burger bar – the day that the Age reported about his “Atlas” intervention.

CDH’s “Atlas” urban intervention with John Robinson’s ‘The Pathfinder’ is a significant work of unauthorized street art. The statue opposite the NGV in the Queen Victoria Gardens has been neglected for twenty years. The repetitive theft of the hammer that simply unscrewed made it impossible to maintain. CDH’s planning and the bravado of the daylight execution, disguised in a bright safety vest, was perfect and the result is an amazing transformation. CDH reverses the theft of the hammer with a replacement.

It was a big risk that might have gone wrong if the globe had been removed a day or so after the intervention. “Street art is generally cheap and is produced in multiples but I invested a lot into this.” CDH told me and then explained the time and money that he’d put into the project. Adding welding to his skill set and improving his angle grinding skills in the process. The globe had to be manufactured in China and imported to Australia. CDH said that he would have liked to have had the globe fabricated locally but could get Australian manufacturing.

How long will CDH’s intervention last? What will the official reaction will be? The tourists wandering around the Queen Victoria Garden today certainly appreciated the intervention. They also told me about the tagging of other sculptures in the garden. The intervention challenges the notion of vandalism because it is gift repair.

”Atlas” was “bestowed up the people of the City of Melbourne by courtesy of Rio Tinto and CDH” (according to the plaque that CDH added). The statue has been renamed “Atlas”, after the titan who carried the world on his shoulders. CDH’s post-modern Atlas swings the world around; the natural world has been unbalanced by the activities of man, including mining giants like Rio Tinto.

CDH, "Pacman: the street art guide game", 2011

CDH has experimented with water-activated paint, with the fire graffiti to paint a portrait of Mishima and next, oxidizing iron filling. He has made interactive street art maps of the city (Pac Man and Logic Deductive Test – my first blog post about CDH). The range of his activities is impressive – he is not from an art school background and does believe that artists should be creative, politically engaged and street.

In the emails before the meeting CDH asked me who my top 10 Melbourne street artists and the 10 international street artists that I would like to see paint in Melbourne. The list of Melbourne street artists was easy (CDH was on that list) but I’m not that interested in the international street art scene – street art is such a mass movement and often anonymous. I thought again about his question – street artists that I would like to see paint in Melbourne. The surviving high school students from Homs who started the current uprising in Syria by painting anti-regime slogans on their high school wall – I would like to see them painting in Melbourne.

Situationalism Up Against the Wall

The Museum of a World Forgotten presents “Where Popular Stopped Being Pop”. The museum is actually some frames pasted up on Sutherland Lane, off La Trobe Street. The cook standing at the back door of the restaurant sends his assistant across the lane to pick up one of the A4 pages documenting the exhibition. He doesn’t look at the documentation for very long – it is all art student bullshit.

The Museum of a World Forgotten, Sutherland Lane

“9. In a world which really is topsy-turvy, the true is a moment of the false.” (Guy Debord Society of the Spectacle, Debord’s emphasis.)

There is so much that is false in this urban intervention: the paintings are false, the exhibition is false and the documentation is false.

Some of the paintings are dross landscapes, obviously found in some opportunity shop; the others are prints of classic ‘Australian paintings’. The paintings images of a ‘real Australia’ detoured to an urban laneway; landscape painting is always emphasized in a history of Australian art. When did this type of landscape cease being popular? There are a couple of shows on Channel 31 that will teach you how to paint more like them.

The documentation for “The Museum of a World Forgotten” is actually the first five entries from Guy Debord’s book, Society of the Spectacle. The documentation’s layout of the pictures does not represent the actual layout of paintings; the numbers are also false. The only thing that is true about “The Museum of a World Forgotten” is that it is an intentional situationalist action.

I have often commented about street art and situationalism because there are some obvious connections. There are many other aspects of the Debord in street art including the graffiti slogans on the streets of Paris. In talking about street art we need to discuss Debord and the Situationists further: the detourement of images, psychogeography and the flâneur exploration of the city. But it is also sad that a philosophy developed in the 1960s in France when, post Stalinism, the revolution needed to reinvent itself is being repeated in Melbourne endlessly by sophisticated art students (like reciting verses from the Bible).

Ace Wagstaff writes about some of these connections in his article: “Duchamp, Nietzsche and the Spectacle of the Live Creative Act”. Wagstaff writes about the public enjoying the spectacle of a legal graffiti performance at the NGV.

Meanwhile is the ‘true’ revolution starting in the Melbourne’s city square?