Cities of Hope

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April 2013

Vanessa Gerrans

Peter Corrigan’s world

For more than forty years, maverick architect Peter Corrigan has contributed a unique and imaginative voice to Australian architecture and a continued legacy of teaching at RMIT University. His magic as a raconteur shines through his practice, Edmond and Corrigan, which he operates together with his wife and partner Maggie Edmond.

Dividing his passions, Corrigan has brought his vision to theatre productions as well as architectural projects. He has designed hundreds of opera, ballet and drama sets and costumes for directors including Barrie Kosky and Michael Kantor. Staging now at the Oper Graz in Austria are Corrigan’s fanciful, fairytale inspired designs for the opera Falstaff, directed by Australian Tama Matheson.

RMIT Gallery’s exhibition Peter Corrigan: Cities of Hope (April 12 – June 8) is a portrait of a man who believes that aesthetics assist us in leading a better life. To Corrigan, architecture and design are an expression of culture that constitutes an act of hope.

Corrigan operates with a sense of purpose in the service of ideas. His mind is a tangle of influences. Each articulation whether as building, costume or set design, represents a clear and distinctive moment. His design approach is always an ‘and’, never a ‘but’. It is speculative and open to wonder.

Corrigan has built meaning into buildings in the same way he concocts fictional worlds on stage. He borrows from popular culture, elevating it and making it strange. His works incorporate a rich collection of inspirations: Darth Vader, Madonna’s cone bra, football colours, Kabuki, Kandinsky, the symbolism of the cross and Dame Edna’s ‘face furniture’ glasses.

These references are playful and brazen. The resulting designs are gaudy and impervious to taste. The final product is idiosyncratically fruitful and faithful in its unsentimental composure, seeking out a truth even as it tests our sensibilities.

Always enamoured by the notion of dreams and their narratives, Corrigan’s buildings and theatre designs can be interpreted as a series of fictions. He uses this as a way to refocus our eyes giving a new glimpse of reality and point of entry into discussion. This approach is natural in theatre but more challenging in architecture, which concentrates on the limits of structure and materials.

The challenge of any design exhibition is to show something more than the vestiges of a building or performance in the absence of a direct experience with the original. Corrigan’s personality offers an obvious arrangement, that of a character portrayal. Cities of Hope unites disparate artifacts, authors, musings and histories, against a backdrop of Corrigan’s distinctive colour scheme.

As you would encounter when visiting his home or cluttered studio/office, the exhibition is dense with a world of images and diverse objects. It includes a wide range of Corrigan’s extremely personal works, acquired over years of friendship and engagement, tending towards a common metaphysical theme. His personal collection includes artists Peter Booth, Bill Henson, Philip Hunter and Roger Kemp as well as costume illustrators Christian Bérard, Kenneth Rowell and Yolanda Sonnabend.

In this exhibition, Corrigan’s own collection is supplemented by an extensive range on loan from the National Gallery of Victoria, and privately loaned works including Jason Pickford’s meticulous and fanciful drawings of built other worlds; Bruce Armstrong’s mythological Snow Leopard; William Eicholtz’s faux marble ‘shepherd’, Monarch Portrait; a bust of the Roman emperor Hadrian; and Howard Arkley’s suburban celebration, Family Home.

These works of fine art sit in dialogue with footage and costumes from the opera Nabucco, designs from Falstaff, architectural models, posters, and Corrigan’s new set that has been purpose-designed for the re-staging of Marguerite Duras’ The Lover. Adapted for the stage by the late Colin Duckworth, directed by Greg Carroll, starring Kate Kendall, this gripping one-woman play will be presented within the exhibition space itself. It provides a rare opportunity to experience at first hand the relationship between Corrigan’s engagement with theatre and his overall approach to design. Corrigan’s stark white set evokes the intense heat of Saigon and the sparse luminosity of Duras’ prose.

The twenty two Melbourne practitioners participating in the exhibition have been selected by Peter Corrigan. They include his contemporaries, colleagues and former students. Their works are not intended as homage but rather an opportunity to celebrate their own current practice or state of mind, and contributions to Melbourne architectural culture. Naturally, they are mindful of their similarities, differences and provocations.

These diverse works capture the spirit of Corrigan’s inquiries, complementing his commitment to architecture, cultural history and ideas. They afford us the pleasure of discovering serendipitous connections among widely diverse topics. Presented as a mise-en-scène, Cities of Hope establishes a context to encounter Peter Corrigan in his entirety, as opposed to presenting a catalogue of his career or his work. Like the work itself, this exhibition is an expansion: An ‘and’ following an ‘and’. Definitely no ‘buts’.

Vanessa Gerrans is the curator of Peter Corrigan: Cities of Hope showing at RMIT Gallery from April 12 – June 8.

rmit.edu.au/rmitgallery

Images:

1. Edmond and Corrigan, Building 8, RMIT University. Swanston St, Melbourne, Vic., 1994.
2. Niagara Galleries. Punt Road, Richmond VIC 3121. Design by Peter Corrigan.
3. Portrait of Peter Corrigan.