Melbourne Now sends an intriguing message about an appetite for street cred grit chic.
Melbourne Now is a bit OTT. It’s not so much the weight of numbers as the wide diversity of encounters on offer from conventional works, some that trade in immersive experiences and others, particularly some commissioned works, that refuse to be pigeon-holed. Spectacle and entertainment factors are high but it makes demands. Real concentration is required to weigh up the content of individual works and join the dots in terms of curatorial intentions underlying relationships between works by different artists.
Where is Melbourne in all this? Not the ‘creative spirit of Melbourne’, as espoused by Tony Ellwood, Director NGV and doubtless the many curators and designers who have contributed to this large undertaking, but Melbourne the city as something lived in, smelt, trodden, listened to, observed, remembered or imagined. Rick Amor’s Mobile call, 2012, is a good place to start. A city back alley. Plenty of concrete. Some graffiti and a salaryman on a mobile watched over by surveillance cameras. This is grim, melancholic Melbourne. It’s a reminder of the kind of city it used to be, back in the wastelands of the 1960s, the dead heart ringed by suburbia. With this image as talisman consider a number of artists in Melbourne Now who draw down on graffiti as a leitmotif for defining urban character. Ponch Hawkes is drawn to ‘tree-tagging’ (the art of vandalizing tree trunks with spray tags), seeing redemption in the self-healing process of bark shedding. Tully Moore has sourced such tags, found street art, signage and evidence of decay as raw material for paintings, which come across as secular chasubles.
Stieg Persson’s panels combine trash tagging with cuter-than kittens and piglets to invoke a so-sad stand off between pubescent anti-social mewling and middle-class taste. A full room installation by the anomalous, ubiquitous LUSH tracks similar territory by offering sardonic advice on what it takes to be a street artist – and how to blow it. The list goes on. A video documents the actions of artist Ash Keating paint bombing an enormous tilt-up wall of a commercial building on Melbourne’s’ outskirts (Truganina). There’s another story here, about the naming of an outer suburb after the Tasmanian Aboriginal woman, Truganini – but another time. The artist, complete with hoodie, may be emulating guerilla style street art, but the end result has a classic gravitas. Similar comments apply to Daniel Crooks’ ‘time slice’ animations of city laneways. No drug pushers or bins full of week old prawns. Liquid love is in the air.
Melbourne Now sends an intriguing message through such works about an appetite for street cred grit chic which feeds the self image of a city addicted to its transgressive race memories as a foil to tourist ads of waif girls rolling balls of string along Melbourne boulevards.
Melbourne Now continues until March 23 at the National Gallery of Victoria, St. Kilda Rd and Federation Square.
Images
1. Ash Keating – born Australia 1980 / NGV International North Wall Billboard Intervention 2013 Weathershield Low Sheen on Vinyl Billboard
2. Tully Moore – born Australia 1981 / Chevron, Goggles, Jaws, Universal Habit 2013 (installation) oil on canvas, cotton, chrome, plastic 178.0 x 108.0 cm © Tully Moore, courtesy John Buckley Gallery, Melbourne
3. Daniel Crooks – born New Zealand 1973, arrived Australia 1994 / An embroidery of voids 2013 (still) colour single-channel digital video, sound, looped Collection of the artist © Daniel Crooks, courtesy Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne and Sydney Supported by Julie, Michael and Silvia Kantor
4. Daniel Crooks – born New Zealand 1973, arrived Australia 1994 / An embroidery of voids 2013 (still) colour single-channel digital video, sound, looped Collection of the artist © Daniel Crooks, courtesy Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne and Sydney Supported by Julie, Michael and Silvia Kantor
