Public art and an evolved city
With the Commonwealth Games on the anvil, the focus is on Delhi learning some valuable lessons from other mega cities of the world. Bharati Motwani comes back from Melbourne charmed by its sophisticated sensibilities.
Building a city is simple enough, but growing its soul takes hundreds of years — unless, like Melbourne, it transmigrates an old soul from Europe. Certainly Melbourne’s creative consciousness, though modern in expression, feels like it has evolved slowly with layers of artistic accretion. Its remarkably sophisticated sensibilities belie its 19th century beginnings as a barely legal, speculative settlement populated by convicts.
Every city has art galleries and Melbourne has dozens, but here they don’t always bother to put them inside buildings. Many buildings offer their outer skins as canvas for graffiti art — to walk down the shadowy, cobbled alleys of Hosier Lane and Centre Place is like being ambushed by a giant comic book filled edge-to-edge with dark, moody and energetic illustrations. The murals are done in stencil graffiti or with spray-cans. Many of these are “cultural jamming”, which means they use images or icons from popular culture to convey messages that are whimsical, edgy and irreverent. None of these were put here by teen vandals for a lark — laneway commissions, as these murals are called, are taken very seriously and are, in fact, perfectly legal. Sometimes they are even commissioned by government agencies.
MoVida, a popular wine and tapas restaurant here, commissioned Melbourne’s most in-demand graffiti artist, Al Stark, to paint their exterior walls. Says Stark, “Graffiti art allows me to communicate with an audience far larger than what an institutional space would permit.” Anywhere up to 3,00,000 pedestrians admire these walls each week — not many galleries can claim numbers like that. What makes graffiti even more intense for the artist is the ephemeral nature of it. “It’s not meant to last,” says Stark, “you paint it, document it and then you say goodbye”.
So respectable is graffiti that artists from far afield, from Brazil, Korea, Canada, Europe and USA, come here to Melbourne to paint the city red and more. Noted among graffiti artists are Logan Hicks and Banksy, an Australian artist who calls himself Ghostpatrol (http:// ghostpatrol.net/) and Miso (http://www. cityofreubens.com). Tourists and passersby stop to watch the artists go up on ladders and work with aerosol spray-cans. It must have been not very different when, during the European Renaissance, crowds would gather to watch artists perched on scaffoldings of cathedrals and palaces painting frescoes on to the basilicas and vaulted ceilings. Or, closer home, when 19th century painters decorated the walls of the Marwari havelis of Shekhawati. Frescos, like spray-paint, are a fast medium as the artist has to finish painting the section before the plaster dries.
In fact, there is much in Melbourne that brings to mind the bohemian textures of places like Montmartre and Greenwich Village during the Beat years. Above its catacombs of laneways are odd-shaped loft apartments, tiny studios accessed by narrow stairs, galleries and boutiques, where designers, artists and students live and work. The streetside cafés and hidden bars are places where the young and the possessed meet over a heady mix of cocktails and creativity.
The Esplanade Market at St Kilda’s, along the Yarra riverfront, is where Victoria’s artists and craftspeople set up stalls and sell their artworks and organic produce every Sunday. But the best way to find really good work by undiscovered artists is by checking out the weekly and monthly art markets. Among the best are the St Rose Artists Market at Fitzroy and Nunawading Market outside the Civic Centre.
Sydney architect Elizabeth Farrelly described Melbourne as “richly textured, intensely energised and minutely explorable”. While many cities botox out their wrinkles and hidden secrets, replacing it by bland uniformity, Melbourne’s wrinkles are zealously protected by people like Andrew MacDonald, who set up the City Lights Project in 1992, colonising the city’s neglected spaces, its laneways and unused buildings transforming them into art hubs. His latest experiment is the setting up of a series of light boxes — small perspex display cases containing tiny art installations. One of these micro-galleries is Mailbox 141 at Flinders Street, where old letterboxes in the foyer of a Deco building have been turned into little lighted-up showcases. The smallest of the galleries, 20cmx30cm, is a tiny light box located at the entrance to Pushka cafe in Presgrave Place. The project is hugely successful with artists from around the world displaying their work and is such a big draw with tourists that the city council is also sanctioning City Lights projects. Some of the better public art in recent time has come from commissions from corporations, large organisations and public benefactors.
Urban sculpture and art installations are also big in the city. While waiting to cross a street, I found waiting beside me, to my consternation, a young student carrying a satchel of books and plugged into an iPod. The thing was, he happened to be a kangaroo, albeit one carved out of stone. Then, at Warburton Lane, above my head, was a large 500-kg chandelier, caught midfall and wedged between two buildings. Then, there’s a brick wall that appears to be breathing softly, bulging out, then in… To walk the streets of Melbourne is to be exposed to some of its most inventive and experimental artists. That the city nurtures the creative, that personal expression finds place in municipal space, is a mark of an evolved and peaceful society.