Friday 17 August 2018

Statuary Friday Vol 2 No 3 (Winter 2018)


Ok here's my project or perhaps it's a meme: though I doubt if anything qualifies as a meme if only one person is onto it. Well, anyway, every Friday I do a different piece of sculpture selected from the vast numbers littered around lovely Melbourne. My only criteria are: it must be outdoors, it must be more or less permanent, and it must be in a publicly accessible location.



#2.3 Courage

Whitlam Park, Napier Street, Fitzroy




Napier Street runs the entire length of Fitzroy, parallel to the three-ring shitshow that is Brunswick Street, through high-rise housing commission, schools and community centres, I'm A Super Big Deal You Know apartment buildings where warehouses used to be, pubs, cafes and terraces of what I think might be some of the oldest housing in Melbourne outside of the city. It's an interesting street, and thanks largely to the City of Yarra's iron-fisted approach to forbidding non-residents from using on-street parking spaces, it feels like a quiet neighbourhood backwater, which it isn't really. This little pocket of green is on the corner by the Town Hall.

Napier Street is the bike rat run for this part of town and I ride on it at least twice weekly, sometimes on sociable missions but more usually because I am pelting furiously along trying to get to some appointment on time. I can convey to you the usual state of mind I bring to the passing glances I always throw at this statue by telling you that one afternoon last week in Napier Street I heard a helicopter overhead, and I squinted up and saw it, and right then, indivisibly, I felt a gust of paranoia and my mind's eye saw Ray Liotta's twitching bloodshot coked-up eyes staring up through his windscreen.* A moment of existential unease, derived from registering in one mental moment the feeling of an authentic emotion coupled with the strongest possible evidence that I was shaping my consciousness into a form derived from a moment in popular culture. Well, as they say in Readers' Digest, 'Life's Like That'.

So, this statue. I've looked at it a lot. I am very out of practice with statuary blogging, and it shows in the terribleness of these photographs, but the statue-blogging urges have been making themselves felt so here we are. Like everything else I write here, it's not going to unfold in the same manner as it did ten years ago.






I intend, in this era, not to fall into the thoughtless cheap snark that once upon a time came all too easily. So already I need to just say outright, without being stupid about it, that I don't enjoy this object. I see its merits, particularly as a highly technically accomplished piece of figure modelling and casting in bronze, but it really isn't my cup of tea



So that 'not my cup of tea' business is my starting point. Why isn't it? Given that I know I like, understand and appreciate so many things about contemporary artwork that isn't embarrassed to depict a human body naturalistically, and to be committed enough to do a good job of this, which implies continual practice and refinement of a specific set of traditional studio skills, and is frank about thinking that there's still plenty to be said using this representational language, and is confident that the things that can be said with these forms are things that the denizens of Napier Street are going to be interested in taking up an ongoing conversation about for as long as this statue stands on this corner.

Well, for one thing, through no fault of its own this artwork has fallen afoul of a particularly bad case of a presentation practice that I think of as a malaise, a madness almost, which to some degree contaminates every contemporary commission of a heroic figure. I'm talking about the appending of insane, anxious, ruinous, over-explanatory plaques to artworks that just never, ever need to be explained in this plodding and didactic manner. If they're portraits of some real person, then that person's name is enough and any viewer who wants more biographical information than whatever the statue itself can convey (which is lots, usually) - well, you know what it is that such a viewer is able to do.



TMI.



And there's been a visible resurgence of portrait statutes over the last half-decade, entirely due to the centenary of the first world war and the money thus made available to communities wishing to memorialise a local figure. Often these statues are pretty dire. Stop in Euroa some time and you'll see what I mean. But despite their direness, they've undoubtedly taught new generations of viewers how to read the visual language of heroic statuary, whether it's in portrait mode or allegorical, like this. 

And thus we peel our way down to the next layer of it's not my cup of tea. The statue has 'Courage' written on it, twice. The figure is holding a medal. It's a big medal, and colourful! He's looking at his medal. He's been captured in what is inarguably a universal gesture of self-revelation - taking off an outer skin - and you'll still see that even if you don't recognize in his garb the specific content and gay iconology of the Wizard of Oz, which of course, in Napier Street, everybody will. 







Where this next level of overly didactic obviousness leaves me, I find, is in a paradoxical place: as the outer garments are stripped away, what should be revealed inside is the form of the subtlest, most expressive, most powerful, perverse, recognisable, mutable, vulnerable and enduring object in the human world and history. This undressing is a shedding of acculturated skins, not a striptease. The invitation is not an invitation to viewers as voyeurs, but to viewers as empaths. What would it be like to be inside this skin, inside this skin? A wonderful question. But does the artwork, the actual, real object, not the claims made about it, does it keep up its end of the conversation, does its form speak to me in these terms? I find it doesn't. It's been irrevocably coated, glazed, in dictated meanings. It makes me anxious, you know?

I'm not seeing camp. I'm seeing kitsch.










*if Goodfellas is not the actual greatest movie ever, it's close enough as makes no difference

1 comment:

GS said...

Uninspired piece of art but am really glad to see Ralph get a mention on the plaque. Crossed paths with him at many a RRR party. A most entertaining, truly Fitzroy man.