Melbourne: A Pillar of Art

All readers either know or should know that Me!bourne considers itself the cultural capital of the 'straya-mate (That's Australia for you clear tongued foreigners). After taking for a stroll the plinth we found in a bin behind the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art last year, we discovered why: Melbourne is an art object, held atop a plinth. And if its on a plinth, then it must be... art!

No matter where the plinth was placed, it was found to be supporting the city. Here it can be seen proudly displaying, in "its own, self-diclosed area, which is is withdrawn from the context of profane existence, and in which [the] special laws [of art] apply", Melbourne's famous tram tracks, now stripped of their utility and rendered as... art.

Bourke St Mall wasn't excluded from becoming an object of artistic ponderability.

Last but not least, here is a view of the Melbourne-art-object from the ground up. Little did the inhabitants of the city know what had become of the ontological status of their habitus that night.

ANNA SCHWARTZ exhibits beyond the cube

In Melbourne, you are a nobody in the art-world if you haven't either exhibited in or been kicked out of Anna Schwartz Gallery. Thankfully Anna is showing some initiative and is extending her portion of the gallery-dealer system art-sausage factory beyond the confines of the gallery walls.

We have been told that this work is 'exploring the notion' - and what would a contemporary art work be if it wasn't exploring a notion - 'of time not as a continuous succession but as a non-necessary series of discreet, individually self-contained times, linked by the guiding thread of the tactile,' by which is meant skin, in this case animal skin.

Further, 'the work recalls the minimalist interventions of Dan Flavin, but replacing neon, which is an overused and therefore exhausted medium in contemporary art, with the light of the sacred, namely animal flesh. Hence, through the intersection of discreet self-contained moments of time and the sacred light of the flesh, the work phenomenologically exposes the viewer to a deep sense of eternity that is always present once one escapes the illusion of successive, linear temporality'.

Interested buyers can contact the dumpster behind the Coles supermarket, Spencer St, Melbourne, which proudly sponsored the artists by donating the materials.

Mounted Branch

This poor plinth, one pillar of the art world, was found hiding in the bin behind the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA). Maybe this itself was an artist's installation, which the saving of the poor plinth ruined (one need only place the dumpster and it's contents inside the gallery, and of course be an artist, for such to become art). Be that as it may, this plinth and its surrounds bewitched us with the presence of Robert Morris, and soon we could not fathom where the art began and the body ended. (The Mounted Branch is, of course, the Mounted Police Barracks across the road from ACCA and the Victorian College of the Arts... necessary to keep in check the revolutionary nature of contemporary art)

In this photo you can see how the act of being luggage at a tramstop has been transformed into a mysterious art object.

Here a waiting commuter has sacrificed their inviolable corporeality to becoming art.

Art today is very transportable. One even finds it in the very air that inhabits cultural Melbourne's famous trams.

Yet art, especially if performative, is serious business and therefore hard work. This living sculpture is taking a nap... or is he/she?

Fuck Capitalism!

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The cult of the new is, despite certain claims to the contrary, as intrinsic to the contemporary art market as it is to capitalism. Maybe this is because the former is dictated to, albeit with a large degree of mystification and reified self-denial, by the latter. In each case, which is the same case, we may feel left behind by the succession of the new. Despite the seeming futility of rebelling against all this, we must, as they say, 'keep the flame alive'... especially after finding an old fold-up battering ram and some Dionysian spirit... or rather spirits.