Prometheus dreams

I had a superb week­end last week­end. On Friday, Dean and I went to the Mel­bourne Plan­et­arium at Sci­ence­works. I’d never been there, des­pite having lived here for five years. It was lots of fun, although very dif­fer­ent from what I’d expec­ted. I’d ima­gined it would be more like Questa­con in Can­berra, more hands-on phys­ics, and aimed a little older as well, but we had a ball wan­der­ing around the geo­lo­gical exhib­i­tion and the house secrets bits, which was an unbe­liev­able nos­tal­gia trip: old radios, a 135mm slim­line camera like my first camera in the 80s, an ori­ginal box of the game Mousetrap hiding under the stairs. 

And while the Plan­et­arium show was dis­ap­point­ing (flashy anim­a­tion and a stupid voice over by Fran­cis Leach, aimed squarely at the tweens) the tour of the col­lec­tions in stor­age was superb, from the antique horse-drawn hearse to the cars and the early 20th cen­tury Mal­vern Star motor­bike, the huge and care­fully pre­served models of sail­ing boats to the marine radio com­mu­nic­a­tion room that they’ve got in its entirety, ready for an exhib­i­tion one day; shelves and shelves of old tech­no­lo­gies, breath­ing quietly and wait­ing for their day in the light again. It makes me think of an old book I had as a child, I’m sure it was from Mum’s time if not earlier, with old cars as old men, mous­taches and little Brit­ish caps. Wish I could remem­ber the name of the book.

And again, that feel­ing I get some­times, with living his­tory, that all this led us to now, that we are poised at the edge of a moving line or point, swiftly head­ing into the future, every second we pass is now his­tory and there are tasks for cur­at­ors now, to pick which items of now are sig­ni­fic­ant, which thing now is the pre­cursor to tomor­row’s every­day and which is the anom­al­ous dead-end, the laugh­able wrong turn, which tomor­row’s chil­dren look at and wonder how we ever thought that this, this ungainly, thing, whatever it is, was the way to go.

And that it’s part of my job as an editor to mark those things, too, to see the pat­terns and spot the trends, to get it right, so that tomor­row judges me as pres­ci­ent or at least astute, rather than laugh­ing at me as we do at the myth­o­lo­gical patent guy who said in 1899 that there was noth­ing left to invent (good thing I do my research; I’d thought he was real!.

Then on Sat­urday, we went to the NGV Ian Potter Gal­lery to the other bit of the 2004 exhib­i­tion. Now this is what I’d been hoping for. I was blown away by so many of the pieces. I just felt that the qual­ity of the mixed media works had more breadth of vision than the solely screen-based works. For some reason, I’d expec­ted the ACMI screen gal­lery to be more cut­ting edge than the NGV mater­i­als. (I real­ise I forgot to men­tion last time the impress­ive work by Troy Inno­cent at the Screen Gal­lery, which I did like a lot. It’s just that having seen Troy’s work evolve for the last 10 years, it wasn’t rev­el­at­ory for me. It was the next evol­u­tion­ary step, lit­er­ally, since part of his pro­ject is about semantic life-forms evolving. This ver­sion of it really, really worked though.)

So let’s see: responses to NGV per­man­ent col­lec­tion first and then 2004.

I have dis­covered a new favour­ite indi­gen­ous artist: Lin Onus. NGV has two superb pieces, one a painted invoc­a­tion of fire, trees rising in an ochre sky, cross-hatched with tra­di­tional col­ours and under­neath this, an inset rect­angle of burnt wood and cock­a­too feath­ers, the haunted moments of loss; and secondly, a large canvas of dart­ing fish, again covered in tra­di­tional cross-hatches and dots, browns and whites and yel­lows, but with West­ern shad­ows beneath them, and per­fect per­spect­ive, so it feels as though you are watch­ing these fish dart beneath a per­fectly clear lake, rip­pling just so, pebbles on the bottom.

I’ve writ­ten down “Michael Taylor” but I can’t remem­ber why.

An enorm­ous deep blue piece called the Mel­bourne Panels by John Cat­tapan escaped my cyn­icism about paro­chial moments with broad colour under­neath and on top, intric­ate land­marks — the arts centre, the MCG, Fed­er­a­tion Square — formed from dots of white light, elec­tric out­lines like a satel­lite photo.

I’m not usu­ally a fan of Sidney Nolan’s work, but a trip­tych called Salt Lake made me think of denuded trees march­ing mourn­fully to hold war coun­cil on the edge of a barren land­scape. It is mel­an­choly and amaz­ing and invites contemplation.

John Long­staff’s Bush­fire piece had little impact close up, but from a dis­tance made us draw breath sud­denly: the col­ours, the sense of move­ment and speed, that par­tic­u­lar colour of Aus­tralian sky, burn­ing. An under­wa­ter piece called Sirens had sim­ilar detail, a sense of immer­sion and gor­geous colour bal­ances with an entirely dif­fer­ent palette.

More bush­fire and yet another John: John Wolse­ley’s beau­ti­ful works, Fire and the Mallee, and The Har­monic Pat­tern of Mallee Bird­song, each with around six panels, placed in three dimen­sions, some in front of each other. The Har­mon­ics ones placed on music stands, fleet­ing moments of musical nota­tion but not quite, flashes of bird flight and vibrato recor­ded on a staff, or sound waves and at the same time, they are flecks of ash and the wing of a passing eagle and smoke on the wind and a leaf sway­ing, graph­ite shad­ows and tan memor­ies on cream, hints of tan­ger­ine and rose in the sunset or the fire.

And then 2004: so much to take in, I didn’t take detailed notes. I do have to go back. Nat & Ali’s intensely com­plic­ated video/audio/paper/photography col­lage was engross­ing; there was a video piece with blurred shapes melt­ing into one another like Gib­son’s Belong­ing Kind and a woman trying to remem­ber some­thing and a boy look­ing scared; almost pho­to­graphic art­works, haunt­ing metic­u­lous draw­ings from 1950s photos about family and memory; a photo-real­istic sculp­ture of a girl in jeans sit­ting in front of a strik­ing abstract of stripes, called Walk­ing in the Grass made me com­ment to Dean about the way we paint sculp­tures now and he men­tioned that the Romans painted their sculp­tures too, but the paint fell off and the Renais­sance imit­at­ors thought that was how they were sup­posed to be and left theirs white. I was a little sur­prised that I didn’t spot any Pic­cin­nini, given she was our rep at the Venice Bien­nale last year; I would have thought she mer­ited a spot in an exhib­i­tion pur­port­ing to rep­res­ent Aus­tralian cul­ture in 2004, but maybe she’s too last year, dah­ling.

Well, I sat down to write a brief response and ended up with a gush­ing tor­rent of words. That’ll happen. 

As for the rest of my life, it’s look­ing inter­est­ing to say the least. I could be very, very busy in the next few months. I’ll let you all know more when things are firmer.