Anti-graffiti
A white car with “Graffiti Management” on its door driving in the dirt beside McCauly Station with a wall of solid graffiti behind it. The derelict switchbox near Coburg Station where the graffiti is assiduously painted over but the building has been allowed to stand derelict for decades. Managing graffiti and allowing a hundred-year old brick buildings to slowly crumble is like the proverbial dog in a manger. Melbourne’s railways are being covered in anti-graffiti grey paint. The preference for grey graffiti proof paint over the multi-colour calligraphy of graffiti is a strange preference. The grey monotone symbolizes control that is considered good and therefore aesthe

Party @ Blender
They came together on a hot, humid November evening in Melbourne. There were young emerging artist – “aren’t that one of those twins that was on the ABC doco?”  There restless drunks clutching brown paper bags of take-away alcohol or sharing the silver plastic bag guts of a cask of wine; the beer had run out before I got there and the only thing that the very short barman was serving glasses of wine with every $2 donation to the gallery. They were no longer celebrating an exhibition opening but surviving another year in Melbourne’s art world. There was an exhibition opening earlier in the night at Michael Koro Gallery: “Surface”, an exhibition about the p

Street Artists making $
My blog entry Street Art & Galleries attracted a lot of comments some of them espoused a non-commercial ideal for street art. However, much of the free art on the streets appears to be advertising for street artist’s highly commercial enterprises, (see my blog entry Advertising & Graffiti). Street art is the most commercially accessible of contemporary movements; street art is far more commercial than even the Surrealism.  Street artists produce art from the high to low price range, from museum

Graduate Exhibition @ VCA
The VCA School of Art Graduate Exhibition 2009 is huge. Space after space filled with art: video installations, sculpture, paintings, drawings, printmaking, installations and things that defied classification, but were called “spatial practice” on the invite. If you are going to see this exhibition, and it is worth seeing, then give yourself over an hour to see it all. It is at the Margaret Lawrence Gallery (named after the Margaret Lawrence Bequest who supported the exhibition); which is all of the studio and workshop spaces at the VCA turned into a gallery. The entrance is at 40 Dodds St., Southbank, it looked like there was a cue to get in when I arrived shortly

Contemporary Craft – politics & blogs
Contemporary craft in Melbourne is street wise, informed about art history, political and fun. It is not fluffy, twee granny craft, but radical, cool craft. To understand how radical contemporary craft can get see:  Radical Cross Stitch, “seriously seditious stitching”. “A more interesting role for the word ‘craft’, perhaps, rather than leave it marooned as a pejorative cultural refugee, is to return to it updated to its function as a politicised response to modernization.” Paul Greenhalgh The Modern Ideal (V&A Publications, 2005) (p.93) In this political response craft is: un-alienat