the art fair

oh, the art fair...the Exhibition Buildings full of artistically dressed people, sipping champagne...

trends this year appear to include blobs - silvery blobs, blobs made of fibreglass and covered with shiny car enamel, roughhewn silvery blobs, and my favourite, long blobby things, vaguely biological,improbably carved out of marble. Butterflies and moths are big too - real, painted and video, to name just three manifestations I saw.

and yes, Melbourne-themed art. Aboriginal carvings, brightly painted, representing AFL footballers, sharing a space with more traditional painted emu figures...a large, $88,000 painting showing Melbourne as fields and the city gathered around the south of the bay, in Geelong, complete with Westgate across the Heads (that's a slightly different one by the same artist, Jan Senbergs, above).

there was Marc de Jong, with pixillated paintings of ordinary Melbourne scenes - my son said "Bunnings!" with great delight.

and lots of great stuff that was not specifically Melbourne, but from here...plus some glass thingies that I adore but cannot afford and are not relevant to Melbourne in any way at all.

and as this is my blog and I can do, like whatever, I reproduce here the text of a mini-zine I wrote for the art fair four years ago, and left on the staircase banisters for artlovers to find and ponder...



You came to see the art show. You were thinking of paintings, etchings, photographs and the like, something largish to hang in that blank space in the hall; you hadn’t thought of sculpture.

But when you walked in, out of the cold drizzle into the warm bright space vibrating with voices, there it was, facing you across the length of the old high-ceilinged building. You skip the free wine at the door and walk past the too-many pictures, to see what it is.

It’s like a giant drum on its side. Where the skin should be, colours swirl. It’s hard to tell if they are coloured gases or some kind of light projection, lasers maybe, or something done with mirrors.

Did you ever play with glass marbles? This is the most beautiful, desirable coloured circle you could have imagined then, when you were eight.

Listen. It’s sighing, singing to itself, trying out high notes and harmonies, but softly, so softly.

Is it alive? The sides are polished steel, marked with unfamiliar hieroglyphics. It rests in a kind of fine white ceramic cradle, cast to fit its curve exactly.

It’s like a ball held in the hand.

There are no clues at the back; the sheet steel extends across its rear face. A single thick cable runs from the machine to a socket in the wall.

Is it a machine? If it is, what does it do? What’s it for? Machines are supposed to be useful, after all.

A hand held a centimeter from the shining metal detects warmth, vibration, almost a pulse.

But no one touches it. Now there are five or six people gathered before it, admiring the moving colours, seeing patterns in the clouds. They don’t seem to be afraid.

A child – waist-high, hair combed straight and cut just below his ears – steps forward and reaches into the coloured mist. So it’s hollow. There is no sheet of glass or perspex between its interior and its audience.

The boy moves his hand about, disturbing the drifting patterns. A soft ululation begins, deep inside the drum: ay-yi-yi-yi-yi-yi-ay, repeating itself on shifting notes. The boy laughs, and immediately the machine replies, adding a hearty “whumphf” at the end of each utterance.

A little sister – one of two, copper-haired, pink-dressed – runs to her brother’s side and peers into the drum. A quick tapping rhythm is added to the music. She claps her hands and a triple clap, set to a faster beat, joins the songline.

“It’s a music machine,” their mother says to their father, keeping her hands on her remaining child’s shoulders.

“Clever,” he says, walking where you’ve just been, looking for buttons to press or levers to pull. There are none.

“Give someone else a turn,” the mother says, mindful of the gathering crowd. The children return to her, but the music continues as the five of them walk away, the parents tall on either side of the three little creatures.

Two elderly ladies, occupying the same body at different stages of decrepitude, walk forward out of the group.

“Are you sure you want to get close to it, Mum?” asks the younger.

“And why not?” says the older. This record’s been played before.

The hand-clapping, thumping, nonsense-singing music drifts away as they approach. The daughter takes the mother’s arm, and a violin begins to keen. Each phrase starts low and finishes high and drawn out. Three short steps bring the older woman right to the brink of the drum, where the colours seem to have darkened, taken on a sunset hue. In the distance, as far back in the machine as possible, a gentle ragtime tune is playing on an upright piano, probably one of those automatic players operated by a roll of yellowed paper pierced with notes.

“Those tunes don’t go together,” the younger woman complains; but her mother is nodding softly and swinging her free hand a little, like a conductor in her dreams. Her hand is still keeping time as her daughter takes her off towards the coffee franchise stand in the corner of the hall for tea and muffins.

While the crowd makes up its mind whether or not to try this thing out, a young man – a youth, you’d call him, if he loomed behind you on an abandoned railway station platform – steps into the horseshoe space now walled with spectators. Once he’s stepped in, he has to keep going, swinging his shoulders in his boiled-wool, vinyl-sleeved jacket, a football club’s logo printed on his back. His mates’ voices jeer from the back of the crowd, and he executes a clumsy kung fu kick, aiming a grey and fraying sneaker into the glowing pit before turning his back on the stupid thing. A few of the watchers suck in their breath, with disapproval or apprehension, but the machine doesn’t seem to mind: it responds with a cacophony of bells, the voices of the gang transformed into a ringing set of clear harmonies in conversation with each other. The gang moves off, but the boy – a youth, you’d call him if he was sneaking down your back lane with a can of spraypaint hidden under his jacket – hangs back, looking over his shoulder at the faint colourful glow showing over the top of the crowd.

A woman in red-framed glasses, matching lipstick and a boxy jacket has been watching from the edge of the crowd. Before anyone else can move, she slips to the face of the machine and plunges her hands in, fingers moving like a pianist’s, whispering instructions. You wait for the piano music to begin; but the machine is silent. She shakes her blunt-cut black bob and turns away; as she pushes an exit through the crowd, a crisp drumbeat starts up: dum-diddle, dum-diddle, dum-diddle, dum. She turns her sharp blue eyes back on the cloudy interior, which seems to have gathered itself into the centre of the circle; there’s silence again. Eventually she turns away again and there’s a single dum! as she disappears amongst the black-suited artlovers.

Now there’s a queue, and people with video recorders and cameras; the bunch of humans has reached that critical mass where those at the back can’t see or hear what’s going on at the front, adding to the attraction of whatever it is that’s happening. But still the space just in front of the drum stays clear, as people step forward one by one to hear their music.

After everyone else has had a turn, done with their marvelling and theorising about how it works, when the workers are stacking the chairs up at the coffee zone and the lights at the back of the hall are being switched off, dying in banks of six, you come out of the shadows, feeling like you’re entering a spotlight.

Little shots of white light dart across the face of the drum, like lightning on a multicoloured storm front. There’s a beating sound, but perhaps that’s your heart. There’s a kind of sighing, but that could be your breath. Something that could be the chiming of a triangle, or a shiver down your back, trills through your mind. You stand and wait as the hall falls away into darkness.

The gentle hand of a uniformed security guard on your shoulder brings you back; she’s asking: “Sir? The exhibition’s closing.” And you shake your head quickly, say thank you, I’m sorry, and let her walk you out through the oversized doors into the night; the night where the dew on the grass is singing to you, the streetlights are refracting in the fountain, from diamond to ruby to emerald to sapphire, and the stars overhead are raining music onto your upturned, tear-wet face.