Works of art part of our city landscape. Here's 20 of our favourites
October 10, 2009
SCHOOL groups and newlyweds, TV stars and tourists. The thousands of people who troop through Hosier Lane week in, week out are looking for the same thing; the technicolour street art that screams across its walls.
"People approach art in a different way when they see it in a space like this," street-art curator Andy Mac says.
But its not just the volume of visitors that makes this cobbled city lane a must-see site. It's the way Hosier Lane's vibrant graffiti murals are renewed and embellished.
Mac reports: "Something changes in this lane every day and sometimes large sections of it change overnight."
Elsewhere in Melbourne, art stays the same, year in, year out, and we like that, too. It's comforting to know we can wander into Young and Jackson Hotel any time and eyeball Chloe over a beer. Or dine at St Kilda's Tolarno under the enduring gaze of Mirka Mora's cherubs. Or stumble on William Ricketts' mystical sculptures in their ferny sanctuary at Olinda.
Down at the National Gallery of Victoria, we expect to see Tiepolo's masterpiece, The Banquet of Cleopatra, and Tom Roberts' Shearing the Rams. "Destination paintings", they call them.
But we don't seek them out just because they're famous. These masterworks - one gloriously European, the other utterly Australian - are so rich, so layered, they reward repeated viewings.
The same goes for sculpture. Melbourne's civic authorities can legislate all they like to have a certain amount of space set aside for public art, but favouritism cannot be fixed by committee. We decide.
"If the person creating the work brings something personal and genuine to it, that somehow speaks to others," sculptor Peter Corlett says.
He should know. Corlett's statues of Sir Edward "Weary" Dunlop in St Kilda Rd and Ted "Mr Football" Whitten outside Footscray's Whitten Oval are among our most visited.
Dunlop and Whitten are great Australians, of course, so their larger-than-life images are viewed by many as hymns to compassion and courage.
For emotional impact, it's hard to beat Man and His Donkey at the Shrine of Remembrance. More than half a million people visit the Shrine reserve each year and this small bronze - which speaks so eloquently about the Anzac spirit - is by far the most recognised.
"Many come to the Shrine just to see it," a spokesman tells us. "A family from Tasmania were here the other day because they wanted their fiveyearold to see Simpson and his donkey."
Animals are always popular. People pat Pamela Irving's dingo-like Larry La Trobe in the old City Square andm seek out the lizard secreted in The Children's Tree in Elizabeth St.
Humour gets us in as well. We smile back at Luna Park's Mr Moon face, we're bemused by the Architectural Fragment outside the State Library, and we slow down to look at Callum Morton's fake Hotel on EastLink,
The right location is essential. Would Inge King's Forward Surge at the Arts Centre be as popular with skateboarders if it were not so visible? Probably not.
The NGV's decision to place Bill Viola's Ocean without a shore near the gallery's waterwall was inspired. Viola's 2007 video presents viewers with solitary figures immersed in water and deputy director Frances Lindsay reports that visitors now seek it out and stay to watch.
"When something transfixes you and you can barely leave its presence... that's great art," she says.
Events can change the way we view things. It's almost impossible for a Victorian to inspect William Strutt's Black Thursday, February 6,1851 at the State Library and not think of Black Saturday, 2009.
People change, too. In the 1980s, Ron Robertson Swann's abstract sculpture Vault - dubbed The Yellow Peril by its critics - divided the community. Moved to a museum in Southbank, it barely raises an eyebrow now.
Our understanding of what constitutes art is vastly different and there's growing acceptance that a temporary installation - perhaps inserted into a lane - can be just as convincing as something permanent.
As Steven Tonkin, who curates the art collection at the Arts Centre, says: "Temporal work is unexpected and because you may not see it again, you actually work harder to experience it."
Ultimately, art puts new things in the world things that didn't exist until artists dreamed them up and their creations are complete only when spectators stop to look.
CITY LIGHTS (1996) Artists: Various
Where: Hosier Lane and Centre Place, city, The story: Fifteen years ago, they were largely ignored, but when street-art curator Andrew Mac installed light boxes in Hosier Lane and Centre Place, he helped turn these alleys into hugely popular sites for stencil and graffiti art.
Writer : Simon Plant
Pictures: Ian Curries and Ben Swinnerton