A bit of back-story casts a dim light on the officially-sanctioned blue-ing of a Melbourne street art icon.
Rutledge Lane is a horseshoe-shaped lane that wraps around the building which used to house the now defunct street art gallery, Until Never.
Until Never’s director, Andrew Macdonald, aka Andy Mac, was the founder of the CityLights Projects and a pioneer in street art. He was the first Australian gallery director to see the potential in graffiti and street art on such a large scale, he battled the Melbourne City Council for years and he supported many artists early in their careers.
He obtained permission from the owners of buildings in the Hosier, Rutledge and also Centre Place laneways for street art, graffiti and his own curated outdoor art light boxes. CityLights held, over the course of over fifteen years, exhibitions by some of Australia’s brightest and finest artists and graffiti writers: Ha Ha, Ash Keating, Dlux (James Dodd), Phibs, Rone, Vexta, Nails, Civil, Anthony Lister, Deb, Al Stark, Braddock, Stormie Mills, Marc de Jong, Nat & Ali, Ben Frost, Adrian Doyle, David Noonan and Monica Tichachek. It hosted exhibitions by international street artists such as Blek Le Rat and Shepherd Fairey (Obey).
Andy Mac encouraged any visiting artists or writers to paint the walls. I remember visiting with the now late Aboriginal artist Ian Abdulla, in 2004. Mac urged him to paint on the walls, Abdulla could not be convinced: as an Aboriginal man, he said, he would be the one arrested, not us, despite our insistence that he had permission from the building’s owners.
Mac has left now; the place has no guardian. It may have become more scruffy and run down, which was partly part of its appeal, but nonetheless I was shocked when street artist Adrian Doyle this week painted the entire lane blue, with the backing of the City of Melbourne and RMIT University.
Doyle explained that the blue had come from experiences with his family and childhood:
‘By using Empty-Nursery Blue to cover Hosier Lane, I am symbolically ‘coating’ my present with my past, it is reminder to me and anyone who is living, that you are a product of your former experiences, and you should be reminded of them as you work your way through your present and into your future. By doing this, I am claiming that a colour in its pure form can be street art or graffiti. This is a great conceptual link from fine art to street art, a link that is often lacking in the Melbourne Street Art scene. By bridging this gap, I hope to expose more people not only to Street Art, but also to the importance of art in general.’
I am not sure I understand Doyle’s thinking here. The very site he painted over, as a conceptual artwork, had in fact been host to numerous conceptual artworks over the years of CityLights: from massive melting ice-blocks to umbrella installations. This is not the birth of conceptual street art in Melbourne: it had already happened: it had just left these lanes in particular when Mac did.
The concept of ephemerality is undoubtably central to both graffiti and street art. Graffiti writers spend huge amounts of time and energy on works that may not even last twenty-four hours. How many masterpieces have vanished within days, weeks or months, been cleaned off or painted over (the City of Melbourne itself has painted grey over numerous well-executed graffiti and street art works)? This is part of its nature. As with much Aboriginal art, it is the act itself that is important, rather than the result of the work decades down the track. And yet, for an art historian, this is tragedy. It recalls the Australian government’s destruction of the famed Honey Ant mural at Papunya, which was part of the birth of the desert art movement.
For me any work of substance: a tag with nice flow, a detailed wildstyle piece, a witty political slogan, a funny line, a multi-layered intricate stencil, all the variants and forms of good quality graffiti and street art are valid and interesting. I prefer them to a monotone concrete wall, I prefer them to remain, perhaps with others adding work around them, or to them, if done correctly.
I love the moving gallery walls of trains and static outside gallery walls. This was the beauty of Rutledge: it was a street art and graffiti cacophony: layers of imagery: tags, slogans, stencils, stickers, graffiti pieces, portraits, built up over years. Every time I walked around Rutledge, I’d take photographs of something that would catch my eye. There were works up high that made you look up; graffiti makes you look at your landscape, your city scape differently. It makes you look up and around and in corners, where you wouldn’t usually look.
I enjoyed visiting it to see what had changed. Some pieces stayed for ages, some disappeared under others. I liked that it wasn’t just street art: graffiti writers were present too. The late 1990s to late 2000s were significant in Melbourne art: for it was really the time the street art movement was born. Graffiti had flourished in the 1980s (in Melbourne); while there are still some decent practitioners left, the golden age is over.
Street art is a newer movement but it too peaked in the early to mid 2000s. This was a time of the Gulf War, George W.Bush, dissent, activism, which was carried out in a major way through street art. There is little of that left. Pretty images appear; decorative ones. They are stylised and beautiful, and promote peace, not justice. Thus the popularity of street art has grown; it now appears on designer clothes trickling down to mass-produced t-shirts made in the very sweatshops the earlier street artists protested against.
Artists were emerging then and now have gone onto successful careers and are living all over the globe. There have been some interesting street artists appearing in recent years in Melbourne, but it is nothing like the energy and vitality of that time.
What fails for me about Doyle’s piece, is that as an artwork, it’s just not a particularly interesting idea. Reductionist colour works were interesting in the 1950s, when Rothko explored them.
But this work to me is just well, simply, rather boring: it is not a burner, no matter how much Adrian Doyle may say it is. To me, and to many graffiti writers and street artists, this is a massive buff. A buff provides a clean slate, true.
Lord Mayor Robert Doyle himself said that: ‘”We are very proud of our street art in Melbourne and the epicentre of that is Hosier and Rutledge Lane and over the weekend my eponym Adrian Doyle has given us a blank canvas in Rutledge Lane…”
Whilst I would deny the original part of that sentence as historically true, perhaps now that street art brings advertisers, films and tourists, the Council is finally ‘very proud’ of it. Why then destroy it, why not create a new ‘blank canvas’ in another lane? Why cover over something that was a part of Melbourne, Australia and the world’s cultural history?
I find the ‘nursery’ aspect patronising and I’m not really convinced that it is creatively interesting to claim a colour as street art, as a ‘tag’.
It’s great that the City of Melbourne and its Lord Mayor and a large institution such as RMIT are not longer disinterested in street art, nor fighting it, nor removing it, or covering it up with grey paint. I’m just not convinced that covering it with any colour, whatever its artistically personal significance, is the right way forward.
Rutledge Lane in 2007 and the contrast this week:
(Pictured: Rutledge Lane has the blues.)
