NAKED CITY: ART & ABOUT WITH THE YELLOW PERIL!

Does anybody remember the ‘yellow peril’?  Not some form of racist xenophobia from the Menzies era but the much maligned public sculpture called Vault which was originally commissioned by the Melbourne City Council for the new city square way back in 1978. Lampooned mercilessly by the tabloid press and despised by conservative factions in the Council, it soon became the laughing stock of a bleak city.

One critic even suggested that it might become a hiding place for deviates who would leap unexpectedly into the passing crowd, exposing themselves to all and sundry. Child safety experts declared its protruding angles unsafe and overall its bright yellow colour was a cause of great consternation for Melbournians used to grey winter skies and a monochramtic landscape.

Finally the Council gave into pressure and the ‘yellow peril’, as it had been dubbed by the tabloids, was exiled to a gulag-like park near the Westgate Bridge where it remained for years, daubed with graffiti and unloved even by the homeless who failed to take shelter in its hulking interior. It wasn’t until two decades later, given a quick scrub and a coat of Dulux, that it was moved to its current Southbank position and revered with a newborn cult status that can only come with 20 years of shameful neglect.

We recall the Vault and its artistic resurrection as for the next month or so the City of Sydney is home to Art & About, an explosion of colourful installations all over the CBD and surrounds. It promotes the concept of art in unusual places like laneways, illuminated trees in Hyde Park and a prefrabricated house in Macquarie Street where you don a plastic raincoat (yellow by the way!) to experience an environment, “where rains pours inside its walls slowly destroying the private word within”. Mmm – seems strange the Council can put up a house to keep the rain in when the homeless men of Wolloomooloo are constantly looking for somewhere to keep the rain out.

That of course is the irony of great art and like the Peril down in Melbourne you don’t have to love it to otherwise learn and grow from the experience. Mind you when that prefab house outside the Hyde Parks Barrack has run its course we would love to see it moved to the Loo to provide some much needed emergency accom during the wet summer nights.

In the meantime would it be art or anarchy if a group of squatters took up residence, undeterred by the constant downpour indoors? Local fauna seem to have got a bum deal during Art & About, with Hyde Park lit up like a christmas tree so at least a family of possums could be encouraged to nest in the roof. Additionally ibis could be encouraged to adorn the Astroturf surrounds, aerosoled pink to resemble a flock of flamingos and an essential stop for the Sydney sightseeing bus.

Finally it may sound outrageous but perhaps Sydney could do a straight-out swap with Melbourne – the Monorail for the Vault. Melbourne has the big wide streets that could easily accommodate the Mono and how wonderful that gawky assemblage of yellow steel slabs would look positioned like a crown atop the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Laugh if you like but we’d like to think that’s just art baby – out there, in your face and about!