Sydney’s laneways ain’t Melbourne’s
COMMENT
Tired of Sydney’s public art being tightly controlled by Council, we had been resisting the latest in an endless string of “festivals” designed by the big end of town to make Sydney a Fun Place, attractive to dwindling numbers of tourists.
But when a friend invited us to do the laneways tour on Friday night, we gave it a go.
We found ourselves among a straggle of confused and underwhelmed people trying to follow maps made cryptic by the omission of most of the street names.
But our first installation, Forgotten Songs, looked promising. A host of empty bird cages suspended above Angel Place felt surreal while the songs of birds long-gone from the city rang out clearly from hidden speakers.
Next we found Infinity Forest, not quite living up to its publicity images. It was a small mirror-lined room on the corner of two lanes, filled with Silver Birch saplings. It was only later, looking at the brochure, that we realised the mirrors were supposed to create the illusion of a large forest. Nice idea, but the thick foliage blocked most of the reflections.
Then our map-challenged group got lost until we found what looked like a 1970s beer garden outside a pub. There were square orange vinyl seats among small, crooked plants, some of which seemed to be life-challenged, bracketed by two large plastic roadwork barriers. There were red dots on the ground. We asked the bouncer if this was one of the artworks and she thought it was a “Council thing”. Nobody was using the space.
After a few dead-ends where we found ourselves in deserted loading docks and the like, we found I dwell in the city and the city dwells in me. The best thing about it was its name. Stuck here and there on the brick walls around the entrance to The Establishment nightclub were what looked like a few bits of pig carcase, complete with hairs. Hmmn. No doubt there’s a meaning there.
The urban barcode was a set of white flourescent lights strung above Abercrombie lane. They changed a bit now and then, and there were some barely decipherable matching strips of black on the road surface below. Basically the neons outside the strip clubs in Kings Cross leave it for dead. Art seekers kept walking.
Teeth gritted, we forged on to find The meeting place, two sheets of yellow material curving either side of Little Hunter Street. Our group, and another couple we met, scratched our heads and moved on.
Then we found the Seven metre bar in Underwood St. Yes! A crazy collection of urban junk including cars, boats and signs adorned the wall around a red-lit bar selling cocktails for $10–12 while movies flickered on the opposite wall. It was full with fun people chatting over the rock music soundtrack. The idea was to represent the city after catastrophic climate change. Only one drawback – it will be pulled down on 31 January along with all the other installations. Here’s one vote for making it permanent.
It’s hard to see how putting this event on once a year is going to result in anything like the laneways of Melbourne or Barcelona which have evolved over years, free of Sydney’s heavy-handed regulation which kills life even as the regulators throw fortunes at bread and circuses, themselves destined to become forgotten songs.
by Michael Gormly
