Public art strategy

Excuse the large deviation from this blog's nominal topic. I'm not even going to try to tie this in...

I just read Owen Hatherley's piece on roadside architecture in Britain:

Today’s landscape is morphed and sullied by the car via all sorts of underinvestigated types, from out-of-town shopping centres to drive-ins, business parks and hotels, the Americanised space hymned by JG Ballard, who in the eighties claimed “the future is going to be boring”.

This boredom is represented very neatly in the architecture the car currently inspires.

The situation, for a number of reasons, is rather different in Australia. Like home ownership, the ownership of a car is held to be something like an inalienable human right in Australia. More than this, though, the car is a key mythological symbol in contemporary Australia. The road, even more so. This supremacy of the vehicle and highway recalls the situation in the US, except Australia has its own versions of this modernist frontier narrative. See Mad Max. Listen to The Triffids. Read Meaghan Morris. Skim Graeme Davison.

A debate about the merits of public transportation and private transportation is ongoing in Australia. It's fairly heated in Melbourne at the moment, as the state government insists on building large freeway projects and neglecting a PPP rail network.

EastLink is one of the recent freeway projects. A toll road, it arcs around the belly of this sprawling city's eastern suburbs, delivering city drivers to the Mornington Peninsula and vice versa. The road, it seems, has not been as popular as projected - although one of the hallmarks of such constructions is the way in which they launch housing prices upwards and thereby increase the 'desirability' of certain suburbs around them. The fallow fields next to the freeway will be sprouting houses soon enough.

"Desiring Machine" by Simeon Nelson

One of the selling points of this road - alongside "extensive park and wetlands for native plants and animals" - is that it is dotted by public art projects. These must form part of what their website calls "eye catching urban design features."

"Hotel" by Callum Morton

The best of these is Callum Morton's "Hotel." This is part of an ongoing exploration by Morton of the anonymous international hotel space. In his "Valhalla" and "Babylonia" installations (see them here), external structures of 'ruins' and a cave harbour blank luxury-hotel corridors and foyers. The "Hotel" piece is a scaled-down version of a tall, uninspiring hotel structure. Less luxury, this one, and more family-roadtrip pitstop. Although you can't go inside, its windows blink at night, glowing blue as its imagined visitors distractedly flick through channels of - what? Porn and chat shows? The scale - it must be about 2/3rds, enough to make a normal-sized human not-quite-fit - and semblance and feasible roadside position make the structure uncanny, sure to make many do a double-take.

But there's more than art on EastLink. Cyclists and walkers can wander the EastLink Trail. May a thousand Iain Sinclairs bloom: the trail "includes vantage points from which to enjoy the EastLink Environment." (Capital E!) This is a nod to the exigencies of the car-dictated suburban environment in Melbourne, with its poorly provisioned estates and momentarily glamorous housing developments. (These were once called exurbs, but that feels a bit dated.) What better way to get some exercise than by walking along the road which takes you to work each day.

This type of activity is both encouraged and admonished. A large warehouse along the freeway - somewhere around Dandenong, I believe - carries an injunction in the form of its occupier's brand slogan: "Work. Don't play." This peculiarly aggressive and patrician invocation seeks a strong-armed embrace of alienation. No time to recreate, fuckers, keep working.

These slogans form part of the entertainment for those driving the road's sleek and smooth new lanes. This is "the sad anomie of the individual bunkered in the car," as Owen puts it, "refusing to get on the train that would get them there in half the time." But the car has its pleasures. The car has always been for me one of my favourite places to listen to music. There I get to do it loudly and with a focus I barely manage elsewhere.

"Public Art Strategy" by Emily Floyd

Out along EastLink, trains are barely an option. There are no trains servicing large parts of this tract. Consequently, the public art - let alone the "eye catching urban design features" - plays the role of product differentiator. With a number of other roads leading to the same destinations - the CBD, other eastern suburbs, the Peninsula - the toll road must spruik for trade. Aside from the art, a primary attraction for the driver is its lack of congestion. In a city growing by over a thousand people each week, with little affordable new housing anywhere near the city, the roads are busier for longer (peak-hour begins earlier and ends later, the midday drop off now barely perceptible) and bottles-up much further out from the city.

"Ellipsoidal Freeway Sculpture" by James Angus

Obviously, the toll has the effect of segregating commuters based upon financial means. Those who can afford the toll get the benefits of a pleasant, smooth driving experience: uncongested roads, endlessly serviced by a team of sub-contractors, with a smatter of public art curios installed next to the service lanes.

The art and architectural design features, then, aid the marketing and 'delivery' of a 'product' aimed at a more discerning commuter-consumer. In a city with an ailing public transport system, the roads have their own websites and art projects. In a (once?) neoliberal economy with little space for independent culture, the public art is given titles and content pointing to a certain self-consciousness about being involved in a road project - or, in the case of "Public Art Strategy," given to commenting on the controversy surrounding other public art projects.

And, in the final loose thread, it's perhaps in this context that middling singer-songwriters find the inspiration to film clips next to these arterials, staging something of their own public art extravaganza (I refer, specifically, to the reverse hat throw at 4:39):