Something to think about at the Guild

By Rhonda Dredge

As flat-dwellers seek out new routes for their daily walks, there’s a small public space by the Guild building opposite the Victorian College of the Arts (VCA) on Sturt St.

You can slip through to Moore St, past Café Godot, which was still open for takeaways when Southbank News wandered through on April 2.

Along the north wall of the pedestrian walkway are four vitrines.

In them is the only art exhibition that can safely be visited in person in the arts precinct.

While most other artists have left the precinct to work on their visions, Mark Radosavljevic and Mayed Fayad have theirs on display in an exhibition called Cannonade.

Presence is everything for a viewer who likes to look rather than listen to what might have been or what might occur in the future.

Visibility is the key factor.

Ironically, this is the theme of the exhibition, which looks at the way history fades and is reinterpreted from the present.

The artists have cleverly used the glass at the front of the vitrines to represent our graphic present and the back of the vitrines to represent the slowly fading past.

Sometimes we wipe out the past from the present with a few cross lines. Other times we wow it and make a fuss. Finally, we blow it up with a BANG!

What remains in this fight between the past and the present are the contours of a few, old colonial buildings that we still romance.

According to the artists, “recorded history requires similar digestion to works of fiction yet it is accorded a different status.”

This message is a constant one from the art community, accusing us – the viewing public – of thinking of the canon as a singular idea when really history is complex and fragmented.

There would be few people alive today who still believe in the old method of recording history in terms of dates and facts.

The art, like always, is more powerful than the message because it deals with images that have mood, tone, edges and a host of other material qualities that have to be simulated in language.

The artists have juxtaposed dreamy, romantic drawings of settlement in Melbourne against dark, aggressive tools that suggest how it was achieved.

Early Melbourne was beautiful. People rowed along the river, built a tent city, erected churches and public buildings. The landscape was as conducive to settlement as anywhere in the world.

What has happened to that vision? Has our canon become a cannon? What remains?

A few contemporary photographs give us clues. Do we glorify our achievements in art yet build expendable towers for economic greed?

At least you’ll have something to think about at the Guild •