Melbourne’s beating heart

Bling and variety at NGV

Sophie Knezic

Melbourne Now launched in 2013 as a massive survey championing contemporary art. Ten years on, the National Gallery of Victoria presents the second iteration. As with many sequels, the intent is to be bigger and better. Melbourne Now 2023 styles itself as an extravaganza, an epic journey into the city’s artistic beating heart. Art works spill across all three levels of the Gallery, and the tone is one of exuberance and bounty.

This edition features more than two hundred projects and seventy new commissions by artists and designers working in fields we might expect the gallery to support: photography, drawing, ceramics, painting, printmaking, performance, video, and installation. It also showcases product design, fashion design, jewellery, civic architecture, and book publishing.

In addition, Melbourne Now offers a Community Hall with a rotation of works, a Performance Program, and an Artist Film Program. It’s a lot to get your head around.

Bearing the stamp of Tony Ellwood’s directorship of NGV, the exhibition leans towards spectacle, as if its foremost intention is to awe audiences. Firmly in this camp is Rel Pham’s TEMPLE (2022), a large-scale structure built from hundreds of computer fans whirring simultaneously, illuminated by electric blue light from a central Bagua with digital animations of Taoist cosmological symbols. Its bling effect is the antithesis of serenity. Nearby, Troy Emery’s Mountain climber (2022), a three-metrehigh sculpture of a big cat in a semi-predatory pose made from polyurethane foam studded with multi-coloured pom-pom balls, gains drama solely from its imposing scale.

Continuing the trend towards the oversized, a display room titled Vessels (curated in conjunction with Craft Victoria) presents ceramic vases of varying forms and techniques from fifteen artists. As tabletop works, however, many are exaggerated in scale, as if pumped with steroids, vying for attention in a crowded room.

The curatorial decision has been to intersperse the works amid the permanent collection of Australian art; a strategy that has limited success. Some works suffer by comparison with others nearby. While linked by a mutual interest in activism, the sprightly elegance of Sarah CrowEST’s Strap-on Paintings (2022–23) is overshadowed by proximity to Jan Nelson’s interactive wind chimes and bulky crocheted rug made from protest T-shirts, whose concentric coloured rings suck the room’s attention. Kenny Pittock’s 52 shopping lists found while working at a supermarket –a series of cleverly crafted ceramic facsimiles of these very lists – loses impact surrounded by a motley collection of dour, early modernist abstract paintings.

Other works are more effectively juxtaposed. Julia Ciccarone’s meticulous trompe l’oeil paintings nestle nimbly near Frederick McCubbin’s The Pioneer (1904) and other Impressionist paintings; each artist fuelled by a desire to depict the idiosyncrasies of the Australian landscape. The historical divide across more than one hundred years brings into relief the contrast between the urge towards conservation in an era of ecocide and the blitheness of the colonialist gaze. Similarly, Megan Evans’s Wills Project (2021) – a vitrine of nineteenth-century wills and portraits delicately painted over with skulls, feathers, and fake blood as an ambivalent comment on inheritance – is surrounded by colonial landscape paintings implying invisible histories of dispossession.

After being dispersed through the permanent collection, Melbourne Now occupies the Gallery’s entire top floor. Here the works come into their own. A room dedicated to fashion presents works by eighteen independent designers challenging the hegemony of global fashion. Garments are diverse and striking, with varying cuts, fabrics, and textures making for a pot-pourri of vivid, energetic designs. Another room stages the Design Wall, a massive scaffolding holding thirty-five projects of product design such as the SRS70C electro-acoustic guitar by Maton Guitars; Carry On Light (2021–22), the world’s lightest hard-shell suitcase designed by Alan Kirszner; and a basin, shower, and mixer set designed by Australia’s first carbon-neutral tap company, Sussex Taps.

The most cogent section of the entire exhibition is Slippery Images: an adroitly curated selection of works by contemporary photographers who treat the medium in unorthodox ways, pulling away any sense of sure ground. Ali McCann’s digital type C prints are beguiling hybrids; images that depict three-dimensional objects against curiously flattened grounds or else appear half-painted, half-photographed like the bisected woman in The secret life IV (After Magritte) (2020/2022). Kiron Robinson’s photographs similarly subvert flatness through interference with actual objects, such as a pile of photographic magazines that are punctured by a tube of glass in Stack 2 (2020). The most impressive work in Slippery Images is the photographic installation Surface measure: threshold device (2022–23) by Danica Chappell. Using a dark-room technique of camera-less photography, Chappell produces a choreography of luminous abstract forms that glide across the paper’s surface, whose long sheets tumble gracefully from tall metal supports. If there is a standout in the entire exhibition, however, it is Nicholas Mangan’s Core Coralations (2022), a film and related sculpture based on Mangan’s time at the Australian Institute of

Marine Science’s National Sea Simulator, a research unit studying the environmental impacts of climate change on living coral. The film captures close-ups of stressed ocean reefs, isolated specimens, lab machinery and schematic graphs, all cast in a silvery glow; an eerie bioluminescence conveying an otherworldly reality to coral destruction and the scientific attempts to reverse it.

Bearing the stamp of Tony Ellwood’s directorship of NGV, Melbourne Now leans towards spectacle

While there are many fine works in Melbourne Now –although also some glib pieces by artists who have previously made better work – the main problem with Melbourne Now is its lack of focus alongside an exhibitionary intent to be bigger than Ben Hur. With the exception of the tautly curated section Slippery Images, the main shortfall is the absence of a linking thread between all the projects – apart from the fact that they have been recently made by local artists. This is a stretchy curatorial premise covering for what is really a grab bag of miscellaneous works. One wonders if a series of separate exhibitions with a sharper curatorial focus would allow more cohesive investigation along specific thematic lines and be a better way for audiences to be provoked by the vitality of contemporary art and design. g

Sophie Knezic is a writer, scholar and visual artist, who works between practice and theory.

Melbourne Now continues at NGV Australia until 20 August 2023.