A way to remember in a time of free market forgetting

Next year is the 40th anniversary of the military coup that overthrew the democratically elected socialist government of Salvador Allende in Chile. This elected alternative to free market economics was met with state violence supported by the most powerful nation in the world. The 17-year dictatorship that followed traces the systematic end to the idea that democracy would be permitted to deliver equality and justice. In 1989 the Cold War symbolically ended with the fall of the Berlin wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union. At the end of Pinochet’s dictatorship, this point signified the apparent victory of capital over labor through both a global financial system connected in a real time global communication network and the military industrial complex that is coordinated by and underpins it.

In 1990 the period of transition to a new kind of democracy commenced in Chile with the return of a democratically elected government followed by sustained economic growth in the first decade of 21st century. The term ‘transition to democracy’ was used to describe this period. It is a term now widely used to describe dictatorships formerly supported by the US - from the middle east and north Africa to Asia and the Pacific region - as they embrace or are strangled by free market economics.

BiciPaseos Patrimoniales, frente al Museo de Bellas Artes, Santiago

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Default – Art, Culture and Cities

“The advocacy of artistic intervention in the public realm shifted radically during the 1980’s. Public Art became increasingly justified, not in aesthetic terms but rather on the basis of its supposed contribution to what might be broadly termed ‘Urban regeneration’.”i After three decades of arts involvement in such regeneration and in the midst of a global economic crisis, what might be the substance of these claims or the relevance of such ideas? In September 2011, I attended a master class in residence in Lecce in Southern Italy to discuss art, cities and regeneration with 20 practicing artists and 13 presenters across 10 days. The workshop was entitled Default.

The reinvention of cities in the Middle Ages and again in the 18th century saw massive movements of people from rural societies to the nascent capitalist and industrial cities respectively. Urban regeneration in the early 21 century plays out many of the predictions of Lefebvre’s thesis as articulated in David Harvey in the Right to the City: surplus capital finds its form and generation in the urban and its regeneration and/or flight spells disaster for the city or region that is not willing or able to compete with either privatized and/or subsidised infrastructure, exploitative labour or the cultural and natural assets of tourism. The de-industrialisation of these same cities in the developed world and the role of rural and semi-rural communities in the developing world’s urban century create a new paradigm for place, culture and the movement of people. The question of mobility in a globalised world is often considered in relation to the migration of those who chose to move (the professionals) and those who are forced to move (the asylum seekers and refugees escaping war or persecution). However, a third group needs consideration across both the developed and developing world as “it is estimated that fully 40% of all people on earth will be involved is such migration”ii This figure includes the movement within and between cities, regions and countries in pursuit of employment within cities.

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Banal and Mundane

In her article published in 2005 “Kant comes to Footscray Mall - thinking about local cosmopolitanism"”, Dr Maree Pardy reclaims the notion of cosmopolitanism from the educated and cultural elite, at home everywhere in the world, for the “mundane and banal” circumstances of a suburban place with the world in it.

Footscray is 7 kilometres from the centre of Melbourne but is subjected to the inevitable homogenizing effect of property prices. It the space of five years it has become unaffordable.

The City of Greater Dandenong (CGD) is 30 kilometres from Melbourne’s centre and like Footscray has an industrial base of working class and migrant labour and a refugee intake that traces most of the political and social conflict and upheaval of the 20th and 21 centuries. Unlike most regions in a post industrial Australia, CGD retains a large manufacturing base and its historic regional status as a rural centre is now replaced as the centre of a growth corridor of dormitory suburbs.

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Public Mourning

Public mourning recently manifest itself in two curious forms in the state of Victoria, Australia. The first was a national day of mourning following the recent bushfires, known as Black Saturday, which killed 173 people. The second was a road side memorial commemorating the death of four teenagers that allegedly caused the death of another person at the same site two weeks later.

Commemorative events and spontaneous memorials gain resonance in the manner in which they appropriate public space. Sites that are used for one function are transformed for a period of time into a place of ceremony. Urban infrastructure becomes a prop for personal shrines. The form which these ceremonies and shrines assume demands respect regardless of the site’s former purpose or the manner in which the memorial is made. However, the location only partially assumes the status of a collective site of memory. Public space remains contested most clearly in matters of death and who can be commemorated, how, where and by whom.

The Premier of Victoria announced that the Federation Bells would be rung at 11 am on Sunday 22 February 2009 to commence the national day of mourning. He invited the ringing of church and town hall bells to join this moment of reflection.

I was unsure how to express my feelings at such a tragic loss of life and decided to be present. I imagined the air filled with the sounds of bells radiating out from the city centre to the suburbs. No words would be needed.

Federation Bells were commissioned as part of an earlier commemoration marking the centenary of the Federation of Australia. Designed by Neil McLachlan and Anton Hassell, the idea behind Federation bells is the question of whether secular society can have meaningful ceremony. In proposing a response to this question, the designer and artist team trace the spatial and sonic history of bell ringing from church spire to clock tower as the signifier of the city's collective ritual – the sound of religious ceremony is surrogated by mechanistic time in architecture and acoustic form that would be the medium of this work of art. Federation Bells is essentially a public artwork as instrument for which compositions are written and it was planned that these would be played daily at specific times or on specific occasions. It is an instrument consisting of 39 inverted bronze bells of various sizes standing at varying heights in Birrurung Marr. Birrarung Marr, the first park to be constructed in Melbourne in 100 years, means 'river of mists' and 'river bank' in the Woiwurrung language of the Wurundjeri people, and is a symbolic gesture of reconciliation with the original custodians of the land.

On the National Day of Mourning, in this location of historic symbolism, I was the only other person to join a television crew waiting at Federation Bells as 11.00am came and went with not a single bell tolled in the whole of the City of Melbourne. A dirge rose from the nearby Rod Laver arena, possibly the national anthem, marking the commencement of our national day of mourning. The bells to be rung turned out to be another set of much smaller, hand ringing bells and the televised ceremony was held inside the artificially lit and climate controlled sports facility. That the national day of mourning should happen inside a sports stadium and through the televised tears and speeches transmitted into the living rooms and towns across Australia is perhaps understandable from a practical point of view. But public mourning is unmediated and its impacts on the vicariously involved is through sound (or silence) and physical presence in a city or town. However, the capital city of Black Saturday could not be interrupted by even a sound, a moment of pause and involuntary collective reflection. The mourners could not be seen in public except exiting the sports stadium, caught, edited and telecast by the waiting television crew as they made their way into the car park and back home.

The public artwork in the public park, imagined as a place of public ceremony, ringing out through the entire city a mournful toll marking a national day of mourning could not be realized and was never even considered.

The only toll to permeate this car dependent city for its 70 kilometre radius is the road toll. Like the national day of mourning it is telecast into our homes and towns. The nightly news reports the aftermath of mangled vehicles and an endless, escalating and shocking series of advertisements graphically depict full impact, multi car collisions and dramatised reenactments of human tragedy. Bumper stickers feature a white line crucifix under the slogan of “Touched by the Toll” and spontaneous memorials sprout along the extensive and ever expansive road networks of Metropolitan Melbourne.

On the 27 June 2009 four young people were killed in a two car collision in the outer suburb of Lynbrook in metropolitan Melbourne. A memorial was erected by friends of the deceased which grew, scaling a pole to over three metres and strewing over the pavement at an intersection which was the site of the accident. Just two weeks later, a fatality occurred at exactly the same spot with a driver collided with a truck. It was suggested that the shrine either obscured the view or distracted the driver and caused the accident. The shrine was subsequently removed by the authorities to the protests of friends of the first fatalities.

People do not chose where they die. For young people in Victoria between 15 -29 this place is most likely to be on a road, in or hit by a car. Unlike the Lynbrook memorial, most shrines are modest and personal in scale, made as if to be visited and tendered by individuals while signifying a place of mourning to the general public. Made with tremendous care from everyday items, the spontaneous memorials demand acknowledgement for this very reason – they universalize the personal and personalize the collective tragedy of the road toll in a material and present manner. These shrines are defiant in a way that is inspiring and poignant, countering the speed with a shrine to the victim of this very velocity and marking a place in an urban form often described as a non place. These memorials are beginning to feature on freeways where, paradoxically, it is illegal to stop except for an emergency and where pedestrians are banned. I have yet to see one of these memorials on the privately managed tollway where there is no advertising, litter, life or presumably death.

Unlike the public day of mourning without a presence in a public place, the roadside memorial takes possession of space and forces the uninvolved to consider death in the course of our daily life. It cannot be ignored like the enclosed ceremony, shrugged off or generate repulsion like the graphic television advertisements and it is most certainly a citizen initiated action about the one thing we all share - mortality.

Post Script: In the Brazilian city of Puerto Alegre one metre wide, white stencilled butterflies on the black bitumen road mark the site of road fatalities and television advertisements for mental health are based on happiness.

Anthony McInneny
Architects for Peace, August 2009

The New Town Centre and the New Main Street

The New Town Centre and the New Main Street

The industrial revolution produced the antecedent of the shopping centre in the form of the department store of the 19th Century. The big box shopping centre phenomena, with its anchors of major department stores was born in post-war USA during a period of mass-produced low-cost housing developments located in car dependant suburbs on the periphery of large urban centres. The importation into Australia of this form of urban development was accelerated by the de-centralisation of cities in the 1960’s and 1970’s and manifests itself in poorly serviced and designed urban sprawl.

The 1980’s and 1990’s saw merger and expansion as the key facets of shopping centre development. Chadstone Shopping Centre’s gargantuan refit and the doubling in size of Knox City Shopping Centre are two examples that transformed outer suburban Melbourne, the notion of a city centre and raised the idea of the new main street – Shopping centres replacing town centres and public spaces.

The recent growth of the retail sector has large shopping centres in another round of growing fits. However, the ground has shifted somewhat as the suburbs have consolidated, land is not as easily or as cheaply available as it was in last quarter of the 20th century and the limits to how big a shopping centre can actually grow pose philosophical and social questions for what a city is and how it functions. Shopping Centres in their physical form and configuration are being challenged through both the economics of retail architecture and social demands for connected cities.

“ While all other cultures give space to the political by opening up the private, mass culture obstructs the political space by putting the private on display… Mass culture creates an atmosphere of irresponsible consumption”. (Matzner 2004)

The interior of the shopping centre accelerates the introversion of the public becoming private and the extroversion of the private in public through the transforming behaviour of mass culture as mass consumption.
This sociological inversion of the public and private is replicated in the physical form of the shopping centre itself that has no façade and at least four backs, all turned on the public. This is changing as the big box shopping centre is forced to open up into the public realm.

Regardless of the weather, a shopping experience will not be delayed. In fact, the experience is heightened, like an extension of the home on a blustery winter’s day or a sweltering summer heat wave; it offers shelter from the elements. The analogy with the home and this interiorisation is a key to understanding the importance of the cultural shift that has occurred from the public into the private as we trade privacy for convenience, social for material wealth and an uncertain, self-sufficient individuality for a dogmatic individualism.

Not architecture, not even interior design but tilt slab economies of consumption, shopping centres are more like theatre design: a black box with a raw, perfunctory infrastructure upon which the media of illusion - lights, sound, props, sets, scenes and disbelief - are suspended in spatial temporality. Seasons and faux campaigns based on perpetual adolescence and entertainment as culture set the cyclic program and production schedule. Dates and days are dislodged from the calendar to be the same day, the same experience; a totality that delivers the notion of choice through a standardisation completing the sensation of an abundance of everything, everyday for the everyman.

The consumer aesthetic overwhelms the senses with a visual saturation and acoustic that demands a sensory muting of the consumer. The food court, with that olfactory mixture of fat, sugar and salt exhaled at most suburban intersections by the holy trinity of choice, McDonalds, Hungry Jacks and KFC, takes on a multinational multiculturalism reducing kebabs and sushi, noodles and falafels to the homogenous speed of transaction. Music and smell, triggers of involuntary memory and libidinal desire, permeate the air with pop culture pubescences, preservatives or pure and natural hyper-inflated value as the boost juice assumes the mantle of entrepreneurial activism.

The tactile impact of this concrete and glass echo chamber is buffered by the upholstered lounges, like those in airports, private hospitals or tourist resorts, that pepper these interior as resting places, each facing the other as shoppers seek refuge from shopping, travellers from travel, patients from treatment or tourists from the other.

Shopping Centres are safe places, monitored and surveyed, they are private concerns not muddied by issues of national sovereignty or local place but clarified by the contract, the lease and the rule of the free market housed in a single entity – retail space: a curious analogy for our national displacement.

So, what markers trace the history or meaning of our presence in a suburb whose New Town Centre might be the shopping centre? At its simplest level, street and place names are traditionally named after that to which they lead or after significant people of national life or historical events – Station street, Church Street, Market Street, Bourke Street, Victoria Street etc. So it is complete that of our Cardinal points of suburbia, Eastland Shopping Centre should have a Plaza Centre Way that leads from a car park, the accepted euphemism and antithesis of a plaza, to nowhere, that the juggernaut that is Southland Shopping Centre obliviously traverses the eight laned Nepean Highway (who was Nepean anyway?), that Waverley Gardens is a shopping centre without vegetation but a casino called Vegas that, according to an internal Tattersall report published by the Herald Sun (24/2/2007), extracts $150,000 per week from losing gamblers, and that Knox City Shopping Centre should be a surrogate public space with a piece of bitumen without footpaths called Capital City Boulevard, leading to the New Main Street. Chadstone Shopping Centre – the largest shopping centre in Australia thanks to the extension called “Chadstone Place” - has recently unseated Knox City Shopping Centre in the spatial war.

It was with apprehension that I visit several shopping centres to see how urban development and public space might work with the multinational retail space sector.

Parramatta, in Sydney’s West, offers a rare example of a local government engaging with the Westfield shopping centre and reasserting the place of the public over the private in the creation of our cities.

While not perfect, the city has leveraged public land holdings with state and private investment, citizen participation and clear and unnegotiable objectives for density, housing, employment, public transport, public space, art, heritage and culture for the cities development.

There has been a demonstrable change of mentality from the designers of this major shopping centre while containing the growth and opening up the “big box” to deliver urban amenity under the insistence of government.

The inside of the shopping centre is still a retail shopping centre. The exterior of the shopping centre is glass, not concrete, transparent, permeable and free of advertising and signage. Adjacent urban renewal has included the upgrade and integration of a bus terminal with cafes and active street frontages and an upgraded train station with restored historic buildings and modernised heavy rail transport and infrastructure.

But the Westfield shopping centre is not the New Town Centre, not even the New Main Street. The major development for Parramatta is the new city square, an open, public space with a library, technology centre and museum as the key public cultural facility that forms the New Town Centre, leads to and integrates the Old Main Street.

Anthony McInneny
Architects for Peace, April 2007


Reference
Vilem Flusser, Dinge and Undinge, Munich 1993 form the essay “Strassenlampen” quoted in an essay by Bogomir Ecker “Horse Sense and Cucumber Salad” in Matzner, Florian ed. 2004. Public art: a reader. Germany: Ostfildern-Ruit.

Postism and Parasitic Art

Postism and Parasitic Art
September 12, 2006

A review of Melbourne Art Fair 2006 Lecture
Massimiliano Gioni – Live in Your Head: Places of art
BMW Edge
Federation Square
Monday 31 July 2006


The presentation by invited guest of the Melbourne Art Fair, Massimiliano Gioni, as part of Melbourne Conversations at BMW Edge Theatre in Federation Square (31/07/06) argued a case for the position of art within the public realm (socially, spatially, economically and politically) in ambiguity and in so doing demonstrate pluralism and the space for others.

The presentation was opened with a cartoon of a person standing in front of a public artwork of a giant ‘W” asking, “what does it stand for?” to which another person answered, “Worried when things turn bad that the state won’t help you”. This poignant comment on the vacuous nature of much public art was capped with a remark quoting Erich Gombrich that art really doesn’t exist, that it is an expression of belonging and by extension, according to Massimiliano, of exclusion, of not belonging.

Various projects were presented in this slide show of defecating artists working to health and safety standards (no irony here), a car with trailer in tow emerging from the floor of a piazza in Milan (and receiving a parking ticket - laughter from the audience) to a replica baby in a basinet left for ten days in the back of a car parked outside of a gallery, to the hanging of three replica children by the neck from a tree, to gay pride parades and tango dancing in the streets of the Basque capital, creating a space for those who do not inhabit this space unlike the protests and vigils of Basque separatists and victims of “terrorist” acts respectively.

Further sojourns into reality by artists included creating a direct line through a city from church to graveyard cutting through several apartments. In so doing, one apartment was given up by the journalist owner to live in a hotel for three weeks while people could visit his home and, in another, two artists lived in an abandoned apartment in East Germany and made art for several weeks handing back to keys to the organisers revealing painting on the walls, broken bottles, a torn up couch and several other tokens of mayhem.

After art joke number three my mind meandered back to reality and I thought of the man who lay dead in a car in Croydon, Melbourne, being found two parking tickets and three days later by a parking infringement officer. I also thought of the baby left for dead in the car park of the Melbourne casino by her gambling addicted Mother. I also thought more about the phenonmena of home renovation programs and reeality t.v. appearing to offer a more exciting critique than the contrived art “events” .
Perhaps the artists inhabiting the East German apartment should have “Changed Places” with the journalist and be filmed for television for a more authentic encounter with reality. The response to the three hanging children was a much more powerful artwork created by the objecting public by hanging inflated sex dolls from town hall asking “is this art?” Unfortunately the answer is “yes” as the parasitic art claims ownership of both the self justifying action (art as a verb) and the content and quality of its surrogate.

But I was informed that content in art is old hat, so 20th Century.

All of this left me feeling both bored and annoyed. Bored in that traipsing people (the citizens) like mice through unknown and neglected spaces of a city in the democratization of contemporary art is uninspiring enough but to suggest that in some way this is provocative or challenging to a unipolar system in that it promotes an ambiguous interpretation of social, economic or politic structures is empty rhetoric that cannot escape self referential contradiction.

When asked by me about the self-censorship of artists in the illusion of dissent, the ambiguous/pluralistic line was touted by Massimiliano with a sweeping statement about money and art always being strange bedfellows. This may be true, as is said of politics and art not being able to keep their hands of each other, but to accept that capital is neutral in some way that politics is not is both ignorant and dangerous.

When the regurgitated ideas of Marcel Duchamp and Andre Breton are presented as contemporary because they take to the public realm and are mixed with an acceptance of the Situationist’s spectacle in the guise of an Art Fair, a Biennale or an intervention complete with permits and approvals, you know your being asked to only live in your head and not in public life.


Anthony McInneny

Eternal Games and Eternal Flames

Eternal Games and Eternal Flames
Anthony McInneny, July 2006

In the recent Melbourne 2006 Commonwealth Games (M2006) the eclipsing of this international sporting event by a celebration of the arts and the city was further extended through political activism about land and place.

The cultural program for M2006 revisited many of the ideas of the original Melbourne Spoleto festival of 1986. Free and high quality art experiences were the highlight of the games in a city that likes to pride itself as the self-appointed cultural capital of Australia. The City looked and felt like an active place with debate about the things that matter – art, public transport and Indigenous sovereignty.

The unofficial cultural program of the Stolenwealth Games opened the debate through a group calling for the end of Genocide of indigenous Australians, Sovereignty to be recognized and a Treaty to be made (Black G.S.T). This was perhaps the most effective indigenous political action in recent years because of its site, the Commonwealth Games offering international exposure and the simplicity of it methods of engagement. It found few supporters in the mainstream but challenged all to enter the dialogue.

Black GST established a tent embassy on a site in the Kings Domain Gardens for the duration of the Commonwealth Games. Known as Camp Sovereignty, the fire at the centre of the camp and the Aboriginal flag flying above it became the focus of a protracted legal battle about the use of land for ritual and ensured the issues of indigenous Australians would stay in public debate longer than the games themselves, running into the equally charged commemoration of national identity through the tragedy of other wars – Anzac Day.

It must be said from the outset that the Indigenous leaders of the Wurundjeri do not and did not support Camp Sovereignty. From the vantage point of Camp Sovereignty, one can view Birrarung Marr, the first major parkland to be created in Melbourne for 100 years. Birrarung Marr is the Wurundjeri name for the area and the river; it is the designated site for an aboriginal meeting place and the site of contemporary indigenous public artworks commissioned by the City of Melbourne in consultation and supported by the Elders of the Wurundjeri.

It is appropriate and ironically fitting that the group Black GST should use the element of fire and a continuum of its use that runs millennia in indigenous culture as the central point of claim and contention. Camp Sovereignty occupied land that was in a direct line with another flame at the Shrine of Remembrance.


The source of this fire, known as the Aboriginal Sacred Fire for Peace and Justice, was from ashes brought from the Tent Embassy in King George Terrace, Canberra. Perhaps the most controversial, permanent, temporary structure in Australia, the tent embassy was established in the 1972 as a protest action for indigenous land rights. The recent debate about the Tent Embassy’s status and structure has confounded the very notion of heritage when mixed with indigenous issues, ephemeral forms, a beleaguered government with a paucity of imagination only matched by a lack of empathy with the notion of land rights and planning regulations that cannot cope with anything other than bricks and mortar. But that is for another time.

Back to the Kings Domain; of all the memorials to settlement and war, the place where camp sovereignty was situated is the only commemoration to indigenous history in the Kings Domain, albeit occupied indigenous history. This is the burial site of some 30 aborigines whose remains were once held in the Museum of Victoria. A granite burial rock honours the Aboriginal people of Unungan (Victoria). This easily missed boulder is adorned with an as easy to miss plaque that marks their burial. “Their remains, were interred here as a tribute to the people whose long relationship with the land was destroyed with European settlement.” This description on the Melbourne City Council website was put to the test with a petitioning of the Council by Black GST and a humorous offer to return the flour, sugar and blankets that were traded for the Kings Domains.

Just prior to the Commonwealth Games, the Melbourne Prize 2005 was awarded to quite a witty concept by OSW called “groundings” that would place three oversized grass turntables across the road from Kings Domain in the Queen Victoria Gardens. People could sit and be rotated through a gentle 360 degrees panorama of the gardens like a ground floor picnic version of a revolving restaurant.

The concerns I am raising here are not in relation to the validity of the grass turntables as an artwork, the recognised sites for indigenous expression and reconciliation in Melbourne or the sanctity of the Shrine of Remembrance.

What I am drawing attention to in considering these sanctioned expressions of identity in the city in contrast to political activism during an international event is the power of an action that uses the act of lighting a fire, both metaphorically and actually and the raising of a flag as an act of dissent.

The idea of a flame to symbolise the continuum of a culture, to offer solace, contemplation, reflection and mourning is acknowledged through the eternal flame at the Shrine, the lighting of a fire at a campsite or the cremation at a funeral. The use of Prometheus’ gift to cook food, offer warmth, forge a tool or manage an ecology is universal. The raising of the flag is recognised immediately as a claim even if it is as futile as hoisting it on the moon or in the Kings Domain.

Upon visiting Camp Sovereignty and after being taken through a smoking ceremony, and watching Council workers in a cherry picker remove the red yellow and black flag from the light pole, I sat upon the rise overlooking Melbourne and thought of the idea of a public artwork that was simply a flame, not an artificially, eternal gas flame but simply one in a hole in the ground, tendered and fed with eucalypt timber that would remind us all of a fundamental humanity, that would smell of this country, that could be seen and sensed from a distance by the smoke that leaves its scent in our cloths and blows through our shared land, that would be a site of acknowledgement of indigenous culture and custodianship, a place to warm our Melbourne winter and light the night above our city. This couldn’t be too hard to achieve across the road from the rotating grass turntables, on the other side of the river from Birrarung Marr and down the park from the Shrine of Remembrance.

Image 1. Photo: Andrew de la Rue. www.theage.com.au
Image 2. People gather by the eternal flame at the Shrine of Remembrance. Photo: Eddie Jim. www.theage.net
Image 3. www.aboriginaltentembassy.net
Image 4. www.melbournetrustprize.org

Flag burning, flag raising, flag wearing, flag painting and flag waving

Flag burning, flag raising, flag wearing, flag painting and flag waving

Anthony McInneny Feb 2006


The 1945 photographic image by Joe Rosenthal of the flag of the United States of America being raised on the Pacific Island of Iwo Jima by five US soldiers in WWII has been accused of being a staged piece of propaganda and successfully defended as an authentic 20th century iconic image and the most reproduced photograph in history. It is an iconic image because this flag raising marks a pivotal point in the ascendancy of the USA as the world’s policeman, 20th Century Empire and first unipolar nuclear power.

Jasper Johns’ 1950’s series of paintings of the US flag posed a simple question. Is a painting of the flag of the United States of America the same as the actual flag? Johns makes us look at everyday objects in a different way. What is a flag but a piece of cloth, in this case a canvas, with an emblem on it, printed, sewn or painted? This same piece of cloth with the same emblem on it, floating weightlessly on the moon, was beamed across the world in 1969. This image, more powerful than the real object on a dead planet, had people standing to attention wherever there was a tuned television.

On the other side of civil rights movement and towards the end of the Cold War in 1989, the use of an actual flag in an art exhibition created an act of legislation. The work entitled “What it the Proper Way to Display An American (sic) Flag” by Dread Scott Tyler encouraged people to walk on the flag by exhibiting it on the floor in the entry to the gallery. As a result, the U.S. senate voted unanimously in the same year to make it a crime to display the flag of the United States of America on the floor or ground.

Talking about free speech in Australia in a constitutional sense is like citing the Fifth Amendment in the Melbourne Magistrate’s Court. Similarly, there could be no cultural equivalent in Australia to that in the United States of America of the use of the national flag in art. Both the recent debate in Australia about a Human Rights Bill (A Bill of Rights) and that of the use of Australian flag and the flag itself are part of the same conversation about national identity that highlights our deficiency in terms of the protection of basic human rights and our unresolved sense of place and identity.

Recent events involving Indigenous Australians, activists and artists burning the Australian flag were not the first acts to bring the use of the flag into controversy.

The idea of a political leader draping themselves in the national flag and being taken seriously was brought into contemporary Australian life by Pauline Hanson’s 1998 election campaign. ANZAC day at Gallipoli continues to swell with young people, caped solemnly in the Southern Cross and Union Jack, rising from sleeping bags on the beaches, rubbish and road works on the former battlefields as the Prime Minister claimed this site a de facto sovereign land in 2005. The pilgrims to Gallipoli have hyper inflated from 100 in 1984 to 17,000 (mostly young people) in 2005. We have been at war for no substantiated reason twice in this time period.

Imagine how 17,000 Japanese tourists might be received at Darwin on the 19 February (marking the bombing in WWII), sporting the Rising Sun.

In 2005, the Prime Minister placed the flag at the actual centre of the education debate with the policy of a functioning flagpole being the prerequisite for public schools receiving funding. Funding was provided to repair flagpoles as public education slips further down the pole.

The latest yobbo fest at Cronulla takes the Australian flag to the pressing national debate of who has the right to harass women and act violently and who doesn’t. Cronulla is more symbolic in the beach being the place of vitriolic racism. The shift in the idea of the beach as a place where egalitarian (I would argue apathetic) ideas had dominated, to a place of parochial and bigoted battles over crown land is fitting in a land girt by sea that excises territories for the purposes of exclusion, denial and abrogation of international responsibilities.

As an aside, the reaction and actions by some followers of Islam to the recent publication of cartoons portraying Muhammad serves as a source of reflection. Cartoons as an artform and a medium of expression are deemed to be a demonstration of a healthy democracy. However, as cartoonist Bruce Petty pointed out in an interview on ABC RN, while politicians are fair game, there is one subject in our culture, and particularly in Australia, that is out of bounds for the cartoonist’s satire, ridicule and criticism – corporations. It may be the fear of litigation by newspaper proprietors and/or it may simply be part of our shared cultural values. This fundamental tenet of the “free” press, is accepted as the way it is and our cartoons help us laugh all the way to, through and after the many wars fought in our name for the same said cultural values.

In the 1990’s and in a similar vein to Jasper Johns, Australian artist Constanze Zikos de-politicises the Australian flag by creating “counterfeit” and fake flags from laminex, felt and timber. He plays with urban/pop culture in an innocent and uncertain notion of national identity. There is little controversy around this use of the flag and postcards of Fake Flag are on sale in the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) bookshops.

Azlan’s McLellan’s work is considered in the exploration of the relationship between galleries, public space and artwork that has as its subject matter political issues. Azlan McClellan’s recent work using the national flag will not appear on post cards in the NGV.

His latest offering is a partially burnt Australian flag, displayed in a charred and singed state entitled “Proudly UnAustralian”.

Works of this nature are usually exhibited within the walls of obscure galleries or small cinema’s with little or no response from the State or hesitation from the struggling collectives that exhibit these works.

Azlan’s work is important as much for the manner in which it was exhibited as for the subject it tackles or the object it is. The work is effectively in public space, viewed on the outside, rather than the inside, of the Footscray gallery, Trocadero. This is work consistent with his exploration of public space as a contested political space dominated by the visual pollution of commerce and sanctioned propaganda. “Proudly UnAustralian” forms part of his body of works that steps in, out and between public spaces, testing what is permissible and the tolerance of the Government, private sector sponsors and the police to dissent. Devised or not, he has managed to have his work threatened with removal or forcibly removed by all three defenders of public space in subtlety different manners over a very short period of time.

His work tackling the Israeli Palestinian conflict in the shop front windows of the Flinders Street Gallery 24/7 (supported in part by the City of Melbourne) was quickly removed upon threats to funding. His portraits of assassinated Hamas leaders on the outside of City Lights Gallery foreshadowed the “Proudly UnAustralian” work in the use of space and elicited condemnation from certain sectors of the press. A light box work featuring images of Abu Ghraib for the public art, tram stop project Urban Art, saw the sponsor and provider of the space, Adshell immediately remove the works after installation and following protestations from the State Government. The Victorian Police without reason or court order removed “Proudly UnAustralian” on 20 January 2006 from the outside of a the Footscray gallery Trocadero.

Azlan’s latest work raises the most interesting irony in the absence of laws prohibiting the burning of the national flag. The trouble for the law is that it appears that no crime has been committed and the artist will use the law to retrieve his artwork. The trouble for Azlan is that his right to burn the flag has been defended by the Prime Minister who has stated that burning the flag should not be a crime.

I would propose that, while the political debate about the content of Azlan’s work places it in the frame of political art, the far more interesting political debate he raises is about the notion of public space. In all the heat around the burning of the flag the more confronting question is who has the right to public space even when it is the outside of a privately run gallery? I look forward to Azlan’s next outing.