Helmet

 

Writing in his Substack daily, Wes Westgarth reviews the new artwork with characteristically breathless enthusiasm: “The mini-Christo-and-Jeanne-Claude pop-up at one of the world’s hubs of cultural experiment is Banksy-like, an anonymous celebration of the mundane turned into an aesthetic triumph. Familiar objects – a hydrant and a bicycle helmet – are brought together by layers of duct tape and instantly transformed into an arresting statement of the zeitgeist. The untitled sculpture invites titles, while simultaneously deferring them, perhaps indefinitely, or until the work is dismantled by a council worker.” Comments from passersby are more prosaic, ranging from “That’s odd!” and “You’d think people had better things to do with their time,” through to “What a waste of a good helmet!” and “I’m sure there’s a law against that!” Iconoclastic grouch Frank ‘FFS’ Fitzroy wants this stopped before it starts, declaiming to his email-list of ex-students and fellow-grumblers: “The inner-city crowd find time away from their turmeric lattes to stick together makeshift models for new tennis stadiums. This flagrant misuse of public property is a form of the toxic ‘graffiti objectivo’ that now disfigures many European cities, driving away the tourist dollar. The hydrant is the thin edge of the wedge.” While the good-humoured piece in the Weekend Age from Berenice Brunswick picks up on Westgarth’s aesthetic turn: “It is hard not to notice the matching of those favourite Pre-Raphaelite colours of green, grey and red with those of the Lord Newry Hotel across the street. Placement offsets while complementing the classic line of the noble facade with the playfulness of the foregrounded rough vernacular.” Social analysis is all we would expect of Carla Carlton, who offers this pungent political critique: “The helmet, grotesque computer-generated headwear of twilight capitalism, is fastened inextricably and fundamentally to the hydrant, last symbol of bourgeois government’s desperate efforts to appease the revolutionary instinct through the cynical control of an essential need, water, and an irresistible force: fire. This whole transparent sham is held together by the flimsiest of covers.” At present no one has laid claim to the artwork, raising questions as to whether the untitled germ of a hundred similar artworks across the metropolitan area is art, or a prank masterminded by a couple of skateboard kids on their way to the rink they call home in the Edinburgh Gardens. Local bourgeois representative in the parliament, Morrie Moreland, has no time for this sort of conjecture: “Serious head injuries are being sustained by cyclists refusing to wear the helmets they hire. It has to stop! This sculpture, if that’s what you call it, is a memorial cairn for an accident waiting to happen.”