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.”

Helmet

 

Lime helmets bestrew the urban landscape. Separated from their lime bicycle or lime scooter, even more elegantly, e-scooter, lime helmets rest quietly as tortoises at the juncture where their motorist bestrode the beast and bestrew the headgear. It is what it is. What it is, is it. It is it, what is. Like other exotic imports, lime helmets pop up randomly in unlikely locations, a wonder or a weed depending on viewpoint. Their outsize appearance is what? A Martian mushroom, a smoothest cactus, a globular bulb, a football triffid. They roll roundly in the sunshine, they catch raindrops when left upsideup. The legal requirement to protect the head is a nicety of the ninety percent. The other ten percent have forgotten, if they ever learnt. We, not being there at the time, assume they possibly didn’t care, one way or the other. If the hat fits, don’t wear it. It is a case of leaving their brains behind, as the 10% wheel off into a future that is ever before them, void of basic cover, freely hair flowing. The Newtonian collision of cranium with bitumen, forehead with foreground, mind with matter, is incidental. And, just as they dismiss the law on mandatory wearing of helmets, so e-scooterers defy the laws about taking their beast along footpaths and crazy roadways. They weave along the wrong side as trucks heave into view and road-ragers veer around corners without warning. The question of whether lime vehicles have laws that apply to them is moot when their riders have sidetracked all commonsense, leaving their helmets behind them. There it remains, solitary and significant, a canopy for green thoughts in a green shade. Such thoughts circulate under the braincap of lime helmets, an air that’s its own small atmosphere. We can only wonder at the fresh green shoots that ping like neurons in that sacred space. Were they meant for the age of penny-farthings, are they actually as lonely as they appear, or reminders of care and protection? It is what it is. Count yourself fortunate. This, strangely, was not the destiny of o-bicycles. Lemon yellow, these imports were visible beneath brown waters of the Yarra, whence they had been ungraciously hurled by mindless card-carrying layabouts. The glowing frames of those sturdy beasts accumulated beneath the tidal flow, their cause not aided by a lord mayor calling them “urban clutter”. Steady income flow was unforthcoming from the yellow tangles, murky bubbles rising from their lemon helmet vents. The vagrant layabouts needed to invest in a thinking cap. Lime helmets think back to those days of 2018 with a certain relief. Left a while in unusual places on the board, like pieces in some game with evolving rules and a rotation of users, lime helmets await the next shift in their fortunes. They dot dull patches of Melbourne with hardy iridescence. They keep their own counsel.