It's Oh So Quiet
The Age
Saturday May 20, 2006
Remember the days when an installation was something that happened after a
trip to McEwans? Raymond Gill does.NOTICE SOMETHING different in the air this morning? No distant sounds of revelry seeping under the door, no tinkling tap on the tram poles of banners fluttering in the wind, no sign of harried and beanied and scarved black-clad hipsters loitering in arts precincts, no telephone book-sized program dropping onto your foot from this morning's paper? Yes, Virginia, there is something different about this weekend - those sounds of silence are actually Melbourne enjoying a rare weekend off from festival-having.Sure, there are some mini, minor, marginal or boutique festivals going on. There always are. There's the Visconti retrospective at the Nova, the Melbourne Jazz Fringe Festival, the Stencilling doodle fest in the city, and probably a brandy snap-making workshop, tasting and symposium in the Dandenongs somewhere. But there's nothing in the way of the state-assisted, sponsor-heavy, Mary Delahunty-attended, acknowledgement-of-the-traditional-landowners-in-the-opening speeches kind of festival. And at the risk of parroting The Advertiser during the recent Adelaide arts and NASCAR festivals -"How much excitement can Adelaide take?" asked the headline, the answer being, well, a lot more - it's kind of nice to get back to basic Melbourne. The Melbourne we had when a festival meant spring racing and the grand final. The Melbourne we had when an arts festival meant the Gas and Fuel float passing by at the Moomba parade. When an installation was something that happened when you came back from McEwans. When a soundscape was the transistor on a rainy Saturday afternoon as you switched from 3AK to 3XY and picked up the Radio Rentals ad punctuating the footy broadcast - "Radio Rentals eight double eight, double eight, double eight". Those were the days when people rented TVs, when a bread stick was culinary big news, and when we had lives rather than lifestyles - an innovation that can be dated back to 1977 when The Age became one of the first newspapers in the world to introduce a funky leisure lift-out known here as The Weekender.Until then we were all perfectly happy with our bad haircuts. An arts event meant going to the St Andrew's market at the weekend and coming home with a furry Alpaca jumper sporting llamas, which you wore to the pub to see Ross Ryan wail I Am Pegasus. Even those whose professional lives revolve around the arts, who will defend the arts to the hilt and support the right of anyone to do a free-form dance monologue whenever they feel the muse, even they might occasionally relish an arts-free zone in the calendar. No nude Belgians doing Tristan and Isolde, no comic trans-gender wunderkinds from Wyoming to redefine laughter. Not even a food festival with Bhutanese canapes.This might cause a revolution in Melbourne homes this weekend as adults will converse coyly with each other, catch up on tax planning, purchase new canisters and even, God help us, interact with offspring who are normally left in the care of paid helpers while parents head for the Arts Centre knowing that their lives will never be the same again on emerging from the mind blowing mime artists from Bucharest. So this weekend, if your mind is a little vacant and your kitchen noticeboard isn't overflowing with thumbtacked tickets purchased eons ago in hope and wonderment, why not trek into town and see how much has changed since you had a weekend off, how cosmopolitan we've all become, and what a remarkable, liveable city this is.Take a moment to observe how the Gas and Fuel buildings no longer impede views of the Yarra - OK, so now Federation Square does. And as you enter this remarkable architectural sign of the times from Flinders Street, through the billowing, plastic palm fronds (yes, slight licence taken), past the gardening books and home brewery displays on chipboard trestle tables, you'll feel the nostalgic thrill of visiting Southland circa 1977.
© 2006 The Age
