If I were to compare Sydney and Melbourne to people, I’d say that Sydney is one of those naturally beautiful but vacuous people who just sits there expecting everyone to adore them just for how they look and Melbourne is one of those plain looking people, who has been forced to develop an interesting personality to attract people.
 
I not only live in Sydney, I love Sydney, but I also have to say that during my recent visit to Melbourne, I was left with the feeling that Sydney is somewhat lacking.  Sydney just seems to be relying on its natural beauty, which comes from being located on a spectacular harbour.  Although Sydney has the world-famous Opera house, and the clunky Sydney Harbour Bridge, it’s not a particularly nice city, to walk around.  Once one gets away from the harbour, most of Sydney is merely functional rather than beautiful. 
 
There have been articles in the Sydney Morning Herald describing a recent visit by a Danish urban planner, Jan Gehl and his comments about Sydney. Gehl was quoted as saying that Sydney “is a doughnut, because it has nothing in the centre.” I couldn’t agree more.
 
Melbourne on the other hand has instituted changes suggested by Prof  Gehl after studies his team conducted in 1994 and 2004, that have completely transformed that city into a much more liveable place. 
 
Melbourne has many kilometres of cycleways that encourage people to get exercise, and reduce the amount of cars on the road.  There is also much more public art in Melbourne.  I really enjoyed seeing Duncan Stemler’s “Blowhole”,

a 15 metre (50ft) high wind powered sculpture set in a children’s playground, and John Kelly’s joyously quirky  “Cow up a tree”, not only put a smile on my face, it brightened up the rest of my day.

As a matter of fact, many public structures in Melbourne exhibit beauty in their design, more than mere functionality.

When I told my friend that I was going to Melbourne, she recommended that my wife and I take our bicycles.  Luckily, I took that advice and spent a few days cycling around Melbourne’s beautiful art filled streets.  We’ll be going back to Melbourne again, we loved the place.

As for Sydney… get your act together, Melbourne’s kicking our collective butts!

This post was first posted on the 29th of January 2008

Choi Jeong Hwa’s installation at this year’s Biennale brought out the playfulness of most of the children who saw it. The adults stood back and looked at it and the kids just raced around inside of it chasing each other, banging it all about and having fun.

Years ago I remember reading an article about how people’s educational background affects the way they perceive art.  According to some research done in the past, people who have very little education tend to see art galleries as temples and approach them with some reverence and awe, whereas people with a high level of education are much more comfortable in experiencing art.

Watching the children play in amongst the “art”, I found myself thinking about the study and it occurred to me that what the study doesn’t acknowledge is how we are taught to respond to art.

Perhaps in the past the less educated have been made to feel that art was beyond their understanding, whereas today’s kids haven’t been as oppressed by such elitist claptrap and just respond in a freer way.

Here are some images of art that I really liked from the exhibition of feminine art called “elles@centrepompidou” at the Centre Georges Pompidou that we went to yesterday.

Generally (this is were I whack the hornet’s nest), when ever I hear the term “feminist art”, I think about so many shows that I’ve seen that have been dominated with works dealing with, vaginas, blood and naked artists making statements about how they’re treated as sex objects. I’ve always had a problem with the notion of “feminist art” because I think that if we are all equal then it shouldn’t matter what sex a person is and their work should be judged on its own strengths and not the sex of its producer.

I’ve never liked the idea of victimhood from any group.

And before anyone gets full of righteous rage and wants to start jumping all over my case because I’m a middle aged white guy (the punching bag of choice by the world’s disaffected), all I have to say is, “try growing up as an overweight freckle faced red headed male”. I’ve never seen a poster of a guy like me on any teenage girl’s wall or my type described as the ideal, but yet life goes on and we can’t all be the focus of everyone’s desires and in control of the world.

Having had my little rant and bleat, there are of course many issues faced by women artists, like they are discriminated against and their work is often ignored. While at the exhibition, I gave myself the task of naming female artists and you know what, I could only name about five.

I hang my head in shame.

Having banged on about “feminist art”, the refreshing thing about the elles@centrepompidou exhibition was that the museum was displaying the feminine side of its own collections rather than making just a feminist statement.

The Guerilla Girls make plenty of salient points and combat discrimination with sharp wit and humor. No victimhood here just action.

Respect!

Alisa Andrasek’s “Biothing” is a beautiful tour de force of applied intelligence. 

Adaptive Agent Based Extreme Structures are created using a computer program, not unlike the one Engogirl uses in her work in Computational Fluid Dynamics. As a matter of fact my wife got very excited about Alisa Andrasek’s work and I’m sure that she’d like to meet her and play around with the software she uses.

Niki de Saint Phalle is someone I’ve been aware of for a while, and this work is quite different from most of her work that I’d seen before.

Kristin Backer’s “Passage at section K-P” (2004) acknowledges how structures are so dominant in the landscapes we now live in.

Lee Bontecou’s untitled work (1966) is about sitting on a jet airplane’s wing. I really loved this piece and it’s something that I’d like to own so I could look at it more often.

I’ve saved Helen Frankenthaler’s “Spring Bank” (1974) for last as it was the piece I liked the most.

Engogirl and I went to the Centre Georges Pompidou today as an antidote to going to the Prado a few days ago. We just had to see something that was more expressive than the visual catalogues of possessions owned by the rich and powerful from years gone by, that makes up most of the Prado’s collection. Let’s not even talk about the mountain of stuff with the guy nailed to a cross and his bummed-out friends.

It was just the same thing over and over again.

I’ve never been a fan of the outside of the Pompidou center. It just looks like a industrial plant that has become a little shabby over the years, but some of the interiors are fun. There are sections of the restaurant on the top floor that look as though they were lifted straight out of Kubrick’s “2001,  A Space Odyssey” and then crossed with Roger Dean’s designs.

Although the price of the automatic machine produced coffee was scandalously high (a whole family in a developing country could be fed for a week, for what we paid for our two drinks), it was a pretty cool place to hang out in for a while, just to soak up the design ideas.

A short while after we finished our coffee, a staff member came by and sprayed scent on all the roses. No, it didn’t smell anything like roses but the roses themselves were real.

Go figure?

This next shot is of a little bar (not open at the time we were there) that was tucked away in a little bubble-like silver dome structure.

Around the corner from the bar are restrooms, which have to been seen to be believed.

The whole place was mirrored and you can have the dubious pleasure of watching yourself on the can from four different directions……..

nice!

About three weeks ago I was in Burgos, Spain, where I visited the Catedral de Santa María which is the burial place of El Cid.

Needless to say Hollywood’s version of El Cid’s life bears no resemblance to the one lived by the man himself. There isn’t that much of El Cid’s life to be seen at the cathedral other than a marriage contract and an old trunk said to be his coffin. El Cid has been buried under the floor of the cathedral and unlike so many other people intered there, there is nothing but an inscription to mark where the great man is buried.

This brings me to the point at which I start my rant.

There are times when I look at gigantic structures like cathedrals and I think to myself, “what a colossal waste of time, money and effort”.

When I was in Bangkok a few years ago I can remember having the same thoughts about the Buddhist temples and then it occurred to me how much industry and commerce religion causes. For example in Thailand there is a whole industry employing thousands of people who just prepare the offerings that are changed everyday, that go into household shrines.

In short religion keeps a lot of people in employment.

Even the small shrines and chapels in the nooks and crannies of the cathedral would’ve kept teams of craftsmen busy for years. So when I was looking around the cathedral in Burgos I found myself once again thinking about all the people and the wide range of skills that were employed to construct such an amazing building. Make no mistake, the Burgos Cathedral is amazing. It has it all; beauty, size, complexity and history.

The trouble I started to have with the cathedral was when I started thinking about where the money came from to build it. The answer of course is the people. Back in medieval times the common person’s life was short, brutish and full of misery. Archeological evidence from medieval graves has shown that the lower classes quite often suffered from malnutrition and often went through long periods of starvation while their overlords lived the high life.

Which brings me to my next problem; the aristocracy.

Back in the old days if you were a bigger and nastier than other people you just took their stuff and if you were really good at fighting you built up a gang around yourself and made a career of making other weaker people’s lives miserable.

As Thucydides (c. 460 B.C. – c. 395 B.C.) once said, “”Right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.”

The aristocracy is basically a group of people who have descended from the worst kind of people and who for some strange reason think that they are better than others. It always blows me away when I talk to people who defend the whole idea of rule by monarchs as though it were a good thing. The idea that someone who comes from a long line of selfish bloodthirsty bastards would make a good leader in this day and age strikes me as completely ridiculous.

So what has this got to do with Burgos cathedral?

Over time Burgos cathedral has become shrine to aristocratic hubris and ego. Huge chunks have been added to the original medieval cathedral by rich people trying to buy their way into heaven. All over the church are either paintings or statues of rich people that try and associate them with god.

For example there are paintings of archbishops (a common person could never hope to rise so far in the old church) in triptychs showing the crucifixion as if to say, here is god and I’m his best mate.

Probably the most disgusting display of overwhelming arrogance and cluelessness on display is the Chapel of the Constable which houses the bodies of Pedro Hernández de Velasco, Constable of Castile and his wife Doña Mencia de Mendoza.

The chapel it’s self is a tour de force in carved stone with lifelike carvings in Carrara marble of the constable and his wife. The chapel was begun just before Columbus found the Americas so gold that had been tortured out of the Indians wasn’t yet available for its construction so it can only be assumed that the peasantry of Castile paid for its construction with their blood sweat and tears.

Building a church that employs a lot of craftsmen because the people have a fervent faith is one thing, bleeding an already oppressed people to build a hugely expensive monument to one’s greed and desire to buy their way into St. Peter’s good books is utterly unforgivable.

A pox on Pedro Hernández and people like him.