Melbournians are very familiar with parts
of Flinders Street Station. Since the 1860s we have made plans to ‘meet under
the clocks’, and over 100,000 of us pass through the turnstiles each day. Yet,
despite the ubiquity of parts of this site, few of us have been into the spaces
‘above the clocks’. Since 1983, the upstairs environs of Flinders Street
Station have been largely inaccessible to the public, closed due to the
building’s state of disrepair. Since becoming ‘off limits’ to us, the interior
spaces of Flinders Street Station have achieved a kind of mythical status: many
of us have heard anecdotes about the elegant old ballroom but few of us have
been inside.
Throughout August and October of 2012, a
group of artists working under the name ‘Contemporary Site Investigations’
(CSI) have been in residence in the building. Campbell Drake, James Carey,
Jeremy Taylor, Cameron Robbins, Elizabeth Drake and Robbie Rowlands have each
selected a particular interior space in the building to respond to. Over the
period of their residency, each has inhabited their space, carefully observing
its qualities and researching its history, in order to develop an art project
that will be revealed to the public in late October.
Although each of the artists participating
in the CSI project work in diverse ways across different artforms, they are
united though a shared interest in space and place – the ‘raw materials’ for
most of these artists and architects is the built environment and its social
and cultural histories (whether real or imagined). CSI create their projects by
infiltrating existing sites and then using whatever they find there – the
structure, the materials, the personal narratives – to undertake their
experimental spatial practices. This commitment to an absolute site-specificity
is reminiscent of the ‘anarchitect’ Gordon Matta-Clark’s ‘building cuts’ into
abandoned houses, or the conceptual artist Martha Rosler’s interest in the
social and political aspects of sites, such as her 1989 project If you lived here…, which explored
difficult public housing issues in a rapidly-gentrifying New York City.
The Flinders Street Station project is the
latest of a series of similar projects undertaken by CSI. In February of 2007,
for instance, the group inhabited an old beach house at Merricks that was
scheduled to be demolished. In the four days before the wreckers came, CSI made
carefully orchestrated cuts and interventions into the structure, which were
designed to expose the formal conventions of residential construction but also
to explore our more symbolic notions of ‘home’. Similarly, in 2008, the group
was invited by the City of Dandenong to undertake spatial interventions into
the former headquarters of the Grenda Bus Company. After the company vacated
the site after 62 years, CSI intervened in the two-week gap between
decommission and demolition. This latest project – the Flinders Street
iteration – is perhaps the most ambitious. Many practical and political
encumbrances attend the site, not least of all the question of how to mount a
public art project in a site that the public cannot access. CSI’s response was
to inhabit the site over a period of weeks and then to distribute their spatial
research out to the public through other means, such as sound dispersed through
the stations public address system or imagery presented using the digital
billboard above Young & Jackson's pub and also on the station's concourse.
An impressive quality of CSI’s project is the elegantly understated manner in which each artist has intervened into the site. Rather than bring in works ‘for’ the site, the group has been led by an intention to create works ‘from’ the site. This has resulted in a series of quiet and impressively nuanced actions within the interior spaces of Flinders Street Station. Overall, the artistic gestures were relatively minimal: instead of flamboyant architectural statements, the projects have subtly illuminated – or perhaps even merely preserved – some aspect of the site. This has paid homage to the building’s past and enabled thoughtfulness as to its future, but it has also comprised commendable acts of genuine custodianship. CSI have used their substantial artistic and architectural skills to impact the building for the better.
An impressive quality of CSI’s project is the elegantly understated manner in which each artist has intervened into the site. Rather than bring in works ‘for’ the site, the group has been led by an intention to create works ‘from’ the site. This has resulted in a series of quiet and impressively nuanced actions within the interior spaces of Flinders Street Station. Overall, the artistic gestures were relatively minimal: instead of flamboyant architectural statements, the projects have subtly illuminated – or perhaps even merely preserved – some aspect of the site. This has paid homage to the building’s past and enabled thoughtfulness as to its future, but it has also comprised commendable acts of genuine custodianship. CSI have used their substantial artistic and architectural skills to impact the building for the better.
James
Carey’s project, for instance, has made order out
of relative chaos. Carey’s contribution has been to a large room called Room
244, dubbed ‘the naughty room’ by the group because of its former life as
office space for social services and their ‘delinquent’ clients. This elegant
space had become a dumping ground for obsolete office miscellany, a disheveled
landscape of dented filing cabinets, outmoded uniforms, broken chairs and
hundreds of ring-binder folders their contents once meticulously compiled but
now languishing in mildewed piles. Working diligently over weeks, Carey sorted
the piles of junk into carefully ordered taxonomies, which he then loaded into
the wooden shelving at one end of the space. These shelves are like weird wunderkammers of railway workers past:
one ‘cabinet of curiosity’ presents items that might be categorised ‘personal
grooming’ (hair brush, comb, disposable razor, soap), another ‘lunch room’
(Saxa Salt, toothpicks, Nescafé), or another ‘computer accessories’ (a neat row
of now-bung trackball computer mice). Carey has reasserted some order to the
junk heap and, by doing so, has paid homage to the past life of these objects
and the people that used them. With the space unencumbered of its debris, Carey
then made further subtle interventions in the space in a manner that evidences
his highly refined spatial sensitivity. Careful observers will notice areas
where he has worked back the dusty residue on the floor to record the patterns
of light streaming in through the window. His artworks will also manifest as
surprisingly monumental ‘dust paintings’, large-scale abstract compositions
created through dumping dust vacuumed out of the space onto paper sheets.
Robbie
Rowlands has displayed a similarly keen spatial
awareness. Working in the old gymnasium, Rowlands, like Carey, committed to
taking his cues from the room itself. Rowlands’ artworks often manifest as
dynamic altercations to built architecture – sometimes in the form of dramatic
‘cuts’ into the architecture and sometimes as striking manipulation of objects
found within a site. Rowlands’ interventions often provide a spatial jolt
– the objects are at once familiar but also made strange. For the Flinders
Street project, Rowlands has elected to work with the content and the context
of the former gymnasium. This is a curious space: many of the rooms in the
Flinders Street building seem haunted by past activity, and it is easy to
re-imagine this gym back into life: the old gymnast’s rings hanging from the
roof and the boxing ring seem only momentarily abandoned. Rooms often record
the energy expended within them, and Rowlands’ spatial manipulations reactivate
some of this latent energy. This has been kickstarted by Rowlands’ restringing
up the boxing ring, and is further signaled through his placement of an
historical photograph that depicts boxers sparring in the old gym. The space
immediately becomes weirdly reverberant with echoes of this past usage. This
‘hall of echoes’ is further intensified by Rowlands’ other artistic spatial and
sculptural actions, some of which are remarkable sculptural modifications of
old office furniture, which he has cut and manipulated into remarkably dynamic
forms.
Cameron
Robbins’ projects also reveal some of the more
ethereal elements of the site. Working across the clock tower and roof, Robbins
has staged a series of ‘machines’ that perform an aspect of the building. His
‘drawing machines’ for instance, are marvelous contraptions: each an
ingenious concoction of scavenged materials – plastic bags, scraps of metal and
offcuts of wood – that culminate into a drawing implement such as a ballpoint
pen or a paintbrush. These machines have been strategically positioned to
capture the otherwise invisible air flows and currents of the building – its
atmospheres and vapours – and to record them as in the form of smudgy
abstract paintings or beautifully dense line drawings. The resulting images are
strong compositional arrangements, as well as beguiling records of a specific
time and place. Robbins had also mounted a light sculpture in the clock tower
– those checking the time from this familiar landmark may also have
noticed a subtle light signal intermittently emanating from the tower turning
it temporarily and marvelously from clock tower into lighthouse.
Elizabeth Drake and Jeremy Taylor have
responded to the more performative aspects of the station’s history. There is a
melancholy aspect to the site’s empty and dilapidated ballroom. However,
through Drake and Taylor’s contributions, the space will once again be filled
with music. Composer and sound artist Elizabeth
Drake has been in rehearsal with Caroline Almonte preparing two
compositions that will be performed on two grand pianos that will be placed
under the vaulted ceiling of the ballroom after being theatrically hauled over
the train platforms (no doubt to startled looks from commuters). One work,
Simeon ten Holt’s Canto Ostinato, is a hypnotic composition, which is
distinguished through the fact that no two performances of it are the same.
While the score consists of 106 fixed musical phrases, how many times these
phrases are repeated, and how they are performed, is up to the performer. This
flexible and democratic compositional structure seems a fitting score for the
Flinders Street ballroom, which, over its history, has had a similarly flexible
nature, responding in a similarly organic way to the desires of its ‘players’.
The other composition conjures up the sonic qualities of
the railway site. The two pianos phase in and out of time, their sliding
melodies – now in time together, now sliding apart – reminiscent of
the trains moving in and out of the yards.
Jeremy
Taylor has also responded sonically to the site,
using the residency to create a new composition comprising the ‘found sounds’
of Flinders Street. His compositional palette included field recordings of the
site – whether the rhythmically intense clickety-clack of the trains or
the more ambient reverberations of the interior spaces – but also sounds
taken from cassette tapes found in the gymnasium that have preserved the audio
of the station’s public address system. Taylor has used these site recordings
to create a new musical composition that, when played through the station’s
public address system, will comprise a curious feedback loop in which the site
plays itself. In a similar manner, Cameron Robbins will create an improvised
work Metronomic, which will
take as its starting point the ticking of the clock –
apparently Melbourne’s loudest. Robbins will improvise alongside with
percussionist Allan Browne, who will perform on a marvelous old drum discovered
in the space, which would have provided the bass notes for a past railway band.
Campbell
Drake has worked with the history of the site, drawing
resonant connections between the past and the present. Drake’s project is
founded on his careful research into the space, including consultation with
writer Jenny Davies whose book, Beyond the Façade: Flinders Street, is a rich compendium about the site. Reading through it, Drake
became compelled by one photograph in particular: an image from 1964 of a young
newspaperman selling his papers from the Flinders Street steps. This was
17-year old Michael Binney who, like his father and uncle before him (both
identical twins), sold newspapers to commuters. Over 15-years Binney put
in long days selling ‘one-hundred dozen’ or so before knock-off time. Davies
put Drake in touch with Binney, and his conversations with him led to an idea
to restage the scene now 50-years on. The later incarnation of the photograph
faithfully observes the original photograph but with a now older incarnation of
Michael Binney. Drake’s retelling of this history folds the past and present
together, making rich relations with the past. A similar objective is enabled
through this newspaper – its format another homage to the newspaper
sellers who worked the Flinders Street steps.
It’s now over one
hundred years since the architect J. W. Fawcett and civil engineer H.
P. C. Ashworth conceptualised the ‘The Green Light’, their design for a grand
new station for Melbourne. Their building has become an iconic landmark but
also a progressive social space – few train stations can also declare
themselves ballrooms and boxing rings. CSI’s project
has reminded us of these different usages. In their quiet and respectful ways,
the artists have encouraged Victorians to remember this site and to reflect on
how we might, once again, make it central to our activities.
Philippa Murray
Philippa Murray
