by Sam Beard.

Yesterday evening, Vessel Contemporary launched its much-anticipated inaugural program. ‘At Vessel, we boldly dedicate ourselves as the future,’ announced Will Ek Uvelius and Nina Juniper, the executive board directors of Vessel Contemporary. ‘Our mission is to fill a missing gap in Western Australia by providing a non-profit arts organisation with a unique independent voice and dedicated exhibition space.’ This is a bold statement, and one that has had many speculating whether Vessel may very well be positioning itself as Fremantle’s answer to PICA.
        In the months leading up to the program launch, Vessel has been sharing similarly emphatic statements, along with board member profiles, through its social media channels. Given the many “gaps” within the Perth artworld, and the bold phrasing of Vessel’s announcements, one could not help but speculate on the then-forthcoming program: how might Vessel support early career artists? Perhaps with a comprehensive education program? Act as an alternative to university art schools? Deliver a robust series of lectures and workshops? Present a full exhibition program?
        The official announcement included five projects in all: the much-rumoured exhibition by Gian Manik; the inaugural eight-week paid artist-in-residence program, awarded to Amanda Bell; a documentary film screening series with the Montreal-based non-profit Cinema Politica; an exhibition as part of the Fremantle Biennale in November (details to be announced); and an experimental workshop series provided by Landing Thoughts (find out more here: https://landingthoughts.com), which ‘[t]hrough mutual learning, material investigations and conversation [...] examines what it is to land delicate thoughts in language.’ Two of the three artists behind Landing Thoughts, Kate and Magni Moss, have run comparable workshops in the past at PICA. Similarly, Manik was selected as the 2024 PICA Editions artist, and Amanda Bell received the 2025 Judy Wheeler Commission, also at PICA. While it is certainly exciting to see more workshops, exhibitions, and residencies (particularly paid ones) occurring in WA, perhaps the “gap” which comes to mind is not an “absence”, as proposed in Vessel’s marketing, but the distance between their ambitious statements and the modest program.
        To deliver this program, funds are required. At the launch, the Vessel execs gave special mention to their aim of raising $1 million in donations by 2030. This is a rather ambitious goal for a start-up arts organisation that has just gone public. However, Vessel is nearly 56% of the way there, thanks to a major financial contribution from inaugural board director, Adam Jorlen. What is unusual about the $500,000 donation is that it is entirely in cryptocurrency. This may ring alarm bells for some, given the fluctuating nature of crypto. Yet, Jorlen is a futurist with a penchant for startups, and his interests in crypto and blockchain are not unrelated to The Naval Store, which also houses Enkel Collective.
        Jorlen is the co-founder of Enkel Collective, which has two main activities: running The Naval Store, and ‘auspicing and supporting individuals and organisations involved in changemaking activities.’ Clicking through the Collective’s website, one can explore a variety of past projects including ‘thinking workshops,’ ‘sector discussions,’ ‘study groups,’ ‘ideas accelerator’ sessions—the bread-and-butter of the mid-2010s ‘makerspace.’ Furthermore, Jorlen is the co-founder of the newly announced Arrival music festival, which will also be taking place largely at The Naval Store. With these three endeavours, Enkel, Vessel and Arrival, orbiting around The Naval Store, it is easy to become confused by their relationship with one another. So, to recap:

• The Naval Store is just the building, has a neutral brand, is open to community use, and is under a 20-year lease from the City of Fremantle.
• The Enkel Collective is the leaseholder and manage The Naval Store with the purpose of “activating” it.
• Vessel Contemporary is an “arts organisation” that will present an annual program at The Naval Store (which will also continue to operate as it has, more or less, for the past decade).

In other words, Vessel is not quite an “arts organisation” in the traditional sense (a standalone bricks-and-mortar gallery). Nor is Vessel a rebrand of The Naval Store. Instead, Vessel appears consistent with a trend of “gallery takeovers” that have been occurring across local arts organisations. For example, the “Cool Change Presents” exhibitions at PS Art Space and Artsource. This trend of Russian doll galleries and organisations, who cohabit within one larger location, is perhaps most easily explained by the scarcity of affordable real estate—the lifeblood of art galleries, particularly those where commercial activities are a secondary concern. Under these conditions, the makerspace provides hyper-flexibility and, in turn, security. For arts organisations in these share-house situations, branding is crucial for clearly delineating between the activities of one another. Perhaps this, in part, explains the empathic claims made during the program launch.
        Ultimately, this program appears to be a tidy, focused presentation that prioritises community activities and offers paid opportunities to artists. Certainly a delight to see! But hardly revolutionary. Which is precisely what has me scratching my head: the dissonance between Vessel’s modest program, which seems so familiar, and the “gap” referred to by Vessel. If this presumed lacuna can be better articulated—at the very least, so as not to appear to dismiss the equivalent efforts of other independently run arts organisations in Perth, however mighty or modest—then Vessel may well hold a stronger position. But for now, in keeping with its name, Vessel remains empty. Only time, and a few exhibitions, will tell if indeed WA’s artworld future has arrived.

by Scott Price.

All painters, perhaps, in their secret heart, wish for a return to the medieval. To the resacralization of art and the reconstitution of its religious affect—a return to the magic of images, to the image as magic. In Jacob Kotzee’s flowerfield, Current Gallery’s reclamation of the Old Naval Store’s junkspace brick storage shed was remade into a shrine for a single painting ensconced like an altarpiece in the gallery’s north wall. A non-specific painting of a “non-specific field of flowers”[1]; just abstracted enough to avoid falling into accusations of kitsch that might accompany a figurative painting of actual flowers.
        Kotzee’s methodology usually involves the selection of photographs or film stills as painting reference, interrogating the construction of cultural and political mythologies through imagery, though here this process is omitted from any discursive statement (or lack thereof) about the work. I assume the painting was painted from reference to some photographic image, and so situated somewhat in the tradition (and aesthetic) of Monet’s water lilies, which he painted from his garden pond, an artificial landscape created to serve as a reference material for painting; a mediated image of an already mediated image of a vague landscape. Or perhaps more in the vein of Rothko’s paintings for the Rothko Chapel in Texas; the work is emptied of content to be filled with affect.
        Through darkness and light, Current Gallery is made into a makeshift shrine. The painting is made-to-measure for its north wall recess, like a holy relic illumined in a darkened sepulcher; a cave painting in the rarefied crawlspaces of Lascaux. There is a conscious striving here to achieve a heightened experience of presence, to reconstitute the cult-value of the art-object through isolation and illumination. Unfortunately, the directness of the lighting does not always jibe with the materiality of the paint. In the sunken-in areas, the hard glare washes it out, rendering it flat and lifeless, obscuring detail. I’m reminded of Frank Auerbach’s Looking Towards Mornington Crescent Station, Night currently on display at AGWA; a wonderfully expressive work whose material impact up close is let down by insensitive lighting. Or Melissa Clement’s recent exhibition Flight of the Battery Hens at PS Artspace, in which a penchant for glossy varnish and spotlights obliterates the proficiently rendered faces in her portraits when scrutinised from the wrong position. Such installs are always predicated on an idealised subject, one standing in removed, passive contemplation of the work of art. Stand on your mark and look, no moving around. I’ll refrain from too much judgement of the painting itself, because the painting itself is beside the point, which is the striving for the auratic possibility of the artwork achieved through its staging.
        Walter Benjamin locates the aura of an artwork in “its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be” which “withers” with its reproduction.[2] But there is no longer any question of the reproduction of the artwork, which always now exists in a multiplicity of states, both physical and digital. Exhibitions now begin before their actual opening, existing not as a discrete experience, but a flow of images that precede and proceed it.[3] Kotzee has resisted the dispersed experience of art in the age of social media by carefully curating the lead up to the exhibition, consciously avoiding the pre-reproduction of the work. The painting was revealed/veiled through cropped sections teased on instagram stories, disappearing after 24 hours, careful not to hint at the form of the exhibition or even the quantity of works. Will Ek-Uvelius, the poster designer, mentions his discussions with the artist being “centred around maintaining an element of surprise when visitors experience the work in person at the gallery”. [4] Aura is diminished through reproduction; the aura of the work is maintained by denying its reproduction before the fact. The cult-value of the art-object rests in its being hidden away, revealed only in its proper time and place; revealed as revelation.
        Benjamin elucidates the aura of artworks with reference to the aura of natural things as “the unique phenomenon of a distance, however close it may be”.[5] Distance and proximity is inherent in Kotzee’s painting; the close up image of a flower field is ambiguated through the abstraction of paint; a fuzzy rendering, barely legible as what it is without the titular hint. There is a unique sensation of being within this field but also removed from it, a vacillation which draws us in through the desire to resolve this ambiguity through proximal inspection, to be intimate with the materiality of the paint. But this desire for intimacy is rebuffed by the hard glare of the light up close, by the resistance of the painting to resolve into specificity, and we are sent back to our proper place.[6] The auratic always insists on distance, on the separation of the subject from the object, on which aura depends.
        In the week after the close of flowerfield the usual flow of documentation has been uploaded to instagram. Shots of silhouetted viewers in contemplation on Current Gallery’s feed, and finally documentation of the work in isolation on Kotzee’s instagram and website. I have to profess myself disappointed with this regression to the usual formalities of the post-exhibition. If the exhibition is not documented, did it even happen? If it does not at least allow the possibility of its historicisation, can it ever be important? But what remains of the artwork after its acquiescence to the discursive field, and what is lost by not allowing it to remain in its time and space?

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Footnotes:

1. https://current.gallery/025-FLOWERFIELD

2. Walter Benjamin. 1935. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.

3. fakewhale. April 2, 2025. “Beyond the Real: Art in the Age of Perpetual Reproduction”https://log.fakewhale.xyz/beyond-the-real-art-in-the-age-of-perpetual-reproduction/

4. https://www.instagram.com/p/DHkcl6CJxE1/?img_index=1

5. Walter Benjamin. 1935. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.

6. For a discussion of the effect of light as both revealing and concealing/obscuring see Barbara Bolt’s “Shedding Light for the Matter”.

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Image credits: Artwork by Jacob Kotzee. Photographs by Scott Burton.

by Francis Russell.

Enshittification is a recent coinage by media scholars used to refer to digital platforms’ life cycle of innovation, normalisation, and decline. A new digital product or service appears, providing some novelty to the user, quickly gains market dominance, which thereby triggers the search for profit. At this terminal stage, the user is locked into a platform that becomes increasingly unusable, as management strip the copper out of the walls in the pursuit of surplus.
        If we’re being charitable, enshittification has a mimetic quality, with the crudeness and ugliness of the word embodying the seemingly inescapable processes of decay and decline it references. In a less charitable mood, however, the popularity of the term suggests something rather bleak about contemporary critical discourse. The frequent invocation of enshittification to explain that, well, things are pretty shit, seems to function more like a viral marketing campaign—the Frankfurt School by way of Shark Tank, perhaps—than the kind of ideological critique that can render the invisible visible. But there’s no arguing with success, since, despite enshittification providing us with the worst of both high theory’s terminological awkwardness and advertising’s empty frivolousness, it was chosen as the Macquarie Dictionary’s word of the year for 2024. 
        These prefatory remarks shouldn’t be taken as a complaint about declining standards in critical rhetoric or style only, but, instead, as a way of introducing, perhaps polemically, the broader problem of critique’s legacy amidst the naked banality and stupidity of so much contemporary politics and culture. “The relentless transparency of all things”, as Jean Baudrillard wrote, disarms critique and leaves the critic mute; reduced to merely pointing, increasingly exasperated, at what is obviously going on. Or, worse than being mute and ineffectual, the critic potentially and unwittingly adds to the world’s cynicism and confusion by undermining whatever stability and surety remains. As Bruno Latour warned, when mistrust, if not paranoia, is the norm, are there any illusions left to disperse?
        It is in light of this problem that I would like to turn to the work of artist, editor, and critic Jeff Gibson, and, more specifically, the 2024 book Jeff Gibson False Gestalt (co-published by Griffith University Art Museum and Perimeter Editions). Edited by Wes Hill with additional contributions by Thomas Crow, Susan Best, Tara Heffernan, and Angela Godard, this beautiful full colour monograph presents a theoretically astute overview of Gibson’s legacy as an artist and thinker concerned with the paradoxes of multiple decades of mass media. Whether in his role as an artist or as an editor for influential publications like Art & Text and Artforum, False Gestalt makes a compelling case for Gibson as an artist and thinker attuned to contemporary culture’s ambivalent relationship to mass-produced images. As Hill writes in the book’s conclusion, Gibson has arguably spent his career attempting to address “the hold images have over us and our determination for them not to” (147). Discussing works produced over forty years, False Gestalt reveals Gibson’s oeuvre as attempting to conceptually analyse and creatively synthesise a range of tensions in our collective response to print and digital mass media: that we simultaneously take mass media images to be a waste of time and yet we find little else as captivating; that mass media images are typically stupid, predictable, and inane (especially when compared to high art) and yet we tend to be tricked and manipulated by them; that mass media images are a crass by-product of monopoly capital and yet are also highly innovative and experimental; that mass media images are a product of vast systems and are consumed by the homogenised masses, and yet individuals routinely derive personal and idiosyncratic meanings from them.
        Not only do these tensions remain pertinent, the works by Gibson that embody and explore them maintain a capacity to delight, confuse, and surprise. Given the ubiquity of internet memes in everyday communication, the aesthetic strategies deployed by Gibson—parody, pastiche, and juxtaposition—would suggest a corpus faded by overexposure. Nevertheless, series like disPOSTERS, Dupe, and Pictopoesis resonate with today’s anarchic and ironic modes of digital exchange whilst maintaining a distinct visual signature. This is not only because Gibson’s work evinces a clearer grasp of design principles than the output of your average shitposter—such that his works are almost always handsome even if odd or unexpected—but also due to the fact that his works shatter online culture’s pretence of eternality and totality. By virtue of his longevity, Gibson’s work helps to remind us that while certain and almost archetypal images from the 70s, 80s, and 90s have become engrained in the internet’s visual repertoire, the mass media of those decades contained subtleties that can be hard to appreciate outside of retrospectives. 
        From an art historical perspective, however, this volume could have perhaps contributed more to the reader’s appreciation of the critical and contextual differences between Gibson’s work and that of comparable artists such as Robert Rauschenberg, Jenny Holzer, Cindy Sherman, or Raymond Pettibon. False Gestalt rarely stages a comparative reading of Gibson’s work, and while this is perhaps more a practical reality of the scope of False Gestalt as a text rather than a missed opportunity per se, it is at times difficult to evaluate Gibson’s art historical significance. Far more successful, and potentially closer to the editor’s and contributors’ respective aims is False Gestalt’s capacity to unpack Gibson’s particular ethos for approaching mass produced images—both in terms of their status as culture and their effect on culture. Although increasingly démodé, and tragically so, False Gestalt presents Gibson as an artist and critic very much in step with the theoretical and political disposition of Australian Cultural Studies in its heyday—as exemplified by the works of figures such as Meghan Morris or Niall Lucy, and for whom lowbrow art or mass culture was neither something to be disdainfully abhorred under the auspices of maintaining standards, nor celebrated in the manner of the poptimist. As Hill clarifies,

seduction and superficiality are generative fixations for Gibson, not targets. His way of talking back to a trope and its ‘environment of reproducibility’ starts by first acknowledging his active fascination; his sensitivity to the way a popular form ‘massages’ us into abandoning our principles. (80)

Principles can be read here as referencing the elitist’s commitment to avoiding the sensationalism and sentimentality of mass-produced images and mass-produced culture, but it can also be read as indicating the poptimist’s dedication to overcoming the high/low binary. Most are familiar with the former, which perhaps can be expressed no better than via Adorno’s admission that “every visit to the cinema leaves me, against all my vigilance, stupider and worse”. While the elitist knows that they should overcome their attachment to “trash culture”, they are seduced by its superficiality, and often struggle to escape the “culture deserts” that make poor choices impractical. Following Hill’s argument, we can understand Gibson as a pluralist on this point, an artist willing to be fascinated by the processes through which we come to abandon our principles rather than assuming the “critical” position of polemical condemnation.
        The latter, the poptimist’s struggle to uphold their commitment to the notion that popularity is no barrier to quality or sophistication, is potentially more foreign to us although it needn’t be. For, as the cultural theorist Robert Briggs argues in his “Culture & Pedagogy: On the Popular Art of Reviewing Popular Art”, insofar as the regular occurrence of “a person’s defense of their decision to see a Schwarzenegger film, say, by claiming that they felt like watching something that wouldn’t require them ‘to think’” reveals an anxious attachment to cultural hierarchies that purportedly died along with high Modernism (117). In response to these anxieties, the poptimist either reveals themselves to be a crypto-popessimist, or retreats into an inverted snobbery, one that looks down on difficult art, literature, and music as conservative and reactionary. “I only watch TikToks to unwind” and “TikTok is a site of radical democratic politics” both reveal the poptimist as abandoning their principles in response to the seductive superficiality of mass-culture. Accordingly, the value of Gibson’s work for a critical examination of cultural hierarchies and our relationship to mass images is evinced, not simply in the admission that everyone, and not just the hoi polloi, is made stupider and worse by mass culture despite their vigilance, but more surprisingly and productively by a willingness to engage with the persistence of such hierarchies despite our supposedly enlightened and postmodern—or metamodern or whatever—appreciation for cultural relativism. Or, to return again to Hill, part of what makes Gibson’s work so compelling is his capacity to “see stupidity as seductive, to find something undiscovered in the overestimated, something reflective in the declamatory” (147).
        While this ethos is easily detectable in Gibson’s earlier series—especially those that show the influence of his interests in 70s punk rock and DIY aesthetics—his recently concluded Instagram-based series Pictopoesis might at first seem too quietist to suggest any particular stance or orientation as regards the image. As Angela Goddard notes, this serialised work, comprised of a weekly “four-part composition of assorted commercial products that are lightly Photoshopped and arrayed on a white field […] appears distinct for its lack of political intent” (119–24). This is likely to be the viewer’s first response, as the arrangements of consumer products can seem oddly catatonic on an initial encounter. However, such muteness is inseparable from a subtle mutability, and while Goddard perceptively draws our attention to the work’s subversive dry humour and penchant for the absurd, these works also speak to the internet’s dual logic of dispersion and control. Regimented and yet associative, literal and yet symbolic, the image groupings that comprise Pictopoesis are maybe the works closest to the book’s thesis of Gibson as the artist of the false gestalt. As Hill argues, while “Gibson’s often serial work accentuates our inclination as viewers to look through unsystematic displays of imagery for an overriding pattern, behavioural explanation, or line of commentary” he is better understood as attempting to stage “a host of uncanny, symbolic, metonymic, and synecdochic relations with just enough intensity to belabour scrutiny” (12).
        While this might seem like an abdication of responsibility, I would argue that it is an ethos or aesthetic disposition that is preferable to the “critical project” of reheating yesterday’s hot takes. While the critic always faces the risk of taking too great a pleasure in their capacity to productively weave meanings and associations out of what might be, for others, a symptom of something dangerous or malignant, surely the explosion of opinion and discussion that is concomitant with the commercialisation of the internet requires the critic to cultivate a sufficient ethos of openness and pluralism such that they are able to discover in the object of critique something worth sharing. The alternative would seem to be the need to discover new neologisms to circumscribe mundane online discourse within the faux-profundity and quasi-precision of critical vocabulary. Indeed, and as Tara Heffernan writes with reference to Gibson’s use of neologisms in his text-based series Dupe, “the act of coining them constitutes a shortcut for the author, cultivating an air of inventiveness and intellectual confidence while signalling their familiarity with the fickle currents of the world/s they inhabit” (89). Although they are certainly fine-tuned to the fickle world of image production and circulation, the works covered by False Gestalt do not attempt any shortcuts nor do they hasten to provide the viewer with an overarching causal explanation or moral determination as regards the world of mass-produced images. This is an ethos worth cultivating, especially in a contemporary political climate where the left and right are often unified in their attachment to the narrative that everything is toxic—food, culture, identity, art, and politics—and the desire for authenticity feels inescapable. Against such tendencies, False Gestalt presents a body of work that maintains, even after almost three decades of the commercial internet, that there is something to gain from lingering with media we might find narcotic or moronic. Which is effectively to say that, following Gibson, when it comes to the mass-produced image there is something yet unseen, yet unthought.

Francis Russell is a former academic and trade union official. He researches contemporary art and alienation, drawing on the legacies of Marxism, Freudian psychoanalysis, and phenomenology.

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Images courtesy of Perimeter Books.

by Nick FitzPatrick.

There is a painting by Klee called Angelus Novus. An angel is depicted there who looks as though he were about to distance himself from something which he is staring at. His eyes are opened wide, his mouth stands open and his wings are outstretched. The Angel of History must look just so. His face is turned towards the past. Where we see the appearance of a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe, which unceasingly piles rubble on top of rubble and hurls it before his feet. He would like to pause for a moment so fair, to awaken the dead and to piece together what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise, it has caught itself up in his wings and is so strong that the Angel can no longer close them. The storm drives him irresistibly into the future, to which his back is turned, while the rubble-heap before him grows sky-high. That which we call progress, is this storm.

A storm has risen in the teacup of Perth's public arts community.
        To even name this story's proximate subjects, Boonji Spaceman and the giant Kebab, is to immediately succumb to its special and pervasive brand of farcical absurdity. It is enormously difficult to refrain from indulging each and every one of this story's hysterical details, so extensive and labyrinthine are its zany antecedent factors and metaphysical resonances. Gaze too deeply into the Boonji Spaceman's visor, and you may accidentally glimpse the most louche and low-minded recesses within Borges' Aleph or Indra's net.


Let's first examine the narrative as it is popularly presented and understood:

In July 2021, the City of Perth dismantles Paul Ritter's 1971 iconic monument Ore Obelisk (popularly known as the Kebab) from its Stirling Gardens premises after the work is deemed structurally unsound. The Obelisk is chopped up and placed into storage while the feasibility of its restoration is assessed. Ultimately, costs of conservation and reinstatement are estimated at $113,000. Nothing happens.

In June 2024, the City of Perth votes in a meeting to accept the donation of an artwork it identifies as The Spaceman from American artist Brendan Murphy, purportedly valued at $1 million (in unspecified currency). The deal is brokered by local gallerist Paul Gullotti, and the donation is made on condition that the City agrees to cover costs of transport and installation (estimated at approximately $250,000) and instate the work to coincide with a planned future exhibition of Murphy's work at Gullotti's Cottesloe gallery. The City later determines that it will install the Spaceman on the now-vacant base where the Ore Obelisk once stood.

In March 2025, a public campaign forms beneath the hashtag #savethekebab to publicly oppose the installation of the Spaceman, and to call for reinstatement of the Ore Obelisk. Precise angles of prosecution vary, but argument generally casts Ore Obelisk as a storied and cherished component of Perth's cultural and historical landscape, deserving of conservation as a matter of principled priority before even entertaining the prospect of what lead campaigner Helen Curtis dubs a ‘parachuted-in piece of 1960s space paraphernalia.’ The campaign has since gathered substantial steam among key players in Perth's arts-industrial complex and broadened to question the handling of other public artworks within the City of Perth.

A simple enough story. Compelling, even, and dovetailing ever-so-nicely with prevailing sentiments towards the Zempilas mayoralty, cultural amnesia in Perth, and the contemptuous disregard for history so frequently observed within Western Australian governance. “Of course,” we cry, “Save the Kebab!”
        But let's not rush to conclusions. A closer examination is required. Let's begin with the works.


The Ore Obelisk was unveiled in Stirling Gardens, next to Council House, in 1971. It was a 14 metre length of high-tensile steel oil drill shaft, projected skyward and appearing to skewer fifteen large clumps of economically-significant minerals mined around Western Australia, from Superpit gold ore to Koolyanobbing iron ore. The work's subtitle, Harmony of Minerals, suggests exactly the rapturous spirit of prosperous modernity to which the monument paid tribute. The sculpture's base was, additionally, conceived as a three-dimensional graph, explicating the annual economic productivity of the Western Australian mining sector—an addition presumably considered necessary in case viewers were left trapped in the monument's otherwise diaphanous and poetic ambiguity.
        Paul Ritter, the designer of the Ore Obelisk, was not an artist per se but Perth's first official town planner, later City of Perth councillor, and a noted and prolific sociological eccentric of his time. Ritter's historicisation in Perth is a polarised and complex one, and he is variously and simultaneously remembered as a champion of conservation and godfather of development, as a progressive critical thinker and as a woo-woo charlatan.
        Indeed, there are aspects of Ritter's public persona that fashion him almost as a mystic visionary, of the kind decidedly associated with mid-century utopianism and esoterica, and their marriage within architecture and social planning. He promoted his beliefs widely, lecturing often and publishing many curious texts across his lifetime, with early titles including Universal Manifestations of Orgone Energy in Spirals (1954) and a treatise on the self-coined science of Educreation (1966). Such fabulously modernist, interdisciplinary portmanteaus appear frequently across Ritter's oeuvre, including educreation (Ritter's holistic therapeutic/pedagogical/architectural philosophy), Sculpcrete (Ritter's personal methodological invention for concrete casting using polystyrene), and emoplay (presumably a pedagogical technique, though the precise definition seems to be lost to history). Fascinatingly, Ritter was an enthusiastic follower and proponent of psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich's esoteric teachings on orgone, a theorised primordial cosmic life energy—though Reich himself rejected Ritter's interpretations and applications of the theory.
        Ritter “directed” the Planned Environment and Educreation Research (PEER) Institute, staffed solely by himself and his wife Jean—a detail making his appointment as director especially charming. It was this “institute” which conceived the Obelisk, originally as a fixture for a (very) early incarnation of what would later become the Perth City Link project. After that project's deferral, it was this “institute” which promoted and ultimately brokered the erection of the Ore Obelisk in Stirling Gardens after several years of determined courtship with industry and government figures. The official narrative—that the work was erected to mark the state's surpassing a population of one million—seems, on the balance of probability, to be a mere political convenience rather than any sort of genuine motivation.
        Ritter's affairs with the City, in the public sphere, and private enterprise were dogged by controversy, and in 1984 he was arrested and imprisoned for fraud, though Ritter claimed to have been framed.
        Apparently irrepressible, Ritter published two volumes titled Prison Poetry (1986 and 1987) from the inside, and, tellingly, after his release self-published Curses from Canberra: Public Service Conspiracy and the Failure of Democratic Safeguards (1989).
        Ritter died in 2010, aged 85. He is mainly celebrated, perhaps unusually for an urban planner, for his achievements in the negative, having successfully campaigned against two projects: one to demolish the Cloisters building on St Georges Terrace, and the other to construct an 8-lane freeway along Perth's foreshore.


The work that the City of Perth refers to in their June 2024 meeting as The Spaceman appears to be more accurately (or more lately) titled Boonji Spaceman. It is 1,365 kilograms of steel and carbon fibre, formed into the suited figure of a 7-metre tall spaceman, mid-low-gravity-step, and presented in markedly Koons-esque blue chrome. The entire work is covered in the kind of schizophrenic scrawlings you might expect to find on Albert Einstein's chalkboard, if only he had been some kind of toxic positivity influencer hellbent on contriving the precise mathematical formula for world peace, instead of lamely contriving whatever it was he actually contrived: [trust] × (PASSION) + [DESIRE] ⨳ 7[ADVENTURE].
        Boonji Spaceman is the work of artist Brendan Murphy. Born in New England in 1971, Murphy moved to Europe at a young age to pursue a professional career in Germany's basketball league, before later returning to the US to take up trading on Wall Street. Recalling his life's arc, Murphy can identify the precise day he pivoted to art: September 11th, 2001.
       ‘Everyone who worked on Wall Street lost friends, we all knew people who died that day,’ Murphy told Forbes in 2019. ‘That day was like a mirror for a lot of people and made many of us question “am I doing what I really want to be doing?” That’s when I decided to leave finance and become an artist.’
        Luckily, he was tennis buddies with painter Eric Fischl, who (according to Murphy's account) granted the upstart access to his studio for inspiration. ‘Also, David Salle and Robert [sic] Bleckner,’ said Murphy in the same conversation with Forbes. ‘I got a crash course with two or three of the best painters in the world and I began to experiment with different materials and that just kickstarted the entire process.’
            Twenty-odd years down the line, the artist is going strong. Murphy's repertoire encompasses innumerable paintings and Boonji sculptures featuring his signature formulaic scrawls. He has patented his chroming technique of choice to allow him to scale his business. In 2021, Murphy launched the Boonji Project, unleashing a legion of customisable NFT Boonji Spaceman avatars upon an apparently eager market and raking in over $15 million USD. The same year, Murphy unveiled Frozen with Desire, a special 42-inch Boonji Spaceman featuring a visor encrusted with 6,200 diamonds (totalling 517 carats), and commanding a highly publicised price tag of $25 million USD. After a year sitting in Saks Fifth Avenue's jewellery vault, the work appeared at Art Basel Miami Beach in 2022, where its price had dropped to a mere $15 million USD. In February 2025, the work was “unveiled” again at Riyadh's Four Seasons Hotel (this time alongside a curated cheese tasting!) now available for SAR 77 million, just a shade over $20 million USD.
        Many interested sources online are quick to highlight Murphy's collectability amongst the world's elite, his sculptures being acquired by such cultural luminaries as Warren Buffet (billionaire CEO of holding company Berkshire Hathaway), Larry Page (billionaire former CEO of tech giant Google), Bracken Darrel (mere multi-multi-millionaire CEO of fashion outfit VF Corporation), Jorge Paulo Lemann (billionaire investment banker and ex-tennis player), Serena Williams (tennis player), Novak Djokovic (tennis player), Grigor Dimitrov (tennis player), a handful of other semi-notable sportspeople, and Ryan Gosling (who suddenly seems that much less fuckable). Strangely, these same sources fail to enumerate the esteemed public collections which have acquired Murphy's work—this list is left to the reader's imagination.
        Such astronomical success may slow or arrest lesser artists as they grapple with questions of change, legacy, and reputation. Questioned—during a 2014 presentation at Google at which an unidentified, green-shirted Jim Doe introduces ‘Brandon [sic] Murphy’ as a new friend, recently acquired on a Caribbean yacht trip back from an island owned by Richard Branson—as to whether he concerns himself, artistically, with the opinions of others, Murphy granted his rapt audience insight into a recent exchange deemed especially resonant:

The difference between ideal creative output and just being noa- being a decent- is- that's the- that's- I have a- Alberto [sic] Bertini, my friend from Australia. Big Developer. Built some of the biggest buildings Australia, sold his company f- three hundred million bucks. Went off- off the reservation. He's now covered in tattoos, rings, an- bought his own island in Fiji. We had dinner with him last week. The girls stepped away. An- and the guy's completely out of his mind on some level. Super successful. And I said to him, I s- what's the one thing that you can tell- what's the difference- what's been the difference maker- he's- it's just an incredible guy. And the word he us- used was 'fearlessness'. Fearless. Coz the minute you start thinkin' what other people- n this is a guy who has- has done it, and still does it. And I thought that was very interesting.

Precisely how the Spaceman came to the attention of the City of Perth, we are sadly unlikely to ever know. What we do know is that Paul Gullotti, of Cottesloe's Gullotti galleries, was instrumental. Anyone with an internet connection and a burning hole in their pocket also knows that Gullotti has access to a great many preeminent artistic minds of our times, also representing such titans as Russel Young (USA), Mr Brainwash (USA), and Robert Mars (USA). For the savvy few with their finger on the pulse, it may have been possible to know that Gullotti was, in fact, perfectly suited to broker a major art placement with the City of Perth in 2024.
        And so, at its Ordinary Meeting on 25th of June, 2024, shortly after City CEO Michelle Reynolds appealed to almighty God for the ‘wisdom to understand [the city's] present needs... and grace to serve our fellow citizens with integrity and selfless devotion,’ the city council voted unanimously in favour of Lord Mayor Basil Zempilas' motion to accept the donation of Boonji Spaceman.
        The next day, Zempilas proudly announced the decision, posting on his Facebook page: ‘A gift for the City of Perth in honour of our origin story, the City of Light and John Glenn.’


On one level, the #savethekebab campaign invites, in the popular mind, a dichotomy of choice. Which do you want, Perth? Our beloved Kebab, or the Big Ugly American Spaceman?
        This is a reductive and unilluminating lens through which to analyse the debacle, but it does provide an opportunity to discuss each work on the basis of its merits—so let's indulge it for a moment. Now, then, is about the time to take off the researcher's gloves and deliver a frank appraisal of the works at hand.
        There can be no doubt that Boonji Spaceman is, by any credible measure, tawdry crap. Let's be precise: it is tawdry, tasteless, and uncritical crap, hawked by a quackish dilettante, and instated by a blundering and navel-gazing body politic. The problem is that it's hard to describe Ore Obelisk as much else. In fact, it is tempting to view the instatement of Boonji Spaceman as a moment of astonishing historical symmetry. One giant, hideous thing, emblematic of the idiotic fixations, self-serving narratives, and grossly negligent governance of one era dies. And from its ashes rises another giant, hideous thing, horrifically and upsettingly evolved to emblematise precisely the same for our current moment.
        The Ore Obelisk is a perfect monument to the Western Australia of the late 20th Century and its irreversible coupling, economically and culturally, to the rapacious exploitation of our mineral resources. It is brusque, phallic, quite literally unrefined. It is almost a taunt against those who this society and its industry dispossessed, and who until very recently could scarcely be named. History has proven it hopelessly optimistic, even for the white everyman who public art of its time may have been supposed to serve.
        The Boonji Spaceman is in turn a perfect testament to a 21st Century Western Australia, swept—like the rest of Australia, the majority of the developed world, and a great deal of the rest—into the frenzied and hyperreal turbulence of globalised late capitalism trailing in the wake of an increasingly deranged United States. Mesmerised by wealth and celebrity, enthralled by myths of independent endeavour, and enslaved to prospect and speculation. A sculpture as contrived and hyper-referential as it is (again quite literally) empty. A spaceman, the final frontiersman and last safe vestige of settler colonial iconography, dressed in Murphy's pathetic and impotent emotional “formulae”—the nervous jitters still echoing after the depravity of September 11 and the subsequent War on Terror.


We are now over a month into the proper public undertakings of the #savethekebab campaign.
        A change.org petition calling for the Obelisk's reinstatement prior to the Boonji Spaceman's acquisition has, at time of writing, garnered over 1,500 signatures. Articles have appeared on the ABC, the Guardian, WA Today, and Arts Hub Australia. The story even earnt its own article on eminent arts critic John McDonald's substack (huge for Perth). Campaigners presented themselves to a City Council meeting to demand answers (albeit not entirely successfully). Notable figures from the local landscape have taken up arms and spread the good word.
        On balance, it's a good cause to support. The Ore Obelisk is indeed deserving of better treatment, as a notable, complex, and historically enmeshed monument. The Boonji Spaceman is indeed artistically void, and we'd all probably rather see public money spent on something—almost anything—else. The City should indeed be ridiculed for its lack of taste, condemned for its lack of transparency in its dealings with Gullotti, and questioned on its lack of consultation in accepting the Spaceman.
        Outright opposition to the Spaceman's arrival, however, seems to be a doomed cause. The Boonji Spaceman has well and truly touched down on Australian soil, funds have been provisioned, debts have been incurred, and a mild media circus roused in anticipation of its imminent installation. The campaign itself knows this, refocusing advocacy onto conservation of the Obelisk and other public artwork, calling for transparency, and somewhat optimistically pitching the City West/SciTech complex (or anywhere else, it seems) as a more suitable destination for the Spaceman.
        Whatever the outcome, it's worth reflecting on some of the social and emotional vectors the #savethekebab campaign has activated. Rhetoric has at times flirted with provincialism, nationalism, protectionism, and brute financialisation of arts and culture. Historical significance of the site in question is relevant only insofar as convenient, and never beyond a colonial timeline (campaign leader Helen Curtis repeatedly invokes Stirling Garden's sanctity as “Perth's oldest garden”). Nor is there any appetite for an earnest assessment of Ore Obelisk's narratives and tensions, beyond deploying such thought-terminating clichés as “like it or not,” or reposting a video of British artist Yinka Shonibare explaining that he thinks destruction of colonial statues is tantamount to book burning—hardly a helpful or even a relevant parallel. All this is to say that a genuinely nuanced and sensitive examination of the situation at hand has been almost as lacking from the campaign as from the City. Perhaps this is the price of politics.
        Moreover, it is difficult to shake the feeling that the #savethekebab campaign is missing the forest for the trees. Nobody who has been paying a modicum of attention for the last five, ten, or fifteen years can pretend to be surprised that the City of Perth should behave the way that it has, that government should display such little respect for the arts, that such a Boonji travesty should arise. The outcry over this single inflection point seems in ignorance of decades of arts positioning and policy. The arts industry has, in many ways, worked hand-in-hand with the public and private sectors in allowing its output to be commodified and relegated primarily to self-serving political performance, “activating” spectacle, or idle decoration.
        ‘Public art should reflect who we are,’ says a #savethekebab-branded Facebook post by Apparatus, campaign leader Helen Curtis' own arts consultancy operation which itself expertly peddles palatable art solutions to developments in the public and private sectors.
        One final question then, before we lay down this mess. Who are we?


Thus far we have entertained ourselves with the quirks and vague conspiracies of the chosen few, the cultural and political bourgeoisie whose actions collectively comprise the dominant events occasioning the turgid erections that are Ore Obelisk and Boonji Spaceman. But stories of corruption among the powerful are quotidian and ubiquitous the world over. We might gain one final perspective, then, by stepping back and taking in the full vista of this place in particular.
        Public art's power in shaping collective perceptions of history, place, identity, and narrative is lost on nobody in this story. Nobody—not Zempilas, not Ritter, not Curtis, not Murphy—is at odds over whether public art ought to tell the story of this place, its people, and their history. The matter at hand is which stories ought to be told, which stories the public wants and needs. Of course, any story, whichever story, will be just that: a story.
        There is only one, whole truth. Uncontrollable. Messy and entangled. In places, it is triumphant and magnificent. In others, ignominious and contemptible. The truth cannot be entirely contained, nor edited, and where such attempts are made, the truth bleeds out through seams and cracks and silences.
        The truth is that Perth is a remarkably fortunate city, blessed with natural beauty, material plenty, and peace. And the truth is that this place is a settler colonial outpost founded upon the domination, genocide, and enduring, totalising disenfranchisement of Aboriginal people.
        The truth is that the tireless industry of this state's prospectors and miners has delivered dizzying riches so bountiful as to guarantee the prosperity of all who live here. And the truth is that these riches have flowed into the hands of the very few, and that today a widening wealth gap renders the necessity of mere shelter unaffordable for many hundreds of thousands.
        The truth is that, in a beautiful moment of unity, the city of Perth left its streetlights blazing, and festooned its laundry lines with gaslights in a bid to be glimpsed from outer space by astronaut John Glenn aboard NASA's Friendship 7. And the is truth that, half a century on, such starry-eyed visions of global camaraderie and American excellence are dulled and fading.
        But the whole truth of this place, its people, and their history is one with which the public—and by extension its elected government—has been unwilling to reckon for 200 years. And of this unwillingness is born precisely the kind of hapless and incompetent storytelling embodied by Boonji Spaceman and the giant Kebab. Until, collectively, we find the fortitude to face all the stories of this place, earnestly and in depth, each story we tell will be filled with seams and cracks and silences. Our public artworks will remain fantasies of unblemished virtue and grand endeavour, or empty and generic works of formalism. The story of our city will remain imbued with its special and pervasive brand of farcical absurdity.
        For now, we are left to brace for a probable reality, thus: that the Boonji Spaceman is, in fact, precisely the kind of art the public wants and enjoys, and perhaps—in this moment—what it deserves.

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Endnote:

boonji
noun. (coined, B. Murphy c 2021)
/bʊnd͡ʒi/
1. Positive energy derived from creativity.

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Image credits: 1) Photograph courtesy of the City of Perth. 2) Photograph courtesy of Frances Andrijich, Perth Public Art Foundation.

by Sam Beard.

For fans of Jesse Marlow’s street photography, the images in Street Posters 2020–2025 will appear familiar. Perhaps not only because they’ve been postered around Perth and Melbourne in the format presented in this exhibition (that is, accompanied by text by artist Sam Bloor), but because the photographs are from a series Marlow shot between 1998 and 2004, since published in his 2021 photobook Second City.[1] Bloor and Marlow began collaborating during the 2020 Covid-19 lockdowns, which resulted in a selection of Marlow’s black and white street photographs paired with Bloor’s characteristic sans serif aphorisms. These designs—images and texts—were then printed and pasted as large posters around the streets of Melbourne and Perth (and Fremantle, on the old Woolstores building, which doubles as a popular postering spot). Now, for Street Posters 2020–2025, held at Kolbusz Space, the posters are (re)presented as archival prints on aluminium, in editions of five (‘ready to hang’, as the room sheet notes) for clientele and fans of the pair’s respective work. This preamble outlines what interests me most about the work, the recycling and reworking of it, which leads me to ask: which iterations are most successful and why?
        Before addressing this question or the exhibition itself, here is what one needs to know about these two artists. Jesse Marlow has a storied career as a photographer. Based in Melbourne, Marlow published his first photobook in 2003 (Centre Bounce: Football from Australia’s Heart), followed by his first collection of street photographs, Wounded, in 2005. He has been awarded several notable art and photography prizes, and his work is held in the collections of Monash University, NGV, and the Australian Parliament House. In a review of Marlow’s Second City—the series in question—photographer Doug Spowart notes that the work ‘reveals [Marlow’s] astute observations of the human relationship with and in the urban environment through his use of candid photography approaches.’[2] In an interview with American photographer Blake Andrews, Marlow described how the title for the book (which he began working on during lockdown) came about from ‘the constant reference to Melbourne […] as Australia’s “Second City” during the early Covid-19 reporting. As the editing process progressed, the title took on a whole new meaning, as the distinction between the Melbourne we all know now and those reflected in the photographs […].’[3]
        With these two remarks in mind, the synergies with Sam Bloor’s practice may already be apparent. Bloor cut his teeth in Perth’s graffiti scene before transitioning into traditional signwriting techniques. Before long, he began utilising these techniques to present brief phrases on walls and old signage spots around Perth and Fremantle. The evolution of Bloor—from graff scene to text art—was completed through his borrowing from conceptual art of the 1960s and ‘70s. Particularly relevant touchstones seem to be John Baldessari’s Pure Beauty (1968), Lawrence Weiner’s A Stake Set (1969), and Jenny Holzer’s Truisms series (1977–87), specifically the iteration that involved Holzer pasting the Truisms prints around the streets of Manhattan.
        The significance of the urban environment for both Marlow and Bloor is signposted before entry. Through the window of Kolbusz Space, a large wraparound print of a photograph of the Bloor / Marlow posters in situ advertises the show to passers-by. To me, this particular rendition—the eclectic street poster—is the most interesting. As editions in the gallery, art objects in their own right, the interplay between mature street photography and youthful aphorism is at best whimsical and at worst perplexing. Some of the aphorisms are perhaps more aptly described as (and I do not mean this in a derogatory sense necessarily) juvenile. This particular mood or overwrought cadence is exemplified in the aphorisms; ‘Fever Dream,’ ‘Doomed to Flourish,’ ‘All My Bright Ideas vs the Sun,’ or ‘The Early Bird Dies on the Way to Work’ are all apt contenders for angsty emo song titles. This may seem dismissive—not so, however—as it is important to assess the text, the image, and their relationship in order to grasp the whole. The aphorisms throughout Street Posters 2020–2025 tinge the photographs with airs of youthful despondence, overwrought poetics, detached ennui, and pub philosophising. These moods are not dissimilar to the subjects of many of Marlow’s images: scenes of city life passing by somewhere between dissociation and contentment. The photographs and texts appear tightly bound together, as opposed to the large-format posters which more boldly asserted themselves in the urban landscape. These pairings may have been more compelling in the gallery context had they been pried apart from one another, freed for the viewer to associate varying texts and photographs.
        A friend pointed out another interesting comparator for Bloor’s aphorisms, those by Rirkrit Tiravanija for last year’s Perth Festival. ‘Do we dream under the same sky?’ asked Tiravanija, via billboards and posters, laid out in black sans serif type on stark white backgrounds (the inverse of Bloor’s usual format). In these works, Tiravanija appears to search for a poetic “open-endedness”, encouraging a participatory quality in which the viewer makes up for the ambiguity of the respective aphorism and fills in the blank with a “meaning” of their own. At the time, I concluded that the “open-endedness” of the work was a disguise for its insufficiencies.[4] Perhaps my review unfairly focused on the content of the posters, rather than the effect they might have on unsuspecting viewers going about their business. Instead of thinking through Tiravanija’s work as an art object, but as a sign [5], one can appreciate the need to jar, confuse, or discombobulate with idiosyncratic phrasing. In an environment of competing signs, one might conclude this phrasing is a way to pique interest and ignite questioning in the mind of the viewer. If this is true, their simple design only adds to the curiously conspicuous yet low-key a/effect. On the other hand, interpreted as art objects (perhaps a misreading), or even simply as text, the whimsical naïvety of the signs betrays an awkwardness that is hard to shake. But Tiravanija’s signs remained on the street and not in the gallery. Because of this, I now tend to favour the more generous reading.
        For Bloor and Marlow, what were eclectic street posters are now commodities in a gallery. This is by no means an issue in its own right. But devoid of their relationships to adjacent posters, cruddy brick walls, and obscuring street signs, they are isolated and thus the sums of their own parts. Under this spotlight, Bloor’s text-based work never quite transcends its youthful and despondent argot. Compare this with Holzer’s Truisms: Holzer strips the texts of any personal “style”, paring the phrasing back to impersonal, fundamental ideas. In their naked state, the germs of ideas are ready to infect a host—with little concern for their host’s context, surroundings, or interests. It is through the directness and clarity of Holzer’s phrasing, combined with the minimalism of its presentation and the complexities that come with its public display on the streets, that the most interesting qualities of Truisms are formed. Bloor and Tiravanija share an “open-endedness” that Holzer does not, and therefore, we can turn to the pair to understand what Truisms might have been like had it lacked Holzer’s crisp, sharp, and concise phraseology.
        Combining such phrasing with images—at least in this context—does not detract from the text. But it does complicate it. This pairing of recycled photographs and texts in such a tight convention as “image on top/caption below” just seems too slick, too formulaic, in the gallery space to yield the kind of perplexed contemplation the works might have provoked in the urban settings where they were initially postered. Or, perhaps the ubiquitous nature of internet memes, aspirational image/text combos, inspirational Kmart posters, or workplace calendar designs, is too great a burden to be borne by the works of Street Posters 2020–2025 in the eyes of this critic. However, their slick presentation, sophisticated photography, and contemporary idioms will undoubtedly find an adoring audience.

Sam Bloor and Jesse Marlow: Street Posters 2020–2025, Kolbusz Space, 15 – 16 March, 2025.

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Footnotes:

1. I haven’t yet consulted a copy of Marlow’s Second City, a collection of 44 street photos published by Marlow’s own imprint, Sling Shot Press, to confirm that all the images selected for the Bloor/Marlow collaboration are from the Second City series. However, several certainly are—including some of the most poignant in the exhibition.

2. Spowart, Doug. “Second City by Jesse Marlow – Book Review”, Photo Collective, August 12, 2021. https://photocollective.com.au/book-review/doug-spowart/second-city-by-jesse-marlow-book-review/

3. Andrews, Blake. “Q & A with Jesse Marlow”, blog, April 28, 2021. http://blakeandrews.blogspot.com/2021/04/q-with-jesse-marlow.html

4. See Partial Sightings: Rirkrit Tiravanija in the suburbs, Sam Beard, Dispatch Review. https://dispatchreview.info/Partial-Sightings

5. Rirkrit Tiravanija proposes this very idea in a recent interview with the Louisiana Channel: https://youtu.be/KUYL90wEoYc?si=QmphVKuLITcj4k35

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Image credits: Installation photographs of Sam Bloor and Jesse Marlow: Street Posters 2020–2025, Kolbusz Space, 15 – 16 March, 2025. All artwork by Sam Bloor and Jesse Marlow.