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 Gulotti, 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 Gulotti'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 Gulotti, of Cottesloe's Gulotti galleries, was instrumental. Anyone with an internet connection and a burning hole in their pocket also knows that Gulotti 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 Gulotti 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 Gulotti, 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.