Spring1883 Art Fair by Giles Fielke

• Giles Fielke

It is Spring, but it is not yet spring. In my street, the jasmine was flowering in July. So what? You can either let climate crisis get you down or you can party like it’s 1300. Entering Caves’s suite, I meet gallery director, Storm Gold. European seasons don’t make sense here anyway. Gold is wearing a trucker hat that suggests he belongs to “Western Hydrodynamic Research.” On the double bed of the Windsor Hotel room is a set of tails, hair arranged by one exhibiting artist, Noriko Nakamura. Gold is in the midst of explaining to a guest that Caves was named for the earliest examples of a known art gallery, perhaps Chauvet, but also perhaps Madjedbebe.

In NAP Contemporary’s room, co-director Riley Davison is looking for a phone charger. I attempt to continue a meandering email thread about the artist Tim Burns in person. I am not here to buy any artworks, so maybe I shouldn’t make small talk. The one I would buy, if I was in the market, would be from this suite, however. Scott Redford’s electric resin and fibreglass work, Rothko Surf Painting (2017) is a standout for my money. It’s like an alien object John McCracken found out the back of surf coast shaper’s stockroom. Perhaps it’s the obelisk from 2001. Here, its glossy body is resting up against the mirror in the bathroom, like a naughty boy blagging a line while talking about how great the offsite show with the stolen Lutz Bacher sculpture. This toilet is the space reserved for the only best ware, the most intimate and exclusive artwork commodities (the closer you can get art to human shit the better).

While Neon Parc and Sarah Scout are showing in the most expansive suites (and cluttered—although they all are, to be fair) in some rooms you can even smell the Melbourne art world—it is a kind of industrial-grade musk that coats every surface and seeps into every orifice. What is apparent is that only about ten percent of the work here is blue chip stock (that is, its value will increase like real estate), the rest is purely decorative, and most people here are looking to jazz up their digs. It is around the dialectic between investment and entertainment that the art fair revolves, both forms need the other: the bathroom and the bedroom.

The best suite I found was Murray White Room. It’s on the corner of Bourke Street overlooking the steps of Parliament. There is a protest for Iran taking place. Inside there are multiple Tony Clark paintings on display, these Putto sit exactly at the mid-point between kitsch (Emma Borland’s blobs of aventurine glass on polished aluminium or stainless steel) and utopia (Mira Gojak’s Cutting through the vast plain of the day series from 2018). A single work from The Huxleys, Derek (2022), symbolises a show of their wildly successful series DisGraceland currently on show at The Store, in the Abbotsford Convent. During the Fair, Memo gets a mischievous mailout seeming advertising an event there from eight to eleven in the evening, after the closing of the Fair. I’m about to head over there now, just after this one more point.

While navigating the halls of the Windsor Hotel I am reminded of Hotel Theory, an exhibition at the two-year project, Y3K, held in a real estate-development-awaiting-approval in Fitzroy, 2010. Then artist and now founding director of the Los Angeles gallery Chateau Shatto, Olivia Barrett, was at that time obsessing over an idea inspired by that city, whereby everyone is a kind of guest in their own transient fiction. Everyone was reading Will Self. Someone who went by the name Thomas the Obscure wrote a blogger post ripping into Barrett’s Art Forum lecture from 2010. It is still online. Perhaps the Hotel Theory holds: show work, but don’t reveal anything. Just obfuscate while holding our attention for a little while.