Yes, that’s right - that’s Bert Flugelman’s silver sculpture in a more yellowy-green light than usual, in this glamorous photograph from the monthly glossy supplement to Sydney’s daily morning newspaper.
In the 1990’s the sculpture was, without consultation, removed from Martin Place ( by then re-named, without consultation, ‘Martin Plaza’) and placed (or 'dumped') in a city council depot yard in Ultimo, just around the corner from where I lived. It lay there, on its side, for years, until its reinstatement, without consultation, in a small space in the city near the revamped York Street.
Here are my old poems that mention these events and others about My City Of Sydney (and Tommy Leonetti's too) from a decade ago and then later, around 2000.
In Surry Hills
faintly scribbled in sky-blue pencil
on the front wall of my house
in Surry Hills in 1971 -
“is this the hostel where the lazy & fun-loving
start up the mountain”
I don’t think anyone entering the house
had heard of F. O’Hara,
their T-Rex records under their arms,
sauntering
out to the kitchen to lean against
the fur-lined door I’d made
to honour Meret Oppenheim
& for a sensual lean
as well
At the Ian Burn show
MCA 1997
at the Ian Burn show
there’s a badly recorded
b&w; video of Ian Burn
& colleagues performing
anti-authoritarian art spiels -
drumkit, keyboards, guitar, voice -
it’s the ‘Art & Language’ days,
the mid-seventies - recorded,
most likely, on a Sony portapak
(I set one up - a tripod
in the lounge room
of our communal house
& let it run full twenty-minute
brackets to film quotidian comings
& goings).
ah - here’s Terry Smith
with plenty of hair - a stringy beard
&, possibly, an Afro - singing along
in the refrain -
“...ee...gal - it - tar - i - an...ism...!”
gustily.
I’m chuckling now - this is
amazingly cheering - I feel
it’s my culture - or was - &, easily,
could become
karaoke !
as it contains, for me,
equivalent nostalgia.
ingenuous, idealistic
and schismatic !
direct-action practising populist artists
(anti-institutional-intellectual-academy)
vs
theoretical conceptual post-object artists
(yet not always nor certainly pro-academic)
it was my schism too, our exegesis,
“artists think” ? well, maybe -
they did, for a decade
all under the same
tin roof
In Ultimo in ‘98
I maximize my traipsing
round the district -
at the end of Bay Street
Bert Flugelman’s silver shish-kebab
lies abandoned
in the Sydney City Council yard
behind the garbage trucks garage
(“Living City”
say the
t-shirts)
Another think coming
on time,
speeding into the cold shade
in the mica-blue daihatsu,
hailstone dings patched
with felt-tipped pens
and nail polish,
towards York Street,
the only street
left standing
after two centuries
of demolition –
its sandstone Victoriana
like a row
of determined invalids
suddenly brought into daylight,
stunned in a gone world.
cement-dusted street corners
draped with orange vinyl netting -
framing the unannounced return
of Bert Flugelman’s
silver shish-kebab.
an un-hoped-for cityscape -
two clocks
on the same building
displaying different times
having, so far,
dodged all civics conferences -
now, punctually, I attend
stressed-finished
seminar rooms -
a beautifully literal
painted-on patinae
of grime and cracks.
buoyed by
off-to-the-second-
day-of-a-conference-
eagerness,
this flâneur
drives everywhere,
imaginary ram-raider
skittling that bricoleur
clutching a fascinating
collection of spoils
in a palm organiser.
attention, attention ,
may I have your
attention
sorry no -
I’m reviewing a few
windows of opportunity
from my workstation desktop,
on the actual desk –
the pale golden colour
of white ginseng
steaming in a china cup
perched on a silvery
compact-disc coaster,
screwed-up pages, red ball-point,
small black radio emitting news -
political party supporters’ dreams
weakened by boom time fluctuations
like comets in a spin
were ‘we’
not to apply
serious scholarship
to metro profit margins’
most pressing questions -
‘we’ might find ‘we’
have
another think coming.
money now
determines class,
focus, promise, function
& an era
of boredom
tolerated by
the middle classes
ends
mistaking the ruins
for decoration
the dig reveals
bits of polyvinyl chloride,
ribbons of audio tape,
the usual aluminia –
the site becomes a museum,
the souvenir shop’s
elegant glass counters
house miniature replications
of christianity’s clean spires
carefully erected by
gigantic Russian helicopters
in time for the international
sports event
some time back
in the year 2000
(poster by jan mackay)
