Category Archives: Documentaries

Renzo Piano & the Centro Botín

Posted on by
Reply

In March this year, the Victorian Government unveiled the winning concept design for the NGV Contemporary, a new centre for art and design, forming part of the planned revamp of the Arts Precinct on Melbourne’s Southbank. Due to open in 2028, The Fox: NGV Contemporary (to give it’s full name, thanks to the benevolence of trucking magnate and close acquaintance of Premier Daniel Andrews, Lindsay Fox) is being heralded as an iconic, nation-defining statement in support of Melbourne’s claim to be the cultural centre of Australia. So far, so good – but I can’t help feeling the design competition has been conducted with some undue haste: Expressions of Interest were sought in March 2021, with a one-week registration deadline. The competition for Stage One of the project closed in August 2021, and Stage Two in November 2021, with the winning team announced in March 2022, barely 12 months from the EOI. Why the hurry (especially as Melbourne was in lockdown for much of that time), and up to now, there does not appear to have been any public consultation in the design process.

The Centro Botín, Santander, designed by Renzo Piano (image sourced from Wikimedia)

Contrast this with the design of the Centro Botín in Santander, Spain, by Italian architect Renzo Piano, whose story is told in an absorbing documentary, “Renzo Piano: The Architect of Light”. First, neither the architect nor the sponsoring Botín Foundation had any aspirations of creating an “iconic building”; instead, the goal was to have as minimal physical impact as possible, while reclaiming an area of land and returning it to public use. Second, there was a public consultation process, to overcome concerns expressed by some nearby residents. Third, while the documentary has no doubt been artfully edited, it does provide extensive “behind the scenes” access to the design and construction process over its 7-year development, which included a 3-year delay in completion. The fact that this was a private commission rather than a competition may account for this approach, but there was still a great deal of negotiation with municipal and community stakeholders.

The documentary itself is notable not only for the degree of transparency (we observe meetings between architect, client and project managers throughout the process), but also for the simplicity of its narrative, and the wise decision to dispense with any voiceover commentary – the subjects are allowed to speak for themselves. There are also references to cultural icons such as novelist Italo Calvino and film-maker Roberto Rossellini. The use of Mahler’s ‘Symphony No. 5’ in the soundtrack underlines Renzo Piano’s fascination with light as a construction material, as important to him as glass, concrete and steel – the music is most famously associated with the film of ‘Death in Venice’, a city renowned for its light.

If the primary inspiration for the design of the Centro Botín is light (and lightness of construction), I’m struggling, based on the available evidence, to see what the inspiration is for the NGV Contemporary. Despite being a statement about “art and design”, I fear that this project is as much about political statements and lasting personal legacies. Much has been made about the potential job creation during its construction, but much less about the design principles and aesthetic objectives. I hope this project does not turn into a municipal white elephant.

The original NGV (now referred to as NGV International) is a landmark building and one of the most popular destinations in Melbourne. I have known it most of my life, having first visited it aged 10, when it left an indelible impression on me. Having lived in Melbourne the past 20 years, I have been a regular visitor since it was extensively refurbished in 2003. As part of the Arts Precinct, the NGV is a focal point for the city’s cultural activities, and is a major draw card for local and international visitors. Any enhancement of the NGV and the surrounding facilities is generally to be welcomed, and certainly there are parts of the precinct that could do with upgrading. However, I’m not sure the design for the NGV Contemporary is the right decision.

Aside from the hastiness shown by the NGV Contemporary’s design phase, I’m surprised that the winning design team, Angelo Candalepas and Associates, do not appear to have built any comparable projects, despite winning multiple awards for their past work. The Candalepas studio has designed many residential buildings (and I lived very happily in one of their first competition successes, ‘The Point’ in Sydney’s inner city suburb of Pyrmont), but as far as I can see, nothing on the scale, significance or importance as NGV Contemporary. The proposed design looks very “blocky”, notwithstanding the internal “spherical hall”, which is highly reminiscent of New York’s Guggenheim Museum. It’s also not clear what the spacial relationship will be with the existing NGV and other neighbouring buildings, nor whether any of them will need to be remodelled or demolished to make way for this latest addition. I’ve tried, without success, to find a map or ground plan of the proposed development, or any details on how the NGV Contemporary will be accessed from adjacent streets, other than via a new garden that appears to envelop the NGV International – so what existing land will this garden occupy, and what current facilities might be lost in the process?

In conclusion, since its opening in 2017, the Centro Botín appears to have been enthusiastically embraced by the residents of Santander, and manages to be both utterly modern and easily accessible, unlike so many other examples of “statement” architecture. I hope we will see a similar outcome for NGV Contemporary.

Next week: Mopping up after the LNP

You said you wanted a revolution?

Posted on by
Reply

In terms of popular music and the “revolutionary” counter-culture, the Hippie Dream was born during the Summer of Love in 1967 (Haight-Ashbury to be precise) and died in December 1969 (The Rolling Stones’ concert at Altamont). The tipping point was probably The Beatles’ “White Album” released in 1968, featuring “Helter Skelter” and “Revolution 9”. Along the way, we had the “14 Hour Technicolour Dream (April 1967); the Monterey Pop Festival (June 1967); the first Isle of Wight Festival (August 1968); the Miami Pop Festivals (May and December 1968); Stones In The Park (July 1969); oh, and Woodstock (August 1969). From visiting the current “Revolutions: Records + Rebels” exhibition at Melbourne Musuem, the most significant outcome from this era was Woodstock, even though it came close to being a self-inflicted human, environmental and logistical disaster. It was only saved by a combination of the emergency services, the military, local residents – and sheer luck.

This ambitious and uneven exhibition spans the years from 1966 (The Beatles’ “Revolver”, The Beach Boys’ “Pet Sounds”, and Bob Dylan’s “Blonde on Blonde”) to 1970 (Deep Purple’s “Deep Purple in Rock”, Black Sabbath’s “Paranoid”, and The Stooges’ “Fun House”). Despite covering the peak psychedelic era of “Sergeant Pepper”, “Their Satanic Majesties Request” and “The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn”, the exhibition leaves you with the impression that Woodstock is the only enduring musical or cultural event from this time. Yet, the music portrayed in Woodstock is far from revolutionary – being mostly a bland collection of highly-derivative (and by then, almost passé) rock, blues and folk.

It almost feels like the curators of this exhibition set themselves up for failure. By trying to cover such a broad spectrum of political, social, economic and cultural themes, and then view them primarily through the rather narrow lens of popular music, the net effect is a grab bag of museum artifacts assembled with little coherence, all accompanied by a rather insipid soundtrack selection.

I’m not doubting the importance and lasting significance of the topics included (civil rights, peace movement, feminism, class war and gay liberation) – but the attempt to tack on some Australian relevance almost backfires. Let’s not forget that homosexuality was not decriminalised in Tasmania until 1997, and abortion is still not decriminalised in NSW. In fact, Australia was possibly more progressive on some issues in the early 1970s (anti-Vietnam War, ecology, feminism) than it is today with the current resurgence of populism, nationalism and religious conservatism.

Anyway, back to those “Records + Rebels”. I was surprised there was nothing about the radical developments in jazz or improvised music by the likes of Miles Davis (“In A Silent Way, “Bitches Brew”), The Art Ensemble of Chicago and Ornette Coleman, or labels like ESP, BYG and ECM. Absent also was any reference to the mod and early skinhead movements that were the antidote to hippiedom, embracing soul, r’n’b and reggae music. No mention of Soft Machine (who were contemporaries and colleagues of both Pink Floyd and Jimi Hendrix). Very little significance given to The Velvet Underground (probably the most influential band of the era in terms of inspiring the music that came after the hippie dream dissipated). And where were the likes of Can, Tangerine Dream, and Kraftwerk (their first album came out in 1970….) to represent the German rejection of traditional Anglo-American rock and roll?

On a somewhat depressing note, apart from Woodstock, two of the other enduring “brands” of this era that were on display were Richard Branson’s Virgin empire, and Time Out magazine…. So much for the Children of the Revolution.

Next week: Top 10 Gigs – revisited.

 

Jump-cut videos vs Slow TV

Posted on by
Reply

In last week’s blog on the attention economy, I alluded to the trade-off that exists between our desire for more stimulus, and the need to consume more (sponsored) content to feed that hunger. Given the increasing demands on our available attention span, and the rate at which we are having to consume just to keep up, it feels like we are all developing a form of ADD – too much to choose from, too little time to focus on anything.

Christian Marclay – “The Clock” – image sourced from Time Out

Personally, I place a lot of the blame on music videos. Initially, this format merely reduced our attention span to the length of a 3-minute pop song. (Paradoxically, there was also a style known as the “long form music video”, which stretched those 3 minutes into a 10-20 minute extended narrative). Then, in recent years, the video format has been distilled to a series of jump cuts – no single shot lasts more than a few frames, and the back-n-forth between shots often has no narrative cohesion other than serving the technique of the jump-cut itself. I sometimes wonder if the reason for so many jump-cuts is because too few of today’s pop stars can really dance, forcing the director to distract our (minimal) attention from the poor moves. (Note: pop stars who can’t dance should take a leaf out of The Fall’s playbook, and call in the professionals, like Michael Clark…)

I have previously made a brief mention of Slow TV, which made a return to Australian channel SBS this summer in the form of trans-continental railway journeys, a UK barge trip (can it get any slower?) and a length-ways tour of New Zealand. These individual programs can screen for up to 18 hours, a perfect antidote to the ADD-inducing experience of jump-cut music videos and social media notifications.

Concurrently in Melbourne, two installation works are on display that, in their very separate ways also challenge the apparent obsession with rapid sensory overload in many of today’s video content.

The first is “The Clock”, by Christian Marclay – a sequence of finely edited clips sourced from a multitude of films and TV programmes that together act as a real-time 24 hour clock. The work also manages to reveal a beguiling (dare I say seamless?) narrative from such disparate and unrelated scenes that you really do begin to wonder how the story will end…. The fact that some of the scenes are quite mundane (and whose main function is to indicate the passage of time), while others are iconic cinematic moments, only adds to our real-time/real-life experience of the ebb and flow of the seconds, minutes and hours.

The second is almost the complete opposite. “Cataract”, by Daniel Von Sturmer comprises 81 screens, each showing looped sequences of somewhat banal events. Although each video event is no more than a few seconds, and none of the loops are synchronised with each other, it does not feel like a series of jump-cut edits. This is partly because the events, despite their brevity, are all engaging in their own way; and partly because even though we know it is a loop, we somehow expect something different to happen each time (maybe because our brain is wired to find a narrative even when none exists?).

According to the gallery’s description of “Cataract”, “the world is full of happenings, but it is only through selective attention that meaning is found”. Quite appropriate for the attention economy and jump-cut culture – meaning is where we choose to see it, but if we are not paying the appropriate amount of attention or if we are not viewing through a critical lens, we risk missing it altogether.

Next week: The Future of Fintech

 

Sakamoto – Coda and Muzak

Posted on by
Reply

Contemporary music documentaries tend to fall into one of two categories: the track-by-track “making of” account, in support of a new album; and the “behind the scenes” artifact of a live concert tour (often in support of that new album).* Both can be fine in their own way, but ultimately they are there to plug product. The recent documentary “Coda”, featuring Ryuichi Sakamoto clearly bucks that trend.As a recording artist, Sakamoto is one of the most prolific composers of his era. As a performer, he has maintained a regular schedule of live concerts and collaborations. That is until he was diagnosed with cancer a few years ago, and was forced to temporarily abandon his work. Fortunately, he has come through that recent health scare, even completing a major film score for “The Revenant” before he had fully recovered.

“Coda” started out as an account of Sakamoto’s anti-nuclear activism, but ended up providing an insight into his creative process, an examination of the role of sound and music in film, and a discourse on the aesthetics of minimalism.

There are two images in the film which provide a link between the “craft” of the composer and the “art” inherent in any form of creativity. The first is a close-up of Sakamoto’s working tools – the pencils he uses to write out his scores. The second is a shot of some immaculate cooking utensils – arranged in a similar fashion to his perfectly sharpened pencils. This is someone for whom both process and form serve the purpose of creativity, and which combine to determine the artistic outcome of the resulting content.

As a regular soundtrack composer, Sakamoto has been likened to a film-maker, although he is neither director nor cinematographer. He has an acute sense of the use of sound (not just music) in film, and in fact for his most recent album, “Async”, Sakamoto invited film-makers to submit short films to accompanying each of the tracks. An astounding 675 films were considered for the competition.

Ever sensitive to his environment, it was perhaps no surprise that Sakamoto chose to change the music played at one of his favourite restaurants, rather than eat elsewhere. And ever the non-egoist, none of the tracks on his restaurant playlist was his own.

The forthcoming performance by Sakamoto and long-time collaborator Alva Noto at the Melbourne International Arts Festival promises to be something special.

Next week: Revolving Doors At The Lodge

* An honourable exception in recent years was “The Go-Betweens: Right Here”