Before and After Melbourne Now

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‘Melbourne Now’, the National Gallery of Victoria’s (NGV’s) ambitious summer exhibition dedicated to contemporary practice in Melbourne, was a subject of keen anticipation, well before its doors opened in November 2013. Including over four hundred practitioners representing visual art, design, fashion, sound and architecture, this undertaking is unprecedented in the history of the museum, and seems indicative of an attempt to transform its stuffy image to one that is in touch with Melbourne’s larger creative community. Significant floor space was devoted to the exhibition at both the Federation Square and St. Kilda Road galleries, and a number of commissions added to the atmosphere of novelty and extravagance promoted by an assertive publicity campaign.

The curatorial premise was not any more specific than a survey of current practice, conjoined with the almost inevitable iteration of the now, the imperative of contemporaneity—whatever that might be—and of a collective identification through geographical site. Beyond the nature of the exhibition as a survey, there did seem to be a loose concentration of work which took up the question of locality as a discourse or framing device. This is, of course, no surprise given the blanket theme, and the ongoing attention to such matters in contemporary theory and practice. Against the flattening of what remains a complex and contested ideological construct by yet another affirmation of ‘Melbournity’,¹a number of the artistic projects involved a specific examination of the condition, locality and significance to cultural practices.

The foyer of NGV Australia, the starting point for many visitors, gave some indication of this with the elaborate multi-part installation by the ex-Collingwood collective the Hotham Street Ladies. This work, At Home with the Hotham Street... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline

Hotham Street Ladies: Cassandra Chilton, Molly O’Shaughnessy, Sarah Parkes, Caroline Price, Lyndal Walker, Girls Girls Girls at the Carlton Hotel, 2008. Icing on items of furniture, installation. Collection of the artists.

Destiny Deacon and Virginia Fraser, Untitled, 2013. Installation comprising photography, video, sculptural diorama, dimensions variable. Collection of the artists. © Destiny Deacon and Virginia Fraser. Courtesy Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney;