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Dressed in blue uniforms, we schoolboys would taunt each other with the lyrics of AC/DC’s Jailbreak (1974). It was the anthem of our single sex nightmare, one of the few songs that spoke back to the world in which we were trapped. Unlike the parents, teachers and priests that hemmed us in, AC/DC’s singer and lyricist Bon Scott did not lie to us about life on the outside. Many of my schoolmates ended up working on the railways or at the abattoir and, unlike many other bands, AC/DC was able to speak to their reality.
The best of the pieces at the Fremantle Arts Centre in this exhibition to commemorate Bon Scott have something in them of working a shit job, living in the suburbs, and making the best of it. Ian Haig’s Eastland’s Shopping Centre, September 1975 (2008) recalls seeing AC/DC at the local shops before they were shut down for being too loud. This video piece is not projected, like so many, but sits below eye level on an ordinary television. Its blaring strobe of yellow, black, red and white recalls posters seen from a passing car window, or an early morning cartoon after a night out tripping. So it is with Cecilia Fogelberg’s collages of Bon and the band, drawn carefully like a girl’s scrapbook, and populated with flowers and mutant animals. Such fan-like images are the kind of thing we have been seeing pasted to Bon’s grave in Fremantle for many years.
More conceptual are three imaginary record covers by Alex Gawronski who plays with the designs of 1980’s Heavy Metal to evoke the genre’s authentic criticality. These are not ironic pieces. They play hard with