Visual Arts Program
Some twenty-five public and commercial venues mounted exhibitions associated with the 1998 Melbourne Festival’s Visual Arts Program. At its heart was the exhibition Remanence, housed in what is now part of RMIT's city campus: the former Magistrates' Court and City Watch House. Fourteen chosen artists, five internationals and nine internationally-recognised locals, were invited to build discrete works inspired by the site's more than century-long association with the administration of justice in Victoria (it was only finally vacated in 1995). Curator Maudie Palmer assembled midcareer artists whose work often deals with difficult social and political issues.
The result was a big show, heavy on accompanying textual statements, requiring several visits to take it all in. The oppressively Victorian space was filled with appeals to justice, guilt and redemption, evocations of personal and institutional memories, even divinities. Most of the work interacted or intervened in the complex legal cultural history of the site, with uneven degrees of success.
From the street outside the stone building at night, the eyes of Linda Sproul's A Better World peered out of the windows. Inside was a reconstructed waiting room, with a pot plant, coffee machine, and desks stacked with yellowing witness and record forms. There was also a kitchen with a clock radio playing to used polystyrene cups, and a spotlit passage set up to resemble an interrogation room just waiting for something for happen.
Mladen Stilinovic's Poor People Law featured real cakes and rum-balls affixed to the walls, and black and white plates with aphorisms about justice. But the ironic juxtapositions of word and image were unsubtle. Next door, in the Chamber Magistrate's rooms––with their palpable atmosphere of bureaucratic excess suggesting recent vacation––Imants Tillers