downtown
The lights are much brighter there
You can forget all your troubles, forget all your cares And go downtown, things’ll be great when you’re Downtown…no finer place, for sure Downtown…everything’s waiting for you (From Petula Clark, Downtown)
You can forget all your troubles, forget all your cares
And go downtown, things’ll be great when you’re
Downtown…no finer place, for sure
Downtown…everything’s waiting for you
(From Petula Clark, Downtown)
I doubt that Simon Cuthbert is of the vintage to remember Petula Clark’s 1964 anthem to New York first time around. The song struck a chord with generations seeing their cities rise again from the destruction of wartime, and has echoed down the decades.
Cuthbert’s exhibition, ‘Downtown’, denies easy access to such a bright, exciting city. A screen wall installed inside the CAST gallery space delays progress, preventing the viewer from entering his Downtown with a glance. A vast poster-scale title sign bears an image of the lights of Manhattan, suggesting positive connotations like those expressed by Clark. But the works themselves (fifteen type C photographic prints, 94 x 120 cm) support no such associations. For Cuthbert, such bright images of the city as spectacle are no longer tenable.
City View General Store 2003 and City Lookout 2003 are hardly the celebratory city views proposed by their titles. The first of these is an iconic image: a portrait of the sort of general store seen in every Australian country town. However, the signage indicates it to be one that looks onto the city. This, and the emptiness (the shop space is populated only by Coke advertisements) raise questions: just what kind of city lies in view, and who is the viewer?
This work is paired with City Lookout, and together they frame an interesting dialogue: the perspective from the urban store is certainly not that of City Lookout, which