Painted Over

Painted Over

Hairy Chin

With the three still faces looking down on this concrete culvert tucked in behind Lygon Street the builders responsible for presenting the newly built apartments have covered over some of the pieces that I had photographed the day before. You can see the missing image here on the left, now covered and never to be seen aside from this image again. It's disappearance from the universe may be less significant than the final breath of the representative of an entire species but it does evoke some kind of response. Something that was created, that stated a brief message read by very few people and then is gone is, to me, reminiscent of the Japanese aesthetic of wabi-sabi.





Now the hairy chin above may not encompass all that a Zen garden or Japanese tea house might but, it could be said to share some of the characteristics that these represent. In a very crude sense the Japanese aesthetic of wabi-sabi points our senses toward three aspects of the world around us: imperfection, impermanence and the incomplete. In other words this aesthetic asks us to notice, for however short a time, those things around us that may soon be gone, that may appear crude or poorly constructed, even unfinished, and see and experience them in a way that could give us a moment's pause.

"Dolphins"

The image below was painted to cover over some preexisting graffiti. I stood and watched them paint for a time while waiting for the 119 tram city bound, it took them two days to finish. I have read that it is insulting to spray or paint over another artists work and a day or so after this image was complete the row of "dolphins" appeared.

Cnr Lygon St. and Brunswick Rd.

I assume that these "dolphins" represent a territorial mark, a kind of "fuck you" to either those who they perceive as having sold out or the people who have paid them to do so. Either way, like the funeral parlor that used to inhabit the now barren foreground, soon this corner block will also be apartments, and I imagine that the above image, and the contestation for visual domination that it represents, will disappear behind another concrete wall.



I found these on Hoddle St in Collingwood today, they are much older than the one's above and it appears as though the ledge that was used to paint them from has subsequently been removed.

No doubt I will find more of these hanging around Melbourne's walls.