THE Arts Manager, Wagga City Council: this is the true explanation of the funding submissions I’ve recently made for this year’s round of making merry with ratepayers’ money and generally milking the public teat.
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Yes, my sculpture, “Slab in the Face” might be – to artistic Philistines – just a “block of concrete” as you call it; but it is also in exact proportion to a carton (a slab, geddit?) of beer, only three times the size.
It would eventually become self-funding with the right promotion to beer companies who could deck it out to the nines like the real McCoy.It also serves the purpose of the iconic Australian “big things” which represent the main function of various towns and regions – the Big Banana and the Big Prawn of our northern cousins, or Clover Moore’s Big Café Latte.
What better way to represent Wagga’s main claim to fame than with the Big Grog Box?
Secondly, my interactive installation piece, “Cab Rank” deserves your closer consideration; you might see it as a “bit of dowel with a cardboard sign saying “cab rank” but it offers viewers a psycho-symmetrical journey through dimensional one-ness and being, to anyone with an artistic soul or a thesaurus.
Placed anywhere, the symbolic sign evokes an immediate desire to form a queue, vomit on each other’s shoes and king-hit the person in front of you before engaging in an all-in brawl.
I don’t think the fact that it is “misleading” is relevant: people wait for hours at real cab ranks before deciding to walk home anyway, and any complaints would just be conclusive evidence that it is doing what art is supposed to do – irritate people.
I’ll concede that my third idea is not as good as the others – old Hills Hoist supports, mostly a bit bent and standing around doing nothing is a bit “colourless” and, as you point out, duplicates what the city already has on the Tarcutta and Morgan intersection roundabout.
What about if I paint them black, lay them flat somewhere, and call it “Black Hoist Down”?
My last idea though, “The Magic Bin” is by far most worthy of your reconsideration in that it combines science with art and will get the kiddies puzzling over its mathematical conundrum by the score. Something to do during the hols once they’ve bunged up their knees at the skate park or singed their eyebrows off playing with neighbourhood cars and matches!
Imagine, if you will, an ordinary 120 litre household waste bin with 60 per cent of its surface bronzed and an arrow pointing to a 5kg bag of spuds (also bronzed) next to it! Your own Council has explained how a 5kg weight measure mysteriously expands to become a 70 litre content measure once it enters the “magic bin” so you’re in on the trick!
Ordinary people, unacquainted with the arcane art of instantly making a weight measure into a volumetric one with no conversions required at all will probably scoff; but they scoffed at that bloke who proved that the Royals are all really lizards didn’t they? And the hole at the top of the world that leads into the hollow earth; eh? Laughed at that too didn’t they? Not to mention ridiculing Athena X who can recall umpteen past lives just by having a snooze on a couch, apparently just because she can spell her first name but not her last one!
We’ll show them! We’ll show them all! Can I have the money now? A loan of a lobster ‘til Wednesday would do.
