I recently visited Redfern for the first time in several months and clocked the sharp gentrification evidenced by a quick influx of small bars and delicious coffee. Now a place just slightly cheaper to live than Surry Hills, it would be fair to say that perhaps the artistic community are partly the perpetrators of such gentrification, and as the rent rises, may soon to be of victims of it. Nevertheless, HOUSE WORK – a curatorial project by Diana Smith, confirmed Redfern is currently crawling with artists.
For the project artist and curator Diana Smith invited her peers that live within walking distance of each other to open up their homes for one afternoon to the public. I left home expecting to visit several loungeroom cum- galleries, perhaps with sculptures on dining tables and some video art on the television. I was pleasantly surprised to encounter something more integrated with the daily workings of domestic life.
I began at Nick Coyle, Alice Gage and James Harneys sharehouse, greeted by the hungover flatmates who encouraged us to play 1970s boardgames. Naturally witty, Nick powered us through wheel of fortune while Jimmy made guacamole in the kitchen. We could have easily stayed for the afternoon, competing against whoever walked in the door, but were determined to visit every abode before sundown.
At first I thought Dara Gill had hired performers to undertake ‘tasks’ around his place, but quickly realised the situation when we were offered rubber gloves. Strangely compelled, I became focused on cleaning the windows while others scrubbed mould on their hands and knees. Surprisingly the house was filled with satisfied grins, leaving Dara with a whole vegetable garden and his DVD collection both alphabetised and genre-specific by the end of the day.
Perhaps less welcoming were Julia Holderness and Henry Kember who had skyped into their lounge room from a bed in a symmetrical flat down the hall. As they sipped tea and read Sunday Life we desperately tried to gain their attention, firstly by poking around their kitchen , and finally by grabbing watermelon from the fridge, and enjoying a slice. This left the invigilator a little on edge, who had clearly been briefed to allow participatory activity until things got stolen. He let us have one slice before wrapping the tropical fruit in glad wrap and asking us to think about how we would feel if strangers simply grabbed things out of our fridge. On later enquiry it was confirmed the artists were happy to see their almost slimy melon get eaten.
Keg De Souza offered us a couple of things from her fridge – home brewed beers and freshly baked cakes. Her boyfriend wasn’t around but he had recreated his sound installation which used cassettes tapes attached to balloons to make noise. This made it the most gallery-esque home and I think I would have preferred some of Lucas Abelas eccentric stories over a beer.
Our last stop was an appropriate finale. Shane Haseman, Ella Barclay and Rosealee Pearson had stayed up all night – the evidence was on the kitchen table. Upstairs we witnessed all flatmates in deep subconscious after popping sleeping pills, and in between spying their book collections, we eerily watched them breathing deeply. A sound recording of them drunk the night before confimed they weren’t acting, the snores were real, and after taking a couple of photos, we left feeling like creeps.
HOUSE WORK cleverly played with the intersection between routine, art and daily life, generating a sense of play without any frightening theatrical participation or a plonking of works made for gallery contexts. It was localised tourism on the most micro scale – made for those who take pleasure in checking out other peoples shopping trolleys and in investigating bathroom cabinets. With it also came a great sense of neighbourliness, a coming together of like-minded strangers walking around the street nodding at each other, eating, scrubbing and chatting, making for a satisfying way to spend a sunny afternoon. HOUSE WORK also showcased one element of a suburb at a time of flux, making me wonder if those share-houses will still be inhabited by artists in a few years time.
Lara Thoms
HOUSE WORK curated by Diana Smith for Perfromance Spaces WALK program Sat 10 December 2011. Photos by Alex Wisser.
This notion of recording/mapping a suburb before it is gentrified seems quite familiar to me – it makes me think of Chinese artist Ou Ning’s project that documented the suburb of Dazhalan just south of Tiananmen Square in the centre of Beijing. That demolition of buildings, ‘cleaning up of the streets’ and removal of people out of the area to beyond the fifth ring road of course is perhaps more dramatic than the gradual gentrification process that will push artists out of Redfern.
I wonder from here what will happen to the indigenous presence in Redfern in the future?
is it too cynical to suggest that, actions and events like these are already indications of gentrification? once the artists move in, the cycle has started.
as artists, we have choices: can communicate, flex a certain level of personal safety, we have access to money and are capable of autonomy. they may not be at the same level as the middle classes, but by and large, don’t actually live in areas that are permanently violent, downtrodden or unable to change. once we’re able to survive and share our homes in safety, change has happened and it’s only a matter of time before the yummy mummies move in.
‘as artists’ – what does that actually mean? Do you mean people who make art with money from funding? Loads of artists don’t have ‘access to money’ as suggested, so I assume you mean a small minority of people making a living out of art be it by funding or personal wealth?
Moving into cheap rent areas in the late 80′s early 90′s was a financial decision for many of us who made art during these years and needed cheap rent and access to facilities. Redfern in Sydney or Fitzroy in Melbourne during these times were rough neighbourhoods and the artistic community became part of the local community not because they could flex personal safety or had access to cash – but because they needed to survive here. I don’t know if artists as ‘perpetrators’ is quite right – in the early years at least, artists developed a new and interesting culture within and around the culture that already existed in these areas by simply living and doing their craft locally. Those with money – or access to it – and local councils are the perpetrators of gentrification. Artists contribute to making life in an area interesting – consumerism says it should be for sale.
Yes I think artists can be perpetrators and eventually victims of gentrification. One of the artists involved in the project, Keg De Souza a Redfern local, is doing a 10 year investigation into gentrification of the area as part of her art practice with Zanny Begg.
http://www.youarehere.me/2016.htm
I reflected on some of these things in an essay I wrote for There Goes the Neighbourhood.
The pdf of the publication (containing heaps of other interesting stuff) is here:
http://www.theregoestheneighbourhood.org/TGTN-eBook.pdf
Nobody is ‘to blame’, but artists are often the avant-garde of the gentrification process, which means when they moan about being pushed out of a suburb, it’s just the other end of a long process which enabled them to move in there in the first place.
there’s a link in my essay to a great piece of research by David Ley on this issue –
Ley, D., 2003, “Artists, Aestheticisation and the Field of Gentrification”, Urban Studies, Vol. 40, No. 12.