There and back again

Given that I'm interviewing the curator of The World's Most Photographed, an exhibition currently displayed at the Bendigo Art Gallery on SmartArts in a few weeks' time, I thought I'd take the opportunity of a quiet weekend to head up to Bendigo to see the show.

It was a quick trip, as while there I convinced myself that I absolutely, positively had to rush back to Melbourne in order to get to the Victoria Police Museum before it closed, in order to buy a copy of a a local history of the wallopers (it's a research thing). Of course, once back in Melbourne, I found out that the museum isn't open on weekends... Doh!

A little known fact about the train trip to Bendigo: some genius built the city just far enough away from Melbourne that the duration of the roughly two-hour train journey is the perfect period of time required to read The Saturday Age properly, rather than my traditional time-poor skim through its pages. How lovely.

Arriving at the gallery, the first work I saw after cloaking my backpack was by potter Victor Greenaway, who not only was a guest on my show last year, but is the father of one of my best friends, Lisa. This, I decided, was a good omen.

Next I stood and studied a group of works by indigenous artists representing various spirit figures, mostly Mimihs, by artists including Jimmy Bungurru and Jimmy Annunguna. While looking at the works I was struck by two things: firstly, that Annunguna's study of the Wurdeja creator spirit Malinji had a belly button, and secondly, that every other single person who entered the gallery in the few minutes I was contemplating the works walked straight past them without a second glance. Does that strike anyone else as slightly odd, and perhaps a little telling?

Before I went into view The World's Most Photographed, I took an hour to contemplate some of the gallery's contemporary Australian works, and was especially struck by:

• Two 2004 photographs by Donna Bailey (who's also been a guest on the show) Sunday, and Charlie and the Pink Biscuit (pictured, above right), which have a wonderful sense of vitality about them, and a tangible sense of place and emotional investment about them;
• Two works by Jan Nelson, the abstract precision of Summer Collection (enamel on linen, 2004) and the evocative and emotionally resonant sculpture (pictured below left) Blackwood (fibreglass, oil paint and rock, 2004, from her Walking in Tall Grass series).
• A marvellously sensual, fluid and organic abstracted landscape by Dale Frank, awarded the Arthur Guy memorial prize in 2005, entitled Three Lies: Good things come in small packages; Nothing is interesting if you are not interested; One man's meat is another man's poison. They will show you everything they have - their sexy bodies. When the student is ready, the master will appear. Laughter is the closest distance between two people while Happiness is not a state of mind, but a manner of travelling. Tarampa Hotel, Tarampa Road, 2004 (acrylic and varnish on linen canvas).
• And lastly, the 2004 video installation by New Zealand-born artist Daniel von Sturmer, Screen Test, which I found utterly engrossing.

As for The World's Most Photographed, which was curated by the National Portrait Gallery, London, while it encourages us to rethink our approach to the curated and media-manipulated public image of the celebrity (including, in this instance, James Dean, Adolf Hitler and Queen Victoria) overall I was a little underwhelmed. Perhaps it was the modest scale of the exhibition, perhaps it was because I'd been so blown away by the works I've named above, but it just didn't quite work for me, I'm afraid.

The exhibition is showing until March 25.

And on the train home, given that I'd already read the paper from cover to cover, I wrote six pages of notes concerning plot and characters for my novel, and mapped out the various avenues of research I have to undertake before I feel informed enough to really start work on the nuts and bolts of the story.