25 Blackwood Park Road

Geoff Newman

26th July – 11th August 2007

Gallery One

25 Blackwood Park Road is an installation-based work exploring the similarities between devices used in both theme parks and new housing estates. Geoff Newman is a Melbourne based artist, increasingly interested in the way these devices are being used on the edge of the city. His practice deals with issues of community and the spaces we create for ourselves. His previous work has dealt largely with issues of social history and the relationship between water and wealth.

Geoff Newman completed a BFA at Massey University in 2004, and has shown other works from his Blackwood Park series at Westspace, Kings ARI and in the Next Wave Festival.

Editions

In the 1990s the Walt Disney Corporation, previously known for building theme parks advertised as ‘the happiest place on earth’, marketed its own real estate development, ‘Celebration’. Established in 1994 near Orlando, Florida, Celebration has been described as ‘theme park meets enclave’.

“According to the Disney Corporation, their aim was to make the town feel like it has a shared history and traditions– even though it does not.” (Diken 2005:92).

Underpinning this sickly nostalgia is a neo-traditionalist desire to create an idealised place that never existed– except of course in Disney movies.

These same aims seem to be the driving force behind the design and marketing of many new estates on the edge of our Australian Cities. Newman is interested in these changing codes, and the shifts that exist between wealth and recreation, which can be contextualised within suburban housing environments. Within these estates “Detailed plans and strict rules govern all aspects of this ‘perfect’ micro society, including the colour of curtains in the home, what can be planted in the yards and where cars can be parked” (Hayden 2003:214).

This work, 25 Blackwood Park Road explores these ideas considering relationships between (suburban) architectural ideology and the value systems embedded within late-capitalist Western society, and the forces that influence us into making decisions about the communities we choose to live in. The latest work in a series exploring these ideas: it uses a number of the same devices as both the theme park and the housing estate primarily the man-made pool: suburban object of longing, and flirtatious water-filled danger.

The symbolic content of pools and of swimming pools has always been interesting: “…a pool is misapprehended as a trapping of affluence, real or pretended, and of a kind of hedonistic attention to the body. Actually a pool is for many of us in the west, a symbol not of affluence but of order, of control over the uncontrollable.” (Sprawson 1992:274)

Newman’s representation of a scaled down, blatantly man made pond highlights the disconnect between a manufactured community spirit and the disciplined reality of a conformist and controlled society. The work consists of a boardwalk which leads the viewer either physically or figuratively into the work. Located just above the ground it caries the viewer above the gallery floor, eventually to end over a small body of water, Here they can hover over the pool so blatantly fake that its lies there oblivious to our nostalgic need for a nature surrogacy.

Within the pool: a polythene vessel, ringed by cast and carved plastic rocks is a body of water. These rocks while natural in form appear definitely man made, painted the same colour as the floor they both disappear into and yet engage the space. The water contained within has an artificial quality, the painted base allows it to appear mirrored. This mirror quality and the water itself are disturbed by a pump which controls the movement of the water. Above the pool and attached to the wall is a fountain head referencing the suburban ‘romantic ruin’. Rather than a classical form, the head takes the appearance of early Mickey Mouse, with water cascading into the pool from the corners of his overly smiling mouth. The fountain has a definitely homemade or garden ‘made over’ appearance, with exposed plastic piping and wall attachments, the whole configuration could be described as being “Mickey Mouse”. The proportions of the pool have been altered, deliberately making it unusable and inturn ridiculous. As well, it has only a few centimetres of water barely covering the bottom. With these two strategies, Newman has rendered it useless – twice. This pond cruelly offers up the spectacle of a trusted and familiar ‘community’, knowing only too well that its offer – like the pool itself is effectively empty.

With his installation Newman has responded to the growing trend toward building and marketing self-contained housing developments as desirable communities, A cursory glance through the real estate section of any metropolitan newspaper reveals page after page of full colour ads extolling the virtues of friendliness, community, quality, value and the appeals of what is described as ‘contemporary living’. And just as the small fake pool exudes the charm of the synthetic in a calm and benevolent manner, so too do these estates, both with their quiet serenity, completely complicit with enhanced blue water.

Geoff Newman

Bibliography:

Diken, Bulent; Lausten, Carsten Bagge. The Culture of exception: Sociology Facing the Camp. London& New York. Rutledge 2005.

Hayden, Delores, Building Suburbia: Green Fields and Urban Growth 1820-2000. New York. Pantheon Books 2003.

Sprawson Charles. Haunts of the Black Massuer: the Swimmer as Hero. London. Johnthan Cape. 1992.