When RISING announced mini golf as the format for its next exhibition utilising the upper levels of Flinders Street Station, this reviewer’s first thought was ‘Can you play it?’.
With a show like this, interactiveness felt like the first criterion to establish. And Swingers indeed delivers, with nine artist-designed, entirely playable, mini golf holes – some requiring skill while others can only be left completely up to chance.
Swingers sets out to explain the origins of mini golf, tied with the rebellious attitude of 19th century Scottish women who refused to wait idly in the clubhouse while their husbands played ‘real’ golf. The game then attracted all sorts of marginalised identities throughout the ages, but what has remained central is its sense of inclusivity and fun.
Working with limited space has always been something at which mini golf excels, and the Flinders Street Station venue poses a similar challenge. Natasha Tontey’s Hole of the Simian Crone takes you on a winding path across two rooms, while the ball travels through the underside of a queen orangutan surrounded by skulls. It’s a more challenging course than one may expect in an exhibition, but waiting in line means extra time to take in the wildly decorated surrounds, complete with a disco ball.
Swingers constantly pushes at the boundaries of mini golf. Swap your ball for a cube in Delaine Le Bas‘ Square peg, round hole. NO!. While the title is metaphorical enough, the playing experience is not as difficult as it seems.
The most physically active you’ll get in Swingers is at Animal Golf by Japanese latex specialist, Saeborg. For Saeborg, her latex outfits are an extension of her skin; for us, it’s a replacement for the putter. Grab yourself a tail and a headband and enter the forest of inflatable trees where you’ll embark on a whimsical game of fierce competition.
It’s nonsensical, childish fun, but if you want to combine the naivety with something even more unhinged, head to Algorithmic K-Holes and the Techno-Serfdom of Simulated Entrapment Under Slop Capitalism by prominent and controversial artistic duo, Soda Jerk. Here, the worlds of the Teletubbies and Jack Nicholson as Jack Torrance in The Shining collide and melt (in the now characteristically AI fashion) into unfathomable and slightly childhood-destroying formations. It’s perhaps highly ironic that a work designed to critique the ‘gamification of attention’ is the one that captures attention most, where players linger even after the completion of their game.
Swingers ends in the Flinders Street Station Ballroom with three holes by artist Nabilah Nordin, American rapper and singer Bktherula and film director and screenwriter, Miranda July. It’s an appropriately slow come down after the craziness of the previous rooms, especially with July’s Wave of Fortune, where players hit the ball without knowing where it will land. Up they go against the wave, and down into one of several holes marked by flags printed with the kind of messages one could find in a fortune cookie – though more elaborate and to heart. One message reads, ‘You’ve spent far too much time holding things together that don’t belong together. Today they come undone and you let them.’
These exhibitions can prompt mixed feelings – the desire for art to be popular on one hand, but conflict about its commercialisation on the other. There’s the suggestion that artists who play into the gimmicks of the experience economy become somehow morally corrupt, but if you go into any profit-led ‘art’ experience you’ll immediately feel the difference genuine artistic engagement can make.
No one goes into Holey Moley thinking about the sociopolitical context of mini golf, so at the very least that’s a critical element art like Swingers brings.
In this exhibition, participants are bound by the artists’ rules, and that can also be a form of empowerment, if not artistic integrity. To borrow the words of my mini golf companion: “Turning a piece of subversive history into an experience of fun and joy might be the perfect antidote to bring comfort in our chaotic times.”
Read: Event review: Diagrammatica, RISING, Slot 9
I walked into Swingers thinking ‘What makes an exhibition?’. Walking out I thought, ‘What doesn’t?’
Swingers
Curator: Grace Herbert
Artists: Miranda July (US), Kaylene Whiskey (AU), Nabilah Nordin (AU), Saeborg (JPN), Natasha Tontey (ID), Delaine Le Bas (UK), BKTHERULA (US), Soda Jerk (AU), Pat Brassington (AU).
Swingers runs from 4 June to 31 August at Flinders Street Station, part of RISING 2025; tickets $26-$35.
