It’s hard to believe that Melbourne’s Mailbox space has been running for over seven years. If you have never even heard of Mailbox put it on your list next time you walk down Flinders Lane on a gallery tour. It’s a tiny place that gets some serious attention.
As the name implies, Mailbox is exactly that, a set of 19 original and beautifully age-patinated oak mailboxes that have been repurposed as small exhibition spaces. You’ll find them in the entrance landing at 141 Flinders Lane. Although there have been some large installations there, Mailbox specialises in small format works that can be too easily lost in bigger spaces. The current show is a good example.
Artist Gary Anderson is more widely known for guerrilla ice-performances where his work is left to melt-perform and leave a scattered ‘aftermath’ of objects. This time he has simply taken US 1 cent coins, ingeniously reshaped them and had them all gold plated. They look super-schmick but the artist took pains with his gilder to ensure that the coins are covered with the thinnest possible layer of gold – barely a few atoms thick. This work is all about illusion. So it comes as no surprise that each of the mailboxes appears like a little theatre stage set in the deep black space only velvet can provide. To make the coins ‘perform’ Anderson has used the mechanisms from digital clocks. The artist has taken a sculptural eye to the clocks, twisting the hour hands into convoluted armatures. Sometimes he attaches his coin-performers directly; elsewhere he has suspended them. The most fascinating pieces are those where he somehow uses the magnetic fields the clocks generate to make his objects wobble, twist and gyrate incessantly.
It’s a good idea. A big part of the thinking behind this show is about time and the duration of memory (and the ‘necessity of forgetting’). If you ask him, the artist will tell you about his interest in early Minimalist sculpture – who would have thought that the very first ever Minimalist sculptures created by Robert Morris were actually not shown as objects but literally performed as choreographed dances on stage. Anderson’s objects ‘remember’ that forgotten dance-object history and they ‘think’ they are part of the same tradition.
There is a calm but frantic quality to this work – the gilded coins make the objects feel like little people putting on their best clothes and toughing it out at work in the false economy of fake values. But the artist, maybe as a distraction from heavier meanings, just wants you to enjoy these intriguing little objects as ‘performative objects’.
They do feel like proxy people. They are lovely to look at but strangely affecting in their desperation to be valued.
Mailbox is curated by Martina Copely and Shanley McBurney.
Value Propositions
By Gary Anderson
Mailbox, Melbourne
10 September – 11 October
