 | UNION HOTEL "WATCH THIS SPACE" North Sydney's Union Hotel has acquired a parasite. Its clamped on the roof garden of the restaurant in West Street and, from some angles, could be a giant silver insect undergoing convoluted metamorphic change or perhaps its just sucking the restaurant dry. The work of architecturally trained sculptor Richard Goodwin, it comes as the latest in a long line of projects in which he has "operated", as he puts it, "on a range of three scales". They are "prosthetic" gallery art, manifested as "exoskeleton"; the conflation of art and architecture at specific sites, manifested as "parasitism"; and urban landscape "prosthetics", manifested by achieving degrees of "porosity". For many years, until the mid-1980's. the Union Hotel was the watering hole of the Royal Australian Institute of Architects, which had its headquarters nearby. Among older members, apparently, its still remembered with nostalgia as a place where conviviality lubricated burning discussion by men in sports coats. Its recent make-over by Cracknell Lonergan, Bill MacMahon and Patrick Nicholas has turned the place into a late 90s venue for a much younger generation, the kind that often turns out with shaven heads and buttoned-up black copper enlivened, if at all, by a flash of grey. Its amazing what changes can be rung on the curvaceous P&O pub style of the 30s to suit brave new worlds. What former locals would have made of the high, silver metal, tractor-seat chairs in the Blah Blah Blah Bar, for instance, is anybody's guess, but they're certainly a far cry from yellow terrazzo and nicotine-stained linoleum. So is Goodwin's "parasite". It is a work of uncompromising, even uncomfortable, structural assertion, composed of jaggedly cut plates, wings, panels and shards of glass, shade cloth and zincalume, hung on a tubular metal skeleton. He constructed it in his Leichhardt studio, working up freely from models, and when it was complete, deconstructed it in order to construct it on site, in an entirely different skewing context. All very postmodern, one has to say. Inside, it works as a distinctly sculptural top to the dining conservatory; outside, it also functions and managed to survive Sydney's recent hail-storm, and is thus set to be a landmark for many years. There is no space here for an unravelling of Goodwin's complex theories about his art, though its worth noting that, at 46, he's of a generation originally influenced by Arte Povera, performance art, German Expressionism and German artists such as Kiefer, Baselitz, Penck and Beuys. Examples of the way he likes to look at the human body as carapace-architecture - as bony structures clad by folds, puckers and volumes of flesh - can be seen in one of his best-known works, the concrete sectioned column Mobius Sea (1985) outside the Art Gallery of NSW. Its shapes were moulded from old clothing, used as a metaphor for flesh, and he has described the work as "a sea of bodies, a sea of skin . . . rotating up to the top like a Tower of Babel". For his parasitic work to exist as public art, it must take its life from architecture, he says. "It represents a permanent attack on the skin of architecture [and] relates to its site only by way of its attachment and facilitation of views and climate emanating from the public realm." Disregarding any architectural confluence, it seeks instead to reveal a new image as well as the hidden workings of the hotel". Goodwin's art practice is provocative and ambitious, as can be seen in the work he has done for the NSW Road and Traffic Authority in sculptural interventions in traffic arteries such as the 3km Gore Hill Freeway and the Pennant Hills Streetscape. None of the projects, so far, has been on the ambitious scale of Melbourne's City Link Gateway (Denton Corker Marshall) and Eastern Freeway sound barrier sculptures (Wood/Marsh), but at least the dreaded NSW RTS bureaucrats are thinking of more than bleak traffic engineering. The most recent example of his aim to make public and private realms mesh "using sculpture or installation as parasitic attachments" can be seen under and over the southern approaches to the new Glebe Island Bridge near Sydney's Fish Markets. Working with Conybeare Morrison and Context, repetitive motifs taken from tiles used by Walter Burley Griffin on his demolished Piermont incinerator have been cut into the sound walls. Underneath the deck, in the tangle of approaches, an arrangement aluminium wings, stone turrets and growing frames for climbing figs has been installed as "a pinball machine of prosthetic devices". These are designed to "mediate between the pedestrian and the car to facilitate an increase in the permeability of the space", he says. Well, perhaps they do, and with the figs yet to grow, perhaps its also really a work in progress. What can be said is that, whether defined by parasite, confined by exoskeleton or engorged yet porous, Goodwin is making spaces worth watching. - Peter Ward. |
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