What Danny Thinks of ACCA

What Danny Thinks of ACCA.

I wrote this for Beat, I dunno, end of last year some time. They printed like one of my rants, and I guess have had too much advertising to do to have room to print another. Anyway, here it is.

This is written under the influence with Nick Cave’s Curse of Milhaven playing. That’s not important.

Pardon me for saying so, but the front end of the of the “serious arts” end of town, the Sturt Street section, is a fuckin disgrace.

Is it me, or is it a hideous Baltic wasteland? And you know it too, don’t’ you Melbourne? Parked the Yellow Peril, Melbourne’s single most hated piece of public art, smack in front of it. Trying to tell us something.

What callosal fuck up saddled us with this eyesore?

This rant began going to the Malthouse last week as the sun was setting, the sky that deep blue fading to perfect a pool at the horizon, stars beginning to come out. Walking through the VCA, which is ugly in its own way, with its haggard and leprous face, with the exception of the new School of Drama which looks like a white filling in a mouthfull of black teeth. Well, that’s alright, does em good, students to live in shit holes, ‘specially arts students. If Taryn from Toorak can take slaving twelve hours a day, every day, in an Edwardian sweatshop, then yeah, she wants to be an artist. If she runs screaming back to mummy, then she’s gonna marry someone rich.

Including the fact that when the prevailing wind isn’t blowing the smell of horse shit from the mounted cops who are housed across the road, you’re sucking in the collected exhaust for the city link tunnel which pumps its shit out a giant chimney smack in the middle of the arts centre. It’s a direct delivery system of lung cancer and I don’t care how many orange pipes you stick around it in an interesting pattern, that’s what it is so I say smoke em if you got em.

What kind of message is that sending the artists?

So I come through that and what do I see? Modern industrial art made to look like the fucking industrial waste land that already surrounds it. And you say artists live there? Has nobody told them about contrast?

The giant rusty orange ACCA building was designed to look like a goanna. The whole building is a sculpture. It’s spectacular and you know why we hate it? The ground around it. Flat, white ugly stone and brick. It looks like a giant piece of junk smashed into a junk yard.

You know what’d fix it? Trees. The whole of the arts centre is an urban nightmare, a clash of idiotic marketing and high culture, what it needs at it’s heart is an oasis. A haven. It needs a fucking park. That brilliant orange building would look so much better rising out of a thick cover of bright green trees. And the Yellow Peril, actually called Vault by the way, might be a damn site more popular if it was bloody cleaned once in every century. It’s covered in graf and tennis shoe marks, I know people who have climbed the fucker and pissed on it. if it was cleaned and surrounded by green, it might look more like a flower than a stepped on Tonka toy.

Throw in some well chosen lights on poles, some light-up signs advertising the art that goes on there, and maybe extend a covered court yard made of perfect glass into the agora at the heart. Get a nice café in there. Not that the café there isn’t okay, but a proper café, not caterers. And a book shop. A proper friggn book shop, not that paltry selection of Australian crap being hocked by Grandma Nevins in the foyer.

So that’s all it’d take, to turn an eye sore into an urban retreat. Might even encourage the public to come see a show or two.

See give the bastard to me, I’ll make us some money.

I’m Danny Episode, vote one for evolution.