Truth is sometimes stranger than fiction. This doubly nude eyesore Father and Son, was lovingly modelled by the doyen of Lumpy Naturalism, Adelaide sculptor John Dowie, and the plaque dates it 1964. This sculpture sits, annoyingly, in Garema Place, Canberra, a commission by the father of our current Minister for Foreign Affairs, Alexander Downer, as a memorial to John Downer. It took us a moment to get our heads around this dynastic inheritance. Alexander R. Downer is Alexander Downer’s dad, and he’s celebrating the parliamentary achievements of his own dad. Our Alexander’s current interest in transgressive behaviour clearly runs in the family. He was twelve when this was modelled, and so those chubby little buttocks which so inspired the imagination of the artist were, at the very least, contemporaneous. Surely, we might ask, such formative aesthetic influences are part of every young boy’s upbringing? (“Hey, want to come over? Mr Dowie’s working on Pater’s new sculpture! It’s cool!”)
If this were just another hideous memorial cluttering up the streets of Canberra, ArtWranglers might simply have continued to avert our eyes. But there is another nagging issue in relation to the public good, which ArtWranglers feels obliged to raise. Is it a good thing, we ask ourselves, for the Downer dynasty to celebrate itself in the public domain with an image that might otherwise be on a watchlist? Take away the provenance, and what do you see? Another embarrassment. Or perhaps the ACT Government might be persuaded to spend its million dollars on a Christo, and then the centre of Canberra city would be one memorial better off.
10 responses so far ↓
1 Brett // Aug 27, 2007 at 4:26 am
Aaaaaaarrrrrgh!!!!
2 MPC // Aug 27, 2007 at 5:28 am
Yuk!!! What a downer.
3 Geoff // Aug 27, 2007 at 8:13 am
Ah! Those chubby cheeks, fore and aft.
4 will jurgens // Aug 27, 2007 at 9:34 am
You choose to see it as you will.
5 Leonard // Aug 28, 2007 at 12:39 am
Is that the chubby face of our current international ass? I mean… er… the chubby ass of our current international face?
6 canberraglasscentral // Aug 28, 2007 at 1:37 am
Nothing like a bit of Downer Downunder, what!!
7 Club Troppo » Missing Link - graphical edition // Aug 29, 2007 at 12:28 pm
[...] “Alexander Downer nude.” Is it a good thing, we ask ourselves, for the Downer dynasty to celebrate itself in the public domain with an image that might otherwise be on a watchlist? ~ Art Wranglers [...]
8 Blogger on the Cast Iron Balcony » Blog Archive » Not just pretty (type)faces // Oct 28, 2007 at 3:34 am
[...] of useful technical stuff. Zoe is running the blog and Ducky is doing the printed material. Here is something very frightening from the earliest posts on the blog. [...]
9 finding sculpture’s edge // Mar 10, 2008 at 10:02 am
[...] their successors to rise above the mundane! But public spaces are never sacrosanct (see the Alexander Downer Nude for the nadir of public art in Canberra) and much more needs to be done to lift the standards of [...]
10 what is it about bronze // Apr 13, 2008 at 10:31 am
[...] Canberra that would be illegal in any other artistic medium? Styles change, from John Dowie’s Alec Downer Memorial sculpture, born of a more innocent age, but we have no idea what is the contemporary significance [...]
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