When Philip Johnson was wont to hark back to his Greek heritage, he would refer to architecture as “the art we used to call the mother of the arts”. Early this Sunday morning I was dreaming in the passenger seat of Willa’s Daewoo when bam! this particular progeny whacked me in the eye. So why is this unfinished masterpiece a must-see?

Once you’ve recovered your breath, you may realise that the most compelling aspect of this dwelling at 20 Scrivener St, Lyneham is its narrative quality. Buildings have stories to tell. This one can be interpreted as an 21st century metaphor: it’s the mini-orbed ship of design foundered on the rock of featurism. Hooraa!

Readers please offer a score for the Design Aesthetics Index…

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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.

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What’s it called when a city can’t find its own center? I know we’ve been spoiled recently by the fantastic ceramic sculptures by Jun Kanenko in San Jose, but when we drive past this dysfunctional signage for three months in a row (you can tell it’s been this long by measuring the grass behind that attractive safety net) we no longer even make aesthetic judgements! If it doesn’t work, take it away! And take away the foundations for the others before it gets worse, and someone trips over them. Enough! We’ve seen enough of them to know we really don’t like them. Take them away!

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By contrast, the dead centre of Canberra is just that. It’s been fifteen years since fairy lights were the latest thing, and these look as if they’ve been there that long. Let’s see what they look like at night…

Worse. Only about 10% are working. A bad omen.

Who looks after this place? Who cares? Who notices the broken down facilities, the weedy gardens, the light strands hanging down? Or the sculptural object???

This is Canberra’s “Jun Kanenko“. But imagine the southern end of Northbourne Avenue, the historic space between the Sydney and Melbourne buildings, the city epicentre, if it were a place where people would want to sit, where there was something to enjoy, an expression of civic pride, cleaned, fixed, painted, even, perhaps…

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