ArtWranglers likes to visit Narra Bukulla, at Tanja on the south coast, where Marr Grounds can’t help but add to the range of aesthetic surprises which surround his home. We’ll say more about the house (designed by Tone Wheeler and built in 2003) in WAGAAGN:2, our next post on the subject.

Emeritus Prof. Marr Grounds (Vice-Chancellor of F.U.T.C. – the Free University of The Coast) taught art and architecture in the Faculty of Architecture and as director of the Tin Sheds Art Workshop at the University of Sydney in the late sixties and early seventies. His aesthetic philosophy always ranged between arte povera, environmental art, and what is now called ecominimalism. His house and studio have become a kind of thesis: can we make things that test the boundaries of convention (of art, of architecture) with whatever is at hand, and with whatever has the most economical impact? We’ll see how that works when we look at the house in a later post. To continue: what do you do with the trees when you clear the forest to build a house?

Answer: you make things: in this case, the shell for a mud kiln, to be fired from the inside out, by a local ceramist, who lost his nerve when he saw how big it was. So that never happened, but the lantern remains, as an invitation for the next bushfire. And the tree stumps? You invert them, and singe them, in readiness. But relax, Marr has installed a sprinkler system. So where does the timber come from? You build a giant shed, like the ones sawmillers used to build, because you’re not satisfied with the ones you built before…

The local gypsies call it The House of the Rising Thong, but that’s another story… And what do you do when the National Parks threaten to abscond with the houseboat your father once gave you as a wedding present? You put it in the trees where nobody will find it.

What interests us, and the reason we like it, is that we don’t know what to call this form of art. The antecedent for things like this (MG doesn’t call them “sculpture”) is the follies and grottoes the european ruling classes used to have built in their gardens. But these objects and artefacts below to a post-20thc aesthetic, and so other issues adhere… These, surely, have their heritage in collage, the found object, the readymade, with a twist. And it’s the twist that makes them interesting.

Living at the coast (or in any natural environment for that matter) one can’t help seeing things to whose form one has an aesthetic response. The unfamiliar forms of a snake, a shell, a sea-worn boulder, a black cockatoo – they all attract us and give us aesthetic pleasure. There is a kind of sublimity and shock value to natural beauty. And when it is framed, or decontextualised, it becomes something like art. So when someone like MG collects and inverts the tree stumps left over from clearing his patch of land, yes, they become something like art. And in this case, the artist in MG picks up other things, like giant rolls of rabbit-proof fence, like boats, like worn-out tyres, like other pieces of rural refuse, and inverts them, elevates them, re-scales them to the size of architecture. Thus making them (also) strangely like art.