History viewed through images

Volume 9 Number 12 December 9 2013 - January 12 2014

 

Celebrating the University of Melbourne’s 160th anniversary, the Ian Potter Museum of Art has drawn an exhibition of artworks, blueprints and photographs from the historical archives, that tell the story of its evolution as an institution. By Laura Soderlind.

There is no such thing as a neutral image according to University of Melbourne artist, curator and architect Dr Alex Selenitsch.

All documents, artworks and images are clothed in and echo with the peculiarities and assumptions of an era.

“The main form of representation of any time is seen as ‘objective’. As though it’s impartially reflecting reality,” Dr Selenitsch says. 

An exhibition currently on show at the Ian Potter Museum of Art called Designing ‘The Shop’ curated by Bala Starr and Dr Selenitsch with a team of exhibition staff gives form to this notion.

“The images in the exhibition all posed as neutral in their day, but history shows the layers of information, as well as omitted information, within every frame,” Dr Selenitsch says.

Just as the selfies snapped on iPhones today are loaded with a commentary about the current economy, individualism and youth culture, so too are the exhibition’s 19th century watercolours of campus lawns, that expose attitudes towards nature, education and colonisation.

Tracing the University’s history through these artifacts, Dr Selenitsch identifies three main phases in its representation: the Philosopher’s garden, the chemical laboratory and the data bank.

Following the University’s inception in 1853, there were a series of picturesque paintings of campus lakes, rolling slopes, gentle clouds and castle-like stone buildings in the background.

One painting has cows and quaint military personnel in the foreground. It is a campus only vaguely familiar. There are no urban traces and the You Yang mountain range is in the background. 

“It’s very reminiscent of the garden of Eden,” said Dr Selenitsch. “The artists were not drawing the institution so much as they were capturing a feeling or an impressionistic experience of a place.”

These paintings signify an era of University education that had a large focus on the liberal arts: philosophy, Latin, literature and the natural sciences. It was an era of education for education’s sake rather than a vocational process. 

As a result, in its early days, the University was accessible only to those who could afford it. Men with a British background largely populated the student body. In 1883 Bella Guerin became the first woman to graduate from a university in Australia, when she graduated from the University of Melbourne. 

The University’s history is shaped by both outside pressures and internal forces as it keeps up with, and at times leads, social movements and changing tides. It is an organism in a cultural ecosystem. 

The cataclysm that ended an era in the University’s history, according to Dr Selenitsch, was the burning down of Wilson Hall – the building that housed ceremonial traditions of the University.

Dr Selenitsch explains that this was the turning point in the University’s narrative that began the second phase of the institution. Gone was the gothic construction with its stained glass panels. With a ground zero in the heart of the campus, the University opted to build a new-fangled 1950s Wilson Hall, that it still uses for exams, graduations and significant functions.

“This next education era, and the way it was represented by documents and images, can be understood as ‘the chemical laboratory,’” says Dr Selenitsch.

Increasingly, the University began to support more practical disciplines and offer more vocational courses. It became more responsive to market pressures and forces. This saw the rise of engineering and applied sciences.

The images representing this machine-age show students and staff in white lab coats and the elaborate ‘cutting-edge’ scientific equipment of the time. Compared with previous contemplative images of scenic and exterior grounds, interior spaces and facilities are documented more along the lines of marketing brochures. 

In 1999 the University received its own postcode. This, according to Dr Selenitsch, ushered in the next phase. 

“The University has become a data bank.  It is now a place of figures, statistical records, computer labs and wifi connectivity,” says Dr Selenitsch. “The images representing this era are digital and we experience the University via online platforms.”

According to that view, information is the raison d’être of the contemporary University, and technology its vehicle.

And as an institution dating back 160 years, the University grounds and its buildings themselves can be seen as documents of the changing trends in University education. 

“All of these different phases overlap and contain elements of each other,” Dr Selenitsch says.

With the cyclic incoming and outgoing of thousands of students and staff over 160 years, the University is a changing, organic and forward-looking creature, constantly refreshing and re-defining itself. 

The process of curating this exhibition required creating a story out of a jumble of artifacts and making sense out of fragmented and sometimes contradictory material.

Like all histories that sprawl over centuries and map out ideological, social and technological change, there is an element of imposed order on messiness and chaos. 

The exhibition is itself a document, loaded with today’s assumptions and peculiarities, reflecting how generations have looked at the University over time.

 

Designing ‘The Shop’ | Ian Potter Museum of Art | Exhibiting until
9 February, 2014.

Event:

Saturday Walk: System Garden | Saturday 14 December, 2pm-3pm

The System Garden’s curator will give a tour and discuss the rich history and hidden secrets within the garden. More information.