L O O P   S P A C E   INTIMATE  Review by Keri Glastonbury

For those of you who haven’t loitered in Newcastle’s Hunter Street mall of late, it’s a pretty desolate mis en scene. As is typical of other regional centres, the Westfield’s have been built out in the suburbs and this has meant something of a slow apocalypse for retail in the city centre. There’s still an old David Jones, kept alive, so rumour goes, by a Council subsidised rent scheme to prevent it closing and taking the surrounding businesses down with it. Inside, you are likely to find more staff dressed smartly in black cardigans, than customers. It’s a pale reminder of the role department stores played, back in the days when people would dress up to go into town once a week to do their shopping.

Over the past few years the mall development company GPT has bought 71.9 million dollars worth of real estate in the southern end of Hunter St. Practically, this has translated into even more empty shops and evictions, as GPT now struggle to find short-term tenants who can deal with a future of uncertainty. With the current economic downturn to boot, it looks as if the so-called salve of development has been put on hold: ‘GPT puts Newcastle shopping plan on lay-by’ (Newcastle Herald, 28/2/2009). The development faces an unsure future; even the proposed underground car parks were found not to be viable because of old mine workings and tunnels beneath the city. Part of me can’t help thinking perhaps they should have done better research before buying up big?

In response to the indefinite delay David Jones has also now announced the closure of its city store in 2010. As Hunter Business Chamber chief executive says: ‘with DJs going, you'll be able to shoot a cannon down the Newcastle CBD as far as retail is concerned’. (Newcastle Herald, 28/2/2009).

Enter Renew Newcastle’s (www.renewnewcastle.org) version of the ‘carpe diem’. As founder Marcus Westbury argues, it’s time to stop waiting for a deferred ideal or ‘fixed-up’ Newcastle, and instead focus the ‘now’. In other words: to seize the day. Renew Newcastle takes its cue from similar renewal stories in other post-industrial cities internationally, such as Glasgow (where, for nominal rent, artists have set up studios in some phenomenal spaces, such as old ship building warehouses and derelict sawmills and in doing so bought life and culture back to the city).

Newcastle gives you lots of room to imagine and project. There’s something very ambient about emptiness. Arguably, the centre of town wasn’t as spoilt by development in the1980s as its southern equivalent Wollongong, and has more historic buildings left on the city peninsula. Perhaps there’s something to be said for lying fallow. I personally don’t believe a shopping mall is the right solution for such a narrow strip of land, right near Newcastle’s ocean beaches and port. It would probably be best as a residential neighbourhood, with the opportunity to develop a much more cosmopolitan culture. I imagine a seafood yum cha, thai massage and wine bars to provide an alternative to the heavy drinking pub and nightclub scene that Newcastle is infamous for.

Since I’ve moved to Newcastle I’ve also noticed that many of the younger alternative crowd prefer Melbourne to Sydney, and perhaps Newcastle aspires more to the kind of transformation that occurred in the inner-city Melbourne laneways in the 80s and 90s, than being forever Sydney’s poor cousin. In many ways the conditions seem perfect (the depressed economy, vacant buildings and changes to NSW licensing laws etc.), but there’s also a markedly different cultural history in Newcastle as a regional working-class town that already occupies its own place in the national mythology and which will no doubt resist beautification in its own inimitable way.

The Loop Space gallery is part of the Renew Newcastle program, and is one of the first batch of projects to be up and running. Directors of the gallery, Damian Castaldi and Solange Kershaw were given the keys to an empty piece of ‘prime real-estate’ in the Hunter Street Mall: the old Fletcher Jones building. They quickly gave it a coat of paint and transformed it into a sound and new media exhibition space, replete with the old change rooms as listening booths.

Once the L O O P  S P A C E lettering went up on the front window, the transformation from a derelict shop to contemporary art space was complete and convincing. This is a credit to the DIY energy of Damian and Solange, who had their first exhibition, the touring show ‘Intimate’, up within a few weeks. L O O P  S P A C E is also in partnership with the Sydney based d/Lux/MediaArts, a contemporary arts organisation that has a commitment to supporting and touring work to regional media arts spaces around Australia and overseas. I rode past the gallery today on my bike and saw Solange gallery minding amidst the lunchtime trade, and the locals seem to have already incorporated the changes to the streetscape. The Newsagent across the mall is particularly supportive, and it feels like there’s a lot of goodwill and support for people willing to do something to bring life to the mall.

The Renew Newcastle logo is also on the front glass window of the gallery and beneath the splash of yellow paint are the logos of supporters: Arts NSW, GPT, Ipera, Newcastle City Centre Committee and Sparke Helmore Lawyers (who have provided pro bono legal work for the project). At the launch of Renew Newcastle Marcus Westbury said that while most people probably look at Renew Newcastle and see an arts project, he sees a complicated legal minefield. In its simplest form, however, Renew Newcastle is a mutually beneficial contract between the owners who want care-takers for their empty buildings and the artists who want space to work in. The owners can terminate the agreement at any time, but as the seemingly eternal lag drags on in Newcastle’s CBD, I can see why the carpe diem approach might just work. Perhaps artist burn out will take its toll before any eviction notices are even served.

Also in the front window of the gallery is a work by Damian Castaldi, ‘Coal Country’. An aerial view of Newcastle East and the headland, hangs above some coal (the bona fide substance) deposited in perspex. Part of a series of work that will look at the impact of climate change on six locations between Newcastle and Newtown, the perspex will be respectively filled with Coal, Wine, Fish, Salt, Water and Smoke.

The entrance to Loop Space is an interesting threshold. It’s the point at which the outside (the buskers, the drunks, the mall rats, low riders, skateboarders, Sportsgirl shoppers and emo teenagers) meets the inside (the contemporary art world, itself with a lot invested in an aesthetics of the everyday). For a sound gallery it might also be where the ambient noise of the street, meets an equally ambient, if much more constructed, sonic landscape. Neil Jenkins’ work ‘Entrance’ seems to perfectly capture the skew of these encounters. Positioned at the doorway, a surveillance screen captures images of people entering the gallery, and runs them through an algorithm producing a surreal morphic splice.

Roger Mills & Neil Jenkins’ ‘Idea of South (work in progress)’ is another interactive work. You stand underneath a groovy listening cone which plays sound recordings from various sites selected from an onscreen map. Over time users will be able to add locations and annotations to the map and upload their own recordings on-line. As the program notes say: “… Idea of South explores the quintessense of southern sentinence through sound. Part phonography and part psycho geography Idea of South maps an evolving collage of sound events through a web based interface”. Like many of the works on show, Idea of South has a personal narrative motivating it, here the return of the expatriate to the homeland and its realm of the senses.

A small monitor to the right plays Jane Shadbolt’s ‘Ink Test 11’, which I at first thought was some kind of x-ray images of smoke in lungs, one of those new media projects that looks deceptively low-fi and old school, but you then find out was made with the latest medical imaging technology during an ANAT residency. Not so. It is, in fact, a simple stop-motion durational animation made with a light box and ink in water. It’s a Rorschach test in motion, and a reminder to never fix what we think we see. The artist is also part of Renew Newcastle and has been given space for an animation studio above the gallery; as part of the recycle and renew ethos she was last seen carrying an old gestetner upstairs.

Porkpie hats hang on the wall near the headphones for Norie Neumark & Maria Miranda’s ‘Homicide Rumours’. It’s a mash up homage to the Crawford television show of the 60s and 70s and to an era of Australian idiom and accents on our screens: “No worries, Mac”. The program notes also suggest that this is a slash fiction narrative, but in my listening I missed any explicit homoerotic tension between detectives. A pity, as I got hooked on The Bill when it got all sudsy and sexy about 5 years ago and screened a kiss between two policemen in uniform.

Instead of trying on some Fletcher Jones strides in the old wooden change rooms, in one of the old booths you can listen to a selection of recordings from the net label furthernoise.org, and in the other a selection from the New York based 60 X 60 compilation including Solange Kershaw’s ‘Dididahdit’. These cubicles also offer great potential for future installations, with the intimacy of adjoining solo spaces (and of course the mirrors making you confront your own body in the process).

John Tonkin’s early animations, 'These are the days' and 'man ascending' are now over 10 years old, and are, at once, both ‘of their time’ while also attesting to the timelessness of a simple Zen.

The split level store has given Loop Space an almost Soho feel, and Nigel Helyer’s installation ‘The Naughty Apartment’, made up of miniature scenes in perspex boxes and intriguing magnification handsets, is held aloft on the mezzanine. If there’s one book that everybody has told me I should read over the years, it’s The Master and Margarita, by the Russian author Mikhail Bulgakov. I’m not sure that now that I’ve seen this installation I won’t need to read the book, but it is a very interesting spatial manifestation of narrative. “Manuscripts don’t burn”, it seems they are forever re-invented.

Whether Renew Newcastle grafts itself irrevocably into the cityscape is yet to be seen, but with the arrival of Loop Space gallery, the Renew Newcastle headquarters in an abandoned Catholic church around the corner (with the possibility for an artist-in-residency program), the other artist studios and a surplus of empty spaces, there is at least a sense of community cohering in the cracks. If there’s a parallel with the devil coming to town, perhaps it is GPT, and yet, as in The Master and Margarita, it seems the devil can get into bed with art after all.

Keri Glastonbury