Off-site art exhibitions have seen something of a resurgence in Melbourne over the past few years. There are a number of reasons for this, not the least being the rapidly rising cost of rent in the city, which seems to force a commercialise or perish imperative on artists exhibiting work early in their career. Mediating the reappearance of ‘recession art’, as Peter Cripps termed a similar turn in the 1980s East Coast art scene, White Cuberd is a gallery on wheels, literally a cupboard that has been renovated to resemble the three walls of the conventional white cube. Once delivered and installed to a planned and pre-arranged site, the cupboard doors are thrown open. A battery powering the interior lighting for the space makes it an autonomous, stand-alone monument to contemporary art at a particularly low point.
But is this really the case? Lucina Lane’s show Range saw White Cuberd’s third exhibition open in the carpark of a 1970s brutalist building that is the architectural offices of March Studio at North Melbourne’s Abbotsford Street. The show was open for just two hours on Sunday the 15th of January, between 8pm and 10pm. The online-only announcement of the event came via social media and email a few days before it took place. Off-site shows such as this are usually organised by artists, sometimes in collaboration with other, similarly locationless initiatives such as Info-Punkt, and catalogued online at http://melbourneoffsiteindex.org/. Often tailored to accommodate the documentation of the artwork (and artist) before opening, most importantly it seems that the main reason for the initiative is to bypass the inconveniences of rent and over-regulated gallery conditions.
Giles Fielke is a writer and musician working at the University of Melbourne.
