Alexandra Peters: Dead/Quiet
“It is no longer my face (identification), but the face that has somehow been given to me (circumstantial possession) as stage property.” — Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh, Omnicide: Mania, Fatality, and the Future-in-Delirium
Alexandra Peters scoops me up in her janky grey Subaru Forester almost every time we meet. She entered my artworld orbit around 2014 when she was studying fashion at RMIT. It was a potent period for a subcultural convergence of Melbourne’s artists, designers, musicians, and even skaters. Fashion adjacent ARIs such as Centre for Style, Rare Candy, and Monica’s Gallery provided significant cultural territory, at least enough for a teenager like me to access it and feel welcomed. Today, “expanded design” is perhaps our closest attainment of commercial cultural hegemony, in which montage and image reproduction reign supreme.
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Dean Kissick’s Downward Spiral chronicled the art world’s contradictions with the breathless urgency of an end-times prophet. Now, with the column closed and the critic in semi-exile, the question lingers: was he a voice of his generation, or just another scenester burning out on his own myth?
Archie Moore’s “impoverished aesthetic” transforms memory, class, and race into immersive, unsettling worlds. Rejecting the tidy self-disclosure of trauma narratives, his work lingers in ambiguity—neither confession nor critique, but something in between.
As Melbourne’s art institutions blur the line between art and design, a corporate logic of spectacle, lifestyle, and marketability takes hold. Is the NGV’s embrace of design a progressive expansion—or just kitsch in highbrow drag? And if public museums have abandoned art, who’s left to protect it?
