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The Ian
Potter Museum of Art promotes the research of key art
works and collections within the University of Melbourne
Art Collection through its Collections Management department.
Staff and volunteers have greatly contributed to our
understanding of collecting practices, art movements
and artists’ lives through on-going research. ‘Highlights’
provides on-line access to much of this research and
can be used as a valuable resource for visitors to the
museum, teachers and students.
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Christine O'Loughlin's Cultural rubble
Christine O’Loughlin is an Australian artist who has lived and worked in Paris since 1979. She was artist-in-residence (Macgeorge Fellow) at the University from May 1987 to May 1988. Cultural rubble (1993), was originally commissioned for the facade of the previous Ian Potter Gallery with funds provided by the Ian Potter Foundation. It was designed to fit into window cavities that had been blocked in when the original gallery was created, and was repositioned on the facade of the new building for the Ian Potter Museum of Art in March 1998.
Cultural rubble comprises four reinforced fibreglass panels that protrude from the building. Each panel incorporates shattered fragments from classical statuary, architecture and pottery, cast from plaster moulds in the collection of the Musée du Louvre, Paris. O’Loughlin worked on site at the Louvre to produce the individual components in each panel, which were then assembled and shipped in four sections to Australia.
Each panel refers to a different category of the Classical tradition, and each is individually titled ‘Perfect architectural support, ‘Perfect woman’, ‘Perfect man’ and ‘Perfect pot’. Fragments of the Venus de Milo and the Winged victory of Samothrace, the Discus thrower and the Delphic Charioteer, highly decorative Greek urns and vases, and a monumental Doric column, form some of the individual elements constituting the panels.
According to the artist, Australian art history has traditionally been based upon the received ideas and cultural fragments of a European past. Cultural rubble draws attention to this received history while the use of fragments reinforces the notion of distance from the original culture. O’Loughlin notes in a statement about the work: ‘The obvious irony in using European cultural rubble which both blocks and bursts from the windows of an Australian contemporary art gallery, becomes a statement of confidence in the dynamism of contemporary Australian art’.
When Nonda Katsalidis designed the new Ian Potter Museum of Art building he included Cultural rubble as an integral element on the facade in consultation with Christine O’Loughlin. The artist noted in an interview: ‘I responded to the [original] site and now the new building responds to me’.
The sculpture is located on the facade of the Potter on Swanston Street.
Photographs: Andrew Curtis
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