EFFECTIVE CAMPAIGNS HEROICS
Charles Ninow >

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Sitting in genteel groups, just back from the wide footpath, the terrace houses of Clifton Hill in Melbourne are unusually compelling pieces of architecture. Each suburban block comprised multiple sets of terraced buildings; each building containing several dwellings; each dwelling being composed of innumerable quantities of bricks.

Their visual power, like their physical strength, lies in their numbers: either in square groups presenting their faces flush to the street, or staggered, like troops that have frozen mid-turn as they stride in formation. But they are too heavily-set to move. Double-storeyed and several house-widths in girth, they possess a huge mass and speak with formidable solidity.

Their solidity does not, however, preclude grace. The terrace houses are elegantly adorned. Each house is closed from the street by a low brick fence, and a row of arrowhead-topped iron bars, politely forming a guard against direct entry. They wear their wrought-iron fences like rows of medals. Often the hairpin-patterns of the ironwork curve in echo of the arched windows - perhaps more like lace.

Their refined brick articulation and wrought-iron elocution speak a plain, if polished, message: stay out.

And whilst his work is never so haughty as these grand dames of architecture, Charles’ practice seems to share certain qualities with the buildings.

Charles’ work often appears in bulk, en masse, in sets of sets. Over a hundred paper bags make up the barricade at Window, and online Six Breakthroughs takes its name from the number of times the same action is performed for the camera, before being dispersed and viewed innumerable times on the internet. In 2007, Charles’ Socialist Book Launch involved piles of flaccid vinyl milk crates, slumped in lethargic piles on the floor and strewn over any objects more supportive than themselves. An untitled installation earlier in that year featured several dozen molotov cocktails and a spread of home-made weaponry. If something is worth making, it’s worth making again.

Despite the apparent anonymity of the work - a wall of white paper bags is frustratingly blank - the presence of Charles as a maker appears in the repetition of these ‘lots’ of objects. The repetition of semi-industrial processes, from electro-welding to paper-bag construction, suggests some concern for mass-production. But this is no Factory: we are still in the suburbs, after all. Whilst each floppy crate, each paper bag, may be made from the same template in the same materials, these objects communicate a sense of hand-made-ness. There is a craft imbued in this mass-production. It is cottage industry.

The mass-production of craft, be it brick-making or iron-working, or in Charles’ case screenprinting posters, defies Pop blankness and speaks up for toil that is physical. Certainly, a design is made before clay is fired or an image reproduced. But these things are made material, their construction happens outside of the intellect. Often the making becomes a test of endurance: actions are repeated until the materials and energy have run out.

The kind of ‘work’ that makes up ‘a work’ is alluded to in the weapons of the untitled installation. The home-handyman objects used to create the grisly D.I.Y. torture instruments clearly refer to labour - but that labour is the lawns-on-sunday kind, the renovating-before-the-baby-arrives kind. One is often aware of a middle-class ‘ease’ in the materials employed in Charles’ installations. EFFECTIVE CAMPAIGNS HEROICS replicates a barricade, but the ‘sandbags’ are made of good quality drawing paper and filled only with air. The Archers Aqua Schnapps bottles used to make the molotovs are about as effective as the wrought-iron fancywork of the terrace house fences – hardly a deterrent. But, with their pure turpentine and pointed heads respectively, still quietly threatening.

And as one can’t quite be sure of where in the gentrification cycle a suburb is, it is hard to pinpoint the political position taken in works like EFFECTIVE CAMPAIGNS HEROICS or Socialist Book Launch. Just when the bourgeois-ness of the materials appears to undermine any sincerity, the amount of labour put into each work communicates the opposite sentiment: a sense of concentrated craft, an attempt at disruption through creation.

The terrace houses form a community, their likeness of design and proximity giving them a quiet visual force, a real aesthetic strength. Likewise Charles’ work builds upon itself, playing a numbers game. No matter how well-formed, a single brick is hardly useful: only with the mortar of thinking that occurs between each iteration does it become significant, functioning; a strategy.