Melbourne gem helps city get its groove back
Colourful character is more mission than mantle for artist Marcos Davidson.
THERE were lunchtimes when he would walk to the tops of city buildings and cast toy planes and parachutes over the streets below. From the rooftops, as they flew, he could see splashes of his graffiti art in the alleyways, bright pinks and oranges amid the dour bluestone.
Marcos Davidson was arrested seven times for spraying the city in colour. ''Melbourne is pretty grey - there wasn't, you know, United Colors of Benetton posters everywhere. It's pretty dull out there and I thought it would look great with a little pink or orange drawing on it,'' he says.
''Things are pretty straight on the whole. You want to change the beat around.''
With this in mind, the eclectic Melbourne artist and jeweller has run water-bombing championships off Station Pier and fired giant water cannon and jelly atop cherry pickers at the Big Day Out. For next January's music festival, he plans an 18-metre-high inflatable creation that will bristle and bloom like a flower next to the main stage.
Botanical books with wondrous titles - Edible and Poisonous Mushrooms of the World, Colourful cacti and other succulents of the deserts - are stacked high in his jumbled studio above Flinders Lane.
Here, amid a chaotic growth of plants in glass beakers, marching drums, metal files, animal bones and gemstones, he has spent much of the past three decades creating jewellery and artworks.
Now in his 50th year, he marks 30 years of continuous endeavour with a retrospective show at Until Never Gallery, in Hosier Lane, which runs until next Sunday. He carries those years like a young rogue, with curled hair and thick black beard, a red-gold hoop in his left ear, snake bones rattling round his neck and black rings on his fingers - their nicotine-stained tips worn hard from working on microscopic stones.
These days his chest is seared by sunlight streaming in across the city rooftops. But his first pieces were made far below, when, after leaving high school at 14, he swept up offcuts from goldsmiths and melted them down. Back then, Little Collins Street was aloud with the tapping and dink-dink-dink of professional jewellers.
''If you look out the window, it's all apartments now, all the studios have been booted out, all the characters are gone,'' Davidson says. ''The city has now become homogeneous.''
Jewellery is like micro-engineering, he says. ''Jewellery is the nomadic art par excellence. If the shit hit the fan, you're not taking your sculpture and running down the road, you're not grabbing your paintings off the wall, you're leaving them. But you can take your jewellery. If it wasn't there, you would feel denuded.''
For a time, he played drums in a ''country and Eastern'' band, and electronic music until dawn on community radio station 3RMT, now named 3RRR. He was an installation artist, a performance artist. A graffiti artist back before it was art, he was brought to court seven times in the 1980s for spraying ubiquitous cone men along train lines and on signs.
Wedding parties now pose for photographs by the graffiti outside Until Never Gallery. Inside, Davidson's curiosities include miniature metal record players, Bakelite masks and a calcified ox bone.
On opening the exhibition last month, Heide Museum of Modern Art director Jason Smith compared Davidson to the ossicles, the three smallest bones in the body.
They transmit vibrating sound waves through the ear, just as Davidson works, high above the streets, creating vibrations that help Melbourne hear its groove.
He seems somewhat bemused by the attention. ''I hear I've arrived but I've always been here. I've never been underground. All these things we did were front and centre, live and direct, not on the fringes at all but right in the middle of the city.''
The House of Hallmarcos is open until November 15 at Until Never Gallery in Hosier Lane.