The sculpture, and a commemorative publication celebrating the collection, will be publicly launched on Thursday 8 March as part of La Trobe’s 40th Anniversary celebrations.
Already a quirky part of Melbourne’s public art history, Robb’s Landmark sculpture now stands in the Health Sciences forecourt, Science Drive, at La Trobe’s Bundoora campus - forever reminding La Trobe students there’s more than one way of looking at things.
While standing on his head on a University bush campus may not have been an epigraph La Trobe would have commissioned himself, the artist who sees him that way meant it as a compliment.
“I wanted to set up a dialogue around this notion of the Antipodean, and the more I read about La Trobe the more I realised he was very much the enlightened gentleman; he was a water colourist, a well-travelled person – hardly the brutish administrator we tend to think about when we think of those colonial administrators,” the artist says.
“La Trobe brought about the first State Library, he founded the first University in Melbourne, the Botanic Gardens, all those things that are incredibly important around the enlightened, humanist idea of building a city. He knew that enlightened cities need parks to walk in, that people need to be educated. I became fascinated with his vision.”
While Robb’s confronting work seeks to invert the concept of civic monuments as a commemoration - “I’m not sure civic memorials have any real function any more, I don’t know if we even believe in heroes in the same way”, he says - the University sees it as a good fit.
“Landmark’s new home here is an obvious choice,” says the Sculpture Park catalogue. “The University is named after La Trobe. The work is challenging, complex, contemporary, and encourages dialogue: all qualities synonymous with a University. La Trobe seeks to teach its students in all disciplines to discover, question and continue an active and productive dialogue not only while they are here, but long after they have gone.”
Landmark’s companions among the public art works at the sculpture park include 19 other sculptures by important Australian artists including another recent donation by Karen Ward, and major works by Allen David, Inge King, Robert Klippel, Bart Sancialo, Jock Clutterbuck, Leonard French, and Heather B.Swan.
La Trobe Sculpture Park houses public sculptures collected over the University’s 40 years across its 500-hectare Bundoora campus and is now considered sufficiently robust to be fully integrated as a park – the first of its kind in the northern suburbs of Melbourne.
As part of its 40th Anniversary Year the University will also honour the life of its namesake in a public lecture from noon to 1.00pm on Wednesday 7 March in the Szental Lecture Theatre, Bundoora –La Trobe the Man- La Trobe the Institution: Two Histories. The event will be chaired by La Trobe historian Professor Marilyn Lake, with guest speakers Dr Dianne Reilly (La Trobe librarian at the State Library of Victoria and author of Charles Jospeph La Trobe: The Making of a Governor), and former La Trobe historians Dr William J. Breen and Professor John A. Salmond.
Robert Lindsay, Director of the McClelland Gallery and Sculpture Park will launch Landmark and the publication La Trobe University Sculpture Park at 10.30 am Thursday March 8 at the West Lecture Theatre lawns, Bundoora.
Sculptor Charles Robb - who has donated his sculpture to the University - will be there early to ensure the Governor’s comfort.
Picture Opportunity:
Time: 10.15am, Thursday 8 March. Robert Lindsay, Vincent Alessi and Charles Robb with upside down Governor and a curious student or two (Launch is 10.30am).
Venue: Health Sciences forecourt (near Car Park 1), Bundoora.
(For site map see www.latrobe.edu/au/bg/maps)
Friday, 2 March 2007 It’s that upside down lad again – at home in BundooraMonuments are about remembering, says Australian sculptor Charles Robb: so it’s fitting that his controversial likeness of the Victorian colonial Governor Charles Joseph La Trobe now cocks its upside down snoot at the world from the Bundoora campus of La Trobe University.