Spider-Man and ornamentation...

Ah, the strange threads of a day. It began whilst I was walking down Lygon Street and ran into Professor Margaret Manion one of Australia's pre-eminent art historians, who specialises in Medieval and Renaissance art. She was my teacher for Illuminated Manuscripts, one of the subjects I took for my post-graduate diploma in art history at The University of Melbourne in 1994. I complemented her on her red coat. Shortly after, I ran into my friend Francesco, an architect who has almost completed his PhD in the History Department. As we sat over coffee we discussed his theory about how the city of Melbourne was designed around a grid, and that everything that was condoned was in fact ornament. The indigenous population who had initially been given land away from the white population, were eventually displaced from the grid and the land they inhabited was made over into what we now know as the Royal Botanical Gardens. The grid (or, the city of Melbourne) becomes to Francesco a place purified of everything untamed and unwanted. Since he mentioned the grid provided order over the disorderly - the indigenous population and unruly nature, I was able to add that a unusual connection had formed in my mind after seeing Professor Manion and my thinking about ornamentation. Indeed, in Illuminated Manuscripts the central image was the image condoned by the Church, generally below it was a Rubric - an enlarged initial letter of the chapter or prayer that related to the image. However, the margins of the manuscripts sometimes contained beasts, humans or animals that related to things that were outside the control of the church. It was the place where outsiderness and perhaps fear of the other could be expressed. This often also occurred in early maps in which the village was the central image, and outside of it the forest was depicted, with its imaginary and dangerous beasts. So, nothing is new. I found it interesting in this discussion that Francesco was positing that ornamentation, rather than being an embellishment or adornment, functioned to conceal. Not a thing as such, but an imposition - an overlay. I guess what he was saying was that in looking at decoration, we consider its aesthetic aspects - its presence, rather than what is erased, absent, disguised by decoration. I suggested that since Secular Humanists were hell bent on separating what they considered animal from human nature and encouraged raising ourselves above our 'primitive', uncivilized past, that this may have been part of the reason why a line was drawn between white colonists and indigenous people from the Kulin nation. The embellishment of our city with buildings, zoological and botanical gardens, our roads and streets is an orderly overlay, a masking of nature and everything out of our control. On that note, later on in the afternoon I was walking through the city and in Little Collins Street a man dressed in red and blue lycra body-suit, as the Marvel comic super-hero and film character - Spider-Man, suddenly jumped onto and performed aerobatics on a street pole. His suit was simultaneously an embellishment as well as a form of concealment, but it's interesting isn't it that there were no spider-webs, no threads that could be seen, and I can hear you saying 'Of course not, it's all just fantasy' ! I suppose what I enjoyed about this encounter, was that it was a bit of disorder amongst the apparent order of the city.