Curators Fleur Watson and Kate Rhodes with the exhibition. Photo: Angela Wylie
BEHIND the porous yet dauntingly pure facade of the $80 million RMIT Design Hub a grudge match is taking place. In Public Offer, the first exhibition to launch the university's massive and much anticipated Design Hub gallery, it's Melbourne versus the rest of the world.
In the blue corner is a disparate team of local mainstream and obscure zines, from Elizabeth Carey Smith's series Imaginary Alphabets, inspired by Brunswick signs, to Fast Forward, a cassette music magazine produced by Michael Trudgeon and Bruce Milne during the 1980s, to hardcore architectural journal Transition.
The grey team is represented by a travelling exhibition of international titles, Archizines curated by Elias Redstone, featuring Dutch magazine Volume and including just three small Australian magazines among its 60 titles. Public Offer shows how many local publications could have been chosen, tracing 60 years of local publishing.
The RMIT Design Hub. Photo: Paul Rovere
''If it's serial it's in it,'' says co-curator Kate Rhodes of the exhibition, which displays about 80 Melbourne publications in every conceivable format: zines, journals, mainstream magazines and blogs are all represented.
It's relatively easy to understand why publications are the subject of the gallery's first exhibition. Rhodes and her co-curator, Timothy Moore, are former magazine editors. But she also sees the world in publishing and curatorial terms.
''When I was editor of [interior design magazine] Artichoke I often thought about myself as a curator of the magazine, and it being like a two-dimensional gallery,'' she says. ''Now I'm doing it the other way, using the gallery almost like a publication.
''It's very important for the Hub not to be a vanity publisher - for it not to be just about RMIT. It's about the broader Melbourne, Australia, the world,'' she explains. ''It's setting up these things from the get-go. To say this is the kind of stuff you can expect.''
Publishing also demonstrates design's crossover, melding as it does graphic design with fashion, music, architecture, to name a few.
''Design is interesting because it gets its tentacles into different disciplines as well. So it doesn't make sense we think for a design exhibition to be really focused on single disciplines.''
Nor should it focus on one designer. Despite the infamous egomania that's attached to it, Rhodes sees design as a team activity. ''The social side is the glue [that holds these publications together],'' says Rhodes. ''It's people getting together and making these publications with their friends; colleagues trying to grow the circle around themselves and their ideas. It's driven by the social and we wanted to tap into that literally within the exhibition.''
Which brings us back to the sporting metaphor. The exhibition's design by Sibling plays with a sports theme, not just by pitting local magazines against the international Archizines exhibition. It treats the gallery like a court. Timber bleachers allow visitors to sit and read the magazines, engage in floor talks and, perhaps most surprisingly, watch or join in games such as netball and badminton. Suspended in the 8.75-metre-high space are Olympic-certified Roman rings that visitors pull down to raise the table tops arrayed with magazines.
''It makes reading easier and the displays less static and more engaging for viewers,'' says Sibling team member Nicholas Braun.
In the gallery's smaller space, eight projectors will screen online material and interviews with publishers and designers, while ancillary information is displayed like scoreboards.
''It's all to encourage the experiential side of this exhibition,'' Rhodes says. The Hub is not a traditional gallery but more ''a sweaty, messy, doing kind of place''.
''When you come to the Hub you leave a bit exhausted because you've had to be involved with things. It wants to be a new way of thinking about exhibitions.''
But, just as the gallery finally opens, its founding curator will pass the baton - at least in the short term. The inevitable construction delays on RMIT's baby pushed back the opening. Now Rhodes is having her own. She will be on maternity leave and Fleur Watson - another former magazine editor and founder of the Collingwood design space Pin-up - will take over. Watson is curating the forthcoming five-year retrospective of the Design Research Institute.
Public Offer - Ways to Share Design opens on February 1 until March 27.
designhub.rmit.edu.au
