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This place always feels a lot like a post-mortem. Always, the barren gravel and sand it sits in, a monolith to nothing in particular tucked between the backs of the city buildings and the West Gate Freeway. I feel hollow when I step inside. I don’t like buildings that echo because it feels like they go on forever. This room has a door but no exit; big walls with no windows.

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The building is functional in obvious ways. The ceiling isn’t much of a ceiling, with sights easily overtaking the black grating, slipping through to piping and industrial fans. I don’t understand how they built it, really, but I’m not a builder so it’s not my business.

Insurmountably high walls seem taller when they’re painted such stark and sterile white. The deep corners, at the floor, at the ceiling, always seem deep enough to get lost in. You could crawl inside, burrowing lower forever, never being any less trapped. There’s an odd sense of dread standing at the foot of artworks and looking up to the ceiling instead.

In the top left corner of this room there’s a security camera, plugged into the empty space. At the back wall, a temperature reader indicates that the space sits at 20.5 degrees Celsius. Everything’s painted perfect white. This room could almost have you believing it’s not even there.

Interlude

I took a train out to Geelong with my partner over the break, to visit an exhibition of Australian impressionist artwork. Avoiding the paths restricted to paying visitors, she spoke to me about the ways impressionist movements in the country were used to forge a national identity, an aesthetic culture to clarify how our hands had domesticated a lawless land.

Under fading pink sunlight, the rising between night and day, a man leads cattle down a muddy path.

Maybe a week earlier we’d been through the NGV, noting the lacking context of exactly how the items on display came to be there. Donated, loaned, in honour of, in agreement with. They put statues on display behind glass, and I know, always know, that they had once belonged to somebody.

What is an object without story? It’s lonely, I think; to be without function to a body, to a people. Our culture of art can valorise the mind. But we are bodies. We are people.

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Components Parts

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I remember saying goodbye to my two dogs. They died months apart, but both in the same medically sterile room so they feel closer together in retrospect, which I suppose is nice. I don’t recall if my little brother was there.

On the car drive home I spoke to my mother but looking back I get the feeling we were talking past one another – talking to talk, so we wouldn’t have to be silent, like the dog we had just put down.

The loneliest I’ve ever been was standing in an art gallery.