The Melbourne Museum closes at five pm; I arrive at four. Great Expectations is embedded in the building, so I quickly walk through the halls, up the escalators and there it is—in a single space, tucked into one of the smaller rooms in the leviathan.

The room is filled with an oversize steel-framed table, with slabby steel chairs fixed but placed a bit awry in a casual way. Over-size white (porcelain? steel? plastic?) plates cups and saucers, cutlery and napkins are arranged around the perimeter of the table, there is lettering on the glass table top—and it falls into place. This is a birthday, maybe even a Christmas. The dishes have not yet been taken away, and the table is crowded with objects and goods from the happy world of Design. The soundtracks of two wall projections form a kind of background hum. I can hear bells being rung, and voices talking.

I sit down at one of the chairs and notice an eMac in front of me. It’s a catalogue of the show using a left to right scroll with single branches off icons. The talking voices come from the back of the chairs—the chair I’m on features the designer of the object behind and to one side of the eMac. I get up and saunter round the outside of the table; further up I peek over the shoulders of a person working away at another eMac. The height of the chair-backs is just right to lean on: it’s an elegant way to organise a bank of viewers at a spread of things.

The things themselves are interesting and even charming. There is Marc Newson’s bicycle (Marc is a Brit? shouldn’t he be French?). There's a cartoonish red plastic doghouse, there are non-needle injectors, cellulose bags for water purification, an articulated plank of wood, a plywood child-size version of a rowing scull, a stack of coloured plastic chairs, expanding laundry bags on legs, some video games, advertising and book designs...I sit down to play with the catalogue and then become absorbed in the animated computer graphics on the adjacent console.

There are too many things to note. I need a paper catalogue, so I hurry off to the bookshop. There is no paper catalogue, which means it’s all on the eMacs. I hurry back, and begin a systematic scroll of the show. My first selection is a Ford Cosworth engine. Ah yes, for a while the most-used and most reliable engine in the F1 circus. The next icon shows one of Ron Arad’s chairs. I don’t recall seeing it so I walk around to look for it. When I can’t find it, I ask an attendant who has come in to service some consoles on an adjacent table. She tells me that it’s only ‘half the exhibition’. All of it was put up in New York, but it’s been reduced for travelling.

Back at the eMac, a bit baffled by this news, I trawl past the models of architectural schemes by Norman Foster, Will Alsop and Terry Farrell, some beautiful paper reliefs of Zaha Hadid’s ski run...and I realise only then that that was why there was also no trace of the Cosworth engine. I don’t get anywhere near through the whole program before a Museum attendant gently tells me to wind it up, the place is closing...I think of the $15-00 entrance fee, and put it down to experience. I have time to fill in a questionnaire at the entry to the exhibit. For Q8, where it asks whether you agree or disagree that ‘...the UK is a country that values its relations with Australia’, I circle ‘disagree’. For Q9, ‘To what extent has this perception changed as a result of this event?’, I circle ‘not changed’. As I go down the escalators, I think I should have marked ‘worsened’. I feel I have been to half a show arranged for colonials to come to the table after the food has gone, to imagine they are feasting on the best the Brits have to offer. Through this, I can sense an appalling Aussie cringe on my part, as Mother Britannia once again reminds us of our third level status. I also think of Rodney Hall’s novel The Island of the Mind, and the part where the French monarch visits the un-named republic belonging to the narrator, and through diplomatic moves makes the republic realise its relative unimportance.

*

I have picked up a full-colour tri-fold paper giveaway and a post-card—both free—from the exhibition. The text in the tri-fold notes that the exhibition demonstrates that there is ‘... an ever-deepening partnership with countries such as Australia...a deep-rooted partnership, both economically and culturally. The UK is Australia’s third largest trading partner and in 2000, two-way goods and services trade between the two was worth A$18.1billion.’

The text goes on to note that the works on show are at the edge of things media-wise: digital, interactive, global and so on. With no paper catalogue, you would expect a web-site, maybe even a CD-Rom to take away, given that the eMacs already have the program running in the show itself.

The postcard, however, does give a web address for the British Council, so I look it up and ring the Sydney office. I talk to Grianne Brunsdon, who promises to send me a brochure and also puts me in touch with Steve Annett at the Design Council in London. Grianne also points out that the Design Council website has a Great Expectations section. Of course I look it up and it turns out to be just what I’m after; I print off my own version of a paper catalogue which includes a couple of press releases, a complete list and description of the 98 items in the whole show, with a selection of more detailed pages of 12 of them.

The brochure from Sydney gives the web-site I have already looked up but also gives a full list of exhibitors with addresses and phone numbers. While counter-checking the texts in the tri-fold and the brochure, I discover that (in the brochure) the UK is ‘Australia’s fourth largest trading partner—in 2001 total two-way goods and services trade was worth A$18.1 billion’. In the meantime Steve Annett from the British Council emails back and confirms that ‘the full version of the Great Expectations table (all 180 feet of it) was created specifically for the first venue in New York: Vanderbilt Hall in Grand Central Terminal...when the exhibition went on tour, it was effectively halved in size...our local partners in the various venues (all publicly funded bodies) were not able to meet the costs of transporting, storing and installing the full scale exhibition... so far, the exhibition has toured to Ottawa, Montreal, Shanghai, Tokyo and Melbourne. It moves to Brisbane and Sydney before returning to London via a couple of new venues in China. I have to point out that even here ‘at home’ the exhibition will not be seen in its full New York glory, but in a cut-down version similar to the one that is in Australia at the moment....’

So my initial response to this exhibition was to a mixed field of good intentions, compromises, colonial hangovers and current local circumstances, many of which could not have been predicted by the UK end of the matter. After my visit to the exhibition, two more local irritants have been added to this field. Grianne Brunson tells me that the Powerhouse installation in Sydney will use a larger table than the Melbourne installation, although it will contain the same objects. And before I finished my first draft of this review, the Victorian State Government cut the Museum’s entrance fee from fifteen to six dollars.[1]

*

For the last decade or so, I’ve been wondering at the European reception of Minimalism. (Bear with me on this). Recent publications from England, Spain and Switzerland put forward a consensus that Minimalism is reductive, degree zero, essentialist, de-materialist, elemental, simple.[2] All of these words describe objects produced by Minimalists, but because they only do that, they establish a deep misunderstanding of Minimalism.

The Minimalist composition is typically a single item in a rich context, or rather, it is an item that makes its context a rich one. A line of bricks is not the bricks, but the space they create with the room they are in. Repetitive cells of pulsing music are not mechanical repetition but shimmer and alter as the listener regroups the cells in different ways. A Minimalist work is thus a complex situation in which the artist’s gesture is one component that composes itself into the context, while still remaining a discreet item.

Suddenly, confronted by a range of designed objects in Great Expectations, I can see where Minimalism has been properly perceived in the Old World: in the same arena in the Old World where it has contributed to the proto-minimalism in the New World—manufacturing and industry. In the various contexts of production, distribution and use, the Minimalist designer’s action is a coherent single proposal which draws attention to its production, distribution and use. Not all designed objects do this, much less play with it. Many designed objects avoid the evidence of their production, restrict the possibilities of their use, draw attention to their own cleverness and so on.

But quite a few of the objects in Great Expectations use a Minimalist strategy for their effectiveness. At the level of policy, it is there in the Remarkable Pencil's aim of recycling one (polystyrene) cup into one pencil. At the level of production, it is there in Jasper Morrison's Air Chair, a one-piece, one colour, gas injected polypropylene stacking chair which shifts attention from its construction to its use. More playful is Tom Dixon’s hexapod The Jack, which is a seat, light fitting or table base depending on how you use it (incidentally, the web-site for this doesn’t mention the designer; I had to look that up in my paper catalogue of the British Home Sweet Home exhibition that toured here last year). Rainer Spehl’s Qoffee_stool is an over-size plastic coffee cup that can be a bin or seat depending on which end is on the floor. Plank by Thomas Heatherwick is a six-foot (sic) straight wooden plank with four joints so that it can fold into a bench or small table, or anything else you can invent. The Jack, Qoffee_stool and Plank actively engage with function as their context. Hussein Chalayan’s Air Mail Clothing identifies the postal system as an industrial distribution system: the garment unfolds from a flat airmail envelope.

This doesn't exhaust the list of minimalist objects and systems to be seen in Great Expectations. Others such as the Gateshead Millennium Bridge engage with and alter their urban contexts, although you have to know about this bridge from other sources; the exhibition presents it through a small model. But I will finish with what might be the least British of the objects, Placebo Furniture. This is a range of furniture that alerts the owner? user? passer-by? to the ambient level of electromagnetic radiation. A domestic system is here being used to map out an invisible aspect of its context, introducing a psychological ambience at odds with the usual comforting function of furniture. The designers admit that the furniture doesn’t offer any real protection against such radiation but just lets you know it’s there. It’s a surreal idea: chair + scientific instrument = paranoia/security. In retrospect, I wonder what level of electro-magnetic radiation there was in the Melbourne Museum on my visit. I can’t remember if any examples of the Placebo range were tabled in the Melbourne installation.

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