Tagged building by Carl and Renks, Bourke Street 2005

Summary

This image was created by Lachlan MacDowall and displayed using a lightbox in the 2022 City Gallery exhibition 'Off the Grid: Invader and Melbourne Street Art in the early 2000s.' The text below is written by the exhibition curator, Lachlan MacDowall.

"In 2003, two graffiti writers entered an empty office building in Bourke St scheduled for demolition and began a sequence of tags on the windows. Demonstrating restraint and careful planning, the writers spray painted single white tags in each window of every floor of the 10-storey building, eighteen windows in each. The tags are produced in a checker-board design and painted in reverse, to address the outside viewer. With Melbourne enduring seemingly endless reconstruction during this period, empty buildings in the centre of the city were common terrain for urban explorers, squatters and graffiti writers looking to add their tags to the city skyline. However, the scale and precision of the tagging in this building transcended the usual vandalism. Attributed to Carl and Renks, and best considered as a single artwork, the piece has many aesthetic resonances. It is restrained in its approach – single tags in single colours – but also uncompromising, striving for total coverage of the object. The tags demonstrate the addictive repetition of tagging but with distinct, improvised flourishes in each window. Long since demolished and replaced with a larger, generic office tower, this artwork constructed entirely of tags remains one of the key works of this period." - Lachlan MacDowall, 2024