‘Grotesque faces’ removed
“It’s clear that council’s processes failed to be at the standard the community deserves.” Caulfield MP David Southwick
A MURAL depicting figures with long noses – above a shopfront in Carlisle Street, Balaclava – has been painted over by Port Phillip Council after an outcry that it used antisemitic tropes.
The caricatures outraged shoppers in Melbourne’s Jewish heartland last week, triggering the decision to remove them, with mayor Heather Cunsolo apologising and councillor Marcus Pearl lamenting “a governance failure” in council greenlighting the artwork.
The mural was painted under the Creative Graffiti Pilot Program, run by Port Phillip and five other councils with funding from the Victorian government’s Community Support Fund, as an initiative to reduce random graffiti. Port Phillip earlier promoted the mural on Facebook as “depictions of many of the characters of Carlisle Street”.
Cunsolo stated on Friday that Port Phillip “received a large volume of community complaints”, adding that “the current [Israel-Hamas] conflict has understandably heightened sensitivities”. (The mural’s creator, street artist Mic Porter, reportedly attended an October 29 pro-Palestinian rally.)
The mayor said that when Port Phillip “was first made aware that the artist’s figures could be interpreted as antisemitic, we reached out to several Jewish community leaders for advice, but no concerns were raised”.
However, The AJN understands that Port Phillip’s enquiries to the Melbourne Holocaust Museum and the Jewish Museum of Australia – for feedback on Porter’s style – were based on a creation of Porter’s on St Kilda’s Lower Esplanade, not on the Carlisle Street artwork.
An MHM spokesperson confirmed that Port Phillip had contacted it this year “for an opinion” about a Porter mural on Jacka Boulevard. “While there were some grotesque figures in the mural, which is his style, we did not see anything inherently antisemitic in them … To take some of the grotesque faces out of that mural and paint them onto shops in a Jewish neighbourhood needed a fresh consideration. We have not been consulted about this and can see that they could offend members of the Jewish community in this different context, because on their own they do resemble antisemitic caricatures.”
Caulfield MP David Southwick said, “It’s clear that council’s processes failed to be at the standard the community deserves.”
comments