For a few days this month Australian cable TV company Foxtel set up a series of pastiche gravestones, outlandish sculptures, and faux crypts in honour of the fallen in the massively-popular ‘Game of Thrones’ franchise.
The exhibit, in the Fearnley Grounds in Sydney's Centennial Park, started on Friday and finished yesterday evening. I went with a friend who has a friend who is a massive GoT fan. I parked the car in the park (boy we were lucky to nab the slot, the crowds were tremendous, with cars backed up out the gate and down Darley Road and west along Alison Road) and we walked up the circuit to meet this friend. At least 500 people were milling around with their mobile phones, taking selfies and photos of family and friends. The crowd gradually turned over so over three days probably tens of thousands viewed the lugubrious installation.
Most visitors when we were there were aged in their 20s or 30s, so it was overwhelmingly a young crowd. Neither men nor women predominated. Some had children with them. Some of the children were toddlers and others were aged up to about 10. There were a few older people, but not many. One older Asian man was taking a lot of photos of a young Asian woman wearing a fantastic black costume with lots of lace.
The people were from all over the world. There were different skin colours and accents. There were fashionable haircuts and leather jackets. One young man wearing aviator sunglasses had a ponytail on the top of his head. Some of the people were better-dressed than the rest, and a few looked like they were from the theatre world, but for the most part people were dressed casually.
The autumn sun was still out at 4pm when we met up, and you could see the dust that people’s feet kicked up suspended in a golden haze of air and light where the sun shone through the trees. The subtle atmospherics generated by the modulated light from the waning sun lent a fittingly nostalgic air to the temporary graveyard where people slowly made their way from one attraction to the next. At one stage a large and noisy flock of sulphur-crested cockatoos flew overhead, heading northeast.
“Ours is the fury,” read one stone-like crypt. “Kneel before your king,” read a plaque set in a strange concrete sculpture like a human head that had what looked like flames coming out of its scalp in a form that resembled a crown. Made of concrete but looking heavy and authentic and as though they had been carved from sandstone, the displays often had real moss growing on them. Some had rusty chains staked around them on iron spikes.
A weird kind of goth aesthetic animated the whole scene. The place was quiet, as though the constant reminder of mortality that emanated from the fake gravestones had quelled people’s socialability. Few voices were audible and mostly people just ambled around in silence, happy as larks. They revelled in the macabre panoply of kitsch. There weren’t enough headstones to satisfy the crowd’s appetite for yet another name in the show’s gruesome list of suicides, gorings, and cold-blooded murders.
This atavistic yearning for simplicity and predictability highlights the complexities of the lives of the people who came to gawk and snap photos. The fictional world that the TV series has as a backdrop for its violence and drama seems to offer people an escape from the realities of modern life, with its KPIs, performance reviews, redundancies, on-again-off-again relationships, marriages with children, and all the tomfoolery of performing your civic duties in a modern, pluralist democracy. With everything that goes on in the lives of these people, I thought to myself, it’s no wonder that they crave black-and-white values, dramatic demises, an endless roll of colourful characters, and bald plots satisfyingly studded with gory deaths.
Near the entrance to the precinct, printed on a red corflute stand, were some messages for visitors. “Thank you for coming and paying your respects,” the sign read. “Please be mindful of the dead,” it went on. “Do not touch the gravestones,” it warned in a slightly bureaucratic tone that more closely matched the intent of the sign. “Please also take care when walking around the grass and trees,” it ended up, mindful, no doubt, of occupational health and safety standards that apply at such events. (The area has pine trees giving shade and leaving needles and cones on the grass.) So the modern world was close enough at hand, but there was still allowance for people to behave in a relaxed way, and to have fun. Spotted around the grassy area were Foxtel staff wearing orange-badged black T-shirts and one or two security guards with IDs stuck in plastic pouches attached to their sleeves.
Each display had on it the cause of death of the character being honoured, along with a short cryptic code standing in for the series number and the episode number, to give people who have watched the shows a hook for their memories. I have seen none of the episodes. But I’m in the minority, it seems. This is the generation that grew up reading Harry Potter books in their teens, so the fantasy genre suits it to a “T”. These people have grown up with entertainment full of marvels and larger-than-life characters, and they seem to be immune to the emotional demands that so many deaths inflicts on viewers. I would probably find it all exhausting, so it was something of a relief to be able to sample a taste of the aesthetic of this fictional world and have a short walk in the park at the same time.
The exhibit, in the Fearnley Grounds in Sydney's Centennial Park, started on Friday and finished yesterday evening. I went with a friend who has a friend who is a massive GoT fan. I parked the car in the park (boy we were lucky to nab the slot, the crowds were tremendous, with cars backed up out the gate and down Darley Road and west along Alison Road) and we walked up the circuit to meet this friend. At least 500 people were milling around with their mobile phones, taking selfies and photos of family and friends. The crowd gradually turned over so over three days probably tens of thousands viewed the lugubrious installation.
Most visitors when we were there were aged in their 20s or 30s, so it was overwhelmingly a young crowd. Neither men nor women predominated. Some had children with them. Some of the children were toddlers and others were aged up to about 10. There were a few older people, but not many. One older Asian man was taking a lot of photos of a young Asian woman wearing a fantastic black costume with lots of lace.
The people were from all over the world. There were different skin colours and accents. There were fashionable haircuts and leather jackets. One young man wearing aviator sunglasses had a ponytail on the top of his head. Some of the people were better-dressed than the rest, and a few looked like they were from the theatre world, but for the most part people were dressed casually.
The autumn sun was still out at 4pm when we met up, and you could see the dust that people’s feet kicked up suspended in a golden haze of air and light where the sun shone through the trees. The subtle atmospherics generated by the modulated light from the waning sun lent a fittingly nostalgic air to the temporary graveyard where people slowly made their way from one attraction to the next. At one stage a large and noisy flock of sulphur-crested cockatoos flew overhead, heading northeast.
“Ours is the fury,” read one stone-like crypt. “Kneel before your king,” read a plaque set in a strange concrete sculpture like a human head that had what looked like flames coming out of its scalp in a form that resembled a crown. Made of concrete but looking heavy and authentic and as though they had been carved from sandstone, the displays often had real moss growing on them. Some had rusty chains staked around them on iron spikes.
A weird kind of goth aesthetic animated the whole scene. The place was quiet, as though the constant reminder of mortality that emanated from the fake gravestones had quelled people’s socialability. Few voices were audible and mostly people just ambled around in silence, happy as larks. They revelled in the macabre panoply of kitsch. There weren’t enough headstones to satisfy the crowd’s appetite for yet another name in the show’s gruesome list of suicides, gorings, and cold-blooded murders.
This atavistic yearning for simplicity and predictability highlights the complexities of the lives of the people who came to gawk and snap photos. The fictional world that the TV series has as a backdrop for its violence and drama seems to offer people an escape from the realities of modern life, with its KPIs, performance reviews, redundancies, on-again-off-again relationships, marriages with children, and all the tomfoolery of performing your civic duties in a modern, pluralist democracy. With everything that goes on in the lives of these people, I thought to myself, it’s no wonder that they crave black-and-white values, dramatic demises, an endless roll of colourful characters, and bald plots satisfyingly studded with gory deaths.
Near the entrance to the precinct, printed on a red corflute stand, were some messages for visitors. “Thank you for coming and paying your respects,” the sign read. “Please be mindful of the dead,” it went on. “Do not touch the gravestones,” it warned in a slightly bureaucratic tone that more closely matched the intent of the sign. “Please also take care when walking around the grass and trees,” it ended up, mindful, no doubt, of occupational health and safety standards that apply at such events. (The area has pine trees giving shade and leaving needles and cones on the grass.) So the modern world was close enough at hand, but there was still allowance for people to behave in a relaxed way, and to have fun. Spotted around the grassy area were Foxtel staff wearing orange-badged black T-shirts and one or two security guards with IDs stuck in plastic pouches attached to their sleeves.
Each display had on it the cause of death of the character being honoured, along with a short cryptic code standing in for the series number and the episode number, to give people who have watched the shows a hook for their memories. I have seen none of the episodes. But I’m in the minority, it seems. This is the generation that grew up reading Harry Potter books in their teens, so the fantasy genre suits it to a “T”. These people have grown up with entertainment full of marvels and larger-than-life characters, and they seem to be immune to the emotional demands that so many deaths inflicts on viewers. I would probably find it all exhausting, so it was something of a relief to be able to sample a taste of the aesthetic of this fictional world and have a short walk in the park at the same time.
Above: Me standing in front of one of the larger displays, which had the figure of a sort of wolf on top of it.
Above: People ambled about on the grass among the displays and the trees, happy as larks.
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