Snowman Killer

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Background: In the 1980s my father took the Alpine Shire to VCAT contesting the proposed construction of a 17-metre-high concrete snowman. The Big Snowman was part of an Australian post SWW tradition of constructing big kitsch monuments in rural townships. These massive sculptures had been inherited from a similar trend in the US (Venturi et al. 1972) and were designed to put communities on the tourist map by stopping the passing car in awe. Big Things, along with highway police and road-side service mechanics are part of what Sheller & Urry call a ‘mechanic complex’: the network of objects, buildings and services that have developed as a direct result of the car (2000, p.738). The transitory and commercial nature of these spaces have been attributed to a type of international ‘non-place’ (Augé 1995).

Contribution: This research project takes a mixed-method approach, utilising a family archive of documents related to the Big Snowman controversy, memory, and performance-based mobile fieldwork to ask what Big Things tell us about Australian national identity. In doing so it reveals that far from ‘non-places’, Big Things can, and do, tell us a lot that pertains specifically to Australia and its car culture.
‘Snowman Killer’ is a mixed-media artwork comprised of photographs, a 20min performance lecture that weaves together memory with on-site analysis of Big Things and a 4min video.

Significance: The work was selected to be exhibited during the Mobile Utopias conference at Lancaster University and was supported by a T2M travel grant. The performance lecture was presented at the Benalla Art Gallery, supported by RMIT’s Writing & Concepts. Finally, this project and its research methods were reviewed in detail in Southern et al. ‘Mobile Utopia: Art and Experiments’ and mentioned by Kaya Barry in her contribution to the ‘Handbook of Research Methods and Applications for Mobilities’.