On New Year’s Day, 2023, the sun rises over a couple of hundred people partying in a public park in Heidelberg, a suburb just over ten kilometres north of the Melbourne CBD. Woozy punters wander in and out of thickets of grey-green gumtrees. DJs labour on decks underneath a camping tent, techno titans for a few short hours. In another corner of the party, a diamante-collared chihuahua yaps incessantly. Posthumanist ravers try and mostly fail to relate to the psychotic beast. Someone falls in a sludgy pond; another person falls in trying to retrieve them.
It is a happy gathering of socially conscious drug-fucked middle-class people in their twenties and thirties. Everyone who's anyone, or at least wants to be someone, is here. Fashionista socialite Babs Rapeport is here. Miscellania nightclub boss Sasha is here. Rising gay pop star Willing is here. Art world documentarian and beatnik Carmen Sibha-Keiso is here. Essayist-of-the-moment (and editor of this newsletter) Sally Olds is here, rolling about in the green grass with her lover, the poet Kat Capel. And David Homewood and Alex Vivian are here, representing Guzzler.
For the uninitiated, Guzzler is a gallery located in a shed behind a nondescript brick house in suburban Melbourne. It has spotless white walls, a corrugated iron roof, fluorescent overhead lights, and a dirt floor the size of a backyard swimming pool. Public areas of the primary residence (kitchen; living room; toilet) are coated in a layer of homely grime. Private areas are more mysterious. The three mid-30s to early-40s gallerists, David Homewood, Alex Vivian, and Luke Sands, are talented, party-hardened male artists in varying states of decrepitude who started the gallery together in 2019. They’re the coolest artists in Melbourne. Men want to be them; women want to be with them; absolutely nobody wants to live with them. The house is a nightmare.
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