When Basil met Boonji: It was love at first sight, but not everyone is starstruck

Sydney Morning Herald

23-05-2025

When American artist Brendan Murphy offered to give the City of Perth a seven-metre sculpture of an astronaut, Basil Zempilas embraced it with characteristic enthusiasm.
The former lord mayor saw the freebie as a cool, Instagrammable piece of public art that aligned perfectly with the recently elected council's rebrand of Perth as the City of Light, a reference to John Glenn's 1962 triple-orbit of Earth in which our young metropolis put on a glittering show for the future senator.
Zempilas was so entranced by an artist collected by the likes of Serena Williams, Ryan Gosling and Warren Buffett gifting a piece valued at $1.5 million to the City of Perth — albeit a gift that would cost ratepayers about $250,000 for transportation and installation — that he became part of the creative process, feeding the Florida-based Murphy information on the city he grew up in.
Fragments of the story Zempilas told Murphy can be seen in the text on the skin of our Boonji Spaceman (including the story of Glenn's famous flight), which was eventually placed in Stirling Gardens and unveiled on Thursday in front of a large media pack.
Zempilas is so invested in the Boonji Spaceman (titled Lightening) that he took time out from his duties as the Liberal leader to attend the unveiling and to catch up with Murphy and Gullotti Galleries owner Paul Gullotti, who set up the deal and who is holding the artist's first Australian solo show (Zempilas also hosted the opening of the exhibit).
'Basil was the one who sold me on doing the project,' says Murphy in the lead-up to the unveiling of the Boonji Spaceman.
'He was so fired up about Perth and had this incredible energy. Here was the mayor of a major city who was genuinely interested in my work and wanted to bring it here.
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'I received a long email from Basil full of history and dates, including the story of John Glenn's flight.
'So this Boonji Spaceman is not a generic piece built on the other side of the world and shipped here. It's been created specifically for Perth and with input from someone who truly loves the place.'
Zempilas said he told Murphy that Perth was 'very proud, it's adventurous, it's ambitious'.
'I note that he has adopted some of those,' Zempilas says.
While Zempilas and Murphy were all smiles at the media launch, they spent much of their time answering questions about controversy swirling around the Boonji Spaceman, which has been sucked into more general criticism of the City of Perth's cavalier treatment of the public art works in its collection.
Art activists believe that the city should not have paid a quarter of a million dollars for a work they claim has no merit and genuine connection to Perth.
Even more galling for those pushing back against the Boonji Spaceman is that Murphy's piece has been placed on the plinth on which for half a century stood Ore Obelisk, Paul Ritter's monument to the mining industry which, critics argue, was not properly maintained and chopped up and removed without proper consultation.
Now looming over the cherished Austaliana spread around Stirling Gardens — Joan Walsh-Smith and Charles Smith's kangaroos and Mae Gibbs' Snugglepot and Cuddlepie, statues of founding fathers and key historic buildings — is a hulking electric-blue space traveller whose clones grace public and private spaces in cities such as New York, London, Oslo and Riyadh.
Prominent art critic John McDonald labelled the work as 'space junk' and compared the councillors who voted for Murphy's piece to be placed near Council House as 'a bit like Donald Trump deciding that the Kennedy Centre needs to ditch all that elitist crap and put on a great production of Cats or Fiddler on the Roof '.
'The arts are there to start discussions, to bring people into the room. It is what I hope the Boonji Spaceman will do.'
Brendan Murphy
'It is not the role of the mayor to make decisions on art acquisitions for the City,' says Helen Curtis, a public art consultant who is leading the campaign to save both the Ore Obelisk and the Northbridge Arch, which were removed because of corrosion.
'The mayor's job is to promote the city and be a statesman. It is not making calls on works of art,' Curtis says.
'They can put something forward, like any elected member. But it must go through a proper process.
'Committees and advisory groups are a filter and safety net to ensure that the city does not find itself in this exact situation — paying an exorbitant amount of money for work whose connection to Perth is dubious and is so poorly regarded by the arts community.'
Curtis believes that Zempilas managed to sway councillors and circumvent the normal procedures because he was an unusually high-profile and charismatic mayor, a well-connected media personality who during his single term brought a huge amount of attention to the city.
She also believes the Boonji Spaceman represents a larger problem for the city and for Western Australia, in which the arts have been 'dumbed down' and subsumed by the grander project of branding, marketing and tourism.
'The Boonji Spaceman is a marketing stunt dressed up as art — and not a very good marketing stunt at that,' Curtis says.
'If the city wants to use art to draw tourists we need work that springs for here. Nobody is going to travel to Perth to see Ikea art that has popped up in Dubai or Miami or wherever.
'If the City wants something Instagrammable, we can do that here with authenticity. But fix the important works we already have first — that's what should be prioritised.'
Murphy said he was unaware of the controversy swirling around his work until a couple of weeks ago.
'Not everyone's going to like it. But trying to stop it from being shown is shutting down discussion.'
Brendan Murphy
Since arriving this week, he's fielded questions from journalists about the appropriateness of a piece of American pop art sitting in a civic space, and a large piece of ratepayers money going to what is could be construed as an advertisement for a show.
'Whatever opposition there is to my Boonji Spaceman it has nothing to do with me. And it can't have anything to do with Basil because his motives are genuine,' says Murphy, a former professional basketball player and Wall Street trader who pivoted to art after watching many of his colleagues die on September 11.
While Murphy has sympathy for the position of Curtis and the Save the Kebab movement — 'I stand by all artists,' he says — the Rhode Island-born sculptor and painter who counts Jackson Pollock, Jean-Michael Basquiat and Willem de Kooning among his influence does not want to be drawn into what he regards as a political dispute.
'Politics has no place in art. The job of the artist is to bring people together,' he says.
'I'm not interested in what divides us. I'm interested in our commonalities. I'm an artist. I'm not an American artist. All I care about is inspiring some young kid who dreams of one day being an artist.'
Indeed, Murphy believes in remaining neutral even though he has recently had a show in the Kennedy Centre, which became a flashpoint for the resistance against Trump when he fired 17 board members and made himself the chair.
'When Trump said something stupid, as he always does, a group of singers pushed back and did not invite him to a show, which is why he got so angry and took over the place,' Murphy says.
'It was not their role. They should have sung for him and made their point. It's what Bob Dylan would have done.
'The arts are there to start discussions, to bring people into the room. It is what I hope the Boonji Spaceman will do.
'Not everyone's going to like it. But trying to stop it from being shown is shutting down discussion.'
While the city says the Boonji Spaceman will be moved to Elizabeth Quay after 12 months, Curtis and her colleagues, who are fighting for the Kebab to be returned to the spot where Murphy's work now stands, remain convinced that Murphy's sculpture is here to stay.
'Our great fear is that in a year the city will announce that it is too costly to move the Boonji Spaceman and that it will be left there,' she says.