All fores! Miranda July among artists to create feminist mini-golf course in Melbourne
Swingers: The Art of Mini Golf will take over the Flinders Street station ballroom, an abandoned space above the busy Melbourne railway station, as part of the city's annual Rising festival.
July, whose latest novel All Fours became one of the most talked about novels of 2024, is one of nine artists selected by the festival to create a hole on the nine-hole golf course. Others include the Yankunytjatjara artist Kaylene Whiskey, whose colourful works celebrate female pop culture figures such as Dolly Parton and Tina Turner; and Tokyo's 'half human, half toy' artist Saeborg, who creates disconcerting, cartoonish latex sculptures.
Swingers' curator, Grace Herbert, says she wants to celebrate the 'surprisingly subversive' history of mini-golf, which originated in 19th-century Scotland after a group of women endured antagonism from male players while playing at St Andrews Links, one of the oldest and famous golf courses in the world.
The women decided they needed their own club and established the St Andrews Ladies Golf Club in 1867, with Mrs Robert Todd Boothby as president and Miss Ellen Boothby as vice-president.
A nine-hole mini-golf course, called the Ladies' Putting Green, was laid out for them by the famed Scottish golfer Old Tom Morris.
Herbert says Swingers will be family-friendly and will take roughly 45 minutes to an hour to complete.
'It's a nine-hole mini-golf course, except that each mini-golf hole is also an artwork,' Herbert says. 'Every hole will be playable, though they may not be exactly what you would think playing a mini-golf hole will be like.'
While she wants to keep July's work a secret, Herbert reveals it would be the final hole. 'Usually on the last hole of mini-golf, it eats your ball so you don't get it back. When you play Miranda's golf hole, you'll be able to take some words from Miranda home with you. It is a really generous work.'
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Whiskey's work will be the first hole, Herbert says, and will draw on her childhood experiences travelling from her home in Indulkana, in the APY Lands, to play golf in Adelaide as a child. 'Being Kaylene, of course we'll have Dolly Parton there and you'll have to putt through Cathy Freeman's leg.'
And Saeborg's work will involve her usual inflatable animal latex body suits and will require players to don a strap-on animal tail and use it to putt. 'I guess you'll become a human-animal hybrid to complete this course,' Herbert says.
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Herbert says though she played mini-golf obsessively as a kid, she hadn't known its history as a women's sport: 'When we told the artists about the history, I think it excited them so much, because nobody knew about it either. And also because they'd be giving something a go that they wouldn't normally do.'
The other artists creating holes are the Singaporean-Australian sculptural artist Nabilah Nordin, the Turner prize-nominated British Romany artist Delaine Le Bas; and the Minahasan artist Natasha Tontey, with three more names to be come.
'Each of the artists is responding to the history of mini-golf, and has been prompted to think about things like obstacles and their removal – in both a literal sense and a metaphorical sense, in response to that surprisingly subversive history that that mini-golf has,' Herbert says. 'Obviously people have fun but it is also political and I hope that people can also engage with those ideas and that history.'
This is the third time the Flinders Street ballroom has been transformed into an exhibition by Rising, after a show dedicated to the Melbourne sculptor Patricia Piccinini in 2021 and the immersive Indigenous show Shadow Spirit in 2023.
The rest of the Rising festival program will be announced in March. The annual winter festival will run from 4-15 June this year, with Swingers running for an extended season until 31 August.
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