Vandal tries to decapitate Fitzroy’s banana sculpture

A vandal has tried to “decapitate” a banana sculpture just weeks after the City of Yarra installed it to “activate” a Fitzroy street.

Police have released more information about a man who allegedly tried to “decapitate” the $22,000 banana stature in Melbourne’s inner north.

Investigators believe the man damaged the 6ft tall banana sculpture on the corner of Rose and Brunswick streets sometime between 9pm on Thursday, November 25 and 6am on Friday, November 26.

He is perceived to be Caucasian in appearance, in his mid-to-late 20s, around 175cm tall and has short black hair.

The man was also wearing a black jacket, black pants and a blue face mask and was carrying what appeared to be a hacksaw.

Police are calling for witnesses to the incident.

“Police have been told offenders tried to remove the ornamental carved face of the statue, which is used as a traffic bollard,” he said.

Artist Adam Stone said the vandalism was “pretty shocking” and “upsetting”.

“I’ve had to come to terms with it this morning … someone tried to decapitate the banana,” he said.

A Yarra City Council spokeswoman said an angle-grinder had been used in the attack.

“The artist will make repairs to the sculpture in the coming days, but will conduct a further restoration, off site, at a later date,” she said.

“Yarra Council is co-operating with Victoria Police on the investigation into this matter.”

The Herald Sun understands CCTV will be installed nearby to help prevent further vandalism of the artwork.

The ‘fallen fruit’ sculpture has divided opinion over its look and price tag. Picture: Alex Coppel

The banana has split public opinion, with a small business body slamming the artwork as a shocking waste of money.

The City of Yarra spent a fifth of a $100,000 taxpayer-funded grant from the TAC on the artwork – dubbed “Fallen Fruit” – in Rose St, Fitzroy.

A council spokeswoman said the sculpture, installed earlier this month, “activates” the area, encourages increased pedestrian activity and had been “well received by residents and visitors”.

A 300-word description of the artwork published on the council’s website says it attempts to “subvert” the 1970s phenomenon of oversized, kitsch roadside objects.

“The work does this by employing the symbol of the banana, anthropomorphised through the inclusion of a human skull, a memento mori to meditate on our Western tendencies towards unsustainable desires and excess,” the description claims.

“Using absurdity and humour as an entry point, this oversized pop object reveals the ‘infallibility’ of the super-human figure as social myth.”

A bemused local mulls the banana. Picture: Alex Coppel

It also says the artwork “engages with Banana Art, a lowbrow internet subculture” and acts as “an absurd warning about our human compulsion towards an excessive drive”.

Artist Adam Stone said his taxpayer-funded $22,000 big banana sculpture in Fitzroy was “dealing with the unstainable excess” of western society.

Mr Stone said he had previously worked on another project for the City of Yarra in Edinburgh Gardens, which was a crashing skateboarder.

“They were both the same work again dealing with the excess that is the focus of my art practice,” he told 3AW.

“So looks back into my history as a kind of ex-BMX guy, a skateboarder and also use that as a metaphor to think about this kind of potential crashing … kind of unstainable excess.”

The big banana was installed as part of the council’s conversion of Rose St, which also has a painted mural, into a shared zone for pedestrians and cars with a speed limit of 10km/h.

The inner-city council spent a fifth of a $100,000 TAC grant on the artwork in Rose St Fitzroy.

TAC Head of Road Safety Samantha Cockfield said she had not been fully briefed on the project by Yarra Council, but said the artwork was “doing its job”.

“We were very aware of the general scope of the project and what was going on … (but) we were not specifically aware that there was a piece of art which was going to be a banana,” Ms Cockfield said.

The City of Yarra said the artwork was ‘a memento mori to meditate on our Western tendencies towards unsustainable desires and excess’. Picture: Alex Coppel

“I’ve only seen pictures of the banana artwork in the paper, I’ve got no problems with it as a place of art.”

Ms Cockfield maintained the artwork had fulfilled a purpose in reminding the community about road safety.

“Certainly the entire project is doing its job. It’s slowing down people. We know it helps delineate where people are walking and using places to live, to work and to get around versus a roadway,” she said.

“We know it works, we know it helps.”

Roads Minister Ben Carroll said the majority of the project had been funded by the City of Yarra, and works were not overseen by the TAC.

“One silver lining (of the banana) is that it’s certainly got people talking, however I will leave it to the City of Yarra to explain more clearly what the thinking was behind this investment,” he said.

“I think we need to certainly look at whatever we can do to keep road safety and talking about it. There’s no doubt, coming out of Covid, there’s been a massive uplift in people getting to know their community, whether it’s on the bike or on the footpath.

“This place-making investment was about people literally taking the time to slow down.”

When asked if the TAC in future would ask councils applying for grants to run their plans past the road safety organisation, Ms Cockfield said “certainly we will”.

“In fact, we didn’t specifically pay for the piece of art, it was that we were involved in a project that we provided a grant for,” she said.

BANANA SCULPTURE LABELLED SHOCKING WASTE OF MONEY

But it has been branded a waste of money by Small Business Australia.

Small Business Australia executive director Bill Lang said the spend was inappropriate when the council planned to charge businesses to use carparks to trade outdoors under Covid restrictions.

Adam Stone’s “Fallen Fruit”. Picture: Adam Stone

“It seems to me that this local government continues to lack empathy and understanding of what Yarra small businesses have faced,” Mr Lang said.

“Painting pink shapes on Rose St and cementing an acrylic half-peeled skeleton headed banana, while screaming about council budget issues … where are their priorities?

“Brunswick St has dozens of empty shops, it’s time to empty out town hall.”

Artist Adam Stone said the purpose of his banana sculpture was to represent the overconfidence in western society’s approach to the climate and finite natural resources.

“This is a very small budget compared to what councils spend on other projects and consulting for those projects,” he said.

“The production budget provided a public artwork as well as employment for a professional painter, artist’s assistant, engineer and local concrete contractor, all of whom were sole traders.

“My ambition was to create a sculpture people could enjoy of all different backgrounds.”

The council’s controversial plan to charge businesses up to $5000 to convert a single car space into a dining area from October 2022, sparked widespread condemnation.

Victorian councils with plans in place for infrastructure works improving road safety are eligible to apply for a TAC grant.