An exhibition of art, music, food and wine. Hobart, December 2017.

The standard new-release event has a shape everyone knows. A room, a table, a row of bottles, a winemaker explaining the season, twenty minutes of polite circulation, and a strong incentive to leave once you have tried the top wine.

RELEASE was not that.

It ran at Macquarie Point in Hobart on Saturday 9 December 2017, and it was billed exactly as it was built: an exhibition of art, music, food and wine. Tickets were sold through this website.

Who was there

Art — Joshua Andree, Alex Davern, David Fooks, Erin Linhart, Bethany van Rijswijk.

Music — Ruben Reeves & Band, and DJ RBENT.

Food — Foodfight, Slow Bones, Binalong Smoke.

Five artists, two acts and three kitchens. Wine was one element of four rather than the entire agenda, and the arithmetic makes the point better than any statement of intent would: on the night there were more people making things than there were wines to taste.

Why bother

That view is not unusual among small producers. It is unusual to actually stage it, because staging it is expensive, logistically annoying and considerably harder than opening some bottles in a cellar door. Artists have to be organised. Musicians have to be paid. Food has to arrive hot. Someone has to build sixty boxes and then work out what happens to them afterwards.

There is also a quieter thing happening. A wine tasting positions the winemaker as the authority and everyone else as the audience being educated. An event with several things going on at once flattens that. Nobody is being taught. People turn up, look at work, listen to music, eat, and drink wine made half an hour up the road — and the wine has to hold its own in that company rather than being the only thing in the room.

A poster survives, along with artwork produced across sixty boxes. Both are in the archive.

What the archive does not hold is the running order — who showed which work where, what was played, how the evening actually moved. James’s account of it is four words long and entirely consistent: the artists were great, the music was awesome, the food was great. A fantastic night.

That gap stays as it is. This page could be filled out with plausible detail about the room and the set list, and it would read well and never be questioned, and it would be fiction. An archive that invents the parts it has lost is not an archive.

The wines poured that night are long since sold. The idea behind the evening has proved more durable.