Daniel Thomas : Newspaper writings

"TELEGRAPH" Sydney, N.S.W. Machines... and art MACHINERY and .rt have been more than visually mixed up lai, ,y. In the past couple of years, important exhibi- tions of kinetic and lum- inal art havc been put on in Paris, Berkeley, Buffalo, Kansas City, and London. where the show was called "Cybernetic Serendipity." A Stuyvesanv Founda- tion exhibition, "Art of the Space Age" has begun a tour of Australia, and will be seen in Sydney In 1969 if suitable premises can be found. Motorised and luminal pieces were in the Power Bequest purchases shown early this year; Ken Rein- hard and Michael Knelling have shown machine - Involved art locally for some time; Oatoja and Hinder have shown boxes filled with moving light. There have been Isolated artists painting pictures of machines for 200 years, though only in England, which was the first coun- try in the world to become industrialised. An interest in machinery need not produce a new kind of art. Mostly, the machine is just another novelty to incorporate into realistic art, even when its as moving and strange as Joseph Wright's paintings of air -pumps and crucibles in the 18th century. Today, machinery has lost the strangeness it originally had. It is a large part of everybody's daily life, to be taken for natural d landscape.par of the A cow, grazing in a paddock is much stranger than a machine to a world of city dwellers. The rapid increase of machinery -art in the 1980s is moat!' s new realism for a new set of working and living conditions. The parallel rise of Pop Art was a similar revival of realism, only It was about the landscape of printed matter and com- munications media, not so much about machines. Most kinetic, luminal and machine-form art is probably made and exper- ienced as a plain or a metaphoric description of the world around us, or as a glamorisation of it. Computer art Lately, I've seen how men working with com- puters can respond so strongly to the beauty of their medium that they will use it to make works of art. Or almost. One will graph out pen drawings on paper. These are nets of curved lines which represent difficult three dimensional star - shaped forms or spherical ones like nephrolds. Another will produce similar three dimensional linear effects in move- ment, on a cathode screen. In spite of their beauty one feels these computer graphics are scientific "finds,' more akin to a crystal found by a mine- ralogist, or a flower found by a botanist, than to a work of art. (Sometimes machinery e tak another area of experiupencby e. Early this century the revolution in sexual psychology pro- duced vu:ious insights Into the ,rot,-. aspects of machines, and the mech- anical aspects of self. Mar- cel Duchamp's major painting is an example. Anyone interested in art should ace this RIM It's ART with Daniel Thomas beautiful to look at. It's also perilously pretentious, but then risks are always preferable to safety. Machines, too, are espe- cially fine to, maso- chism. The tradition of the erotic machine is appar- ently still alive In a re- cent film that I missed: will someone please bring back "Barbarella"?; But the moat interest- ing effect of machines on art is not their appear- ance. but suggestions made by their purpose and their effect. A railway train gave Turner the hint which produced one of the first great pictures of speed. A hundred years later, the sensation of speed was still the chief concern of the Futurists, for the indus- trial revolution did not come to Italy till long after its advent in Eng- land. Weightless I think.the sensation of weightlessness must be the special discovery of the mid-20th century space age. I don't know if it's been consciously put into paint- ing, but from Morris Louis through most post -paint- erly abstraction it certain- ly seems to be present. There have always been painters who took a con- scious interest in. the sea, and in sensations of fluid support, of being lifted, floated and tossed.. Turner, again, and Monet are examples. They were the prophets of weightlessness. _ Gliding Is another very silent way to approach weightlessness, and several abstract painters have be- -WHAT'S ON Art Gallery .of New South Wales: Gaudier- Brzeska, drawings and sculptures; permanent collection. Newcastle City Art Gallery: Erlo Thake; CAS-Kolotex exhibition; Dobell's Tunku Abdul Rahman. Chine: Colonial Eye (closes Tuesday). David Jones: Mixed show. Macquarie: Mixed show (closes Monday). Central Street: (clos- ed t. Eldorado: Mixed show. Walters: (closed). Stern: (closed), Gallery A: (closed). Bonytlion: (closed). Komon: Mixed show come addicted to it. Per- haps psychedelic art and drug-Induced trips are at-. tempts at an easy way into outer space. Stanley Kubrick's film "2001, A Space Odyssey.' has provoked my remarks today. I found the complete lack of rhythm in this flint irritating, nut the slow pace or the silence, for slow, silent films, like An- tonio:11's, can still have firm controlling rhythms. It seems the absence of any supporting rhythm must have been a deliber- ate image for the arbitrary flailings of a man in space. Or for the freedoni to move in any direction-up walls, along ceilings-whan you are no longer suppott- ed by the earth's surface and orientated upon a horizon. I once received Intima- tions about liberation from the horizon. It was at the giant radio -telescope at Curvature Ascending through a series of ladders and hatches, one lost track of what was vertical, for the end of the journey was through a swivelling sup- port to the giant disk, and was tilted well off vertical. When one climbed out of the last pop -hole, on to the surface of this vast dish curving up and away towards moon and stars, there was further dis- orientation; the concave curvature, in reverse of the earth's own, placed one in a situation more closely related to the sky than to earth. A third experience was like walking on a ceiling; a catwalk among the struts on the underside of the dish took one so far out front any supporting struc- ture that it felt like wan- dering across the under- side of a midnight space- ship hovering near to earth. In the "2001" film, it was easiest to enjoy the beauty of the decor, the machine landscape. It wasn't so easy to see why Kubrick inserted the trip through rushing color- ed lines and clouds, and over wildernesses photo- graphed through gaudy fil- ters, unless the outer space of technology and of psychedella are indeed two very similar dreams. Certainly the cinema was full of hippies, who prefer the front, right in the mouth of the wide-screen. The principal character in the film is a large pol- ished, black, upright rec- tangular slab from outer space, perhaps front Jupi- ter. It looks in on us while we are still apes. It's found on the moon in 2000 A.D. It presides over the death and rebirth of a spaceman in a LOUIS Seize hotel on Jupiter at the end of the film. It is a beautiful piece of minimal sculpture, and it disturbs the apes and the technologists more titan they've ever been disturbed before. They touch and press it hopefully (all push buttons on spaceships are rectan- gular nbw). It stands for a higher order of things, for per- fection and control in a world that is still as chaotic as the world of our ape ancestors.