Daniel Thomas : Newspaper writings

"Vr "TELEGRAPH" Sydney, N.S.W. WHAT "5 WITH THE OPERA HOUSE? WHATEVER became of the Opera House? W e'v e heard nothing much for the post two years. Before Christ!) it was the only work of art here that foreigners made speelai trips to Australia to see. The now discontinued tours of the raw concrete interior were ex- periences of a lifetime. Pure ar tectural forces and spaces; no ser- vices to spoil them (as of course there must be), such as seats, soreen-passages, acoustic ceilings. It was better than the Pyramids. But in the Australian perform- ing arts there's little awareness of the need to experiment, either into extreme purity, or into mixed - media. There has been The Living Body, an underground group, at Pact. Above ground there's the New Theatre, there was the Candy Stripe Baloon and similar revues. Mixed media, or intermedia, combinations of drama, dance, cinema, painting, sculpture. are a flourishing experimental branch of the Performing arts. Sydney has nowhere to perform them. The Opera House Is obviously where there should be facilities. (Melbourne's Arts Centre will have them.) And these facilities are very simple: a sort of barn, with no fixed stage, no fixed seating; in it, performance, seating, and film projection can be moved at will to any position within the hall. It seems that a -flexible space" of this kind Is being requested in the Opera House by the Opera House Society and by the Profes- sional Producers ana Directors of Austral la. The space became available when the Main Hall ceased to be Intended for opera, and when its stage machinery was no longer needed. A cinema has been proposed for this space. Obviously a 200 -seat cinema might be nice to have somewhere in the building, but it's hardly an urgent requirement for Sydney. As I said recently, Sydney has been a permanent film festival this year. On the other hand a flexible workshop apace for contemporary performing arts is an urgent need. We don't have it anywhere at pre -sent. It seems absurd, and wastefully expensive, to propose any other use for the space that's become available. C14RISTO has an exhibition, of wool bales, both wrapped and unwrapped, in the National Gal- lery of Victoria. This temporary monument is the first thing ever to look any good In the huge scaled courtyards. VE left myself short of space I for exhibitions by three Im- portant Australian artists, Tucker, Williams, Shead, and for Indian stone carvings and miniature paintings at David Jones. The Indian sculpture, though essential, Is familiar ground any- way; soft fragments of pink or yellow stone, Iron, temples of the 4th to 12th centuries. A twisting crowded orgy of ornament, round- ed faces, torsoes, linitts. The miniatures are 17th end lath cen- tury, and rather harder than others seen recently. ART with' Daniel Thomas tion, all of which are admirably direct and unsubtly in the service of his subject matter. And it is his subject ,natter which is interest - Mg (though not clear) and the obsessive recurrent images which embody it. What recurs are mouths, nostrils, pulpy flesh. The early 1940s "Images of Modern Evil" are clearly about violence and rape and rain, in Melbourne streets and cinemas. There are straightforward per - traits of murderers. His more re- cent honed, arrow -head ''Intruders" or Explorers may be an attempt to elevate the specifically relished horrors of the young man's Mel- bourne to a general idea of alien Western man, mindlessly raping Australia as he penetrates the in- terior during 19th century ex- ploration. The present is usually more interesting than the past, and specifics always more than generalities, But still I suspect I'll like the recent work more when it has matured. Meanwhile, there are 158 paintings to brood over, 1936 lo 1969. ARRY SHEAD (Wattersi, Jt though young, is also familiar enough. He has always been an artist who likes to put everything in, his own life, his landscape, the pictures he's been looking at, the movies he's seen, the furniture at home, the things that have hap- pened in the nearby bush. Now he's going through a phase of learning about structure; previ- ously the images floated over, or grew organically, p now theren 's geometry, alien hone boxes i the bush, windows to frame the world, fences, poles. Now too there's more color, when previ- ously his handling, his tonallsm, and his taut sensibility all made him seem more like Sidney Nolan than did any other young artist. 1100 to $850, and a wealth of visual and poetic references In every picture. JOHN RIGBY !Macquarie), who works In Brisbane, is another artist who's settled on revived fauvism. and he's better at It than the other recent exponents. In fact it's the 1910 German expres- sionist derivations of Gauguin and Matisse that Rigby brings to mind, an it's a long while since anyone In Australia has tried out Heckel, Modersolin-Becker, van Dongen and Jan Muller, Vivid color, more painterly. less designed than Rigby used to be. $30 to $1800, FREDp WILLIAMS (Rudy Komori) Is only the beet landscape painter we have, and his work is familiar enough. Except that now it is even more beautiful, and much more refined. Meaning that lila large canvases leave a lot of empty ground, are animated with drifts of rather small tree - elements. Also that his colour Is now heat, greenish. and In fact more various: the stained grounds, and the brushmarks really con- tain a thousand opalescent colours, rather fairyland or hush orchid colours. If we hadn't already seen over 10 years of his art would these new paintings be eesUy rec- ognised as landscapes? Maybe not, but then we have and do. Williams might be pushing stead- ily into the unknown, but hels led us there too, very firmly. 4 LBERT TUCKER (Bonython), also essential to visit and a profoundly gripping experience it is, in spite of the often rudimen- tary, centralised compositions, the ugly color. But ugliness often .4 ges, with the spectators' in - d experience, to beauty, and rgoirs tIlie better word for 1 andling, compost-