Daniel Thomas : Newspaper writings

"Wr A DECADE OF PROTEST IN response to public demand, some be- lated remarks on art in the 1960s. In Australian art the '60s began in 1962. Not till then was there any- thing that didn't con- tinue from the '50s - from the semi -abstract French-style painting of Leonard French, the semi - abstract and equal' European paint- ing of John Olsen and other Sydney painters. This semi - abstract painting I suppose has to be given the label abstract - exp ession- ism, since exc) pt for one or two anti its like Peter Upward at d Stan Rapotec it hardly had enough spontarJity to earn the name action - painting. "Abstract - exvession- ism') was yo unched about 1956, and it was locate( in Sydney more than Melbourne, though Melbourne then had a couple of pioneers, Don- ald Laycock and John Howley, who later went as different directions. It alarmed Melbourne, where it produced the response of the "Antipo- deans," a gathering of some painters of the forties and their follow- ers. The Antipodeans claimed to be more Australian, less imita- tive of lo:eign styles than the abstract -ex- pressionists. they were just as imitative of for- eign styles, only the styles were older, Rem- brnndt and Bruegnel and Beckmann were unitated instead of Soulages or Alan Davie. The Antipodeans are highly personal rather than Australian; not much of the Melbourne world around them got into their Ineiginaave I antasies. On the other hand, the abstract-expression- ists were very intimately involved with a specific place - Sydney, Pass - more, Klippel, Olsen and others were making romantic images of a lloiTetdo.r and a city they The change in 1962 was signallea by the "Imitation Realist" ex- hibition which included Cohn i Lanceley and Michael Brown, and It was wrongly called "Pop Art," I suppose because Pop Art had been the New York revolution that same year and Australian examples were being sought. It was a collage- assemblage style, an anti -goon taste move- ment (like most new movements), and it grew easily out of the "total experience" that Olsen, of the previous gener- ation, had wanted to put into his work, But they put In more. They mixed their media, used junk as well as oil paint, they Increas- ed the eroticism and added politics, wh ch were hitherto pretty un- common in Australian art. Within a year they were recognisably part of the 60s protest generations that be- came visible in the now ART with Daniel Thomas defunct magazine Oz. Whiteley and Lance - ley would have looked the most important new talents in the early '60s, but Michael Brown was perhaps more sig- nificant. For him a "total experience" might have included an ex- pae.i thuse oalaowikn dh im 1 to make paintings and sculptures ranging all the way from junk - assemblage to realism to geometric abstraction. This random accept- ance of everything sim- ultaneously, this per- missiveness, this refusal to be conf.ned within one set of rules was a very 1960s tiling. However, the fairly numerous artists who investigated openness. and sometimes moved on to conceptual, or non-buyable art didn't become so visible in Australia as the more easily de- fined reaction against abstract -expressionism, This reaction also constituted a change from a European ori- entation to an Ameri- can one and perhaps Sydney Ball was the be- ginning, for in 1965 he returned from two years in New York the first Australian painter since Frank Hinder to choose America for study rather than Eurcpc. This late - sixties mainstream was well established by 1966, much stimulated by a visiting exhibition from America in 1967, and; was surveyed in a large exhibition, "The Field" at the Nat -lentil Gallery of Victoria in 1968, It was conscious of being a mainstream, of being academic, that is transmissible and teachable, It preferred to start from formal considerations and let the feeling find its own way in tae, of course, it will with art), rather than to start with care- fully trained feelings and let the forms to embody those feelings find their own way into the art. The result - call it "hard-edge" for con- venience - was rela- tively impersonal and controlled by com- parison with abstract expressionism, b u t it was not cold, and cer- tainly not "minimal." By the end of the '60s the supposed situa- tion that produced the Antipodean group was reversed, Melbourne was international, Syd- ney was- still secretly regional. "TELEGRAPH" Sydney, N.S.W.