Daniel Thomas : Newspaper writings

"TELEGRAPH" Sydney, N.S.W. 27 DLC, \910 THINGS DON'T LOOK BETTER AT L011 KELPAC, who was candor at the Art Gallery of South Australia, is now in London, and Australian art looks very dif- ferent to him from that distance. It looks much less good. "Outside its histori- cal context it is dull, provincial and aestheti- cally suspect," Klepac says. And a lot of it, he says, is loaded with na- tionalism, with propa- ganda about Australia. "This impurity or propaganda which at home is invisible, is very obvious to people outside. It is a factor which has always limi- ted the acceptability of the art of minor cul- tures - be they Bulgar- ian or Australian - where there is self con- scious forcing of feel- ing. People are prepar- ed to go and see such art but they will never absorb it totally until it is essentially pure." Lou Klepac writes all this in the December issue of Art and Aus- tralia., and it's interest- ing that his examples "f impure and pure art- -ts are Tom Roberts and John Glover. -Tom Roberts' The Breakaway is so suf- fused with nationalism that only to think of it in London makes me feel like barricading myself in Earls Court and fighting the poms. "On the other hand Glover's Tasmanian House and Garden makes me feel like rush- ing to buy an airline ticket home -to bathe in the sunshine and contemplate the silent, ageless landscape. "There you have the difference between the impurity of nationalism (Roberta) and the pur- ity of art (Glover)." It's true that Tom Roberts' consciously national pictures are immensely popular. Per- haps his Balled Up is the most famous Aus- tralian painting in existence. Though this might be only because it is in Sydney and thus ART with Daniel Thomas known to more people than The Breakaway, which is in Adelaide, and which the artist himself thought was better And perhaps if paint- ings are as popular as Roberts' national pic- tures are they can't be very good; perhaps they are then operating on the level of advertising or commercial art, where all sorts of cal- culated responses are built in. like nostalgia or nationalism or greed. When an artist plans for a calculated res- ponse in his audience he isn't making major art, Major art is made more mysteriously; the artist doesn't care whe- ther it's popular, or Whether it will have any specific effect on A DISTANCE the spectator; he only knows he needs to make it and he hopes some- one will respond to it in some unspecified way. John Glover, every- body agrees, is just about the best artist to have worked In Austra- lia, He was certainly the first artist of import- ance for he arrived in 1831. (I'm not talking about the present, where agreement is still un- certain). He is not a popular artist, but this isn't proof that he is good. His lack of popularity is simply due to public ignorance of his work. He lived in Tasmania and most of his work remains there. Adelaide and Mel- bourne own a couple of paintings and usually exhibit them. But in Sydney the Art Gallery of New South Wales owns no pictures by him, so there has been no way for him to enter public consciousness. And yet there is a place for nationalism, for subject matter that is recognisable and local. If you're going to have rubbish it's essential to have your own local rubbish. From it some spectator response is possible, from foreign rubbish none. I'm thinking of tele- vision and theatre, which provide almost nothing that can touch us directly, when most Australian painting can. Theatre, especially, has seemed completely irrelevant in Australia, a waste of time for anyone. . Hardly anyone I know bothers with the trivial comedies that fill most of our theatres. In the past year they've gone only to the Royal Shakespeare Company, which offered suweme plays, excel- lently performed. And they have flock- ed to King O'Malley and th Biggies. For the first time in years we've seen ourselves, Australians that is, recognisably as interest- ing, amusing and ambi- guous. These two plays are better than local rub- bish, they might even be dramatic art. I've been impressed with their connoisseur- ship of various periods in our recent past, the clothes we wore, the words we once used, And Biggles, which irritated me greatly in its first half, seemingly irrelevant, press ins nostalgia buttons on the Poms In the audience, turned out in the sec- ond half to be a rather moving dramatisation of the way we no longer feel British. I know I felt British as a child. but I cer- tainly don't now and I don't suppose anybody younger than Mr. Men- zies still does.