Daniel Thomas : Newspaper writings

"TELEGRAPH" Sydney, N.S.W. FEB 1971 //Television? It has taught us WHEN people say that the young are now visually literate, and that such mass visual literacy has never occurred before, it probably only means that the young don't read books. And if they don't read books any more, then to credit them with "visual literacy" is a desperate hope that they must still be interested in something. Yet there may be a little truth in this "visual liter- acy" line. the argument probanly grew out of the total re- volution that television caused. A recently published sur- vey stated that in some homes television is regu- larly watched six hours a day. It sounds fantastic, but if it's true, then that's where all the reading time has gone. And O.K., television is a visual medium; perhaps without realising it the television - trained young have become connoisseurs of visual styles, have be- come able to appreciate visual subtlety and visual drama. Maybe. But there's not been much visual excel- lence on television. Television began in Aus- tralia 15 years ago. More recently the Wyndham Scheme insisted that all New South Wales schools should teach art. Every high school now has a few art teachers, the present New South Wales total being over 600. Schooling, not television, could be the reason why the young don't look stupid when they visit an art exhibition these days, while their book -trained parents sometimes look inadequate. These remarks are pro- voked by the surprising disapproval of the Old Tote Theatre Company's pro- duction of "As You Like It." It left me high for a weekend: drunk on beauty. Yet, theatre critics Harry Kippax in the Herald, and Katherine Brisbane, in the Australian, found it juve- nile and boring and a bad interpretation of Shake- speare. Well, maybe the lines weren't alwa spoken as well as ono might wish. But I had a good feeling of these youn(t actors allow- ing the roles to inhabit their bodies. At the same time, the actors were allowing a dif- ferent set of their own real personal relationships to coexist on the stage. And this struck me as a very Shakespearian situation. Also, I felt the actors hugely appreciated the per- missive range of life-styles that Shakespeare was offer- ing. Intelligence can marry ;timidity. youth can love tee. gaiety can respect mel- ancholy. This, I've always imagined, is what "As You Like It" is about. Now, a promiscuous variety of life-styles is what television might have helped train the young to accept. Once upon a time only the few who read boobs, of ) the larger number who went to the cinema were ever lifted out of their own, time and place. At present all Australian children coexist daily with utterly alien people, with television Americans, blacks, British, Vietnamese. And sometimes, with luck, and much more often than in the cinema age, they might encounter great in- telligence and sophistica- tion. But besides an accep- tance of varied present-day life-styles, 1 think the big- gest thing television has done is to make everybody realise that the past exists. Without art we all tend to live in an undifferen- tiated, endless, vegetable present. Old buildings (which, more than anything else, to see . . ART by daniel thomas are conspicuous reminders of the past) are inanimate and easily pushed into in- visibility. [In any case, a coat of white paint is quite enough to move a terrace house out of the 10th century-which didn't care for Mine at all -into the present.) The television past Is old movies. The 1930s and 1940s aren't very distant, but millions of people weren't born when those old movies were made and an utterly alien world of past time has never before been uni- versally available. More Important, a uni- versally accessible past has never been so resistant to falsification and to con- version into the present IYou can't whitewash an old movie like you can an old building. You can't restore it and reframe into present day taste like you can a painting.] These old movies rein- force the acceptance of varied life-styles, but it is they, more than anything else, which teach the "visual literacy" that I started with. They are powerful re- minders that once we all wore very different faces, hair, clothes, that our houses an d transport looked different. Hence they are the beginnings of visual discrimination. Since old movies belong to the 1930s. visual liter- acy moves from non -art things like clothes and faces and buildings, to appreciation of cartoon - drawing styles (the Forest of Arden backdrop to "As You Like It"), to the great silver -screen choreographer Busby Berkeley (the Mas- que to Hymen which closed "As You Like It"), to a major artist of the 1010s, Magritte (whose paintings were brought to life by Tim Eliott's melancholy Jaques), Some day they might move out of the recent past into other pasts. but Brian Thomson, who designed "As You Like It," has found plenty there to sharpen his sense of the present, our sense of Shakespeare, and to provide a visual feast. Finally, I wonder if the fact that television is free helps persuade the young that, all art should be free, and perhaps explains the gift -box imagery beloved by Brian Thomson. ARMSTRONG MUSIC John Armstrong's exhi- bition at Walters is easily the most interesting of the early season shows. On Tuesday. from 7 pm.. there will be "Musical Improvisations" inspired by the objects at Watters. Free. PERTH PRIZE The Perth Prize .lor Drawing International will be judged this year by the :!3ritiskt sculptor Anthony Caro. After Perth he will visit Sydney. Competition entries close at the Western Australian Art Gallery On March 90, 1971.