Daniel Thomas : Newspaper writings

"TELEGRAPH" 114 FE ri Sydney, N.S.W. , ARTby daniel thomas JOHN ARMSTRONG'S exhibition at Watters has a lot to keep it corn - pony. Upstairs there's a walk - and -crawl -through envir- onment with sponge floors. seaweed curtains, colored lights, and strobes to dance in as you wish. It's by Vivienne Binns and Roger Foley whose business name is Ellis 13. Fogg. Its had a giant from the Australian Council for the Arts, a federal body that looks after the per- forming arts, but which has a few handy grants for borderline performing visual arts like this. It continues all this week. One night last week some of John Armstrong's musician friends made music that hopefully re- lated to Armstrong's sculp- tures and objects. He knows two double basses, whose ponderous, weighty sound did in fact seem just right. Armstrong's art is all about weight and light- ness, expansion and com- pression. sinking or stop- ping. So the heavy bass sounds that eventually float free are very like the suspend- ed sticks with buoyant rubber foam tied to their lowest ends, thus reversing their sense of gravity. All Armstrong's bits of foam are constrained with string, so their potential expansion is the main point. The foam-tied wire - mesh bush-house refers to botanical blossoms. but also to an impossible dream of airborne buildings. A piece with small plaster bags suspended in rows in a timber frame refers to the swelling that plaster undergoes when it sets, and to the unlike- lihood of finding hard bs. Moreover the timber frame has a lever at its side which implies that the. entire object can be crank- ed up the wall again gravity starts operating abnormally - a fear which I suspect 4les at the heart of Armstrong's work, His preoccupation with weight and volume are very simple and very old. Piero della Francesca, for example, made great art out of them in Renaissance Italy. These qualities In art were used by the historian Bernard Berenson as a test of the work's excellence - he called them "ideated bodily sensations." They are qualities which a spectator can respond to visually. Or else a spectator can be made to undergo them literally, and that is what the Vivienne Binns' Roger Foley environment upstairs is all about. Modern Decorative Arts from Japan is a show of heavily luxurious orna- ments in metal, china, wood, etc., often compla- cently ugly and spiritually ambitious. This Is what I take "kitsch" to be. It was at the Arts Coun- cil Gallery, Crown and Stanley Streets, East Syd- ney, which seems to be taking on an active pro- gram of small exhibitions Music to sculpt by from the foreign embas- sies. This was an official Japanese exhibition; it was preceded by Barbara Hep- worth from Britain: and it will be followed this week by contemporary litho- graphs from France. The Gioacchino Lauro Art Prizes, which are ap- parently a new name for the Flotta Lauro Travelling Art Scholarships, are free trips to Europe, plus $1000 cash given by the Italian shipping company. One award is for sculp- ture, and was won by Tony Coleing: the other for Painting, won by Col Jordan. Both are well deserved, but except a painting by Robert Boynes. there is little else worth seeing in the exhibition at the Com- monwealth Savings Bank, Martin Place. Gallery A shows work by artists from their stable, at under $1000. (Though Michael Brown, who has been In many stables, Is now with Pinacotheca In Melbourne). - Andrew Nott as well as Michael Johnson is now in Ntw York, and with Janet Dawson and John Firth-Smith, are repre- sented by previously seen paintings. Peter Powditch however shows an important new landscape, and Peter Wright a couple of in- vigorating color-dot ab- stracts. 38 Hargrave Street also shows its gallery artists. Good new work by Dick Watkins. using color again. and Gunter Christman!). whose unstretched can- vases are fixed flush on to the wall: and Alan Old - field: plus good older work by Wendy Paramor, Macquarie Gallery Karim Oom's paintings have an authentic minor lyricism. She is a colorist, and her pictures the abstract wavy filaments that refer to natural effects of light.