Daniel Thomas : Newspaper writings

I. root. "TELEGRAPH" Sydney, N.S.W. AN ARTIST SPEAKS ANTHONY CARO'S lecture ten days ago was probably the most impressive performance an artist has given in Sydney. "Performance," or course, Is a dirty word for Trim, It means practised, habit -formed activity, from which feeling and thought have been drained. Buckminster Fuller, it's true, has lectured in Syd- ney several times, and he must certainly be counted a very great man. Yet his marathon lectures are too literally stunning; you end up inert rather than stimu- lated. Caro's talk must have been something like Cro- plus's. He jus t tstood up and let people know what a real artist is like, What kind of thoughts enter his head, what kind of deci- sions he has to make. Most of what he ,eld was reasonably familia.' the existing writings on Caro. It was the Arts Council exhibita...!, introduction by Michael Pried which had already told us that his work has a lot to do with physical, bodily identifica- tion, with states like stand- ing, Jumping, stretching lying. He didn't give a perfor- mance of this kind. He lust showed slides of his can sculptures, and tal.:od about them. He even said that look- ing at the slides this way he had discovered things about his own work that he didn't know before (things to avoid in the future). So it was by no means a practised lecture. And what he said was utterly simple. Apparently the archi- tect Walter Graphic once gave a lecture in Sydney that was stunning in its simplicity and profundity, and which gave its audi- ence a wonderful insight into the direct plainness of creativity in great men. (Incidentally, before the Michael Fried piece tame out, I had recognised that this was going on in the sculpture of Rai Robert- son -Swann, a Sydney pupil of Caro. But Swann also has an- other more thrustful, less exploratory manner, more like tracking a line of sight across obstacles, or the flow of water, or any wave of continuous energy. And this may be Swann's more personal direction.) What Cam said as an Implied consequence of this was one of his most valu- able comments. His deci- sions about how to relate one piece to the next in a sculpture -in-progress, are not, he said, made visually, He didn't Judge by how it looked; he had liked working in a garage studio that was too small to stand back and see the sculpture in, The implication was that - he had to let it grow, to feel it, by identification with his own body. I don't see why there can't be an aesthetics of this kind of art - maldng though he used "aesthetic' as a bad word, equivalent to "visual." SHARP Martin Sharp's new shrunken, color-photograph versions of last year's pic- tures are framed in looking -glass, and the walls of the gallery are minted in Magritte clouds,- which play against the mirror - frames, The pictures are some- times better as color photographs; the collage elements fuse; the scruffy paint surfaces get cleared up. The pictures themselves are old friends; they are being shown in a building which has friendly associa- tions. They are usually of people that Stuirp sees as old friends, like Van Gogh, Mickey Mouse, Ginger Megp.. Picasso; and they were .,ften originally made for real live friends, like his mother, or Peter Pow - ditch or Ohica Lowe. So I think that the open- ing party must have been intended as the ultimate work of art: the real bye friends - old, young, new, familiar, and all very pretty - were gathered to meet the other friends that were in the pictures. Looking -glass - world Is quite an enchanted place, and Martin Sharp's has no crankiness or monsters in it. DEMI-MONDES Farmer's. An exhibition from the Museum of Mod- ern Art, New York, of great photographs by the by dani el themes great photographer Bras - sal. Mostly of 1933, a lea from the 'forties and liftiee they are all of pert°, mere working in Paris, bu'. not of eclairs. His performers operate on die street, the cafe, the drawing -room. They are mostly prosti- tutes and artists. Is he Baying that Picasso, like t ryi anyng street please?-walker, is only to aUcquarle. More prosti- tutes, poets and actors. But this time it's 18th cen- tury Tokyo, not 29th cen- tury Paris. The demi-monde. or "fleeting work'," of Japan- ese color -woodcuts is so distanced by time and :nil - titre that we must try hard if we are to see what Ls there. It is not quaintly pretty, it is an elegantly sleazy underworld. HOLDSWORTH Tins Storrier's exhibition at Holdsworth is called Oasis, but I wouldn't like to end up in this land- scape. It still looks like the desert to me, and a mirage at that, It's a surreal world of unnatural color, the ructi- meritary two-color scheme, in orange and blue, of poor color -printing. And it's a world of un- natural weight and space: everything seems dry, pulpy and boneless. if you walked on it you would sink through, of it would powder to dust. And I think the forms must be intended as erotic; if so It is pornographic eroticism, that Is an end- lessly repetitive, never satisfying, arid eroticism. IT WASN'T Noel Gray who won the sculpture prize in the Royal Emitter Show art competitions. It was Robert Brown, and his construction was pretty good.