Daniel Thomas : Newspaper writings

25 Af7 1971 "TELEGRAPH" Sydney, N.S.W. Art is What you see NEVER be alarmed if you get something from a work of art that is different from what the artist says he put in. It could be that the artist doesn't , really know what he is doing (though he usually does). Or (more common) that he takes a peripheral aspect of his work to be central. In any case, the greatest art does have multiple meanings. It has to be am- biguous. It has to be re -interp- reted for each generation. Rembrandt was as highly regarded in the 18th century as he is to- day, but then they found something different from what the 20th century en- joys in him. So, when Tim Johnson's exhibition, which has now closed at Inhibodress, claims to be about one thing, I could be right if I think it's about something else. I don't mean that the photographs, which made up the bulk of the exhi- bition, are more important than the "Installations" they document. Yet, there is no doubt that most people who ap- preciate the visual, arts come to them as sense - gratifying objects more than as intellect -stimulat- ing ideas. Good art should, of course, contain both as- pects, but plenty of bad art is mistaken for good simply because it stimu- lates an idea or arouses an emotion. Effect It makes too calculated an effect on the spectator, it has become, in short, commercial art. So, object - fanciers, clutching desperately at straws in a world that seems to be taken over by conceptual art, are quite at liberty to admire Tim Johnson's photographs as softly subtle grey objects, in preference to the ideas they illustrate. It would be con extreme attitude, but not wholly misguided, for Johnson's past work has been soft and gentle. Last year there were lights washing walls, lights reflected in perspex folds; the previous year there were pale green and white paintings of grasses and walls. And it's reasonable to assume some connection between his past work and his present. Artists usually develop with some contin- uity, not with radical revo- lution. With regard to Johnson as a maker of gentle, subtle objects, one should also note that some of the photographs of "found in- stallations" in the exhibi- tion were of beams of light, and some were of beams of light he had set up himself, with a torch, and then photographed. However, when I say Johnson might be mis- taken in his intentions, it has nothing to do with the subtlety of photographs or beams of light. "Installation" is sort of specialist jargon word within the art -gallery pro- fession. It means the setting up of an exhibition: the arranging of in the gallery space. It is an activity that re- quires high awareness of the relationships between objects, like sculptures and paintings, and aLso of the Interplay of these objects with the space they are temporarily to inhabit. Tim Johnson doesn't use the word quite this way, He extends it, to mean the knposition of any alien structure on any environ- ment. He says "A property of installation in the literal sense is the disruption of an ordinary environment by adding something to it ... it brings about a con- structive rearrangement of emphasis in the environ- ment." He also says that in his later works the relation- ship between the disrup- tive element and the ground, or context for the element, is more important ART by daniel thomas than the imposed element itself. My main point is that I wouli go further than this, and say that the only really interesting thing la the ground, not the im- posed element. To place a mark on a building, or on a window, or on a girl's face, or to place boards on a patch of grass - and this is what, most of the exhibited photographs were - serves very well to emphasise the reality of the stone, or the glass, or the flesh, or the herbage. The imposed, or "in- stalled" element is pretty uninteresting in its own right. The relationship be- tween alien mark or ob- ject, and the ground on which it is imposed. Isn't too interesting either. Reclaims What is inte,esting is the way it reclaims the background and heightens one's awareness of it. And since one of the main purposes of art is constantly to battle against the deadening of experi- ence that comes from habit, Tim Johnson's "In- stallations" are valuable for the way they force on us the reality of the everyday world. For a while, after visit- ing an exhibition like his, we should all be able to make our own art by simply casting a glance, of intense awareness, on to anything that happens to be nearby, and seeing it as if one had suddenly been cured of blindness.