Daniel Thomas : Newspaper writings

Delights in an intelligent way ALL you want to say about the Yellow House is that it's The Clune Galleries of ten years ago, at 59 Maclefty Street, Pottr Point, has had a couple el exhibi- tions by Martin Sharp and others over the past couple of years It has housed the Ginger Meg School of Arts, a free -wheeling group of artists, film-makers, photographers, musicians. The name Yellow House refers to Van Gogh's yellow house, whose Dolor was no intensified by an artist's vision. What the goings-on at the Yellow House have mostly been about is friendship. Any artist feels that Van Gogh is a friend. Any Australian feels that a childhood comic -strip character, like Ginger Meggs, is a friend who taught everyone a lot. The actual exhibitions of Martin Sharp. George Piney and Livingston Hopkins have been full of old nos- talgic images, and they have all been launched wills parties that were beautifully successful mixtures of artists' parents, uncles, cousins, young friends and helpers of rich and poor, and fashionable and shy. The old flower -power cult of Li:endship seemed less energetically all-inclusive than this careful em- brace of family, old friends and of a shared past that distinguishes Martin Sharp's art. and hence the Yellow House's (for I think he was the guiding spirit. ENERGY The psychedelia of the mid - 'sixties, the fun -palace happenings and environments of further back, could often fall into passive mind- lessness. This Sydney group not only has energy. it has also been intelligent. It's true that the expanded Yellow House that opened this week as a Palace of Delight is exactly what it says. About 20 rooms on three floors of too adjoining houses have been in- stalled with exhibits by about 20 friends. Hours are 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Tues- day to Saturday, and admission is $1. And it's much better than any such fun -palace environment has been in Sydney; a little more Money seems to have been available than usual - some of it from the Australian Council for the Arts - or else environmental artists are getting better at the technology. The intelligent nostalgia -tripping Of, Martin Sharp continues with More Mickey-Mouse-meets-Van- thawings but mostly he is in- Ing us to Magritte. Twelve Magritte lithographs are framed in painted clouds, many of his. most famous inventions are re- created in scultural actuality like the boots with human tees. The room is set up as an old- -- -- by daniel tbomaj art fashioned respectable middle-class home of the sort Magritte so de- fiantly preferred, Perhaps the greatest of Euro- pean surrealists, Magritte did not much care for fashionable affairs. He speculated, in a traditional way, about art's internal problems (illusion and reality), but he also showed how weird and strange the most commonplace middle-class life could be. M gritte often painted a green apple sometimes masking a face. A giant green apple hangs in a tree outside the Yellow House in Macleay Street to tell you that Magritte is a star of the show. I wonder if the Yellow House mob knows that Granny Smith's wonder- ful green apples began their world career on the Paitamatta River? Every time I go through Ryde I send up thanks to Granny Smith, and I would have liked her to meet Magritte, in this exhibition. Besides Martin Sharp's Magritte, the other main presence in the show is Japan, and this is Brett Whiteley's affair. There's a high-pitched sense of imminent culture -shock. China is near. They're coming very soon. So a shrunken Sydney flgtree, a "bonsai" plant, is speculated upon by about 40 of Whiteley's friends. marvellous. So an "Australian fan dance" (it's a body cast of a girl with a whirring motion fan in her crutch) confronts a wall of dragonish Japan- ese waves from Hokusal's woodcuts. And this terrible worry about what to do with our Japassese relation- ships is, again, far from mindless. Yet, like the absent Granny Smith for Magritte, I missed any reference to the Japanese -Australian land- scapes painted by Streeton and Conder at the most nationalist period of Australia's history, or to Celestium, the Peking -style capital, city proposed by Hardy Wilson for Australia instead of Canberra. GOGH, link of friendship. "TELEGRAPH" Sydney, N.S.W. e5 L