Daniel Thomas : Newspaper writings

'raw A444 "TELEGRAPH" Sydney, N.S.W. 28 m.-/-)72 Violence part of Australian dream Is Australia one of the world's most violent countries? It's quite a distinction, though one, to have provided citizens who will sma sh a Michelangelo sculpture in Rome, long ago, to burn a mosque in Jerusalem. I've come across a lot of Aus- tralian vicilehce this week. One of the, gloomiest books I've ever read is The Great Australian Dream," written by the Melbourne architect Robin Boyd who died last year and whose book has just now been published. It hasn't much to say about architecture. It's mostly dark fan - tastes about the casual, mindless destructiveness that Boyd sees as natural to Australia. The book's most horrifying piece is about an Aboriginal -shoot turned on for a tmtel agent from America. Nearly as nasty is one which counter -points a colonial explorer's expedition, full of easy deaths, of Aboriginals, animals and explorers, with a contemporary real estate pro- ject on the same bit of land. The contemporary Ploneerland is equally destructive and equally unplanned. Boyd was a very sharp observer of the look oi Australia, Its houses in particular. Another sharp observer Ls the playwright Alexander Buzo, only he is more a listener than ob- server: it's our weird turns of phrase, and thought patterns, which he records so accurately In his play "Rooted." Buzo, as well as Boyd, also finds that we unthinkingly destroy people; even while going through the rituals of mateship to the bitter end. He finds that we worship semi - gangster businessmen (the unseen Simmo"). And he finds that we are immature: all the characters in Rooted are clinging to their school - day roles; Simmo had been the playground bully. Favorite relaxation for Simmo and his mates is a fast couple of hun- dred miles drive out of Sydney to shoot some animals in the country, any old animaL:. Fashionable It becomes disturbing to remem- ber that the best Aus.rallan film, "Wake in Fright." cents szl upon a violent kangaroo-shoot. It becomes disturbing to notice that this month's most fashionable piece of violence, the film "Clock- work Orange," begins In a milk bar in London Milk bars are another of Au:- trailia's gifts to the world, or rather to England, for no other countries really took them up. I don't know if Australian gangs gather in milk bars before and after a good night's violence, like the English gang in "Clockwork Orange," but I think the English film shfCres a nice insight with Buzo's Australian play: violence is for children, for people still immature enough to en- joy milk. In the few weeks since the Art Gallery of New South Wales has been re -opened to the public I have been amazed by placid Aus- tralian parents standing by while children touch, deface and begin to destroy the works of art, and the building. Was it as bad a couple of years ago? It disturbs curators dreadfully, and it drives foreign visitors to hys- teria: they've seen nothing like it irathe Louvre, or the Metropolitan, New York or the National Gallery, Landon art by daniel thomas) What's more, this week's most ex- citing new exhibition in Sydney has its moments of violence, At Inhibodrms, Mike Parr and Peter Kennedy have an exhibition of Idea Demonstrations. Kennedy's are mostly concerned with sound. and the sound can be- come painful in its "sculptured" rhythm ant: volume. /One of the film -loops accompanying the sound shows roughly shaved areas of body hair. Parr's are more a matter of boa - sculpture. Two short films are "Hold your Breath as Long as Possible" and "Light a Candle." "Hold your finger in the flame as Long as Possible" and the recorded sound has picked up involuntary grunts and screams that Parr un- knowingly made before fainting away from the camera. ART HISTORY Fortunately even post -object art, idea art, conceptual art, whatever you call it, is trapped willinglyenough, in art history. It isn't en- tirely concerned with real life, and the inevitable violence of real life. Mike Parr also shows a set of slides from his annual holiday, It was on Fraser Island, Queensland, a landscape that Sidney Nolan fell in love with twenty-five years ago, and Parr can't help responding to its limpid waters and endless sands in much the same way' as Nolan. Some non -visual instruction pieces by Parr have art -historical prece- dent in the work of Yoko Ono. This important and expensive ex - Whitton received financial assistance iron the Australian Council for the Arts Salvatore Zofrea (Macquarie Gal- leries) is a weirdly old-fashioned young painter. Thick paint, division - a grisly or, not 1st, impressionist brushwork, a feel- ing for heavy, pumpkin -shaped people, and frank borrowings from similarly inclined Old Masters like Courbet, Delacroix and Caravaggio. One admires the strength of his convictions. Rollin Schilcht illoldsworth Gal- leries) Is equally involved In the his- tory of painting, only he makes acknowledgments to more recent artists, chiefly Matisse, but also to Picasso and Dick Watkins. Schllcht has progressed to this sumptuous colorism from a more constructivist kind of painting (call it Art Deco revival) and still keeps something of his earlier structure. A few of the new paintings, the landscapes rather than the abstracts, have moved into flat art nouveau linearism, and these seem a better vehicle for color. Stephen Earle Matters Gallery) Is much as usual, which is very good. Geometric grids hold down beautiful fields of dappled or graded color. At Bonython Galleries, Brace Petty's Economics Machine, con- structed with the help of Robert Brown, marvellously translates a cartoon drawing into three dimen- sions. Ann Newmarch, a young Adelaide artist, shows watercolor drawings of intensely and strictly felt walls, doors, windows and rooms inhabited by nudes. The texture Is agreeably matt and dry. Geoff de Green sends handsome new paintings to Bonython from Canada where he now teaches, They are horizontal dark red bars, shift- ing on lighter grounds. Their shape forces them to be read as land- scapes , and their colors as sunsets, and why not. At lloirkiworth there is a won- derfully enjoyable show of drawings by 39 of Australia's best draughts- men: Brack, Dobell, Drysdale, Klip- pel, Godfrey Miller, Lloyd Rees, Brett Whiteley among them. At Villiers, an equally enjoyable mixed show of European and Aus- tralian work. Glowing painti by Henri Hayden: a brilliantly ng joyful lithograph by Miro to cheer one at a time of violence.