Daniel Thomas : Newspaper writings

Mixed shows and objects A MIXED show of a gallery's artists is often the chance to try out a change of direction, or to introduce new talent. Gunter Christmann's "Bright Scape" at 38 Har- grave Street is no longer an evenly speckled colour field. From an indigo bor- der at ihe upper edge of the canvas a yellow field descends in a stain to a dark edge, irregular, cur- ved, like a loose Gauguin or a Blamire Young; des- cending again is another irregular -edged magenta stain. For some months Christmann has been talk- ing about upside-down landscapes; he has men- tioned postcard reproduc- tions of Wakelin or Sid Long paintings which, in- verted, have been the starting point for painting. I take it to he a worry about the way the top of a painting, if it's of good size, always seems to re- cede, to become distance simply because it is fur- ther from the spectator than is the bp M. One wilt )...191F . an abstract pain la_tisput recessive blues at the bot- tom and advancing reds at the top, to compensate for the natural recession of the top, and Christmann has done this in "Slab of Space," another painting at Hargrave Street. Another solution is to make the colour planes, and the literal pigment edges, overlap from above, like upside-down ranks of mountain ranges, so that the bottom of the picture is pushed back, and this has happened in "Bright Scape. It is an interesting way of setting up a gentle push and pull of space. I'm not so sure about the areas or ; the colours in this particu- lar painting, obviously a key work in Christmann's development. Also at 38 Hargrave Street, two splendid Jack- son Pollocks bl Dick Wat- kins, more resolved than laSt year's bumpy can- vases; sonic pretty trickled rows of paint by Joseph, Szabo; and Alan Oldfield's, neat quattrocento realism, illustrating life in summer resorts. The mixed show of sculpture at Watters Gal- lery and at the Sculpture Garden contains a start- lingly unfamiliar piece by' Tony Coking. No wayward plant forms, no serialisation, in- stead social satire on a dream of respectability; a house, just the timber framework, painted in orange undercoat, standing on concrete blocks, behind a pair of cement fluted columns with patriotic flags on top, a vaguely classical cement birdbath, a pair of Italianate trees in, tubs. Behind a pretentious facade is jerry-building. A new name is Roberti Jenyn, a young man from' Ballarat, who makes naive painted wooden figures on tabletops, a boxing match, a cycle race. Like Coleing, more scenes from provin- cial Australian life. Ti Parks, listed on the exhibition announcement, does not appear, Noel Hutchison, Robert Brown and John Armstrong are much as usual, and Arm- strong's pieces are if any- thing funnier. "Feet" is 49 wooden shoe-lasts, each suspended from a timber frame, and placed left- ' right, left-right, to mark a journey of 49 steps, with three right-angle turns, up- stairs in the Watters Gal- lery. "Hanging taps" are pairs of taps at the bottom of planks suspended verti- cally from a high gallows; in the grass a few inches below them is a plug, but no water will emerge through the taps from the planks unless -- well, unless the timber came from a maple syruf tree. The incongruities under- mine conventional ex- pectations and liberate fantasy in the spectator. Aleksander Danko, one of Australia's very best young artists, re -exhibits his ceramic piece "An ele- horn phant or a sailing boat," another combination of in- congruities. It is signed AD72 - the AD72 also reads as a date from Mediterranean antiquity, for the piece is made of archeologists earthenware and it is decorated with Minoan wave patterns. Danko's other piece is a reversion to his earlier style of timber and canvas construction, resembling police harriers, revolution- ary banners, paving slabs, orders and instructions, maybe a guillotine. It is I e t t e r ed "Imagination seizes Power," in French, and it is an ironic' acknowledgment that revo- lution is a very old tradi- tion. It quotes a long text from the time of the 1968 Paris riots, disapproving of art as a capitalist com- modity, but somehow it implies that, for the French, revolution itself is chic because, after all, they had the best revo- lution at the best time, the eighteenth century. * * * An exhibition of Anti- quities for the small col- lector, briefly at the Bon- ython Gallery, is still in Sydney with its organlier, Maureen Fry (telephone 32 5363). You don't have to be small before you are allowed to buy: it is the objects and the prices which are (relatively) small. As Max Harris says, tendentiously, "an ancient potcost fyoroumoniliaavalbferkactmionighotf the price required for a work by .a moderately talented local practitioner of the arts." !hat means a nice red - figure pot from a Greek colony in southern Italy, fourth century BC, is $450 or $550, a small bowl from Baalbek, nearly 4,000 years old, is $55. There are terra cotta fig- ures, Coptic textiles, Dan- ish flints, pre-Columbian clay sculptures, Egyptian things, Roman glass. The collection was put together by the Antiquities a n d Ethnographical gavra_be "MORNING HERALD" Sydney, N.S.W. , Society of Australia to strengthen our sense of the past, by means of objects of human civilisation, "to touch, regard and live with." Little of this sort has ever been offered in Syd- ney before, and I highly recommend it to those who like small, ancient bric-a-brac. Stephen %Mitzi shows contemporary glass ob- jects. One or two are like the ancient Roman bottles, but most are marbelised and floppy and of no prac- tical use. They arc, in fact, hilarious as Disneyland. One piece encloses a fur toadstool. Another is bound in chains. The Potters '3allery has a show of new members' work, and among the se- date brown howls and mugs are a few twisted slabs of clay, bound in chains, and labelled "Bondage." Crafts pre entirely sen- suous, scarcely intellectual. I supposdit's not surpris- ing That ;'we arc now offered the appalling ex- trema\ a sado-masochistic pot. * * * G r a c e Cossington Smith's retrospective exhi- bition, which I am organi- sing for the Australian State galleries, is now in the final stages of selec- tion. If there are any paintings which I have not seen over the past two years, could their owners let me know? A message to the Art Gallery of New South Wales today will reach me before a week- end's fieldwork in Moss Vale, Wagga and Bathurst. Japanese woodcuts of the eighteenth and nine- teenth centuries are at the Macquarie Galleries, a collect:on put together by A. 1. and G. M. Halls, who held a similar show there last year. There are a number by Hiroshige and other well- known names but the majority are late nine- teenth-century.