Daniel Thomas : Newspaper writings

1,0", \.(etrr.e?' ;:-1,r-ms") 04_ trrvcr.-., "MORNING HERALD" Sydney, N.S.W. Still life on a table Silbert and George's "Singing Sculpture," at the Art Gallery of NeY South Wales, will start at 1 o'clock today and remain visible for five hours. They will do it again at noon tomorrow and, every day till Tuesday. Then they will rest before presenting it at the National Gallery of Vic- toria in Melbourne. It's probably the most important work of contem- porary art to be seen in Australia since 1969 when Christo wrapped the coast of Little Bay, and it's interesting that it was Christo who suggested these two young English- men to Sydney business- man John Kaldor as a possibility for one of his art projects. Mr Kaldor's projects are very deliberate and high- minded attempts to de- provincialise us by bring- ing to Australia the best of the world's unfamiliar avant-garde art. It is exactly the same aim as Dr Power's when he endowed Sydney Univer- sity's Department of Fine Arts, so it is appropriate that Gilbert and George coincide at the art gallery with an exhibition of the latest Power acquisitions. Gilbert and George's "Singing Sculpture" is themselves, on a tabletop, moving to a recording of the song "Underneath the Arches," and making some play with a stick and a glove. They have done it many times since 1969. for long- er or shorter spans than the five hours a day for six days that Sydney will get. By all reports it is com- pletely hypnotic and riv- eting, as also was their si- lent, stylised prowling around the musicians at a pop conc..rt in Hyde Park, London. in 1968. If these are the only two pieces of which I've had first-hand reports, and if I've not yet seen any of their "performances" my- self, it scarcely matters., for I've met them and they are living sculptures" all the time, not only when a formal performance is on in an art gallery. That is, they distance themselves from real life by the simple means of wearing outmoded, highly respectable clothes. three- piece suits, and short hair- cuts. B y DANIEL THOMAS For the same reason their manners are perfect and charming, they are always as nice as anyone could wish (1 saw them getting on famously with Leslie Walford, who is similarly charming and nice). And as an extension of such unfamiliar good man- ners their bodily move- ments are always ex- tremely decorous and carefully considered: hands are carefully folded, legs carefully placed. I don't really know whether the clothes are Edwardian (which is I think the style of their nicely bound gift book "Side by Side," containing photographs of them in, first, idyllic English land- scapes, then their own scratchy drawings, then London settings, or the 1920s, which is the date of their song). I doubt if it matters, as long as it's obviously dif- ferent from whaz is nor- mal, and obviously belong- ing to the past. All of the past is respectable. In any case the clothes seem to he those of a timeless lower middle-class clerk, not easily -dated upper class fashion. This is probably important. They call themselves "Art for All." They are obviously democratic, not only suggesting that any- body at all could convert their lives into art but also hoping themselves to ap- peal, on a superficial level, to the widest possible au- dience by their old- fashioned niceness, as did the early Beatles. Another puzzle about their clothes is that the trousers are too short, but an offered explanation is the implied boyishness, and although Gilbert and George are 29 and 30 they would like to he as li- keable as innocent, fast- growing schoolboys. Nevertheless their nos- talgia, their approval of old-fashioned simplicities like country lanes and blossom and hometown London and Art and Beauty isn't all superficial. They studied sculpture at St Martin's School of Art in the Anthony Caro period. When you look at them, on a pedestal, also look at the Caro sculpture. (Decide which you'd rather take home. Gilbert and George. of course). Perhaps they felt Caro was too rarefied and abstract: certainly they must have felt they had to do something as different as possible from Caro or they'd get nowhere. Plain, mysterious real- ism was the answer. Sober realism is not very characteristic of English art, which has produced more fantasy and eccent- ricity than simplicity. Although Gilbert and George's art -behaviour might seem traditionally English and eccentric, the content of their art is real- ly a celebration of the simple reality of bodies, faces, houses, landscapes. George indeed is English. but Gilbert is originally Austrian-Italian. I have just returned from a family holiday in Italy where, af'.er 20 years, I was once again howled over by the marvellous, plain simplicity and grace of Raphael, of Fra Angel- ico. Maybe Gilbert contrib- uted the Italian sense of plain bodily reality. When I suggested to him that their art was in the great tradition of Raphael he expressed much polite pleasure. Well, they are always polite and pleased, but only two days away from Rome I in fact feel rather strongly that I am right. * * * Four artists from the Max Hutchinson Gallery, New York, now at Gal- lery A, are the Australian - born sculptor Clement Meadmore and American painters Milton Resnick, Charles Schucker and John Mandel. The Meadmore pieces, very fine indeed, are middle-sized of a kind we already know. Schucker pours !avec- scale stains, and in one in- stance, cuts away the left- over canvas; well it's an idea, if not especially suc- cessful. Mandel is admired by John Canaday, "The New York Times' " conserva- tive art critic, who likes neatness: the paintings place a nude figure in a lonely limbo, a con- ventionally pretentious image of "the human condition." It is Milton Resnick who is really interesting. An early abstract ex- pressionist who fell from sight in the 1960s, he kept on painting, and painting very well. The four canvases at Gallery A have the richly encrusted, re -worked look of 1940s Pollock, the look of "Eyes in the Heat," and they are good. They have the look of genuinely exploratory painting, each mark, each colour -decision a small crisis: nothing pre -planned to a formula yet, in the result. triumphantly re- solved. * * * Danila Vassilieff, at the Macquarie Galleries, was a liberated spirit who ar- rived in Australia in the 1930s, died in 1958, and greatly influenced the Melbourne expressionists Nolan, Boyd and Tucker, at their beginnings. His spontaneity and speed were then incredible. They allowed him to cap- ture, with tender sensi- tivity, the faces of children and heads of lovers, in a series of gouaches which can be compared with Emil Nolde's watercolours. The oil paintings, being done in a less rapid me- dium, show less fleeting things than facial ex- pressions: landscapes, or dignified workers in state- ly f-ontality. Prices $325 to We, which seems cheap for such excellent and warm- hearted work. NEW EXHIBITIONS Art Gallery of New South Wales: Gilbert and George, every afternoon till Tuesday. Woollahra: Paintings by Leonas Urbonas. Macquarie: Paintings by Danila Vassilieff and Mal- colm Thain. Bonython: Paintings and drawings by Colin Lancely: Ceramic sculptures by Ken Leveson; drawings and prints by Ruth Ember; sculpture by Marcus Skipper. John Keogh: Paintings by Aart van Ewijk. Newcastle City Art Gallery: Modern prints, from the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Dents Croneen: Rugs of the Caucasus (Friday). %T1