Daniel Thomas : Newspaper writings

From 30 "MORNING HERALD" Sydney, N.S.W. 1973 Japanese touch the surface By DANIEL THOMAS "The Art of Surface," a survey of contem- porary Japanese art, on view at the Art Gallery of New South Wales tomorrow, is an exhibition of extraordinary interest. Perhaps the exhibition is good because it was tailor- ed especially for Sydney, by one individual, instead of being impersonally packaged by an official committee for a lengthy tour. It was chosen by Father Joseph Love, S. J.. an American scholar, critic and artist who lives and teaches in Tokyo. There he has for some time been in contact with Australian visitors, including Art Gal- lery Society people, and it is the Art Gallery Society of New South Wales which has paid for the event. The last contemporary Japanese show in Austra- lia toured in 1958-59 and included a bit of every- thing: post French -style oil paintings, traditional Japanese scrolls, abstract -ex- pressionism, prints, pots, metalwork, lacquer, bam- boo, textiles and dolls: Father Love's choice is hracingly undemocratic. Presumably he thinks these are some of the best contemporary Javanese artists. hut he also focuses on a special sensibility to- wards surface, a sensibility which he finds peculiarly Japanese. "Many works of Japan- ese art," he says, "have to do with the skin of things, whether that be apples, human beings or the tan- gible surface of objects: not merely in the surfaces of objects depicted but in the real physical surface of the artwork itself. "This approach brings a physical proximity to the viewer, a 'skinship' as the Japanese put it, which af- fords a tactile knowledge and intimacy that is pecu- liar to the cognitive pro- cess as experienced in Japan." It is indeed pecitliar. It is a whole unfamiliar world for an Australian visitor 10 enter, and hence refreshing and stimulating. -Not that the sense of touch is invited at all. Nor is there any shock stimu- lus, as so often in western art, front colour. Colour creates space, and even though all good Western painting acknowledges the surface plane even when most illusionistic, ncknowl- edement is not the same as wholly maintairing the sense of surface, and nc- centuating its physical oh- jecthood. The colour in this exhibition is in fact mostly quiet, or grey. Art that maintains the surface is usually, in West- ern art, purely decorative, an adornment to walls or to furniture panels, and much Japanese art too is purely decorative. But in this exhibition only Domoto preserves something of this Japanese decorativeness. Onosato, who has the same all-over textile -pattern look, is in fact a symbolist, using cir- cles and ying-yangs as em- idems of universal whole- ness. More central to the idea of surface is the tactile identification between spectator's skin and art object, provided by texture - gouged, roughened, stroked with paint, and so on. This too is not an un- known device in the West, though not very common until recently. Saito's gouged hoard, Kano's pierced metal sheets, Tanaka's superb enormous black textured field, have this kind of familiarity. and so to some extent does the grand, brooding painted stoniness of the senior artist in the show, Yamaguchi. But a uniquely Japanese sensibility is the idea of spectator identification with the object by means of his shadow, or his reflection, or simply by knowledge of silhouette as a projection on to the surface. The extreme glossiness of finish in some works has this result. Others ac- tually depict faint, ghostly human shadows, like Ara- kawa, or fragments of bodies, like Usami's mazey overlaps and repetitions. It can he suggested that Japan's climate, its per- manent mistiness and haze, lie behind this sensi- bility for shadows and dis- embodied. ambiguous bodies, seemingly project- ed on to clouds. Another kind of surface .in is the photograph, whose flattening of nature is familiar enough in the West. Here one of the art- ists presents enormous photographs of fields of vegetables heated tinder polythene as an extreme. Milanese extension of the effect. NEW EXHIBITIONS Art Gallery of New South Wales: "The Art of Surface" (Contemporary Japanese art); Screenprints by Andy Warhol. (Tomorrow). MacDonald Gallery, Wentworth Building, Univer- sity of Sydney Union: Contemporary Nuigirti art. John Clark room, University of NSW Union. Photographs by Ian Ritchie and Bill Mori. Arts Council: The Print Circle. !Macquarie: The Sydney Printmakers; Pastels by Kevin Connor. Holdaworth: Sculptures by Peter Hatsatouris. Divots: Paintings by Ron Pardon and Peter de Lorenzo. Farmers: ABC Young World art awards. Newcastle City Art Gallery: Paintings and sculp- tures by Frank and Margel Hinder. Von Bertouch, Newcastle: House show. Soho (new address 23 Military Road, Watsoni Bay): Paintings by John Winch (Sunday). John Keogh: Paintings by Ilsa Tobin (Monday). Commonwealth Savings Bank, Martin Place: Robin Hood art competition (Monday). All Nations Club: 25 Years of Immigrant Paint- ers (Monday). David Jones: Paintings by Harold Hallam (Tuesday). Besides surface skin, another peculiarly Japan- ese sensibility is an avoi- dance of precision, a preference for ambiguity. uncertainty; even a fond- ness for mistakes. Ara- kawa, for example. paints mistakes into his shadowy images, Takamatsu drapes a cloth on the floor which it is impossible to pull into a strict rectangle. The stimulus is endless, and subtle. This is a splen- didly disorienting exhi- bition which no one should miss. Some works are avail- able for sale, $1,000 to $16,000. The Art Gallery Society can put you in contact with the sellers. * * * Andy Warhol. An exhi- bition of 18 large screenprints, opening at the Art Gallery of New South Wales tomorrow, will give us our first good look in six years at the work of this leader of American pop art. * * * Frank and Margel Hinder, pioneer Sydney abstractionists, share a major retrospective, now on view at the Newcastle City Art Gallery. The exhibition is not tourina, so a trip to Newcastle is strongly recommended. * * * "Wok Bilong Nulginl Tude" means contempo- rary New Guinea art. This exhibition. finishing a tour of several universities, is at the Wentworth Build- ing. Sydney University. Some village work con- tinues and modifies exist- ing ethnic traditions, but most exhibits come from two art workshops, one at Goroka Teachers' College, one attached to the University of Papua New Guinea. The sculptures and re- liefs in welded and beaten metals are apparently the furthest from native tradi- tions and arc certainly of no more interest than that of any Australian art student. Ceramics are more inventive. Prints look as if the'; could develop similarly lo Eskimo work. And drawings, by Kauage and Akis, are already of high aesthetic quality and technical sensitivity. * * * Prints, Original prints, mostly by women, are at the Macquarie Galleries in the annual exhibition of the long-established Syd- ney Printmakers. A new group. the Print Circle, all women, and many of them also in the Sydney Print- makers, are showing fur- ther original prints at the Arts Council Gallery. It's nearly all gentle and domestic in either subject matter or decorative pur- pose, though these are not necessarily feminine quali- ties. Joyce ,sllen, Sue Buckley and David Rose are among the more indi- vidual. Mercifully unpre- tentious, and with the technical discipline that prints always impose, these lithographs, wood- cuts and etchings are bet- ter art than similarly low- priced paintings. $25 to $70. Kevin Connors ex- pressionist pastels of tor- mented figures in city landscapes are also at the Macquarie Galleries. * * * Divot. Galleries, at Hal - main, shows colour paint- ings Iv two National Art School students, both pretty accomplished. Stripes by Ron Pardon, drips by Peter de Lorenzo. Excellent value for such good-sized work at $75 to $500. Also silver and plastic jewelle*ry by * * Neil Angwin. Holdsworth Galleries in- troduces two young artists. Christopher Wallis's 27 paintings are all of clouds and empty, grey, twilight landscapes. borderad with a differently graded sky. Very cheap, $160 to $450, they are present-day ver- sions, jazzed up with a hint of surrealism, of the undemanding production- 'irniture-paintinas made the end of tin: 19th century. Peter liatsatouris's bronzes are not jazzed up at all, and I suppose their dowdy 1910s modesnism and their homely subjects of family contact are honestly provincial and thus preferable to Wallis's empty appeal - 1973 organ festival A FULL roster of mornine organ workshops lunchtime recitals and afternoon and evening concerts will make up the 1973 Sydney Organ Festi- val for nine days front Saturday. Among organists taking part will he Australian composer Malcolm Wil- liamson playing his own works in Sydney Univer- sity Great Hall on Tues- day, Arno Schoenstedt from Austria, John O'Donnell, Jeanne de Voss, David Rumsey and Christa Rumsey: other prowls to appear include the Don Burrows Quartet and Renaissance Players. Unusual music to he heard includes- "Glosso- lalia" for baritone, organ, prepared tape and 15 per- cussion instruments be Felciano, and various works by Reger, Heiller and Messinen. Full details are set out it a pamphlet obtainable from the organisers. Inquiries 428 1463 or 7911 5650. -Fred Blanks, 1 4