Daniel Thomas : Newspaper writings

From "41.77- ' "MORNING HERALD" Sydney, N.S.W. L L Andy Warhol, creator of superstars ' Andy Warhol is clearly one. of the key figures in contemporary art, and such ever since American has been recognised as pop art was launched in 1962. His fame spread fast from New York to the world, and to Australia. Once _ when cleraent Greenberg. the NeW York ' critic and theorist of colour painting, was lecturing in Brisbane on picture .planes, surfaces. edges and so on, his young audience became re- bellious. interrupted him and said: "How can you talk about this sort of thing when Andy is dying." Andy in fact lived, but it was the.day Warhol was shot by one of his freaky friends, Valerie Solanis from SCUM, the women's Society for Cutting Up Men. He is famous, his im- portance is acknowledged, but the nature of his art is not really understood. It is not looked at as often as it shraild be. for the Warhol sto-ies are too interesting a r"straction. Richt now there is an exhibition of 18 Warhol screenprints at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, and the first sur- prising thing is their ex- cellence in Greenbergian terms: their excellent dis- position of flattened forms within a rectangle. their space -creating colour, their sensitivity and variation or touch in the inking of the paper through the silk- screen. His "paintings" too are screen-prints. on canvas. so this small exhi- bition is central to his art, not marginal. aspritits so often are. But unlike Greenbergian colour paintings, Warhol's are never abstract, alWaT1 realistic. - ' 'In thi -Sydney exhi- bition thete-are.two of his early notorious Campbell Soup cans, there are four heads of Marilyn Monroe, six of Chairman Mao, one of a cow, one electric chair and four flower prints. There is always too much to say about War- hol, but it is essential to remember that his images are all chosen ready made, usually from mass -circula- tion newspaper photo- graphs or from muss -pro- duced packaging design. Pictorially, therefore, they have the advantage of already being flat before he makes use of them. Emotionally the images at once commonplace in that they are familiar to everybody, and at the same time glamorous for how else would they have achieved their fame, and fame itself is glamorous. Another ambiguity is their "realism." They are pictures made from other pictures hut this is a way of saying that that other picture -the photograph or the trademark is more real to far more people than is the flesh - and -blood Marilyn, or even a flesh-and -blood cow. Big city children, which means most chil- dren. will be perfectly familiar with a cow in a milk advertisement, hut may never have seen a real cow. Repetition is another key concept in Warhol's art. By repeating an image. either many times on one canvas, or else many times on separate sheets of aper. he is showing us that inhuman Interesting. sameness does not really Percy F. S. Spence is on exist. It comes out differ- record as an illustrator, a ent every time. The friend of Tom Roberts in colours :Matlt be different, Sydney in the nineties, but the reaberotenthof the silk. his work has been virtually screenenelight be smudged. unknown. Tn recent years This is, 1, tbittk, the one or two fantasy water - central 110,11t. tkeWarhol's colours have appeared In art, and ttjs generous the salerooms, and now and comPasitionite one. Chine Galleries exhibits a He accepts, maybe pas- sively, everything in the world that exists, or thati real, however freaky in real life (like his would -he murderess), however arti- ficial and maohine-made in art (like photograph, of public figures). It is an attitude similar to that of the great film- maker Jean Renoir who said "Everyone is in- dispensable." Then Warhol, actively, bestows individuality on the mass image by making it different from its repeti- tions. He gives uniqueness to something that was pre- viously commonplace. As be says, he would like everyone to be world- famous, even if only for 15 minutes. * * * Intents Tillers held a one-hour exhibition of one work late last Thursday night. His piece teappears t in Melbourne next Wednesday at the Nation- al Gallery of Victoria in a very important exhibition "Object and Idea," which will suggest a current di- rection in Australian art. The piece was a series of boxes to go in boxes, a series of photographic en- largements from the same subject, a series of dark- ening versions of the same painting. And so on. A newspaper notice of the piece is a required nart of the system, so here it is. Some day I must tell Til- lers ahotit Marcel Duch- aertri's last work. the Syd- ney Waterhag. I made it. not Duchamn. * * * Oddities are always dozen of them. Datable to the late twenties, and done in London, they are signed Seaton Spence,_ so perhaps the artist felt he was now a different person from young Percy. Though the subjects have the look of storybook illustrations, these fairy- land gods and goddesses are too considered as com- positions, and too meticu- lously finished as objects not to have been made as paintings in their own right. (This by the way will he the last exhibition at Clune Galleries' Mac- quarie Street premises. Future operations will not make use of a gallery). Alexander Muir is another oddity, a present- day one. Now nearly 50, he bus returned front 20 years buried in horticul- ture to the painting he had originally embarked upon after his war service. The exhibition at Villiers Gal- lery acknowledges what must have been standard heroes of modern art in the late 1940s. Kandinsky and Klee, and Miro and Mondrian. In Sydney, then as now. Frand Hinder works very, well in the same urea of I mataphS-- geometry, and in any case it is often fruitful to stay with the art language current in your youth. Althouth the first thing one notices about Muir's work is its old-fashioned modernism, the second things are its integrity, its pleasant feel- ing for the organic growth of geometric forms and for the wonder of light (a life-force no doubt), and third, its modest ex- cellence. Is it as good as Helion? No, hot probably as good as Valmier. and if you have never heard of either, well, they were fashion- able French modernists in the thirties and they are still collected on their own home ground.