Daniel Thomas : Newspaper writings

By DANIEL THOMAS "Object and Idea" is the name of a new exhi- bition at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, and it is the most significant attempt to define a current direc- tion in Australian art since 1968 when "The Field" presented hard- edge colourtield painting. This time there are only six artists, none of them painters. Although this year's Mildura "Sculptureseape," and the Contemporary Art Society's "Projects Show" revealed much the same direction, things become cleaer in a small exhi- bition in a museum situ- ation, and Melbourne's National Gallery will be more accessible to more people than was Mildura or Ultimo. The six artists are John Armstrong, Tony CoIcing. Aleksander Danko, Nigel Lendon, Ti Parks and Imants Tillers. Some of their sculptures are eph- emeral installations made especially for the tempora- ry exhibition gallery, and will not exist after the show is over. They do not all fully subscribe to the belief that art is less important than life, that art objects as salable commodities are least important than the artist's own experience of the process of making making art: Tillers's boxes within boxes do exist as permanent objects even though they imply process as an infinite extension. Armstrong's suspended tank with underwater taps is an object though very difficult to own or move: Parks's papers slung on a line could survive with ex- cessively careful handling. Yet these clearly arc their own proposals: art and life should not be separate things, everybody can be in some sense an artist, all objects can be experienced as art. Thus even the once highly aesthetic Nigel Len - don, a young veteran of "The Field," makes a piece which is about his own life; a series of hur- dles, the first arc coloured or sleek and shiny, in the middle are actual pipes from his Watters Gallery scaffold piece, and the la* are rough farmyard timber railings, for he now lives on a Gippsland farm. Parks's clothes-line sheet is made of 1,000. small identical drawings of. perhaps, a demon woman, and perhaps the piece is about the torments of domesticity. Coleing's is the most interesting and most casu- al of all, and the most equivocating between satire and affection for bourgeois dreams of mat- erial bliss. He updates des - pied gum -tree paintings by using real gum trees (only Tillers is interested in il- lusions, and he makes even them into a reality), real birds singing, real gar- den flowers, real building materials that arc them- selves fake stonework. expect artists secretly believe that they will always be an elite, but it is nico that they are going through a phase of telling us we cats all be artists too. The exhibition is an im- portant event. See it if you can. Or buy the S2 exhi- bitions book, full of com- ical pictures. Leonard French's new paintings at Rudy Komon are prettier - that is, softer in colour and con- trast-than anything he's shown before, and perhaps better than anything since his tough, "ugly" paintings of the 1950s. He seldom offers large- scale images, as in the "Mon on a Raft" series. and although the content is still a lofty quest for Australian art: A look at trends From "MORNING HERALD" Sydney, N.S.W. .13.SEP.1973 NEW EXHIBITIONS Holdsworth: Paintings by Joe Rose; Collages and reliefs by Isabel Davies. John Keogh: Paintings by Ilsa Tobin. Sculpture Centre: Sculptures by Bradford James Buckley. Macquarie: Watercolours by Enid Cambridge. Dlvola: Chironidae 73; Danish toys (Sunday). Photographers Gallery: Bob Rhodes (New gallery, 30 Eblcy Street, Bondi Junction). Bloomfield: Paintings by Kevin Oxley (tomor- row). Farmers: Australian Watercolour Institute annual exhibition (tomorrow). Hayloft, Bathurst: Ceramics by Peter Dobinsot.. Rudy Komon: Paintings by Leonard French. Bonython: Paintings by Joseph Love and Elwyn Lynn: paintings and sculptures by Rod Dudley. Watters: Portrait paintings by Eric Smith. something -or -other (the titles indicate astronomers and their heroic search for knowledge of the universe), the new works are generally very success- ful as decorative art, that is, all-over patterned, sym- metrical - like Islamic rugs, or Egyptian painting - and acknowledging the flatness of the walls they are intended to adorn. But perhaps he is uneasy about the decora- tive handsomeness and wants more than the lofty titles and subjects to jolt them into the condition of high art: occasionally a form overlays and harshly disrupts the otherwise harmonious pattern. I sup- pose the intentions arc ad- mirable. but the less am- bitious pieces remain the most successful. * * * Rod Dudley, a new name, is a Melbourne art- ist now working in north- ern Italy. He shows both paintings and sculptures at Bonython. The paintings have a deliberate crude- ness of colour and hand- ling as if in imitation of magazine covers and ad- vertisements: their subjects seem to be the fashionable motor -cars, clothes and faces of the recent past, the 1950s. The work is apparently a comment on the absurd- ity of being fashionable, it so soon becomes gro- tesque. The sculptures are more interesting; the fashionable women, grin- ning ready for a press camera, are extremely tall, slender wood -carvings. tightly encased in leather dresses. The leather re- appears as something to smother a series of relief portraits of ranting politi- cians. Thus although the satire on fashion is a worn-out trivial, concern and al- though life-size, chic wood-carvings were done much better by Marisol in New York (whatever has become of Marisol?), the leather, either as violent punishment, or as perverse pleasure in bondage, adds a twist of originality. * * * Joseph Love, also at Bonython, painted his show in Sydney while working on the installation of "The Art of Surface." the contemporary Japanese exhibition he chose for us in Tokyo, where he lives. They are large, shaped canvases whose minimal colour gradations "cor- rect," and twist back to- wards the actual surface, the illusory recession set up by the angled edges of the canvas: in addition the illusions of zooming space that you apprehend from a distance are, in a close view, converted to opaque surface by the subtle but obvious texture of that surface. It is a familiar enough kind of work from American painting of the late sixties. and not I think especially Japanese. * * * Elwyn Lynn, another at Bonython, shows new paintings which are some- , thing of a departure for him. Not so much art about expressive textures and skins, more art about his own life. That is. the collage elements more frankly inventory his journeys, friendships or daily work. Since his work is an art gallery, there are plenty of references to cul- ture -heroes of modern art like Picasso and Duchamn. The new. open Lynn is an attractive art persona..