Page 47 - Studio International - February 1971

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of new energy and communications are sucked
into.
Australian art is not, after all, pungent, nor
is the best of it quaint. If one epithet had to be
found it would be, necessarily and neutrally,
provincial. Like all provincial cultures it
incorporates values that are drawn and applied
uncertainly from metropolitan centres, and
independent—sometimes conflicting—values
that are generated locally. A very deep cause of
division in the visual arts today lies between
those Australians who are convinced that the
nature and spirit of the place should mould
artistic production and critical attitudes, and
those who think that the worthwhile action is all
elsewhere, in the metropolitan centres or in the
ideal no-place of the international journals and
magazines.
Neither side commands a knock-down
argument, and it may be too soon for the
internationalists to crow that they have the best
of it de facto, if not by right. Metropolitan
visitors still notice the piquant local product, as
tourists have always done, and tend to overlook
or to patronize the furious young men who have
worked most of their professional lives in
London or New York, and are sure that they
have come home again to set Australian art on its
feet in the world.
Australian art cannot, in the nature of things,
be a metropolitan art until Australian cities
become international cultural centres with
metropolitan powers of tastemaking ; and that
may still be a decade or more away. Artists with
an over-simple theory of excellence as intrinsic
are disposed to try too hard, and to blame
themselves too much, for a state of affairs that
is not wholly in their power to change.
In recent times there have been three, or
perhaps four distinct waves of assault upon the
problem of producing major art against the
odds. There were first the heavies : Dobell and
Drysdale, who are taken by most Australians to
be 'old masters', and are certainly the foundation
of the local art-investment market. And then,
overlapping a little, the medium-heavies —
Nolan, Tucker, Boyd, Blackman and so on Sydney to propagate the new doctrines of form Michael Parr
Series, 1970
—who are known not to be old masters because and colour, survived just long enough to see its Typewriter on paper
they are not yet dead, but are very expensive briefly-victorious style collapsing in 1970. 2 Michael Parr
because they have 'overseas reputations' and Finally, making itself positively felt only Structures, 1970
are (therefore ?) great artists. quite recently, and mainly in mixed exhibitions, Typewriter on paper
3 Tim Johnson
Behind and around the dozen stars there are there is a pressing generation of very young Three Supported Planes, 1970
roughly three decades of expressive painting, artists who have not yet travelled but who Perspex and string
both figurative and non-figurative, against nevertheless regard themselves as already
which a new generation reacted in the late placed in an international context by the media
sixties, along post-painterly stylistic lines and the art magazines. They are the first adults
deriving mostly from New York. of the global village, who do not think of
This movement was quite strongly resisted themselves as inferior to their contemporaries
by the middle generation that was just in London and New York, nor even as being
beginning to feel secure after a long struggle much worse-placed since the machinery of
against public apathy, and was committed art-marketing has slipped gear with the main
economically against a change of taste, creative ideas, and success may not be much
temperamentally against anything that did not longer measured in terms of product sales.
look like a variety of expressionism, and I shall comment on five typical young artists
chauvinistically against foreign influences other in Sydney in such a way as to bring out, if I can,
than those already licensed by its own something of the range of ideas and attitudes
plagarisms. CENTRAL STREET GALLERY, founded in forming here at the brink of the seventies.
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