Page 49 - Studio International - February 1971

radical level than the impulse to show Peter Kennedy, too, was never an art student. American sources, and a vague 'philosophy'
commercially-rejected work or to avoid paying His first public medium was light, and he from oriental mysticism.
dealers' commissions. rationally chose to earn his living working for He exhibits regularly, selling very little, at
Two artists who keep a foot in both camps, Claude Neon, where he is in touch with the WATTERS GALLERY, the commercial gallery in
for they are members of INHIBODRESS and they developing range of industrial expertise. One of Sydney with the most liberal reputation for
both show with GALLERY A (a dealer-gallery with his recent exhibitions was of colour photographs supporting young artists on uncompromised
branches in Sydney, Melbourne and New taken by fixed cameras at his place of work judgments of taste, irrespective of fashion and
York), are Tim Johnson and Peter Kennedy. between 5 and 5.3o pm on Tuesdays and of the prospect of economic viability. This is,
Tim Johnson is a recent Arts graduate, Thursdays between June 2 and August 6, 1970. of course, the official pretension of all
majoring in History and Philosophy of Science; An installation shot at Gallery A shows the use commercial galleries with a stake in the future;
and like many of his generation he has no of fluorescent battens with expanded metal in but it can't be denied that there is a spectrum
regrets at missing the kind of professional art an attempt to introduce some hint of turbulence of cases from taste-leading to taste-following,
education that is currently available in New and expressive disorder to a luminal genre that with a strong inbuilt temptation to dealers to
South Wales. He has worked a good deal he may have felt was becoming excessively bunch at the safer end. This is especially true
recently in Perspex, cast and transmitted light, static, cool and tidy. of Australia, where the market is small and
string, and minimal frames of wood and Peter Kennedy has an alert eye through a buyers tend to feel insecure and to move
aluminium, producing, typically, works like camera viewfinder, and his Sheep puts deadpan conservatively.
Three Supported Planes, 1970. In the latter half local content into an international pictorial The distinctive features of John Armstrong's
of 1970 he took to setting up constructions of idiom. He plays and composes music much object-assemblages are their remarkable
an ephermal sort, primarily for photography, under the influence of Cage and Cardew, and delicacy of texture and colour conjunction,
to be dismantled or simply abandoned after conducts or proposes rather delicate their scrupulously non-rational imagery and
being committed to film. investigations of an auditory-visual sort their way of plucking obliquely at the edges of
A good example of this is his Exterior between media; as for example his project, the imagination like something from another,
Window Installation, 1970, which comprises dated June 21, 1970, to 'prepare a tree so as to only half-remembered, place and time. They
simple black wooden slats nailed uselessly to alter its natural sound ... by restricting its are absurd, but not dada. Branch, 1970, with its
the frame of an upstairs window. freedom of movement... e.g. by using rope, tie suspended fragments of broken marble, wired
Tim Johnson thinks of his own work as the branches together or inhibit movement by like little parcels, and Box, 1970, are
evolving very quickly: he is ready to abandon fastening branches to the ground... or insert characteristic pieces.
a technique, a material, a style or an objective various materials into the tree, taking care that He has no theory and proceeds intuitively,
overnight, and he does not worry about the rate whatever is used is not likely to produce its own perpetuating the image of the artist as possessed
of obsolescence or the incoherence of a personal sound...' And he has a similar, even more by a unique creative impulse that works through
image. He speaks of art as if it were in part a rarified project for the sound of wind in grass, him, irrespective of his rational faculties and
corporate activity (`... so many artists work in a to be modulated with wire mesh of various independently of the constraints and promptings
similar way to mine that any discovery I make grades, recorded and photographed. of life. This is a paradigm of the artist in which
will soon be made by somebody else') and in part John Armstrong is one of the new artists art comes closest to the nature of a more or less
a hotly competitive one. He deplores neither who remains unfashionably acquiescent in the amiable private obsession; and while this is not
the egotistical impulse to do well, nor the inherited body of art lore and customary usage. now the most fashionable model it is evidently
insecurity of an activity in which success He doesn't see himself as a radical innovator, not yet quite obsolete.
doesn't guarantee continued success, as the although his assembled objects have no John Armstrong is not strongly attracted to
expressive craft-skill oriented art of the recent Australian precedent. He draws formal the co-operative idea, which seems to offer him
past tended to do. inspiration from quite familiar European and at best an exhibiting space that is in no respect
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