Page 65 - Studio International - October 1970

local critics claim more positive virtues than the his previous peak. Like a number of 'new or A Continuous Wooden Floor (5970), an
above for Christmann but still centre around his generation' Australian painters Hickey seems immense roller-coaster-like affair. Pigment
`essential passivity'.3 at present at a loose end. Bruce Pollard, the Catch is an equally large-scale rectangular
Margaret Dodd (born South Australia Pinacotheca's paterfamilias, has said that painted plastic curtain on a metal grid, an
1941, spent several years recently in California) `Hickey has forced himself to walk straight into artificial autumnal mural, and equally
is associated with WATTERS GALLERY in Sydney a void, and to try to cope mentally with it'. virtuoso. q
which specializes in 'funk', a fairly strong local Warren Knight (born Minneapolis, Minn.
tradition there. Miss Dodd is equally so 1941, to Melbourne 1969) is something of a
inclined in Adelaide. 4 Perhaps inspired by fringe figure, a would-be counter-culture
`visions splendid' of motor cars cast aside by entrepreneur turned artist. He made his
the score in scrap metal yards, she has Melbourne debut with his version of 'concrete
resurrected the shades of all this mashed poetry', massive slabs of indecipherable
mechanical detritus in miniaturized ceramic quasi-Arabic calligraphy done in glutinous
terms, placing them in glass display cases as if acrylic polyester modelling paste, that cried
they were archaeological remains, which in a out for a Rosetta Stone. He said at the time that 'Penguin Books 1970 and Oxford University Press
1962 respectively. Hughes actually only deals with
sense they are. They are grotesque admonitory he wanted 'to incorporate basic word structure Australian painting and then only up to the early
remnants of 'planned obsolescence', of our and phonetic poetry' into the painting. In 196os. His writing tends to be at cocktail party level.
throw-away culture. They are our own tatty keeping with the times he naturally progressed A second edition of the more sober Smith that goes
icons, our frail dreams of cybernetic power. to some environments elsewhere. Now he has up to 197o will come out later this year. Both have
fairly comprehensive bibliographies bearing in mind
(All very emotive, that.) returned to calligraphy, combining it with their chronological cut-off points.
Ross Grounds (born Melbourne 1949) is, another current artistic concern, photography, There has in fact been an upsurge in Australian
like some others of these seven, associated with specifically nineteenth-century genre photos art publishing in recent years evidenced in
the PINACOTHECA GALLERY in Melbourne, now with the features, particularly the faces, monographs such as the Lansdowne Press series and
numerous picture books of sorts and in magazines
more or less an artists' co-operative and the overlaid with the calligraphy of yore and has such as Art and Australia and Other Voices. Little
only Melbourne gallery to present contemporary collectively entitled them 'Photoscripts' : of all this, I suspect, makes its way overseas; little of
it deserves to make its way overseas. Accordingly, a
art on a continuous basis, however much there verbal Mumbo Jumbo blots out their
number of points made in this article, which could
may at times be an embarrassing gap between individuality, they have become 'frustrated, be backed up by local bibliographic references,
their 'reach' and `grasp'; in these respects the filtered, translated human beings', to use haven't been because of their probable unavailability
overseas.
Pinacotheca is the Melbourne equivalent of Knight's own words. The effect is Kafkaesque or 2Presumably Terry Smith: 'The Painting of David
Sydney's INHIBODRESS. Grounds's Untitled, Orwellian, as Knight puts it; the point is limited. Aspden', Art International, Oct. 197o, pp 50-3 and
one of a series of similar matrices, is very much Ti Parks (born south-east England 1939, `The Painting of Gunter Christmann', Art
a case in point of this gap between pretension to Melbourne 1964) is, like Margaret Dodd and International, March 1971, pp 22-5, and Donald
Brook: 'Sydney commentary: New Art in
and achievement.5 In Grounds's case it's a Warren Knight, associated with WATTERS Australia', Studio International, Feb. 1971, pp 76-8o
simple polarity or binary relation as so often GALLERY but his art, unlike theirs, is less subject respectively.
such works today are between lumps of coal to quasi-sociological interpretations. His 'E.g., Smith sup.
Painting, particularly quasi-figurative with local
and a nylon grid, between the vitality of chequered career so far, though, may be the colour, is still quantitatively, though not exactly
conventionally-regarded ugly forms such as precursor of Miss Dodd's. Parks never really qualitatively, the major form of artistic activity in
Australia. Szeemann contented himself with just one
these and the sterility of culture (Levi-Strauss made it as an abstract 'dimensional' painter,
example of this once strong but now moribund
again). Grounds, however, personally regards despite the sometimes initially teasing tradition, an execrable collective painting Linked
his matrices in more strictly formal terms than dadaistic addenda; so perhaps because of this Portrait in mixed media by William Pidgeon, Brett
such fashionable interpretations. he, like Knight (in one instance together), Whiteley and Tony Woods. Szeemann noted, no
doubt poker-faced, that 'Brett Whiteley's
Dale Hickey (born Melbourne 1937 launched out into 'environmental experiments' formulated obsessions stand for a lot of works by
though at present in the U.S.A. in search of (note the qualification) such as Virginia's or artists of this [35 to 45] generation'.
'One should note in passing the rise in artistic
the holy grail, as are a number of younger rather Vagina's (1969), 'a sculpture of total activity in Adelaide in recent years that for some
Australian artists) is something of the typical environment' or 'a sculpture of a painting on a strange reason parallels the fall in activity in
socially-conscious Melbourne artist as opposed stretcher', and Hawthorne Installation (1970), Brisbane. Neither city, however, approaches either
to the typical pleasure-seeking Sydney artist which never really made it either. Parks's Melbourne or Sydney in terms of over-all activity,
whether it be measured in terms of the frequency of
—one can characterize thus endlessly as our wayward if not topsy-turvy Banner construction commercial exhibitions or the catholicity and quality
historians are wont to do, but not now. (Our represents a more concentrated and perhaps of the museum collections, principally European in
best historian, Manning Clark, once said therefore more energized variation on this the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne,
principally Australian in the Art Gallery of N.S.W.
Melbourne was 'a child of the Enlightenment' free-form theme. It could well be a symbol of, in Sydney.
while Sydney was Nietzsche's !) Hickey began and comment on, Australian bricolage. The art markets of both of these latter cities,
however, are for various reasons such as the state of
as a rather messy Alan Davie-like organic Guy Stuart (born Canberra 1942) first the post-mining boom stock-markets presently in
abstractionist but eventually found his stride, made his name as a large-scale virtuoso painter the doldrums. The heady Australian art boom of the
under the influence of a Hartford Connecticut- of such ostensibly simple objects as bowls and early 196os, partly reflected in, and stimulated by,
born painter James Doolin then in Melbourne, walls but bathed in ambiguity so that they London interest in Australian exotica at the time,
has since retracted considerably; the market has
as a psychologically rigid abstractionist of seemed to belong to another solar system. He stabilized if not retrenched. Likewise, the New
upholstery patterns, paling fences and other endowed the commonplace with mystical York-oriented 'post-painterly abstraction' or
suburban emblems, of which Black Painting significance, giving them in Auden's phrase 'a `minimal' resurgence of the late 196os has also since
declined considerably, if not completely evaporated.
represents the predominantly pessimistic passion of awe'. There was a deliberate and Probably this is a Good Thing in that it separates the
conclusion of the series. Since then Hickey has poetic disorientation away from convention, serious artists from those out for a fast buck from
renounced painting and gone in for galleries a metamorphosis. Stuart too has stopped boom times.
lined with actual paling fences (`If you're going painting in favour of supposedly less inhibiting 3 This is largely the old old story of Australian artists'
reluctance to think enough about what they're doing,
to paint [a fence], why not build it ?') which activities, though still sculpturally based and the bricolage syndrome (to refer back to an earlier
was social realism with a vengeance, and then deliberately mystifying as before, such as his point), of usually settling for well-heeled
compromise, of hopping on a stylistic bandwagon
some ninety small photos of white walls, but large Lock-Span project for aluminium casting and then never getting off again—such are the
never recapturing the suburban sinistrality of (1969) a la Oldenburg and his Art in Process pressures of the local art market.
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