Page 55 - Studio International - April 1972

Australian stand in the way of easy conversation. We are the last few years is dramatic and temporarily
I think that Clement Meadmore's work of
There are a lot of myths about Australia that
outsiders not lean, sunbronzed, inner-directed racists. arresting, but that it is less good than people
say. It has a flaw that strikes me as fatal,
We are mostly overweight and pallid office
workers who have once or twice seen an although one doesn't see it immediately. The
Donald Brook aborigine and guess that he is probably harmless sculptures in twisted square section, like links
enough in his place, wherever that is. from a 'Chinese' puzzle, have the kind of energy
Above all, we are other-directed. We wait that everyone who has twisted heavy square-
for a consensus, and we go along with it. section rubber strip in his hands will have felt
Occasionally one of the more thrusting of us and seen. Such deformation of substance does,
will jump the gun, and declare the consensus in fact, store physical energy.
a little ahead of the count, thus pre-empting Steel is more elastic than rubber, and
the situation in his own interest. This tends to whoever doubts it should try bouncing a steel
happen especially in the arts, where bearing on a steel plate, in competition with a
everything is so uncertain that the man with rubber ball of about the same size. But once
confidence and apparent power is king. the elastic limit is reached under deforming
Artists, always anxious to do right, and stress, which happens quite quickly with steel,
especially the most ambitious of them (to the material goes plastic and the storage of
borrow a great comic phrase from American energy—the drawn bow effect—all drains away.
punditry), have recently been caught in mid-air, Now Clement Meadmore lets some of his
wondering whether to come down on the sculptures rust, so that they look like bent solid
Nolan-Boyd-Pro Hart side or the Stella- steel bars; and he paints some of them matt
Noland-Olitski side. Some of them, like Charles black, so that they look like rubber. The rusty
Blackman, are so ambitious that they have done ones fail because it is evident that if they were
themselves an acrobatic injury, falling both made of solid steel they would have been bent
ways at once. past recovery, and the effect of energy storage
It would be a felicity for the minor art of lost. (Not everything is lost, of course—I am
commenting on great art if one could say that talking about the difference between goodness
of course the best artists are not the ones with and greatness, not the difference between
American-type ambition—but it isn't entirely goodness and disaster.)
true. The difficulty is that the game of attaching The black ones don't fail in that way because
value to artists' work is stacked : we never know it is open to the viewer to read them as being
whether artists who went in unrewarding made of rubber, or of some anonymous
directions did well or not because they simply substance with rubber-like characteristics. But
got wiped out by that awful brainless juggernaut both the black ones and the rusty ones fail for
called Art History, that the ambitious lot slit another reason : that as a matter of fact the
each other's throats to drive. carefully staged effect of shaping as if by stress
It would be misleading to describe applied to the whole homogeneous mass (by
Australia's artistic innocence as nonconformity, bending the bar, in fact) is not well enough
but we do have our outsiders, and they don't sustained. It is apparent from small
always stay outside. Just at the moment, for imperfections, especially at the junctions of
example, everyone is very pleased with Clement flat with curved surfaces, that they are
Meadmore (showing at Max Hutchinson's fabricated hollow things with the same inertness,
Gallery A in Sydney), because he seems to have the same lack of inner substance and life, as
leapt safely aboard the history machine from a air-conditioning ducts.
vantage point in the USA. One local critic If one tries, after seeing this, to take them
writes 'Let there be no doubt about his as having no substance but as being the mere
Clement Meadmore position ... Meadmore is up there with Tony marked surfaces of something like 3-d platonic
Up Ended 1969 forms, then they are much diminished. Quite
Cor-ten steel, 16 x 52 x 15 in. Smith, Robert Murray, Anthony Caro and
Courtesy Gallery A, Sydney Isaac Witkin'. He forgot Joan Sutherland. clearly one is being encouraged by the artist to
read them not as platonic but as vital—as being
full of 'thrusts' and 'tensions' and 'energy'. To
work properly they should either be better
fabricated than they are (which must be very
nearly impossible, for they are nothing if not
well made) or else they should not be fabricated
at all but made in some other way, so that one
isn't nagged by the certainty of their sheet
construction and literal hollowness.
Clement Meadmore, in Australia, was an

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