the dimension game

Daniel Thomas

Try to imagine a two-dimensional form of life, living, say, in a sheet of paper. Whatever would they make of the slices of three-dimensionalnature that they encountered?  Like, for example, a humble finger piercing the sheet of paper. They would know the diameter of the finger and its inner contents, but  its three-dimensional extension beyond the plane would be beyond comprehension.
Similarly, in our three-dimensional world we could not comprehend four (or more) dimensional phenomena if we encountered them.
Artists, more than other people, sometimes have an uneasy sense of these extra dimensions.
Last year Guy Stuart's notorious floor (or was it a roof?) undulated up from the entrance of Gallery A, Melbourne, or else it surged down in channels from the left-hand wall.
You couldn't really tell where it had come from, or what it was doing in that room. Just like the slice of finger that the inhabitant of a sheet of could encounter.
Col Jordan's paintings and sculptures now at the Bonython Gallery have a similar sense of interpenetrating dimensions.
Undulating slabs of color have emerged from walls, and these we have called paintings.
Others have come up out of the floor (or flowed into it from a. point in mid-air), and these we have called sculptures.

DISTINCTION
As with most art these days the distinction be­tween painting and sculp­ture is quite irrelevant, and only blinds us to what the artist is doing.
When he first emerged—was it 1964?—he seemed a pioneer of Op Art in Australia. Certainly he preferred flat surfaces, hard edges and bright color, but color interaction or optical tricks were not going on for their own sakes.
They existed, if at all, to give a mood, and it was a mood of unease. They also described the slices of alien dimension that passed through the planes he chose to work on. And the uneasiness was a matter of never knowing what extra dimension  might manifest itself next; it was a kind of science-fiction unease.

The current exhibition demands. great respect. When Jordan began, he was, stylistically, a pioneer in the context of Australian art. He isn't now, but he's still a pioneer within the context of his own art, that is, he is still exploring, his work is still fresh.
His work is always the same, but always different, which means that his subject-matter and his formal obsessions (undu­lating curves) are always the same, but that his treatment is always differ­ent, it varies, and indeed improves.
By the way, I wonder if subject-matter and formal obsessions aren't, in the end, identical?  Surely the formal obsession comes first, and then the artist finds a subject to fit the form? And since he feels the forms so strongly he brings the subject to life?

BALANCE
Other artists in town this week lave failed to keep the balance between subject-matter and form.
At the Macquarie Rodney Milgate's forms for his very interesting subject-matter haven't varied much and were never very pioneering.
Perhaps there was never a formal obsession to be­gin with.

At Walters, Arthur Wicks' pretty color-fields don't seem to have much content at all, though time hasn't yet allowed us to learn his work fully.
Since prints are more frankly decorative in intention, his prints may be better than his paintings.

Col Jordan's new exhibition renews his old obsessions in several ways. The perspex-slice sculptures now have additional wavy cutouts or extensions, like clouds invading.
The same clouds, but smokier, appear in paint­ings along with tubes, and remind us that Jordan, unlike doctrinaire, Op Artists, has often been very interested in sombre blacks and browns.
Mona Hessing; also at Bonython,  shows woven woollens.
They're not rugs, though there's no reason why a beautiful rug shouldn't be hung on a wall, as are her strange objects, or why it shouldn't be draped over a suspended rod, and turned into a room-divider, as also are some of these exhibits.
They are built up mainly from oblong woven panels, which usually have a fringed lower edge, and sometimes there are pairs of folded flaps which are curiously like collars.
So these weavings are almost clothes, They are occasionally quite like a poncho or a shift, only they are scaled for small giants, not for ordinary people.
I doubt if Mona Hessing knew that her weavings would end up like clothes, but the effect is imposing and impressive, and lifts the work right out of the category of decorative art.

Harald Szeemann visited Australia last week to look us over.
He is director of next year's Documenta at Kassel, Germany, the world's most important survey of contemporary art.  His Documents will be an "Enquiry into Reality," and as well as Painting and sculpture it will include "Social iconography" as manifested in clothes, tattooing, banknotes, science-fiction, gift-shop  kitsch. So Mona Hessing's near-clothes and Col Jordan's hint of science-fiction are closer than they might realise to the "Szeemann's Choice" exhibition in the next room. I'll describe it next week.    

The Daily Telegraph  2 May 1971