Selected reviews of Transfield Art Prize, 1970

Image dances its way to a $5000 prize

(Geraldine Pascall in The Australian, 4 November 1970)

An Adelaide artist, Bill Clements, has won the $5000 Transfield Art Prize for 1970 with a “hang-up” – a remembered image of Hiroshima expressed on sheets of photo-sensitive paper hung with string.

The judge, Sir Roland Penrose, President of the British Institute of Contemporary Art, described it as “an intellectual sort of dancing creature” carrying a message of the miseries of our time.

Reluctantly cornered by the Press in Sydney’s Bonython Gallery yesterday, Mr Clements elaborated while insisting that he and the work were separate things and he was just a spectator.

“Hiroshima had a deep effect on me, as it has on anyone who goes there,” he said.

“But it’s not just Hiroshima – in the 25 years since then, the world has seen disasters of equal magnitude… like Vietnam.

“I had an image of Hiroshima and this grew out of a desire to try to order all those images from the past and present…

“And from my interest in graphics and machines… in new forms of communicating.”

Clements calls the work Reading for August 6th and he emphasises the reading.

“It is not a painting although I made it in much the same way as making a painting… responding to forms and finding the way to make sense of the forms.

“But you can’t stand back and look at it – people have to come in close and read it for themselves.

“I’ve never done anything like this before… I’ve never tried to suspend things. Basically, I’m a sculptor.”

He has put a price of $500 on the work.

Announcing the award, Australia’s second largest, at the gallery last night, Sir Roland said of his choice: “It’s a very individual piece and it’s a piece where, the more you look at it, the more you contemplate it, the more you find in it from all sorts of angles”…

A farewell to the flat-worlders

(Nancy Borlase, The Bulletin, 14 November, 1970)

Where has all the flat abstraction gone? If the Tenth Transfield Prize Exhibition at the Bonython Gallery does anything at all, it sets the final seal on the ’sixties art – well timed, to be sure, for the first Transfield of the ’seventies.

It has been argued, though, that the coup de grace was administered two years ago at the National Gallery of Victoria’s ‘The Field’ exhibition, on the supposition that once a movement, however vital it may appear at the time, becomes the subject of a major survey, its demise is inevitably accelerated. New York’s Museum of Modern Art has been criticised, unfairly perhaps, for these reasons; with that part of its policy dedicated to contemporaneous and to catching a movement in flight, as it were, it is sometimes faced with the predicament, in so doing, of liquidating the avant-garde before giving it time to consolidate itself. An awful contradiction.

New York’s Museum has even anticipated movements, such as in its 1959 New Images of Man exhibition, which turned out to be a classic misjudgement of forward-looking trends. And if one were looking for a key to the art of the ‘seventies, mainstream that is, it would be difficult to find in this Transfield. One can, though, distinguish two opposite directions – a recomplication of the plastic and pictorial presence, or the elimination of it altogether.

By far the most interesting work lies outside conventional painting and Sir Roland Penrose’s choice of Bill Clements’s Reading for August 6th for the $5000 award is to be applauded. In view of his interest in the surreal and the metaphysical, it is not an unexpected decision. These pale, photostatted analogues of the past, strung on flimsy string, drift across the wall as memory patterns through the mind, intangible and disquieting, prescient of disaster over the quiet city of Hiroshima...

Main art awards differ on explosive question

(Art by Ann Galbally, The Age 4 November, 1970, p. 4)

Sydney: The two major art awards judged here within a week provide markedly different solutions to that explosive subject - the art prize.

Among the dilemmas to be faced by would-be organisers is one of form. Do we still regard art as that solid, long-lasting commodity, invariably painted upon canvas and destined to be hung upon a wall? Or is art today more experimental, ill-defined perhaps, but expressive of the uncertainties that threaten all our established categories?

TravelLodge invited 12 artists each to exhibit two pictures in their Macleay Street premises, and judges, Laurie Thomas, Geoffrey Dutton and Michael Parker, awarded the $7,500 prize to Donald Laycock. Looking remarkably like Melbourne's recent Leasing prize, the subsequent exhibition included David Aspden, Asher Bilu, Guy Stuart and Leonard French. All very solid and unexciting with the exception of New York-domiciled Michael Johnson's stepped colour-stained canvases.

But a tame, traditional show compared with the freedom and fancy encouraged in the 1970 Transfield Art Prize. Here, 25 selected artists were each given an allotted space in Bonython's Gallery and told to do what they like with it. The result is that the usual competition straining after eye-catching circus tricks has been avoided and most artists have tended to exhibit characteristic and unforced work…

Not often can the judge's decision be whole-heartedly acclaimed, but Bill Clements' August 6 Reading is the most thought-provoking work in the whole exhibition.

Judge Sir Roland Penrose avoided the seductions of more obviously appealing works in favour of the difficult Clements' piece, whose great quality is that it moves beyond self-absorption to make a statement about man in the world.

Clements' use of a variety of machine-printed images - bars of music, graphs, Japanese landscapes, data and Piero Della Francesca's Resurrection - sets off a train of associations in the mind of the viewer, working poetically rather than visually…

If art competitions can be organised with as great a margin for artistic freedom as the 1970 Transfield Prize then perhaps the future of this cumbersome mode of patronage is not as unhealthy as it would seem.

Letter from Australia

(Alan McCullough, Art International, 1971)

… There were no Fairweathers at the 1970 Transfield Prize exhibition at Bonython’s Gallery, Sydney, in November, but there was evident a gratifying awareness among some artists of Australia’s deepening involvement with the Asian world and the need to give expression to this general situation, even though the materials used appeared sometimes as insubstantial as moths flickering in the headlights of speeding automobiles.

At the invitation of the sponsors, Brian Finemore, Curator of Australian art at the National Gallery of Victoria, had courageously selected a combination of twenty eight mostly dissimilar works by twenty five artists each of whom made free and often adventurous use of his allotted floor-wall space. The result was an exhibition that seemed on the one hand to expand into boundless realms of abstract colour and architectonic forms, and on the other to contract cynically into a narrow “conceptual” cul-de-sac...

The task of sorting it all out fell to Sir Roland Penrose, who in selecting a work by the South Australian, Bill Clements, entitled Reading for August 6th, gave point to the argument that in the present heterogeneous context originality of ideas is as important as their plastic realisation. Clements’ idea indeed concerned a universal catastrophe that stood well beyond the ideological scope of ordinary forms of expression. Its form of expression, as Laurie Thomas succinctly observed in his review in The Australian (6/11/70), recalled the paper and string advertisements that flutter just above head-height in Japanese trams.

The very fragility of Clements’ curling Xerox prints that stretched defencelessly in a large inverted H-shape across some seven or eight feet of wall-space gave poignancy to the title. Here, as Sir Roland Penrose described it, was “a poetic idea developed from Hiroshima, from the miseries of our time… a work of great originality… depth of thought… and sensibility.”

Clements’ interest in the Orient had been cemented during protracted studies in Japan and travels in India and South East Asia between 1964-1967, the results of which had come under general notice at the 1970 Mildura Sculpture Triennial, notably in a 7’ high construction entitled Anthrop Clay I, in which the tall narrow doors of a shrine-like structure opened to reveal a symbolic figure done apparently in painted, clay mosaic. Observed metaphorically, Reading for August 6th was drawing in the sand, a tremulous wisp of time regained, a compacted vision on scraps of paper that would soon vanish leaving only that which fleetingly could be read into it – the significance of Hiroshima magnified suddenly in the last few tragic moments of the act…