The art of alumina: Peter Brown reviews the Comalco Sculpture Award

(Antiques and Art, February 1972)

The fourth Comalco Invitation Award for sculpture in aluminium was exhibited at the Bonython Gallery, Sydney, in December, and at the Victorian Arts Centre during January.

Unlike the $5000 Transfield Prize, which is a straight-out acquisitive prize alternating between sculpture and painting, the Comalco Award is for a piece of sculpture utilizing aluminium for a specific architectural environment.

Of the 1971 competition the excellently produced catalogue/brochure states: “Six sculptors were invited to design a finished work of free-standing sculpture, suited to positioning in quite small public spaces such as small foyers and reception areas.

“Consistent with such architectural settings where ceiling height would not exceed nine feet, the entries were envisioned as small to medium pieces of sculpture. The entries are finished works and not maquettes for larger pieces.”

The six artists chosen to submit work for the latest award were George Baldessin, Tony Bishop, William Clements, William Gregory, Noel Hutchison and Michael Kitching. Each sculptor competing for the award received a fee of $800. The winner received an additional $3000.

… the Comalco entries, by and large, remain within the confines of predictable taste. In fact, the superb graphics, smooth-running and elegant openings and the unobtrusive scale of the work give the Comalco exhibition the air of a well-mounted trade exhibition.

Aluminium abounds and the sculptors, in their individual solutions to the posed problems, have exploited the material’s possibilities and moods. One cannot help wondering, however, if ideas best expressed in another medium have not been forced into an unnatural alliance with Comalco’s products.

Perhaps the exhibit which runs most counter to established values is William Clements’ History Song for Weipa. Clements first attracted attention with his 1970 Transfield Prize winner, Meditation [sic] for August 6th. It was a controversial decision but the argument generated was somewhat quashed by the eminence of the presiding judge – Sir Roland Penrose – the champion and early participant of surrealism in England, the friend and biographer of Picasso and an esteemed administrator of contemporary art in Britain. This early mimeographed and stringed work showed the strong influence of several years Clements had spent in Japan during the 1960s. His Comalco entry is of a very different order.

“Song for Weipa” (presumably named for the centre of Comalco’s bauxite mining activities) depicts a nine-foot high Medusa-like figure with arms outstretched a good eight feet, whose “torso” merges into the form of a double-headed horse, the hooves of which are moveable castors.

In creating this witty yet powerful image Clements has been at pains to exploit the full expressive range of aluminium. “Song” has smooth surfaces, uneven surfaces, sandblasted surfaces as well as cast and extruded pieces. The long debate about kinetic or static sculpture is neatly by-passed by Clements – his sculpture can be pushed or moved in any direction, or parked at will.

As in this artist’s Transfield Prize winner Clements seems much concerned with the literary allusions inherent in the work; with the “artiness” of certain materials and the dialogue which these considerations provoke. The artist himself states in the catalogue that this sculpture “is the third in a series of explorations into material and cultural juxtapositions (meeting of metaphors) which lead, hopefully, toward more complete images.”

Clements has used factory cast-offs to produce a totem-like symbol which effectively evokes the abrupt transition of Aborigines like those at Weipa from a traditional tribal life into an alien, mechanized world. The social on literary comment is readily evident in “History Song for Weipa”, but on closer scrutiny the plastic references to this half-way culture are equally effective. Age-old materials such as wood, clay and paint are used in conjunction with the new, the impersonal and the mechanically extruded, producing an image of haunting power. “History Song for Weipa” well repays a look beyond the obvious, and poses in this competition unanswerable questions about collective taste and the preference for the polite well-made object…