Whitewashed in the name of art

Author: By SEBASTIAN SMEE
Date: 10/04/1999
Publication: Sydney Morning Herald

The inverted commas in the title of `Art', the play all of Sydney seems to have heard about, must be there for a reason. 
But what are they driving at? 

`Art' opens tonight after a week of previews and several months of controversy, including union disputes over the 
importation of British actor Tom Conti, and the last-minute illness of John Waters, replaced by Geoff Morrell. 

All this has added ample kindling to an already blazing publicity campaign. 

On this count, `Art' is unique - the only play in recent memory to be marketed as if it were a musical. 

The play - not just its publicity department - is clever. And very, very funny. 

And it's very simple. 

Three men representing three attitudes - arty pretension, reflex scepticism and habitual, cowardly apathy. 

Serge (Morrell), the pretentious arty type, buys an expensive painting, which, at first glance, is, well, blank. 

("The background is white," snarls Marc (Conti), the sceptic, "and if you screw up your eyes you can make out some fine 
white diagonal lines.") 

Marc can't believe Serge could be such a dolt as to buy it. They argue and argue, while Yvan (David Wenham), their 
gormless friend, sits on the fence with both ears to the ground. 

But what about those inverted commas? They're like little tongs, tweezers - as if it's too distasteful to get an actual 
grip on the idea of art; it has to be kept undefined, at a sanitary distance. But then, if art is this - this ridiculous 
white painting - what does that say? 

Possibly the most interesting thing about `Art' is not what happens on stage, but what happens in the audience. The 
arguments are conducted in such a way that it is often we who feel under attack. 

It goes a long way to making `Art' the perfect play for a brash city like Sydney, where cultural values sit close to the 
surface, and easily rub off. 

Serge complains Marc is "one of those new-style intellectuals, who are not only enemies of modernism, but seem to take 
some sort of incomprehensible pride in running it down." 

Heavy stuff. (The play, incidentally, is not heavy: it is too funny and life-loving to be heavy). 

All the same, the audience basically seems to agree with Marc: the work "is shit". 

And if being "progressive" or "of one's time" means falling into line with such soulless rubbish, why not be a nostalgia 
merchant? 

(The confusion here is that Modernism itself is by now very much a period style; Malevich painted White on White in 1918, 
for heaven's sake. So Serge's attempts to portray himself through the painting as a "man of his time" are hardly convincing.)

Art of itself remains an idea that is in a sort of rolling crisis after a century spent churning out radical innovations 
and provocations - including the painting Marc and the audience delight in mocking. 

And why not? 

The endless drive for novelty in culture means, as Marc says, that art is "dead meat Serge . . . no sooner conceived than 
dead". 

But Marc's lacerating scepticism - what Serge calls his "perpetual display of suspicion" - is the same arrogant, 
characteristically modernist spirit that for a century discarded everything inherited - right down to form and colour - 
in its search for the new. 

The new was often awesome and life-affirming: bridges, skyscrapers, spaceships. But important things - human things - got 
lost in the process. 

The modernist drive to purity gave rise to all sorts of phenomena more heinous than white paintings - everything from the 
desecration of the built environment to Auschwitz. 

When Marc decribes culture as "something I absolutely piss on", his contempt is no longer funny. It's sinister. 

Follow Marc's harsh, sceptical impulse to its logical conclusion in art, and you end up with blank canvases. 

Follow it through in life, the three characters in `Art' discover, and you can end up with blank relationships.