The Age from Melbourne, Victoria, Australia • Page 28

28 THE AGE WEDNESDAY 31 AUGUST 1994 Arts Entertainment Picture; CATHRYN TREMAIN Gallipoli Turkish premiere to aid peninsula restoration A weighty problem for ballet flight of Turkish emigrants from Istanbul to Australia. There are now about 150,000 Turkish-Australians. Mr leffreys worked for the Istanbul Film Festival this year. He said he was impressed with the interest in foreign films, but disappointed there was none from Australia. They started organising the festival after gaining the support of the Australian Government and Australian Film Commis-, sion.

Turkish companies were also sponsoring the festival. But Mr leffreys said the response of Australian companies with Turkish interests was disappointing. Other films to be shown, apart from Gallipoli, are: Strictly Ballroom, No Worries, Sweetie, Day of the Dog, Romper Stomp-er, The Last Days of Chez Nous, The Good Woman of Bangkok, Black River, Shame, The Adventures of Priscilla Queen of the Desert, Exile and Bedevil. Mr Jeffreys said money from the Canakkale program would go to a reforestation project on the peninsula. Bushfire ravaged the scrubby trees and undergrowth this summer.

He said some of the most important Anzac sites from the 1915 campaign, like Lone Pine, the Nek and Chunuk Bair, were now little more than blackened earth and stumps. AAP THE film Gallipoli will premiere in Turkey next month only a few kilometres from where the Anzac legend was born. Money from the filming will help restore the bushfire-devas-tated Gallipoli Peninsula, where' thousands of Anzacs are buried. The 1981 Peter Weir film will launch the first Australian film festival in Canakkale, the nearest main town to the Gallipoli battlefields. The festival, which opens on 28 September and moves to Istanbul on 8 October, is being or-' ganised by Bruce Jeffreys and Catherine Simpson, of Perth.

It ends on 13 October, the 26th anniversary of the first Peter Weiniger IT MUST be something about the food in the Netherlands, but the principal ballerina Miranda Coney has pulled out of the Australian Ballet production of The Nutcracker because she is "out of Conev notified the AB from the Hague, where she has been appearing with the Netherlands Dance Theatre. The AB's Jill Rivers con LA firmed yesterday that Coney had been unable to get her weight down enough to dance Nutcracker's complex and demanding point work. With three weeks to go until opening night, Coney, who was to partner Stephen Heathcote in the role cho 'Bar and Oiecfc', by oin VTcitery, is one of the so-called Spectrum paintings which disturb the optical senses with their colored edges. Optical distortions disturb the senses reographed tor ner Dy uraeme Mur-phv, will be replaced by Vicky Attard. The AB hierarchy is believed to be less than pleased with Coneys late withdrawal.

Taking Attard's place opposite David McAllister, as one of the alter riv- 'Stf" nate couplings, is the Spanish dancer Trinidad Sevillano, a former princi Art 4 pal with the Boston Ballet. ml But seriously John Vickery. Charles Nodrum Gallery, Church Street, Richmond, until 3 September. Carolyn Fels. Michael Wardell Gallery, Verity Street, Richmond, until 17 September.

Lauren Berkowltz. Karyn Lovegrove Gallery, Wattle Street, Prahran, until 17 September. Alda Tomescu. Christine Abrahams Gallery, Gipps Street, Richmond, until 8 September. Paintings from Lajamanu.

William Mora Gallery, Hinders Lane, city, until 3 September. CHRISTOPHER HEATHCOTE THE COMIC Vince Sorrenti, who opens a season at the Last Laugh to morrow, has been picking up kuaos for his performance in an environ mental documentary that he co- wrote with director Paul Harmon in 1990. For his part in No Laughing Matter, which looks sustainable development, Sorrenti was nominated for best talent at the 1992 Berlin colors (creamy yellow, grey, dirty white) although her surfaces are more activated, the pigment sometimes having been applied loosely with a palette knife. Most satisfying are 'Numbers 1, 2, 4 and 10' which represent a single vertically positioned ovoid in a monochrome field banded with subtle bars. They suggest that Fels is becoming disillusioned with ultra-contemporary values, lor they see her replace her former deadpan chopped and folded newspapers dangling from the ceiling, two minimal hanging screens fabricated out of white plastic bags, and a rectangle of old bottles placed on the floor.

One realises that local sophists will soon envelop these objects in artspeakish meanings, but one has to ask whether they possess more than a momentary novelty value. The glaring deficiency about this display is, to my eye, that the artist hasn't faced up to any lery space misses the whole point of what pollution really is. AIDA TOMESCU'S dark gestural abstractions seem labored to the point of lapsing into garbled incomprehensibility. Her pictures are devoid of inventive mark-making or iconic motifs, and consist chiefly of successive layers of thick, scraped pigment that appears to lack any grace or fluency. Most disappointing are the turgid green pieces "Numbers 8, 9 and for the artist seems not to have known when to call a halt to the creative act.

As a painter, Tomescu may have little to say, although her etchings are coming into their own. Especially resolved are the small works "Numbers 17, 18, 19 and which convey an unexpected freedom and lyricism. They are collectively tided "Om" after the Eastern religious chant, and represent massed, black gestures curling and writhing across the pure whiteness of fresh paper. THERE Is an ineffable visual intensity about many of the paintings by tribal elders from Lajamanu In the Northern Territory. The motifs seem to ripple and shake with energy in their symbolic representations of dreaming sites and accompanying tales.

Especially arresting are "Women's Dreaming" by Lily Nungarrayi Hargraves, "Small Potatoes Dreaming" by Liddy Nakamarra Nelson, "Bush Plum Dreaming" by Topsy Napurrula Sampson, "Budgerigar Dreaming" by Mona Napaljarri Rock-man and "Ngurlu Dreaming" by Rosie Napurrula Tasman, where the dots converge around each structured form as highly charged bands of color. OP ART makes a reappearance on the contemporary gallery circuit with an exhibition of so-called Spectrum and Linear paintings by John Vickery. Executed in the late 1960s, his small geometric abstractions use subdued not jarring optical effects to suggest that our visual faculties are being manipulated and distorted. The rather remote Linear paintings resemble a dense arrangement of slender parallel bars although on close inspection most are actually rarified diamonds. The more engaging Spectrum paintings consist of black rectangles deployed over a white field, or white oblongs upon black.

The optical senses are greatly disturbed by such works because their edges have been enhanced with small colored margins: cadmium red and pale cadmium yellow on one edge of the rectangle, and cyan and manganese blue along the opposite. Exceptionally accomplished are 'Bar and Check' and 'All in a Row', which both bring to mind Mondrian's early abstractions apprehended through a prism. The normally pristine non-objectives format becomes alarmingly animated and disruptive. Also strong are 'Windows', 'The Dotted Line' and 'Presence' which suggest photographs of compositions that have been printed out of register. CAROLYN FELS seems to be changing artistic direction with her latest relief paintings.

Her familiar elliptical motif is still present, but there is a new painterliness to the works which are collectively titled 'Memory'. The artist also prefers the same Exceptionally accomplished are 'Bar and Check' and 'All in a Film Festival and more recently at the New York Film Festival where the eco-doco won a gold medal. Not just a funny face, Sorrenti has two degrees in architecture, of which he says: "You're a lot safer seeing me on stage than you would be on one of my buildings." Slow developer PHOTOGRAPHER Robert Ashton was pleased and just a little surprised yesterday to receive in the mail an original transparency he had submitted for publication in the book A Day in the Life of Australia. The accompanying letter from Collins Publishers, San Francisco, apologised for having taken so long to return the work. What the note didn't mention was that the book was published in 1981 a mere 13 years ago.

Lock-up mock-up TIMING is everything. Just as the Victorian Government has decided I i I I I 3 1 1 a I I 1 1 1 I normally pristine non-objective format becomes alarmingly animated and disruptive. to demolish the notorious Division at Pentridge, set-makers at the Merlin Theatre in are building Division postmodernism with an iconic abstraction. Such fundamentally contemplative objects don't need an explanatory theory to sustain one's attention; they start to hold their own in purely aesthetic terms. LAUREN BERKOWITZ exhibits three large scale works which occupy a point somewhat between sculpture and installation.

She shows a net-like structure which has been made from substantial creative or imaginative issues. Actually, Berkowitz's tame work seems only a student exercise at one remove, with teacher's set project being to make three pieces from recycled rubbish. All very well and good, but are the results of enduring value, and has a substantial statement on our waste-making culture been made? In my view, simply reconfiguring refuse into minimal sculptures within a gal in South Melbourne in readiness for the Barry Dickins play Remember Ronald Ryan. Ryan, the last man. hanged in Victoria, spent his final years in Division.

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