Martin Sharp: memory and longing

Christopher Allen finds poignancy among the bright colours of a Martin Sharp survey

Martin Sharp: Sydney Artist
Museum of Sydney, to March 14, 2010.

TO walk into Martin Sharp's survey at the Museum of Sydney is chromatically an almost breathtaking experience. You expect things to be bright, even gaudy, but nothing can prepare you for the wall-to-ceiling hanging of paintings and posters, almost all in the three primary colours, with broad red or yellow frames against a deep blue wall.

Tucked around to the left, at the beginning of the exhibition but not immediately visible as you enter, are a few quieter youthful works. Among them is a sensitive portrait of Sharp as a boy, painted by Justin O'Brien, his art master at Cranbrook.

The space is perfect for the show and its aesthetic, which is at once utterly excessive and remarkably consistent: it is a relatively long and narrow room more like a picture gallery in a stately home than a bland modern exhibition space designed to accommodate crowds.

The rich dark background - so different from institutional off-white - also evokes a grand private house, although one where a hippie heir has mingled psychedelic posters with the gilt-framed old masters; which is how one imagines Sharp's old family home in Sydney's Bellevue Hill.

The impression all this makes is at once exhilarating and oddly nostalgic. Bright primary colours are not, of course, the vehicle for great painterly subtlety, and this is not an exhibition in which individual works will open up a world of poetic depth. It is really a kind of giant installation, mostly composed of posters, personal memorabilia and a number of large poster-like paintings.

The effect is in the ensemble, in the explosion of colour and in a certain number of characteristic themes and motifs.

One of the most prominent of these is the colourful and eccentric figure of Tiny Tim (Herbert Khaury, 1932-96), the singer best known for his falsetto rendition of Tiptoe Through the Tulips. Sharp promoted him as the Superman of Song and in 1979 sponsored a performance in Sydney at which his hero set a world record for non-stop singing: two hours 15 minutes, he performed a medley of a century of popular song, from music hall to the Bee Gees' Staying Alive.

The whole thing is shown on a video screen at one end of the room, and the gallery is filled with this continuous weave of old songs. It is this that adds so greatly to the nostalgic, poignant feel of the exhibition. This is also what makes it all cohere: the singing animates the room, and overlays what could feel like brashness with a veil of memory and longing.

The non-stop singing event was held at Luna Park, another favourite motif in Sharp's work. The huge open mouth entrance fascinated him. Wide open mouths are always somewhat sinister, and a mouth that is also a gate inevitably recalls the hell-mouth of medieval art. That association became vividly real after the terrible fire of 1979, in which an adult and six children lost their lives. In subsequent images, the Luna Park face is shown in flames, often in conjunction with Sydney's Harbour Bridge and the Opera House.

Sharp has little obviously in common with such artists as Sidney Nolan and Arthur Boyd, and yet he shares with them a peculiarly Australian love of mythologies and emblematic images. Another of Sharp's characteristic emblems is the word eternity, borrowed from the mysterious chalk inscription that would appear on footpaths all over Sydney from the 1930s to the 60s; it was only in 1956 that their author was revealed as Arthur Stace, a reformed alcoholic and Christian convert, who would get up every day before dawn to write his one-word sermons in time for the morning commuters.

Most of Sharp's works are designs for posters. A number of pieces are conceived as more or less straightforward pictures, though even here Sharp can't help painting and decorating the frames, and even incising the designs into the timber support, or possibly cutting them out with a jigsaw, as well as building up the paint surface in a decorative but mechanical kind of impasto, so that the whole composition is almost in low relief.

For all its visual exuberance, this is a mode of painting that has little sense of the maker's hand, or of the presence of the artist's mind in the act of painting. That is why such works benefit from the collective presentation and the musical accompaniment. The content of these pictures often involves the collage of images from van Gogh, whom Sharp sees as the paradigm of the artist. The famous Yellow House in Potts Point, where Sharp and other artists lived and worked from 1971 to 1973, was named after Vincent's house in Arles.

Joining van Gogh's figure of himself walking to Tarascon with Mickey Mouse, or setting the head of Marilyn Monroe by Warhol in the middle of van Gogh's Sunflowers, probably only really adds up if one has ingested sufficient quantities of psychotropic substances. Perhaps we can be more indulgent if we make an effort of historical imagination, or if we are simply old enough to remember the 70s.

There was something unappealing about Australian culture in those years. Stifling suburban conservatism is the lazy cliche. But it wasn't quite as simple as that. The conservatism was the good part: the attachment to what used to be the fundamental Australian ideas of egalitarianism, fairness and decency. A certain rusticity of manners was an inevitable part of this ethos; conformism and a closed mind were its darker side.

But the worst of it was a new and different postwar attitude: materialism, greed and consumerism, with no compensating increase in sophistication. This was the ethos epitomised by the developers who destroyed large parts of Australia's architectural heritage in those years, and whom Sharp suspected of having lit the Luna Park fire.

It is in such circumstances that one can understand the appeal of Sharp's anarchic blend of poetry, humour and idealism. Its lack of aesthetic sophistication or intellectual coherence simply mirrors the limitations of the culture against which it was in revolt.