By Axel 'Asko' Sutinen
Martin Sharp, OZ & the Yellow House
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| Axel Sutinen |
I was the eldest of a large family from Finland that immigrated to Australia at the end 1969. By ´71 I was inspired to move out of the family home and find my own place in life. The place I would find myself at happened to be the Yellow House in Sydney´s Kings Cross. I couldn't believe my luck as it seemed to be a dream come true, something I had always wished and hoped for in life. This unique artist-run communal art gallery / performance space was created by the artist Martin Sharp and experimental filmmaker Albie Thoms. There were also many other great artists and incredible personalities coming and going all hours of the day and night. I was in awe of them as I didn't feel that I was of the same caliber as they were as I was so young, so I was very shy and nervous. It was my dream to become an artist and live a creative life full of art and music, and now I found myself in the best place that there was for that possibility in Sydney at that time. I had hung around the Arts Factory on Goulburn Street, listening to bands and meeting people. One person I met was an American named Sam Bienstock. He was an aspiring photographer and musician (just as I was likewise musically inclined) and didn't mind playing music with anybody who wanted to have a jam session.
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| Sam Beinstock, Yellow House, 1971. |
Sam had been to Paris and showed me his photos of derelicts under the bridges of the river Seine and talked about George Orwell and his book Down & Out in Paris (1933) written about his experiences of living under those same bridges. Sam played guitar and the sitar, a stringed Indian instrument.
My past-time was playing percussion of all kinds, so Sam and I liked going around the city to meet with different musicians, like all young people at the time. We had longish hair and most likely looked like hippies, as it was the norm in alternative cultural circles at that time. We both were newcomers to the Australian scene and found like-minded people in the Yellow House, as most of the people we met there had spent time in other countries. There was an openness to different modes of expression and thought. Individuality was welcomed and inclusiveness was the rule at the place.
So to go back in time: One day whilst carrying our instruments, we walked past the Yellow House in Macleay Street, Potts Point. There was a tree on the edge of the sidewalk in front of the house that had a giant green apple nearly 2 meters in diameter hanging from it´s branches. This was an amazing vision to see on the street.
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| Peter Wright 1971, outside the Yellow House. Photo: Sam Bienstock. |
Then, if you entered through the gallery doorway, you received a paper mask of a light green apple to wear over your face, though it had no eye holes to look through.
I already had become slightly acquainted with the place from many previous visits, as I´d gone to see several of Martin Sharp´s exhibitions there on my weekend gallery walks. The outside of the house used to be painted silver and now it was a bright sunflower yellow.
There were a lot of people milling around in front of it and the girl sitting at the door noticed us and invited us to come in and play some music in the front gallery. We were welcomed in. I was totally amazed how the place had been transformed since my previous visits. Once inside, it was immediately apparent that the place had radically changed in mood and we were greeted with many friendly smiles. The very first people we met were Jon ('Jonny Fantastic') Lewis and Bruce Goold. The corridors and rooms were totally transformed since my other visits and were now like a continuous, constantly changing art environment. The whole place was a labyrinthine maze consisting of two old Victorian buildings side by side, taken over by a myriad of artists and transformed into something incredible - a Palace of Art with imagination and skill and many visual appropriations of art-forms ranging from the West to the East. The Puppet Theatre by George Gittoes on the first floor was a stand-out in oriental-style in red and gold.
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| George Gittoes, Puppet Theatre, Yellow House, circa September 1971. Photograph: Greg Weight. |
Previously it had been a main gallery room where Martin had had his big Muybridge-inspired paintings exhibited during his solo shows.
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| Martin Sharp, Exhibition in the Yellow House, Revolution 1(3), June 1970. |
The main-stairway walls were painted in dark metallic colours with symbols, graffiti-like lettering and poetic texts. Parts of the walls were covered with the Italian/British artist Eduardo Paolizzi´s works and the stairs where covered with fake green grass lawn. All the walls of the other galleries were painted artworks in themselves with framed paintings hung over them to give a total immersive and dazzling experience. A large gallery space on the ground floor was devoted to Brett Whiteley´s Bonzai exhibition with many of the house artists contributing their works along with him, all depicting a bonsai tree that was positioned in the middle of the room.
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| Brett Whiteley, Bonzai Room, Yellow House, 1971. Photograph: Greg Weight. |
Spooky Land on the top floor was a dark ultraviolet wonderland created by Peter Wright. There was also Roger Foley's Capsule Room. Peter Kingston´s bright yellow Elephant Dome dominated the backyard, surrounded with many brightly painted life-sized wall-relief figures, saved from the old demolished Trocadero dance-hall, giving a monumental effect from eras gone by.
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| Peter Kingston, Elephant Home, a Buckminster Fuller-inspired, geodesic dome-like structure, located at the rear of the Yellow House, Sydney, September 1971. Photograph: Sam Bienstock. |
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| Antoinette Starkiewicz with one of the bas reliefs retrieved from the Trocadero Club and placed in the backyard of the Yellow House, September 1971. Photograph: Sam Bienstock. |
The Yellow House definitely was a nexus-point where the visual arts, music, culture and counterculture collided and synthesised into a new form of expression. In hindsight I personally see it as a first-of-it´s-kind phenomena, a Post-Modern artistic manifestation, a Gesamtkunstwerk. I have read much later on, that many of the Australian modern artists didn't approve of, or frequent it, as it was deemed to be too Pop Art orientated. To myself it was a great Surrealist / Pop Art / Dada / experimental / conceptual / collage aesthetic / living reflection of European High Art culture and the London pop / rock music scene - and it´s manifestation on Australian soil. It was a blending of visual, aural and musical experiences that defied all labels. I think nobody knew what it really was, but it most certainly was ahead of it´s own time. It was an artist run non-profit countercultural gallery, where everything and anything was possible for the certain period of time that it lasted; a magically mysterious environment akin to a multi-dimensional cake created by many visionary talents. All this appealed to the younger generation, not so very much to the old guard establishment of the Australian art scene.
The place was a pivotal point in time and space, created by the focus of visionary artists fulfilling the dreams of the Dutch artist Vincent Van Gogh´s unique attempt nearly 100 years earlier, to create a community of artists living and interacting with one another and the public in harmonious ways. A lot of the influences were from the Belgian surrealist Rene Magritte. Several rooms were created straight from his paintings and made into life-size 3-dimensional environments: the Stone Room with the large blue Hokusai wave positioned in a doorway; the Cloud Room with Martin Sharp´s paintings; the White Room with the model of a locomotive steam engine coming out through the fireplace - another recreation of a Magritte painting, with mysterious men wearing bowler hats and long black overcoats, spying from `the outside looking in´ through the windows; then the large wall art piece named “Ceci n´est pas une pipe” [This is not a pipe], with the big brown pipe painted on the wall.
This was a wider introduction of Magritte´s surrealist-oeuvre for me and most likely for other people also. Magritte´s vision seemed to be more dominant one than Vincent Van Gogh´s. Maybe it was a lot closer to our contemporary urban life-style.
The people there were so friendly I felt like they were my long lost friends from an forgotten past. From then on we went there everyday and slowly got to know everyone. One day the photographer Jon Lewis announced he was leaving to go somewhere else and to my surprise he offered me to take up his room. This was off a halfway landing going up to the top floor and you had to bend down on your knees to crawl into the room. It was made out like an Arabian tent all in white, with a mattress on the floor and a little low table next to it, no other furniture at all. So there I was now living and enjoying the bustle of activity constantly in motion in the Yellow House. Being there had a sense of breathing the most rarefied air, where each happening and encounter took on a significant and mythical dimension. In the evenings we had communal meals in the backyard garden, occasional collective meetings, and other happenings coming to town.
I was completely in awe with all of the people and artists I met there. Mostly they were 10 years older than me: Martin Sharp, Richard Neville, Albie Thomas, Brett Whiteley, Peter Wright, Philip Mora, Tim Burns, George Gittoes, Jon Lewis, Bruce Goold, Peter Kingston, Greg & Dick Weight, Tina & Sebastian Jorgensen, Juno Gemes, David Litvinoff, Antoinette Starckiewicz, Mick Glasheen, Roger Foley, Gary Shead, Victor Rubin, Nicolas Lyon, Bliss, Jewellion´s Mime-Circus, Moppy the Clown, Peter Carolan, Adrian Rawlins, Ian Hartley, Peter Royal, Ted Markstein, Rina Cruickshank, Marty Sonnenberg, the Captain Matchbox Whoopee Band, the jazz-rock group Sun and many others I can´t recall or I've forgotten their names.
Live music was performed in the Cloud Room, the front gallery with white clouds painted on the azure-blue walls.
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| Jam session in the Cloud Room, Yellow House, circa September 1971. Left to right: Axel Sutinen (drums), Nicholas Lyon (bass), the visiting American artist Billy Preston (piano). Photograph: Greg Weight. |
There was, for example, this wild artist and musician Lindsay (Blue) Bourke who played his electric-organ with Wagnerian grandiosity ubiquitously everywhere, including once being the opening act for the Pink Floyd concert. He wasn't actually so involved with the Yellow House on a day-to-day basis, but that is still were I met him playing in the Cloud Room on many occasions.
And all the bohemian poets that hung around - people like the wildean Adrian Rawlins; the amazing Melbournian personality Patrick Alexander; and Roger Foley (Ellis D. Fogg) with his psychedelic light shows for the band Tully. All of these individuals where in the epicenter of the ebbs and flows of Sydney´s awakening awareness to new possibilities in the global countercultural zeitgeist. There were so many evenings and art-happenings, that to attempt to recall it all - and any descriptions in words - in hindsight does not really do it very much justice. You just had to be there, as it is in life in general.....
Occasionally some of the more intimate musical events were held upstairs in the Music Room on the top floor of the adjacent house, incorporated into the complete system via a “pop-cartoon-blast”-hole through a brick-wall in-between the houses.
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| Jon Lewis. Photo: Sam Bienstock |
The Music Room was where Nicholas Lyon, a classically trained British musician held more esoteric musical moments. Concerts in the Cloud Room included the Captain Matchbox Whoopee Band from Melbourne, Sun - a fusion jazz rock band, films by Albie Thoms and other underground filmmakers, many experimental theatre performances e.g. “Cop Out”, Jewellion´s Circus - a Commedia dell'arte-mimetroupe, and innumerable impromptu concerts with visiting musicians. The Pink Floyd held their press event in the Cloud Room at the beginning of their first Australian concert tour.
Pink Floyd, Sydney press conference and concert, GTK, ABC television, 15 August 1971.
Sebastian Jorgensen, who was a classically-trained guitarist, had recently arrived from London where he had just organised a free concert in Hyde Park featuring Pink Floyd and his own group “The Incredible Oz Band”. The Oz Band had broken up in London and Sebastian was now in the Yellow House starting a new band featuring all the members of the house. I ended up playing the drums. We had a whole evening's concert performance with everyone involved from the Yellow House at the Arts Factory. I recall one special moment from that evening´s show when Martin Sharp was dancing wildly, shaking a tambourine in front of the drum set that I was playing.
Albie Thoms, Akai Ghost Poems - a compilation of video footage from the Yellow House, July 1971. Compiled during 1995. Source: National Film and Sound Archive of Australia Collection. Reproduced with the permission of the Albie Thoms Estate.
Soon after that the Incredible Yellow House Band had it's “15 minutes of fame”, as we all went to play before an audience of thousands of people on the Grandstand stage of the Sydney Showgrounds, at a concert by the rock band Daddy Cool. We had at least 50 people all dressed up flamboyantly and dancing around the stage. Bruce Goold looked like a satyr with rams horns protruding out of his wild curly hair, Jonny had on a black top hat and tails and Bliss wore a huge floppy hat laden with feathers and balloons. We performed two rehearsed musical pieces and I recall the songs were named An Artists´ Life and the other one The Yellow House. I believe the audience were not expecting to see such an amazingly strange spectacle as that before the main act. The Sydney Morning Herald newspaper printed a photograph and article of our performance the next day to our great amusement.
Guests at the Yellow House were international celebrities like the American Beat-poet Allen Ginsberg, Mick Jagger, Pink Floyd, Warren Mitchell, Marty Feldman and many more Australian personalities and famous actors, among them Jack Thompson. Some of them were very pleasant and others where a bit more distant. David Litvinoff was a mythic figure always around Martin Sharp and was constantly playing his original American blues-tapes on his portable cassette player.
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| David Litvinoff. Photo: Sam Bienstock |
He generally held court around the garden and galleries telling us tales about all the famous people and rock-stars he knew and how he´d worked as script-advisor on the 1970 film Performance by Nicolas Roeg & Donald Cammell, starring Mick Jagger and James Fox. Martin had also been involved in creating the film´s visuals. One day I was very surprised and flattered when David presented me with a scarf that Mick Jagger had given to him.
On some days I sat at the front door collecting admission fees, or looked after Wendy and Brett Whiteley's little daughter Arkie in the back garden. At other times I was selecting and playing records in the little room next to the office where Martin spent most of his time. The record player and amplifier were there and all the speakers of the twin houses were connected to it. There were large P.A. speakers at the bottom of the staircase in the main entrance, so that loud music by T-Rex and Pink Floyd was blaring out most of the time, when the house was open and when there wasn´t a concert on in the Cloud Room
One day it was announced that Martin Sharp was leaving for London to paint a mural in the house of Keith Richard from The Rolling Stones. There was going to be a big farewell-party and I got involved helping to decorate the puppet-theatre for the evening´s event. David Litvinoff also was departing to go back to London. It was a great time had by all, but the very next day the doors of the house didn´t open for the public and Sebastian informed me that the fate of the place was threatened. After days of negotiations we managed to secure a continuation of the lease and started planning for the opening of the “Summershow - Chapter Three” of the Yellow House. Sebastian asked me to produce a poster design for the new exhibition season. I met a silkscreen-printer named Colin Little and we collaborated on the poster project. We thought of inventing a name for this team of two, coming up with “The Earthworks Poster Collective”.
I designed the complete layout and hand-cut the stencils for all the different colours, one for the black ink was a photographically-exposed stencil and then Colin printed it with my assistance. This we did at the Sydney University Tin Sheds Art Workshop in City Road, Darlington. It ended up actually being the start of many more printing projects during the years to come and an expanding collective of artists creating graphics at the Tin Shed studios
Victor Rubin was asked to put on an exhibition in the large gallery of the second building of the Yellow House. It was an art show of paintings in bright colours depicting ice-cream cones and flowers. Sebastian also asked him to paint a wall-mural on the theme of a “hot sunny day at the beach”, in another gallery room on the first floor of the main house. Sam eventually spent many nights driving Martin´s mini-moke to Bondi Beach collecting loads of sand into used wine-casket bags. I walked into the room the floor filled with beach-sand and saw Victor painting a Sydney harbour night-scene with boats and yachts, with reflections of the lights playing on the water all in very dark-blue tones and colours. Unfortunately I opened my mouth and tried to remind him about the mutually-agreed theme that was intended to be of a hot-day-at-the-beach. Victor reacted very surprisingly with tears in his eyes, some strong words were exchanged in a very tense manner and he then packed up his paints and stormed out of the room. (Eventually it took me many years to apologise to him at an exhibition opening of his in the 80s, and be on more friendly terms again).
I painted a smaller gallery room floor with all the silhouettes of the artists of the house. Each silhouette had different themes and colours related to the artist and his or her work. Very soon after the new Chapter 3 exhibition opening, the modernist avant garde music composer David Ahern held a “Musique Concrete” performance for one whole day in the house.
That day I walked in the house to an absolutely terrific noise and banging coming from all parts of the two buildings. It sounded like giant termites were eating the structure of the houses. There must have been at least 20 to 30 `musique-concrete musicians´ throughout the 3-story complex, all banging and grinding their instruments - bricks - on every wooden surface they could find. A well-to-do middle-aged lady was clutching a red brick with her two hands, scraping and hitting the floor that had the silhouettes that I´d just finished painting several days earlier. I admit I lost my cool asking her to stop destroying my art work and to please find another spot where to make her “music”, as I feared it was going to be totally hammered and rubbed out in the process. Later on in the day I had some embarrassing explaining to do to the composer Mr. Ahern.
Even though Martin's works of art were still in place and exhibited in the house, personally I felt the new art works by other artists along-side the earlier works were very different in quality. The previous shows in the house were probably more nostalgically orientated with appropriations of art from earlier periods of the 20th century, compared to the later Chapter 3 exhibition that definitely was filled with more closely related to site-specific” and installation art environments relating to the contemporary era. Of course different artists tend to produce widely diverse art works - that´s just the nature of creativity. But we did our best. Sam and his American friend Marty Sonnenberg created a small running waterfall set into a doorway and Tim Burns had painted the Puppet Room totally black, which I felt very sorry about. You had to walk into the pitch-black room until you stepped on a rubber mat and then suddenly blue-flashing lights and police-sirens went off revealing a realistic car-crash scene in the darkest corner. Then there was the Beach Room full of sand with bright spotlights and a large brightly coloured sun-parasol stuck in the middle of the room with deckchairs and sounds of seagulls - the exhibit with the ´anachronistic´ Victor Rubin harbour mural on the wall. Maybe it was just the right thing to do to make this installation work.
In another gallery, classic vintage movies like Fritz Lang´s 1927 film Metropolis where shown at regular intervals between projected slideshows of the Belgian artist M.C. Escher´s metamorphosing drawings. A downstairs gallery had my painted silhouettes on the floor and Victor Rubin had his own paintings hung in the largest gallery. Brett Whiteley exhibited a large painted portrait of the 17th century Dutch artist Rembrandt with his enlarged nose protruding in high-relief from the canvas.
Antoinette Starckiewicz´s paintings were in the Cloud Room and a perfume bottle installation by Boris Branwhite was set into a mirrored niche in the dark old Spooky Land area. There was a tiny totally white room where one could lie down on a bed of white sheets and have one´s face-mask done in plaster, while the amazing singing of the Inca princess Yma Sumac floated from underneath. Many other installations and exhibits filled both houses, including Roger Foley's Laser Infinity Room.
Sometime later Sebastian Jorgensen left the house to return back to Montsalvat - the medieval stone castle and village that his father had created near Melbourne. Despite the fact that Martin had left for London, most of his art and many personal effects were still left at the Yellow House. Sebastian had given the keys of the house to Roger Foley and asked him to keep an eye on the place. Apparently some of Martin´s things where being damaged and robbers were climbing in an stealing Martin's artworks. Also the electricity bill had not been paid. Roger was told LSD was involved and gangsters wanted to take over the place. That´s the reason why Roger had to eventually close the house.
Ian Hartley, a young activist involved with Tharunka - a student newspaper from the University of New South Wales - took over the daily running of the house and by then it started to feel like the original creative energy was beginning to diminish and wane away, with people leaving for other destinations one by one. I really don´t mean to imply Ian was responsible for any of this overall entropy, but the general impetus was in decline despite his great efforts to keep the house afloat.
One night a white haired, bearded old gentleman named Fred Robinson came to give a lecture about building alternative-communities and talked about the unbalanced state of the planetary ecosystem et al. It was a full house of young people eagerly wanting to hear about new sustainable ways of living. There were probable stories of a prophesised `Mega-Tsunami´, which was the very first time I even heard that term. It was going to hit Sydney and wash everything right up to the edge of the Blue Mountains. That caused a commotion in the audience, who all were probably trying to decide whether or not that it might be possible. I think that a lot of people decided then and there to try to leave the inner city and start small alternative communities in the countryside far away from the cities. I personally feel that that was the night the fate of the Yellow House was sealed and that the end was near. The focus had changed and the creative energy dissipated slowly. Soon afterwards I was the very last person living in the house, as I still hung on and believed in the idea of the place and didn´t want to abandon the house. Eventually Roger Foley came to ask me to vacate the premises explaining that the lease had expired and I reluctantly had to do so.
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| Alex at Nimbin, 1973. |
All this was just before the AUS (Australian Student Union) organised their first Alternative Arts Festival - t he Aquarius Festival - in the small northern NSW town of Nimbin in May of 1973. John Allen, who had previously been running the Arts Factory, was now heading the AUS along with Graham Dunstan. They were organising performers and artists to come together to promote the festival, calling their troupe the White Company.
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| The White Company at the 1973 Aquarius Festival. Source: Paul Joseph, Aquarian Archive. |
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Nimbin Aquarius Festival, 1973, ABC Television, Four Corners. Source: YouTube, duration: 9.46 minutes.
Most of the people involved in it were from, or had been affiliated with, the Yellow House and some others had been performing with the musical `Hair´. I was in turn asked by Johnny Allen to become a member of this troupe. So I became involved in performing and promoting the Aquarius Festival with this group travelling around all the university campuses in the eastern and southern cities of Australia. A lot of poster and flyer designs, and many other tasks like set designs and props, besides performing live everyday with the troupe, kept me very busy. So this ever-changing collective was in some manner a continuation of the Yellow House, but now on wheels, traveling together throughout the country in a big old bus. But that´s another story....
The fact that Sydney had been blessed with such an open-minded and artistic place for creative people of many genres, to show their works of art and perform their acts, made the Yellow House a very special place. A lot of the other venues like the Arts Factory had been more rock-orientated. The Filmmakers Co-op was geared for experimental filmmakers. All the traditional art galleries were catering for the mainstream art scene in a more commercially orientated way. The Yellow House was the hidden pearl in the crown of the countercultural alternative youth culture, an ´Art for Art´s sake´phenomena for a brief but significant period in time. It was unique in the modern cultural history of Australia. It flowed and crystallised into a jewel of Art, came to it´s full glorious flower and then very slowly began to fade. But the ideas didn't.
From my perspective the OZ magazine of the Sixties, created by Martin Sharp, Richard Neville and Jim Anderson, was a major precursor to the Yellow House, and then after that the Aquarius Arts Festival in 1973 took on the momentum of social change that has had an enormous effect on today's lifestyles and the modern social climate. I am very happy and honoured to have been a small part of something so significant and exciting, sparking for me personally a lifetime of artistic endeavours and various projects in many different countries. I can still feel the repercussions from that experience to this day.
Axel 'Asco' Sutinen
19 July 2016
References
Orwell, George, Down and out in Paris and London, Victor Gollancz, London, 1933.
Notes
* Greg Weight took a series of colour and black and white photographs of the Yellow House around September 1971, though the time period may have extended into early 1972. Sam Bienstock also took some colour photographs of the Yellow House around this period. Some of these images are used to illustrate this account.
* Victor Rubin's first exhibition of his art was at the Yellow House in 1971. Source: http://victorrubin.com/cv.html.
* Roger Foley closed the doors of the Yellow House around March 1973.
Last updated: 20 February 2024
Axel Sutinen & Michael Organ
Great read, and yes what a special special thing, Jo
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