illustrations, crying for attention to the wares of each little shop, grew from fairly discreet sign writing to huge placards and cut-outs. Hardly a section of external wall in the shopping streets was left without commercial announcements as Australians grew after the middle of the twentieth century into the most vigorous and undisciplined advertisers in the world.
Australians now were more prepared even than Americans to allow anyone with something to sell to take control of the appearance of their country. Nothing like the Fifth Avenue Association, or the Hawaiian ladiesâ organization, or the American Governmentâs control of advertisements on its freeways, could happen in Australia. The typical Australian small, prosperous town is all but smothered with advertising and in extreme examples of holiday towns like Surfersâ Paradise, Queensland, or Belgrave, Victoria, the buildings disappear beneath the combined burden of a thousand ornamental alphabets, coloured drawings and cut-outs added to their own architectural features. And meanwhile again the industrial areas keep developing their own separate Featurist style: the featured administration block thrust forward towards the street in front of the plain businesslike works, the featured painting of snow-gums on the feature wall in the featured lobby of the featured administration wing.
And look more closely. Follow the successful Featurist with his neatly creased jacket-sleeves and his four-button cuffs when he leaves the office in his two-tone Holden (light pink with plum feature panel) and goes home to have tea in the feature room: the room he calls the sun-room: the one that he used to call the back parlour, the one the American now calls the family-room.
The roomâs main feature is not really the feature wall in the yellow vertical v-jointed Pinus Insignus boards, nor the featured fireplace faced with autumnal stone veneer, nor the vinyl tiled floor in marbled grey with feature tiles of red and yellow let in at random, nor the lettuce-green Dunlopillo convertible day-bed set before the Queensland Maple television receiver, nor any of the housewifely features hung on the walls; nor the floor-stand ash-tray in chromium and antique ivory, nor even the glass aquarium on the wrought iron stand under the window. The real feature of the room is the tea-table, groaning with all kinds of good foods set in a plastic dream. The table top features hard laminated plastic in a pattern of pinks resembling the Aurora Australis. The tablemats are a lacework of soft plastic, the red roses in the central bowl are a softer plastic, the pepper and salt shakers are the hardest of all. And, soft or hard, all this plastic is featured in the most vivid primary pillar-box red, butter yellow, sky blue, pea green, innocent of any idea of secondary or tertiary tints, and all strikingly prominent against the pale, hot pastel tints of the flat plastic paint on the walls; all vibrating like a chromatrope beneath the economical brilliance of the fluorescent tubes on the ceiling. The main feature of the feature window is immediately apparent: the venetian blinds featured in a pastel tint. But look again and discover that this is more than one tint; every slat of the blinds is a different pastel hue.
And if you look more closely still you may discover, if this is a very up-to-date house, that every aluminium blade of the blind carries a printed pattern, perhaps of tiny animals done in Aboriginal style. Everywhere, the closer you look the more features you see, as in the old novelty picture of a man holding a portrait of himself holding a portrait of himself holding a portrait of himself, until the artistâs and the viewerâs eyesight fail.
The descent from the sky to a close view of modern Australia is a visual descent from serenity and strength to the violence of artistic conflict in a rich, competitive democracy. Featurism is not of course confined to Australia; it exists
Australians now were more prepared even than Americans to allow anyone with something to sell to take control of the appearance of their country. Nothing like the Fifth Avenue Association, or the Hawaiian ladiesâ organization, or the American Governmentâs control of advertisements on its freeways, could happen in Australia. The typical Australian small, prosperous town is all but smothered with advertising and in extreme examples of holiday towns like Surfersâ Paradise, Queensland, or Belgrave, Victoria, the buildings disappear beneath the combined burden of a thousand ornamental alphabets, coloured drawings and cut-outs added to their own architectural features. And meanwhile again the industrial areas keep developing their own separate Featurist style: the featured administration block thrust forward towards the street in front of the plain businesslike works, the featured painting of snow-gums on the feature wall in the featured lobby of the featured administration wing.
And look more closely. Follow the successful Featurist with his neatly creased jacket-sleeves and his four-button cuffs when he leaves the office in his two-tone Holden (light pink with plum feature panel) and goes home to have tea in the feature room: the room he calls the sun-room: the one that he used to call the back parlour, the one the American now calls the family-room.
The roomâs main feature is not really the feature wall in the yellow vertical v-jointed Pinus Insignus boards, nor the featured fireplace faced with autumnal stone veneer, nor the vinyl tiled floor in marbled grey with feature tiles of red and yellow let in at random, nor the lettuce-green Dunlopillo convertible day-bed set before the Queensland Maple television receiver, nor any of the housewifely features hung on the walls; nor the floor-stand ash-tray in chromium and antique ivory, nor even the glass aquarium on the wrought iron stand under the window. The real feature of the room is the tea-table, groaning with all kinds of good foods set in a plastic dream. The table top features hard laminated plastic in a pattern of pinks resembling the Aurora Australis. The tablemats are a lacework of soft plastic, the red roses in the central bowl are a softer plastic, the pepper and salt shakers are the hardest of all. And, soft or hard, all this plastic is featured in the most vivid primary pillar-box red, butter yellow, sky blue, pea green, innocent of any idea of secondary or tertiary tints, and all strikingly prominent against the pale, hot pastel tints of the flat plastic paint on the walls; all vibrating like a chromatrope beneath the economical brilliance of the fluorescent tubes on the ceiling. The main feature of the feature window is immediately apparent: the venetian blinds featured in a pastel tint. But look again and discover that this is more than one tint; every slat of the blinds is a different pastel hue.
And if you look more closely still you may discover, if this is a very up-to-date house, that every aluminium blade of the blind carries a printed pattern, perhaps of tiny animals done in Aboriginal style. Everywhere, the closer you look the more features you see, as in the old novelty picture of a man holding a portrait of himself holding a portrait of himself holding a portrait of himself, until the artistâs and the viewerâs eyesight fail.
The descent from the sky to a close view of modern Australia is a visual descent from serenity and strength to the violence of artistic conflict in a rich, competitive democracy. Featurism is not of course confined to Australia; it exists
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