Venus in Tullamarine: Norman Lindsay Now
Thursday, 1 December 2022 at 12:00:00 am UTC
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Session Convenors
Cameron Hurst
Session Speakers
Professor Ian McLean, University of Melbourne
Cameron Hurst
Robert Vidas, Monash University
Norman Lindsay (1879-1969) was a prolific, popular and controversial Australian artist. He is best known for his children’s book The Magic Pudding and his skilled prints, which mostly draw on Greek and Roman mythology and 19th century literature and philosophy. The white Australian cultural consciousness is indelibly marked by Lindsay’s output, his prominence in the Sydney bohemian intellectual scene around figures like Rose Lindsay, Ken Slessor and Francis Webb and The Magic Pudding, which entrances the imagination of generation after generation of Australian children. This consciousness is marked too by the paradoxical conjunctions of Lindsay’s life: artistic bohemia and fascistic tendencies, avant-gardism and the rule of law, libertinism and conservatism, worship and denigration.
Panellists will examine Lindsay’s current position in Australian art history, building on research conducted during Venus in Tullamarine, an exhibition of the University of Melbourne’s Norman Lindsay collection held at the George Paton Gallery in 2022.
Normalising Norman
Professor Ian McLean, University of Melbourne
Norman Lindsay was very much in his time, but he is way out of ours. A century ago, he was a celebrity and his genius was widely admired; today his art appears fatuous and irrelevant.
Because few Australian artists have fallen so low from such height, Lindsay’s fate reveals the full force of what keepers of the canon i.e., art historians, do. Additionally, Lindsay’s celebrity—a rare achievement for an Australian artist—means his art touched a nerve in the public psyche. Hence, it is not just his art but a whole zeitgeist that has slid from view. It is kept from view by a new retrospectively reordered canon that now represents and speaks for these times. This is the work of art historians: each new generation renovates the canon to fashion a moral lineage for its own celebrities. Most difficult to predict is which artist will survive future taste. In my view, Norman Lindsay didn’t. His fate was to be the sacrificial victim of an oedipal culling that follows the aspirations of a new generation responding to their situations in the mid-20th century (with Bernard Smith wielding the sharpest scythe).
Today, when artists are held ever more accountable for their values, Lindsay has as much likelihood of being recouped as the Empire from which he sought to be free. His only chance of return is as an ironic figure of transgression, but who today would go there?
Norman Lindsay is: Absolute Evil, Women's Liberation, Queer?
Cameron Hurst
Norman Lindsay is due for revival. Of what kind, however, remains a vexed question. How should an emerging generation of Australian art historians critically approach his legacy—and the substantial collections of his artworks in nearly all major institutions? One way is to understand Lindsay as a foil for the sexual politics of any given decade. He has been an ungodly pervert (1900s), a sensual genius (1910s), an ally to the lesbian separatist contingent of the Women’s Liberation Movement (1970s) and prolific lech with a printing press (2000s). Analysing the display, reproduction and interpretation of Lindsay’s art across disparate periods gives insight into what the film scholar Elena Gorfinkel has termed “dated sexuality,” an approach wherein “the taste for history’s residue coalesces with a taste for the erotic horizons of past audiences and sexual subjects.” What does the cyclical return of Lindsay’s libidinally charged work illuminate about successive Australian generations’ discourses of sexuality? How does the meaning of Lindsay’s prints change as they travel from contexts as disparate as Oz magazine in London 1971 to Queer: Stories from the NGV in Melbourne 2022? This paper will look closely at works exhibited in Venus in Tullamarine.
Norman's Bacchanalia: Classical Revolutionaries and Antipodean Arcadians
Robert Vidas, Monash University
Of the many influences upon Norman Lindsay’s work and philosophy, the ancient civilisations of Greece and Rome stand out as possibly the most profound and long-lasting. From among the many subjects of Antiquity in which he revelled, it was the bacchanalia that became one of his most frequent expressions of the classical past. The celebration of the god Dionysus (Bacchus) was embraced as the visual manifestation of Norman’s Nietzschean vitalist philosophy and his dream of transforming Interwar Australia (1919-39). The body of work based on this theme is also representative of his qualities as a thinker and artist. He demonstrated a brilliance of technique in execution yet held a narrow vision in meaning, and promoted a radical Arcadianism in the celebration of libertarianism but practised a discriminatory elitism as to who could partake in his revolution. Despite this significance, Norman’s classicality has been, with only a few exceptions, underplayed in Australian art scholarship. Through an examination of specific examples from both before and during the Interwar period, this presentation seeks to redress such absences by exploring these aspects of Norman’s work and placing his efforts in the context of the cultural phenomenon of Australian Classicism.
Biographies
Professor Ian McLean, University of Melbourne
Ian McLean is Hugh Ramsay Chair of Australian Art History at the University of Melbourne. He has published extensively on his research interests in transcultural expressions and the invention of national traditions, particularly in Australian art.
Cameron Hurst
Cameron Hurst recently completed Honours in Art History at the University of Melbourne. She is a contributing editor of Memo Review, the managing editor of Index Journal, teaches art history and cultural studies undergraduate subjects across Monash University and the University of Melbourne and is the curator of Venus in Tullamarine, an exhibition of the University of Melbourne's Norman Lindsay collection. She also co-hosts a arts radio show, Clam and Jackie Bam, from Crawl Radio in the Collingwood Yards Arts Precinct.
Robert Vidas, Monash University
Robert Vidas has over two decades of teaching experience in History and Visual Art at TAFE and university levels. He holds a Bachelor a Fine Arts (Painting major), Graduate Diploma of Secondary Education (Art and Craft), and a Postgraduate Diploma in Arts (History). He is currently completing a PhD in Art History at Monash University on the question of Classical influences upon Australian visual culture during the Interwar period (1919-39). This concerns the causes for the interest of Australian intellectuals and artists in a native Classicism, what ideas or conceptions of Classicism they had, and how it was physically manifested.