art
A STRANGE NEW LAND
Robert Holden
Anita Callaway
Visual Ephemera: Theatrical Art in Nineteenth-Century Australia
UNSW $49.95hb, 227pp
0 86840 634 1
THESE PAST FEW WEEKS I have been a traveller in a strange new land. I had thought that the terrain -- nineteenth-century colonial art history -- was familiar and charted territory which I had often traversed before. But the strangeness of my journey came from an original and fascinating viewpoint that claims to subvert all previous art historiography.
The author lays claim to new territory:
This book attempts to reinvent the history of Australian visual culture as a richer, more positive and more cogent story than the one we are used to. It is not strictly an art history. It is as much a history of performance and spectacle as of orthodox painting.
Here is the warning implicit in the title: this is 'art' created for effect and not for posterity; this is 'art' from the street, the stage and the ballroom.
Visual Ephemera thus ranges across varieties of nineteenth-century Australian visual culture which have either been unacknowledged or dismissed as irrelevant to our very concept of art. These are the ephemeral works of the title: transparencies, tableaux, waxworks, painted dance-floors, panoramas, daring poses plastiques and theatrical scenery -- hardly examples of validated High Art. In the light of this re-invention it should therefore come as no surprise to discover that the Centre for Cross-Cultural Research at the Australian National University encouraged this research.
The author makes a provocative yet well substantiated claim:
The lack of art museums and of grand paintings to fill them did not condemn colonial Australians to visual penury. The elevated ideals and cultural traditions that High Art images normally conveyed...were found...[in] transparency painting.
These transparencies were very large illuminated paintings usually designed for outside night viewing and created on lightweight fabric treated with clear size. In this way the colours remained on the surface rather than being absorbed into the cloth. When lit from behind they glowed in the dark with much the same effect as stained glass.
Perhaps the earliest colonial exposure to this spectacle occurred in 1811 when John Lewin was commissioned by Governor Macquarie to decorate his vice-regal ballroom and recreate Regency civilisation in penal conditions. Later colonial novelties included a large scale (16' x 21') Neptune and his tritons and nymphs conveying the young Duke of Edinburgh to our shores in 1867, an immense gloating dragon (102' long) on Sydney Harbour in 1868, 'living statues', bizarre and (for the time) titillating stage displays, waxworks of the dead Burke and Wills and tableaux vivants of iconic Australian oil painting. (Before I too hastily thought of these discoveries as colonial kitsch, I even recalled our own New Year's Eve festivities to welcome the year 2000.)
There is another example of ephemera, admittedly outside the scope of Callaway's book, which has yet to receive equally painstaking research. Illustrated supplements to the colonial press (usually Christmas offerings), sometimes lavishly printed in double-page colour spreads, really brought art of one form or another into more colonial homes than anything in Callaway's catalogue. These supplements included topographical panoramas, sentimental genre scenes and popular nationalistic illustrations. High Art examples, like the Christmas number of the Sydney Mail in 1903 which presented the reader with a colour print of Lambert Across the Black-Soil Plains, were also offered.
Most issues of these newspapers today are found without these supplements: they were extracted, as they were meant to be, and became part of a humble gallery in bush huts, colonial cottages and city drawing-rooms. We await an equally inspired researcher of this art for the masses -- someone to complete the story by including this ephemera in another fascinating re-write of colonial experience.
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Return to Australian Book Review /September 2000