THE ENDURING RELEVANCE OF PIONEERING OCCULT ARTIST ROSALEEN NORTON

She's My Muse | Neshan Tung

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"I came into this world bravely, I'll go out bravely."

~ Rosaleen Norton, artist, occult practitioner, daughter of Pan, before her death in 1979

Rosaleen Norton has only recently begun to get the cultural recognition she deserves. Despite being a tremendously influential and defining artist of the mid 20th century, Rosaleen’s unapologetic artistic legacy remains relatively obscure compared to her counterparts. Perhaps this has to do with how she was outcasted, crudely mocked and relentlessly hounded by the media. She was branded by most as a depraved, satanic witch. In the 1940s and 1950s, she became a national fascination and was perceived as a major threat to the social norms and moral orthodoxy of a predominately Christian Australia. Her artwork, tragically misunderstood, was torched by the government, confiscated by police and censored by major museums and galleries in Melbourne. She remains the only Australian artist whose work was physically destroyed by order of the courts. Rosaleen also faced charges of obscenity for her provocative paintings depicting Greek gods and goddesses, female sexuality and ritual magic. In a recently made film about the artist, director Sonia Bible proclaims that Rosaleen was once “the most persecuted artist in Australia.”

Rosaleen Norton with one of her paintings, c. 1945-1950. Source.

Born in Dunedin, New Zealand in 1917 and plagued with spiritual visions as a child, Rosaleen had always been fascinated by the otherworldly. What seems now to be an instance of cosmic foreshadowing, at 14 she was expelled from school for supposedly corrupting fellow schoolgirls with her “deviant” drawings. By her twenties, Rosaleen was mastering her occult and artistic skills, practicing Aleister Crowley trance magic and creating paintings that fused her search for transcendence with her spiritual beliefs. Being openly bisexual – in addition to her unconventional appearance, love for animals, bohemian lifestyle and penchant for worshipping and painting figures like Pan (a Greek god who resembles and is often mistaken for Lucifer) – made her a true outsider amidst the hyper conservative landscape of mid-century Australia. A 1949 exhibition of her work held at the Rowen-White Library in the University of Melbourne ended with a police raid and charges of obscenity. Later, her book The Art of Rosaleen Norton with poems by Gavin Greenlees (published by Walter Glover in 1952) was heavily censored in Australia and banned in America, and resulted in Glover also facing charges.

Rosaleen Norton with her cat, c. 1950. Source.

Even though she was admired by visionaries like Carl Jung and Kenneth Anger, the scope of Rosaleen’s far-reaching cultural impact has yet to be fully realized and appreciated. She was a subversive, fearless artist who spearheaded a path forward for generations of eccentric and bold female artists to be themselves. Her unprecedented body of work has endured despite decades of backlash and unlawful attempts at suppression. Over half a century later, her art has begun to slowly resurface in various Australian exhibitions— such as one held in 2000 that was solely dedicated to the display of her paintings in Kings Cross, Sydney (where she lived most of her life) by enthusiasts of her work. Others include the S.H. Ervin Gallery’s Windows to the Sacred: An Exploration of the Esoteric in 2013, and the City Gallery Wellington’s Occulture: The Dark Arts in 2017.

Rosaleen Norton sketching, c. 1945-1950. Source.

Despite renewed interest in Rosaleen, her work is not easy to access. Other than a handful of articles and images on Google, there is no widely accessible digital archive documenting her work, nor is it featured in any permanent exhibitions. Most of it resides in archives, private collections and rare books that are hard to come by. Rosaleen’s legacy and life’s work could have easily been lost to history. That begs the question: how many brilliant female artists have we lost due to museum censorship and government persecution? How can we ensure that the bodies of work produced by visionary artists who challenge the status quo are not lost due to museum practices that support nationalistic agendas? How can we reconcile with the fact that exclusion and censorship remain prevalent issues in museum spaces, and what can we do about it? All of us have the responsibility to continuously challenge and unsettle cultural institutions by questioning what gets to be remembered and who is included.

                                        Rosaleen Norton in Kings Cross, Sydney, c. 1943. Source.

References:

https://whatmagicisthis.com/2020/04/10/rosaleen-norton/

https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-why-rosaleen-norton-the-witch-of-kings-cross-was-a-groundbreaking-bohemian-154184

https://hyperallergic.com/144377/a-documentary-for-the-witch-of-kings-cross-australias-persecuted-occult-artist/

https://archive.org/details/bookofliesthedisinformationguidetomagickandtheoccult/page/n431/mode/2up?q=rosaleen+norton

https://www.talesfromthegrave.org/post/an-artist-who-practiced-the-occult-and-worshipped-pan

https://magazine.artland.com/the-fear-of-art-contemporary-art-censorship/

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2021/feb/09/sex-magic-occult-art-and-acid-the-story-of-the-infamous-witch-of-kings-cross

HONG KONG M+ MUSEUM OPENING AMID CENSORSHIP CONTROVERSY

Muse News | Avigayil Margolis

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As I write this article, Hong Kong’s M+ museum is scheduled to open in one day. M+ is Asia’s first museum of contemporary art, built to rival the Tate Modern and Metropolitan Museum of Art. On Friday November 12th, the museum will open, displaying 1,500 works from its collections of 6,413 to the public for the first time.

Two months ago, the museum was struck by a controversy regarding its choice not to display Ai Weiwei’s Study of Perspective: Tian’anmen (1997) which features the artist raising a middle finger at Bejing’s Tiananmen Square, in its online collection. Tiananmen was the site of a massacre by the People’s Liberation Army against peaceful pro-democracy protesters on June 4, 1989, resulting in thousands of deaths, injuries and arrests, as well as a massive government cover-up. This photograph was one of several pieces criticized by pro-Beijing politicians and media as inciting hatred against China, a violation of national security law.

 

A screenshot featuring Ai Weiwei's work on the M+ website with a Study of Perspective: Tian'anmen replaced with a grey image unavailable square. Courtesy of Avigayil Margolis.

Other pieces from the Study in Perspective series remain visible in the online collection even though they are not on display in the museum, so Tiananmen’s absence is glaring. Ai’s 2003 Map of China which features wood from Qing Dynasty temples and celebrates China’s cultural diversity has also been removed from the online collections. However, Whitewash (1995-2000), containing 126 Chinese Neolithic jars painted over by Ai is still being displayed during the museum’s opening and likely serves as a major draw due to the artist’s international fame.

Ai Weiwei has always been a highly political artist who criticized the Chinese government. In 2011 he was arrested and detained for 81 days, after which the government continued to watch him and restrict his movement by taking away his passport until 2015 when he was finally able to leave and moved to Berlin, Germany. His documentary Cockroach (2020) films the 2019 Hong Kong anti-extradition protests, empathizing with the youth fighting against an authoritarian government. His vocal support of the protests may be one reason his art is being specifically highlighted by politicians and media.

"China faces a massive problem if the youth of Hong Kong continues to protest," Ai said in a 2019 interview with the Hong Kong Free Press. "It is a challenge that alarms the rest of the world as to what kind of society China is. If they don’t stop the protests, the democratic voice will get louder and there will be better conditions for freedom. But how can they stop them? Hong Kong is not just another Chinese city. If that were the case, the military would have moved in and crushed it immediately. There would not be any media coverage or international attention. This already happens all the time in China. Hong Kong is different."

Looking back to protests against his own secret detention, during which artists posted his picture and name throughout the city to demand his release, Ai describes Hong Kong’s protests as "the most beautiful. They are so peaceful, rational, and those taking part are so young."

An activist holds a doll, toy handcuffs and drawing of the detained Ai Weiwei in front of a police officers during a Hong Kong protest demanding his release. Photo: Laurent Fievet/AFP

The museum’s decision to remove the controversial pieces raises serious questions about censorship in the museum field and what our role is as museum professionals.

"This is the first contemporary museum in Hong Kong, so therefore, I want to ensure that the message is clear so that people don’t think that we are above the law," Henry Tang, the head of the West Kowloon Cultural District which includes M+ said at the museum’s opening ceremony. But does the argument of just following the law really hold weight when the law is unjust?

M+ director Suhanya Raffel had earlier said that the museum would have no problem showing works by dissident artists. This has held true in some regards, with local artist South Ho’s photographs of the city’s 2014 Occupy Central protests and Kacey Wong’s Paddling Home installation which represents his exile from Hong Kong to Taiwan to due his democracy activism both featured in the museum. M+’s agreement to remove the criticized artworks may have prevented a harder government crackdown which targeted more art or prevented the museum from opening to the public entirely. On the other hand, there is an inevitable dishonesty to only allowing government approved dissidence.

Ai Weiwei has criticized the museum for capitulating to censorship. "When you have a museum which cannot or is incapable of defending its own integrity about freedom of speech, then that raises a question. And certainly the museum cannot perform well in terms of contemporary culture," he told Reuters during a phone interview.

This raises the question of where a museum’s obligations to support freedom of speech end. Can a museum choose to break the law of the country where it is situated? Is it worthwhile for a museum to sacrifice a few high attention controversial pieces to allow itself to stay open and display a multitude of other important artworks?

There are no easy answers to this question of course. As museum professionals, we must work to maintain our own ethics and integrity, but we are still members of our countries and societies, subject to the laws and punishments that accompany them. Living in Canada with our rights to free speech and a fair trial, it is easy to say that we would defy any government censorship laws that targeted our museums. But how many of us would really risk jail time for our work? And should we even be expected to?

THE PROBLEM WITH MIN: A TEMPLE WALL, A MAN, A MEMBER

Object of the Week | Caitlin McCurdy

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During my undergraduate degree, I spent a lot of time studying one deity, the mysterious fertility/agricultural deity Min. He was of particular interest because his visual depictions often caused confusion, misinterpretation, and in the case of one temple wall fragment — outright censorship. This particular artifact is a segment of a temple wall from Koptos, a site in Upper Egypt and a major worship center for Min. Currently, the wall is housed in the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology in London, England. The Middle Kingdom wall depicts Pharaoh Senwosret I in a ceremonial run before Min. Min is shown standing tall before the pharaoh, fully erect.

Temple Wall UC14786 as it's currently displayed at the Petrie Museum of Art and Archaeology. (Photograph courtesy of Caitlin McCurdy)

The reasonings for his ithyphallic depictions have been debated at length. Some argue it demonstrates his, and by extension the pharaoh’s, sexual virility. This line of thinking is supported flimsily by the belief that a type of Egyptian lettuce — also an emblem of Min — works as an aphrodisiac. Without going on too long of an aside, this is not my belief. After doing an independent study project on Min, I believe he serves a more agricultural purpose. That he is always depicted erect, demonstrates more of a metaphorical seeding across the fields of Upper Egypt. 

Artist Depiction of Min. | Source

His presentation has proved to be the largest problem for his treatment in Egyptology museums. Not to mention that it’s basically impossible to consider his presentation as anything less than sexual for the modern viewer. It further complicates the understanding of this deity when one considers that this temple wall was found in 1893, during the height of Victorian morality in England. This time period invoked moral panic around the realms of nudity and the middle class.

The Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology was founded during the height of Egyptomania in England and during extensive colonial projects in the country. Amelia Edwards, a British author and “collector” of Egyptian artifacts, donated her collection to University College London in 1892, establishing the museum and cementing the legacy of the man who would be its first director and namesake.

William Flinders Petrie, | Source

William Flinders Petrie was a founding figure in British Egyptology during the late 19^th century. There is ample evidence that Petrie allowed his own ideals of British purity and racial hierarchy to inform his work in Egypt. If modern museums are to interrogate their position as objective and neutral caretakers of non-Western artifacts, Petrie set out to do the exact opposite of that. His personal voice and views permeated the exhibitions he created.

The temple wall currently in question was considered a problem immediately upon its arrival in London. Petrie’s solution was to create a label just large enough to cover Min’s erection, and place it directly onto the slab. This was considered sufficient to appease the sensibilities of the university population, who, at the time, was the museum’s only and desired elite audience. Referred to as a museological fig leaf, the label remained where it was from 1893, allegedly into the 1970s.

Min Censored. | Source

The temple wall in the Petrie museum may be an extreme historical example of a curator or director’s personal beliefs preventing an unbiased display from taking place, yet it also highlights the potential pitfalls of displaying an ancient culture from a modern perspective. Egyptology in itself is a colonial institution, its foundation taking place during Britain’s violent imperial actions in Egypt. How do you begin to decolonize an institution such as this? The knowledge of ancient Egypt is informed by a history of unequal contact between a colonial power and the modern civilization living where the ancient once stood. If Min’s treatment in the Petrie museum can reveal anything, it’s that the colonial roots of museums have perhaps prevented some knowledge from being fully revealed because the knowledge contained information considered unacceptable by colonial power’s social mores. 

ALLOWING "PUSSY" IN THE LIBRARY: ART CONTROVERSY ACROSS GLAM SPACES

GLAM Guide | Evelyn Feldman

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Much of this post is informed by Amy Arsenio and Diane Macklin of Markham Public Library's inspiring session at the Ontario Library Association Super Conference 2019, titled Defending Pussy: How Two Recent Public Art Controversies Challenged us to Change the Way We Think About and Defend Art in our Spaces.

The events: Censored to uncensored

From March 2-30 2018, the Markham Village branch of the Markham Public Library displayed Yafang Shi's exhibition Marching for Gender Equality: Voices, Movement and Empowerment. The exhibition featured 51 photographs from the January 2017 Toronto Women's March, including two photos that captured signs containing the word "pussy."

Wikimedia Commons, Toronto Women's March. Source. 

The library received complaints even as the art was going up. These complaints were largely regarding the art's child-appropriateness (although the photographs were not displayed in the children's section). The branch left the photographs up for the exhibition's opening panel on March 2, but then took down the two photographs containing the word "pussy."

At their conference session, Amy Arsenio and Diane Macklin described how these complaints followed directly on the heels of a previous controversial exhibit, which had contained a drawing of two nude men depicted from the chest up. In the first situation, the staff involved had been prepared for objections, had weathered them, and had left the art up, though they admitted during the conference session that it had been emotional for both the staff and artist involved.

They had been less prepared to receive complaints about the Yafang Shi's photographs, having barely noticed the word "pussy" hidden in two of them. This perhaps led to a more emotional and reactionary response to complaints.

A few weeks following the removal of the art, pressure to restore the photographs arose from sources such as the American Library Association. The library retracted and put the two photographs back up, apologizing for the act of censorship and acknowledging their fault. News media including the Globe and Mail picked up the story, conveying a dramatic tone at the library's act of censorship--while ironically themselves censoring the word "pussy."

Markham Public Library, Markham Village branch. Source.

Following the re-installation of the two photos, the branch, at Yafang Shi's request, held a discussion about censorship hosted by the artist. And, most recently, two of the staff members involved presented about the events at the Ontario Library Association Super Conference.

The library censored this. Right or wrong?
We're hosting a public conversation with @yafangshi about #censorship, #womensrights & the challenges that come with #publicart contextualized by her photo exhibit on the Women’s March.
Join us at Markham Village branch on March 28, 7pm. pic.twitter.com/oKyO1gBWbO

— MarkhamPublicLibrary (@markhamlibrary) March 27, 2018

Cross-cutting GLAM questions

Across GLAMs, our institutions face challenges related to censorship and controversial content, although for libraries these challenges are more often directed towards their books.

"Just as a library's uncensored collection says 'all these stories matter,' so too does an uncensored art exhibit" - lessons learned by the Markham Public Library after weathering the art controversies last year. A brave admission of where mistakes were made!" #olasc

— Vicky Varga (@vixvarga) January 30, 2019

At the conference session, questions arose that cut across our GLAM fields. How do we prepare staff for art that may be controversial? What do we give to front-end staff to help them be ready for any complaints they may receive? How do we write art policies that prepare our institutions to face these situations?

How much should GLAMs need to satisfy the demands of their communities? Is it our duty to create spaces in which visitors are comfortable, or spaces in which visitors are challenged?

Our expectations of spaces

These events also show the importance of considering context: viewers will have different responses to art depending on the space it is in, whether Gallery, Library, Museum, or public art in our own neighbourhoods.

How do our expectations of spaces change how we perceive the art in them? While visitors go to galleries and art museums expecting to view things that educate, surprise, or unnerve them, they might be going to the library for a peaceful study space, to use the internet, or to pick up a book. Art displayed in libraries faces different challenges and considerations to art in museums or galleries.

As Arsenio and Macklin noted in their session, many patrons feel a sense of ownership of the library. The library feels like it belongs to everyone. Libraries can be spaces of comfort or security, and having that security questioned by art that challenges us can be jarring.

For me, these events show a common concern across GLAMs relating to the display of controversial content, and how we can share questions and approaches relating to such situations. But at the same time, the events also show a key difference between GLAMs--our spaces are not the same, and patrons or visitors expect to encounter different types of content when entering them.