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

TO BREATHE LIFE INTO THIS SPACE: OBJECTS WITH LIVES AND AGENCY

Breaking the Glass Case | Megan C. Mahon
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CW: This article contains mention of Canadian residential schools.

If you’re a Museum Studies student, it’s likely you’ve talked a lot about the ways that museums can better serve Indigenous communities, given that so many examples of traditional Indigenous art and cultural materials reside in Canadian institutions. Repatriation of these items – while one of this author’s favourite topics to expound on at length – will wait for another article. With this piece, I’d like to bring your attention to a novel agreement that’s been struck between an Indigenous artist and a certain (rather infamous, but that’s another story we all know) Canadian museum.

The Witness Blanket is a large-scale art installation made from hundreds of items reclaimed from churches, government buildings, and residential schools. The artist, master carver Carey Newman, is Kwakwak’awakw from the Kukwekum, Giiksam, and WaWalaby’ie clans of northern Vancouver Island, and Coast Salish from Cheam of the Sto:lo Nation along the upper Fraser Valley. The Blanket he and his team created stands as a national monument to the atrocities committed in residential schools, and symbolizes the work of ongoing reconciliation. It’s an incredibly moving piece: in addition to pieces from buildings which ran and operated residential schools, it contains personal items from survivors and weaves it all into a giant tapestry of tragedy, resilience, and hope.

The Witness Blanket. Source: The Canadian Museum for Human Rights. https://droitsdelapersonne.ca/histoire/picking-up-the-pieces-the-making-of-the-witness-blanket

The Blanket itself is marvel enough, but what deserves special attention – especially to us Museum Studies students – is the agreement behind its exhibition at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights. I see you twitching at the mention of that museum’s name, but I promise we won’t get into that whole sorry debacle here. The story is thus: after the Witness Blanket completed its cross-Canada tour, its creators knew that it needed a permanent home to rest and undergo conservation. However, they did not want to give the Blanket to the CMHR in a way that would imply the piece had one owner. So too, in order to reflect the spirit of truth and reconciliation in which the Blanket was created, they wanted to forge an alliance with the CMHR that did not reflect the traditional power imbalance between museums and Indigenous communities.

The agreement that resulted was unprecedented among museums. In a traditional gathering place on Vancouver Island, British Columbia, stakeholders and museum workers were invited to witness an oral ceremony that made Canadian museum history. For the first time ever, the Crown had ratified a binding legal document through Indigenous ways of knowing. The agreement struck between the CMHR and creators of the Witness Blanket would be put into effect using both written documents and oral agreements, both of which were given equal weight. Carey Newman described this groundbreaking contract as one that lives in two worlds, and joins Western and Indigenous traditions. But to my mind, that isn’t the only incredible part. The contract dictates that the Witness Blanket itself holds its own legal rights – not its creators or the museum where it will reside. This artifact, a physical testimonial to the horrors of residential schools and hope for a better future, has the right to its own story as an independent, living being.

This might sound strange to the majority of us who grew up thinking that museums owned artifacts, which were inanimate objects that were there to teach us about history. I know that’s how I grew up seeing objects in museums. But I think this unprecedented agreement is the first step to seeing artifacts in a different way, one that affords objects more agency. What does this mean for the future of museums?

When I heard about the agreement to treat the Witness Blanket as an object with its own life, I thought of this Robert Smithson quote: “Museums…are graveyards above the ground – congealed memories of the past that act as a pretext for reality.” And while I don’t entirely believe that this is true, I can’t deny that sometimes entering a museum does feel like entering a graveyard - not just because of the artifacts taken out of their contexts and placed behind glass cases, but because of the atmosphere of silence and the idea that we should be treating the space with quiet reverence. Quiet reverence doesn’t have to be a bad thing, but the idea that objects are living things with their own spirits – which many Indigenous cultures on Turtle Island have always known – opens up a whole new pathway of what museums can be.

In the context of this agreement, the Witness Blanket isn’t simply an art piece that commemorates those who never came home from residential schools. It’s a living thing with its own spirit and agency; it isn’t owned by a museum but stands as its own being. What would happen if we treated all museum objects this way? If we treated each artifact as something distinct, with its own life, deeply connected to the lives of those who made and used it?

We would be making museums safer spaces for Indigenous communities – and everyone else! We would be injecting emotional and spiritual care into the sometimes-sterile atmosphere of collections care. And we would be taking an important step down the road to museum reconciliation. If we have the courage to unlearn, a whole new era of interacting with objects is at our fingertips. With the precedent of the Witness Blanket set before us, now is the time to consider just how alive museums can really be.

Art and Archive: Reflections from the Information Desk

 Exhibition Reviews | Rachel Deiterding

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Having worked in numerous museums and galleries, I somehow always managed to avoid gallery sitting…. until this fall. In September 2021, I was one of two gallery sitters at Jess Dobkin’s Wetrospective at the Art Gallery of York University. For a month I spent 18 hours a week looking at the show, telling people about the show, and learning more about all its hidden secrets. I can’t think of many exhibitions that I’ve visited more than once, let alone spent more than 72 hours with, but the perpetual proximity of gallery sitting, this long-term visiting, had a way of revealing the life of the exhibition. I was watching it grow and listening to it breathe. It felt personal. Maybe like it was watching me back? 

Central to Jess Dobkin’s Wetrospective were the ideas of performance and archive. Jess Dobkin is a Toronto-based performance artist whose work facilitates uncomfortable encounters and is often created in dialogue with community. Using relics of past performances, the works were reimagined to produce multiple iterations of what a performance archive might look like. The exhibition was fueled by the tension of simultaneously looking at the past, the present, and the future. Thinking about the afterlife of the archive, the exhibition “demands of archives what we expect from performance: the live encounter of experience in a ritual of transformation.” (Emelie Chhangur, 2021)

Jess Dobkin's Wetrospective, installation view, 2021 | Documentation by Yuula Benivolski |  Source

 

The thing about spending so much time with a show is that you start to form an intimate relationship with the space. Initially, the space felt overwhelming. There was so much to look at that each time you entered new details emerged, elements I had never seen before. The consistency of these discoveries was almost comical. Like the exhibition itself was consciously sharing these details, leaving these easter eggs, posing questions, and forcing reflection. Soon it felt absurd that someone might visit the show only once, walk through in 20-minutes or less and never return, leaving stones unturned.

Jess Dobkin's Wetrospective, installation view, 2021 | Documentation by Yuula Benivolski |  Source

My favourite parts were the corners. Not only is this where many of the plugs were hidden, which I used to power up the exhibition each day and tuck it in for the night, but the corners also housed messy bits of the archive, teeming with life - a mix of loose sketches, notes, another ephemera. A seemingly uncatalogued history, but a history nonetheless. Beyond getting acquainted with the energy of the space, gallery sitting also brings you into an interesting relationship with visitors. Interacting with each person, you learn a bit about them and, through that interaction, a little bit about the show. In the second week of September, as students were returning to campus, a family of four came into the gallery. After I warned them of the show's mature content, the mother and daughter went in, warily, and the father and the young son waited outside. While the father bragged about his daughter entering university and the success she was sure to find as a landscape painter, she emerged from the gallery, eyes wide. “That was vulgar,” she said. “Exactly,” I said. The space told me nothing more was required. We blinked at each other. Sometimes people get it and sometimes they don't.

Jess Dobkin's Wetrospective, installation view, 2021 | Documentation by Yuula Benivolski |  Source

Perhaps it was the performative nature of the show that made it feel alive. Or the archivists that animated the back room, producing a constant physical presence. But even with the gallery empty and the lights off, there was a sense of tension in the space. Like it was waiting for me to turn my back to come alive, to get into all kinds of archival imagining and experiments. It felt a bit like Toy Story. Of course, this didn’t happen, but at the same time, maybe it did? One evening I got an email from a colleague. It was a "gallery update" that concluded by saying: “I should let you know that one of the boobs in the lactation bar isn’t working very well, so we have one boob working fine and the other is dribbling. I guess it's more relatable? Like its more realistic to actual breast feeding? Idk.” As I was refilling the fish tank that powered the lactating breasts the next morning I knew that the exhibition was alive, that it was playing a bit of a prank on me. I was grateful for it. 

These details had almost slipped from my memory. I chalked them up to too much introspection; it’s just gallery sitting after all. It wasn’t until I was in a new gallery, in a new exhibition that I started to feel the viscerality of the space again, a connection being formed. Undoubtedly, exhibitions take on their own lives, and we have much to learn by being attentive to them. So, here I am, sitting in more exhibitions and trying to look and listen closely to uncover just what they might be trying to tell me.

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?