Fantastical Scenes: Queering the Collection by Dr Ariella Van Luyn
In 1929, Howard Hinton made his first donation of art to the Armidale Teachers’ College.[1] His gift would be the first of many. This exhibition ‘queers’ Hinton’s bequest as well as the other collections now held at the New England Regional Art Museum (NERAM). This act of queering an existing artistic assemblage, an archive of a kind, makes visible the links between queer lives and artistic practices in Australia in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In this sense, NERAM’s collections demonstrate that Howard Hinton’s intention to ‘illustrate the development of Australian art from 1880’[2] can manifest in multiple ways, perhaps beyond what he imagined.
The challenges of queer art history
Understood as a verb and a noun, the word queer is both an umbrella term for a range of identities outside of heterosexuality and binary genders and a practice of resisting social pressure to conform to normative ways of being and expressing self. This understanding of queer did not emerge until 1990 when Teresa de Lauretis described it in an academic conference.[3] Although many of the works in the NERAM collection were created before this time, historian Kit Hayem has made the argument that it is possible to understand historic lives through a queer lens by considering both the voices of the subject’s themselves and attuning to evidence of non-normative modes of being in their biographies.[4]
So, queering the collection has involved seeking artists’ voices, reading the biographies of Australian artists whose works NERAM holds, and investigating the ways these artists engaged in artistic practices that might resist dominant ways of being or offer new possibilities for expression. Reading artists’ biographies alongside their work can sometimes be challenging, even uncomfortable. As Hayem also notes,[5] imposing contemporary labels on the past is inherently an imprecise act. Some queer artists wished their private lives to be kept private, knowing that their identity could mean exclusion from gallery spaces, while euphemistic terms like ‘close friend’ often hide a spectrum of non-heterosexual modes of relating.[6] For example, Peter McNeil, lead researcher for a project titled The First Homosexuals: Connecting Australian Art and Design to the World summarises some of the challenges in queering collections of Australian art:
Much of queer traces reside in illustration, caricature, the decorative arts and design. Second, Australian [people] were circumspect in a nation where male homosexuality was criminalised colony by colony, with South Australia the earliest state to decriminalise in 1975…we are often working with fragments or pieces that suggest a queer identity we can never prove.[7]
In addition, while not naming queer artists risks erasure, outing queer artists risks essentialising and erasing complexity and context.[8]
Returning to the collection also highlights how Indigenous people are often silenced or excluded from queer histories and archival assemblages.[9] For example, in the 1990s, divisions existed between the First Nations community and the queer community in Australia.[10] Nor can such an exhibition ever capture the breadth and diversity of queer artistic practice. Still, this act of queering the collection reveals that, in Australia, queer artists and their work are deeply tied to the wider art movements of modernism, surrealism and abstraction, themselves attempts to subvert the existing social structures implicated in industrialisation, global warfare and climate change.
The Artists’ Ball and the bohemian carnival
Historians of queer history remind us that history matters to queer people, although re-remembering queer lives is a complex act. In Transgender Australia: A History Since 1910, Noah Riseman describes how the Artists’ Balls of the 1920s were formative to the queer scene in Australia.[11] The Artists’ Balls of Warrane (Sydney)[12] are historic events that resonate with ongoing traditions of expressions of queer joy. Taking the Artists’ Ball as a starting point for the themes of the exhibition provides a historical context for many of the artworks in the NERAM archive, which are a rich snapshot of modernist art practices in Australia, especially in Sydney and the surrounds. Yet, such a focus is by necessity exclusionary. The Artists’ Balls themselves were ticketed charity events attended by elite Sydney socialites as well as artists and models.[13] The Artists’ Balls were also only a brief moment of liberation from wider oppressive legislation and culture, as drag queen Karen Chant remembers when they describe the policing of clothing by Police at the end of balls in the 1950s.[14] The inherited Europe subculture from which these balls emerge, bohemianism,[15] appropriated stereotypical ideas about Romani culture that elided their lived experience of displacement; in France, and especially Paris, where the concept emerged in the 1830s, the word bohemién referred to Roma people mistakenly assumed to be from Bohemia (now part of the Czech Republic).[16] The concept, promulgated through literary texts, came to be a state of being and mode of living associated with artistic life as well as a resistance of dominant ways of being and thinking.[17] In Australia, many writers and artists embraced the label of ‘bohemian’; Bohemia’s ‘reification of the artist as hero…and the only true arbiter of aesthetic value buttressed artists’ campaigns for professional status.[18] The importation of such ideas to Australia reflected the networks of colonial exchange present amongst the settler culture, and which overlooked the thousands of years of rich Indigenous cultural practices in favour of imported traditions.
Sapphic Paris
Nonetheless, the exhibition reflects trends in queer art history in Australia. Amongst queer artists in Australia in the early 1900s, Paris and Europe held an allure as artistic hubs that were also more permissive and liberated, places where non-normative modes of being and doing could be expressed. This is evident in the biographies of the artists who identify as women in the early twentieth century.[19] In this era, women, much more than men, embraced modernist art and introduced it to Australia.[20] Their work was not without resistance; the conversative male hierarchy in Australian dismissed modernist art as insignificant.[21] The emergence of the ‘new woman’ figure in the 1920s meant some women embraced independence and mobility.[22] For women attracted to other women, Paris was seen as a place where such desires could be expressed.[23] Australian modernist artists including Agnes Goodsir, Margaret Preston, Grace Crowley, Mary Cockburn Mercer, Bessie Gibson, and Anne Dangar all travelled to Paris or other parts of Europe and lived and studied with other women during their time there.[24]
Any act of queering must be attuned to individual voices, especially if these voices are marginalised. The artists in this cohort of modernists drawn to sapphic Paris use terms to describe their same-sex relationships in ways that do not foreground sexual intimacy. These artists may not have perceived themselves as queer.[25] For Grace Crowley, Anna Dangar was a ‘staunch courageous pal,’ who bravely navigated their confrontation with the modernist work they encountered in Paris.[26] Crowley also rejected gendered roles and found Paris a place she could work outside of being a woman.[27] Margaret Preston asked Bessie Davidson to love her in an inscription in a book of poems.[28] Yet, their relationship ended when Margaret married Bill Preston in 1919.[29] Rather than attempt to pin down the exact nature of their relationships or assign a label to their identities, it is perhaps more meaningful to consider the ways these life narratives demonstrate the range of intimate, supportive and creative relationships possible outside of heterosexuality and binary gender identities and the way these relationships nourished and extended art practices in the interwar years.
Bohemian London
In the mid-1900s, a wave of gay male artists were drawn to London, including artists whose work NERAM houses. Amelia Barikin et.al. observe that this
horde of Australian gay middle-aged artists who ended up in London in the middle years of the 20th century—including Roy de Maistre, Loudon Sainthill, William Dobell and Godfrey Miller—seemingly had less difficulty recognising or articulating their sexuality, perhaps because it was still illegal.[30]
Peter Kirkpatrick describes London’s bohemianism in the 1920s onwards, arguing that, as aristocratic systems of patronage ended, the art industry was sustained by prosperous middle class and open market economy; in a sense, bohemianism is a product of capitalism.[31] London ‘as the first home of modern capitalism produced a romantic bohemian prototype.’[32] The conditions created an individualism where artists might perceive themselves as sages and visionaries.[33] Queer artists are caught up in these wider mechanisms of economies and the imaginaries they produced; the irony here is that bohemianism is a middle class production intended to transgress middle class values and normative modes of being.[34] Places implicated in the mechanisms of bohemian lifestyles generate their own magnetism. Indeed, McNeil notes that ‘many Australian artists became expatriates, not simply for the lure of Paris or London, but because they could experience a radically different social experience.[35] Throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, other queer artists represented in NERAM’s collections travelled to and lived in France, Britain and other parts of Europe, including Donald Friend,[36] Elioth Gruner and his partner Gordon Esling [37] and Michelle Collocott.[38]
Seacoasts and carnivals
It is hardly surprising then that the work of some queer artists work engage with the obsessions of bohemianism, even beyond the 1920s. For example, William Dobell’s Carnival[39] takes up two sites of queer bohemian fascination: the beach and carnivals. Hannah Freed-Thall argues that the beach is central to modern aesthetics and that ‘to think about the beach is to think about the history of sexuality.’[40] Beaches and coastlines are liminal and paradoxical sites, shorelines between industrialised geography and oceanic currents. Beaches can be emptied of people, free from social expectations or surveillance, as is the beach in Elioth Gruner’s untitled beach painting. They can also be industrialised and commodified such as in Roy de Maistre’s Study for the Boat Harbour. In contrast, Dobell’s beach is populated by a carnival crowd. Historian Tony Moore argues that the ‘Artists’ Balls of Sydney’s roaring twenties were the climax of a half-century long Australian bohemian carnival.’[41] Carnivals are ritualised events celebrating transitions between time and a space for dissent and subversion.[42] For queer artists, the ‘bohemian misrule’[43]of the carnival offers disruption of the status quo and an imaginary outside of time and normal rules.
Global warfare
Beyond the oppressive morals that regulated non-normative modes of desire and expression, queer artists were also suspicious of the ideologies that lead to global warfare. The two world wars profoundly affected Australian art practices. Many queer artists in NERAM’s collection had direct experience of war or created in respond to it. Gay artists Roy de Maistre, Adrian Feint and Loudon Sainthill, among others, served in the Australian forces. In another example, James Gleeson, who lived with his partner Frank O’Keefe for nearly sixty years,[44] experimented with surrealism in response to ‘the Depression, the rise of Fascism in Europe and the build-up to the Second World War.’[45] Inspired by Michelangelo and their shared identities as homosexual men, much of his work centres the male nude form, some modelled by his partner O’Keefe,[46] amongst tense scenes of apocalypse and mechanised destruction.
Contemporary anxieties
In the works of contemporary artists in NERAM’s collection, relationships with the more-than-human world emerge as another mode of queer resistance. Henri van Noordenburg’s Composition XXXV depicts a lone male figure, reminiscent of Gleeson’s male nudes, amongst a forest of gnarled eucalyptus, a sweep of clouds emerging from behind their branches. The highly charged atmosphere of the work, which suggest vulnerability isolation, loss and anxiety [47] suggest the person expression of wider cultural anxieties of climate change and the cultural distrust and devaluing of the natural world that led to it.
In contrast, Michelle Collocott’s abstract landscapes are sites of exploration, imagining and longing. Collocott is possibly the first recognised trans woman artist in Australia. Over the phone, Collocott describes how in her childhood she explored the bush in the Blue Mountains; this exploration was a transformative experience. Michelle’s sensitivity to the textures, climate and undulations of the landscape emerge in her layered, oscillating geographies. Collocott’s Unit 26 The Foot[48] uses layers of transparent paint to depict a landscape layered and stitched with emotion and longing. A foot journeys through a landscape populated with human anatomy. Lashed eyes and breasts all become sites of desire—features of a body for which Michelle longs.
The queering the collection exhibition, which spans aspects of queer Australian art from the 1920s to the mid 2000s, demonstrates some of the diversity of queer art making practices. Notions of the bohemian carnival, and its manifestation in the Artists’ Ball of the 1920s, offers historical context for understanding the themes that emerge in the work of queer artists in the twentieth century and frame the works as resisting normative ways of being, while simultaneously being shaped by, and participating in, free market economies. Fantastical and anachronistic visions that draw from myth and imagined pasts manifest in the work of these artists. Art and life entangle as imagination spills over into very real ways of being, travelling and moving; successive generations of queer Australian artists are drawn to, learn from, and reinterpret places associated with freedom and longing. In her novel Beloved, black writer Toni Morrison uses the term ‘re-remembered’ to describe how protagonist Sethe returns to her past and re-tells the traumatic events of slavery and escape so that she might make sense of them and reclaim her life.[49] In this exhibition, a different kind of re-remembering takes place and, in this act, participates in recent efforts to recover Australia’s queer art history.[50]
[1] New England Regional Art Museum, ‘The Story,’ Hinton, last modified 2023, accessed 5 August 2024, https://www.hinton.neram.com.au/the-story.
[2] E.S. Elphick, ‘Howard Hinton (1866-1948).’ Australian Dictionary of Biography, last modified 2006, accessed 5 August 2024, https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/hinton-howard-6681.
[3] Amelia Barikin, Courtney Coombs, Callum McGrath, Spiros Panigirakis and Tim Riley Walsh, ‘Don’t Forget to Remember,’ Queer Australian Art, last modified 2024, accessed 5 August 2024, https://queeraustralianart.com/writings/don-t-forget-to-remember
[4] Kit Hayam, Before We Were Trans: A New History of Gender (Australia: Hachette, 2023).
[5] Hayam.
[6] Danielle Scrimshaw, She and Her Pretty Friend: The Hidden History of Australian Women who Love Women (Australia: Ultimo Press, 2023).
[7] Peter McNeil, ‘The First Homosexuals: Connecting Australian Art and Design to the World,’ Australian Academy for the Humanities, last modified 2024, accessed 5 August 2024. https://humanities.org.au/power-of-the-humanities/australian-queer-art-and-design-pre-1930/.
[8] Barikin, et.al.
[9] Scrimshaw, p.10.
[10] Mia Hull, ‘Lookin’ Good was Australia’s first LGBTQIA+ First Nations Exhibition, held at Sydney’s Boomalli Cooperative, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, last modified 3 April 2024, accessed 5 August 2024. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-04-03/lookin-good-exhibition-boomalli-mardi-gras/103638600
[11] Noah Riseman, Transgender Australia: A History Since 1910, (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2023), p.57.
[12] Sydney Cove was originally known as Warrane in the language of the Gadigal people who lived there. Indigenous communities invite us to use Indigenous place names for Australia’s capital cities as a way of acknowledging the enduring connection of Aboriginal peoples to the land and appreciating their rich heritage and ongoing cultural practices. See: Common Ground, First Nations Place Names of Major Cities, last modified 2022, accessed 5 August 2024, https://www.commonground.org.au/article/first-nations-place-names-of-major-cities.
[13] Deborah Beck, ‘Scandalous nights: Sydney artists’ balls,’ The Dictionary of Sydney, last modified 2013, accessed 5 August 2024, https://dictionaryofsydney.org/entry/scandalous_nights_sydneys_artists_balls; Peter Kirkpatrick, The Sea Coast of Bohemia: Literary Life in Sydney’s Roaring Twenties (Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 1992).
[14] Riseman, p.58.
[15] Kirkpatrick, p.267.
[16] Robert Darnton, ‘Bohemians Before Bohemianism,’ The Bodleian Library Record 21, no. 2 (2008): 194-233; Kirkpatrick, p.12.
[17] Kirkpatrick.
[18] Tony Moore, Australia’s Bohemian Carnival, History Australia 2, no.1 (2005): 11-4. DOI: 10.2104/ha040011
[19] Peter Di Sciascio, ‘Australian Lesbian Artists of the early Twentieth Century,’ in Out Here: Gay and Lesbian Perspectives VI, edited by Yorick Smaal and Graham Willett (Melbourne: Monash University Publishing, 2011).
[20] Di Sciascio, p.5.
[21] Di Sciascio, p.5.
[22] Di Sciascio, p.7.
[23] Di Sciascio, p.8.
[24] Di Sciascio.
[25] Barikin et.al.
[26] Nicola Teffer, Elena Taylor and National Gallery of Australia. ‘Grace Crowley.’ Know Thy Name. Accessed 5 August 2024, https://nga.gov.au/knowmyname/artists/grace-crowley/.
[27] Teffer et.al.
[28] Di Sciascio.
[29] Di Sciascio.
[30] Barikin et.al.
[31] Kirkpatrick, p.23.
[32] Kirkpatrick, p.23.
[33] Kirkpatrick, p.23.
[34] Moore, p.11-2.
[35] McNeil, n.p.
[36] Anne Gray, ‘Donald Stuart Leslie Friend (1915-1989)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, last modified 2007, last accessed 5 August 2024, https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/friend-donald-stuart-leslie-12516.
[37] Art Gallery of New South Wales, Elioth Gruner. Art Gallery of New South Wales, accessed 5 August 2024, https://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/collection/artists/gruner-elioth/.
[38] Michelle Collocott, ‘Biography,’ accessed 5 August 2024, http://www.michellecollocott.com/full_bio.html
[39] William Dobell, Carnival, 1941.
[40] Austin Lillywhite, ‘Modernism at the Beach: Queer Ecologies and the Coastal Commons. By Hannah Freed-Thall,’ ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 30, no.4 (Winter 2023): 1024–1026, https://doi.org/10.1093/isle/isad062
[41] Moore, p.11-1.
[42] Moore, p.11-2.
[43] Moore, p.11-14.
[44] Queer Australian Art, ‘James Gleeson’, accessed 5 August 2024, https://queeraustralianart.com/database/artists/james-gleeson
[45] Art Gallery of New South Wales, ‘James Gleeson,’ accessed 5 August 2024, https://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/collection/artists/gleeson-james/
[46] Queer Australian Art.
[47] Marcus Bunyan, ‘Three exhibitions,’ Art Blart_Art and Cultural Memory Archive, last modified 2013, accessed 5 August 2024, https://artblart.com/2013/11/19/three-exhibitions-henri-van-noordenburg-efface-amber-mccaig-imagined-histories-and-greg-elms-what-remains/.
[48] Michelle Collocott, Unit 26 The Foot, 1982.
[49] Toni Morrison, Beloved,( United States:Alfred A.Knopf Inc, 1987).
[50] See, for example: Barikin et.al.; McNeil; National Gallery of Victoria, Queer: Stories from the NGV Collection, last modified 5 August 2024, https://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/exhibition/queer/.
