Dr Robert J. Wallis – Austin Osman Spare lecture, Cuming Museum, London
01/10/2010
'Zos vel Prometheus', Austin Osman Spare, 1920s (watercolour and pencil on paper)
Dr Robert J. Wallis, Professor of Visual Culture and Director of the MA in Art History, was invited to lecture on the Edwardian London artist Austin Osman Spare at the Cuming Museum in London. The ‘Austin Osman Spare: Fallen Visionary’ exhibition, 14 Sep - 14 Nov 2010, is the largest show of the Spare’s work since his death in 1956. Wallis’s talk, on Saturday 9th October, examined critically the notion of Spare as a ‘shaman’.
Title:
'Austin Osman Spare, Visionary Shaman: Deconstructing the Myth'
Abstract:
In a number of accounts, Spare is described as a 'shaman' - a genius artist whose work evidences spiritual insight into other worlds, such as the induction of ecstasy via the Death Posture, having been taught by the 'witch' Mrs Paterson, and whose legacy has influenced the 'shamanic' practices of Chaos Magicians, Modern Witches and other Pagans. Though labelled a ‘Surrealist’, ‘Primitivist’ and ‘shaman’, rather than standing outside time and the social within a fuzzy notion of a universal shamanism, I suggest that Spare’s oeuvre is better understood as infused with a variety of Eastern and Western esoteric influences, historically and socially embedded within the late Victorian and Edwardian interest in spirituality.
Link to this page: http://www.richmond.ac.uk/n/1091.aspx
