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Esoteric Australian Art*

Darren Jorgensen
Eyeline 81
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Esoteric Australian Art1

The notion of esoteric art may bring to mind mystic triangles, or half-naked women coiled around swords. This would be to mistake fantasy for the esoteric, illusion for the experience of astral travel, automatism, ceremony and trance. Perth has recently become the centre of esoteric art in Australia, as Buratti Fine Art’s 2012 exhibition, ‘Windows to the Sacred’, is touring nationally in expanded form. The show was inspired by the Pompidou Centre’s 2008 blockbuster ‘Traces of the Sacred’, that showed the metaphysical aspirations of all manner of avant-garde, contemporary and cult art. For the Paris curators, the artist is the key to the divine in a secular era, inheriting the role of gatekeeper to the dimensions beyond. Perth’s Windows to the Sacred takes an antipodean view of the esoteric, as it places an eclectic mix of Australian artists alongside paintings by the English occultist Alastair Crowley.

Crowley’s place in both the Paris and Perth exhibitions is instructive for thinking through the history of esoteric modernism. For his work turns up in two of the themed rooms of the massive Traces of the Sacred, first as one of the ‘Grand Initiates’ of the avant-garde with Piet Mondrian, and second as one of the ‘Doors of Perception’, alongside William Burroughs and Harry Smith. So that Crowley bridges two distinct periods of the esoteric, these being the avant-garde and the psychedelic, the first in which he was a minor figure and the second a major, as his ideas coincided with a more general interest in drugs, magic, mysticism, the occult and sex.

Crowley’s transition from one kind of esotericism to another is mirrored by the Australian artist Rosaleen Norton... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline

Barry William Hale, Legion 49, 2012. Graphic on cotton rag paper, each panel 30 x 20cm, overall installation 180 x 300cm. Courtesy the artist.

Barry William Hale, Legion 49, 2012. Graphic on cotton rag paper, each panel 30 x 20cm, overall installation 180 x 300cm. Courtesy the artist.

James Gleeson, A Moment in the Process, 2005. Oil on linen, 133 x 178cm. Courtesy Gleeson O’Keefe Foundation.

James Gleeson, A Moment in the Process, 2005. Oil on linen, 133 x 178cm. Courtesy Gleeson O’Keefe Foundation.