2009 AAANZ Conference Abstracts - The Art Association of Australia ...

1. OPEN SESSION
The session welcomed papers from any member of the Art Association of Australia and New Zealand and any academic, student, artist,
photographer, filmmaker, or other art and design professional concerned to engage with issues that advance scholarship and discourse around
issues relating to visual culture.
Convenor:
1. Tableaux Vivants: Not Painting by Numbers, But Painting
with Figures
Dr Anita Callaway
Dr Rebecca Elliott
(The Australian National University)
When Louis Keller brought his troupe of tableau-vivant performers
to New York in 1856, he likened his shows to “the great galleries
of Europe, the master pieces of which I bring before the eyes of
those who else might never see them”. Among the living pictures
he presented at the Broadway Theatre was Emanuel Leutze’s
Washington Crossing the Delaware. It had cost New Yorkers twentyfive
cents to view the original of this “Great National Picture” when
it was exhibited at the Stuyvesant Hall in 1851; now, five years on,
it cost fifty cents to witness not only Keller’s representation of this
“National Tableau”, but an entire program of living pictures (including
Rubens’ The Battle of the Amazons and Raphael’s Triumph of
Galatea). Can the conventional distinction between Leutze’s
painting as art and Keller’s performance as kitsch be critically
sustained today
Leutze had painted both versions of his iconic picture in Dusseldorf,
where tableaux vivants (lebende bilder) were familiar exercises
during Wilhelm von Schadow’s directorship of the academy and,
as Cordula Grewe notes, integral to the art community’s existence.
This paper, in comparing the supposed “double mimicry” of the
Dusseldorf tableau-style of painting with tableaux performances
that added a third layer of mimicry (performances that mimicked
paintings that mimicked tableaux), is an attempt to rehabilitate
tableaux vivants into the art historical mainstream.
Anita Callaway is the Nelson Meers Foundation Lecturer in
Australian Art, in the Department of Art History and Film Studies, at
the University of Sydney, and author of Visual Ephemera: Theatrical
Art in Nineteenth-Century Australia (UNSW Press, 2000). She is a
member of the Editorial Board of the Dictionary of Australian Artists
Online, and is currently joint editor-in-chief.
2. Art in the Service of Agriculture: John Buchanan’s Nature
Printing of The Indigenous Grasses of New Zealand
Associate Professor Linda Tyler
Described as the first major botanical work by a resident botanist,
The Indigenous Grasses of New Zealand was published by the
Colonial Museum in Wellington in six parts between 1878 and
1880. The spirit of experimentation that yielded John Buchanan’s
production of this work exemplifies a remarkable instance of the
co-option of the illustrative arts to the service of colonial science.
For the materials to make the book, Buchanan was indebted to Sir
George Grey, who had secured governmental funding for production
of a manual on the “grasses and forage plants likely to prove useful
in New Zealand”. Instructed by James Hector as Director of the
Colonial Museum to illustrate the grasses natural size using the
newly-discovered technique of nature printing, Buchanan was
challenged to develop new lithographic skills. As a corollary, he had
also to prepare enlarged drawings of floral parts using microscope
dissection.
Buchanan’s attention was drawn to a lecture by Henry Bradbury,
England’s first nature printer, which was reported in the proceedings
of the London Athenaeum in June 1855. Bradbury advocated
adaptation of a Viennese technique, and implemented his method in
the production of Thomas Moores’s The Ferns of Great Britain and
Ireland which was nature printed in green and brown ink between
1855 and 1857. Buchanan pioneered a less sophisticated method
in New Zealand to produce the plates of The Indigenous Grasses,
by printing from specimens that had been lightly inked and then
faintly impressed on the prepared surface of the lithographic stone,
so that “nature itself provided the detail”. In so doing, he created a
botanical study of considerable artistic as well as scientific interest.
Linda Tyler was appointed as an Associate Professor at The
University of Auckland, New Zealand and as the inaugural Director
of the Centre for New Zealand Art Research and Discovery in late
February 2006. Prior to this appointment, Linda Tyler was Curator of
Pictorial Collections at the Hocken Library at the University of Otago
for eight years where she oversaw the day-to-day running of the
historical photographs and pictures collections.
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