Susan Norrie

(born 1953)

Vanity unit 1986 190.0 x 440.0cm (74 13/16 x 173 1/4in.) (overall)

Footnotes

PROVENANCE
David Bremner
Australian British, New Zealand & European Historical Paintings etc., Leonard Joel, Melbourne, 2 November 1988, lot 1360
Robyn Brady Fine Art, Sydney
The Reg Grundy AC OBE and Joy Chambers-Grundy Collection, acquired in 1989

EXHIBITED
Origins, Originality + Beyond: Biennale of Sydney, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 16 May – 6 July 1986
Susan Norrie, University Gallery, Melbourne, 15 October – 14 November 1986, cat. no. 5
Susan Norrie, Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth, 19 September – 20 October 1998

LITERATURE
Nick Waterlow, et al, Origins, Originality + Beyond: Biennale of Sydney, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 1986
Trevor Smith, 'Body double', in Trevor Smith and Gary Dufour, Susan Norrie, Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth, 1998, pp. 8-25, (illus.) pp. 24-5, 41
David Bromfield, 'Something borrowed becomes something new', West Australian, Perth, 10 October 1998


Susan Norrie's Vanity unit, first shown in the 1986 Biennale of Sydney, is the work that signals a major shift in scale that would subsequently characterise the style for which she is best known. Although there is a triptych of earlier larger works from 1983, held in the Art Gallery of New South Wales, she worked predominantly on a small scale until 1986. So the combination of small and larger paintings, forming a single statement in Vanity unit, is a new direction for her and this suite of works thus constitutes a crucial breakthrough in her practice.

Vanity unit is followed by the Tall Tales & True exhibition, launched at Mori Gallery in September 1986 and the painting Fête (Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney), which went on to win the inaugural Moet & Chandon Fellowship, announced in January 1987. So it is in Vanity unit that Norrie resolves a number of formal concerns that allow her, in later installations, to move beyond the plane of the painted surface, engaging the viewer and drawing her audience into the reality she evokes in her deft handling of paint. Like Tall Tales & True, Vanity unit was influenced by her travels to the US in 1984, to participate in the Australian Visions exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum. During that period, she experienced the excesses of American spectacle in the Los Angeles Olympics opening ceremony, the re-election of Ronald Reagan as President and the absurdities of a television special and international tour by Donald Duck, celebrating his fiftieth birthday. What made these spectacles all the more grotesque was that in her own private life, she was in mourning, so that there was a particular hollowness to the celebrity that surrounded her in this period.

In Vanity unit this hollowness is foregrounded in the manner of painting, and in the surface itself. A softness of tone in the palette on first appearance gives way to a hardness and roughness of surface, an abrasiveness in the way that paint is caked on. Although this is a suite of paintings, Norrie spatialises the composition by grouping the segments, so that it becomes a triptych – a structure she had worked with earlier, as noted. Rather than the more sacred origin of the triptych in the altar pieces of Christian art, Norrie's fascination with popular culture and with domestic space secularises the form, so that it becomes an imaginary piece of furniture – the vanity unit, an evolution of the dressing table, with its three-winged mirrors. The addition of mirrors converts the dressing table from the bureau, escritoire or secrétaire (secretary), becoming an item of the boudoir, associated with vanity and femininity, a negative association the artist uses as a departure point to reflect on the nature of popular culture and contemporary existence.

In this case, the mirrors reflect back a shallow world of pure and glittery surface, a rhinestone reality of kitschy images, of chocolate box castles and church spires, kittens and poodles, or Disney's Bambi, a coach and four horses - like the wallpaper of a child's bedroom or a cheap motel; there is the shadowy figure of Liberace, who at the time this work was conceived was celebrating forty years of flamboyance and who would be dead from an AIDS-related illness within a year of the showing of Vanity unit. This too is one of the shadows of this work. Norrie's interpretation of popular culture ambivalently reflects on the world of television and its transformation of reality. "I always suspected that I was watching TV instead of living life", Andy Warhol had observed, 1 providing us with as clear a statement of the experience of modern celebrity and contemporary life as we are likely to need.

In 1986, Dallas was the top-rating local television series and the central painting of the triptych incorporates J.R. Ewing's ten-gallon hat, atop the figure of Koko the gorilla, with pursed lips, holding a flower. The aqua-blue and pastel tones of the paintings evoke the high-key lighting of soap opera and day-time television. In the first of the 'side panels' of the suite, a poodle, with well defined face and head dissolves into layers of paint, spilling onto the frame; features fade and dissolve – an amorphous figure holding a poodle; an ice castle, a key element, suggesting the overall coldness of the work, replacing the first appearance of warmth and lightness.

The second of the suite's 'side panels' arranges twelve white-framed miniature paintings, including several quite detailed poodles, over-pampered in the fussiness of their clipping. Other frames contain vases of flowers and primordial shapes, like amorphous sea slugs, reminiscent of earlier pieces which appeared in Determined 1985, the suite of works included in the controversial 1985 exhibition Heartland at Wollongong City Gallery. In Vanity unit there is a ghostliness in rendition, a lightness of tone (though not of treatment, overall) reducing the overt 'fleshiness' of the pieces, without removing the unease they evoke. An exhibitionistic extravagance characterises the whole suite - 'Lloyd Rees meets Barbara Cartland', as one critic referred to it at the time.

Within Vanity unit, a number of concerns and technical approaches are combined. Smaller precise elements are combined with larger works and the composition of larger pieces changes markedly. Until this point, the layering of elements, a quality of Norrie's work, followed some of the techniques of eighteenth century painting (Norrie herself has referred to Watteau and Fragonard as influences and Watteau's Pierrot (Gilles), 1717-19, is explicitly referenced in Fête). Sentimental aspects give rise to a mood of melancholy, both here and in Tall Tales & True, a feature of the fantasy spaces of television and theme parks.

The title's link to domestic space brings home the larger theme of the work, this postmodern memento mori that it constitutes, the vanitas of Flemish or Dutch art and Ecclesiastes i:2: ('A shadow's shadow, he tells us, a shadows, shadow; a world of shadows!'), given a new twist here in contemporary vanity's 'fifteen minutes of fame'.

Helen Grace

1 Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, California, United States, 1975, p. 9