Susan Norrie

(born 1953)

Untitled 1988-89

Footnotes

PROVENANCE
Mori Gallery, Sydney
The Reg Grundy AC OBE and Joy Chambers-Grundy Collection, acquired in 1989

EXHIBITED
Peripherique, Wollongong City Art Gallery, Wollongong, 6 October – 22 November 1989

LITERATURE
Virginia Spate, Peripherique, Wollongong City Art Gallery, Wollongong, 1989, (illus.)
Eloise Lindsay, 'Susan Norrie Painting Against the Grain', Art and Australia, Autumn 1993, vol. 31, no. 3, pp. 336 (illus.), 339


The Peripherique series culminates Susan Norrie's fascination with spectacular, commodity painting. Through the 1980s, in the context of post-modernism and a booming art market, the artist had interrogated painting's critical potential, its seductive rhetorics of beauty and its historical legacy of embodying the fullness of authentic experience. The very idea of painting's ability to search and communicate self-revelation or embody the fullness of being was put on notice.

In some ways, the virtuosity of Peripherique itself signalled a painterly end-game, for from this point, Norrie increasingly used installation, video and film as a preferred medium for major work. Her ideas on the power and the limitations of painting had been focussed through her 1987-88 residency in France and Italy, courtesy of a Moet & Chandon Fellowship. These works were spectacular objects of desire at the same time as they delighted in their own post-modern perversion. Norrie combined and amplified the painterly and canonical language of high art and low-brow popular culture until their ambiguous rhetorical affects reached tipping point. Peripherique took these feminist strategies a step further, and we are left to face up to the painfully sweet contradictions of commodified aesthetics.

The decorative surface is tacky and loaded with domestic cartouches, interior design touches and other forms souvenired from the lower depths of fine art's hierarchies of genre and taste. Across the canvas, the stencilled words Hello Hello Hello float and submerge under veils of paint, and our gaze is trapped in a shallow circular field of surface effects. The words lose their humanity and become simply a commodity sign, like the repeated stencilled image of Disney's Bambi who trots across the canvas like visual muzac. In the world of Peripherique, our basic human capacity is trimmed to Oprah-sized sound-bites and the frozen exchange of the greeting-card.

The painting is overly lush and sensually compelling. These painterly tricks of vision, where image and text alternatively emerge then melt back into cloudy tints of cream, ivory and blushy pink suggest cosmetic flesh-tones corrupted with shades of yellow, and the eye is repeatedly and unwillingly drawn to an erupting stain in the upper centre of the canvas. Norrie has observed that "I have always been aware of the power of the materiality of paint and its ability to create dimensions – the time scales operating within one work and its readings. Surface is not in this sense the veneer or seduction associated with glazes; for me it is the veil of complexities superimposed at the point of painting. Surface is both style and substance."1

Peripherique is also haunted by the ghosts of masters of the modern surface such as Turner and Monet, feminised and rendered in commodity form, and its surface gloss is reminiscent of 'Japanning', the fashionable mimicry of Japanese lacquer work in 18th century furnishing. As Virginia Spate notes, "every touch of the brush may signify money, where the painter becomes name brand, and the woman painter in particular is caught in the play of mirrors; she becomes the image of her work, and the work her image. At the same time, the human presence is evacuated from her work and human experience is reduced to the processes of consumption and to the endless vacillations of credit and debit." 2

Catriona Moore

1 Susan Norrie, Value Added Goods: West Magazine, vol. 2, no. 1, 1990, p. 26
2 Virginia Spate, Peripherique, exh. cat., Wollongong City Art Gallery, Wollongong, 1989, p. 7