Spare art

Austin Osman Spare.  What a name!  Sounds like a classic car part.  Is/was he real?  What is/was he famous for?  Hey – STOP what you’re doing– step away from your phone!  Don’t go looking it up on Google or any other search engine.  Because ‘Google’ and ‘search engines’ don’t exist.  The internet does not exist.  Home computers are no more than futuristic fantasies.  You use typewriters and a big plastic phone with a curly lead, that plugs into the wall.  You have no way of finding out anything at all about a character you’ve never heard of before, other than asking around your more cultured friends.

 “Ever heard of this guy? He’s featured in this song - Austin Osman Spare.” 

“No, sorry.  Can’t help you there.”

Or you could try looking him up in the town library, home to thousands of hardback books with little ticket envelopes stuck to their title pages, but where would you even begin?    All you know is that Austin Osman Spare apparently “painted daydreams”.   He also “painted nightmares” if those lyrics you made a note of are to be believed.  Do you go to the section on Art? - Dewey Decimal classification somewhere round the 700 mark? – peruse the spines of dozens of oversize tomes on the subject in the hope that one might mention him, even if only briefly.   It might at least give you a starting point.  You’ll need your sandwiches with you and a flask of coffee… you’re in for the long haul... running your finger down the tiny index listings in the back pages until your vision blurs into kaleidoscopic patterns.    And even then your search could be utterly fruitless; Austin Osman Spare might not even be real.

We just had to suck it up once upon a time, safe in the knowledge of our lack of knowledge, accepting of the fact that there were some  facts we’d never find, at least not until the internet was invented one day in the future by which time we had probably forgotten what it was we wanted to know anyway.  And of course even that was a fact we couldn’t know.  It was back in the era of typewriters and curly leads when I first heard a song entitled 'Austin Osman Spare' and was intrigued by the person written about in the lyrics, yet unable to discover a single thing about him because of all the above.  We take so much for granted now.  

The song was by the Bulldog Breed, a British band who were sort of part psych / part pop / part prog I suppose, and who were around in the late sixties – a musical period I was delving into nearly twenty years after the event, having been too young first time round -  but only much much later was I able to find out that Austin Osman Spare was indeed a real person.  I do like this song with its phased vocals and psychedelic vibe.

As for Austin, he was an artist and occultist, best known for his dark and often sexual imagery and his figurative linework, not dissimilar to the work of Aubrey Beardsley (I really like it).  He was interested in Black Magic and a friend and associate of Aleister Crowley.  Born in the late 1800s, he lived until 1956. Type his name into your favourite search engine and pages and pages about him and his pictures appear.

The artist

The art

The song

Suddenly I find myself doubting all that I have written above about not knowing who he was for years. How can there ever have been a time when you couldn’t find something out immediately? You hear a name, you don’t know who it is, you look it up online, your question is answered along with dozens of other questions you didn't even ask and you move on, whilst those oversize art books in the town library quietly gather dust.

I guess someone somewhere, who wasn't even born in the '80s when I first came across Mr Spare, might be doing that right now after hearing a Bowie song for the first time.   

“Every heard of this guy? He’s featured in this song – Andy Warhol."

"No, sorry. Can't help you there. Have you Googled him?"