Sunday 16 June 2019

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?" 

16 comments:

  1. This comment has been removed by the author.

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    1. Marie, I loved your comment, really interesting. I just didn't get round to responding last night, shame!

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  2. Books trump Google, for me. I appreciate that this will become an increasingly minority view...

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    1. It's a bit of both for me. I love books, and have loads of reference books I'll always go to first over Google, there's something about perusing the pages and the physical thing of books that's far more satisfying than scrolling down a screen. But it just made me wonder how on earth we found out anything when we didn't have much of a starting point. Where do you go, how much time can you invest and it might be fruitless anyway? At the same time, it is much more rewarding when you do get somewhere after a lot of painstaking research!

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  3. Great post C, and as you say, a great sounding name so can see why it lends itself well to a song title. The band are new to me but their sound is very much of the time.

    As I was reading I just knew you were going to mention Aleister Crowly, a name familiar to us around here as he had a house on the shore of Loch Ness a few miles from us. Jimmy Page bought it in 1970 and owned it for 22 years as he had an interest in Crowly (my sister-in-law went to parties there in the 70s) - Strange rumblings and goings-on of the supernatural nature happened there.

    As for "just google it", this is why we all have busy minds nowadays. In the past we lived in blissful ignorance about most things, unless we really decided from an academic point of view, to investigate further. I think most of my time as a student was spent trying to locate books in one of the libraries and then copy out passages - Kept us busy but wasteful as mostly legwork really. Having said that, my blog came about just because so much info is at our fingertips nowadays about the songs and bands we loved in our youth. "What's It All About?" just couldn't have been answered back in the day unless an artist had a biography written about them or they featured in the music papers. Much of the back story has been a revelation but I do have a very busy mind nowadays when I can't remember what I did last week but have all this trivia at the forefront.

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    1. Thanks Alyson, I just remembered too about Aleister Crowley's house in the Highlands. Your sister-in-law went to parties there in the '70s? Wow, she must have some tales to tell! Also intrigued abut the supernatural goings-on but then again what other influences might there have been?!

      Yes, busy minds... not always a good thing. I was thinking how a lot of technological possibilities designed to make things easier have added to our stress because we have to make so many choices, do certain things to enable them, keep software up to date, etc. Whereas at one time we just thought "oh I can't do that", accepted our limits and moved on. I realise I can sound like a Luddite...I just can't be doing with complicated stuff!
      Having info at our fingertips is great in so many ways and, as you say, all your blogging research (a lot of mine too, including the above!) has been thanks to that. But as always there's another side.

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    2. I don't think Jimmy Page was ever there when she went to the parties but as she was still a schoolgirl at the time she certainly gave her parents a few sleepless nights!

      Yes, yes, yes - Having all this technology at our fingertips makes life a lot more stressful as you can no longer opt out and say "I can't do that". Just tough (at my age) to keep on top of it all - I'm always one step behind.

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  4. I've heard of Aleister Crowley but not the other names. I enjoyed reading your thoughts on the pre-internet age, was very different and not long ago! As someone with a librarian degree, I can understand the nostalgia for the "detective" aspect of finding answers. Typing in google doesn't require the same imagination. Life had a greater sense of mystery back then which to some degree has been lost today. I also think all this knowledge at our fingers tips is harmful to our ability to remember things ourselves(because wee don't have to). I like how your final sentence also points to the social aspect, the conversation/exploration about things is not the same with google and smartphones.

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    1. Interesting what you say about the imagination required to do research - yes that's been lost I guess. Google (or other search engines!) often frustrates me though because it's so geared up to selling, so you still have to wade through loads of irrelevant stuff sometimes to get an answer to an obscure question and that's when it really hits home that I just need to go to a good book.
      But then, I'll probably find the book on Amazon! So I'm still taking the same route...
      There's nothing like spending a few hours in a real library, though. The feel, the smell even, of proper books, and the chance to just indulge yourself in them is far more satisfying and enjoyable than any internet search.

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    2. In reply to Chris I also feel sad about losing the detective aspect of finding answers - It used to be so satisfying. For those of us who love going to organised quizzes etc, there is always that suspicion nowadays that someone has a phone on their lap and is googling the answers. Having a good memory for such facts, figures and trivia is now redundant. Shame really.

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    3. C and Alyson: There is a limit to what can be located online and the librarian's job still includes detective work and use of reference books. Although I think a lot of the questions libraries used to get asked, most folks can now google themselves. The library's function in the internet age is, amongst other things, to offer quality controlled online resources and databases, as opposed to untrustworthy sites like wikipedia which (useful as those articles can be) anyone with internet access can edit and would not hold up in a uni project.

      Those organised quizzes sound fun. Nice to have phoneless/internet-free days sometimes!

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  5. My first job out of college, outside of teaching English in Japan, was as a research librarian at a big newspaper. This was 1995, and the reporters and editors did not have Internet access. All research was done on expensive databases through the librarians. By the time I moved to another part of the paper in 1998 the Internet was changing everything. I felt like I got out of the library just in time. My guess is the library at that paper today is probably one or two people with few books and nothing to archive. Everything the newsroom needs is at their desks or on their phones.

    I like Rol's rule with his Saturday quiz. No peeking on Google. I wish I could stay awake to play for real, but I always give it a go some 7 or 8 hours later when I wake up and everything is already solved.

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    1. Interesting jobs! Interesting too how your experience was so different to what it would be now in that line.

      Yes Rol's quiz is good exercise for the old grey matter (and I'm in great need of that...) A big shame about the time difference for you; perhaps we can persuade him to reschedule it every so often so you get to see it earlier?

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  6. The big advantage f the internet is the instant access- I just Googled Imaged him, knowing nothing more than what you wrote above- and find scores of pictures, drawings etc straight away. The library's closed. I couldn't get there before Saturday by which time I might have forgotten (unless I added him to a list of things I need to check out). I'm a fan of him now though so may look for him further afield.

    Good post C- asks more questions than it answers maybe (a good thing).

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  7. This article's interesting in a 5 minute read kind of way...

    https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/xw8zjk/austin-osman-spare-forgotten-occult-artist-hitler-london

    Taking in Hitler and Crowley and a recommendation from Alan Moore ( which should be recommendation enough in itself).

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    1. Thanks SA, really chuffed that you're now a fan of him. That's a great article, really interesting. I also want to explore more and for that I'm very grateful for Google.

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