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Art Mania: Geoffrey Bardon and the Painting Men of Papunya
An innovative biography by an acclaimed author and scholar, based on unprecedented access to the Bardon archive, Art Mania sheds new light on the pivotal story in Australian art history. It stands at the same time as an important account of an Australian life – a portrait of mental illness, and of the conflicted psychology of white Australia. Written as a dialogue between text and images, Kitty Hauser’s powerful work explores the limits of the biographical form.
Art Mania: Geoffrey Bardon and the Painting Men of Papunya is the first biography of the young teacher who, through his involvement with the painting men in the Western Desert in 1971–72, was for a long time said to have set in motion the Aboriginal art movement. Geoffrey Bardon effectively invented the origin story of Aboriginal painting – the pivotal moment in Australian art history – with himself as chronicler, hero and martyr. He did it partly to manage his own disintegrating sense of self after undergoing a catastrophic form of psychiatric treatment called Deep Sleep Therapy, from which he never fully recovered.
Informed by unprecedented archival access, Kitty Hauser’s book illuminates Bardon’s obsessive nature, and the creative and destructive forces of mania which affected him. It chronicles his intense, brief involvement with the Aboriginal men who were the key protagonists of the painting movement in Central Australia, and examines his complex relationship with his brother James, a figure who profoundly affected Bardon’s writing and the story he told about Papunya. Hauser interrogates the limits of the biographical form, through a concern with what cannot be known, or should not be spoken about. Her book brings into sharper, truer focus the context of Geoffrey Bardon’s life and work, and what the success of the story he created says about Australia and its white mythology.
This is a brilliant book.
Fred Myers, Professor Emeritus of Anthropology, New York University and author of Painting Culture: The Making of an Aboriginal High Art
Geoffrey Bardon was a lightning rod for a forcefield of cultural expression and aspirations he had only the most vestigial understanding of. Hauser examines how this brush with a different cognitive realm both remade and undid him… Art Mania is an engrossing and sensitive appraisal of cross-cultural dissonance, and a welcome addition to the ripple effect of Bardon’s precipitate plunge into the Western Desert sensibility.
Kim Mahood
Praise for Kitty Hauser’s previous biographies:
Absorbing and highly original.
The Literary Review
Riveting, revelatory, and generally rather marvellous…The fact that Kitty Hauser has managed to construct such a compelling read from such a shadowy and unhappy life represents a triumph.
The Sunday Telegraph
A work that sits at the juncture of biography and art history, taking its colours from writers as various as W. G. Sebald and Carlo Ginzburg… Hauser is a scholar of seraphic literary talents.
The Australian
Hauser has a wonderfully bonkers, yet highly illuminating tale to tell, and she tells it beautifully.
The Guardian
Kitty Hauser has written a book full of clever perception and sympathetic insight. She digresses often, but always brilliantly. To have dragged such a difficult but interesting man at least halfway out into the light is a service to intellectual history.
Public Archaeology
