Issue Details: First known date: 2020... 2020 Felix the Catalyst : An Antipodean Who Animated Modernism
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'Despite acknowledgement that cultural exchange is an active two-way process, there remains metropolitan condescension towards the role played by the less powerful peripheral partner in this transaction. It is still the centre that determines whether to recognize, to accept, and to appropriate the visual imagery of its former colonies and, finally, whether or not to absorb it into the High Art canon. Yet, in peripheral societies that lacked both public art institutions and private patronage, the imperium’s cultural traditions could not be reliably promulgated by High Art alone. Instead, this cultural colonisation was achieved by means of the less esteemed imagery that commonly goes by the misnomer ‘popular’ visual culture.

'If, in its reductive simplification of great art, popular visual culture is considered well suited to a mere colony, is it not ironic that it has been reabsorbed surreptitiously from colony back to metropole? Because of its lowly status, its ubiquity, its anonymity, and the speed of its distribution, popular visual culture has infiltrated the metropolitan mainstream as if it were a clandestine colonial counter-attack—as seen in the example of Felix the Cat, alter-ego of the Sydney-born cartoonist Pat Sullivan, whose Australian larrikinism has been recast as the exemplar of ‘modern trickery’, and whose self-referential, metamorphic, transgressive and updated carnivalesque behaviour has influenced modern culture, world-wide. Sullivan/Felix is just one of many unrecognized expatriate Antipodeans who, as popular artists and performers working ‘undercover’, have successfully challenged—even changed—the hierarchical tenets of traditional western culture.' (Publication abstract)

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon JASAL From Colony to Transnation vol. 20 no. 2 2020 20746686 2020 periodical issue 'This special issue of JASAL is a collection of essays based on papers delivered at the ASAL conference ‘From Colony to Transnation,’ held at the University of Sydney on 5–6 December 2019, to mark the retirement of the Chair of Australian Literature, Professor Robert Dixon. In all, thirty-nine papers were given, including keynotes by David Carter and Jeanette Hoorn, and the conference also incorporated the Herbert Blaiklock Memorial Lecture, delivered by the writer Nicolas Rothwell.' (Brigid Rooney, Peter KirkpatrickFrom Colony to Transnation: Introduction)

    2020
Last amended 12 Nov 2020 08:16:28
https://openjournals.library.sydney.edu.au/index.php/JASAL/article/view/14332 Felix the Catalyst : An Antipodean Who Animated Modernismsmall AustLit logo JASAL
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