Silly Symphony is playful & witty

Robert Rooney, Australia 1937–2017 / Silly Symphony 7 (Camel Cuts) 1988 / Liquitex on canvas / 129.8 x 183.1cm / Gift of Clinton Tweedie as a tribute to his parents Heather and Arthur Tweedie through the QAGOMA Foundation 2024. Donated through the Australian Government's Cultural Gifts Program / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art / © Robert Rooney Estate / View full image
Silly Symphony 7 (Camel Cuts) is one of a series of seven paintings titled ‘Silly Symphonies’. The series takes its name from the interwar Disney series of whimsical animated musicals. (Camel Cuts) continues the theme of music and play, the segmented 'Jumble Animals' images are from the back of Kellogg’s boxes which were designed to be cut out and reassembled by children, like a jigsaw.
In what has become one of the most defining statements on his practice, Australian artist Robert Rooney (24 September 1937–2017) once wrote: ‘I have always preferred to work from secondary sources, particularly mass media ones, rather than paint or draw from the actual subject’. Silly Symphony 7 (Camel Cuts) 1988 (illustrated) continues Rooney’s investigations into the aesthetic potential of everyday items.
Silly Symphony 7 (Camel Cuts) 1988

Robert Rooney, Australia 1937–2017 / Silly Symphony 7 (Camel Cuts) 1988 / Liquitex on canvas / 129.8 x 183.1cm / Gift of Clinton Tweedie as a tribute to his parents Heather and Arthur Tweedie through the QAGOMA Foundation 2024. Donated through the Australian Government's Cultural Gifts Program / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art / © Robert Rooney Estate / View full image
Instead of focusing on a single, repeating motifs, as he did in the 1960s, for ‘Silly Symphonies’, Rooney appropriated entire forms from these cereal boxes. He has reconstructed the ‘Jumble Animals’ against a disorientating background, retaining its ‘wonderfully ‘off’ colours’ from the original packaging. (Camel Cuts), the series final instalment, displays the animal, still jumbled into segments as it appeared on the box, ‘creating an even greater perceptual problem for the viewer’. Isolated from the visual context of the cereal box, the seemingly dismembered creature, rendered in garish colours, demonstrate the bright visual appeal, overt simplicity, and perhaps even the pithy emptiness of the era, highlighting Rooney’s ability to locate the joy and absurdity in some of the most quotidian images.
Kind-hearted kitchen-garden I 1967

Robert Rooney, Australia 1937–2017 / Kind-hearted kitchen-garden I 1967 / Synthetic polymer paint on canvas / 168.3 x 168.3cm / Purchased 1990 / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art / © Robert Rooney Estate / View full image
Canine capers VII 1969-79

Robert Rooney, Australia 1937-2017 / Canine capers VII 1969-79 / Synthetic polymer paint on canvas / 151.5 x 152.5cm / The James C. Sourris AM Collection. Gift of James C. Sourris AM through the QAGOMA Foundation 2022. Donated through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art / © Robert Rooney Estate / View full image
Playful, witty and reflexive, Rooney is an influential figure in the history of Australian painting and conceptual art. In the mid-to-late 1960s, Rooney’s practice mainly involved abstraction and hard-edge paintings, inspired by contemporary advertising, product design and popular media imagery of everyday items and domestic scenes. As a painter, his work was included in the landmark exhibition ‘The Field’ at the National Gallery of Victoria in 1968; however, by 1970, Rooney had grown restless and mostly gave up the medium in favour of photography. He began painting again in the early 1980s and would revisit his old source material throughout the decade; his 1988 painting Silly Symphony 7 (Camel Cuts) is part of this return.
Holden Park 1, March 1970 & Holden Park 2, May 1970 1970

Robert Rooney, Australia 1937–2017 / Holden Park 1, March 1970 & Holden Park 2, May 1970 1970 / Type C photographs, colour on paper on cardboard / 19 photographs: 12.8 x 12.4cm (each) / Purchased 2001. QAG Foundation Grant / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art / © Robert Rooney Estate / View full image
Grace Jeremy is Assistant Curator, Australian Art, QAGOMA
This text is adapted from an essay first published in QAGOMA’s Members’ magazine, Artlines