I have spent the last three weeks in Australia with a very good friend of mine, Greg Wilding, who is finishing his Ph.D. at the University of Queensland with the art historian, Rex Butler, as his supervisor. His house is fairly isolated on the top of a hill in the Byron hinterland. It was just the two of us there for those three weeks with a few breaks to go to the shops to resupply. He is doing an art history thesis and is a practicing artist himself. Our days were full of discussions about the state of Australian art and more specifically the thrust of his thesis, which was - to outline it very broadly - that the dominant theories and practice of what might be called postmodern appropriation and quotational art in Australia during the last 20 to 25 years has brought about a necessary need to theorize, and thus, a concomitant increase in art bureaucracy. Why? When an artist appropriates an art work as part of their own art practice, then it becomes necessary to contextualize that art work as something more than merely copying, or less kindly, plagiarism. With the rise of theory as being necessary to the contextualizing of an art work comes the increasing power of the art institution. The way in which Australian art institutions have wielded this increased power has, according to his argument, been to "de-mediate" any contrary view. In other words, any view or theory that might question the legitimacy of postmodern appropriation/quotational art practice has in Australia in the last two decades been denied any platform of expression. Greg goes on to use Lacan, Zizek, and the works of the Australian artist Mike Parr to re-examine postmodern critiques of origins and originality by suggesting that along with the act of appropriation is also the necessary act of dis-appropriation both of which are grounded by the Lacanian Real, or the un-speakable and un-knowable. And, it is this that he points to as that which is also the original (never repeatable) of an artwork worthy of our attention. Ultimately, Greg is trying to suggest what might be post of (as in 'after') the postmodernist project.
(I am going to send the above to Greg and see how much of his argument I got right. I will post his corrections later.)
Recommended Reading:
Butler, Rex.
Slavoj Zizek: Live Theory. (New York: Continuum, 2005).
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