On 7 September at the Art Gallery of Western Australia, Dispatch Review hosted a lecture by Rex Butler, who had been brought to Perth to be a judge for the Lester Prize for Portraiture. Entitled ‘The Modern and the Contemporary’, the lecture was, as Butler stated in his summary, a response to Darren Jorgensen’s review of his and ADS Donaldson’s recently published UnAustralian Art: 10 Essays on Transnational Art History. In particular, Butler suggests, he wanted to address the relationship between the “modern” and the “contemporary” raised by Jorgensen’s review and what exactly the relationship is of an “UnAustralian” history to an “Australian” one. Is it, as Jorgensen writes, a “parallel” history to it? Is it a “complement” to it? Or is it, as Jorgensen also proposes, a “double” of it?
        After Butler’s lecture, and before audience questions, Dispatch asked three speakers give their responses to what Butler had said: Peter Beilharz, who spoke more generally of transnational effects and the connections that occur between countries in all areas of culture (at one point Beilharz remarked that Mick Jagger’s mother was born in Australia, which Rex then observed was almost the equivalent of the recent discovery that the English painter Francis Bacon’s father was also born in Australia); Tara Heffernan, who pointed to the unacknowledged class and economic factors that allowed certain Australian artists to be expatriates; and Darren Jorgensen, who raised the negative reaction of a number of Indigenous Australians to the recent Voice referendum as an important issue when thinking about any future possible Australian identity.
        The paper Butler presented will be published in Thesis 11 journal, which also published Jorgensen’s review (available here). But in the meantime, Dispatch thought it would be good to ask Butler some questions, based on the discussion that took place after he gave his lecture. The email exchange took place over the next few days while Butler was involved in judging the portraiture prize. As Butler indicates in his first answer, what he spoke about was not only a response to Jorgensen’s review but also prompted by what was said at Dispatch’s launch and conversation between Terry Smith and Ian McLean for Ian’s also recently published Double Nation: A History of Australian Art (available here). For all of these reasons, Dispatch felt that this conversation between us and Butler was a very good fit for our website.
– Sam Beard

Dispatch Review: Hello, Rex. Before we begin to ask you some of our own questions, could you perhaps briefly outline what you spoke of in your lecture at the State Library of WA for those who weren’t there? In some sense, the event served as the Western Australian launch for your and Andrew’s UnAustralian Art and we even had a book signing afterwards at the nearby Planet Books.

Rex Butler: Well, first of all, thank you so much for organising the event and for having people respond to the book. Andrew and I are very grateful. We thought it would be a good match for us to pick up in our lecture on a remark that Terry Smith made towards the middle of his speech to launch Ian’s Double Histories at the State Library of WA on 30 August 2023. The event was held on the same day as the date for the Indigenous Voice referendum was announced, and Terry said in the undoubted “progressive” consensus on the issue: “Within this complexity, it is rather reductive, but also politically necessary, to acknowledge that our polity here in Australia remains riven by the doublings between our Anglo-history and Indigenous history. Reconciling these two unequal formations—not so that they merge, but so that they coexist—has been hard. Some progress has been made. More, I hope, when the ‘Yes’ vote prevails in the upcoming referendum”. But then, as we all know, the referendum failed. However, we would contend that it was a very insightful connection to make to Ian’s book, because Double Nation and Ian’s work in general takes “reconciliation” as the very model and logic of Australian art history.

Dispatch: Yes, that’s what you were saying. But could you perhaps elaborate a little further for those who weren’t there.

Rex: There is a very revealing moment—almost an admission—towards the end of Ian’s book. After sketching out the long narrative of his “double history”, which is about the attempts by both settler and Indigenous artists to “reconcile” with each other, he says that he cannot write the history of the last 50 years of Australian art. Drawing a parallel to the New Zealand art historian Francis Pound, who began his account of New Zealand art in 1930 and ended it in 1970 because, before and after these moments, “New Zealand” art was not being made. Ian writes:

Double Nation tracks a similar timeline. A national self-consciousness first conclusively appeared in Australian art after the First World war, though, as Double Nation does, its gestation can be traced in colonial arts. A line is drawn under 1970 because by then new-generation artists were making sharp turns away from the national imperatives that had shaped Australian art during the previous fifty years.

Ian suggests at certain points that we cannot write this new history because we are not sure of its exact character and we do not have a model for it yet, but we would suggest that it is because we do know what its character is and have for a long time and it does not fit Ian’s model. For Ian’s “double history”, even if doubled, is fundamentally a national or nationalist history, a history of Australian art, and of artists, even Indigenous artists, who want to make “Australian” art. As is well known, the argument of Ian’s White Aborigines is that white Australian artists wanted to become “Aboriginal” in some way, and the argument of his Rattling Spears is that Indigenous artists made art somehow to “communicate” with their colonisers. But that “reconciliation” hoped for by both has not yet come about, and likely never will. That is why we have a “double history” and we are not able to move beyond it, or at least Ian is not able to write a history of Australian art that comes after it to arrive at some moment when this “reconciliation” would be achieved. This 50 years after the end of Australian art history, or when it can no longer be written, undoubtedly starts from the fact that this attempted reconciliation never comes to an end and can never be realised.

Dispatch: This last 50 years, let’s say, is the period we would now call the “contemporary” after the end of first “modernism” and then “post-modernism”, as you said in your lecture.

Rex: That’s right. Put simply, Ian’s account cannot supply an account of our present, of how we got to where we are today. He cannot write a history of the failure of “reconciliation”, or perhaps the irrelevance of the very notion of “reconciliation” as a way of thinking about Australia. (And, of course, I voted “yes” in the Referendum.) In fact, if you go back, you can even find a certain hesitancy or qualification when Terry speaks of it: he’ll worry about being “reductive” and speak of “reconciliation as a “co-existence” and not a “merging” or coming together. I’d say here that “co-existence” is more the “UnAustralian” way of thinking, while “reconciliation” and merging or “coming together” is the more national or Australian and what is implied, even if deferred or ultimately unrealisable, by Ian’s account. Darren made a point in his response to our paper that many of the Indigenous artists and artist communities that he knew of—and, of course, he is much more embodied and knowledgeable in these matters than I am—were against the Voice. For them, it would be just another layer of bureaucracy coming between them and their self-agency and in fact constitute a distraction from the proper issues of justice that were at stake. He held it against what we were saying, but I think that it is properly a point for us. Our UnAustralian story is not a double history. It is not a history in which settler and Indigenous peoples are exclusively or even largely defined by their relationship to each other in seeking to determine the identity of this country. Our histories are much more numerous, overlapping and multiple than this. Not only are white and settler artists artists of the world, but so are Indigenous artists not determined by their “Australian” identity in any dialogical way.

Dispatch: Again, could you please elaborate?

Rex: Well, the fact is that this “double history” Ian writes cannot be completed, which means in a way it cannot be written and isn’t the history of who we are and how we got to where we are today. (And perhaps we’d say that not only can this national story no longer be written, but no one after Ian would even want to write it any more.) As perhaps the failure of the Voice shows us, the true “reconciliation” might be settler and Indigenous Australians seeing themselves not reflected in each other in terms of being “Australian”, but in a more “worldly”, “global”, dare I say “universal”, coming together that involves many others from around the world. One of the things Andrew and I explore in our work—encapsulated by the slogan “Australians in the world and the world in Australia”—is our immigrant and emigrant artists. (At the State Library here at the moment is a wonderful exhibition about the some 2000 cameleers from Afghanistan and Northern India who came here from 1870 on, and Andrew and I for a long time have wanted to write a history of the Muslim artists in Australia.)  We would want to say—we might come back to this in a moment—that this “UnAustralian” history is the true history of the art of this country and that the “national” in Australian art is only a reaction to or rejection of the “UnAustralian”. And we would also want to suggest—we are obviously less expert in this, but in our paper we cite or at least point to a number of people who have already said this before us, such as Wilfried van Damme and Susan Lowish—that Indigenous art is also not about any obvious “reconciliation” or even communication with white Australia, but global, timeless and universal in its aspirations. Black and white come together in Australia not through any kind of double history that would one day be overcome yet never actually is, but rather in multiple histories that have no beginning and are endless. And, in fact—because as with any strong thinker, and Ian is exactly one of these, we can read Ian against himself—Ian has already at certain moments said exactly this. We might think, for example, of his essay ‘Global Indigeneity and Australian Desert Painting’, published in the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art in 2002, which is already a non-national and UnAustralian account of Indigenous art. Or even at the Dispatch launch of Double Nation he speaks of the way that ‘Youthful Indigenous radicals inspired by US Black Power movements and Third World anti-colonial struggles defied what they perceived as the assimilationist strategies of their parents’ activism that had delivered the 1967 Referendum’. Which is also to say, like so many of our artists and art historians, Ian’s “double history” is also a repression of something he already knows.

Dispatch: I think Darren would like us to ask this one. In his review of your book in Thesis 11, he makes a distinction between the “modern” and the “contemporary”, arguing that in effect you provide a history of “contemporary” but not “modern” art. And along the same lines, he attempts to characterise what relationship your history has to existing accounts of Australian art, by which he means those by Bernard and Terry Smith and Ian. I hope I’ve got that right, Darren!

Rex: Actually, I think you’ve put it quite well. Darren wrote an extremely insightful review, for which we are extremely grateful. He is absolutely correct to suggest that our history—unlike Ian’s—makes no distinction between the art made before 1970 and the art made after. In fact, our real argument is that the UnAustralian is the history of the art made after 1970, asking how we go there and, more than that, suggesting that we have always been there. Darren then asks in his review what is the relationship of our history to the existing ones. Is it a complement to them? Is it “parallel” to them? Is it somehow the “double” of them? But, of course, being megalomaniacs, we are not entirely satisfied with any of these. We would contend that, if our UnAustralian history is “contemporary”, it has, therefore, by the very logic of the contemporary, always been. It is not a matter of some subsequent movement or moment in a progressive teleology—that is modernism—but, after it has been proposed, it has always been. And, similarly, the UnAustralian is not some complement or parallel to Australian art, but its condition of possibility. It does not only come after Australian art, but also before it, making it possible. The UnAustralian is the history of our present, but the present by coming to pass has always been. It is the very opposite of the narrative of “double history”, which, by being uncompletable, understands itself as one day passing away. By contrast, we would want to suggest that the UnAustralian is complete from the beginning and will never pass away. In this it would want to see itself as the equivalent of that “everywhen” Stephen Gilchrist speaks of in his magnificent show at the Fogg Art Museum and what Archie Moore says about kith and kin at the Venice Biennale: ‘The archives keep our past in our present and future, just how the aboriginal temporal system dictates that everything always is, always was and always will be’. Aboriginal art has always been, before the Australian and the possibility of the Australian. And so has the “UnAustralian”. This is what Andrew and I continue to try to show. And perhaps a rare show of modesty on our part. It is not us inventing or coming up with this non-national or UnAustralian history in the twenty-first century as some kind of “solution” to the art of the last 50 years—this again would be Ian’s problem. Both artists (John Russell, Thea Proctor and all Indigenous artists) and art historians (Edith Fry, Eleonore Lange and we are sure Marcia Langton in her upcoming 65,000 Years: A Short History of Australian Art) have known of it forever. So that when Margaret Preston, for example, after she returned to Australia and got married after spending considerable time in Europe with her ex-student and likely lover Bessie Davidson, decided to make a “national” art, she precisely rejects the “UnAustralian” possibility. It is this rejected, maybe broken-up with, Australian female expatriate possibility that is the real explanation of her Australian work. The “UnAustralian” is not the “double” of the Australian. It “doubles” it, at once makes it possible and splits it. This is the true “double” of Ian’s book, that which is between the “Australian” and the “UnAustralian” or the national and the trans- or postnational. But they are not alternatives and one does not succeed the other and it is not a matter of their eventual reconciliation. The second doubles the first. It comes before it—before the Australian there was, of course, the UnAustralian—and makes it possible.

Dispatch: I think many people would instinctively agree with you that the new history of Australian art is “global” or “postnational”. That the more engaging stories for people today are the hitherto excluded or overlooked ones of our expatriate and immigrant artists. This does appear to be the history of our present and of how we got there. But a tough question: if you are wanting to write a non-national, UnAustralian, decentred history of Australian art, where do you write it from and in the name of whom do you write it? Surely there still remains some residual, imperishable “Australian” identity that allows you to write your “UnAustralian” story?

Rex: Yes, it’s a question we often ask ourselves and, indeed, are occasionally asked. On the one hand, as we say, the international comes before the national, the UnAustralian before the Australian and even the national and Australian are a reaction to and rejection of the international and the UnAustralian. It’s the history of that truth that we are trying to write, to record the evidence that has always been there. But are there still not some kind of criteria for being part of our story? It is not the history of everyone and everything. We at first thought you had not just needed to have been born here but to have spent some time here. That’s why we didn’t include, say, E. A. Hornel, who spent only two years in Australia before moving to Scotland with his parents. But then of late we looked at Francis Bacon’s close relations with a number of Australians, most notably Roy de Maistre and Patrick White, and realised it was because his father, Arthur Edward “Eddy” Mortimer Bacon, was born in Adelaide. And so who is this ultimately the history of? Who are we writing it for and from where do we write it? It’s a question—to allow him some sort of riposte to what we have been saying—that Ian puts in his essay ‘On the Necessity of (un)Australian Art’, where if, on the one hand, he can say the UnAustralian is “the most refreshing idea to enter the critical arena for a long time”—thank you for that—he can also say that it must necessarily “cut back to the frame of Australian art history”. It’s a question or objection along the same lines as you. It’s also a problem art historians more generally are grappling with the rise of so-called “standpoint aesthetics”—thank you to Andrew McNamara for alerting us to the phrase. One answer is perhaps Imants Tillers’ post-modern one that Australia is a kind of empty place from which worldly coincidences can be observed, for example, that between Arnold Bocklin’s Island of the Dead (1888) and the massacre of Tasmanian Aborigines or Paul Foss’ in his essay ‘Theatrum Nondum Cognitorum’ that Australia is that “balance” or “sponge” from which the territories of the rest of the world are mapped. There is something to this, but I’m not entirely satisfied with these answers yet, although I know we are right. The histories or stories we write are not universal, disembodied overviews—this tends to be more typical of those globalist overviews of contemporary art, which like to pretend they are written from nowhere. Our stories—and we would want to call it an artistic-centric history in homage to Ian Burn—are always specific, embodied, practical, particular and scene-focussed. (So definitely those words “global”, “worldly” and “universal” above need to be in inverted commas.) Most recently, for example, we wrote the story of the gay or queer men in the Recent Australian Painting show at the Whitechapel, which precisely demonstrates that—against the way the show was understood—we are not “exotic” and from a non-Renaissance tradition from far away, but in many cases actually living and practising in England, in all kinds of intimate relationships with English artists and the English art world. There’s probably some Leibnitzian perspectival solution to the problem here: the “universal” is only an endless series of perspectives and the “UnAustralian” is only the realisation of this. I’ll have to read Deleuze’s The Fold again! And people, of course, put the same objections to Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of “deterritorialization”. I think we’ve got lots of new stories about ourselves to tell, each of which hopefully constructs a new “us”. We’ve got a few coming up on the “Australians” in the Pacific, another on the “Australian” women Surrealists and another on the “Australian” global abstractionists. Let alone the big book we’re planning on the long history of Australian-American artistic relationships as the refutation of the famous “provincialism problem”. To go back to what we were saying before about the modern and the contemporary, we would argue that, because we are no longer provincial and there is no artworld centre, we have never been provincial and there has never been any artworld centre. Even Renaissance experts like Anne Dunlop are writing new global histories of the Renaissance. What could the possible meaning of those be if they are not actually saying Rome and Florence were never simply the only centres of the art of the time? Seriously. This is the only way to tell a history and not have it end before the present. You have to write the history of the present. That’s the only history there is.

Dispatch: Well just to ask the question again, and tease this out further, do you think people have a good point against you when they say you can only write an Australian history?

Rex: I’ll put the answer in a kind of paradox: we here can only write an Australian history, but only because of the UnAustralian. And for all of those speaking about “deconstructing” Australian art history, this is what it would be. Deconstruction is not some kind of double or parallel. Deconstruction speaks of the condition of possibility of things: presence is possible only because of absence. But because this “absence” can only be grasped through presence, that is in terms of the system being deconstructed, Derrida comes up with the term différance. Différance is this doubling, the fact that the condition of possibility of things is only those things themselves. The UnAustralian—and it is crucial that it still has the word “Australian” in it—is at once the fact that the “Australian” can only be explained from outside of itself and we can only speak of this explanation in terms of the Australian. But this is not a “double” of Australian art history in the sense that it proposes some parallel, alternative or complement to it. It is a “double” to it in the sense that it “doubles” it, explains it entirely, is what it arises in reaction to, is its condition of possibility. The “UnAustralian” is the différance of Australian art history. And perhaps the book to read here would be Derrida's Of Hospitality, which plays on the paradoxes or impossibility of a universal “cosmopolitanism”. 

Dispatch: Wow. Deep breath. Thank you so much for speaking to us and taking the time out reply to our questions.

Rex Butler: Thanks to you and the Lester Prize for having me over. It’s been an honour and also an honour disputing with my colleagues. Maybe the next book launch you do will be someone having a go at us. I hope so. And if they’re right, then they’ve always been right. By the way, I know by now who won the Portrait Prize, but I can’t tell you!