HEATHER BARKER and CHARLES GREEN No More Provincialism: Art & Text
Heather Barker and Charles Green, No More Provincialism: Art & Text HEATHER BARKER AND CHARLES GREEN No More Provincialism: Art & Text ABSTRACT This essay discusses the writing and personalities surrounding the 1981 establishment of the Australian art magazine, Art & Text, and traces its progression under Paul Taylor’s editorship up to his relocation to New York. During this period, Art & Text published Taylor’s own essays and, more importantly, those of other writers and artists — Meaghan Morris, Paul Foss, Philip Brophy, Imants Tillers, Rex Butler, Edward Colless — all articulating a consistent and complex postmodern position. The magazine sought the niche and status of an antipodean October. The essay argues that the magazine’s founder and editor, Paul Taylor, personified the shattering impact of postmodernism upon the Australian art world as well as postmodernism’s limitations. Taylor facilitated a new theoretical framework for the discussion of Australian art, one that continues to dominate the internationalist aspirations of Australian art writers. He produced temporarily convincing solutions to problems that earlier critics had wrestled with unsuccessfully, in particular the twin problems of provincialism, and the relationship of Australian to international art. Introduction Australian art writers and critics of the early 1980s used a methodology and a vocabulary that were new for writing on Australian art. Like good avant-gardists, they said that they were freeing themselves from traditional assumptions, relationships and strictures, questioning and deconstructing the unchanging truths to which their antecedents putatively subscribed. Instead of beginning with revelatory foundational models such as Marxism, young postmodern theorists in Melbourne and Sydney eclectically combined ideas from the new, still fluid canon of French post-structuralist philosophy.
[Show full text]