The Art of David Mcdiarmid

There’s Always More: The Art of David McDiarmid Sally Suzette Clelland Gray A Thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy FEBRUARY 2006 School of Art History and Theory College of Fine Arts University of NSW Abstract This thesis argues that the work of the artist David McDiarmid is to be read as an enactment of late twentieth century gay male and queer politics. It will analyse how both the idea and the cultural specificity of ‘America’ impacted on the work of this Australian artist resident in New York from 1979 to 1987. The thesis examines how African American music, The Beats, notions of ‘hip’ and ‘cool’, street art and graffiti, the underground dance club Paradise Garage, street cruising and gay male urban culture influenced the sensibility and the materiality of the artist’s work. McDiarmid’s cultural practice of dress and adornment, it is proposed, forms an essential part of his creative oeuvre and of the ‘queer world- making’ which is the driver of his creative achievements. The thesis proposes that McDiarmid was a Proto-queer artist before the politics of queer emerged in the 1980s and that his work, including his own life-as-art practices of dress and adornment, enact a mobile rather than fixed gay male identity. i Acknowledgments This thesis would not have been conceived and written had I not met Dr Peter McNeil in 2001. It was Roger Leong, now Curator of Fashion and Textiles at the National Gallery of Victoria who introduced us and began the series of conversations, initially on the visual culture of dance clubbing, which ultimately led to my decision to undertake this thesis. Peter’s imagination, intuition and knowledge in his role of thesis supervisor and his unwavering confidence in my project have been inspirational for me. Dr Anna Munster, Dr Tony Ross and Dr Sue Best of the University of NSW College of Fine Arts, are jointly responsible for making suggestions which led me to decide to write in depth on David McDiarmid’s art. My former Masters supervisor, Dr Bob Petersen, and academic staff at the College of Fine Arts encouraged and supported my application for the University of NSW College of Fine Arts Research Scholarship which allowed me to write full- time for two years. ii Dr Ted Gott, Senior Curator of International Art at the National Gallery of Victoria, has been an intellectual fellow traveller in the process of uncovering and recording the depth of David McDiarmid’s oeuvre, jointly with me, since David’s death in 1995. Ted has been a companion at a distance throughout the writing of this thesis and I have often been grateful for his work on the chronology of David’s life. Others who have assisted in the research and writing of this thesis directly or indirectly include: George Alexander, Stephen Alkins, Dr Liz Bradshaw, Rebecca Cox, Paul Craft, Billy Crawford, Brian Doherty, Bernard Fitzgerald, Pamela Gray, Ruben Gray, Dr Ian Henderson, Linda Jackson, Ivana Jirisek, John Kirkman, Robert Lake, Roger Leong, Bill Morley, Laura Murray Cree, Anna Rauls, Jane Richens, Brian Sayer, Penny Shore, Jason Smith, Ron Smith, Astrid Spielman, Madeline Spielman, Talulah Stephenson, Jeffrey Stewart, Annie Talve, Sarah Tucker, John Witte and Ellen Young. Institutions which have assisted me include: The University of NSW, College of Fine Arts which in granting me the COFA Research Scholarship and a research travel grant enabled me to have the freedom to think and write and the opportunity to speak on McDiarmid’s work to an international audience. The Museum of Modern Art at Heide, The National Gallery of Victoria, The National Gallery of Australia, The Australia Council for the Arts, iii the State Library of NSW and the Library at COFA UNSW have all assisted me in locating and/or photographing published and unpublished documents, images or art works. My girlfriends, sisters and boyfriends: Margot Anwar and Ariani Anwar, Barbara Bee, Lesley Brown, Eva Castle, Susan Charlton, Dr Shula Chiat, Gillian Corban, Liz Day, Jan Fieldsend, Pamela Gray, Susan Head, Maggie Lloyd, Robbie Lloyd, Bruce Packer, Brian Sayer, Kit Shepherd, Ron Smith, Astrid Spielman, Annie Talve and Margot Tucker all took an interest in this project from its inception or added in some special way to the process. David McDiarmid’s mother Vivien Weetman and his brother Paul McDiarmid have given me nothing but love and support in my role as executor of the artist’s estate. The thesis is dedicated to the memory of David McDiarmid. iv Table of contents Abstract i Acknowledgments ii Introduction 1 Chapter One I Just Can’t Think Straight: The Politics and Poetics of McDiarmid’s Early Work 1976-1979 46 Chapter Two You Make Me Feel Mighty Real: McDiarmid and America 97 Chapter Three Art and the Dance Club: Utopia and Ecstasy in the Work of David McDiarmid 1979-1981 150 Chapter Four I’m Here Girlfriend What’s New? McDiarmid’s Performative Self Presentation as Art Practice 193 Chapter Five Toxic Queen: McDiarmid, Art and AIDS 1984-1992 246 Chapter Six The Full Spectrum : The Rainbow Aphorisms and the artist’s ‘final work’ 1993-1995 293 Conclusion 320 Bibliography 333 Unpublished and non-print references 360 There’s Always More :1 The Art of David McDiarmid History is made an inexhaustible enterprise only because of the ongoing movement of time, the pressure of futurity, the multiplicity of positions from which rewriting can and will occur. History is not the recovery of the truth of bodies or lives in the past; it is the engendering of new kinds of bodies and new kinds of lives. History is in part an index of our present pre-occupations, but perhaps more interestingly, the past is as rich as our futures allow. Elizabeth Grosz This Nick of time: Politics, Evolution and the Untimely 2004, p255. 1. “There’s Always More” is a repeated line from the song “Sly”, from Massive Attack’s Protection album, Circa Records, 1994 Introduction All art is political in one way or another and this thesis recognises the “always already political character of the very representational process and of the contest that it presupposes.”2 The thesis also proposes the political character of the reception of art and visual culture. That is, that where one stands, what world views one holds, what experience one has had, impacts on what one sees - indeed what one can see - and how one responds to what one sees. The thesis title derives from the idea that the self-consciously political is implicitly and or explicitly the refusal to accept ‘what is’. It is in part an insistent reaching for the more that exceeds ‘what is’. Or a reaching for the potentiality for more which exists in the productive liminal spaces between orthodox categories of ‘what is’. The more referred to here is not the more of late capitalist consumption fetishism but the more made available by reaching 3 across the space between the “already-there and the yet-to-come.” Implicit in David McDiarmid’s art oeuvre as a whole is a postmodern unsettling of the secure hierarchical cultural binaries of Western thought: high /low, masculine/ feminine, East/West, reason/intuition, good taste/bad taste. His work embraces an 2 Fabio Cleto. (1999). Camp: Queer Aesthetics and the Performing Subject. Ann Arbor Michigan, University of Michigan Press, p35. 3 Judith Butler. (1997). The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection. Stanford, Stanford University Press p18. 1 open investigative approach to epistemic and aesthetic questions. McDiarmid adopted a practice characterised by “curiosity rather than faith” in the political art he produced from the 1970s to the 1990s.4 A non-metaphysical drive towards the “unknown” is a characteristic of McDiarmid’s creative practice as it reaches across locations, cultures and political imaginings creating hybridities and excesses and engaging in a nomadic play with multivalent subjectivity and performative masculinity. The artist engaged in an appropriative nomadic “conductivity” which refuses to acknowledge established bounds.”5 The writer of this thesis is also implicated in an uncertain and curious practice of reaching across categories. This thesis works in the interstitial spaces of feminist thought and gay and lesbian history, across art historical and post structural discourses. I appropriate from urban theory, fashion theory, art theory and cultural studies in a restless search for the more which is required to make sense for me of recent cultural history. Epistemic meaning is sought in the liminal spaces between. 4 Thomas McEvilley. (1995). Art and Discontent: Theory at the Millennium. New York, Documentext McPherson and Company. P172- 173. 5 Nigel Thrift. (1996). Spatial Formations. London, Thousand Oaks, California, and New Delhi, Sage p 288. 2 Beginnings It was a question asked by art historian Robert Farris Thompson in his essay “Haring and the Dance” which provoked the initial investigative spark which ultimately led to the research and writing undertaken for this thesis. Robert Farris Thompson wrote in his catalogue essay for the 1997 Whitney Museum of American Art’s Keith Haring retrospective: “The question emerges: What kind of dancer was Haring himself?” The subsequent discussion by Farris Thompson of Keith Haring’s dancing at the Paradise Garage dance club encompassed interfaces between African American, Hispanic- American and Hip Hop music and related dance kinetics, urban subcultural lineages, the performativity of the street and the dance floor, street and subway graffiti and the dynamics of particular urban visual sensibilities.6 It was the direct question about Keith Haring’s actual dance style and the kinetics of his art work which opened up my own enquiry into the art work of David McDiarmid.

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