On writing a history of ‘UnAustralian’ art

These reflections on my current project, ‘A History of UnAustralian Art’, strike me as being of little or no worth. Personally, I believe too much methodological self‐consciousness kills one’s work, or at least makes it uninteresting. Paradoxically, too airtight an argument prevents other people entering into it and making something of it on their own. Certainly, I am very conscious – having already put them to myself – of the inherent self‐contradictions involved in writing an ‘UnAustralian’ history of Australian art. But it is just this tension between the Australian and the UnAustralian that I am wanting to capture, both in the art and in my own speaking position. I offer these introductory remarks, then, not to explain or justify myself but simply as a way of situating what I am going to speak of within a wider context for those for whom the art history will not be enough (and I want to stress that the proof or evidence for what I am arguing is very much in the materiality of the history I am going to present, the density of the artistic connections I am going to point to, the way this UnAustralian history resembles in what must be called its tradition that other, nationalist history of Australian art we have become used to)