How to Appear? Writing Art History in Australia After 1973

Abstract

This chapter is an attempt to make myself better appear in Australian art history. My research focuses on art and migration, but I rarely speak from my own migratory experiences. Perhaps this absence is a symptom of disciplinary norms. Arguably, art history has disciplined me to speak with critical distance, that is, without a subjective attachment to its subject matter. Or perhaps art history overall prefers to erase, exploit and/or subjugate non-white subjects (e.g. migrants from the global south). I suggest that to appear is to be accountable, and to make the discipline accountable to the subject matter. Maybe to appear is also to enable a voice that doesn’t (by default) reproduce what a dear friend of mine terms the Straight White Guy of Art History (SWGAH), mimicking Kant, Hegel, Winckelmann and so on. To try and appear, I reflect on my art history training, especially during my PhD, when I was writing a thesis on the nexus of contemporary art and the aftermath of the Pacific Solution (2001) at a sandstone university in Melbourne/Naarm. I also try and appear as a Latinx art historian shaped by my flight from Chile across the Pacific to Australia during the Pinochet dictatorship (1973–1990). Because the art historian’s possibility of appearance is always dependent on an external subject—the artist, the artwork and the museum—I chose as my object of affection and analysis the Chilean-Australian artist Juan Dávila, who also left Chile after 1973. I write this chapter as a letter to Juan, who I address as ‘you’. So, when I speak as ‘I’, I do this in relation to Juan. I want to trace how, via Juan, it might be possible to locate a place in Australian art history for intergenerational dialogues and experiences of migratory subjects in/out of the Pacific after 1973 and after the Pacific Solution. However incommensurable migratory experiences are, is it possible for art history to allow an ‘I’, ‘you’ and ‘we’ to appear? Is it possible for art history to make intra-Pacific solidarity appear in Australia? If I have been able to appear at all it is because I now work at an art school, which has cultivated in me a deeply undisciplined, but generative, approach to art history.