Abstract
In a celebrated 1968 essay titled ‘The Death of the Author’, Roland Barthes defined identity as ‘a tissue of quotations drawn from innumerable centres’.1 Although Barthes was referring primarily to the intertextual construction of discursive meaning, this whimsical, poetic metaphor suggests that we make the text of our lives through constant processes of appropriation. A sense of these processes is nowhere more apparent than in the work of Chilean-Australian artist Juan Dávila. In landscape paintings, murals. wall-hangings and ready-made objects produced since moving from Chile to Melbourne in 1974. Dávila offers a Pop art vision of metropolitan chaos cluttered with a complex network of visual codes and transcultural signifiers. Using television and newspaper images, comics, art history, literary references and pornography from three continents, Dávila's quotes range from Madonna to Matta-Echaurren.
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