UnAustralian Art: Ten Essays on Transnational Art History

UnAustralian Art: 10 Essays on Transnational Art History proposes an entirely new history of Australian art. Traditional histories of Australian art have invariably sought to identify a distinctive “Australian” sensibility, arising from some unique combination of place, people and history. In this way, Australian art was seen as separate from that of the rest of the world, whether this was understood as positive or negative. But in order to construct this history, so much was left out: most notably the Australian expatriate artists who lived and worked overseas, but also many of the immigrant artists who came from elsewhere and continued to make their art once here. Altogether the long history of Australian artists’ relationships with other artists and cultures has been written out of our art history, with an almost exclusive interest on what “Australian” artists did in Australia. However, today in a world of increasing global interconnectedness, this other excluded history, which Butler and Donaldson call that of UnAustralian art, looks more and more like the real history of our present, the past that explains the Australia of the twenty-first century.

In the 10 essays that make up this book, the authors write detailed histories of the artistic relations between Australia and Britain, France, Germany, Asia, New Zealand, South America and the Pacific, but also look at artists around the world who have made “Australian” art or art inspired by Australia. In doing so, they draw our attention to a whole series of hitherto overlooked artists, art critics and exhibitions. Altogether their book widens the category of Australian art and who an Australian artist is. “UnAustralian” art is therefore part of a broader project of “world” or “global” art, although it also argues that this “world” is best seen from a particular place. In fact, its word for “world” art is the “transnational”, which always implies a connection between two places. It is this balance between place and the crossing of place and the positive evaluation of what is considered by Australian nationalists as not properly belonging here that Butler and Donaldson seek to capture with their word “UnAustralian”. In doing so, they want to change our understanding not only of Australia’s past but of what Australia could be.