Book Reviews

Rex Butler, An Uncertain smile: Australian Art in the '90s (Artspace, Sydney, 1996);
Rex Butler (ed.), What is Appropriation? An anthology of critical writings on Australian art in the '80s and '90s (IMA/Power Publications, Brisbane and Sydney, 1996)

Andrew McNamara

Eyeline 34

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Appropriation yesterday, banality today? There's a popular line doing the rounds in art rhetoric and it's all about demarcating mini-epochs. lt runs like this: eighties' art was marked by conceptual and rhetorical overload; it was the decade of art and theory. Today's artists, by contrast, are 'just doing it'. Their art is more direct and engaging, more concerned with the art object. Compared with art of the previous decade, today's art remains largely unencumbered by that heavy baggage of appropriation, parody, irony, pastiche.

As with all such cliched summaries, there is something to this assertion. Yet the current rhetoric does not stop there. It goes on to suggest that contemporary artists somehow manage to circumvent all institutional compromises (whether it be with theory, museums, criticism, art managers, the art market or capitalist commodification in general) and yet nonetheless they are happily incorporated in it all. The result is a wondrous transgression-it is deft, thoroughly complicit and yet undiluted all the same. Not since Santa Claus has so much, so magically, been offered.

In An Uncertain Smile (hereafter AUS)-a series of lectures delivered at and published by Artspace in Sydney-Rex Butler labels this 'constant rhetorical structure' our contemporary camp. This condition becomes evident when 'the contemporary critic decides he (sic) cannot decide, and does not even try to'. (AUS, p. 30) How can one decide when so much art is inevitably critical and complicit? For Butler, this is a kind of saturation point, a point when 'undecidability has become too decidable, ...unknowability too knowable'. (AUS, p. 29)

Far from signalling a break from 1980's appropriation art, Butler contends that the current rhetoric reveals the enduring legacy of that art. And this