Rex Butler’s Radical Revisionism
In 1996, two publications marked Rex Butler as a major new voice in Australian art criticism. The first, An Uncertain Smile, proceeded from an ambitious series of lectures delivered the previous year at Artspace in Sydney, with Butler taking a microscope and, on more than one occasion, a carefully concealed sword to Australia’s most renowned art journal of the 1980s, Art & Text, and its writers past and present. This was generational change with a capital C, precociously delivered in a program that bore more than a passing resemblance to the great Collège de France lecture series in Paris (where figures such as Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault had set the intellectual world ablaze during the 1970s), and which ultimately championed a brave, perverse mix of neo-modernist art and postmodern discourse as the way out of the long 1980s and its dependence on ‘French Theory’.
The second publication was an anthology of essays penned, for the most part, in the 1980s and edited by Butler to form What is Appropriation?. The book, and particularly Butler’s extraordinary introductory essay, quickly became a staple of contemporary art courses throughout Australia. Its odd, circuitous logic—that artistic appropriations not only transformed copies into originals and originals into copies, but that this strategy of inversion was uniquely Antipodal or quintessentially Australian—played wonderful havoc for quick-witted students at their keyboards, eager to be reminded that writing still mattered despite the gradual demise of Art & Text, and that such vitality could still emerge in, of all places, Australia.
Now, over a decade later, Butler has added yet more feathers to his cap (as an internationally renowned scholar of Jean Baudrillard’s and Slavoj