Rex Butler

Rex Butler is an internationally recognised Brisbane based art critic, author and Senior Lecturer at the School of English, Media and Art History at the University of Queensland. He is a prolific academic writer who writes in a clear manner that is accessible to a wide audience. While supportive of emerging artists and critics, Butler is a critic who is not afraid to express his opinion.

In a transcript of his comments on art critic Robert Hughes’ book Things I Didn’t Know on ABC Radio National he stated that:

"Everyone who writes on art eventually becomes constrained by their own taste: their simultaneous weakness and strength is that they end up trying to formulate rules and make predictions, whereas all important art is by definition the 'shock of the new'."

In his comments on Butler's book Radical Revisionism (2005), Michael Snelling states, “At once Butler sees a deep, underlying pattern to Australian culture-one that responds to our continuing concerns as to the reality of our national identity and our place in the world- and seeks to attain some critical distance from this” (Snelling cited in Butler 2005, p.6)

In Butler’s writings on Australian art history and his notion of revisionism, the ‘shock of the new’ is not limited to art in the present. Indeed Butler’s theory of revisionism, explained in his own words in his article A Short Introduction to UnAustralian Art (2003), is the idea that art historians should ‘always be trying to construct our histories as some way of trying to explain the present, of thinking how the art of today came to be’ (Butler 2003, p.1). In essence he is asking what the history of Australian art reveals about the way we understand present Australian art and culture (see https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:131214).

Butler’s article, A Short Introduction to UnAustralian Art, introduces the idea of ‘UnAustralian’ art. His current research, in conjunction with ADS Donaldson, is on a history of “UnAustralian art with artists, art historians and curators specialising in the history of Australian art in the 20^th century. Butler claims that Australian art history has been revised over the past twenty years so that artists previously seen as supporters of ‘empire and nation are now promoted as post-modern ironists secretly debunking the very notion of national identity’ (Butler 2003, p.2). By repositioning the history of Australian art to belong to a global culture it would ‘be an Australian art that was precisely no longer Australian, but let us say UnAustralian.’

According to Butler the art which is least concerned with national identity and therefore the greatest of all UnAustralian art is Aboriginal art which refuses to become ‘either a national (Australian) or an international (Biennale, Art Fair) art’ (Butler 2003, p.3). It is instead a universal art because it aims to speak to everybody.

In his introduction to Radical Revisionism (2005), a book which he edited, Butler says that in a ‘kind of perpetual revisionism, in which Aboriginality is not so much what guarantees the specificity of Australia as exception as what undoes the very identity of Australia in a continuous movement towards the universal.’ (Butler 2005, p.28)

References

Radical Revisionism 2005 IMA Publishing Brisbane edited by Rex Butler

Rex Butler (2003) A Short Introduction to UnAustralian Art. Broadsheet, 32 4: 17. http://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:131214

ABC Radio National, 25 October 2006, Past Programs, ‘Transcript Rex Butlers reviews Things I Didn’t Know, by Robert Hughes’, viewed 14 August 2011, <http://www.abc.net.au/rn/bookshow/stories/2006/1772959.htm>