Rex Butler
Biographic Data
| ID | 3634967 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Rex Butler |
| GIVEN NAMES | Rex |
| FAMILY NAME | Butler |
| SIGNATURE | BUTLER R |
| AFFILIATIONS | Monash University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-9555-2996 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 18 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 4 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 18 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2000 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Residencies Unreflected in Papunya
This literature review takes up two books: Residencies Reflected (2024), a collection of essays on artist residencies, edited by Imeli Kokko; and Dot, Circle & Frame: The Making of Papunya Art (2023) by John Kean. The review will argue that Kean's revisionist account of the “invention” of contemporary Aboriginal art at Papunya in Central Australia in 1971, which gives much more agency to the artists involved than previously, demonstrates that Pap…
The Myth of Heterosexuality
The 1961 Recent Australian Painting exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery in London is an important and much-discussed moment in Australian art history.It is when the idea of Australian art as "isolated" and "exotic" first became popularised in both British and Australian cultures.The prominent Australian art historian Bernard Smith criticised the idea, but in many ways his book Australian Painting, published the year after, repeated the assumpti…
The Origins of the Abbey
We want to begin by suggesting that art history has always been a matter of art colonies.Art colonies are places where artists live and work alongside each other.Sometimes they are associated with the teaching of art and art schools, but this is not always the case.On other occasions they involve shared workshops, for example in printmaking, but again this is not strictly speaking necessary.They can exist either in smaller outlying towns or villa…
Interlude 1
This interlude follows the AAH conference, when all of the authors who contribute to the special journal edition are present. Their wide-ranging conversation covers the idea and possibilities of a polyphonic history of art. This interlude is a starting point, a jumping off point from where a group of authors, researchers and artists reflect on new ways of thinking about, and new ways of presenting, art history. Their conversation develops an ambi…
Lee Wallace, Reattachment Theory
Journal Article Lee Wallace, Reattachment Theory: Queer Cinema of Remarriage (a Camera Obscura book) Get access Lee Wallace, Reattachment Theory: Queer Cinema of Remarriage (a Camera Obscura book). Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020, 264 pp. Rex Butler Rex Butler Email: [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Screen, Volume 64, Issue 2, Summer 2023, Pages 254–256, https://doi.org/10.1093…
Know My Name
A Divided Self and a Doubled World
This essay attempts to present a new interpretation of American philosopher Stanley Cavell's perfectionism. Against most readings, it argues that Cavell's work is fundamentally "transcendental" in logic, seeking to posit the underlying conditions of both the world and other philosophical systems. It understands Cavell's perfectionism, which he takes from Ralph Waldo Emerson, not as any gradualist or inherently limited moral doctrine, but as a con…
Stanley Cavell and The Arts
In the late 1990s, Rosalind Krauss, one of the principal theorists of post-modernism in the arts, began using the term “post-medium” in her work. It was a nod to the American “ordinary language” philosopher Stanley Cavell, who had been thinking through a concept of medium in art for 30 years. Today with the decline of post-modernism, Stanley Cavell has emerged as one of the most important figures for thinking again about the visual arts, film and…
Ben Quilty
This essay looks at the war paintings of Ben Quilty, who in October 2011 was stationed with Australian troops fighting against the Taliban in Afghanistan as part of Australia’s Official War Art Scheme. Quilty’s portraits, in fact made back at home in his studio after he returned, show soldiers naked, in pain, reliving traumatic episodes from their war experiences. They have been almost universally praised as providing a new and compelling image o…
Andy Warhol Ai Weiwei
It was a brilliant idea to put together the American pop artist of the 1960s, Andy Warhol, and the Chinese contemporary artist and dissident Ai Weiwei. Their names in silver on the cover of the cat
Representation
Although popularly associated with postmodernism, the idea that the world is a representation goes back to the origins of western thought. Plato's allegory of the cave suggests that we cannot see the truth but only a reflection of it. Descartes's hypothesis of the evil demon holds that all we know is merely an illusion produced by another, alien intelligence. There are a variety of philosophical idealisms after Descartes, which claimed that the w…
Time After Time
This essay is an analysis of a series of writings by the Australian intellectual historian Ian Hunter on the subject of ‘theory’. It examines the methodological issues raised by attempting to write a history of theory. The essay particularly seeks to analyse the various aporias at stake in Hunter's project: between the empirical and the transcendental, between history and the event, and between theory and ‘empirical’ history
Against provincialism
This article offers an analysis and critique of Terry Smith's well-known essay “The Provincialism Problem”. Against Smith's argument for the “subservience” of Australian art vis-a-vis American, we sketch a long history of Australian-American artistic interaction throughout the twentieth century, and indeed the involvement of many highly-placed Australian artists in American art. We suggest that from a “contemporary” perspective not only does a wh…
Abbas Kiarostami
This essay begins by offering a reading of Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami's Certified Copy (2010), in which we are unable to decide whether or not the couple we see there is married. But rather than coming down ourselves on one side or another, we ask why it is that their love for each other might be expressed only through their game-playing. And we follow this confusion between the real and the artificial throughout Kiarostami's career – fro…
Swallow, Ricky
Curating the World
The Nigerian-born Okwui Enwezor is undoubtedly one of the major curators of and thinkers about art in the world today. His 2002 exhibition DOCUMENTA 11—which took up such topics as democracy, truth and reconciliation, creolisation, and the fate of four African cities—has been endlessly discussed and imitated. A show not only about the idea of the world but also introducing a new ‘global’ style of art, it is widely understood to be one of the defi…
Bright Shadows
The South Atlantic Quarterly - Volume 101, Number 3, Summer 2002
Recent Baudrillard
Against provincialism
This article offers an analysis and critique of Terry Smith's well-known essay “The Provincialism Problem”. Against Smith's argument for the “subservience” of Australian art vis-a-vis American, we sketch a long history of Australian-American artistic interaction throughout the twentieth century, and indeed the involvement of many highly-placed Australian artists in American art. We suggest that from a “contemporary” perspective not only does a wh…
Ben Quilty
This essay looks at the war paintings of Ben Quilty, who in October 2011 was stationed with Australian troops fighting against the Taliban in Afghanistan as part of Australia’s Official War Art Scheme. Quilty’s portraits, in fact made back at home in his studio after he returned, show soldiers naked, in pain, reliving traumatic episodes from their war experiences. They have been almost universally praised as providing a new and compelling image o…
Bright Shadows
The South Atlantic Quarterly - Volume 101, Number 3, Summer 2002
Recent Baudrillard
Bright Shadows
The South Atlantic Quarterly - Volume 101, Number 3, Summer 2002
Curating the World
The Nigerian-born Okwui Enwezor is undoubtedly one of the major curators of and thinkers about art in the world today. His 2002 exhibition DOCUMENTA 11—which took up such topics as democracy, truth and reconciliation, creolisation, and the fate of four African cities—has been endlessly discussed and imitated. A show not only about the idea of the world but also introducing a new ‘global’ style of art, it is widely understood to be one of the defi…
Swallow, Ricky
Against provincialism
This article offers an analysis and critique of Terry Smith's well-known essay “The Provincialism Problem”. Against Smith's argument for the “subservience” of Australian art vis-a-vis American, we sketch a long history of Australian-American artistic interaction throughout the twentieth century, and indeed the involvement of many highly-placed Australian artists in American art. We suggest that from a “contemporary” perspective not only does a wh…
Abbas Kiarostami
This essay begins by offering a reading of Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami's Certified Copy (2010), in which we are unable to decide whether or not the couple we see there is married. But rather than coming down ourselves on one side or another, we ask why it is that their love for each other might be expressed only through their game-playing. And we follow this confusion between the real and the artificial throughout Kiarostami's career – fro…
Time After Time
This essay is an analysis of a series of writings by the Australian intellectual historian Ian Hunter on the subject of ‘theory’. It examines the methodological issues raised by attempting to write a history of theory. The essay particularly seeks to analyse the various aporias at stake in Hunter's project: between the empirical and the transcendental, between history and the event, and between theory and ‘empirical’ history
Ben Quilty
This essay looks at the war paintings of Ben Quilty, who in October 2011 was stationed with Australian troops fighting against the Taliban in Afghanistan as part of Australia’s Official War Art Scheme. Quilty’s portraits, in fact made back at home in his studio after he returned, show soldiers naked, in pain, reliving traumatic episodes from their war experiences. They have been almost universally praised as providing a new and compelling image o…
Andy Warhol Ai Weiwei
It was a brilliant idea to put together the American pop artist of the 1960s, Andy Warhol, and the Chinese contemporary artist and dissident Ai Weiwei. Their names in silver on the cover of the cat
Representation
Although popularly associated with postmodernism, the idea that the world is a representation goes back to the origins of western thought. Plato's allegory of the cave suggests that we cannot see the truth but only a reflection of it. Descartes's hypothesis of the evil demon holds that all we know is merely an illusion produced by another, alien intelligence. There are a variety of philosophical idealisms after Descartes, which claimed that the w…
Stanley Cavell and The Arts
In the late 1990s, Rosalind Krauss, one of the principal theorists of post-modernism in the arts, began using the term “post-medium” in her work. It was a nod to the American “ordinary language” philosopher Stanley Cavell, who had been thinking through a concept of medium in art for 30 years. Today with the decline of post-modernism, Stanley Cavell has emerged as one of the most important figures for thinking again about the visual arts, film and…
A Divided Self and a Doubled World
This essay attempts to present a new interpretation of American philosopher Stanley Cavell's perfectionism. Against most readings, it argues that Cavell's work is fundamentally "transcendental" in logic, seeking to posit the underlying conditions of both the world and other philosophical systems. It understands Cavell's perfectionism, which he takes from Ralph Waldo Emerson, not as any gradualist or inherently limited moral doctrine, but as a con…
Know My Name
Lee Wallace, Reattachment Theory
Journal Article Lee Wallace, Reattachment Theory: Queer Cinema of Remarriage (a Camera Obscura book) Get access Lee Wallace, Reattachment Theory: Queer Cinema of Remarriage (a Camera Obscura book). Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020, 264 pp. Rex Butler Rex Butler Email: [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Screen, Volume 64, Issue 2, Summer 2023, Pages 254–256, https://doi.org/10.1093…
The Myth of Heterosexuality
The 1961 Recent Australian Painting exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery in London is an important and much-discussed moment in Australian art history.It is when the idea of Australian art as "isolated" and "exotic" first became popularised in both British and Australian cultures.The prominent Australian art historian Bernard Smith criticised the idea, but in many ways his book Australian Painting, published the year after, repeated the assumpti…
The Origins of the Abbey
We want to begin by suggesting that art history has always been a matter of art colonies.Art colonies are places where artists live and work alongside each other.Sometimes they are associated with the teaching of art and art schools, but this is not always the case.On other occasions they involve shared workshops, for example in printmaking, but again this is not strictly speaking necessary.They can exist either in smaller outlying towns or villa…
Interlude 1
This interlude follows the AAH conference, when all of the authors who contribute to the special journal edition are present. Their wide-ranging conversation covers the idea and possibilities of a polyphonic history of art. This interlude is a starting point, a jumping off point from where a group of authors, researchers and artists reflect on new ways of thinking about, and new ways of presenting, art history. Their conversation develops an ambi…
Residencies Unreflected in Papunya
This literature review takes up two books: Residencies Reflected (2024), a collection of essays on artist residencies, edited by Imeli Kokko; and Dot, Circle & Frame: The Making of Papunya Art (2023) by John Kean. The review will argue that Kean's revisionist account of the “invention” of contemporary Aboriginal art at Papunya in Central Australia in 1971, which gives much more agency to the artists involved than previously, demonstrates that Pap…
Art (11 works) · History (8 works) · History (7 works) · Visual arts (7 works) · Art history (6 works) · Philosophy (6 works) · Sociology (6 works) · Literature (5 works) · Philosophy (5 works) · Psychology (4 works)