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[New York] felt like home as soon as I went there. It felt comfortable. It felt like a place you could grow. I felt that I’d done everything that I could in Sydney for the moment. It was like going to school on a very high level: on an art level, a sex level—the two most important things. It was like a playground. There was such a lot happening. It was not that frantic, it suited me, the pace. So why not live there? It was a really easy choice.[1]
The life and work of Australian artist David McDiarmid were impacted on strongly by his long-term interest in North American literary, visual and popular culture—an interest that was consolidated during his period of travel and residence in the United States between 1977 and 1987. McDiarmid’s art, produced between 1976 and 1995 and which he designated from the beginning ‘gay art’, might be seen as both ‘mobile and located’, to borrow a term from Marsha Meskimmon,[2] in the sense that it was neither ‘Australian’ nor ‘American’ but an eclectic, multivalent attempt at a gay male art of his time. McDiarmid’s diverse art practice was inflected by his evident commitment to the idea of a mobile, ‘becoming’ sexual, political and creative subjectivity. It was this commitment that was the principal driver of McDiarmid’s 1977 decision to live in New York. Before, during and after his American period, he created a body of work that existed across geographical and cultural boundaries and across the interstitial sexual and gender categories explored in recent decades by queer theory.[3]
This interstitial character of McDiarmid’s art practice involved a play across geography, time and diverse realms of cultural experience. He had a postmodern lack of respect for modernist and Eurocentric hierarchies of culture and his art practice employed a ‘maverick orientalism’ of cultural appropriation.[4]
Listing books he might one day write, Roland Barthes suggested he might write ‘The discourse of homosexuality’ or ‘The discourses of homosexuality’ or, again, ‘The discourse of homosexualities’, referring to the instability of sexual identity.[5] McDiarmid’s art is an evocation of such a notion: of multiple, polysemous discourses of sexuality and multiple possible homosexualities. In the course of his career, and in his pioneering enactment of ‘gay artist’, McDiarmid chose to place himself in liminal cultural zones relating to geography, sexuality, gender, race, culture, history and aesthetics. This gives his work a multivalent complexity and rewards a viewing of it as more than the simple politics of fixed gay identity. His placement of himself in New York, the then metropolitan centre of international gay male life, gave him the freedom and complexity he sought in order to explore a multifaceted identity in his art and his life, as evidenced in his own account:
Yeah. Felt very hemmed in by conservative art scene queens who didn’t feel that politics was part of art and didn’t feel that you can include any kind of confrontational aspect into your work and I never saw art as being a safe thing. I know that exists but that’s not something that involves me. My references were always edgy feminist stuff, or whatever, and that was always seen as being marginal [but] I never thought of it in that way. I thought they [feminists] were actually right on the edge concerning my life, my sexual identity, the whole notion of how people are labelled, why we’re marginalised.[6]
[1] David McDiarmid, interviewed by Carmela Baranowska, 1992. Transcript in McDiarmid Estate Papers, State Library of New South Wales.
[2] Meskimmon, Marsha 2004, ‘Corporeal theory with/in practice: Christine Borland’s Winter Garden’, in G. Perry (ed.), Difference and Excess in Contemporary Art: The visibility of women’s practice, Blackwell, Malden, Mass., Oxford, UK, and Carlton, Australia, p. 126.
[3] Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky 1993, Tendencies, Duke University Press, Durham, NC, p. xii.
[4] Ross, Andrew 1999, ‘Uses of camp’, in F. Cleto (ed.), Queer Aesthetics and the Performing Subject, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, p. 320.
[5] Barthes, Roland 2000, ‘Projets de livres—projected books’, in S. Sontag (ed.), A Roland Barthes Reader, Vintage, London, p. 420.
[6] David McDiarmid, interviewed by Paul Canning, March 1993. Transcript in McDiarmid Estate Papers, State Library of New South Wales.