America was the exciting, ‘excessive’, ‘overloaded’ option for McDiarmid;^[30] Europe was merely the redundantly authoritative and stuffy one. In the last quarter of the twentieth century, when McDiarmid was coming to political and cultural awareness in Melbourne and Sydney, and when it came to making cultural choices, he chose ‘excessive’ and ‘overloaded’ over authoritative. In this context of pleasurable excess and utopian sensuality, African-American dance music and underground dance clubbing would also become an important influence on McDiarmid’s life and art.^[31]

All of the themes of cultural excess and sensuality to be found in 1970s New York came together in the 1979–81 suite of work to which McDiarmid gave the title Disco Kwilts—making reference to the black and Hispanic, gay underground dance club Paradise Garage. Located in a disused trucking garage at 84 King Street in Lower Manhattan, and operating between 1977 and 1987, Paradise Garage was known for its groundbreaking DJ Larry Levan, one of the originators of house music. The club’s state-of-the-art lighting and sound systems were unsurpassed in the years of its operation, and the club’s dedication to making each night a huge private party for its mixed-race clientele was legendary.^[32] Reflective shining surfaces and a camp glamour were hallmarks of disco music and dancing and the underground house-music club scene that grew out of disco. Gloss, glamour, glitz and an underground idea of ‘celebrity’—gained by being a stunning dancer or dresser—were an implicit part of the experience and the imagined idea of the Paradise Garage. The house-music dance club is, as Brian Currid writes, ‘a site in which the performance of “self”, the spectacle of the “other”, and one’s reception as a spectacle of “otherness” provides a complex site for identity formation, and the fabrication of communal histories’.^[33]

McDiarmid’s Disco Kwilt series of work was created as what could be thought of as a community artefact, to reflect and embody the affect of the dance floor and the community that participated in it. The series resonates with the ‘explicit utopianism’ contained in many house-music anthems, ‘especially those with their roots in gay black America’.^[34] McDiarmid employed in the fabrication of this work what was then an expensive commercial display material—holographic reflective Mylar sheeting—to evoke the sensations, seductions and illusions of the underground dance club. In a 1980 work, itself entitled Disco Kwilt, McDiarmid used American pioneer women’s quilting patterns—in this case, the ‘tumbling block’ or ‘baby block’ pattern—to create a decorative, flashy and consciously ‘shallow’ work that frankly embraces the excitement of flashing lights, reflective surfaces and the visual, corporeal and spatial mobility of the dance floor (Figure 16.3).

The visual excess of the work evokes the ecstatic and utopian impulses integral to the lyrics and musicality of house music and the gay male identity politics and sociality of this heady time before the first cases of AIDS became public. Unlike the traditional familial quilt, the Disco Kwilts collectively proposed a ‘beyond-blood’ notion of kinship and community—a community that McDiarmid found in the multiracial gay male community of New York.^[35] The night-time sociality of the dance club, with its intoxicating visual and aural excess and its collective expression of hip and cool, was captured in these works, which represented quintessentially the New York that McDiarmid sought and found.^[36]

Figure 16.3: David McDiarmid, Disco Kwilt, c. 1980.

Reflective holographic Mylar foil on board, 120 cm x 160 cm. Private Collection. Reproduced with permission of the McDiarmid estate.