Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=ctte20 Third Text ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ctte20 A Partial History of South–South Art Criticism Juan Dávila’s Collaborations with Art & Text and Chilean Art Workers during the Pinochet Dictatorship, 1981–1990 Verónica Tello & Sebastián Valenzuela-Valdivia To cite this article: Verónica Tello & Sebastián Valenzuela-Valdivia (2022): A Partial History of South–South Art Criticism, Third Text, DOI: 10.1080/09528822.2021.2019954 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/09528822.2021.2019954 Published online: 04 Feb 2022. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 32 View related articles View Crossmark data A Partial History of South – South Art Criticism Juan Dávila ’ s Collaborations with Art & Text and Chilean Art Workers during the Pinochet Dictatorship, 1981 – 1990 Verónica Tello and Sebastián Valenzuela-Valdivia We – Verónica and Sebastián – met in late 2018 at the Museo de la Soli- daridad Salvador Allende (MSSA), Santiago, where Sebastián works and where Verónica was conducting research. We hit it off instantly, and quickly learned that we shared a mutual love for the eminent Chilean Australian artist Juan Dávila, especially his art from the 1980s. Dávila left Santiago de Chile in 1974, the year after Augusto Pinochet ’ s coup, settling in Melbourne, Australia. For decades, he maintained regular contact with art workers in Santiago, especially with Nelly Richard, his closest con fi dante, their exchanges of airmail, faxes and emails (1976 – 1996) re fl ecting the shifts in technology. 1 For decades, Dávila also visited Santiago on a regular basis, staying in touch with the art scene there and having occasional shows while trying to forge connections and exhibitions in Australia. 2 As a result, his practice, and archives, became scattered across two locations in the Antipodes. 3 Verónica was born in Santiago but left for Melbourne as a kid in 1987 on a family reuni fi cation visa during the Pinochet dictatorship; Sebastián, born in 1990, has lived in Santiago his entire life as part of the post-dic- tadura (post-dictatorship) generation. For over thirty years we have been separated at the two extremes of the south, separated not just by the depths and enormity of the Paci fi c, but also by imperial forces that have also fragmented our archives. When Verónica was visiting Santiago, she was in search of infor- mation on Dávila and his work with Chilean art workers during the dic- Third Text , 2022 https://doi.org/10.1080/09528822.2021.2019954 © 2022 Third Text 1 Papers of Juan Davila, National Library of Australia, 1972 – 2007, MS 9578 et al 2 Ibid 3 The National Library of Australia, in Canberra, and the Centro Nacional de Arte Contemporáneo, Centro de Documentación de las Artes Visuales and the private archives of Nelly Richard, Santiago, Chile Art & Text, issue 4, 1981 (cover: Juan Dávila, Spider Woman in “ Playing with Fire! ” 1981). © Juan Davila, courtesy Kalli Rolfe Contemporary Art 2 tatorship; meanwhile, for years Sebastián had been cold-emailing various Australian art institutions seeking images, essays and information on Dávila, with varying degrees of success. We immediately realised that we could share our knowledge, ideas, experiences, histories, archives, cloud storage space and love for Dávila to support each other ’ s research, and we began a regular correspondence via emails, WhatsApp messages, Skype and, more recently, Zoom. Our correspondence led to us to collaborating on this essay on one aspect of Dávila ’ s cultural work, which explores his collaborations with the iconic Australian journal of art criticism Art & Text , its two his- torical editors, Paul Taylor and Paul Foss, and a small group of Chilean art workers between the years 1981 and 1990, during the military dicta- torship of President Augusto Pinochet, one of the most brutal regimes in Latin America. Dávila began collaborating with Art & Text in 1981, after he befriended its founding editor, Paul Taylor (he fi rst appears in issue 4). Together, Dávila and Taylor – and later Art & Text ’ s second editor Paul Foss – pro- duced over a dozen projects with Chilean art workers. They especially worked with the French-born, Santiago-based essayist and cultural critic Nelly Richard. The extent of Dávila ’ s work with Art & Text in support of Chilean art workers is given some attention in the two key histories of the journal – Paul Foss and Rob McKenzie ’ s The &-Files: Art & Text 1981 – 2002 (2009) and Helen Hughes and Nicholas Croggon ’ s Impresario: Paul Taylor, The Melbourne Years, 1981 – 1984 (2013) 4 – but this is limited to the production of only one output: Margins & Institutions: Art in Chile since 1973 , a special (bilingual) issue of Art & Text (issue 21) authored by Richard. While Margins & Institutions is no doubt of great signi fi cance to the history of Art & Text – a matter we re fl ect on below – we want to shed light on the numerous, varied and sustained ways in which Dávila worked with Taylor and Foss via the journal and the associated Art & Criticism Monograph Series (edited by Dávila and Foss) to disseminate discourses in and beyond Santiago during Pinochet ’ s dictatorship. This history of south – south collaboration across the Paci fi c has not yet found its way into Australian or Chilean art historiography. Perhaps the absence of the history we want to forge here is partly a result of the almost instant anachronism of art criticism, especially that on the margins. Or perhaps some of the protagonists of this history have forgotten, or erased, parts of the archive. Or perhaps the connec- tions across the Paci fi c, between two poles of the south, have been too his- torically faint to allow this history to have emerged. 5 Perhaps such historical elusiveness is a consequence of the Pinochet dictatorship itself, which fractured and rendered precarious the archive of Chilean art production. Then again, perhaps it is the result of Australian art his- tory ’ s Euro-/North American centrism, which is blind to the peripheries. Further, at the international level, developmentalist discourse under- pinned by the centre – periphery model has mandated that locations such as Melbourne and Santiago are always arriving belatedly, relegated to being reproducers rather than producers of knowledge, and are there- fore ignored in many histories. 6 Whatever the reasons, and there are many, the history of south – south art criticism and collaboration we focus on here is wanting, awaiting the attention and care of a younger generation of art workers. 3 4 Paul Foss, Rob McKenzie with Ross Chambers, Rex Butler and Simon Rees, The &-Files: Art & Text 1981 – 2002 , IMA/Whale & Star, Brisbane and Culver City, California, 2009; Helen Hughes and Nicholas Croggon, eds, Impresario: Paul Taylor, The Melbourne Years, 1981 – 1984 , Surpllus/ MUMA, Melbourne, 2013 5 Regarding ‘ weak histories ’ see Verónica Tello, ‘ Futures: Or Weak Histories ’ , Future South: 8 Dialogues on Art and History , Third Text Publications and ́ ECFRASIS, London and Santiago, in press, 2021. 6 Terry Smith, ‘ The Provincialism Problem ’ , Artforum , vol 13, no 1, September 1974, pp 54 – 59; Nelly Richard, ‘ Latin American Cultures: Mimicry or Difference? ’ , in Leon Paroissien, ed, The Fifth Biennale of Sydney: Private Symbol: Social Metaphor , The Biennale, Sydney, 1984, np A r t & Text , issue 1, 1981 4 It is not paradoxical that such a history is being reconstructed, some forty years later, through our south – south dialogue and collaboration. On the one hand, art history in Chile requires archives based in Australia to animate its pasts and forge its futures, and in turn, Chilean archives are required in Australia to bring to the fore its southern art histories. The fl ows and movements of archives have allowed us to rearticulate a missing history for both locations, and to exceed the limits of existing national art histories. In this article we adhere to a theory of simultaneity: in different lati- tudes across the planet, similes of critical thought and conceptual prop- ositions for the future of art, culture and life were/are being developed in parallel via rigorous and experimental forms of art criticism across two distinct sociohistorical contexts. We are motivated to reactivate past currents of southern art criticism at a time which, once again, demands embodying a critical relationship to marginal epistemologies and bodies. A Brief History of Art & Text In Australia, Art & Text is a fabled publication, initiated in 1981 by the enigmatic queer writer, curator and editor Paul Taylor at the age of twenty-three. The story goes like this. It is February 1981. Taylor attends the ‘ Foreign Bodies: Semiotics in/and Australia ’ conference at the University of Sydney, featuring Meaghan Morris and Paul Foss, among others, as speakers. 7 Taylor is in the middle of developing the fi rst issue of Art & Text and is deeply impressed by the conference, invit- ing Foss and Morris to be among its fi rst contributors. Following the example set by Morris and Foss in earlier publications, 8 Art & Text went on to introduce several English-language translations of Jean Bau- drillard, Michel Serres and Roland Barthes to Australian readers in its fi rst years (and many more when Foss took over as editor). After Taylor leaves for New York in 1984, he transfers the magazine ’ s editor- ship to Foss, who has just fi nished translating Baudrillard ’ s The Preces- sion of Simulacra (1983) for Semiotext(e). As this story suggests, Art & Text is well known for introducing French post-structuralism to the Aus- tralian artworld and mobilising a dialogue between Australian art and ‘ international ’ – read European/North American – art discourses more broadly. 9 Art historians have often repeated that this aspect of the journal ’ s legacy was fuelled by Taylor ’ s obsession with what Terry Smith, in a 1974 issue of Artforum , termed the ‘ provincialism problem ’ 10 The ‘ problem ’ here was that peripheries such as Melbourne (and implicitly Santiago) were co-dependent on centres such as New York, the result of colonialist and imperialist logics that constructed a particular locale for the avant-garde, on the one hand, and another one for the derivative and the belated, on the other. Drawing on Baudrillard ’ s notion of the simulacra as well as on Barthes ’ s concept of the ‘ second order ’ , Taylor argued that there is nothing original, unique or authentic about Austra- lian art. 11 The art of Australia, as a colonial outpost of the British Empire, is by de fi nition always a copy, and in this sense is emancipated from both the centre – periphery bind and the fi ction of the originality of 5 7 Peter Botsman, Chris Burns, Peter Hutchings, eds, The Foreign Bodies Papers , Local Consumption Publications, Sydney 1981; Heather Barker and Charles Green, ‘ No More Provincialism: Art & Text ’ , emaj , vol 1, no 5, 2010, pp 1 – 30, p 4, https:// tinyurl.com/73y7njzp, accessed 18 February 2021 8 eg Paul Foss and Meaghan Morris, eds, Language, Sexuality & Subversion , Feral, Sydney, 1978; Meaghan Morris and Paul Patton, eds, Michel Foucault: Power, Truth, Strategy , Feral, Sydney 1979; Paul Foss, ed, Fassbinder in Review: An Appreciation of the Cinema of Rainer Werner Fassbinder , Australian Film Institute, Sydney and Melbourne, 1983 9 Barker and Green, ‘ No More Provincialism ’ , op cit 10 Smith, ‘ The Provincialism Problem ’ , op cit 11 Paul Taylor, ‘ Editorial: On Criticism ’ , Art & Text 1, 1981, pp 5 – 11; Paul Taylor, ‘ Special Section: Antipodality ’ , Art & Text 6, 1981, pp 49 – 50. See also essays published by Taylor: Juan Dávila, ‘ Spider Woman in Playing with Fire! ’ , Art & Text 4, 1981, pp 15 – 16; Imants Tillers, ‘ Locality Fails ’ , Art & Text 6, 1982, pp 51 – 60; Paul Foss, ‘ Meridian of Apathy ’ , Art & Text 6, 1982, pp 74 – 88. By ‘ Australian art ’ , Taylor was implicitly referring to the art of settler-colonialists following the arrival of the First Fleet (1770). For related debates on ‘ Australian ’ art see Helen Hughes, ‘ Upside Down/ Right Way Up: Historiography of Contemporary “ Australian ” art ’ , in The National: New Australian Art 2017 , Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2017 https://tinyurl.com/ 48h2u74m, accessed 21 May 2020. A r t & Text ’ s collaborations with Chilean art workers, atlas developed by authors, 2021, composite image courtesy of the authors 6 the avant-garde. 12 With this in mind, Australian art history always con- siders Art & Text ’ s circumvention of the provincialism problem to be (paradoxically) contingent on dialoguing with particular ‘ foreign bodies ’ , namely, French post-structuralism (via Barthes and Baudrillard, or via Taylor ’ s beloved New York – based October and Artforum ) In other words, the archive of Australian (and Chilean) art history fails to register that Art & Text was in dialogue with ‘ other ’ foreign bodies, and that such bodies buttressed the journal ’ s understanding of critical marginality in a geographically expansive setting, one aligned with southern epistemologies. 13 A Partial List of Art & Text With the support of Art & Text ’ s editors, fi rst Taylor and then Foss, Dávila initiated a collaboration with Chilean arts workers for almost a decade (1981 – 1990) during the Pinochet dictatorship (1973 – 1990). 14 Dávila, or as he is better known in Chile, Juan Domingo Dávila, made friends with Taylor in 1981, at the early stages of the magazine, 15 and befriended the journal ’ s subsequent editor, Paul Foss, as Taylor was pre- paring to leave for New York in 1984. 16 In an act of solidarity, Dávila worked with Taylor and Foss to disseminate the work of Richard in par- ticular, but he also helped to solicit the input of other Chilean cultural workers, including the philosopher Patricio Marchant and the designer/ publisher Francisco Zegers, in order to exceed the limits of the dictator- ship ’ s frontiers. Essays, interviews and artist pages by Dávila, Richard and, to a lesser extent, Marchant appeared in issues 4, 8, 9, 12/13, 15, 16, 21 and 23/24 of Art & Text . Issue 21 was wholly dedicated to Richard ’ s writing, culminating in the special issue-cum-monograph Margins and Institutions: Art in Chile since 1973 (1986). Margins and Institutions was published as a bilingual special issue translated by Dávila and Foss, designed by Foss with the support of Zegers, 17 and ostensibly commissioned by Taylor. 18 In 1985, Dávila and Foss initiated the Art & Criticism Monograph Series, which published as its fi rst book The Mutilated Pietà (1985), a monograph on Dávila ’ s appropriations of Michelangelo ’ s Pietà (1499), featuring a long essay by Foss While it is well known that Dávila and Foss went on to produce another three English-language books in the series, including Danielle Duval ’ s Pages from Maria Kozic ’ s Book (1987) 19 (Duval being a pseudonym of Dávila and Foss), 20 it is barely known that in collaboration with the Santiago-based designer/publisher Zegers they also published two Spanish-language books in the series, for circulation in Santiago: La estrati fi cación de los márgenes (1989), by Richard, and El fulgor de lo obsceno (1989), which focused on the paintings of Dávila and contained essays by Richard, the Peruvian art critic Gustavo Buntix and the Chilean art historian Carlos Pérez Villalo- bos. It is worth noting that while these two Spanish-language books were published as part of the series , they were commissioned by Dávila alone; Foss was, in fact, unaware of their existence until we sent him a draft of this article. 21 Since Dávila funded the Art & Criticism Monograph Series, 22 he clearly took some liberties when it came to which publications were commissioned. 7 12 Taylor, ‘ Special Section: Antipodality ’ , op cit, p 49 13 As Rob McKenzie says, ‘ Taylor ’ s Provincialism theory needed Juan Dávila ’ , which is to say, their interactions allowed Taylor to ‘ internationalise ’ discourse through means other than French post- structuralism and US postmodernism. Rob McKenzie, email correspondence with Verónica Tello, 29 July 2020. 14 It is important to note that while Taylor and Foss supported Dávila, especially in 1981 – 1986, Dávila was driving the collaborations with Chilean art workers, especially in the period 1987 – 1990; by this latter stage he was publishing the work of Chilean art workers (namely Richard) via the Art & Criticism Monograph Series without the knowledge of Foss, as we will detail. 15 Juan Dávila in conversation with Verónica Tello, 10 September 2019 16 As Paul Foss recounts, Paul Taylor ‘ set up ’ the friendship between Dávila and Foss: Taylor ‘ told Juan that I was going to be at a St Kilda nightclub on a certain night & Juan went there & sought me out ’ . Paul Foss, email correspondence with Verónica Tello, 11 July 2020. 17 The roles played by Zegers, Foss and Dávila are recounted in the ‘ Acknowledgement ’ section of Margins and Institutions , pp 5 – 6. There it states: ‘ The present book owes a considerable debt to Francisco Zegers for his work in editing, designing and assisting with the photography in Santiago. ’ Louise Dauth, p 5. Dauth was director of the Experimental Art Foundation, which hosted the exhibition ‘ Art in Chile: Margins and Institutions ’ (1986), co-curated by Juan Dávila and Nelly Richard A r t & Criticism Monograph Series , collaborations with Chilean art workers, atlas developed by authors, 2021, composite image courtesy of the authors 8 A r t & Criticism Monograph Series , collaborations with Revista de Crítica Cultural , atlas developed by authors, 2021, composite image courtesy of the authors 9 In 1990, when the dictatorship ended and the media, along with other institutions, was democratised, the Art & Criticism Monograph Series (and more precisely Dávila) supported and funded Richard to publish the fi rst seven editions of the in fl uential Santiago-based magazine Revista de Crítica Cultural . Further, while not of fi cially part of the Art & Text imprint, in 1984 Taylor edited Hysterical Tears , the fi rst mono- graph on Dávila ’ s art, which included an introduction by Taylor, an essay by Richard and an interview between Dávila and Foss. This list of publications reveals the extent and duration of Dávila ’ s collaborations with Chilean art workers both during and immediately after the dictator- ship, and the extent to which they were sustained by both the structures of Art & Text and the Art & Criticism Monograph Series and by the (inter- mittent) support of Taylor and Foss. French Post-structuralism across the Paci fi c While trickles of Chilean art criticism found their way into international art journals – for example, Domus in 1981, Art Press in 1982, Third Text in 1987 – no journal supported the writing of Chilean theorists and writers as much as Art & Text , under the guidance of Dávila It ’ s worth noting that Art & Text and the Art & Criticism Monograph Series especially supported the work of Richard, publishing her writing across four issues of the journal, including Margins and Institutions as well as two books and the journal Revista de Crítica Cultural (the latter via the series). In this sense, Art & Text and the Art & Criticism Monograph Series became especially associated not just with Richard but more speci fi cally with the group she dubbed the escena de avanzada As Chilean sociologist of art Tomás Peters Nuñez argues, Richard fi rst used the term escena de avanzada in her 1981 texts Postulación de un margen de escritura crítica and Una mirada sobre el arte en Chile. There she posits that such artists as Eugenio Dittborn, Carlos Leppe, Lotty Rosenfeld, Diamela Eltit and the art collective CADA were, like her, working with cryptic and endogamous language as an aesthetic and political strategy. As Richard would later properly articulate in the pages of Art & Text (issue 21, 1986), such language was used because, under the duress of surveillance, artists and writers wished to mount a critique of the dictatorship through often highly distorted and/or illegible visual and textual codes, evading censorship and the consequences of being detected. 23 At the same time, they refused to engage with the populist pictorial and linguistic rhetoric deployed by leftist muralists and artists, which they felt leaned into propaganda. They shaped highly agile yet dense aesthetics that required viewers and readers to furiously decode meanings and parse heterogeneous references using the tools of French post-structur- alism and semiology, and to a lesser extent the Frankfurt School. With this in mind, we want to note that the (French) theoretical foun- dations of the escena de avanzada were clearly deeply aligned with those of Art & Text , even if on many levels the sociopolitical contexts of the two ‘ scenes ’ had little in common. 10 to coincide with the launch of the Art & Text special issue. In personal correspondence to Dauth dated 28 October 1985, Dávila stated: ‘ We are working with Zegers in the design and in collecting the photographic documents that will go with it [ Margins and Institutions ], really an archaeological task! I hope to return with the design ready and all the photos ready to print and also with the Spanish appendix in a fl oppy disc ’ (Archives of the Experimental Art Foundation). Recently, Foss has clari fi ed that Zegers ’ role was to provide the imagery and the Spanish-language copy for the special issue, which supported his design of the bilingual issue overall. Foss states: ‘ there were production problems and the issue almost never saw the light of day ’ . Paul Foss, email correspondence with Verónica Tello, 29 July 2021. 18 There are multiple, con fl icting accounts to wade through regarding the ‘ how ’ and ‘ why ’ Margins and Institutions became a special issue of Art & Text entirely dedicated to Richard In Impresario , Dávila recounts: ‘ In typical Paul Taylor fashion, we were in a sports car at high speed with Nelly. He [Taylor] decided that he ’ d give the whole issue to an essay by Nelly Richard on an “ avant-garde ” movement at end of the world. ’ Juan Dávila and Janine Burke, ‘ Reacting with Enthusiasm ’ , Impresario: Paul Taylor, The Melbourne Years, 1981 – 1984 , op cit, p 246. Taylor met Richard while she was in Australia for the 1984 Biennale of Sydney, for which she was the Chilean Commissioner. In personal correspondence, Dávila has further stated: ‘ Paul Taylor accepted the idea to publish Margins and Institutions ... A bit reluctant, but after all he did it. [By 1986] Paul Foss had come into the magazine, and he was very committed [to the special issue]. We Art & Text , Margins and Institutions: Art in Chile Since 1973 , issue 21, 1986 11 Art Criticism as Solidarity Art & Text ’ s and the Art & Criticism Monograph Series ’ support of Richard and the escena de avanzada , via Dávila, can be read as being part of a global wave of support for Chilean cultural workers during the dictatorship, most commonly manifesting in protests, fi lms and art exhibitions. The Venice Biennale ’ s 1974 ‘ Libertà per il Cile ’ ( ‘ Freedom for Chile ’ ) programme, for example, was wholly dedicated to the Chilean struggle, while the same year in London, Cecilia Vicuña, Guy Brett and David Medalla co-founded the collective Artists for Democracy and staged ‘ Art Festival for Democracy in Chile ’ at the Royal College of Art, showing the work of Chilean artists in exile such as Roberto Matta and Vicuña herself. In 1987 the exhibition ‘ Chile Vive ’ (Madrid), curated by Rafael Blázquez Godoy at Círculo de Bellas Artes, was organised to offer a broad, arguably apolitical, overview of the range of practices after the 1973 coup. 24 Viewed in this light, Dávila ’ s collaborations with Chilean art workers, via Art & Text and the Art & Criticism Mono- graph Series, are part of a broader genealogy of solidarity after 1973, emerging as it did out of transnational solidarity with the Chilean struggle. Yet importantly, such a collaboration did not produce exhibi- tions, fi lms or protests, but art criticism, which is quite unique for the dic- tatorship period. There is no other instance where the writing of Chilean art workers was foregrounded. This is important not only for its gener- ation of substantial critiques of life under the dictatorship but also for the European/North American artworld. Dávila ’ s support for Richard culminated in one text we want to single out: Margins and Institutions , issue 21 of Art & Text Margin/Institution Today, several dissertations, essays and books by a new generation of Chilean art historians have been written on the in fl uence of Margins and Institutions . We are thinking of Peters Nuñez ’ s unpublished doctoral thesis, ‘ Nelly Richard ’ s critíca cultural : Theoretical Debates and Politico- Aesthetic Explorations in Chile, 1970 – 2015 ’ (2016), Lucia Vodanovic ’ s essay ‘ The Art of Writing: Disguise and Recognition in Nelly Richard ’ s Avanzada ’ (2015) and Carla Macchiavello ’ s ‘ Vanguardia de exportación: La originalidad de la “ Escena de Avanzada ” y otros mitos chilenos ’ (2011). 25 Indeed, while we list just three texts here, they represent what is prevalent in the discourse of contemporary Chilean art: it is impossible to write about Chilean art ‘ after 1973 ’ without referring to Richard ’ s text , even when one is attempting to distance oneself from its in fl uence. 26 Yet while Margins and Institutions has become an institution in Chile, it is not only forgotten in Australia but is also never really registered. In a recent conversation, Ross Harley, managing editor of Art & Tex t during the mid 1980s, relayed that Margins and Institutions was a total ‘ commercial fl op ’ 27 Meanwhile, back in Santiago, Margins and Institutions was mostly Xeroxed. 28 Four hundred copies of the special issue were reportedly sent to Zegers, 29 who had contributed to its design and publication, 30 12 spent 6 to 8 months translating Nelly Richard ’ s essay without pay. Both Taylor and Foss supported and printed articles that were not mainstream, or Western ’ Juan Dávila, email correspondence with Veronica Tello, 27 June 2020. Denise Robinson (a contemporary of Paul Taylor) recounts: ‘ The publication, written by the Chilean theorist and critic Nelly Richard, was commissioned by Paul Taylor and edited and translated by Paul Foss and Juan Davila. It may have been published in 1986, however, the impetus for, and the work to realise it, accrued over a period of several years in both Australia and Chile. ’ Denise Robinson, ‘ Everyone gets lights ’ , Impresario: Paul Taylor, The Melbourne Years, 1981 – 1984 , op cit, p 272. Despite Dávila and Robinson ’ s accounts, Paul Foss has said that ‘ Paul Taylor was not involved in any aspect of the planning and publication of Margins and Institutions , though he did insist his name be included as one of the editors. ’ Paul Foss, correspondence with Verónica Tello, 29 July 2021. 19 The other two books were Eric Michael, For a Cultural Future: Francis Jupurrurla Makes TV at Yuendumu (1987) and Allen S Weiss, Iconology and Perversion (1988). 20 ‘ The Danielle Duval pseudonym was an invention of Paul Foss ’ Paul Foss, correspondence with Verónica Tello, 29 July 2021. 21 Ibid 22 According to Foss, Eric Michaels also funded parts of the Art & Criticism Monograph Series. Ibid. Images on the following two pages: Cover of Third Text 2, volume 1, issue 2, winter 1987 Nelly Richard, ‘ Art in Chile since 1973 ’ , Third Text 2, volume 1, issue 2, winter 1987 13 14 but the publication ’ s failure to arrive is still the stuff of local legend. 31 Nonetheless, with the support of cheap mechanical reproduction, and with just a handful of physical copies in university libraries, Margins and Institutions found its way deep into Chilean art discourse. Let us look at how it became canonised in Chile and then beyond. No doubt, the position of this text within Chilean art discourse has something to do with an event that occurred just a few months after its publication. The highly respected research institute, FLACSO, the Facul- tad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales (Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences) invited Richard to co-ordinate the seminar ‘ Art in Chile after 1973 ’ in Santiago, the proceedings of which were published soon after. The seminar was divided into three sections, with the fi rst of them comprising a paper presented by Richard, ‘ The Advanced Scene and Society ’ , summarising the hypothesis she developed in Margins and Institutions. The second part entailed presentations by renowned writers, critics and philosophers such as Norbert Lechner, Rodrigo Cánovas, Bernardo Subercaseaux, Diamela Eltit, Pablo Oyarzún, Gonzalo Muñoz, José Joaquín Brunner, Francisco Brugnoli and Adriana Valdés. The third part offered responses to the seminar by Martín Hopenhayn and Eugenio Dittborn. With this seminar, FLACSO, one of the most renowned critical spaces in Chile, legitimated Richard ’ s hypothesis within the academy, with the support of the coun- try ’ s most renowned artists and intellectuals. Soon after, Margins and Artspace Forum on Margins and Institutions, hosted in collaboration with East Sydney Technical College, 23 May 1986. Left to right: Paul Foss, Nelly Richard, Juan Dávila and George Alexander (Chair of Forum), photographer unknown, image courtesy of Artspace archive, Sydney 15 23 Nelly Richard, ‘ Margins and Institutions: Art in Chile since 1973 ’ , Art & Text 21, Juan Dávila and Paul Foss, trans, 1986 24 Francisco Godoy Vega, ‘ conelchilenoresistentearte, Solidaridad: Chile Vive, una Exposición en España contra el Chile Dictatorial ’ , AISTHESIS 48 (2010), pp 186 − 204, http://dx.doi. org/10.4067/S0718- 71812010000200012 25 Tomas Peters Nuñez, Nelly Richard ’ s crítica cultural: theoretical debates and politico-aesthetic explorations in Chile (1970 − 2015). doctoral thesis, Birkbeck, University of London, http://vu fi nd.lib. bbk.ac.uk/vu fi nd/Record/ 544624, accessed 13 May 2021; Carla Macchiavello, ‘ Vanguardia de exportación: La originalidad de la “ Escena de Avanzada ” y otros mitos chilenos ’ , in Ensayos sobre Nelly Richard (Co-ordinadora), Arte en Chile desde 1973: Escena De Avanzada y Sociedad , FLACSO, 22 – 23 August 1986, proceedings published 1987 16 Nelly Richard, Margins and Institutions, 2007, Third Edition, 2014, Metales Pesados 17 Institutions would go on to be reviewed by the Canadian journal Parasite (Greenberg, 1986) and the UK-based art historian Guy Brett (for Art Monthly , 1987). The latter presumably led to Richard publishing the essay, ‘ Art in Chile since 1973 ’ (a summary of Margins and Institutions ) for the second issue of Third Text (1987), a journal for which Brett was on the editorial committee. As a direct result of Margins and Institutions , Richard was invited to curate several shows, including ‘ Women, Art and the Periphery ’ (1987) in Vancouver focusing on feminist theories and the work of Eltit and Rosenfeld, and ‘ La Cita Transcultural ’ , co-curated with Bernice Murphy in Sydney at the Museum of Contemporary Art (1993, at the invitation of Leon Paroissien, director of the 1984 Biennale of Sydney). The sum of these parts, the local and international support, led to positioning Margins and Institutions as something singular within Chilean art historical discourse. In 2007, Metales Pesados, a highly respected publisher and bookshop of Chilean art history, philosophy and theory based in Santiago, repub- lished Margins and Institutions using the same design as the Art & Text special issue (the Metales Pesados reprint is now in its third edition). It was not until the Metales Pesados reprint that Margins and Institutions became widely available in Chile, and thus why it is being consumed and grappled with by a new generation of cultural workers. The Metales Pesados version, however, only contains Richard ’ s original Spanish-language text, and thus while appearing to be a facsimile of the Art & Text version, even reproducing its cover, it excludes not only the English translation by Dávila and Foss, as a critique of the hegemony of English in a globalised artworld, 32 but also their preface, which under- scored their long-term support for Richard ’ s writing practice. 33 In Richard ’ s preface to the new edition, mention of their commitment to her work – by way of translation, commissioning and securing funding for Margins and Institutions , but also their collaborations with Richard via Art & Text and the Art & Criticism Monograph Series for almost a decade – is only partially acknowledged, and even then buried in a foot- note. 34 Further, as we note elsewhere, 35 Margins and Institutions was supported by an exhibition that toured across Australia, co-curated by Dávila, Richard and Louise Dauth, then director of the Experimental Art Foundation. Notably, Dauth wrote a short text (oddly titled ‘ Acknowledgement ’ ) for the Art & Text edition of Margins and Insti- tutions , which, like Dávila and Foss ’ s preface, does not appear in the Metales Pesados version. In other words, the circulation of Margins and Institutions has been extremely partial, limited and fragmented, and the narrative of its history edited and controlled. We posit that even if Richard has in more recent years forgotten her history of Antipo- dean collaborations, her art criticism and essays were deeply supported by Dávila, Taylor and Foss, spawning an international network of allies. The International Gaze Not only did local and international support for Richard culminate in Margins and Institutions , it consolidated the publication ’ s status and pos- ition, and more speci fi cally, turned the international gaze upon it. After all, the subtitle of Margins and Institutions was Art in Chile since 18 artes visuales: Prácticas y discursos de los años ’ 70 y ’ 80 en Chile , LOM Ediciones – Centro de Documentación de Artes Visuales, Santiago, 2011, pp 85 – 112; Lucia Vodanovic, ‘ The Art of Writing: Disguise and Recognition in Nelly Richard ’ s Avanzada ’ , Journal of Romance Studies , vol 15, no 2, 2015, pp 94 – 108. See also Carla Macchiavello ‘ Territorialidad y construcción de una escea en el arte chileno, 1973 – 1983 ’ , Fundación Cultural CEdA, Miércoles, 17 June 2020, 19:00, https://www. youtube.com/watch?v= hrt4LJJxMCM, accessed 20 September 2020 26 Helen Hughes, David Homewood, Carla Macchiavello and Camila Marambio, ‘ Más allá del fi n ’ , Discipline 5, 2019 27 Ross Harley, email to Verónica Tello, 16 June 2020. As Paul Foss has also re fl ected: ‘ Despite all its setbacks and production woes, it is ironic that the Chile issue ended up sealing the fate of Art & Text , because after it appeared the magazine seemed to acquire more gravitas in the eyes of state and federal funding bodies in Australia. ’ Foss, email correspondence with Tello, 29 July 2021. 28 Lucia Vodanovic, ‘ Reception and Contingency in Recent Art from Chile ’ , Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies , vol 23, no 3, 2014, DOI:10.1080/13569325. 2014.922937, accessed 11 September 2021 29 Kate Briggs, personal correspondence with Louise Dauth, 11 June 1986, Experimental Art Foundation archives. Briggs was managing editor of Art & Text at the time. 30 Beyond what we state in note 17, Zegers ’ s contribution to Margins and Institutions (collating all the imagery and the Spanish-language copy for 1973 , and, as noted above, after 1973 there was a global wave of support for the Chilean people, including in the arts. However, Margins and Institutions was less an act of solidarity with Chilean cultural workers – although it was that too – than an attempt to offer a de fi nitive, and unapologetically exclusionary, account of the art that had emerged after 1973 for an international audience. We can make this point clearer by comparing Margins and Institutions with the signi fi cant exhibition ‘ Chile Vive ’ (Madrid, 1987), which attempted to capture and export the art scene under the dictatorship in its entirety for a European audience. ‘ Chile Vive ’ was unapologetically pluralistic. In contrast, Margins and Institutions had a singular position: it excluded everything but the escena de avanzada . Since 1986, Margins and Insti- tutions has propagated a particular vision of what constitutes ‘ art in Chile after 1973 ’ , universalising it. It is, for example, artists from the escena de avanzada that appear and reappear in exhibitions on Chilean and/or Latin America art, such as ‘ Radical Women: Latin American Art 1960 – 1985 ’ of 2017 at the Hammer Museum (Los Angeles); ‘ Un fi nished Timelines: Chile, First Lab- oratory of Neoliberalism ’ , (2019), at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (Madrid); and ‘ Poéticas de la disidencia | Poetics of Dissent ’ , the 2015 Chilean Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, featuring the work of Lotty Rosenfeld and Paz Errázuriz (the latter two exhibitions are curated by Richard). The incomparable impact of Margins and Institutions on contemporary conceptions of art after 1973 is bound, on the one hand, to the international gaze placed on Chilean cultural work after the coup, giving it unprece- dented attention, and Chilean cultural workers ’ overvaluation of inter- national attention, on the other. In Chile, there is a saying, ‘ Nadie es profeta en su tierra ’ – ‘ nobody pro fi ts in their own land ’ – suggesting that it is the external, international artworld and its recognition of Chilean cul- tural work that gives it its value within the boundaries of the nation. In Aus- tralia, our friends call this the ‘ international knee wobble ’ : when someone works or exhibits overseas, especially in the US or Europe, upon their return employers, grant funding bodies, gallerists and curators experience the ‘ knee wobble ’ , giving into and reiterating the centre – periphery binary and enacting it as a form of social, geopolitical, relations. Uneven Simultaneity While on one level Australia and Chile can be thought of as part of a south – south nexus, on the other, Australia can be seen as an operational centre of Western cultural production in Chile. 36 Australia ’ s use of the English language, which advances the hegemony of the British Empire and main- tains its privilege and position within the global north, creates a distance between the two poles. Australia and Chile, situated across the southern hemisphere, are simultaneously parallel and different: a situation which has meant that when Australian arts institutions ( Art & Text and the Bien- nale of Sydney, for example) connect with and include other peripheries, they also inadvertently validate peripheries from the global south. Austra- lia ’ s support for art critics and essayists such as Richard have played a sig- ni fi cant role in assuring their place in the academy in Chile. 19 Art & Text ) amounted to approximately USD 2,000 in value. As a way of repaying Zegers, 400 copies were to be sent to him. Francisco Zegers, correspondence with Juan Dávila, 4 March 1985, Experimental Art Foundation archives. 31 Vodanovic, ‘ Reception and Contingency in Recent Art from Chile ’ , op cit, p 269 32 This is not to say that the original edition of Margins and Institutions , which was bilingual, necessarily advanced the hegemony of English in contemporary art discourse, but Metales Pesados excluded the English- language translation as they did not seek to participate in a ‘ global ’ artworld where English is always prioritised. Richard makes this clear in her preface to the Metales Pesados edition: ‘ La versión primera de Márgenes e Instituciones fue internacional. El cuerpo principal del texto iba en inglés y su traducción al español ocupaba una disminuida sección en letras ch