The apocryphal narrative: A century ago, European modernism was shipped to Australia in suit cases. Transporting the avant-garde by ocean-going liner, and in poor reproduction, meant that Australian moderns at home experienced the avant-garde as fugitive, second-hand, sporadic and incomplete: quotation and inauthenticity were the norm. In short, Australia experienced modernism post-modernly.

When post-modernism came from Europe and the US to Australia in the early 1980s, it was embraced like an old friend. Jean Baudrillard's Precession of the Simulacra, for example, was translated and published in Art and Text in the spring of 1983 (by Paul Foss and Paul Patton, Melbourne). But what did it mean to a nation for which two centuries of visual culture had been filtered through its colonial mentors? By July 1984, in the conference Futur*fall: Excursions into Post-Modernity (organized by Ted Colless, Allan Cholodenko, et al, University of Sydney) Baudrillard's keynote address seemed flat, so to speak, when compared to presenters such as Elizabeth Gross (aka Liz Grosz), from Sydney University, presenting queer feminism and psychoanalysis, and Gayatri Spivak, from the Indian subcontinent, presenting subaltern studies via post-structuralism. In short, Europeans talking about an Americanized version of post-modernism were supplanted by much more locally pertinent studies: queer feminism native to a bloked-up Australian culture, and post-colonialism, from our own hemisphere. This, especially in regard to Aboriginal activism, gave rise to much more compelling local discourses.

Which brings me to Hotel Australia, a three dimensional representation of different accounts of Australian art history: The history is taken from venerable but sometimes now obscure sources, including Humphrey McQueen's Black Swan of Trespass; Ian Burn's (with Lendon, Merewether and Stephen), The Necessity of Australian Art; Christine Dixon and Terry Smith's Aspects of Figurative Painting; biographies of Australian moderns; MoMA's influential 1936 diagram of modern art history, Alfred Barr's Cubism and Abstract Art; and the occasional fragment of my own lived experiences of those histories. Imagine a structure built of these movements and flows, a space without walls and only its naked plumbing to articulate the form, an architectural skeleton, a hotel stripped bare: It's an impossible structure, built as if to create a room, a room within the room of the gallery, haunted by Bruce Nauman's rooms, but made up only of pipes. The plumbing is labelled with signage and text printed directly onto the plastic pipe so that the art history travels along these channels, each quotation full of holes and intersections.

This then is my model of a partial history of Australian art as a Hotel Australia, a 'watering hole', a place to stay for a while, while passing through, a meeting place. But there is something awry with this model Hotel Australia. It is a matter of scale and emphasis. Its height is approximately one fourth that of a two-story pub but the plumbing is not to scale, it is that which is actually used in building. The effect is a thickening of line, an over-emphasis, a compression of function and space. The infrastructure appears exaggerated, symptomatic of the reception of culture in an antipodes at once eagerly mimetic of imported modernism and scornful of its perceived pretensions, made all the more conspicuous, through the compression that is transcription.

This history as building, as construction, is a messy one. I like to posit the history of modernism as a system of flows, erratic but inexorably moving, in many directions, waste from high point to low, with gravity toward concentration, fumes skyward, lines across and through rooms, electricity, spark, flare, illumination, elimination. If Australia has experienced modernism post-modernly and post-modernism authentically then the flow (of information) is multi-directional and without a source, aleatory, contradictory, a circulation that is eccentric. Despite the title of Baudrillard's address at Futur*Fall to the contrary, 'the year 2000 did [not] take place', and, following it, the year 2001, and the centenary of Australia's Federation. We live in a future for which post-modernism is the past and that is our Hotel Australia.

Which brings me to thoughts of a possible future, a post-post-modern world, a world where another world is possible, an end to the End of History, of actually thinking globally and acting locally, in which minority voices, messy edges, and shifting labile centers and centerlessnesses are the ways in which we understand and exchange culture. I'm thinking more of the Battle of Seattle and the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil and of weird hybrid political cultures and messy exchanges and what will also happen to and through the artist, the gallery, the museum, those vestiges of the nineteenth century already transforming before our very eyes.

Hotel Australia was commissioned by curator, Juliana Engberg, for the Melbourne Festival's Visual Arts Program, 'The Australia Projects', to mark the centenary of the Federation of Australia.

Margaret Morgan Surface Box Inc.

Margaret Morgan Surface Box Inc.

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Margaret Morgan
Surface Box Inc.

Margaret Morgan
Surface Box Inc.