There's always more: the art of David McDiarmid

Abstract

This thesis argues that the work of the artist David McDiarmid is to be read as an enactment of late twentieth century gay male and queer politics. It will analyse how both the idea and the cultural specificity of ‘America’ impacted on the work of this Australian artist resident in New York from 1979 to 1987. The thesis examines how African American music, The Beats, notions of ‘hip’ and ‘cool’, street art and graffiti, the underground dance club Paradise Garage, street cruising and gay male urban culture influenced the sensibility and the materiality of the artist’s work. McDiarmid’s cultural practice of dress and adornment, it is proposed, forms an essential part of his creative oeuvre and of the ‘queer worldmaking’ which is the driver of his creative achievements. The thesis proposes that McDiarmid was a Proto-queer artist before the politics of queer emerged in the 1980s and that his work, including his own life-as-art practices of dress and adornment, enact a mobile rather than fixed gay male identity.