inside out, outside in: changing perspectives in australian art historiography

Beginning from some recollections of art historical training in Australia and the United States in the 1960s and 1970s, the author highlights the key role played by art historiographical awareness within revisionist approaches to art history since those decades. He focuses on the resonance of such awareness in writing histories of Australian art, including Indigenous art. Theories of provincialism that mediated the relationships between the local and the international in Australian art are shown to be present, on a global scale, in the currents of contemporary art in the world today.