Old/New: The Anti-Gatekeeping Method

The Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art will be hosted by UNSW Art & Design until 2027 under the direction of an editorial collective comprising myself, Diana Baker-Smith, Jennifer Biddle, Jaye Early, Bianca Hester, Anastasia Murney, Astrid Lorange, and José Da Silva. The current issue is our first publication. We thank our colleagues at the Centre of Visual Art, University of Melbourne, particularly Jeremy Eaton, for facilitating a seamless transition.

Approximately every four years, the Journal transfers to a new university so that it can distribute its financial and editorial responsibility among various academic institutions in the long term. It is customary for a new journal editor to declare a new vision over multiple pages in the first editorial. I will continue this custom, but I will keep it brief. The journal will implement an anti-gatekeeping method for scholarly publishing in the coming years. Working as a dedicated editorial collective, we are establishing a structure to expose the Journal to new voices through mentorship and collegiality. On this note, I would like to thank my colleague, Astrid Lorange, for leading a workshop in April of this year in collaboration with un Magazine focused on emerging authors and the expanded modes of writing the Journal can support (the recording is available online via the Un Projects website).¹ As the current issue shows, we intend to support authors new to academic publishing by providing editorial feedback before peer-review, assisting authors in responding to peer-review reports, and generally demystifying scholarly publishing.

By demystifying the Journal, we can also address colonial predispositions in art history. Historically, the Journal has not placed a foremost priority on Indigenous sovereignty. However, we are developing protocols for publishing Indigenous scholarship in collaboration with the Art Association of Australia and New Zealand. In December 2023 and July 2025, the Journal will publish its inaugural special issues led by Indigenous intellectuals. Māori art historian Ngarino Ellis and Inuk art historian and curator Heather Igloliorte are the editors of the December 2023 issue, bringing together border-crossing and emerging Ngā Rauru, Māori, Kānaka' Ōiwi, Murruwarri, Wiradjuri, Alutiiq, Sugpiaq, Tsimshian, Bundjulung and Ngapuhi Indigenous knowledge on medicine, dance, museum collections, curating amongst other timely topics. Brian Martin, a Bundjalung, Muruwari, and Kamilaroi artist and scholar, and Jessica Neath, a non-Indigenous art historian, are the editors of the special issue for July 2025, which concentrates on the agency and knowledge of Country and trees in southeast Australia, as well as their cultural significance among Indigenous peoples.

Through this issue, we are pleased to present several other firsts, including the debut scholarly articles of James Nguyen (“Dispersed Subjects”), Cameron Hurst (“VNS Matrix-Pilled: Three Propositions for Revisiting 1990s Cyberfeminist Art Now”), and Frances Barrett, Peter Johnson, and Melissa Ratliff (“Queer Curatorial Relations: A Dialogue on Five Recent Projects”). We are also delighted to publish articles by more established authors, such as Rex Butler (“I AM GORDON BENNETT”), Christopher R. Marshall (“Risky Business: Ivan Durrant Versus the National Gallery of Victoria”), and Lisa Chandler (“The Rescue of William D'Oyly: Colonial Castaway Encounters and the Imperial Gaze”), who have, where necessary, been peer-reviewed by histroically marginalised and younger scholars who have pushed them in new directions.

Intergenerational dialogues shape the current issue in several ways. They structure our tribute to the late eminent Australian art historian Virginia Spate (1922–2022), authored by her former students, friends and colleagues, Mark Ledbury, Terry Smith, Mary Reily, Janet Laurence and Chiara O’Reilly. Sue Best, one of Australia's most established and esteemed art historians, evaluates the contributions, methods, and challenges proposed by Erin Brannigan, a younger, mid-career historian of dance and performance, in her book Choreography, Visual Art and Experimental Composition 1950s–1970s (2022). Emerging art historian Giles Fielke reviews Terry Smith’s Iconomy: Towards a Political Economy of Images (2022), where intergenerationality manifests as difference and refusal of inheritance.

We are all attempting to sort out what we have inherited from art history and academia and what we desire to incorporate into our work or not. As members of a community oriented to art history, we each seek answers to fundamental questions of legacy, debt, transformation, futures, survival, identities, collectives, and networks. I am grateful to each contributor for implicitly or explicitly addressing such crucial issues in art historiography and its politics in the region and for doing so in a dialogical manner: through peer review, editorial feedback, citations, quotations, analyses, reviews, rhetoric, informal conversations, and all the other ways we write. As this issue demonstrates, as a community, we seek to continue learning, undoing, and reforming how we study, analyse, and write art history in a relational manner.

As a final note, we submitted the Journal to Scopus and Scimago earlier this year, and they accepted it for indexing, allowing us to establish the Journal’s reputation and relevance as we continue to cultivate new/old voices through anti-gatekeeping methods.

Notes

1 Astrid Lorange, Verónica Tello, Audrey Pfister, Paul Boyé and June Miskell, “ANZJA x Un Talks,” Un Projects, April 11, 2023, accessed June 9, 2023, https://unprojects.org.au/author/untalksxanzja/