'No more distance': contact, contemporaneity, and the historiography of New Zealand art

Recent years have seen renewed interest in the subject of contact within the discipline of Art History. While the art of colonial encounters and/or cross-cultural exchange has long been studied from postcolonial perspectives, art historians are now turning their attention to transcultural and translocal artistic practice and circulation more broadly, in response to the challenges of (de)constructing global and/or world art histories. As an art-historical framework, contact seems to promise a means of escaping the parameters of national histories of art on the one hand, and of countering the homogenisation of local art histories in the face of the global on the other. However, the task of writing art histories of contact in an expanding field raises significant historiographical questions, which, I argue, require us not only to study contact as an empirical phenomenon but also as a discursive construction. This thesis seeks to supplement this burgeoning scholarly field by examining contact as an art-historical discourse. Its particular focus is on the historiography of New Zealand art, which is ostensibly remarkable for its concern with a certain discourse of distance. It aims to historicise the (re)turn to a discourse of contact in the contemporary art(-historical) practice of Aotearoa/New Zealand, by tracing the appearance of the word “contact” through the literature of New Zealand art history. My reading reveals that there is in fact a double discourse of distance and contact at play in these texts, and that contact is thus not only a contemporary concern but also a perennial theme of New Zealand art historiography. I further explore this shift in focus from distance to contact by examining the historiography of 'New Zealand-born, London-based' artist Francis Upritchard, whose reception as a contemporary expatriate situates her paradoxically at the nexus of these two discursive paradigms.