Peter Davidson - Studio Praxis delaying the dinner
pencil pastel texta on paper
20 cm h x 13 cm w
Toward a First Principles Theory of Australian Art
Australian art history is rich in commentary yet curiously lacking in theory. It has produced influential narratives about landscape, identity, nationalism, postcolonial tension, and cultural belonging, but it has not produced a framework that explains how artistic form is generated at the level of perception and action. This absence is striking. For more than a century, Australian art discourse has asked what artworks mean, how they represent the land, or how they negotiate cultural identity. It has not asked the more fundamental question: How does a mark come into being?
The project advanced here proposes that such a question marks the beginning of a genuinely new theoretical field. It claims to constitute the first Australian-born art theory operating at the level of first principles — not concerned with style, subject matter, or symbolism, but with the mechanics of artistic production itself. To make this claim clear, “theory” is defined in a strict sense: as a structural account of the transformation of perception into material form. This is not a manifesto, not a cultural argument, and not an interpretive system. It is a model of the conditions under which a mark is produced.
For decades, Australian art writing has excelled at interpretation. Its dominant frameworks — landscape-based readings, nationalist and post-nationalist narratives, postcolonial and decolonial critiques, sociological analyses, and stylistic movements — have shaped the field profoundly. Yet these approaches overwhelmingly address meaning, identity, symbolism, and cultural positioning. They describe what artworks signify or how they respond to historical forces. What they do not offer is a mechanistic account of the act of making: the perceptual latency between seeing and doing, the cognitive delay that structures intention, the bodily transmission of that intention, the resistance of materials, or the environmental interference that shapes the final mark.
The present theory begins precisely where these discourses end. It treats artistic production as a temporal event: the interval between the optic moment (t₀) and the spatial mark (t₀ + D). In this model, the artwork is not an image but the residue of a collision between perception and resistance. The delay — the “Sovereign Space” — becomes the primary structuring condition of artistic form. It is within this interval that perception is transformed, distorted, slowed, or accelerated by the forces acting upon it. Light, heat, viscosity, latency, and physiological lag all intervene. The mark is not a representation of the optic moment; it is the outcome of the delay that separates the optic from the act.
This shift marks a move to first principles. The theory does not ask what the artwork depicts or expresses. It asks how perception becomes inscription, how delay structures that transformation, and how environmental conditions modify the delay. Within Australian art history, no prior framework has attempted to theorise this interval or to treat delay as the fundamental variable of artistic production.
It is important to distinguish this model from European phenomenology, which has influenced Australian art writing in various ways. Thinkers such as Merleau-Ponty have shaped discussions of embodied perception, but their frameworks privilege perception over inscription, do not theorise delay as a constitutive force, and are not environmentally specific. The present theory diverges on all three points. It positions delay — not embodiment — as the central variable. It treats the environment not as a backdrop but as an active interfering force. And it grounds the model in the specific conditions of Australian practice, where light, heat, distance, and technological mediation produce distinctive forms of perceptual offset. This is not an application of European phenomenology. It is a structurally distinct model.
The claim to novelty is made within a clearly defined scope. It does not apply to Indigenous epistemologies of art and Country, which operate within fundamentally different ontological and epistemic frameworks. The present theory is explicitly limited to Australian-born, Western, non-Indigenous, studio-based artistic practice. Within that bounded field, the claim to theoretical originality stands.
A further point of distinction lies in the reframing of the artist. Australian art discourse has long positioned the artist as a displaced subject, an identity seeker, or a cultural translator. This theory replaces those cultural narratives with a kinetic one. It positions the artist as an observer in permanent perceptual offset — structurally misaligned with their own perception due to delay. This is not a psychological or cultural condition. It is a temporal one. No existing Australian theory makes this claim.
Central to this framework is the concept of “Sovereign Space.” This is not a metaphor but an epistemic claim. By defining sovereignty as the interval between perception and action, the theory avoids territorial claims, identity claims, and representational authority. Agency is located solely in the act of transformation itself. The artist’s only territory is the delay they inhabit — the space in which perception becomes form.
The conclusion is therefore narrow, bounded, and defensible. This project constitutes the first Australian art theory to operate at the level of first principles of mark-making, grounded in delay as the structuring condition of perception, action, and environment. It does not replace existing Australian art theories. It operates beneath them — at the level where perception becomes form.
