Acting out: performing feminisms in the contemporary art museum

ABSTRACT

The position that feminist art holds within the art museum is complex and often contradictory. As Meaghan Morris pointed out, feminism “is not easily adapted to heroic progress narratives”. There is a very real danger that when absorbed into the museum exhibition, feminist art can become a historicising category, framed as a singular movement rather than a currently relevant set of strategies. The alternative would be the presentation of feminism as a set of living practices. Since 2010, the feminist artist collective LEVEL has been involved in a range of activities designed to reinvigorate the discussion of women's position in the art world and society more broadly. LEVEL was commissioned to provide a public program as part of the WAR IS OVER! (IF YOU WANT IT): YOKO ONO exhibition held at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA) in late 2013. This paper discusses the design of that project as an attempt to move beyond the script of feminism as a historical moment, and back to the lived experience of feminist art as political understanding and social engagement.

KEYWORDS:

• Feminism
• art museum
• participation
• collaboration
• activism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Rachael Haynes http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5024-9424

Courtney Pederson http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3507-7273

Notes

¹Meaghan Morris, “Too Soon Too Late: Reading Claire Johnston 1970–81,” in Dissonance: Feminism and the Arts 1970–90, ed. Catriona Moore (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1994), 126–38.

²Angela Dimitrakaki and Lara Perry, “Constant Redistribution: A Roundtable on Feminism, Art and the Curatorial Field,” Journal of Curatorial Studies 2, no. 2 (2013): 226.

³Dario Gamboni, The Destruction of Art: Iconoclasm and Vandalism since the French Revolution (London: Reaktion Books, 1997), 167.

⁴Kelly Phillips, “Feminism Under Glass: WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution,” FUSE 32, no. 2 (March 2009): 36.

⁵Ibid., 36.

⁶Catriona Moore, “Review: WACK!: Art and the Feminist Revolution; Global Feminisms: New Directions in Contemporary Art,” Australian & New Zealand Journal of Art 9, no. 1–2 (2008): 247.

⁷Ruth Noack, Sanja Iveković Triangle, One Work (London: Afterall Books, 2013), 14.

⁸Sanja Iveković in Noack, ibid., 13.

⁹Pierre Bourdieu and Alain Darbel, The Love of Art: European Art Museums and Their Public, trans. C. Beattie and N. Merriman (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), 14.

¹⁰Mira Schor, “MoMA Panel: Art Institutions and Feminist Politics Now,” A Year of Positive Thinking – Mira Schor, http://ayearofpositivethinking.com/2010/05/23/moma-panel-art-institutions-and-feminist-politics-now/ (accessed September 1, 2014).

¹¹Griselda Pollock, Encounters in the Virtual Feminist Museum: Time Space and the Archive (London: Routledge, 2007), 10.

¹²Dimitrakaki and Perry, “Constant Redistribution,” 235.

¹³Ibid., 235.

¹⁴Ibid., 234.

¹⁵Vivienne Binns, Ian Milliss and the Women's Art Group, “History/Herstory,” in Sydney Biennale: White Elephant or Red Herring? Comments from the Art Community Alexander Mackie College of Advanced Education. Student Representative Council (Sydney: Union Media Services, 1979), http://www.ianmillis.com/documents/historyherstory.htm (accessed March 3, 2015).

¹⁶Linda Nochlin, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” in Woman, Art and Power: and Other Essays (New York, NY: Westview Press, 1988), 145–76.

¹⁷While revisionist art history in a Western context was established as a separate discipline in the 1970s and 1980s, it would take until the 1990s and 2000s for global women's art practices to be acknowledged, for example in museum publications such as the New Museum co-published Talking Visions: Multicultural Feminism in a Transnational Age edited by Ella Shohat, 1998 and exhibitions such as Global Feminism in 2007 (Brooklyn Museum).

¹⁸Guerrilla Girls, “Guerrilla Girls: Naked Through the Ages,” 2012, http://www.guerrillagirls.com/posters/nakedthroughtheages.shtml (accessed July 9, 2013).

¹⁹“When Private Collections Go Public,” CoUNTess: Women Count in the Art World, http://countesses.blogspot.com.au/2011/06/what-happens-when-private-collections.html (accessed July 8, 2013).

²⁰Susan Best, “This Style Which Is Not One,” in Dissonance: Feminism and the Arts 1970–90 (St Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 1994), 154–68.

²¹Jenni Sorkin, “The Feminist Nomad: The All-Women Group Show,” in WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution, ed. Cornelia Butler and Lisa Gabrielle Mark (Los Angeles, CA: The Museum of Contemporary Art and The MIT Press, 2007), 460.

²²A notable example of this is the Australian artist Frances (Budden) Phoenix's account of her involvement in the production of Chicago's work, and the attempted insertion of the text “no goddesses, no mistresses”, in Our Story/Herstory? Working on – Judy Chicago's ‘Dinner Party’ (Sydney, NSW: Phoenix Artwork, 1982).

²³Lucy Lippard, From the Center: Feminist Essays on Women's Art (New York, NY: Dutton, 1976), 57.

²⁴Helena Reckett, “Forgotten Relations: Feminist Artists and Relational Aesthetics,” in Politics in a Glass Case: Feminism, Exhibition Cultures and Curatorial Transgressions, ed. Angela Dimitrakaki and Lara Perry (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013), 140.

²⁵Ibid., 138.

²⁶Schor, MoMA Panel.

²⁷Mary Jo Aagerstoun and Elissa Auther, “Considering Feminist Activist Art,” NWSA Journal 1 (2006): viii.

²⁸Catherine Elwes, “Suzanne Lacy: Silver Action,” Moving Image Review & Art Journal 2, no. 2 (October 2013): 297.

²⁹Mick Wilson and Paul O'Neill, “Curatorial Counter-rhetorics and the Educational Turn,” Journal of Visual Art Practice 9, no. 2 (June 2010): 177.

³⁰Valerie Casey, “Staging Meaning: Performance in the Modern Museum,” TDR 49, no. 3 (2005): 79–80.

³¹Mick Wilson, “Autonomy, Agonism, and Activist Art: An Interview with Grant Kester,” Art Journal 66, no. 3 (2007): 118.

³²Ibid., 118.

³³Aagerstoun and Auther, “Considering Feminist Activist Art,” vii.

³⁴Ibid., vii.

³⁵Suzanne MacLeod, Museum Architecture: A New Biography (Hoboken, NJ: Taylor and Francis, 2013), 62.

³⁶Dimitrakaki and Perry, “Constant Redistribution,” 234.

³⁷Giovanna Zapperi, “Woman's Reappearance: Rethinking the Archive in Contemporary Art – Feminist Perspectives,” Feminist Review 105 (2013): 23.

³⁸Ibid., 25.

³⁹Matthew Fuller, “Breach the Pieces,” Intermedia Art: Tate, 2000, http://www.2tate.org.uk/intermediaart/entry15470.shtm (accessed November 29, 2014).