What is a feminist exhibition? Considering Contemporary Australia: Women

ABSTRACT

This article evaluates the 2012 exhibition Contemporary Australia: Women held at the Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane. It considers the criticisms of the exhibition and situates the show in relation to the international trend called the “feminist blockbuster” by Hilary Robinson.

KEYWORDS:

• Feminist art history
• contemporary art
• women's art

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹Hilary Robinson's abstract for the College Art Association panel “Feminism Meets the Big Exhibition: 2005 Onward” (New York: 2013), accessed 30 October, 2012, http://www.collegeart.org/proposals/2013callforparticipation.

²Hilary Robinson, “Feminism Meets the Big Exhibition: Museum Survey Shows since 2005,” Revista Anglo Saxonica 3.6 (2013): 131.

³The most comprehensive list of exhibitions is provided by the online journal n-paradoxa: International Feminist Art Journal, accessed 20 October 2014, http://www.ktpress.co.uk/feminist-art-exhibitions.asp.

⁴QAGOMA website, accessed 2 February 2016, https://www.qagoma.qld.gov.au/whats-on/exhibitions/past-exhibitions/contemporary-australia2.

⁵While there were a number of forums about women in the visual arts in the wake of the exhibition in Sydney and Brisbane, critical reviews in print were minimal. I discuss the two main critical responses below. In addition, there were a number of positive reviews. For example, see Courtney Pederson, “Contemporary Australia: Women,” Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art 12 (2012): 243–45; Anne Kirker, “Contemporary Australia: Women,” Eyeline 77 (Summer 2012/2013): 63–72; Rachael Haynes, “Re-inventing the F-word—It's Feminism!,” Eyeline 77 (Summer 2012/2013): 68–71.

⁶Amelia Groom, “Some of My Best Friends Are Women,” Overland, March 2013, accessed 1 April 2013, https://overland.org.au/2013/03/some-of-my-best-friends-are-women/.

⁷Groom, “Some of My Best Friends Are Women”.

⁸Groom, “Some of My Best Friends Are Women”.

⁹Vivienne Binns and Ian Milliss, assisted in parts by The Women's Art Group, “History/Herstory,” in Sydney Biennale: White Elephant or Red Herring: Comments from the Art Community 1979 (Sydney: Alexander Mackie College of Advanced Education. Student Representative Council, 1979), accessed 10 October 2014, http://www.ianmilliss.com/documents/historyherstory.htm.

¹⁰CoUNTess blog, accessed 10 August 2012, http://www.countesses.blogspot.com.au/. See also Lisa Kelly's account of the poor situation of women artists in commercial galleries in “All Girl Line-Up,” Lives of the Artists, Special Chick's Issue 5 (Spring 2003).

¹¹Julie Ewington, “Here and Now,” in Contemporary Australia: Women, exh. cat. (Brisbane: Queensland Art Gallery and Gallery of Modern Art, 2012), 22.

¹²GOMA website cited by Elvis Richardson, accessed 10 August 2012, http://countesses.blogspot.com.au/2012/06/contemporary-australia-women-was.html.

¹³For a discussion of the centrality of the body and sexuality, see Lisa Tickner, “The Body Politic: Female Sexuality and Women Artists since 1970,” in Framing Feminism: Art and the Women's Movement 1970–1985, ed., Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock (London: Pandora, 1987), 261–76.

¹⁴The idea of female masquerade is first picked up by feminist film literature – see Mary Ann Doane, “Film and the Masquerade: Theorizing the Female Spectator,” in The Sexual Subject: A Screen Reader in Sexuality, ed., Screen (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), 227–43. The touchstone here is Joan Riviere's essay of 1929: “Womanliness as a Masquerade,” in Formations of Fantasy, ed., Victor Burgin, James Donald and Cora Kaplan (London: Methuen, 1986): 35–45. Judith Butler's idea of performativity revisits this idea in the 1990s. See Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990). Ideas about masquerade and performativity are taken up in the visual arts by many exhibitions. Examples include Jennifer Blessing, Rrose is a Rrose is a Rrose: Gender Performance in Photography, exh. cat. (New York: Abrams, 1997); Shelley Rice, ed., Inverted Odysseys: Claude Cahun, Maya Deren, Cindy Sherman, exh. cat. (Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1999).

¹⁵Ewington, “Here and Now”, 22.

¹⁶Richardson, CoUNTess blog, accessed 10 August 2012, http://countesses.blogspot.com.au/2012/06/contemporary-australia-women-was.html.

¹⁷See, for example, James Elkins, What Happened to Art Criticism? (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2003).

¹⁸Simon Taylor and Natalie Ng, “Introduction,” in Personal and Political: The Women's Art Movement, 1969–1975, exh. cat. (East Hampton, New York: Guild Hall Museum, 2002), 7.

¹⁹Edith Krebs, “Cooling Out—On the Paradox of Feminism. The Motives, Significances and Perspective on Current Debates on Feminism,” in Cooling Out—On the Paradox of Feminism (Zurich: JRP Ringier, 2008), 21.

²⁰De Zegher, cited in Cornelia Butler, “Art and Feminism: An Ideology of Shifting Criteria,” in WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution, exh. cat. (Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2007), 21.

²¹The idea of a feminine sensibility in women's art is most often associated with the American artists Judy Chicago and Miriam Shapiro. At a conference held at CalArts in January 1972, they are reported to have “put forth their ideas about a feminine sensibility. After much research they have concluded that women repeatedly work with certain forms and attitudes, orifices, central images, a vantage point from inside out”. Betsy Damon, Report from the West Coast Conference of Women Artists, Women and Art Summer/Fall 1972, cited in “The Politics of Women's Culture,” accessed 2 February 2016 http://politicsofwomensculture.michellemoravec.com/about-2/consciousness/consciousness-art-world-style/. See Patricia Mainardi's discussion of this idea, Pat Mainardi, “A Feminine Sensibility,” Feminist Art Journal 1.1 (1972), reprinted in Hilary Robinson, ed., Feminism-Art-Theory 1968–2000 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 295–96. For a roundtable discussion of this idea, see also Lucy Lippard et al., “What is Female Imagery?” (1975) in Lucy Lippard, From the Centre: Feminist Essays on Women's Art (New York: Dutton, 1976), 80–89. There are many criticisms of this position, most notably that this thinking is essentialist. See, for example, Mary Kelly, “No Essential Femininity: A Conversation Between Mary Kelly and Paul Smith,” Parachute 37.26 (Spring 1982): 31–35.

²²Julia Kristeva cited in Catherine de Zegher, ed., Inside the Visible: An Elliptical Traverse of Twentieth Century Art, in, of and from the Feminine, exh. cat. (Boston: Institute of Contemporary Art; Kortrijk: Kanaal Art Foundation; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), epigraph, n.p.

²³Julia Kristeva, “Oscillation between Power and Denial: An Interview with Xavière Gauthier,” trans. Marilyn A. August, in New French Feminisms: An Anthology, ed., Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron (Brighton: Harvester, 1981), 165.

²⁴The same quote from Kristeva that opens de Zegher's exhibition catalogue is used to open an early essay on Italian women's art. See Anne-Marie Sauzeau-Boetti, “Negative Capability as Practice in Women's Art,” Studio International 191.979 (Jan/Feb 1976): 24–29.

²⁵De Zegher, “Introduction: Inside the Visible”, Inside the Visible, 32.

²⁶De Zegher, “Introduction”, 21.

²⁷More recently, Kristeva has turned to the question of feminine genius. See Julia Kristeva, “Is There a Feminine Genius?” Critical Inquiry 30.3 (Spring 2004): 493–504. Here she specifically examines the “feminine aspect of woman” (497). While she still adheres to the idea of “psychic bisexuality” (503), where the feminine position is available to both sexes, she nonetheless specifically focuses on the creative and intellectual work of women, namely Melanie Klein, Hannah Arendt and Colette.

²⁸ Global Feminisms (2007) is the other exhibition I am thinking of here. The critical reception from feminist art historians and critics to this exhibition was very negative. For example, Carol Armstrong saw it as giving “equal opportunity for bad art by women”. Carol Armstrong, “‘Global Feminisms' and ‘WACK!,'” Artforum (May 2007): 360.

²⁹Eva Hesse's response in 1970 to Cindy Nemser, cited in Anne Middleton Wagner, Three Artists (Three Women): Modernism and the Art of Hesse, Krasner, and O'Keeffe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 279.

³⁰Butler, “Art and Feminism”, 15.

³¹Diane Moon, “Minyma kamingku, Ngunytjungku, tjitjingku palantja titutjara ngaraku wiyarinytja wiya. The Three Generations Working Together—Our Way Will Never End,” Contemporary Australia: Women, 57–59.

³²Bree Richards, “Embodied Acts: Live and Alive—An Email Roundtable,” Contemporary Australia: Women, 173–83.

³³Emily Wakeling, “Anastasia Klose: The Aesthetic of the Pathetic,” in New: Selected Recent Acquisitions 2007–2008, ed., Michelle Helmrich (St Lucia, Queensland: The University of Queensland Art Museum, 2008), 88–89.

³⁴See, for example, Mary Anne Doane's analysis of this genre, The Desire to Desire: The Woman's Film of the 1940s (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987).