Contemporary Australia: Women

15 Here and now Julie Ewington Justene Williams Australia b.1970 Your boat my scenic personality ofspace (production still) 2012 Multi-screen video installation Installed dimensions variable Why present an exhibition entirely composed of work by Australian women? Why here and why now? Because it’s time. The Contemporary Australia: Women cover shows Kate Mitchell swinging on a grand chandelier. Her video is titled Being punctual 2010 and, like Mitchell’s action, this exhibition is timely: at a moment in Australian history when women are more active and engaged in public life and endeavour than ever before, ‘Contemporary Australia: Women’ acknowledges the strong history of work by women artists in this country, particularly in recent years, and looks to the diversity, energy and innovation evident in their work. Projected on the exterior of the Gallery of Modern Art, Mitchell’s splendid larrikin emblem of feminine élan demands that we attend to the multiplicity of issues, ideas, dreams and desires of women. The exhibition asks: what are women doing and making and claiming? Here and now? This project explores what is inspiring Australian women artists and filmmakers today, what they are bringing to our cultural life. And it was prompted, crucially, by recognition of the ways that women have critically engaged with and broadened the scope of art: their provocative, unexpected and illuminating contributions have reshaped the landscape of contemporary art, not only in this country, but internationally. 1 The post‑Kantian detachment once thought crucial to art has been comprehensively challenged, to be displaced, fractured and extended by a far more diverse, multifocal and, necessarily, robustly contested set of artistic expressions. Women have been central to this shift: confident, energetic and clearly enabled by advocacy for the view that a woman brings particular life experiences and perspectives to the world, artists responded magnificently to the proposition to show together in this exhibition. As the exhibition developed, key threads and themes in recent work were explored and, to allow the possibility of a rich inter-textual conversation, participating artists were introduced to these connecting ideas as possible contexts for their works. Several revisited important directions in art by women, noted by many commentators but most succinctly in 1976 by American, Lucy Lippard: the ways that personal and intimate experiences in women’s lives, such as their sexuality, bodies, motherhood and ageing, were expressed in art; the use of domestic materials traditionally associated with women; and the ways that women working as artists were committed to social and political progress for women. 2 Here we can consider works by Judith Wright and Anastasia Klose as exemplifying, but immediately complicating, the first of Lippard’s topics: Wright’s figurative group is a ceremony for a lost child, and Klose joyously celebrates her love for her mother, but while Wright draws her imagery from deep wells in classical European culture, Klose revels in a YouTube aesthetic whose natural home is the shopping mall. Culturally worlds apart, both artists affirm love between mothers and daughters. Precisely because of their great disparity, works by three particular artists allow me to propose a schematic summary showing what has changed in Australian art in recent decades and point to how central women are to these shifts. Kirsty Bruce’s cool collected deployment of mass media imagery suggests how new generations of artists are bringing distinctive sensibilities to persistent inquiries about socially‑sanctioned representations of both men and women: it’s like a classic feminist project but without the rhetoric. Then the lovely knowing humour embodied in Louise Weaver’s exquisite installation, with Bird Hide 2011 at its centre, draws on the rich lode of feminist and other theories of representation and viewing, but wears them lightly — in Weaver’s hands nature and culture are so superbly intertwined (and problematised) that one must look and listen closely. And last, consider the magisterial paintings by the late Wakartu Cory Surprise, one of the most recent of the many distinguished women painters who have been leaders in the Indigenous Australian adoption of the once-canonical art of painting and who, in so doing, have given it renewed potency. Indigenous painters like Wakartu have critically (and controversially) complicated contemporary art, not only in Australia, but globally. 3 Each of these artists exemplifies some of the complex ways that cultural and philosophical developments have profoundly influenced women, allowing them to select from a supremely supple range of artistic and theoretical discourses. 4 Here and now