Contemporary Australia: Women

16 Tjampawa Katie Kawiny Australia b.c.1921 Pitjantjatjara people Mona Mitakiki Shepherd Australia b.1954 Pitjantjatjara people (Collaborating artist) Tjimpayie Prestley Australia b.1967 Pitjantjatjara people (Collaborating artist) Seven sisters 2011 Synthetic polymer paint on linen 196 x 196.5cm recently-expanded frame. 6 Australians have long been in dialogue with artists elsewhere: it’s a part of the Australian condition to be internationally networked. Despite, or perhaps because of, our distance from the Euro-American centres of theory, a number of feminist discourses have flourished in Australia, including ideas and images prevalent in the visual arts. This is a particularly sophisticated discursive context: Australians were certainly beneficiaries of Anglophone dominance of the post-war international art world, and feminist approaches to art here have consistently been among the most open in the world. Because of the wide diffusion in art and film schools and in universities of Anglophone and French feminist, semiotic and, eventually, post‑structuralist and postmodernist theoretical writings, combined with a healthy dose of scepticism about claims made for essentially feminine forms of art, (especially in the United States), 7 Australian women artists have been remarkably open to exploring a number of different strategies and discourses. In the 1980s and 1990s, tooled up by a wealth of postmodernist and postcolonial texts and artistic experiments, often in photo-based media, they made sophisticated contributions to postmodernist artistic discourses internationally. Ours have been informed and wide-ranging conversations and, as a result, the work of Australians inspired by feminism(s) has been exceptionally rich over these years, a legacy that has been profoundly influential for all artists. 8 Though there was a time when so few women were professional artists that any of them was notable (a conundrum that fuelled the arts activists of the 1970s and early 1980s), women artists are not interesting simply because they are women (except in a sociological sense). 9 Since then, women artists, theorists and curators in Australia have worked steadily to ensure greater access to resources for making art and to eliminate gender‑based disincentives to working as artists: the women’s art movements established in various cities in the 1970s; the Women’s Art Register and Lip magazine in Melbourne; a series of influential major all-women exhibitions in the 1970s and again in the 1990s; and publications exploring both historical and contemporary work, have kept alive questions surrounding women working as artists. 10 What we are seeing has flowered from a series of massive social, economic and political shifts over more than 40 years, which is still continuing. Lives and opportunities have been transformed: workplace participation has increased and changed markedly, in many professional fields almost out of recognition; we have seen the achievement of many demands by women ranging from access to the professions, to healthcare reforms, to the provision of child care, to equal pay — the last still not entirely achieved. (Emily Maguire gives a compelling snapshot of these extraordinary developments in her essay.) All this has impacted profoundly on the ways women negotiate public life, on artists as in every other field, and on the private self. In the cultural arena, as recent research shows, the long histories of women working as visual artists, both in the canonical fields of painting, sculpture and printmaking, and now in photography, installation, new media and performance, is well understood. At the same time, encouraged by revaluations of the domestic arts, artists now raid the repertoires of media associated for centuries with women, particularly textiles, the pleasure of long familiarity spiced by fresh recognition. 5 What is the situation now? ‘Contemporary Australia: Women’ offers multiple answers to these questions, in works by 56 artists/groups, in sculpture, painting, installation, drawing, watercolour, video, photography and, very importantly, performance. Yet the visual arts is only one cultural field where Australian women have a strong presence: women are working in literature, theatre, circus, in music both classical and popular, architecture, landscaping, fashion and design. (The GOMA Talks program with ABC Radio National that accompanies the exhibition reveals something of the wealth of these engagements.) Crucially, since the early 1970s Australian women have been particularly active and prominent in film: the exhibition’s sister project, Contemporary Australia: Women in Film, explores the rich contributions to Australian cinema by women, and contemporary representations of women in Australian films by both women and men, in a timely examination, as Margaret Pomeranz’s essay explains. ‘Contemporary Australia: Women’ contributes these perspectives to the rich contemporary international context for art by women, claiming a place in this