Contemporary Australia: Women

184 Here and now Julie Ewington 1 See, among other sources, Terry Smith, Contemporary Art : World Currents, Lawrence King publishing, London, UK, 2011, especially pp.39–43. 2 Lucy Lippard, From the Center: Feminist essays on women’s art , EP Dutton, New York, 1976, especially chapter 7; Lippard is particularly interesting as she was knowledgeable about Australian art, having made a lecture tour in 1975. See her ‘Out of control: Australian art on the Left’, in Get the Message, A Decade of Art for Social Change, EP Dutton, 1984, pp. 286–94; see also her The Pink Glass Swan: Selected Essays on Feminist Art , The New Press, New York, 1995. 3 Richard Bell has been the most important Indigenous voice taking issue with aspects of contemporary Indigenous arts practice: see his ‘Aboriginal art is a white thing – 2002’ in Ian McLean (ed), HowAborigines Invented the Idea of Contemporary Art , IMA, Brisbane/Power Publications, Sydney, 2011, pp.308–11. 4 With Kirsty Bruce, we might reconsider Laura Mulvey’s canonical 1975 text ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’. See her Visual and Other Pleasures , Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1989. In the case of Louise Weaver, multiple texts in feminist theory about viewing and concealments are clearly sources, together with works by artists such as the late Louise Bourgeois. For the contemporary emergence of Aboriginal women artists, see McLean, cited above, for the section entitled ‘Gender’, pp.189–204, with texts by various authors, including Marcia Langton. 5 This early research includes, among many important texts, Linda Nochlin’s pioneering work, especially her essay ‘Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?’, ARTnews January 1971, pp.22–39, 67; Germaine Greer’s The Obstacle Race: The Fortunes of Women Painters and Their Work, London, Secker and Warburg, 1979; Griselda Pollock with Rozsika Parker, Old Mistresses; Women, Art and Ideology , Routledge & Kegan, London, 1981; and Whitney Chadwick’s Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement , Thames and Hudson, London, 1985. In Australia, numerous studies and anthologies have been published, the earliest being Janine Burke’s AustralianWomen Artists, 1840–1940, Collingwood, Greenhouse Publications, 1980, and the most substantial Joan Kerr’s massive Heritage: The National Women’s Art Book: 500 works by 500 Australian Women Artists From Colonial Times to 1955, Art and Australia, Roseville East, NSW, 1995. 6 See, for example, 1995 Catherine De Zegher (ed.) Inside the Visible: An Elliptical Traverse of Twentieth Century Art in, of, and from the Feminine , MIT Press, Boston, 1996; Cornelia Butler et al., WACK: Art and the Feminist Revolution [exhibition catalogue], The Museum of Contemporary Art and MIT Press, Los Angeles; Maura Reilly and Linda Nochlin (eds) Global Feminisms: New Directions in Contemporary Art [exhibition catalogue] Brooklyn Museum, Merrell, London and New York, 2007; elles@pompidou: women artists in the collections of the National Modern Art Museum [exhibition catalogue], Centre Pompidou, Paris, 2009; and in 2010, at Brisbane’s Institute of Modern Art, Feminism Never Happened . 7 Australians Marie McMahon and Frances Phoenix (then Budden) worked on Judy Chicago’s The dinner party in Los Angeles in 1978. See Frances Budden, Our story/ herstory? Working on Judy Chicago’s ‘Dinner party’ , Phoenix Artwork, Balmain, NSW, 1982. 8 See (ed. Barbara Caine ) Australian Feminism: ACompanion , Melbourne, Oxford University Press, 1998, especially pp.344–55 and, more recently, the Australian Feminist Art Timeline , was initiated by The View from Here: 19 Perspectives on Feminism , at Westspace as part of the 2010 Next Wave Festival. See also my ‘Past the post: postmodernism and postfeminism’, in Dissonance: Feminism and the Arts 1970–90, Catriona Moore (ed), Artspace, Sydney, pp. 109–121, originally published in 1985 . Associated with a major exhibition staged by Artspace, Sydney in August 1991, entitled Frames of reference: Aspects of Feminism and Art , this anthology is a valuable source for the period. 9 Numerous projects focussed on women working as artists: Lucy Lippard’s influential lecture tour in 1975 for International Women’s Year; the 1977 ‘The Women’s Show, Adelaide’, mounted by the recently-established Women’s Art Movement; the campaign over 1977/8 for greater representation by women and Australians in general in the 1979 Biennale of Sydney; the NSW Women and Arts Festival in 1982 and the subsequent publication of the Australia Council’s Women in the Arts report in 1984, to name only the most significant Australian projects of this kind. 10 Women’s Art Movements were established in the mid‑1970s in various Australian cities: in Sydney in 1973, in Melbourne with practical expression through the Women’s Art Register (founded in 1975 and still housed at Richmond Library – see www.womensartregister.org ) and the publication of Lip magazine between 1976 and 1984; and in 1976 in Adelaide, with its original home at the Experimental Art Foundation and from 1978 in its own premises in the city. Artists involved included Vivienne Binns and Joan Grounds, together with Jude Adams and Toni Robertson in Sydney; Erica McGilchrist, Lesley Dumbrell and Elizabeth Gower in Melbourne; and Margaret Dodd and Olive Bishop in Adelaide. 11 See, among other recent projects, the CoUNtess blog, which analyses women’s appearances in major Australian exhibitions; work by scholars such as Kyla McFarlane, A Different Temporality: Aspects of Australian Feminist Art Practice 1975–1985 [exhibition catalogue] , Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne, 2011, and Mellissa Miles, ‘Whose Art Counts?’, Art Monthly Australia , Number 224, October 2009, pp.5–8; and the efflorescence of artist-run initiatives and exhibitions investigating art by women, such as Rebecca Coates, Neo-neo Feminisms, catalogue essay, Neon Parc, Melbourne, 2008; Clare Rae and Victoria Bennett’s The View From Here:19 Perspectives on Feminism: A 2010 Next Wave Festival project , Westspace, East Melbourne, 2010 and Brisbane’s Level (opened 2010). Longstanding curators such as Judy Annear in Sydney and Juliana Engberg and Natalie King in Melbourne are also notable contributors to discourses around women’s work as artist. 12 See Art and Australia , ‘Women’, March 2012, vol.49, no.3, for my ‘Think big, and be loud: Three generations of Australian female artists’, pp.448–55; the journal also published a special issue on women in 1995, see Art and Australia, vol.32, no.3, Autumn, 1995. 13 The dinner party is now permanently housed at the Elizabeth A Sackler, Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum, New York. 14 The key recent text is Judith Butler Gender Trouble , Routledge, UK, originally published in 1990; and, in the visual arts, see Amelia Jones and Andrew Stephenson (eds.) Performing the Body: Performing the Text, London/ New York: Routledge, 1999; Tracey Warr, and Amelia Jones, The Artist’s Body, London: Phaidon, 2000; and Helena Reckitt and Peggy Phelan, Art and Feminism , Phaidon, 2001, reprinted 2006. 15 See Donna Haraway’s influential Simians , Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, Routledge, New York,1991. 16 Feminism is not entirely a dirty word today: see Granta , issue number 115: The F Word¸ published in the European summer of 2011; see also The F-Word: A Day of Global Feminist Debate, a forum at the Sydney Opera House on 4 March 2012 with feminist icons Germaine Greer and Naomi Wolf, journalist and poet Eliza Griswold, and journalist, blogger and SlutWalk champion Clem Bastow, chaired by journalist Jenny Brockie. I can hear her breathing Emily Maguire 1 Equal Opportunity for Women in the Workplace Agency, Components of the Gender Pay Gap , March 2011, www. eowa.gov.au/Information_Centres/Resource_Centre/ Statistics/Statistics_Archive/Components%20of%20 pay%20gap%20Mar%202011.pdf, viewed February 2012. 2 Australian Bureau of Statistics, Gender Indicators , January 2012, www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@ .nsf/ Lookup/by%20Subject/4125.0~Jan%202012~Main%20 Features~Contents~1, viewed February 2012. 3 United Nations Statistics Division, The World’s Women 2010 : Trends and Statistics, unstats.un.org/unsd/ demographic/products/Worldswomen/WW2010pub.htm, viewed February 2012. 4 Ed Pilkington, ‘SlutWalking gets rolling after cop’s loose talk about provocative clothing’, Guardian , 6 May 2011, www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/may/06/slutwalking- policeman-talk-clothing, viewed February 2012. 5 Adrienne Rich, ‘Invisibility in academe’, Blood, Bread andPoetry: Selected Prose 1979–1985 , W W Norton, New York, 1986, p.199. 6 Carmen Calill, ‘The Stories of Our Lives’, The Guardian , 26 April 2008, www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/apr/26/ featuresreviews.guardianreview2, viewed February 2012. 7 Arundhati Roy, ‘Confronting Empire’, War Talk , South End Press, Cambridge, 2003, p.75. Endnotes