Contemporary Australia: Women

18 Sally Smart Australia b.1960 Artists Dolls (various, details) 2011–12 Synthetic polymer paint and ink on canvas and fabric with wood, cardboard and various collage elements Installed dimensions variable Opposite Hiromi Tango Japan/Australia b.1976 Hiromi Hotel — mixed blood 2011 Performance for ‘Primavera 2011’, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 2011 Photograph: Alex Davies Image courtesy: The artist and Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney South Australia have made a special contribution to this exhibition: working to sustain the community economically, as well as culturally and spiritually, senior painters Tjampawa Katie Kawiny, Wawiriya Burton, Ruby Tjangawa Williamson, Iluwanti Ken, Mary Katatjuku Pan, Paniny Mick and Tjungkara Ken have collaborated with members of their families to present shared cultural knowledge in a spectacular suite of seven paintings. The project stands for collective understanding, not only of sustaining beliefs but of ways to actively assert one’s presence in new contexts. At the same time, many artists explicitly riff on international cultural and artistic legacies with special significance for women. Ruth Hutchinson looks back to the classical Greek mythological figure of Medusa, considering her mystery and other ancient manifestations of power in a suite of diminutive and deceptively delicate watercolours. Next, the importance of the early twentieth‑century avant-garde, when women were prominent in cross-disciplinary collaborative projects, is widely recognised: Sally Smart has long engaged with the legacies of modernist artists such as German Dadaist Hannah Höch and Russian Constructivists like Popova and Stepanova; they are explicitly recognised in the names given to her dolls, and in her use of a wealth of found fabrics. Natalya Hughes, on the other hand, plays around with more recent artistic sources: her deliberately hysterical installation, The After Party , pays tribute to Judy Chicago’s The dinner party 1974–79, the pre‑eminent American feminist project celebrating the historical creativity of women. 13 Hughes’s table is not set, though: one cannot join an easy sisterhood here, her obese upholstery and pulsing patterns actively evoking dis-ease, asking discomforting questions rather than giving reassuring answers. Clearly, Australians don’t take goddesses and mistresses on authority, but many more works in the exhibition reveal that the artists are informed, and supported, by knowledge of the wealth of historical art by women: this is one of the most important changes in recent years. These are long conversations, long campaigns: in the last five to six years, in several of Australia’s major cities, there’s been a remarkable upsurge in discussion, agitation and exhibiting together by younger women, many evidently dissatisfied with the professional opportunities available to their generation. We see this in Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane. 11 Artists are interrogating the historical record in order to come to terms with their current situation and they’re not satisfied with anything less than equal consideration for their work. Ironically, whether explicitly aligned with feminist ideas or eschewing them, but clearly enabled by the radical diversification of the visual arts since the 1960s/70s, women are taking the once‑canonical claims of the arts to be non-gendered at face value. They demand to be seen and heard — and loudly, as Brown Council asserts in the current edition of Art and Australia . 12 Leaving aside the vicissitudes of these complex debates, and despite the many modes, materials and methods used by the artists, ‘Contemporary Australia: Women’ asserts the particular and eminently valuable perspectives women bring to working as artists, and to social discourses more broadly: our emergence into public life as artists and filmmakers being one of the most fundamental cultural shifts in recent decades. Yet this temporary assembly also serves to underscore even more forcefully the origins of these works in widely dispersed social and geographical sites and, in the end, the irreducible diversity of their interests and commitments. Far from positing stylistic and thematic unity, this exhibition and film program explores widely divergent concerns. The radical heterogeneity of contemporary art is in fact sharply evident in Australia, where work by Indigenous women has brought extraordinary new voices to the nation’s cultural life. (Marcia Langton’s essay in this publication indicates how innovative solutions to longstanding problems are crucial for Indigenous Australians.) Working far from the coastal cities, the women of the Amata community in remote northern