Contemporary Australia: Women

21 Deborah Kelly Australia b.1962 The Miracles (detail) 2012 Pigment ink prints on Hahnemühle paper, antique frames Installed dimensions variable Important impulses in culture have, however, recently emerged to be immensely suggestive today. Key among them is the idea that one performs ‘femininity’ or performs as a woman, rather than simply ‘being’ a woman, eternal, unchanged. This breakthrough philosophical insight, based in innovative re-readings of psychoanalytic theory and originally fuelled by rage against gender stereotyping, enabled older essentialist accounts of femininity to be refuted. This productive idea has been profoundly influential on artists and, allied with the recent upsurge in performative art permitted by video and DVD technologies, has led to many inventive explorations of the multiple conundrums of femininity. 14 Works by Soda_Jerk (Dan Angeloro and Dominique Angeloro) and Gosia Wlodarczak reveal the affective range unleashed by these ideas. Soda_Jerk addresses images of two great but ageing mid-twentieth century movie stars, Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? 1962, the film that revealed their enormous personal courage in the face of the Hollywood star system. And dancing to the tune of her own ego-investments, and engaging them critically, Wlodarczak’s WINDOW-SHOPPING, FROST DRAWING FOR GOMA embraces the self in the glass, the self that is re-made every day. Cunning and knowing, and often informed by a wild sense of humour, these works emphasise feminine agency, the central motivation (and motif) in much recent performative work, especially by emerging artists. For this reason Embodied Acts is a special focus project within the exhibition, presenting performances, events and actions. Recent performative art is indebted to earlier feminist work. In sophisticated projects here by Rebecca Baumann, Soda_Jerk and Kate Mitchell, together with Lauren Brincat, Brown Council, Jess Olivieri and Hayley Forward with the Parachutes for Ladies, who are interviewed by Bree Richards for this publication, we see informed, playful and meticulous work that actively explores the multiple strategic possibilities of performative practice. Every exhibition grows organically, as much as it is shaped. Inevitably there are surprises. Unexpectedly, three artists address aspects of the Christian inheritance: Bindi Cole takes Christ’s teaching on the importance of forgiveness from the Gospel according to Matthew, Then domestic materials, so-called ‘women’s materials’: for a long time Jenny Watson has used precisely‑chosen fabrics as the grounds of autobiographical paintings, each one triggered by a personal narrative. And Hiromi Tango’s splendid collaborative installations gather together ‘nana’ textiles in tribute to both the natural and cultural aspects of motherhood: the ambition of her Pistil and X Chromosome speaks unambiguously of the confidence of women in the expressive potential of once‑dismissed sources in domestic culture. And politics? Everywhere many works directly address social issues. Darwin-based photographer Therese Ritchie, for instance, grapples daily with inequities and challenges facing Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians in the Northern Territory; her practice seems to bear witness in a traditional documentary fashion, except that, as Miranda Wallace notes in her essay, Ritchie’s digital media emphatically reveal that no ‘truth’ is unambiguous. Similarly, Jennifer Mills’s extensive pillaging of the internet presents 325 other Jennifers sourced in cyberspace, a pictorial project that satisfactorily enriches what seems at first a straight-forwardly affirmative work, while Justine Khamara’s interrogative portraits of herself and her mother literally deconstruct the truth of the photographic apparatus. Judy Watson, on the other hand, evokes sad and shocking events in the history of her matrilineal line in the Waanyi people of far northwestern Queensland, using both documentary and natural materials. Her work retrieves poetry from loss, asserting the strength and continuity of her people. The ways artists today are ‘redressing the canon’ of painting would have been inconceivable in the mid 1970s, the decade of conceptual and post‑object art when Lippard wrote her summary. For centuries the pre‑eminent artistic practice, painting is now rivalled by an explosion of media that has jolted it from its place. Perhaps because there is no longer an effective hierarchy of media, painting is more than ever a rich field for exploration. I spoke earlier about the extraordinary efflorescence of painting by Aboriginal artists, but the spectacular wall painting commissioned for the exhibition from Noël Skrzypczak, and, in very different veins, Rose Nolan’s and Justene Williams’s deployments of the legacies of early twentieth‑century avant-garde painting, indicate how artists are mining these rich territories. Here and now