50 years of Australian women's art and feminist ideas
- Written by Joanna Mendelssohn, Principal Fellow (Hon), Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne. Editor in Chief, Design and Art of Australia Online, The University of Melbourne
In the first century of the third millennium, art by women is finally being regarded with the seriousness it deserves. Last year the National Gallery of Australia presented Know My Name, a mammoth exhibition in two parts. Anne Marsh covers similar territory in Doing Feminism, her compilation of women’s art and feminist ideas made, for the most part, in the last 50 years.
Review: Doing Feminism: Women’s art and feminist criticism in Australia - Anne Marsh (The Miegunyah Press)
She describes her book as “the history of the relationship between avant-garde positions and feminism as it emerged in the visual arts in Australia”. Marsh does not claim to have written an all encompassing history of the complex nature of art by women, which was Joan Kerr’s great undertaking in Heritage (1995).
Nor does the book seek to retrieve forgotten women artists hidden away in storage rooms of public galleries, which was Janine Burke’s achievement in the 1970s. Rather Marsh is tracking the contribution of her own generation of artists and writers to feminist avant-garde art and ideas.
Those who doubt the extent of the change that has swept through our culture need only look at The Field, the exhibition that opened the 1968 National Gallery of Victoria building. Of the 40 artists shown in this celebration of colour field abstraction, only three were women.
It is unfortunate that Marsh has made a significant error in her description of The Field, which implies that it came from the curatorial vision of Patrick McCaughey, author of one of the catalogue essays. The exhibition curators, who are not named, were Brian Finemore and John Stringer. She also writes that McCaughey was then the gallery director. McCaughey did become director of the NGV, but that happened in 1981, not 1968.
In 1973, five years after The Field, the Art Gallery of NSW celebrated the opening of the Sydney Opera House with a large survey exhibition Recent Australian Art. The only work by a woman was Ewa Pachucka’s Landscape and Bodies. The catalogue misspelt her name.
Neither of these exhibitions included work by Aboriginal artists, nor artists of non-European descent. The world, including the world of art, has indeed changed.
While Marsh maps these changes as they concern women artists, she does not ignore the other changes swirling in Australian culture concerning women. Significantly she charts the importance of those Aboriginal artists including Brenda L. Croft, Fiona Foley Judy Watson and Julie Gough whose art also makes them visual historians, recovering the past through art.
Walking and chewing gum
The 1975 visit to Australia of the American critic Lucy Lippard is sometimes claimed to be the “official” beginning of the Australian feminist art movement. Marsh rightly refutes this.
Second wave feminism in Australia emerged during the 1960s within a culture that also saw opposition to the war in Vietnam, conscription of young men to fight that war, sexual liberation and access by women to contraception and abortion.
Vivienne Binns Vag Dens, 1967 122 x 91.5 X 2.5 cm. painting: synthetic polymer paint and enamel on composition board.
National Gallery of Australia. Courtesy the artist and Sutton Gallery
Vivienne Binns’ 1967 solo exhibition at Sydney’s Watters Gallery was the first exhibition by a woman artist to fully enrage the art critics, all of whom were male.
Binns’ works Phallic Monument, Vag Dens and Suggon threatened their fragile egos. While Marsh notes that Binns was close to fellow Pop artist Mike Brown, sadly there is no mention of Pat Larter, another friend of Binns who operated in the same context and whose own performance art was even more anarchic. Larter was a mail artist, who coined the term “Femail art” for her postal adventures.
Read more: Hidden women of history: Pat Larter, pioneering 'femail' artist who gave men the Playboy treatment
Marsh concludes that Binns was “more clearly a pioneer of the pop avant-garde” than a feminist pioneer. Bearing in mind the range of other artists celebrated throughout the book, this is a tricky argument.
Feminism has always flourished alongside other concerns – including politics and the environment. Some of the most interesting images in Marsh’s book come from those women artists who protested against the US intelligence gathering installation at Pine Gap.
The ability of women artists to walk and chew gum at the same time is described in Lippard’s 1997 essay on the late feminist activist Ann Newmarch, which is reprinted in full. The feminism of this generation of women artists was never separate from either rigorous philosophical debate or activism in other fields.
By moving the bulk of her concerns to the period after 1975, Marsh is able to focus on artists whose careers coincide with the time-frame of her own professional life. Even so it is a huge task to map both feminist art and feminist writers over such a long period, at time when the world changed and the once marginal became mainstream.
Marsh’s research methodology is best described as organic, reaching out through known networks and associations to collate records of art, events and ideas. This could reasonably be described as an academic incarnation of the approach used by the collectives that were the driving forces in 1970s feminist movements.
At times the material is so rich in content that it threatens to overwhelm. Because of her history as an activist both in the Women’s Art Movement in Adelaide and later as a part of the Lip collective in Melbourne, Marsh has a long association with many of the artists and writers included. A number of archival photographs place her at some of the more interesting events in women’s art activities in both cities during the 1970s and 80s.
In order to correct this bias towards the personal, Marsh has made a conscious effort to include artists from Tasmania, Fremantle, Perth and Brisbane. Some of these inclusions are uneven.
While political poster art as nurtured by artists at Sydney’s Tin Sheds, is given due prominence, there is no mention of the very lively poster art fostered by Griffith University’s Margaret Bonnin. Yet the Brisbane political posters were a crucial part of the creative response to Joh Bjelke-Petersen’s oppressive political regime.
Marsh rightly identifies the significance of Ngurra (camp/home/country), a collaboration between Dolly Nampijinpa Daniels and Anne Mosey. This is listed as being exhibited at the Biennale of Sydney and the University of South Australia. Yet the work was first developed when the two artists worked together at Yuendumu’s Night Patrol and was exhibited at Alice Spring’s very lively women’s collective, Watch This Space.
Old friends and absences
Readers who visited the NGA’s Know My Name exhibitions will recognise many old friends on the pages. Frances Phoenix, who spent most of her life in relative obscurity, is again recognised as the pioneering feminist of sexual and political activism that she was.
Read more:
Beauty and audacity: Know My Name presents a new, female story of Australian art
Ann Newmarch’s iconic poster Women Hold Up Half the Sky is once more reproduced – this time matched with a photographic record of Nat Thomas’s tribute performance, mimicking the subject matter.
There are some great photographic records of past events and performances, including Jo Darbyshire and Michelle Elliot’s Chile’s Art Stains Bond’s Art: Guerrilla Girls Say Boycott, a record of the 1989 protest against Alan Bond’s links to Chile’s Pinochet regime. Barbara Cleveland, from a later generation of activist performance artists, continues to show how the personal can become political.
Because of the range and variety of artists and writers whose work is discussed, the book presents an organisational challenge. The chosen solution has been to divide it into two parts, listing all names at the beginning of each section, then subdividing further by decade and theme. Sometimes this works, as with the Bad Mothers’ Collective of the 1980s who happily contest any sentiment concerning mother and child relationships in the chapter “Mother and child: discourse and dialogue since 1979”.
Bad Mothers at their group exhibition at the Tin Sheds, Sydney, 1987. Raewyn Turner, Charlotte Clemens, Diane Beavers, Nicole Newman.
Photographer unknown. Digitization and compositing: Eliza Dyball. Courtesy: Charlotte Clemens
Other sections are less satisfactory, especially as most art movements don’t easily divide by gender. The section on murals privileges Geoff Hodge’s 1981 Parkville community based mural projects, rightly seeing the way such events could evolve into projects breaking down barriers of gender and culture.
Yet there is no mention of some of Australia’s most interesting urban community based murals, those made by Merilyn Fairskye and Michiel Dolk in consultation with the people of Woolloomooloo, planned in 1979 and finally completed in 1982. These tributes to the ordinary people of what was once a slum, who fought to save their suburb from the developers – and won, are so well known as public works of art that their omission is surprising.
It is however understandable that oversights will occur when dealing with such a mass of material, and there are pleasures to be found within these pages.
Works illustrated are discussed either by the artists themselves or by the critics who have written most memorably on them. But despite a rough division of chapters into chronological and theoretical frames, the experience of reading is a bit like viewing a kaleidoscope. There are many possible patterns and no easily identifiable path.
The second section consists mainly of extended extracts from archival texts. Some of these key critiques, first published many years ago, make this book a very useful research tool.
Marsh is not dogmatic in her feminism, and where they make a contribution, men’s voices also discuss the women who have reshaped our culture. Scott Mitchell’s account of the women from Yuendumu who visited Sydney in 1982 describes how they came to understand the western art market could work for their community.
The radicalism of the late 1970s is beautifully encapsulated by “White Elephant or Red Herring?” Ian Milliss and Vivienne Binns’ account of the artists revolt against the international focus and gender bias in the 1979 Biennale of Sydney. It is a reminder that activism can work.
Then there is the extract from an article by Julie Ewington, that erudite curator and critic, whose career has spanned the 1970s to the 2020s. Present in the first 1977 Adelaide Women’s Show, held at the Experimental Art Foundation, she wrote that the
collective was so huge, so large in fact that there was every possibility that it might collapse under its own weight; yet in some ways it was one of the best and most rewarding collectives.
It is a description that could also fit this book, which has so much rich content, yet often fails in details, including the spelling of people’s names. There are many people listed in the acknowledgements, but no mention of a copy editor. This is not a surprise.
Authors: Joanna Mendelssohn, Principal Fellow (Hon), Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne. Editor in Chief, Design and Art of Australia Online, The University of Melbourne
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