Feminist Perspectives on Art

Contemporary Outtakes

Jacqueline Millner, Catriona Moore, Jacqueline Millner, Catriona Moore

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138061781
• eBook ISBN: 9781351667197
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

When the body is foregrounded in artwork – as in much contemporary performance, sculptural installation and video work – so is gendered and sexualised difference. Feminist Perspectives on Art: Contemporary Outtakes looks to interactions between art history, theory, curation, and studio-based practices to theorise the phenomenological import of this embodied gender difference in contemporary art.

The essays in this collection are rooted in a wide variety of disciplines, including art-making, curating, and art history and criticism, with many of the authors combining roles of curator, artist and writer. This interdisciplinary approach enables the book to bridge the theory–practice divide and highlight new perspectives emerging from creative arts research. Fresh insights are offered on feminist aesthetics, women's embodied experience, curatorial and art historical method, art world equity, and intersectional concerns. It engages with epistemological assertions of 'how the body feels', how the land has creative agency in Indigenous art, and how the use of emotional or affective registers may form one's curatorial method.

This anthology represents a significant contribution to a broader resurgence of feminist thought, methodology, and action in contemporary art, particularly in creative practice research. It will be of particular value to students and researchers in art history, visual culture, cultural studies, and gender studies, in addition to museum and gallery professionals specialising in contemporary art.

1

A feminist curator walks into a gallery…

Jo Holder and Catriona Moore

Introduction

A feminist curator walks into a gallery… and takes a bite. While women artists have always wanted a piece of the proverbial ‘poisonous pie’, as art writer Lucy Lippard once famously taunted,¹ feminist interventions aim to structurally and conceptually transform the art institution and engage other social spaces. Outtakes from the history of feminist curating thus reveal much more than equal opportunity strategies seeking to ‘redress the balance’ through all-woman shows and sporadic affirmative actions; although in some cases, demands for equity have made the power structures of contemporary art more porous, as U.S. curator Maura Reilly asserts, ‘Curatorial activism is the practice of organizing art exhibitions with the principal aim of ensuring that large constituencies of people are no longer ghettoized or excluded from the master narratives of art.’²

For over a century, feminists have curated alternative paradigms for creative social action. We see the partial legacy of this venture in today’s experiments with forms of art and sociality that come under the rubric of ‘social practice’, whilst feminist exercises in cooperative consciousness³ spearheaded current art curating as a testing ground for social actions and critical collaborations, both in and outside of art institutions.⁴ History suggests that Reilly’s counter-hegemonic perspectives are best fostered through feminist curatorial methods of collaboration, negotiation and research. Our examples are often artist-initiated and collectively organised enterprises, where women gain agency through mechanisms such as oral history or history from below. Contingent and local elements air the white cube and decentralise the curatorial process, often blurring the lines between contemporary art making and curating as exhibition production.

Post-colonial yet racially asymmetric regions⁵ like Australia also benefit from the strategic links First Nations curators make between art practice, care for country, law, individual and community wellbeing. Indigenous curators relay ‘personal is political’ connections in a way that resonates with feminist tenets, through exhibitions that embed individual and community arts into broader political and economic structures. This chapter traces important points of influence and intersection between feminist and Indigenous curatorial methods.

All these actions challenge lingering inequities in our institutional programmes and power structures.⁶ Must cutting-edge projects still simply bypass metropolitan ‘flagship’ art institutions, or are smart curators re-tooling the cultural power of the museum in innovative, political ways? Does the myth of ‘individual curatorial vision’ still narrow the institutional imagination? Will our festivalised, experiential art economy nudge galleries towards genuine and equitable social inclusion? That said, we welcome galleries’ increased visitor sensitivity, and note that they have opened their doors to more varied public programming, research workshops, ‘craftivism’ and audience engagement ephemera. However, more creative structural reforms, affirmative action policies and equitable curatorial funding beyond the urban mainstream would ensure that generative, intersectional forces are not co-opted or rebranded into banality.

Suffragist legacy

Contemporary feminist practice gains strength through knowledge of our curatorial history. We learn from significant exhibitions that have positively addressed the performance of gendered identities (that of ‘woman artist’, for instance). In Australia, progressive critics cheered the game-changing possibilities of the 1907 Australian Exhibition of Women’s Work for linking creative expression with hard-won changes brought by campaigns for women’s employment, education, health and suffrage. The cultural journal The Lone Hand trumpeted that this was

more than a show; it is of national significance, proclaiming loudly Australia’s leading place in the great phenomenon of last century – the advancement of women…. Each year a fresh range of positions in the professional and industrial world is attacked by women: each year women’s work becomes of more profound social and economic importance⁷ .

Feminist exhibitions thus started out as socially engaged, lively and inclusive affairs that cut across restrictive hierarchies of genre and art form, professional and amateur. The Australian Exhibition of Women’s Work crowded Melbourne’s vast Royal Exhibition Building with 16,000 eclectic exhibits.⁸ Art historian Joan Kerr observed that ‘Virtually every known craft and domestic art could be found in it, as well as all the fine arts’.⁹ It was the first to include (unattributed) Indigenous women’s arts, which were astonishingly ‘not exiled to a separate Anthropology annexe or inferior location in an official court’ but displayed beside ‘the work of highly trained self-dependent white female artisans’ and ‘the handiwork of crowned heads (itself a bizarre marriage)’.¹⁰ The exhibition design inventively recalibrated cultural value between the traditional, gendered hierarchies of the professional and domestic arts to promote ‘best practice’, be it in painting, basket weaving or rifle shooting. The inclusion of a model crèche – meeting the needs of a central though invisible part of women’s working lives, and allowing large numbers of ordinary women to participate – was also applauded.¹¹

Inter-war exhibitions also located women’s creativity along a spectrum of fine art, commercial and popular arts. An emerging new artistic subject – the modern woman artist – gained support through the networking and exchange afforded by these ventures.¹² The artist-curated Women Artists of Australia (1934) was a case in point, with participants choosing what media and works they wished to enter.¹³ Sydney printmaker Thea Proctor used the event to underline women’s contribution to all that was forward-thinking at the time:

It has sometimes been said that women are incapable of imaginative creation. Great art is inventive, not imitative. The great weakness of Australian art in the past has been its lack of imagination and inventive design. Therefore it is pleasant to see an increasing number of young artists, and most of them women, who are showing imaginative qualities in their work.¹⁴

Despite Proctor’s enthusiasm, modernism did not automatically guarantee a New Deal for all women artists. While many white women appropriated First Nations artwork to modernise their own designs, Indigenous artists were often not directly paid (or paid in kind) for their work, sold largely unattributed through mission or souvenir outlets around the country.¹⁵ More broadly, from the 1940s, as our male-dominated art institutions slowly and conditionally accepted modern art, all-woman exhibitions narrowed in media, style and inclusivity. The modernist art cloister kept women and Indigenous artists at arm’s length through supposedly universalist values of formal innovation and art historical progress. Kerr wryly noted that this narrowing of focus for art world acceptability accelerated in the post-war period as a ‘reign of terror, which continued well into the 1970s’.¹⁶

Curating autonomous art platforms

Curatorial ambitions expanded again as postmodern feminism responded to the inequitable biases of the art world. As Adelaide artist and art historian Jude Adams later recalled, ‘In 1971 a survey of the Whitney Museum in New York showed only 2% of exhibitors were women. In Australia, a 1973 interview canvassing all galleries in Sydney (public and private) revealed a slightly higher percentage at 11.5%.’¹⁷ From 1974, Women’s Art Movements (WAMs) emerged in our metropolitan centres with a two-pronged strategy: calling for gender equity in collections, exhibitions and other employment opportunities; and providing an autonomous space for fostering a feminist aesthetics. In the same period, but under very different circumstances, Indigenous women artists also called for autonomous and collectively run platforms from which to engage with the white, male-dominated art world. As Ngaanyatjarra, Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara (NPY) Women’s Council ­co-founder Tjunmutja Myra Watson argued in 1980, ‘We all hold strong Tjukurpa and we don’t want to see our culture lost… If we don’t talk up for ourselves, our rights, we get nowhere.’¹⁸ The force of the Land Rights and outstations movement, allied with community employment programmes at former missions and government settlements fostered the assertion of Indigenous women’s centres, often with an art studio component. One result has been the Tjanpi Desert Weavers, whose radical collectivism facilitates self-determination when doing business with white art institutions.¹⁹

Again, in very different ways, and under differing circumstances, the understanding that personal life has political implications (and vice versa) has also helped both Indigenous and non-Indigenous feminist curators to radically reinvent cultural politics. The WAMs integrated feminist aesthetics, social critique, mentoring and campaign work through hosting women-only exhibitions, workshops, art courses, conferences and the use of separatist spaces²⁰ like Women’s Liberation House (in Melbourne, Adelaide and Sydney). Consciousness raising (CR) methods were used in these spaces to guide individual and group reflection on the political implications of women’s personal experience. Embodied, female subjectivity was valued as an aesthetic source, enabling artists and curators to be both subject and object of their own practice. The feminist slogan ‘the personal is political’ challenged the mythic opposition betwee...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Figures
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 A feminist curator walks into a gallery…
• 2 The value of maturity
• 3 Women in the cross-cultural studio
• 4 The Pearl Gibbs ‘Gambanyi’ Kangaroo Cloak
• 5 Still in my mind
• 8 The intimate monument
• 9 FLORINA PREFECTURE: Women in the shadow of ‘The Magnificent Empire’ 1900–1922 and 2017
• 10 Feeling seeing
• 11 Materialising the interval
• 12 Heave, ho, ha
• 13 Slim evidence of fat fortunes
• Index