Re-inventing The ‘F Word’ – It’s Feminism!

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There is necessarily a politics of inclusion at stake when it comes to the task of mounting an all-women, survey-style exhibition such as ‘Contemporary Australia: Women’. Indeed, when it comes to the exhibition of works by female artists in contemporary art institutions, questions of omission are just as significant as the art on view. Recent statistical surveys confirm the continued disproportionate representation and emphasis of Australia’s cultural institutions in favour of male artists.¹ Keeping the art world to account through such audits has been a long-game strategy utilised by feminist artists such as the Guerrilla Girls.² This reflects Linda Nochlin’s observations in her seminal essay of 1971, ‘Why have there been no great women artists?’ Nochlin identifies the central role that institutions play in notions of artistic significance and indeed, success, arguing ‘The fault lies not in our stars, our hormones, our menstrual cycles or our empty internal spaces, but in our institutions and our education’.³ When questioning the relevance of feminist strategies today, one may well draw on such evidence to demonstrate how much there is still to achieve. Exhibitions such as ‘Contemporary Australia: Women’, which celebrate the ‘diversity, energy and innovation’⁴ in the work of women artists practicing in Australia, would seem to herald the state of equality laboured for by earlier generations of feminist artists and activists. However, its presence also begs the question—why are such exhibitions still necessary?

In an international context that has seen the recent return of the all-women exhibition format, this exhibition of Australian women artists is timely.⁵ This strategy of reclamation was initiated by feminist revisionist projects in the 1970s. Ann Sutherland Harris and Linda Nochlin’s landmark... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline

Hiromi Tango, X chromosome, 2012. Detail, installation view. Donated personal objects and art work, artist books, clothes, paper, wool, steel, wire, wood, embroidery threads, sewing needles, beads, crystals, plastic flowers, 140 x 1594cm (installed). Site-specific work commissioned for ‘Contemporary Australia: Women’. Courtesy the artist. Photograph Chloe Callistemon.

Kirsty Bruce, Untitled, 2010–11. Details. Synthetic polymer paint and watercolour on paper, 55 sheets ranging from 14.6cm x 7cm to 39.5 x 27cm, Installed dimensions variable. Purchased 2012, Queensland Art Gallery. Collection The Queensland Art Gallery. Photograph Natasha Harth.