TWO SHOWS AT THE IMA
Feminism Never Happened’ was an ambitious ‘argument’ show curated by Institute of Modern Art (IMA) Director Robert Leonard in early 2010. The premise of the show, as stated in the wall didactic, was that feminism in art today can be almost anything. Even qualities seemingly opposed to each other can both be seen as having some feminine quality or characteristic. As Leonard writes:
[Feminist art] can embrace ‘femininity’ or repudiate it. It can align women with nature or reject the very idea as sexist. If ‘bad girl’ feminists attack middle-class values as patriarchal, preferring the rude and transgressive, other feminists celebrate politeness and decorum, as if middle-class values were always already feminist.
And, as some attempt to demonstrate this proposition, Feminism Never Happened included a wide range of Australian and New Zealand women artists whose work embodied these ‘opposites’. Thus we had, on the one hand, watercolours by Kirsty Bruce of Miss World contestants, repurposed magazine images by Jacqueline Fraser of lingerie models and appropriated old erotica by Fiona Pardington of women in stockings and suspenders. And, on the other hand, we had an acrylic nude self-portrait in nature by Fiona Lowry, a performance by Anastasia Klose in which she wandered around the Melbourne CBD in a bridal dress with a sign saying she was still single and Jemima Wyman holding a video camera above her heavily made-up face dancing to ‘Lady in Red’, Chris de Burgh’s soppy anthem from the film Working Girl, which celebrates a woman’s conformity to the male business world.
The show, while never entirely revealing its theoretical borrowings, clearly draws on Lacanian psychoanalysis, and particularly recent re-readings of Lacan’s so-called formulae of... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline
Anastasia Klose, Film for my Nanna, 2006. Courtesy Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne.
Del Kathryn Barton, Please … Don’t … Stop …, 2006. Courtesy Kaliman Gallery, Sydney.
