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(Very) Unfinished Business

Perspectives on Curating Feminism in the Age of Tumblr Politics

Tara Heffernan
Eyeline 89
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[T]here has emerged a dispersed and fractured feminist space in which conflicting ideologies and politics simultaneously coexist, between groups, tendencies, communities…Yet against any suggestion that this allows a happy postmodern eclecticism, I would stress the need to take up a position and argue it. There is as much danger in the word ‘differences’ becoming a polite fiction allowing us to disregard the real injuries of class and race that disfigure feminist aspirations.

Griselda Pollock, 19961

 

We shouldn’t expect younger people to be enthused by a celebration of the present or to be satisfied with the progress of cultural gestures in place of real material progress any longer.

Angela Nagle, 20172

Throughout his career, literary theorist Stanley Fish has asserted that the value of political commentary is limited by artistic medium: ‘if you want to send a message that will be heard beyond the academy, get out of it’.3 Fish does not doubt that art and literature reflect the social conditions they emerge from. Indeed, these contexts are foundational, as no medium is autonomous. Rather, what Fish warns against is the assumption that artistic or literary works concerned with political issues constitute pragmatic, real-world politics. The Australian Centre for Contemporary Art’s (ACCA) recent exhibition Unfinished Business: Perspectives on Art and Feminism, the second in a series of ‘Big Issue’ exhibitions championed by new director Max Delany, not only reveals much about the current dialogues enmeshed in contemporary feminism(s), but the ways that artists and curators ‘do’ politics.

Collaboratively curated by Delany; artists Paola Balla and Elvis Richardson; and feminist focused curators Julie Ewington, Annika Kristensen, and Vikki McInnes, Unfinished Business occurs at a point in history... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline

Shevaun Wright, The rape contract, 2016. Detail. 14 sheets of paper, wooden boxes, UV ink, torches, 36 x 27cm (each frame). Installation view, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne. Courtesy the artist and MARS Gallery, Melbourne. Photograph Andrew Curtis.

Shevaun Wright, The rape contract, 2016. Detail. 14 sheets of paper, wooden boxes, UV ink, torches, 36 x 27cm (each frame). Installation view, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne.
Courtesy the artist and MARS Gallery, Melbourne. Photograph Andrew Curtis.

Nat Thomas, Man Cleaning Up, 2017. Performance, ACCA. Courtesy the artist.

Nat Thomas, Man Cleaning Up, 2017. Performance, ACCA. Courtesy the artist.