Australia’s Feminist Blockbuster

Contemporary Australia: Women

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So, why have a women-only exhibition in 2012? This is probably the first question that most people will ask about the recent exhibition ‘Contemporary Australia: Women’ at the Queensland Gallery of Modern Art (GoMA). The usual response to this query is to marshal the very depressing statistics about women artists’ disadvantage in Australia: failure to reach anything like equal numbers relative to male artists in most large survey shows around the country, lack of equity in commercial gallery representation, and poor numbers of women artists in public collections (and private collections made public, such as the Kaldor donation to the Art Gallery of New South Wales). The evidence for this pessimistic outlook for Australian women artists has been very ably collected by two artists: Elvis Richardson on the blog CoUNTess and Lisa Kelly in a short piece for the art zine, Lives of the artists.¹ This persistent inequality would support the need for some kind of redress of this sorry situation.

The need to redress inequality, however, is not the argument put forth in the introductory essay to the exhibition catalogue by Julie Ewington (leader of the curatorial team for the show). Although another essay in the catalogue, by the novelist Emily Maguire, does recount the current state of gender inequity in Australia, looking more broadly at commerce, politics and so forth. Instead, Ewington frames the exhibition as a lightening rod for what matters now for contemporary women, as she puts it: ‘More generally, the exhibition allows us time to stop, to consider what Australian women artists and filmmakers are saying and doing, right now’.² In other words, the exhibition is thematically and ideologically open-ended and not... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline

Natalya Hughes, The After Party, 2012. Detail, installation view. Wallpaper, carpet, dining suite, animation and 6 paintings. Commissioned for ‘Contemporary Australia: Women’. Courtesy the artist and Milani Gallery, Brisbane. Photograph Natasha Harth.

Soda_Jerk, Dan and Dominique Angeloro, The Time That Remains, 2012. Still, 2-channel digital video, 16:9, black & white, sound, 11 mins. Post production with Sam Smith. Courtesy the artists.