Homage to the unknown woman
Attached to more obviously important issues than those of Redford, but somewhat less coherent than his, is the work of Pat Hoffie. Hoffie was one of only two Queenslanders selected for the Moet Chandon Prize exhibition earlier this year.
Her work has the advantage of clearly mixing general concerns with specific ones. She portrays her friends and herself in situations that appear to share a private knowledge, but, in addition to this, she tries to express general attitudes about the role of women.
In the (to this date) no-man's-land of Roz MacAllan's walls this is not surprising. Yet where Hoffie is least successful is in the formation of a cogent point of view concerning the problems of gender.
It is a pity that in her catalogue statements she tries to dissociate herself from theory. For theory is what she badly needs.
Her disavowal of what she calls the "hegemony of text" is itself, albeit self-contradictorily, theoretical intervention. In addition, her attempts to defend "the decorative" a traditional domain of women - as a positive quality in art require a careful theoretical strategy.
Moreover, in her pictures, "the gaze", a phenomenon which has attracted elaborate analysis in feminist theory, tends to act as a counter-productive fetish. Similarly, her intention to eliminate gesture, the "obvious handiwork of the artist" by, "trying to get the canvas as flat and matter-of-fact" as she can, takes no account of the theoretical pitfalls of presenting information as "fact".
So in spite of her catalogue statements, Hoffie works in the domain of both feminist concerns and postmodemist semiotics. Yet if her work fails it is chiefly through lack of ideological rigour-there is an inadequate thinking through of