Contemporary Art and Feminism 2021003936, 2021003937, 9780367492250, 9780367492243, 9781003045175, 9781000404302, 9781000404296

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
List of figures
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1. From the politics of representation to a politics of acts
2. Beyond performing identities
3. Feminism and the pedagogical turn in art
4. Craftivism: A material ethics of care
5. Avant gardening: Western landscape, ecofeminism and First Nations’ care for country
6. Feminist worlds: Re-imagining community and publics
7. Conclusion: Feminist arts activism—doing politics differently
Index

Citation preview

CONTEMPORARY ART AND FEMINISM

This important new book examines contemporary art while foregrounding the key role feminism has played in enabling current modes of artmaking, spectatorship and theoretical discourse. Contemporary Art and Feminism carefully outlines the links between feminist theory and practice of the past four decades of contemporary art and offers a radical re-reading of the contemporary movement. Rather than focus on filling in the gaps of accepted histories by ‘adding’ the ‘missing’ female, queer, First Nations and women artists of colour, the authors seek to revise broader understandings of contemporary practice by providing case studies contextualised in a robust art historical and theoretical basis. Readers are encouraged to see where art ideas come from and evaluate past and present art strategies. What strategies, materials or tropes are less relevant in today’s networked, event-driven art economies? What strategies and themes should we keep hold of, or develop in new ways? This is a significant and innovative intervention that is ideal for students in courses on contemporary art within fine arts, visual studies, history of art, gender studies and queer studies. Jacqueline Millner completed studies in law, political science and visual arts, before specialising in the history and theory of contemporary art as an arts writer and academic. She is Associate Professor of Visual Arts at La Trobe University, Melbourne, where she also lectures on contemporary art theory and history. She was previously Associate Professor of Art History and Theory, University of Sydney. She has published widely on contemporary Australian and international art in key anthologies, journals and catalogues of national and international institutions, and has received prestigious grants and awards for her research including from the Australia Council for the Arts and the Australian Research Council. Her books include Conceptual Beauty: Perspectives on Australian Contemporary Art (2010),

Australian Artists in the Contemporary Museum (with Jennifer Barrett, 2014), Fashionable Art (with Adam Geczy, 2015) and Feminist Perspectives on Art: Contemporary Outtakes (co-edited with Catriona Moore, 2018). She co-convenes the research cluster Contemporary Art and Feminism across La Trobe University and the University of Sydney, and is currently leading Care Project: Feminism, Art and Ethics in Neo-liberal Times, a multiple location series of exhibitions and symposia (2019–21). Catriona Moore has been a Senior Lecturer in Art History & Film Studies at the University of Sydney. She has published widely on feminist art and activism, and more broadly on modern and contemporary women artists. Her research and writing have opened up cross-cultural connections between women artists and explored the visual expression of cultural diversity in modern and contemporary Australian art, within a comparative international framework. She is the author and editor of books central to the development of the feminist history of Australian art, including Indecent Exposures: Twenty Years of Australian Feminist Photography (1991), Dissonance: Feminism and the Arts 1970–1990 (1991) and Feminist Perspectives on Art: Contemporary Outtakes (co-edited with Jacqueline Millner, 2018). She co-convenes the research cluster Contemporary Art and Feminism across the University of Sydney and La Trobe University.

CONTEMPORARY ART AND FEMINISM

Jacqueline Millner and Catriona Moore

First published 2022 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2022 Jacqueline Millner and Catriona Moore The right of Jacqueline Millner and Catriona Moore to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Millner, Jacqueline, author. | Moore, Catriona, author. Title: Contemporary art and feminism / Jacqueline Millner and Catriona Moore. Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York : Routledge, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021003936 (print) | LCCN 2021003937 (ebook) | ISBN 9780367492250 (hardback) | ISBN 9780367492243 (paperback) | ISBN 9781003045175 (ebook) | ISBN 9781000404302 (epub) | ISBN 9781000404296 (adobe pdf) Subjects: LCSH: Feminism and art. | Art and society--History--20th century. | Art and society--History--21st century. Classification: LCC N72.F45 M55 2021 (print) | LCC N72.F45 (ebook) | DDC 701/.03--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021003936 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021003937 ISBN: 978-0-367-49225-0 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-49224-3 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-04517-5 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003045175 Typeset in Bembo by Taylor & Francis Books

CONTENTS

List of figures Acknowledgements Introduction

vi xii 1

1

From the politics of representation to a politics of acts

13

2

Beyond performing identities

49

3

Feminism and the pedagogical turn in art

85

4

Craftivism: A material ethics of care

129

5

Avant gardening: Western landscape, ecofeminism and First Nations’ care for country

168

6

Feminist worlds: Re-imagining community and publics

204

7

Conclusion: Feminist arts activism—doing politics differently

237

Index

248

FIGURES

1.1 Helen Grace, Amazon Acres, 1979, unprinted 35 mm b&w photograph, negative. Courtesy the artist 1.2 Susan Norrie, Fruitful corsage, bridal bouquet, lingering veils, 1983, triptych, oil on plywood 186.2 x 376 x 5.3 cm frame overall. Courtesy the artist and the Art Gallery of New South Wales, AGNSW collection: 175.1983.a-c 1.3 Octora, The Gospel of the Lenses, 2019, screen print on vintage fabric, sequins), 70 x 50 cm. Courtesy the artist and Gajah Gallery, Singapore 1.4 Vivienne Binns, Vag Dens, 1967, synthetic polymer paint and enamel on composition board, 122 x 91.5 x 2.5 cm. Collection National Gallery of Australia 78.1302. Courtesy Vivienne Binns/Copyright Agency 1.5 Alice Maher, Vox Hybrida 7, 2018, wood relief on paper, hand tinted, 121 x 81 cm. Photographer: Gidney. Courtesy the artist 1.6 Paula do Prado, Sepiasiren, 2012, mixed media collage, 29.7 x 21. Courtesy the artist 1.7 Tracey Moffatt, Scarred for Life series: Heart Attack 1970, 1994, offset lithograph, 80 x 60 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery 1.8 Karla Dickens, Hard Hitting Sister II, 2019, inkjet print, 180 x 120 cm. Courtesy the artist

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List of figures vii

2.1 Hannah Raisin, Flowing Locks, 2007, performance still, inkjet pigment print. Photographer: Simon Bejer. Courtesy the artist 2.2 Anastasia Klose, Film for My Nanna, 2006, video, 5:32 mins. Photographed by the artist’s mother, Elizabeth Presa. Courtesy the artist 2.3 Justene Williams, Crutch Dance, 2011, video installation, 13 CRT televisions, synthetic polymer paint on wooden pallets, 188 x 440 x 220 cm. Courtesy the artist and Sarah Cottier Gallery, Sydney 2.4 Sonia Boyce, Mother Sallys, Crop Over, 2007, production still from two channel video installation, 15:00 mins. Photograph by William Cummins. © Sonia Boyce/The Design and Artists Copyright Society [DACS] and Copyright Agency, 2020 2.5 Patty Chang, Milk Debt (Hong Kong), 2020, stills from video, 7:17 min. Courtesy the artist 2.6 Eisa Jocson, Macho Dancer, 2013, stage performance at Beursschowburg, Brussels. Photographer: Giannina Urmeneta Ottike 2.7 Pushpamala N in collaboration with photographer Clare Arni, Cracking the Whip (after film still of J Jayalalithaa c 1970s), 2004, colour photograph, 61 x 37.6 cm. Courtesy the artist 2.8 Hoda Afshar, Westoxicated #7, Under Western Eyes, 2013–2014, photograph, archival pigment print, 100 x 86 cm. Courtesy the artist and Milani Gallery, Brisbane 3.1 Emily Floyd, Labour Garden, 2015, aluminium, automotive paint, dimensions variable. Photographer: John Gollings. Courtesy the artist and Anna Schwartz Gallery 3.2 LEVEL, We need to talk (Recipe for a Revolution), 2014, participatory event at the Queensland Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA), Brisbane. Photographer: Joe Ruckli. Courtesy LEVEL 3.3 Barbara Cleveland, Making History, 2016, live performance at 20th Biennale of Sydney. Photographer: Jessica Maurer. Courtesy the artists and Sullivan+Strumpf Gallery 3.4 Alex Martinis Roe, Frameworks for Exchange: Workshop on Genealogies and Spaces Between Authorships, 2012, participatory workshop at Ian Potter Museum of Art, Melbourne. Courtesy the artist 3.5 Soda_Jerk, The Carousel, 2011, 2-channel video lecture performance at Queensland Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA), Brisbane 2012, 60 mins. Courtesy Soda_Jerk

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viii List of figures

3.6 Media Lab, Warmun Art Centre, Ngali-Ngalim-Boorroo (for the women) (dir: Alana Hunt), 2014, video (stills of Phyllis Thomas and Betty Carrington – Gija, East Kimberley – with their work), 30 min. Videoed at Warmun Art Centre, East Kimberley, Western Australia by camera-interviewers Nancy Daylight, Margaret Joshua, Asayah Nodea and Waylon Duncan. © Warmun Art Centre 3.7 Sadie Chandler (graphic) and Elvis Richardson, CoUNTess: The Pool of Artists, 2016, digital print, variable dimensions. Courtesy the artists. © Countess Report 4.1 Narelle Jubelin, Owner Builder of Modern California House (detail), 2001, cotton thread on silk mesh petit-point rendition, 7.5 x 12.5 (unframed). Photographer: Sofia Freeman/The Commercial. Courtesy the artist and The Commercial, Sydney 4.2 Sera Waters, Basking (2016–2017), linen, cotton, sequins, tablecloth, handmade glow-in-the-dark beads, 92 x 60 cm. Photographer: Grant Hancock. Courtesy the artist 4.3 Esme Timbery, Shellworked Slippers, 2008, shell, glitter, fabric, cardboard and glue, Museum of Contemporary Art, purchased with funds provided by the Coe and Mordant families, 2008. Photographer: Jessica Maurer. © Esme Timbery/Copyright Agency, 2020. Courtesy the artist and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney 4.4 Raquel Ormella, A handshake with the past (detail—George N. Emmett, Lily White) 2017, cotton, used business shirts and work wear, 100 x 70 cm, 25 banners and performance. Courtesy the artist 4.5 Dulcie Greeno, (Pakana, Cape Barren Island, Tasmania), Shell Necklace, 1998, maireener shell (Phasianotrochus irisodontes) on polyester cotton thread, circum.: 195 cm. © Dulcie Greeno. Courtesy National Gallery of Australia, NGA 98.187 and the artist 4.6 Liam Benson (with community of makers), Participatory Community Embroidery, You and Me, 2013–2017, glass seed and bugle beads, sequins, cotton, organza, 132 x 332 cm. List of makers and workshop process at https://www.liambenson. net/project-6. Photograph: Zan Wimberley. Courtesy the artist

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List of figures ix

5.1 Tjanpi Desert Weavers, Kungkarrangkalnga-ya Parrpakanu (The Seven Sisters Are Flying), held by Ngaanyatjarra makers (L-R): Miriam Iwana Lane, Claudia Yayimpi Lewis, Mildred Lyons, Jennifer Mintiyi Connolly, Elaine Warnatjura Lane, Angilyiya Tjapati Mitchell, Paula Sarkaway Lyons, Jennifer Nginyaka Mitchell, Mrs Davidson, Nora Nyutjanka Davidson, Janet Nyumitji Forbes, Freda Yimunya Lane at Kura Ala, Western Australia, 2015, mixed media including grass, branches, raffia, fencing wire, feathers and wool, dimensions variable. Photographer: Vicki Bosisto. © Tjanpi Desert Weavers, NPY Women’s Council 5.2 Maureen Gruben, (Inuvialuit, Canada), Stitching My Landscape, still from video, 6:10 min. Courtesy the artist 5.3 Patricia Piccinini, The Pollinator, 2018, silicone, fibreglass, hair, polystyrene, steel, 210 x 98 x 44 cm. Courtesy the artist, Tolarno Galleries and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery 5.4 Sasha Grbich, Wind Work (Windy Point), 2016, still from twochannel video work, 4:18 min. Courtesy the artist 5.5 Barbara Campbell, Well There You Are, 2015, still from single channel video, 95 mins. Editor: Gary Warner. Courtesy the artist 5.6 Basia Irland, A Gathering of the Waters international projects: Boulder Creek Repository, Continental Divide to Confluence (worn), 2007, recycled truck and bicycle inner tubes, aspen branch, beaver stills, glass vials with creek water samples, photographs, canteen, logbook, watershed maps, 127 x 63 x 7 cm. Photographer: Basia Irland. Courtesy the artist 5.7 Mary Mattingly, Wetland, 2014–2016, still from video, 2:36 min. Photographer: Mary Mattingly. Courtesy the artist 5.8 Tita Salina, 1001st island – the most sustainable island in archipelago, 2015, installation, video performance in Jakarta, Indonesia, 14:11 min. Photographer: Irwan Ahmett. Courtesy the artist 5.9 Sarah Goffman, Asian table, 2017, PET plastics, enamel paint, permanent marker, hot glue, dimensions variable. Photographer: Bernie Fisher. Courtesy the artist 6.1 Angelica Mesiti, The Begin Again, 2011, four single-channel videos and one live installation and performance, 16:9 min, colour. Courtesy the artist and Anna Schwartz Gallery

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x List of figures

6.2 Bianca Hester, Fashioning Discontinuities: annexing a patch of grass, temporarily, 2014. Amendment to the Pioneer Lawn in the Royal Botanical Gardens between January - June 2014 in consultation with grounds keepers whereby a circle of grass was annexed and mowing was suspended for a fixed period of time, concrete footing with sign indicating the process of amendment to the lawn, 10 x 120 m. Photographer: Bianca Hester. Courtesy the artist 6.3 Deborah Kelly with collaborators, No Human Being is Illegal (in all our glory), 2014–19. Latai Funaki Taumoepeau teaching workshop participants, work in progress documentation at Central Park studios, Sydney, 2014. Medium: time, people, paper, discarded books, glue, gold, sequins, 109 x 200 cm. Photographer: Nancy Skinner. © Deborah Kelly. Collaborators: Deborah Kelly with Tony Albert (teacher/ facilitator); Kate Andrews; Gemma Avery; Roslyn Baker; Lucy Barker; Kevin Bathman, Prudence Black; Ruth Braunstein; Gary Carsley (reader); Shuxia Chen; Jodi Clark; Dean Cotter; Jane Crowley; Bec Dean; Jenny Du; Helen Duckworth; Michele Elliott; Amy Emerson; Sally Evans; Alex Falkiner; Sky Fleming, Susan Forrester; Janette Gay; Caitlin Gibson; Su Goldfish; Karen Golland; Daniel Green; Lydia Grossmann; Jane Guthleben; Matthew Hamra; Lynette Hearne; Rebecca Heffernan; Amanda Holt; Camille Howard; Yang-En Hume; Jan Idle; Chris Isgro; Linda Jaivin (reader); Cat Jones; Nicolette Katsouras; Zina Kaye; Mary Kellam; Sergej Kolke; Freddie Landgraf; Carli Leimbach; Tania Leimbach; Lex Lindsay; Farhan Mahmud; Tea Mäkipää; Paul Matthews; Letizia Mondello (reader); Mahalia McConkey; Fiona McGregor (reader) Michael McIntyre; Catriona Moore; Frank Motz (reader); Kathie Najar; Elena Ortega; Rujunko Pugh; Bernadette Roberts; Michelle Robin Anderson; Meara Robinson; Megan Rushton; Penny Ryan; Gary Samuels; Bron Shipway; Justin Shoulder; N.E. Skinner; Kim Spinks; Ilaria Vanni

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List of figures xi

6.4 Natalie Thomas, Natty Solo: One woman, one camera, no film, 2014, digital photograph for NATTY SOLO blog nattysolo. com. Photograph by Kirsten Rann of Natalie Thomas taken at Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney opening, and depicting works by Debra Dawes, 2010, oil on linen, AGNSW: 175.2011; Nike Savvas, Rally (detail), 2014, installation, AGNSW2.2014; and Hilarie Mais, Res, 2010, oil on wood, AGNSW 200.2013. © The artists and photographer 6.5 Cigdem Aydemir, Extremist Activity (ride), 2011, live performance. Photograph: Alex Wisser 6.6 Lhola Amira, Philisa: Ditaola (To Heal: Divining Bones), 2019, glass beads, wood, salt. Appearance at Abalozi Bayeza / Os Deuses Estão Chegando exhibition, SMAC Gallery, Johannesburg. Courtesy the artist and SMAC Gallery 6.7 Marisa Williamson, Congo Square (2017) sweet chariot, 2017, video still / digital photograph, 20.48 x 53.34 cm. Performed by Noelle Lorraine Williams at Washington Square, Philadelphia PA. Photographer: James Allister Sprang. Courtesy the artist 6.8 Teresa Margolles, Aproximación al Lugar de los Hechos (Proximity to the scene), 2020, Documentation of a performance that consisted of marking the place where a woman, aged 27, was murdered by her 37-year-old ex-boyfriend, beating her against the cement. Her body was found naked in the shallow area of the Parramatta River. Police detained the killer. Courtesy the artist and James Cohan, New York 7.1 Tomorrow Girls Troop, Empowerment March (Sophia University, Tokyo), 2019. Photographer: Ryota Yokoyama. Courtesy the artists 7.2 Womanifesto, Womanifesto workshop group at Boon Bandam Farm, Kantharaluk, North-East Thailand, 2001, participatory activity; courtesy Womanifesto

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

To begin with, we acknowledge the traditional owners of the lands upon which this book is written: the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation, traditional owners of this place we now call Sydney, and the Dja Dja Wurrung and Jaara people, part of the Kulin alliance of Aboriginal Victorian peoples in Central Victoria. We respect their elders past and present as a way to signal our respect for and openness to First Nations’ ways of being and belonging to the world. The second implication arising from the acknowledgement of country, and a key thrust of this book, is the recognition that Australian Indigenous peoples, lands, practices, bodies and knowledges are still sovereign. Without meaningful constitutional recognition of unceded sovereignty, to live and share this land is to share this predicament. Thus acknowledgement of country is a prompt to examine this quandary and what it might mean for feminism today. There are many dear colleagues who have contributed to this book over the years it has taken to research and write. They include: our research assistants Dr Barbara Campbell and Dr Elizabeth Pulie, exceptional artists whose sharp intellects and creative sensibilities informed our thinking and kept us motivated; the artists, curators, students, writers and other members of the Contemporary Art and Feminism research community (including CAF co-founder Jo Holder) who collectively imagined with us how this conjunction contributes to our understandings of the past, present and future; our feminist scholar friends who encouraged and assisted us by offering us their own lived experience of international feminist practices, including Professor Hilary Robinson, Dr Clare Veal, Dr Yvonne Lowe, Dr Roger Nelson, Professor Brenda Schmahmann, and above all the magnificent Dr Sherry Buckberrough; the artists whose work we discuss for their inspiring practice and for granting permission to reproduce images, their galleries and copyright holders; our universities for their research support, namely, The University of Sydney’s visual arts (then) faculty Sydney College of the Arts and Department of Art History, and La Trobe University’s School of Humanities and Social Sciences. We are very grateful to the Australia Council for

Acknowledgements xiii

the Arts for funding aspects of our research as part of their investment in Australian art and culture. And we thank Routledge, in particular Alex McGregor and her team, for their interest in our project and support throughout the process. We also extend our deep gratitude to friends and family without whose love and care we would be unable to function, let alone write. Jacqueline would like in particular to thank JP for all his support, and Zac, Bella and Jaspar for ongoing inspiration. Catriona would like to thank Gary, her sisters Sharon, Donagh and Fiona, and children Chenier, Dashiell and Declan for their sustaining good cheer. Jacqueline and Catriona

INTRODUCTION

We have been waiting decades for a book like this. As feminist researchers, teachers and activists, we recognise the need for a history of contemporary art that understands the key role feminism has played in enabling current modes of artmaking, spectatorship and theoretical discourses. Ethics has once again become the touchstone of art; we see it in contemporary work that concerns itself with how to live sustainably, how to relate to oneself, others and the world, and how to align values to actions. A consolidated theoretical and historical treatment that identifies the feminist roots of this re-emergence and feminism’s ongoing contribution to ethical aesthetics is sorely needed. Current approaches in contemporary art include: social practice, with its emphasis on collaboration and coalitional action, progressive pedagogies and ongoing community engagement; performance art, with its desire for presence and authenticity, and its political emphasis of putting one’s body on the line consonant with the recent protest movements such as pro-democracy, BLM, #MeToo, international student strikes for climate, and Occupy; and ‘new materialism’, with its affirmation of the animacy of matter and its complication of hierarchies of all kinds, including human/animal, artist/material, and art/craft. Such approaches engage with notions such as leaving a light footprint, caring for country, relatedness, and the embrace of alterity; they move Western cultures beyond a respect for difference and the politics of witnessing, into complex affective territory more akin to love. So many of these ideas and practices, at their most politically savvy and theoretically sophisticated, are pre-figured and find their deepest rationales in feminist research and debate yet are rarely recognised as such. Contemporary Art and Feminism argues the links between feminist theory and practice of the past four decades and contemporary art. It provides a radical re-reading of the contemporary moment, beyond the more conventional attempts to capture the unique nature of art today in art historical discourses.1 Such a re-reading provides alternative ways to think about the phenomenon ‘contemporary art’, and also takes DOI: 10.4324/9781003045175-1

2 Introduction

into account recent doubts about the usefulness of the term and speculation as to what may supersede it.2 Contemporary Art and Feminism relies on, but has a different emphasis from, recent publications on feminist art that focus exclusively on art by women and on individual artists rather than on an epoch, movement or underlying currents.3 Its primary concern is not filling in the gaps of accepted histories by simply adding the ‘missing’ female and queer artists, but rather offering broader understandings of contemporary practice through feminist critiques and methodologies. While there has been some localised focus on the disavowal of feminist contributions to broader contemporary currents,4 our book offers a more comprehensive analysis that enables these local voices to talk with each other. In addition, it integrates recent scholarship and practices informed by care ethics, which position art at the forefront of forging alternative ethics in times of crisis. In bringing these perspectives together, our book is fuelled by the current political priority of coalitional feminism. Contemporary Art and Feminism also addresses the urgent desire among younger feminist artists and writers for analytical frameworks to consider key questions of political strategy, activism and practice, in particular given the contribution of First Nations and Women of Colour to understanding our historical moment. What is to be done? Where are we going? What lies beyond equal opportunity feminism? Can the relative autonomy of the aesthetic realm and the newly empowered cultural producer change prevailing discourses and pave the way for more ethical social outcomes? We ground our research in examples of contemporary work, contextualised in an art historical and theoretical basis: we want readers to be able to see where art ideas come from and offer them theoretical and art historical frameworks that enable an evaluation of past and present art strategies. What has worked, and why? What strategies, materials or tropes no longer work in today’s networked, event-driven art economies? What actions and themes should we keep hold of, or develop in new ways? And can we enhance feminist revivals and art ‘herstorical’ retrievals5 through this integrated questioning? As authors, we offer a unique perspective given our long-standing work as art critics, educators and historians. We have consistently observed an ethical commitment to be close to the artwork, and close to the artist, so that our criticism and historical analysis are grass roots and embodied. Over several decades we have developed ideas in connection with artists, writing catalogue essays, critiques, interviews and histories based on first-hand experience of art and a long, durational relationship to it: in other words, our research method reflects our feminist principles. While the artist’s voice and practice-based insights are often missed in meta-discursive art history, our writing honours them along with art historical, curatorial, multi-disciplinary, community and activist perspectives.6 As part of our commitment to the embodied experience of the artwork and close dialogue with the makers, our research is based primarily in Australia. We would argue that this grants us particular analytical insights that can make significant contributions to discourses on contemporary art, and on feminism, emanating from artworld ‘centres’. Australia’s ‘second-tier’ peripheral vision offers a distinctive critical vantage point on the global play of politics and art; we necessarily see international art relationally, across so-called peripheral cultures as well as along more

Introduction 3

traditional art trades routes from centre to periphery and vice versa. Furthermore, Australian feminism—including feminist art—has always had a pragmatic bent; its history attests to a close connection to practice and lived experience, including to working conditions. Partly on account of First Nations and migrant influences, and in response to the challenges of postcolonial politics, Australian feminism is a hybrid mix of ‘what works’, not hamstrung by a commitment to theoretical purity. It is also marked by Australian black (and blak7) humour, often ironic and wry, sometimes socialist, sometimes anarchic. Their looseness, responsiveness and wit grant Australian cultural perspectives a particular agility—something like the insight of an in-the-know outsider—when it comes to developments at ‘the centre’. Given most material on feminist art8 has been written from the metropolitan centre, Australia’s well-developed tradition of anticolonial art offers innovative insights: First Nations’ art and cultural politics have fundamentally challenged any thought of white Western universality of experience. Such cultural relativity has always gone hand-in-hand with politically strategic thinking, and enriched feminist thought and action. While we are grounded in Australian experiences, we have contextualised our argument by reference to several artists and works from other locales. In particular, we were interested in those practices which resonated with the themes we had identified through our long-term, embodied experience of the Australian scene, and which set out to experiment with new forms of ethical aesthetic entanglement. We made our decisions by first seeking recommendations from international feminist colleagues and those specialising in other contemporary art and art historical traditions,9 and also by reviewing those artworks we had personally encountered at Biennales in Australia and abroad. In line with our feminist methodology and values, we also thought it important to emphasise those practices which have received less mainstream attention, while not ignoring those practitioners whose contributions have been more widely recognised.

Our approach For us, feminism questions how power privileges some to the disadvantage of others and challenges the logic of domination that justifies the status quo. It is anti-hierarchical and inclusive, rather than oppositional and mutually exclusive. Feminism calls to account conceptions of knowledge that are represented as objective, impartial, detached and gender-neutral. It demands more complex ways of knowing by encouraging us to always situate ourselves within specific historical, cultural and economic contexts, and hence to generate knowledge from gendered, concrete, daily experiences. Feminism embraces art as an agent of social transformation. From the 1970s, feminist art has focused on the relationship of art practice to public life. Its critique was ‘tied to an activist project of shifting power relationships in daily life rather than a theoretical exercise in a rarefied language addressed to an art world viewership’,10 seeking a shift from symbolic to actual action. American artist and activist Suzanne Lacy argues that ‘it was feminism that most clearly posited political and cultural activism as part of 70s conceptual and performance art’,11 while British art

4 Introduction

historian Griselda Pollock observes that a feminist political gesture links process, practice, making, history and subjectivity.12 This complex entanglement of actions, forces and discourses is how we think of contemporary art and feminism, a generative phenomenon always in relationship, always responsive, cognisant that power is exercised everywhere. Feminism’s insistence on the links between personal stories and broader social and cultural questions, on the capacity of ‘small’ acts of material nurture to resonate widely, on the centrality of bodies, and on the coming together of these approaches to cultivate an alternative ethics founded on care and generosity that honours the equivalence of all things, be they human or non-human, organic or nonorganic: these commitments capture the values revolution that contemporary times call for and distinguish the artworks we discuss here. The feminist philosophy of the body developed by Australian philosopher Elizabeth Grosz in the 1980s and early 1990s13—founded on Michel Foucault’s notion of biopower via Freudian psychoanalysis and lucid readings of French feminists Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva—influenced a whole generation of local artists and art theorists. It was a particularly empowering interpretation, one that manoeuvred beyond the structuralist cul de sac that viewed social inequality as the product of deep underlying systems with little potential for change, and the left-wing credo that only an overwhelming revolution—economic and political—could ever achieve social alternatives. This empowering reading emphasised the role that representation plays in constructing social realities, and offered a model of social analysis whereby many different views of the world vie with each other, with each, depending on circumstances, having a chance to gain traction. In such an understanding of the process of social change, those who imagine and represent alternative realities—among them, artists—become key. A woman does not recognise herself in patriarchal colonial society, seeing instead only a distorted image created in an alien language. She is deterritorialised; assaulted and bereft, she must fight and invent to locate herself. But in that estrangement is also the possibility for something new, another world. That feminine proximity to how things could be different was another appealing implication feminism wrought through productive amalgams of psychoanalytic theory, Foucauldian readings of power, philosophies of deconstruction and postcolonial analyses of Western hegemony. This sense of the potential impact of artistic practice on broader social realities was suffused in the political project of feminism, offering artists the tools to explore their own narrative within the wider context of the historical repression of women’s experience. Our book begins at this historical juncture with the feminist contribution to the politics of representation, although it argues that already within these feminist debates and artistic approaches there were the inklings of a more entangled, fluid, material politics that set the scene for what was to come: a politics of acts, rather than representation. While positing more generative, inclusive and responsive ways to engage with the relationship of art to social change beyond ‘the politics of representation’, feminist artists and writers at the same time problematised ‘identity politics’, dreaming up alternatives to ‘performing identities’ in part by engaging with theories of affect and new materialism. While feminism has always been concerned with representation—the way that femininity is constructed in part through how female bodies are represented—we have

Introduction 5

also always been attuned to how bodies manage to exceed that very process. The unsayable, the inscrutable, intuited knowledge: feminism reclaimed these from pejorative terrain long ago, so anticipating and laying the groundwork for several recent developments in the humanities and the arts. Feminist theory has been at the forefront of ‘the ontological turn’ in philosophy linked to ‘new materialism’—that has seen a shift from epistemological questions to a renewed focus on the nature of prediscursive realities—and the ‘affective turn’, that has seen emotions take centre-stage in a range of disciplines, including as a way to access life ‘that exceeds the social regulation of our existence’.14 These feminist preoccupations and their development over recent years provide a compelling context for contemporary art. A sense that identity is embodied and relational, that human social realities exist at pre-discursive, cellular levels, and that often incommensurable emotions are what drive and define us: such reconceptualisations find remarkable resonances in what have become the institutionally privileged practices of contemporary art, including participatory work (at times with a pedagogical dimension) and performance. We argue that to understand the (re)turn to the live body in art and to further the aims of such artistic projects, it is crucial to acknowledge this feminist context. Along with granting us insight into how and why contemporary art has turned to the live body in recent years, feminist theories and practices also allow us to understand the concurrent ‘pedagogical turn’. Feminism is a political project that is driven by a desire to change the psychic and social conditions of all subjects. It is by definition activist, seeking transformation by uncovering, expanding the discourse, positing alternatives, imagining. Feminism’s early discovery of the relationship between one’s very (private, individual) subjectivity and the public sphere shaped its political strategy and from the outset tied transformation to teaching. Feminist consciousness-raising was based around personal story telling; it provided space for many perspectives and acknowledged the relative nature of knowledge and its interconnection with power. This intersection of political consciousness, activism and education—that has preoccupied several leading cultural theorists in recent years including Jacques Rancière— is what guides many artists searching for ways to understand political action beyond the predominant Marxist framework of ‘revealing’ the ‘hidden truths’ of exploitation. The art of institutional critique, for example, has feminist antecedents and fellow travellers that more fully contextualise contemporary pedagogical practices. New models of art as pedagogy emerge with early feminist public projects which created works through personal story and supportive listening environments, and have been retrospectively described as ‘expanded public pedagogy’.15 Through such expanded practice, feminist work reinserted the body and the psyche into institutional critique, and along the way helped open up the role of the artist to the curatorial function and its pedagogical register: another hallmark of contemporary art practice. Feminist pedagogy has long-standing links to extra-mural art activities including exhibitions, public programmes and art publishing, informal art networks, campaign work, online resourcing and debate in the blogosphere.16 The pedagogical turn in art has also entailed ongoing debates about the role of art education within neoliberal societies and what alternatives it may offer by way of tacit, embodied knowledge grounded in the

6 Introduction

personal experience of making and a genuine embrace of interdisciplinarity—all principles championed by feminist pedagogy. The return to the body and materiality in contemporary art has also entailed a revalorisation of craft-based practices, with the emergence of ‘craftivism’ and many forms of activist, politically driven work underpinned by sewing, knitting, embroidery17 and other media. The relationship between traditional women’s handcraft, strategies of survival and remembrance has a long history in feminist art. Back in 1984, Rozsika Parker’s The Subversive Stitch first mapped the status of embroidery through the ages according to gender politics, from a professional and high form practised by men and women in the Middle Ages, to a domestic and low form in the nineteenth century associated almost exclusively with women.18 But Parker also documented how women used embroidery as a weapon to negotiate the limitations of femininity, including its use by socially disadvantaged and marginalised women. A particularly potent contemporary strategy is the exploration of the links between textile and text, of the process of literally crafting words, and taking that labour—that so explicitly integrates material, body and thought—into the public sphere. Stitching, handkerchiefs and garments all have strong associations of home and childhood; the intimate experience of sewing or knitting is an act of care that is also meditative, a way to challenge anger with haptic engagement. Bringing such experiences together in a public space is potentially transformative and has a strong affiliation with feminine resistance to the violence of patriarchal forces. There is an inherent creativity within such a practice and materials, one with strong feminist associations that include the intergenerational transmission of knowledge, tending to family, and weaving as a form of connecting with other women, building community and caring for country. The revalorisation of craft, including First Peoples’ cultural traditions, in contemporary art connects strongly to environmental ethics. Feminist environmental philosophers conceive of the self as a relational, ecological being who is a member of the larger biotic community, and hold that ‘moral emotions’, such as empathy and care, are important to environmental ethics.19 According to Australian eco-feminist Val Plumwood, humans are both continuous with and distinct from nature, both individual selves (who are different from nature) and ecological selves (who are a part of nature). Such an approach allows for relationships between selves and others, community and individuals, that are not based on positing human identity in terms of individual interests, autonomy and separation from nature. Caring for self, then, goes beyond individual rights and liberties to also involve protection of the ecological well-being of others (including nature) with whom we have a relationship.20 Caring—unlike justice—is not reducible to individual rights or duties. If the ability to care is necessary for ethics, then the failure to care for others, including nature, is a moral wrong.21 These ethics underpin the idea of an ‘ecological democracy’, where notions of the public sphere, democracy, citizenship and free speech are reconceived based on an understanding of the unjustified dominations of women, animals and nature. Ecological democracy recognises that we live in cultural and ecological communities founded on relationships, and that being a good citizen means to nurture the health of ‘the land’—all soils, waters, plants and animals. Feminist practice brings to material life many of the principles of an ecological democracy, in work that cultivates an alternative ecology founded on the ethics of care and generosity, an ethics

Introduction 7

that aspires to honour the equivalence of all things, and through that non-hierarchical acceptance, attempts to make amends for injuries both personal and historical. As Lucy Lippard claimed over forty years ago, feminist art replaced the modernist ‘egotistical monologue’ with a dialogue—between art and society, between artist and audience—with collaboration as a creative mode. Feminist art deliberately pitched to a public and social context characterised by ‘an element of outreach, a need for connections beyond process or product, an element of inclusiveness’ that ‘transcended the individual’.22 From the 1970s on, the entire field of public art projects was shaped by feminist artists,23 who ‘exemplified a rapport with their site and their material rather than a victory over them’.24 They pioneered site-responsive, collaborative approaches, working with, listening to, and negotiating with communities in ways that anticipated today’s social practice, and provided clear alternatives to artist-imposed work in public spaces.25 As American feminist art historians Norma Broude, Judith Brodsky and Mary Garrard write, Women introduced new attitudes and iconographies to public art projects, in which they sought to express the self not simply as the personal ‘I’ but worked instead to blend the personal with the public, pointing a way to the traditional concerns of the artist with those of the community.26 Through considering non-artists as equal collaborators in the construction of artworks, and drawing on practices not conventionally defined as art, ‘artists were in effect redefining the tools, skills, audiences, makers and imagery of art’,27 and feminists led the way. Artist and activist Suzanne Lacy argues that it was feminist art that ‘gave public life and political meaning’ to Allan Kaprow’s prophesy in 1958 that artists ‘will disclose entirely unheard of happenings and events, found in garbage cans, police files, hotel lobbies, store windows’. Without feminism, such gestures had remained largely in the art world without crossing over into the public sphere and everyday lives.28 This overview of our approach, which integrates feminist ethics, politics and creative practice to situate contemporary art within an expanded historical and theoretical frame, explains how we arrived at our six themed chapters, which focus on the politics of representation, performance, pedagogy, craft, environment and publics.

Chapter topics Chapter 1: ‘From the politics of representation to a politics of acts’ follows the currents of feminist insights into the politics of representation from the 1970s to the present. Our focus is largely on photography, and to a lesser extent painting and print-making. Photo-media has provided feminists with a persuasive and sustained platform from which to firstly call out stereotyped mass media images of femininity, and then create more nuanced analyses of visual representational systems. The world’s ubiquitous Imperial archives have also been re-routed through feminist and decolonial photography to reclaim and re-enliven their historical captives. The chapter canvasses important aspects of gender, racial and cultural identity politics from a feminist, antiidentitarian and studio-centric approach that has sought to imagine resistant and

8 Introduction

alternative forms of subjectivity since the late 1960s. Artists discussed include Helen Grace, Susan Norrie, Vivienne Binns, Paula do Prado, Fiona Foley, Karla Dickens and Tracey Moffatt, alongside work by the Indonesian artist Octora, Alice Maher from Ireland and South African photographer Zanele Muholi. Chapter 2: ‘Beyond performing identities’ proposes reasons for the current importance of performance in contemporary art and contextualises this relative to historical and current feminist theory and practice. It provides case studies and examples that canvass the range of practices in performance and the value-addition of a feminist framework of analysis to understand their currency and operation. Artists discussed include Hannah Raisin, Anastasia Klose and Justene Williams, along with Hoda Afshar, Salote Tawale and Parachute for Ladies (AUS). We also consider Sonia Boyce (UK), Pushpamala N (India), Patty Chang (US) and Eisa Jocson (Philippines/Australia), together with the legacies of Marina Abramovic´ (Serbia/US) in contemporary performance. Chapter 3: ‘Feminism and art’s pedagogical turn’ focuses on the strand of contemporary art that incorporates pedagogical elements and the ethics of progressive teaching (such as those expounded in Paolo Freire’s The Pedagogy of the Oppressed and bell hooks’ Teaching to Transgress). This includes new forms of art practice and curating, like lecture/performances and ongoing ‘social sculptures’ such as workshops that aim for innovative activism. The chapter traces these forms back to feminist theory and practice, and offers insights based on this analytical framework. Artists and artist groups discussed include communities and collectives BC, LEVEL, Euraba Papermakers, Warmun community, and Soda_Jerk, individual artists Emily Floyd, Alex Martinis Roe and Elvis Richardson (AUS), as well as Vanessa German (US), Anita Dube (India), Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook (Thailand) and Caroline Woolard (US). Chapter 4: ‘Craftivism: a material ethics of care’ argues the links between ‘new materialism’ and preceding feminist theory and art. It also contextualises the contemporary turn to craft within both recent philosophical developments and historical practices, analysing works that have problematised the public/domestic divide by connecting domestic crafts with politics and institutional critique. In particular, the chapter reads these developments through the perspective of innovative First Nations’ practices and care ethics. Artists and curatorial projects discussed include Ernabella and Utopia batik, The Sydney WAM-affiliated Women’s Domestic Needlework Group, intergenerational and community-based projects like Mothers’ Memories, Others Memories (1979–1981), Yolngu string work (Ngarrawu Mununggurr and others), Esme Timbery, Dulcie Greeno and Liam Benson, and the campaigning of the Knitting Nannas Against Coal Seam Gas. We also consider the work of Narelle Jubelin, Sera Waters, Michele Elliot and Raquel Ormella, along with the Oregon-based artist Natalie Ball and Inuit artist Taqralik Partridge. Chapter 5: ‘Avant Gardening: Western landscape, ecofeminism and First Nations care for country’ connects contemporary environmentalist art with early feminist contributions to notions of deep ecology (such as the work of Australian philosopher Val Plumwood) and First Nations’ spiritual ownership, knowledge and care for/of/with ‘country’—an active colloquialism of Aboriginal English referring to culturally-inherited tracts of land that conveys both place and practices of belonging and belief. The chapter

Introduction 9

argues that ecofeminism has, over several decades, challenged Western landscape traditions, particularly the latter’s dualistic framework of nature and culture, to promote a non-anthropocentric praxis that dovetails with First Nations care for country/work on country in a coalitional environmental politics that is particularly relevant today. Artists, curators and curatorial projects discussed include the Tjanpi Desert Weavers from Central Australia and projects based at the Boolarng Nangamai (Together Dreaming) Art Centre, south of Sydney, Patricia Piccinini, Cat Jones, Sasha Grbich, Barbara Campbell, Bonita Ely, Rox de Luca and Sarah Goffman. Alongside, we consider the work of Inuvialuk artist Maureen Gruben, Sámi artist Sissel M. Bergh, Indonesian artists Irene Agrivina and Tita Salina, and US artists Basia Irland, Mary Mattingly, Chrissie Orr and Jeanette Hart-Mann. Chapter 6: ‘Feminist worlds: reimagining community and publics’ makes a feminist analysis of public and community engaged art, including forms of social practice or participatory art, a prevalent form of contemporary art. It contextualises and critiques this approach by reference to historical feminist theory and artwork, and contributes new perspectives through close readings of a diverse set of works that extend and complicate ideas of community and the public, and that affirm the activist nature of spatial interventions. Artists and curatorial projects discussed include Angelica Mesiti, Bianca Hester, Deborah Kelly, Cigdem Aydemir and Natalie Thomas (as Natty Solo), with international counterparts Lhola Amira (South Africa), Marisa Williamson (US), Nona Faustine (US) and Teresa Margolles (Mexico). Our conclusion, ‘The herstory and future of feminist arts activism’, sums up the collective wisdom offered by contemporary feminist practice, in particular about what strategies might be effective for understanding and ultimately changing the current ecology of contemporary art to better reflect the ethical objectives of artists. Contemporary Art and Feminism re-reads contemporary art within a feminist framework and offers a radically new interpretation of the current moment. It goes beyond the addition of female artists to an existing canon by questioning the canon itself, and asks what feminist cultural strategies are apposite today. It draws on a feminist methodology and an art critical approach informed by intimate contact with the artworks and deep respect for artists’ practice-based knowledge, while leveraging off the ‘peripheral vision’ of an Australian perspective to engage with global debates and developments to bring to light new work to an international audience. It is indebted to the innovative perspectives of First Nations artists, and integrates new scholarship and practices around care ethics and art. We hope that for these reasons it will contribute to new understandings of art, ethics and politics in the visual arts and art history classrooms, but also among an interdisciplinary and general readership.

Notes 1 Such as Terry Smith’s What is Contemporary Art?, Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press, 2009; and Julian Stallabrass’ Contemporary Art: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. 2 Such as Peter Osborne’s Anywhere or Not at All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art, London; Brooklyn: Verso Books, 2013 and Edward Colless’s notion of ‘the uncontemporary’:

10 Introduction

3 4 5 6

7

8 9

10 11 12

13 14 15 16

public lecture at Contemporary Art Tasmania, 2016, https://contemporaryarttasmania. org/programs/the-uncontemporary/ For example, Eleanor Heartney et al. (eds) After the Revolution: Women Who Transformed Contemporary Art, Munich; London: Prestel, 2007; and The Reckoning: Women Artists of the New Millennium, Munich; London: Prestel, 2013. For example, Helena Reckitt’s essay on social practice in Angela Dimitrakaki and Lara Perry (eds) Politics in a Glass Case: Feminism, Exhibition Cultures and Curatorial Transgressions, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013. For example, exhibitions such as WACK! Art and the feminist revolution, 2007 curated by Cornelia Francis at LA’s Museum of Contemporary Art, and publications such as Heartney (2007, 2013). The book draws on research conducted by the research group that we co-convened at the University of Sydney, Contemporary Art and Feminism, in collaboration with Jo Holder from the Cross Art Projects. Since 2013, we have hosted conferences and symposia, and curated exhibitions, that have allowed us to bring together the most exciting feminist artists, writers, educators and curators in Australia. It also draws on the insights offered by the Care Project running out of La Trobe University and engaging artists, theorists and students from around Australia for a series of roundtables, symposia and exhibitions. A colloquial Aboriginal English term coined by Erub/Mer (Torres Strait) and K’ua K’ua (Cape York) artist Destiny Deacon to reclaim identity from non-Indigenous people’s persistent labelling and misrepresentation of First Nations Australians. See Clare Williamson, Hetti Perkins and Boomalli Aboriginal Artists Cooperative (curators), Blakness: Blak City Culture! (exhibition catalogue), South Yarra, Vic: Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, 1994; and Kate L. Munro, ‘Why “Blak” not Black?: Artist Destiny Deacon and the origins of this word’, NITV, 29 June 2020, https://www.sbs.com.au/nitv/article/2020/05/07/why-blak-not-bla ck-artist-destiny-deacon-and-origins-word-1 accessed 23 November 2020. Including its ‘revival’ almost a decade ago in exhibitions such as WACK! (2007) and elles@pompidou (2009). We are so very thankful to our wonderful colleagues based or specialising in South and North America, UK and Europe, Africa and South East Asia, including Sherry Buckberrough, Brenda Schmahmann, Karen Cordeiro, Hilary Robinson, Clare Veal, Roger Nelson and Yvonne Lowe. Suzanne Lacy, Leaving Art: Writings in Performance, Politics and Publics, 1974–2007, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010, 186. Lacy cites Allan Kaprow and Judy Chicago in making this assertion: Suzanne Lacy, ‘Affinities: thoughts on an incomplete history’, in Norma Broude, Judith Brodsky and Mary Garrard (eds) The Power of Feminist Art, New York: Harry N Abrams, 1994, 269. Griselda Pollock, keynote address, ‘Femininity – the feminine and the feminist as critical terms’ for The Subversive Stitch Revisited: The Politics of Cloth Conference, V&A Museum, London, November 2013. Audio recording published by Goldsmiths, University of London, 2018, https://soundcloud.com/goldsmithsuol/subversive-stitch-pollock?in= goldsmithsuol/sets/the-subversive-stitch accessed 23 November 2020. Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Towards a Corporeal Feminism, St Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 1994. Eve K. Sedgwick, Touching Feeling, 2003, cited in Carolyn Pedwell and Anne Whitehead, ‘Affecting Feminism: Questions of feeling in feminist theory’, Feminist Theory, 13 (2): 115–129, 2012, 117. Vivien Green Fryd, ‘Suzanne Lacy’s three weeks in May: Feminist activist performance art as “expanded public pedagogy”‘, NWSA Journal, 19 (1): 23–38, 2007. Recent Australian exhibitions and related events have foregrounded pedagogical, trans-generational exchanges. These include Backflip! Humour in Feminist Art, curated by Laura Castagnini (Melbourne: Victoria College of the Arts, 2012), Contemporary Australia: Women, curated by Julie Ewington (Brisbane: Gallery of Modern Art, 2012), A Different Temporality: Aspects of Australian Feminist Art Practice 1975–1985, curated by Kyla McFarlane (Melbourne: Monash University Museum of Art, 2011), The Baker’s Dozen, curated by Lorna Grear

Introduction 11

17

18 19

20

21

22 23 24

25 26 27 28

(Sydney: University of Technology, Sydney Gallery, 2012), No Added Sugar: Engagement and Self-determination/Australian Muslim Women Artists, curated by Rusaila Bazlamit (Sydney: Casula Powerhouse, 2012), Curating Feminism exhibition and conference, organising curator: Jacqueline Millner (Sydney: University of Sydney, October 2014), Doing Feminism/Sharing the World, curated by Anne Marsh (Melbourne: Victoria College of the Arts and other venues, 2018), Shapes of Knowledge, curated by Hannah Matthews (Melbourne: Monash University Museum of Art, 2019), Know My Name: Australian Women Artists 1900 to Now, curated by Deborah Hart and Elspeth Pitt (Canberra: National Gallery of Australia, 2020–2021). For example, the Craftivist Collective was founded by Sarah Corbett in 2009 in the UK. The Subversive Stitch Revisited: The Politics of Cloth, a conference held in 2013 in the UK with British feminist art historian Griselda Pollock as keynote speaker, highlighted the range of contemporary feminist activism through domestic crafts. Rozsika Parker, The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine, London: The Women’s Press, 1984. Many early eco-feminists credit American scientist Aldo Leopold’s concept of ‘land ethic’ as expounded in A Sand County Almanac (1949). This ethic held that the moral community should include soils, waters, plants and animals, and that the role of humans should be changed from conqueror to plain member of the land community. Further, Leopold argued that we can be moral only in relation to something we can see, feel, understand, love, respect, admire or otherwise have faith in, and that ‘a thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community; it is wrong when it tends otherwise’: Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac: and Sketches Here and There, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1949, 224. See Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, Routledge, 1993; and Chris Cuomo, ‘Ethics and the eco/feminist self’, in Michael E. Zimmerman (ed.) Environmental Philosophy: From Animal Rights to Radical Ecology, Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson/Prentice Hall, 2005. See Karen J. Warren, ‘Feminist environmental philosophy’, in Edward N. Zalta (ed.) Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Stanford, CA: Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, 2015, http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/feminism-environmental/ accessed 23 November 2020. Lucy Lippard, cited in Broude, Brodsky and Garrard, 1994, 22. Including Suzanne Lacy, Mierle Laderman Ukeles and Betsy Damon, for example, in the US. Cited in Judith Stein and April Kingsley, ‘Collaboration’, in Broude, Brodsky and Garrard, 1994, 243. Damon’s work includes A Memory of Clean Water (1988), a 250 foot paper casting of a dry river bed; Ukeles’ work includes Touch Sanitation (1979–1980) where the artist shook hands with every garbage collector in New York City; Lacy’s work includes Crystal Quilt (1985–1987), a two-year project on women’s aging comprised of community engagement, classes and workshops culminating in a collaborative performance in a shopping mall with more than 400 local women over 60. Of which Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc (1981) is the iconic example. Broude, Brodsky and Garrard, 1994, 23. Lacy, Leaving Art, 2010, 189. Lacy, in Broude, Brodsky and Garrard, 1994, 264.

References Broude, Norma, Brodsky, Judith K., and Garrard, Mary D., eds. 1994. The Power of Feminist Art: The American Movement of the 1970s, History and Impact. New York: Harry N. Abrams. Dimitrakaki, Angela and Perry, Lara, eds. 2013. Politics in a Glass Case: Feminism, Exhibition Cultures and Curatorial Transgressions. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Green Fryd, Vivien. 2007. ‘Suzanne Lacy’s three weeks in May: Feminist activist performance art as “expanded public pedagogy”’, NWSA Journal, 19 (1): 23–38.

12 Introduction

Grosz, Elizabeth. 1994. Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism. St Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin. Heartney, Eleanor, ed. 2007. After the Revolution: Women Who Transformed Contemporary Art. Munich; London: Prestel. Heartney, Eleanor, Posner, Helaine, Princenthal, Nancy, and Scott, Sue. 2013. The Reckoning: Women Artists of the New Millennium. Munich; London: Prestel. Lacy, Suzanne. 2010. Leaving Art: Writings in Performance, Politics and Publics, 1974–2007. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Leopold, Aldo. 1949. A Sand County Almanac: And Sketches Here and There. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Munro, Kate L. 2020. ‘Why “Blak” not Black?: Artist Destiny Deacon and the Origins of This Word’, NITV, 29 June, 2020, https://www.sbs.com.au/nitv/article/2020/05/07/ why-blak-not-black-artist-destiny-deacon-and-origins-word-1 Osborne, Peter. 2013. Anywhere or Not at All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art. London; Brooklyn: Verso Books. Parker, Rozsika. 1984. The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine. London: Women’s Press. Pedwell, Carolyn and Whitehead, Anne. 2012. ‘Affecting feminism: Questions of feeling in feminist theory’, Feminist Theory, 13 (2): 115–129. Pollock, Griselda. 2013. ‘Femininity – the feminine and the feminist as critical terms’, The Subversive Stitch Revisited: The Politics of Cloth Conference, November 2013. Plumwood, Val. 1993. Feminism and the Mastery of Nature. London: Routledge. Smith, Terry. 2009. What Is Contemporary Art? Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press. Stallabrass, Julian. 2006. Contemporary Art: A Very Short Introduction. Very Short Introductions 146. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Warren, Karen J. 2015. ‘Feminist environmental philosophy’, in Edward N. Zalta (ed.) The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Stanford, CA: Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, 2015, https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2015/entries/feminism-environmental/ Williamson, Clare, Perkins, Hetti, and Boomalli Aboriginal Artists Cooperative. 1994. Blakness: Blak City Culture!South Yarra, Vic: Australian Centre for Contemporary Art. Zimmerman, Michael E. 2005. Environmental Philosophy: From Animal Rights to Radical Ecology. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson/Prentice Hall.

1 FROM THE POLITICS OF REPRESENTATION TO A POLITICS OF ACTS

Introduction Over the decades, artists have creatively probed the many (mis)identifications, pleasures and objectifications of stereotyped femininity. As the 1984 Australian feminist pub-rock classic told it, ‘the girl in the mirror ain’t the same as the girl on the wall’.1 And who was that ‘man in the head’ who made that girl so self-conscious, prompting her to constantly watch herself being watched?2 Why do women internalise objectifying gender representations? From the later 1960s, these questions were asked across a broad spectrum of feminist consciousness-raising scenarios. The more important question then became: once feminists stood behind the camera, what alternative images of femininity, including female beauty, could we create? This chapter investigates these speculations on the contradictory pleasures of feminine display and female spectatorship. We argue that feminism re-routed Marxist theories of ideological interpellation through creative analyses of mass media and high art representational systems, helping to drive the politicisation of culture as a relatively autonomous sphere of New Left political action. We use the term ‘New Left’ to designate broad, post-war shifts within Marxist theory and practice from an orthodox framework of economic base and superstructure, which had held the sphere of economic production as determinant (at its simplest, the idea that consciousness was determined by one’s relation to the means of production).3 Yet what if one’s consciousness is contoured through capitalism’s reproductive relations, as is the case for half the world’s population, i.e. women? Moreover, orthodox Marxism could not adequately account for the non-repressive yet compelling ideological workings of the capitalist state. Traditional reflection theory was too mechanistic to be useful when analysing our increasingly mediatised and information-based post-war world economies. The rise of post-war social movements such as civil rights, anti-colonial and anti-nuclear movements, along with battles over the environment and women’s and gay liberation, forced a radical re-thinking of the DOI: 10.4324/9781003045175-2

14 Politics of representation to politics of acts

primacy of class and the privileging of the proletariat as driver of historical progress. This dynamic field, then designated as the New Left, held great potential for coalitional action that is only now being realised in today’s mass social movements. Work on the politics of representation arose through feminist attempts to understand women’s inculcation of oppressive feminine images and roles: stereotypes that proved resistant to the simple call-out of false consciousness. Why did we hold beliefs and self-perceptions that were clearly not in our interests, including repressive ideas of white, straight and bourgeois femininity? From the 1970s, feminism addressed the complex ideological workings of representational systems, including those of the mass media and high art. This chapter sketches a non-linear herstory of this creative praxis, from the early call-out of sexist imagery and promotion of positive images, to structurally focussed, deconstructivist analyses of representational systems and new materialist emphasis on the dispersal of identity. We start with the observation that many activists in Women’s Liberation in the 1970s logged mass media agents of feminine socialisation and presumed an equally clear alternative: to re-educate women by documenting real women going about their daily lives.4 This creative call drew initial inspiration from the imagery of the African American civil rights movement. The feminist debt to Black Pride linked to broader connections with realist traditions in Europe and the Americas that endowed the imagery of the oppressed with progressive political and moral value. Could we similarly calibrate feminist identity along a spectrum of exploitation and struggle? However, the bourgeois moral codes of social realism (best expressed in nineteenth-century realist literature, painting and later photo-documentary) had studiously avoided images of the unworthy poor (no drinkers, no wasters, no wanton women, no bad mothers). For instance, first wave feminist struggles for (white) women’s suffrage had been framed by images of deserving citizenry, social purity and maternal responsibility. Interwar photo-documentary promoted the stoic, maternal body (Dorothea Lange) and the dignity of women’s labour (Marion Post Wolcott) to command respect, compassion and support within an American New Deal politics. Was that what we wanted: a social realist antidote to Media She?5 However the low-key, photo-documentary imagery of feminist magazines in this period often lacked the visual grab of televisual glamour, and the reflection theories that underpinned the positive imagery project could not penetrate the psychologically compelling visual dynamics of sophisticated media technologies, beyond the call to Simply Say No to gender stereotyping.6 This chapter argues that things were a little different in the artist’s studio, however. Many second wave feminists turned the tables on the historical power relations between photographer and subject when creating photo-documentary images of women on the factory floor, typing pool and child care centre in feminist magazines, industrial photography and in later Art and Working Life trade union projects.7 They sought to avoid the photogenic objectifications of traditional photo-documentary as undermining feminism’s aim to promote inclusive and self-generated subjectivities. Most artists realised that the documentary excess through which we could create ‘women’s essence’ was inherently connected with the dynamics of image making. Contrary to accepted herstories, very few visual artists in the 1970s wholeheartedly

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relied on simple realist aesthetic strategies—even those early attempts to create positive images of non-traditional womanhood. One problem they faced was how to refute the mass media objectification of women’s bodies and the commodification of female sexuality, and to still remain pro-sex. Some artists tried to turn the pornographic tables through central core imagery, which sexualised the female body through exaggerated proximity and a disconcerting literalism so as to resist the closures of objectified representation. We will discuss this dishevelling imagery later in the chapter. Other artists were more ambivalent about using women’s bodies in artwork at all, especially naked bodies, as they could be so easily co-opted. Yet we did not want to simply reprise the social purity tenets of first wave feminism, as was discussed through the socalled ‘pornography debates’ from the later 1970s.8 Widespread disquiet with the politics of representation—particularly the depiction, signification and agency of bodies—soon broadened into largely fruitful and often heated discussions around essentialism. To avoid the dubious anti-sex morality of social purity feminism, which too-easily dovetailed with the resurgent Christian Right, many artists developed a highly sophisticated studio critique by reaching into the theoretical toolbox9 of psychoanalysis and post-structuralist semiotics to explore the psycho-social, ideological operations of visual signification. A dynamic and relational approach to power, visual pleasure and the creation of meaning enabled artists to work within and against the racialised, gender and sexual inscriptions of mass media and canonical art imagery. Here we encountered another challenge: that of avoiding the docility of misrecognised feminine subjectivity ‘called into being’ through the psycho-social structures of capitalism’s ‘ideological state apparatuses’.10 Seeking a more active and embodied agency for women, feminist artists moved away from the analysis of gender representation within fixed and generalisable ideological systems. For one thing, First Nations and Women of Colour contested the ahistorical and Eurocentric terminology of the politics of representation, specifically any broad claims made for the applicability of semiotic and psychoanalytic frameworks. Their art projects looked elsewhere to indicate the dynamics of subaltern women’s subjectification as embodied, situated and resisted. These projects resonated, for feminist studio research has always revealed the dynamics of subjectivity to be actively embodied and relational in ways that could not be easily reduced to a priori ideological or linguistic frameworks. This realisation has prompted a broad shift away from the ‘politics of representation’ to embrace a ‘politics of acts’ that could enable interventions in the cultural sphere to coalesce with activism across other social and political spaces, as in the Occupy movements, campaigns for climate justice, First Nations’ sovereignty, Black Lives Matter and #MeToo. This chapter gives weight to these latter strategies of corporeal feminism, given they dominated feminist studio research since the 1970s and continue to inform a diversity of current practices. We observe these subtle shifts in focus and a broadening, feminist visual lexicon. Whilst feminist aesthetics has no singular historical arc or trajectory, we note that strategies of Lettrist-styled détournement or re-routing of existing sexist and racist imagery have increasingly relayed and mutated across diverse regions and over time. We also mark how the use of psychoanalytic and semiotic frameworks to destabilise the psycho-social dynamics of the Western art canon,

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advertising and Hollywood cinema that were prevalent in the West from the 1970s have been overtaken by more assertive affirmations. Much recent work simply abandons Western feminine tropes of whiteness, thinness, wealth or bourgeois decorum in embodied resistances and acts of sovereignty which lay claim to female beauty, yet do not reprise the recuperative identity politics of Coming Out or ‘I Am Woman’. In a moment when the visual rhetoric of identity politics has become a divisive and politically toxic weapon of right wing politics, feminists continue to inform and manifest, in very novel ways, a fluid, connective identitarian field (‘We are George Floyd/David Dungay’/‘I can’t breathe’/‘#MeToo’). Indeed, we would question whether the term identity politics remains a relevant moniker for the diversity and inclusivity of contemporary political self-imaging, by observing how feminism has informed and then moved away from the politics of representation and towards a politics of acts. This recent work does not, however, abandon the feminist idea that depictions of difference, truth-telling and reconciliation are processes of materialisation and allusion: aesthetics as an embodied and affective ethics. We would add that artists have also not abandoned the idea that the personal is political, which uses hitherto unfashionable categories such as personal experience as a tool for social analysis and aesthetic expression. The claim that the personal is political has enabled artists to form complex expressions of subjectification and to simultaneously imagine beauty as a collective sovereignty ever in the making, as African-American artist and scholar Raél Jero Salley describes, ‘a dynamic process of visualising yet-to-be-fulfilled possibilities in human relations.’11 We specifically draw links between the characterisation of feminist aesthetics as a self-determining, personal-political ethics, and Australian First Nations’ calls for sovereignty as embedded being and action that links relations to traditional land ownership and custodianship, reciprocal relations to all others, to knowledge, to law, rights and obligations. Yamatji scholar and activist Chrystal McKinnon describes this deeply connective and collective concept of sovereignty as ‘carried by the body’ and as ‘manifest in our art’, so that ‘artistic production is sovereign production’.12 While nonIndigenous feminists in settler-colonies like Australia would not claim sovereign rights to country in this way, it is clear that feminist aesthetics has dramatically changed from the externally-directed nature of first wave imagery of white women as worthy of being granted franchise, education and employment opportunities, elements of which still linger within neoliberal, equal opportunity scenarios. Most contemporary feminist artworks are more resistant and self-determining, and offer important points of inspiration and intersection with decolonial aesthetics, in refusing ‘to see one’s self as always and only a subject of colonisation. It recognises art as the name we give to those actions, objects, and spaces with which we permit ourselves to produce moments of critical creative freedom’ as Métis artist, curator and academic David Garneau proposes in a broader context.13 The feminist artworks discussed in this chapter encompass this creative gesture of seeing oneself otherwise, and not as complicit with or subject to normative colonial and patriarchal relations of power and knowledge. We describe how such creative acts may produce ‘beautiful’ moments of resistance and self-determination. We track these shifting aesthetic strategies through a methodological emphasis on the local and bodily experienced (and hence Australian) viewpoint,

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which we connect with other localised practices internationally. Hence in this chapter we engage the studio research of Australian-based artists Helen Grace, Susan Norrie, Vivienne Binns, Paula do Prado, Fiona Foley, Karla Dickens and Tracey Moffatt alongside work by the Indonesian artist Octora, Alice Maher from Ireland, and the South African photographer Zanele Muholi. Our focus is largely on two-dimensional image-making, particularly photography, which has provided a persuasive platform for the critique of stereotyped mass media images of femininity, and for testing resistant and alternative ways of looking, living and loving.

Imagining ourselves otherwise Images of feminist beauty, however fleeting or gestural, upend the straight-whitefemininity game, with its double standards, commodified routines and conditional social securities. Artists have offered no clear blueprints: instead we have been asked to reconsider femininity as an open-ended proposal. In the 1970s, this visual dynamic paralleled the non-judgemental, consciousness-raising methods of Women’s Liberation, such as doing the circle—taking turns to individually and collectively articulate how the most intimate or personal areas of our lives are embedded within patriarchal relations of desire, power and knowledge. As a visual confessional, feminist aesthetics became part of the consciousness-raising arsenal, a creative method of ‘using one’s own experience as the most valid way of formulating political analysis’.14 These relational speculations on self and society enabled us to imagine female connectivity. Sisterhood as a connective and coalitional practice prompted new ways of making art, and also new ways of running shared households and cooperative childcare ventures, women’s refuges, health centres and political campaigns. By connecting these arenas of thought and action, feminist aesthetics could inspire more empathetic and empowering ways of being in the world. When linked to structural social and political analysis, art could help us imagine new possibilities for human relations: female beauty as an ideal, collective and coalitional field of self-determination. Sydney-based photographer, filmmaker and writer Helen Grace’s serial documentation of her own personal-political ventures—industrial campaigns, communal households, experimental family forms—honour this emerging selfawareness. We are immediately struck by the artist’s wonder and admiration for what we think could and can be possible. Looking back over these early blueprints for feminist living prompts an aesthetic emotion that is nostalgically bitter-sweet and conveys beauty. Grace’s quiet snapshots of quotidian collectivity—shared childcare, nappies on the clothesline, cluttered communal kitchens, crowded meetings at Women’s Liberation House—resonate all the more strongly today as we attempt to imagine a post-Covid-19 world of community and common cause. Returning to Australia from London in the 1970s, where she had been involved with the Hackney Flashers photography group, Grace was keen to feminise the photographer–subject power relations of traditional photo-documentary. Her points of stylistic departure included the democratic documentation of the interwar Worker Photography Movement in Germany and the USSR, and early twentieth-

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century avant-garde film.15 Between 1978 and 1980, Grace added the informality of low-key snapshot and family photography when documenting Amazon Acres, a lesbian-feminist, separatist commune in the rural back-blocks of New South Wales, home to a fluctuating population (attracting from 10 to 100 women and children over the years) (Figure 1.1). Grace was also keen to de-heroise documentary photography by ‘trying to find aesthetic form to express the production/reproduction relation in a way that gave precedence to social reproduction over industrial production.’16 She thus focussed on the domesticity of Amazonian life through cumulative, diaristic impressions, also as a means to avoid the closures of representation. As she later reflected,

FIGURE 1.1

Helen Grace, Amazon Acres, 1979, unprinted 35 mm negative

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there are no stand-alone, ‘decisive moments’ … At the time they were made, I saw them as just snapshots and not being about anything, just visual notes … . I was always shooting little runs of images, to register a sense of process [conceptual art’s go-to tactic]—proto-cinematic sequences, I guess the play of movement against the rigidity of the image.17 Grace’s subjects wield building tools and farm implements with cheerful determination as they erect communal living quarters (no regard here for twenty-first-century health and safety issues!). They straddle the beams and mug photogenic tropes of strong female labour for the camera. Their playful interaction and disconcerting, Amazonian undress confuse the Lewis Hine-styled, photographic monumentality of the industrial worker stripped to the waist, glistening sweat. The look is positive— indeed fabulous—by queering the workerist aesthetics of photo-documentary history and pleasurably unhinging gender expectations. Forty years later, Grace exhibited a small selection of this extensive series as And Awe Was All That We Could Feel—the title taken from an Emily Dickinson poem—in deference to the futuristic strength of these utopian, feminist adventurers, before which Grace felt a timid witness.18 We also respond to the palpable intensity of women-centred love and friendship (then codenamed the ‘lesbian continuum’).19 Through this aesthetic emotion we also recognise feminist beauty as yet-to-be ways of being in the world: self-determining subjectivities emerging through daily routines and interactions (an image that more strongly parallels First Nations’ acts of sovereignty than the Western-liberal dictum of individual selfrealisation). Whilst we note the herstorical tensions within Women’s Liberation in this period over the question of lesbian-separatism (Amazon Acres’ purported motto was No Men, No Meat, No Machines), hindsight allows us to rethink those (awesome) experiments in communal living and more fluid kinship systems outside of patriarchal, hetero-normative coupling (‘getting married and having children’).20 As Grace recalls, It was a lesbian feminist separatist community and it was completely wild. I would say that I never felt very comfortable there. But [it] also represented the loss of restraint, a loss of the things that block you. When I look back at the images, they captured some sort of freedom that I wanted to feel in myself.21 This early speculation on feminist beauty complicates the charge of mechanistic, realist aesthetics22 that were contested in ensuing academic debates around political and biological essentialism. A more herstorically-nuanced understanding of feminist aesthetics as it developed in places like Australia from the 1970s clarifies how second wave feminist artists did not, in fact, investigate what was then called ‘positive imagery’ as a liberal field of simple refusal and re-education. This has implications for the current neoliberal backlash against equal opportunity and #MeToo, for we contend that then, as now, most second wave feminists eschewed any gestural Just Say No or Ban Sexism option. As Grace has noted of her own cautious approach in photographing the Amazons, ‘There was a certain fear of the image then: that perverse avoidance of “voyeurism” producing such an

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ambivalence around desire.’23 In retrospect, we would argue that this ambivalence opened a more thoughtful and reflexive space for speculating on visual pleasure and female spectatorship that soon gathered pace within studio work and academic cultural politics. We also canvas this early feminist studio research as not following any set epistemological track, although we observe a shared idea that the constitution of feminine subjectivity arose within material-corporeal as well as discursive-socio-cultural relations. Grace’s quotidian framing of female nudity suggests an understanding of sexuality and gender as performed within and against given signs and norms, every day and in every way. With the benefit of hindsight, we see that the material and processual focus and art–life nexus of feminist studio research has always directed artists to consider female subjectivity as constituted through embodied signifying practices that we enact through everyday regulation and repetition—ideas later popularised by academic theorists like Judith Butler, Elizabeth Grosz and others in the 1990s.24 Artists have used this insight to generate feminist agency through an interrogative voice and by probing women’s own complicated visual pleasures, including the voyeuristic and exhibitionist gratifications of looking good. Performances of feminine exhibitionism across all media from the 1970s onwards have opened up the possibilities of female desire, humour, violence and failure: a politics in, rather than of representation. Feminist artists enacted stereotyped femininity as a question that illuminated its own historically-specific field of ‘enabling constraints’25—racial, cultural, body normative, class-based— and thus claimed the agency of questioning subject from within dominant representational systems.26

Feminine masquerade We now fast-forward to another moment in Western feminist art history. There is often a contrast drawn between feminist aesthetics from the 1980s, which is understood as overly text-based, academic and disembodied, and the menstruation bathrooms, nappy and tampon work of the 1970s and later, full-frontal performances of feminine failure seeping through the 1990s Riot-Grrrl art studio doorway. Yet a close examination of actual artworks proves received feminist herstory to be a little reductive. In contrast to accepted wisdom about a singular, psychoanalytic and semiotic-shaded entity called ‘1980s cultural feminism’, we argue that artworks from the period reveal a varied picture. High production values ensured that the palpable Cibachrome surfaces and lush, painterly canvases did not turn from the material body to the text. Indeed, artists insisted that embodied visual pleasure was itself a vehicle for visceral, theoretical exploration. Some artworks incorporated the performative, gestural politics of punk, camp and radical drag to reprise a feminine hyper-passivity and over-compliance that have become a hallmark of more recent feminist performance. At the time, these stylistic strategies pressurised patriarchal and colonial visual terminologies by rendering them uncanny.27 Discussions around essentialism prompted feminist artists to re-pose the rhetorical Freudian question: What does a woman want? What, essentially, is woman? in a discomforting (rather than straightforwardly ironic) register. In answer, artists reprised an historical range of Western

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popular and high cultural scenarios, murmuring, ‘Sex you have said we are, sex we will be’, as the Australian cultural critic Meaghan Morris observed.28 In this manner, virtuoso canvases and fine print photography from the 1980s deconstructed the dizzy dynamics of feminine beauty within the representational systems of the Western Imperium: studio research that dovetailed with archival work within the academy and museum. When acceptably formalised, this work proved successful in the booming postmodernist art market.29 Australian artist Susan Norrie’s Fruitful corsage, bridal bouquet, lingering veils (1983) (Figure 1.2) is a good example of this staged, fraudulent femininity—we choose a painterly example here to highlight an artworld context of hegemonic, neo-expressionist painting that signalled a postmodern return to the studio, museum and market after the (relatively unsaleable) ‘twigs and string’ open-form sculpture and conceptual directives of the 1970s. Norrie’s still life triptych girlied neo-expressionist painterly techniques, additionally overlaying early modern textures and motifs taken from the history of costume and the decorative arts, and the visual delights of retail display—the artist’s family trade. During the 1980s art market boom, Norrie found herself both propelled and hamstrung by the briefly fashionable tag of Young Woman Painter; concurrently, her own mother’s health was in decline. Norrie responded by amplifying art historical techniques and objects, forms and surface textures loosely derived from shop window displays of bonbonnieres in the Italian wedding shops of the artist’s inner suburban locale, to render the allegorical three stages of woman as an uncanny nature morte.30 As Helen Grace wrote of this work, women have long been associated with the modern signs of consumption, ‘woman as surplus, as superfluous to the rational needs of society.’31 Norrie poses these personal-political questions in art historical garb, mining the history of painting, ‘because in its different styles it is not unlike archaeology—it can reveal understanding. Rather than merely quoting from

FIGURE 1.2

Susan Norrie, Fruitful corsage, bridal bouquet, lingering veils, 1983, triptych, oil on plywood

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that history, I want to make painting more relevant today. By rendering practically that history, I am able to deal with it autobiographically.’32 Norrie’s frozen, art-historical glamour commented on a booming postmodern art market that was keen to promote suitably formalised feminist critique but too few feminist artists. To bring home her point, Norrie pantomimes the creamy pastel tints, veiled and overlapping forms and repeated, central core motifs claimed by pioneering US feminist critics such as Lucy Lippard, Linda Nochlin and Judy Chicago as expressive of a generalisable feminine sensibility. Painted in extremis and from afar, white US feminist aesthetics lays claims to canonical art historical style, but in an uncanny, interrogative mode. Norrie and others played the feminine tease with frigid perfection. Her pretty pictures masked an intellectual impertinence, however; a strategy of female masquerade underpinned by hotly debated psychoanalytic theories of feminine pleasure or its impossibility. Could feminist artists use hyper-femininity as a disruptive aesthetic strategy, or was it a compromised form of transvestism, a compensation for the (intellectual) woman’s ‘theft’ of masculinity? The influential film theorist Mary Anne Doane drew upon the psychoanalytic thought of British Freudian Joan Riviere when considering that such perfect womanliness, ‘could be assumed and worn as a mask, both to hide possession of masculinity and to avert the reprisals expected if she was found to possess it—much as a thief will turn out his pockets and ask to be searched to prove that he has not the stolen goods.’33 This assertion suggested a commodified, ‘hysterical’ beauty of theatrical frigidity, of fetishised surface varnish, clever slicks of paint and the display of artifices, as in the near perfection of drag. The sheer elegance of this work further destabilised meanings or truths from which the woman artist was doubly displaced, having already been excluded from the truth and the language of the (originary) art historical texts. We note how Norrie painted femininity as a seductive style—she ‘gives herself’—but only ‘in order to (take)’ as the French feminist writer Hélène Cixous would describe it.34 This theatrical tease was also observed by philosopher Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak through a strategic misreading of Nietzsche’s notorious aphorism on women: ‘Finally—if one loved them … what comes of it inevitably? That they give themselves, even when they—give themselves. The female is so artistic.’ Spivak translates this as, Or: women impersonate themselves having an orgasm even at the time of orgasm. Within the historical understanding of women as incapable of orgasm, Nietzsche is arguing that impersonation is women’s only sexual pleasure. At the time of the greatest self-possession-cum-ecstasy, the woman is self-possessed enough to organize a self-(re)presentation without an actual presence (of sexual pleasure) to re-present. This is an originary displacement.35 Feminist artists faked their own subjectification in Western art history, picking at this structural displacement36 like one does at an itchy, old scab. Western systems of representation, in particular art history, anthropology and other human sciences, ripple, ebb and flow unevenly across empire and back again.37 With each incoming

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tide, bodies are inscribed and resist representational inscription. The Indonesian artist Octora performs this historical relay as a theatrical tease in the contemporary South East Asian context, repurposing the long-standing, Western orientalist fascination with the Beautiful Indies. For The Gospel of the Lenses (2019) the artist models the pose and dress of a Balinese woman from an archival photograph taken during the Dutch colonial period (circa 1910–1930) as an alternative ethnographic archive.38 She elaborates the fetishised attention given to ethnographic and biological detail (ornate head-dress, skin tone, facial bone structure), and prints her own spectre of Balinese beauty as positive and negative prints. Her use of vivid Prussianblue dye and the cyanotype process suggests the effects of light and gold, which she further elaborates through glass and brass to create exquisitely fake, vintage tintypes (or ferrotypes, as they are also known). In another version Octora prints her motif on vintage 1930s fabric (Figure 1.3). She then uses the ornate head-dress as a

FIGURE 1.3

Octora, The Gospel of the Lenses, 2019, screen print on vintage fabric, sequins

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template to halo the image in stitched blue and pink sequins, to suggest an omnipotent, colonial vision, a twinkling blue iris that literally forms a vision of Balinese beauty ‘in the pupil of an eye’.39 Octora resists this singular perspective—the colonial ‘gospel of the lenses’—by over-burdening the image with votive bling. The orientalist phantasm is all but obscured with sequined ornament which reflects back upon our field of vision like colonial karaoke. This opens, ‘in the pupil of our eye’—in a single space—a variety of historical and worldly positions; two-way multiplicities.40 Octora thus occludes the claimed illumination of darker peoples with the clear, penetrating light of western scientific scrutiny,41 and yet the artist’s sequinning is anything but mute or ‘inscrutably Oriental’; indeed, it throws out a noisy challenge to speak, sing and bear witness that is difficult to meet. By swathing the feminine body in the rhetoric of fine art, advertising or cinematic beauty, the formal and material opacities of paint, powder, ornament express no underlying authenticity or dark matter, for as feminist artists had earlier demonstrated, opacity is generated within the embodied mechanisms of representation itself. Therein lay an ambitious, anti-essentialist provocation: that moments of feminist beauty, even when created within the indices of dominant representational systems like Western oil painting or ethnographic photography, have nothing to hide but their own critical pleasures: there is no ghost in the machine.42

Corporeal feminism—central core We have signalled a prevalent studio focus on the specificity of bodies when intervening within Western systems of visual representation. This re-routed more generalised linguistic or sociologically based critiques of the sociocultural construction of gender. Feminist photo-media, photographic performance, painting and other image-based artwork added corporeal weight, mind and matter to academic analyses of ideological interpellation, as they began not with the a priori, gendered codes and conventions of art history or mass culture. They instead explored their intersection with the specificities of the individual and multiple corporeal body—often modelled by the artist and/or her family43—as sexed, sexualised, abled and racialised. Australian philosopher Elizabeth Grosz asked in the early 1990s, ‘is sexual difference primary and sexual inscription a cultural overlay or rewriting of an ontologically prior differentiation? Or is sexual differentiation a product of the various forms of inscription of culturally specific bodies?’44 Feminist art kept the body centre-stage to imagine the specific ways that subjectivity is embodied, and to harness the dishevelling power of a diffused corporeal agency. The body is not passively subject to its constitutive, sociocultural inscriptions. Grosz instead compares the relationship between the discursive and the biological or material dimensions of gendered and sexed bodies ‘to that of the writing tool and the writing material in an etching’. In the etching, Grosz argues, ‘it is important to take the specificities of the material into account and “their concrete effects in the kind of text produced”’.45 We observe Grosz’s reference to the materials and processes of etching when discussing subject-formation, and parallel this studio analogy with UK anthropologist Tim Ingold’s reference to ceramics when describing the materially-based and dynamic ‘meshwork’ of

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individuation.46 The feminist artworks we discuss here depict sexuality and gender within very material tangles—‘morphogenic networks’—that make us each individual ‘from the inside’.47 Just as clay is a co-contributor to studio making, caught in the state of constant throwing or becoming, this understanding of subjectivity moves the process of identity formation and action beyond a one-directional idea of agency. Feminist artists use studio materials and processes to wonder when, why and how matter may resist the closure of representation48 through acting up or acting out. Early corporeal exercises included the fruity, sovereign gestures of central core imagery in the 1960s and 1970s. Gynocentric acts of sexual becoming turned the tables on the oppressive closure of the pornographic money-shot, often by simply and literally coming up too close for voyeuristic comfort. However, we note that taking the body as a point of departure did not necessarily assume an asocial or a priori font of feminine power, which would maintain problematic dualities of mind and body that had plagued Western philosophy. Many of these vaginal adventures were later castigated or ignored as essentialist in some feminist circles, particularly the central core imagery that developed in the US context, which became associated with a more programmatic political agenda. Australian artist Vivienne Binns’ cheerful cunt-dentata imagery was created within a more anarchic and anti-identarian context: the 1960s sexual liberation counterculture, Neo-Dada and pop.49 Her first solo exhibition featured pop-naïf paintings on shaped composition board, including Vag Dens (Figure 1.4) and the motorised, mixed-media Suggon, whose central vanishing point was a netted mesh bag that pulsated lazily in the middle of a high-gloss, geometric colour field.50 Having no existing feminist aesthetic vocabulary to draw upon, Binns was not consciously laying down a critical feminist gauntlet. As she later recalled of Vag Dens: I struggled with this one. I’d got the actual cunt there and a few other things that had happened spontaneously but was stopped. There was an image that kept recurring and I rejected it because it seemed a bit too fierce, a bit too crude or something and I kept pushing it aside. In the end I did it and it was to put teeth on the cunt. Once I’d done it, it was right. I was happy. It was totally spontaneous, a direct self-experience.51 Vag Dens’ toothy contours host bulbous secretions that dwarf a small school of bravely swimming sperm in a blissful exchange of energy that connects the sexual self and world. Yet this is a very personal assertion of vulval power. It points away from the monumental regularity of Miriam Schapiro’s hard-edge mistress-piece Big Ox (1967), or the systemic patterning of Judy Chicago’s Hoods (1965) or Pasadena Lifesavers (1970), and even further from the more studious and programmatic feminism of Chicago’s Dinner Party tableware (1974–1979). While Binns’ approach certainly shares their affirmation of the creative female body, Vag Dens is mutable rather than monumental; the wit of the work lies in its morphing of forms, one into another (eye-teeth, cunt-face, hair-brain), acting out a cuntish grotesquery in line with a Rabelaisian, anatomical sense of the word, rather than enfolding a more symbolic or diagrammatic subtext.

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FIGURE 1.4

Vivienne Binns, Vag Dens, 1967, synthetic polymer paint and enamel on composition board

We have argued that artists are particularly well-placed to engage the materiality of the sexed body and to thus evade representational closure, to instead welcome a feminist politics without prescribed outcomes. Indeed, art is a physical practice of active agency and resistance of materials and the unforeseen, often haptic happenings of experimental processes. It is no surprise to see feminist artists attending to

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the fleshed and sexed body as it seeps or exceeds the ideological work of feminine subjectification. Irish artist Alice Maher echoes the mutable and gynocentric impulse of central core in creating quasi-mythological body-objects that de-subjectivise Irish Womanhood through an open and experimental attitude toward bodily potentials, ‘in both the singular and political registers, as in the phrase “body politic.”’52 Her small acts of resistance and becoming refuse to cohere in a programmatic politics of representation or identity. Vox Hybrida 7 (2018) (Figure 1.5) instead evokes the ongoing, erotic frisson of taking a rubbing—the technique of frottage that was explored by Max Ernst and other Dada and surrealist artists in the early twentieth century—as a vehicle for returning the repressed (a non-singular, Irish feminist voice). This series of hand-tinted, wood relief prints are based on photographs of the artist’s body, stretching and folding in a series of contorted, haptic yoga shapes, which were then drawn in silhouette and printed on cheap

FIGURE 1.5

Alice Maher, Vox Hybrida 7, 2018, wood relief on paper, hand tinted

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plywood, a serendipitous base ‘that retains all its own “mistakes”. The knots and whorls are a material part of the plywood itself’,53 and give the artist’s silhouettes ‘ … orifices, like eyes and vaginas, like interior body’.54 These Sheela-na-gig bodies enact a wayward if indecipherable choreography that we could elaborate forever, if and as we desire. They act out and otherwise through elaboration not representation, to suggest productive moments of self-realisation that resist the pull towards resolution.55 The repressed and hybridised voice of the work’s title nonetheless speaks to current events: to the artist’s parallel campaign work to repeal the constitutional ban on abortion, and to the #MeToo movement (galvanised by the highly criticised acquittal of two rugby players for rape in 2018 and the Brett Kavanaugh appointment to the United States Supreme Court)—precisely ‘vital and contemporary debates regarding how the identity and agency of bodies might be regulated by society, technology, gender and choice’ as Irish critic Francis Halsall observed.56 Yet the work signals no privileged object for interpretation, no specific difference or differentiation to be made—and thus no work of signification per se. We instead attend to a raucous and loving feminine voice ‘that rejoices in the exchange that multiplies’,57 as the work flies in the face of representation as a closed economy. As Cixous hoped of women’s writing, ‘This is an “economy” that can no longer be put in economic terms. Wherever she loves all the old concepts of management are left behind. At the end of a more or less conscious computation, she finds not her sum but her differences.’58 The wood block series was initially shown alongside 23 moulded, hold-in-yourhand objects cast in bronze. The artist describes these as forming an unknown alphabet, ‘a language a hybrid might speak. You know like blegh (she makes an abrupt cutoff sound), some kind of expression of their voice, the voice that was taken away, cut out.’59 Both series suggest onomatopoeia and an abjected voice that bleeds out, shits or spits; she spills her guts rather than talks—and in doing so evokes a roll-call of silenced mythological women, from Cassandra, the prophetic yet ignored priestess of Apollo to Hans Christian Andersen’s Little Mermaid, a hybrid creature who is forced to choose to become mute in order to become mortal. In discussion with the artist, Irish critic Rachel Botha looks to the wise though unattended counsel of these silenced figures to suggest a complex, semi-monstrous and forceful eloquence (‘They’re all acting out in some way’, the artist observes),60 yet like Binns’ vaginal, toothy grin, they act without clear signification. They thus deny their mythopoetic feminine fate ‘to disappear and transform’, as Botha concludes. Instead, as in the artist’s concurrent campaign work for Irish women’s reproductive rights, freedoms and safety, Maher’s reactive bodies ‘capture the complexity of being; a voice that is hard and heavy; an insistence to be heard’.61 Times change, and the fear of essentialism (born of reactions to the exclusive nature of some feminisms) has largely abated. Artists now embrace bodies as rich, complex and irrepressible sources of insight—including that highly charged and contested site, the cunt. Such exploration, which also entails the role of the cunt in feminist organising and thought, nonetheless encompasses the knowledge that vulvas and vaginas are not a prerequisite for womanhood.62 We now turn to more

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recent body materials that act up and otherwise to transform colonial pornography. The 2012 Sepiasiren series by Uruguayan-born Australian artist Paola do Prado,63 for instance, derails ready-made porno imagery from the point of view of the black female subject (Figure 1.6). Do Prado collages and ornaments vintage imagery from Sepia Sirens, a magazine catering for Uruguayan gentlemen with more exotic tastes, using cheap acrylic paint, stitching, beadwork and the artist’s own hair to re-purpose intimate moments of commercialised, masculine pleasure: I recognise that threat of violence on the black body—it’s in my DNA. … How to honour the complex feelings? … I pour these feelings and thoughts into the work. I make the anger soft and pliable. I make the futility colourful and bright. I make the complexity a beautiful web of interconnected threads.64

FIGURE 1.6

Paula do Prado, Sepiasiren, 2012, mixed media collage

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Sepiasiren extends the soft anger and dishevelling logic of both central core and crafty collage (the latter pioneered by Hannah Hoch, Betye Saar, Miriam Schapiro, among others). Do Prado exploits collage’s relational logic and disrupts the colonial porno encounter through violent juxtaposition, combat and display, guided by the artist’s own interest in Yoruba costume and beading traditions, and its influence on Afro-Uruguayan cultural identity: the sirens tempt us in blackface, sport embroidered body folds, stitched seeds and trade beads. Collage operates by juxtaposition and thus metaphoric substitution, but also powers across the metonymic chain of signification. It allows the artist to cut and queer objectifying imagery, so we can enjoy the libidinous and creative force of feminist desire: do Prado’s sirens crackle and fizz with anger as well as creative and sexual energy. These lively détournements nod towards Butler’s historical ‘sexual differentials’ en route to a queer politics of pleasure that had gathered impetus from 1980s debates around pornography. The sirens’ blackface and ornamented bosoms and cunts take on a life of their own through what Australian film critic Adrian Martin noted in an earlier context, the ‘figuration and circulation of desire in an art work … not just sexual desire, but the desire of energy, play, invention, production’.65 They take flight in a ‘prodigious economy’ that ‘unthinks’ the unifying, regulating history of the pornographic money-shot: ‘Flying is woman’s gesture—flying in language and making it fly’, as Cixous opined in 1976.66

Display and opacity First Nations artists have also ruined representational economies by ransacking colonial photography and film archives, re-purposing archival photography to maintain family and community reconnections, bear witness to the displacement of Indigenous peoples from the national story and offer images of resistant beauty. Badtjala artist Fiona Foley, from Hervey Bay–K’gari (Fraser Island) in Queensland, has staged various encounters with nineteenth-century studio photographs of the kind circulated through the colonies as fashionable cartes de visites—for instance, in pivotal 1994 work based upon a turn-ofthe-century photograph simply tagged ‘An Aboriginal Woman on Fraser Island’ found in the State Library of Queensland.67 Foley posed and photographed herself as this unnamed Badtjala woman to highlight the coy connections between the erotic and the ethnographic which have underpinned one of the more sustained stereotypes in the history of Australian settler-colonialism. Yet, like Octora’s ethnographic karaoke, Foley gives nothing away: we can only imagine what that young woman from K’gari was thinking, and we suspect that the artist’s ethnographic adornment—a guaranteed selling point for colonial studio photography—has meaning, power and beauty that non-Badtjala people cannot grasp. As Australian literary scholar Odette Kelada writes of the artist’s more recent work, Foley has at her behest an impressive arsenal of strategies and tactics trialled over so many years. She demonstrates how a most effective way to counter fantasy is to enter into the fantastical, take over its worldly dimensions from within, using symbol, wonder and magic … . One of Foley’s weapons of choice is beauty itself.68

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The Martinique writer Édouard Glissant might say this decolonial pose of display and opacity enacts an ethic of ‘differences that encounter each other, adjust to each other, oppose each other, agree with each other and produce the unpredictable’, as he describes in his Poetics of Relation.69 Glissant’s theorisation of the encounter—a tense and bloody balance between colonial creolisation and cultural specificity—may be useful when considering feminist art’s complex elaborations of feminine display and feminism’s contribution to problematising politics of representation. This tension between ‘worlding’ and cultural specificity also informed shifts within the feminist politics of representation; in particular, a move away from Eurocentric psychoanalytic and linguistically based analyses of representational systems. Increasingly from the 1990s, fraudulent and fetished images of hyper-femininity—the legacy of radical drag—gave way to carnivalesque assertions of survival, desire and display. These used and abused hegemonic media and high art imagery at will, without recourse to qualifying analyses of the media apparatus itself. The idea was not to reveal or lay bare the sneaky job of ideological interpellation; on the contrary, decolonial projects evaded or refused access to culturally specific interiority, maintaining centuries of resistance to the colonial gaze. Writing of his native Caribbean, Glissant used the metaphor of dance when describing this camouflage or deflecting of vision in the colonial encounter. He described the laghia, a machista ‘dance to the death’ derived from African traditions and re-articulated within the Antillean slave plantation as a form of mock combat between two dancers, akin to the Brazilian capoeira. Originally a permitted method of settling disputes when fighting amongst slaves was banned, the laghia has now become an expression of celebration within the Carnivale tradition. Glissant points to the laghia’s balance between creolisation and specificity, describing how the dance partners engage in a mutual exchange, whilst retaining their distinction by avoiding contact.70 The dancers never touch; for as Glissant notes, if this submerged exchange manifests itself through touch (and thus injury, visible to the colonial planter’s gaze and punishment) then the codes of the dance are broken: The repercussions of cultures, whether in symbiosis or in conflict—in a polka we might say, or in a laghia—in domination or liberation, opening before us an unknown forever both near and deferred, their lines of force occasionally divined, only to vanish instantly. Leaving us to imagine their interaction and shape it at the same time: to dream and to act.71 This theatricalised, hyper-masculinised combat suggests a mutability of symbolic representation that is of interest to feminism. As dress theorist Marjory Gerber suggests, the theatre is a common locus of such ‘transvestite’ actions. Gerber points to the standard practice of Classical and Elizabethan theatre, where women’s roles would be played by young men and boys. She extrapolates this understanding of the stage as a symbolic rather than natural space where everyone is (literally or metaphorically) cross-dressed: ‘transvestite theatre recognises that all of the figures on stage are impersonators.’72 Gender roles, like racial and sexual roles, are by definition unstable. In the symbolic theatre of the laghia, the not touching is significant, for each participant

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acknowledges the limits of their contribution and their lack of complete control over the event.73 Glissant thus writes of the right to (Caribbean) opacity, as There’s a basic injustice in the worldwide spread of the transparency and the projection of Western thought. … As far as I’m concerned, a person has the right to be opaque. That doesn’t stop me from liking that person, it doesn’t stop me from working with him, hanging out with him, etc. A racist is someone who refuses what he doesn’t understand. I can accept what I don’t understand.74 Do Prado, Octora and Foley perform and direct bodies to produce an inner beat and a submerged opacity that does not yield itself to the outside. While their feminism arose within very different geopolitical contexts, we would suggest that they share Glissant’s understanding of the creolised colonial encounter: as an ambivalent, relational dance of display and opacity that ‘explodes’ the colonial text, ‘turns it around’, as Eastern Arrernte/Kalkadoon curator Hetti Perkins contends of Foley’s encounter,75 and in the process celebrates survival and resistance.

A politics of acts not representations This chapter outlines feminist depictions of difference, truth-telling and reconciliation as a process of materialisation and allusion: aesthetics as an embodied and affective ethics. Australian artist and film-maker Tracey Moffatt’s photographic tableaux also elaborate the racialised dance of feminine display and opacity as a form of survival and mute resistance. It is to this idea of mute resistance, and the post-identity politics it engenders, that we now turn. Moffatt’s forays in photography and film have always used the significatory systems of white popular cultural media, but not within a deconstructive paradigm. As an example, her 1994 series Scarred for Life transformed the banal yet traumatic humiliations, snipes and jibes of daily life into a series of captioned photolithographs in muted colours on cream paper, to resemble scaled-up pages from the golden years of Life magazine. The series also evoked the informality and remembered events of the family photo album—a field that has been opened for thoughtful aesthetic investigation within second wave feminist and First Nations’ art. The feminist photo album has probed the ambiguity of our personal-political mini-narratives, and Scarred for Life follows the fragmented nature of family memories and, as implied in the title, ‘the way in which injuries from our childhood years remain with us throughout our adult lives’.76 Moffatt made the series while artist in residence at the University of Wollongong, when that town on the coast south of Sydney was synonymous with recession-hit, working-class suburbia. While the hapless subjects of Scarred for Life hail from all walks of life, the series’ suburban idiom is distinctively working class Australian and multicultural, offering a disarming regional perspective on personal experience that underscores Moffatt’s sophisticated understanding of media histories and the white popular culture with which she works. The series broaches subjectification with a light but sure touch, with neither sentimentality nor anger.

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The series’ 1994 iteration comprised nine images featuring children or teens (both Indigenous and non-Indigenous) in staged suburban tableaux.77 Each image records some kind of trauma (from verbal to physical abuse) inflicted by parents, older siblings or friends: the agents of the historical-political-cultural and the psycho-symbolic orders. Moffatt has said she ‘made Scarred for Life … about true stories told to me by friends’, and that she strived for ‘something straight forward and snapshot-ish’ because ‘it had to feel ordinary, everyday, because that’s how incidents happen in our lives’.78 Yet Moffatt’s deadpan take on human-interest photo-journalism jars with the deeply intimate and painful subject matter. Moffatt’s playful aesthetic register wears this task lightly yet effectively. From her earlier photographic series Some Lads (1988) to her more recent My Horizon (2017) and Portals (2019), Moffatt transposes one system of signs into another, bringing about a new articulation of that speaking position. Australian art historians Morgan Thomas and Rex Butler observe that when Moffatt directs her sitters ‘there is a type of looseness, nonchalance, ease, about the figure … that implies a loosening or suspension of the strictures of identity and identity politics’.79 They suggest that her delight in visual pleasure and the rhetoric of beauty is itself critical, for it pleases or touches us, and thus suggests the shared nature of beauty that goes beyond both normative European standards or the wildest cultural hybridity, and makes us think the limits of identity.80 There is a vulnerability to Moffatt’s figures, who often fall short of perfection (such perfect beauty would run the risk of commercial banality, they argue).81 We agree that this falling-short shifts the photos to a place of freedom, a play with form, and engages the viewer’s pleasure, but in a way that dislodges but does not evacuate the politics of representation. On the contrary, as argued throughout this chapter, the playful dance of sex, race and gender may allow subtle shifts or swerves in the scene, as in feminist burlesque performance.82 In Scarred for Life, feminist critique operates in a number of ways. In the traumatic narratives of each tableau, patriarchy and its toxic effects—and its inextricable relation to racism—are acknowledged as the accepted status quo. Moffatt’s appropriation of the style conventions of that apogee of documentary photography magazines Life (published weekly until 1972) hammers home the normality of such trauma. It also adds to what Butler and Thomas describe as an ‘anachronistic temporality’ and a ‘visual anaesthesia’: ‘The photographs … appear to exhibit two different and conflicting effects: both the anaesthesia that is the initial effect of the shock or trauma and the frozen aesthetic imprint that is its “report”’.83 Arguably Moffatt takes this loose fit a step further, as questions of self, identity and history are opened up to be felt rather than shuttled through more predictable or reductive postcolonial readings of representational politics. We experience those calibrated humiliations through affective jolts that make us ‘feel’ injustice before it is ‘known’.84 These brutal encounters with some figure of social authority resonate: it is the stuff that keeps coming back, that stays close, and that manifests the always tenuous, but nonetheless coercive, power of patriarchal authority. While jolting us with pain, each tableau at the same time affirms the subject’s internal revolt against gendered and racial identities. In Moffatt, the afflicted subject has a

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compassionate confidante and co-conspirator who, through humour and the solidarity of shared experience, offers them—and by affective transmission, us the viewers—a safe space to reveal the shame of their abuse. That revelation is not a cry of outrage, but an assertion that each subject retains the power of refusal, and that together that refusal constitutes a collective keeping account of abuse of power and a deep reserve of resilience. British-Australian feminist theorist Sara Ahmed has proposed that unhappiness might sometimes work as ‘a form of political action: the act of saying no or of pointing out injuries as an ongoing present affirms something, right from the beginning’.85 These ‘unhappy affirmations’—the wit of the work—also arise from the affective, temporal lag between image and caption. We are initially startled by the glimpsed image of a naked man abusing a child, but then we’re told with deadpan, grim relish that he was the child’s father, that she’s the girl down the street, and ‘That day he died of a heart attack’ (Heart Attack 1970, 1994) (Figure 1.7). These temporal jolts work like the timing of a stand-up gag, it is this ‘wait … . Ha!’ affective lurch that dislodges the unthinking or overdetermined project of representing difference. Scarred for Life deploys affect—of shame, but also of humour—to loosen the strictures of subjectivity and open out to different virtualities. These images ‘transmit a memory trace of once-experienced intensity’,86 the pain of shame mingled with pleasure: the joy unleashed by insubordination and ‘the Rabelaisian inversion of the

FIGURE 1.7

Tracey Moffatt, Scarred for Life series: Heart Attack 1970, 1994, offset lithograph

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order of things’,87 the assertion of a measure of autonomy, and the shared undertaking to keep count, to not forget. What is this affective force that we register but cannot interpret through Western hermeneutics? We have described an opacity in Moffatt’s and others’ work that indicates a non-doctrinaire, affective energy that we consider, following Glissant and Pollock, to be ‘proto-ethical’, exercising more basic, everyday impulses of stubborn resistance. Moffatt in particular does not represent so much as exercise what Grosz calls a ‘politics of imperceptibility, leaving its traces and effects everywhere but never being able to be identified with a person, group or organization’.88 The small acts of Moffatt’s Scarred For Life refuse to cohere in a programmatic politics of representation or identity. Such a framework, Grosz suggests, might allow feminists to develop a ‘politics of acts, not identities’.89 The transmission of singular affective states nonetheless creates certain collective political conditions and spaces for action. As British feminist theorist Clare Hemmings argues, affect is what sustains feminism and gives it life: ‘politics can be characterised as that which moves us, rather than that which confirms us in what we already know’.90 This sensibility is one of surreptitious resistance to the codes and conventions of patriarchal representation, of going along with, yet quietly retaining a measure of autonomy, despite all the indicators otherwise. This opaque space of ‘quiet iconoclasm’ lies within rather than outside given economies of representation and is also distinct from a circular and reductive identity politics, satire and organised resistance; it evokes rather pleasure and shared experience in such a way that they remain unresolved and suspended. It resonates with, but stops short of, the politics of vulnerability. These works suggest a hybrid postcoloniality and critical non-essentialism that form a starting point, rather than comprise an end in itself.91 We have described the workings of Scarred for Life at some length, to evoke a shift in the feminist politics of representation. This mid-1990s series prefigured the more recent move away from theorising representational economies. In this context, we observe that artworks that engage with our current, internationally-resonant #MeToo and Black Lives Matter moment rest lightly on the critical insights into structures of signification that have developed over forty years of studio research. Today feminism articulates affective and material struggles against toxic masculine behaviours (such as femicide, sexual harassment and assault, militarised police violence or deaths in custody) rather than engaging with representational economies as a political priority.

Insta-ready imagery We have demonstrated how feminist artwork considers corporeality as an active force rather than the passive result of sociocultural gendering. This has allowed First Nations/Women of Colour to sidestep Western media tropes of whiteness, thinness, rich adornment and bourgeois decorum as getting in the way of imagining otherwise. In many cases, we note how these assertions of feminist beauty reference an historical rage that is barely held in check. In demanding truth-telling and reconciliation, Black Lives Matter and #MeToo ground self-determining imagery within an intersectional

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politic and localised interpretation. From regional New South Wales, for instance, Wiradjuri artist Karla Dickens’ Hard Hitting Sister II (2019) glamorises ‘Ms Ready’ against an abstracted, bush-corrugated backdrop (Figure 1.8). She sports a sequined, Australian flag mini-dress, white suspenders, stockings and six-inch platform heels, and she pulls down her sequinned décolletage to reveal a lacy white bra. Snarling like a Vogue model, she gives us the finger like a carnie worker.92 In the original installation, her gesture hits its target: an overlaid clown face in the nation’s red, white and blue (‘Cindy’s Badge’) to signal the culture-jamming force of blak93 feminist glamour: a riotous beauty tailored for viral Instagram amplification. This portrait bookends the site-specific installation A Dickensian Circus (2020) that forced entry to a colonial temple of civilising culture—the nineteenth-century

FIGURE 1.8

Karla Dickens, Hard Hitting Sister II, 2019, inkjet print

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foyer of the Art Gallery of New South Wales—for the 2020 Biennale of Sydney. As Dickens’ poetic notes to the installation proclaim, ‘a dark sideshow has found its way into a womb of Colonial privilege’: Ms Ready emphatically reclaims this sacred space her legs mirroring the strength of its marble columns an exotic Koori knockout, she harnesses the spirits stolen from those caged in the rusty menagerie over which she towers94 At her feet, caged figures—variously assembled from discarded sporting cups, teacaddies, and well-worn Australiana each with a cast bronze Aboriginal kewpie doll’s head—clutter the foyer space. Each abject figure sits on its own DIY plinth: ‘These Aboriginal faces reflect historical human zoos/sadly mirrored today in jails countrywide/unnatural spectacles without safety nets.’95 Dickens’ feisty Colossus96 is paired across the foyer by another ‘Koori knockout’, ‘Mr Ready’, a heavyweight boxer (a complex figure of pride for Indigenous Australians throughout our colonial history97) who ‘firmly stand(s) his ground’ in our present cultural space; he is ‘not just a boxing-tent performer/his fists help him to protect and survive—day in, day out’. First Nations beauty today proudly asserts personal-political experience, sovereignty and body-positive imagery, the tougher and sexier the better. These acts of pride and resistance have helped drive the contemporary resurgence of portraiture. The inter-related influences of feminist, queer and decolonial viewpoints have created spaces for visualising alternative conceptions of selfhood that were prefigured in the 1970s. Photographer Zanele Muholi asserts this idea of decolonial and queer feminist beauty in self-portraits and cameos of black lesbian, gay, trans, queer and intersex folk living precariously on the ‘other side of the rainbow nation’ in contemporary South Africa. Their inter-related series Faces and Phases (2006–2016), Brave Beauties (2014); Somnyama Ngonyama, Hail the Dark Lioness (2017); and the associated video Ayanda & Nhlanhla Moremi’s wedding (2015)98 affirm a history of ‘fabulous’ existence in the face of violence and discrimination. Like Dickens’ Mr and Ms Ready, Muholi’s subjects look to camera and share a complex and collective self-awareness that suggests brave lives lived under pressure. Under apartheid, black lesbians were unable to formally organise; and subsequently, despite the equality promised by South Africa’s 1996 constitution, a prevalent, negative view of homosexuality and trans people has often led to family rejection and violence, including murder and corrective rape. As British journalist Emine Saner writes, Muholi’s life-long project is vital—several of the women she has photographed have since been killed, such as Busi Sigasa, a writer and poet who inspired it. “The risk we take is on a daily basis,” says Muholi, “just living, and thinking what might happen, not only to you but also your fellow activists and friends who are living their lives.”99

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Muholi’s studio portraits draw upon a variety of stylistic antecedents, including the sharp-eyed contemporaneity of Muholi’s mentor David Goldblatt, Robert Mapplethorpe’s elegant reprise of high modernist studio conventions, feminist work with the family album and the postmodern vagaries of fashion photography. Muholi also rejuvenates nineteenth-century ethnographic photography that was modernised in the racial essentialism of the apartheid era, in removing subjects from background context and shooting from a set distance with even, shallow focus, lighting, proxemics and elevation. Muholi’s gelatin prints have a palpable depth and fine tonal range, and are uniformly framed and installed in line or grid formation, which accentuates the subjects’ individual differences in styling and dress, body stance, physical presence and subtle facial expression. As a project, they evoke the photographic catalogues of sub-cultural communities by the likes of Catherine Opie in Los Angeles, August Sanders’ early twentieth-century survey of German citizenry, or the four albums devoted to African Americans that were exhibited by W.E.B. DuBois for the 1900 Paris Exposition.100 We sense a personal connection between photographer and subject, a shared willingness to familiarise the photographic encounter. Each participant in Faces and Phases eyes us directly, and we necessarily take note of individual faces and names as an important photographic event and personal situation. Each portrait holds us fast, then releases us to study the next in a cumulative, community testimonial of life lived bravely and authentically in the face of social risk, violence and discrimination. Together these series form a visual safe space that is analogous to those local community organisations where women and trans folk meet and organise.101 We note this also in relation to the opposition the work has received from both anonymous, violent haters and top government officials taking offence at the work’s so-called immorality. Muholi responds by stressing the importance of non-victim positivity: This work needs to be shown, people need to be educated, people need to feel that there are possibilities. I always think to myself, if you don’t see your community, you have to create it. I can’t be dependent on other people to do it for us. It is a continuing resistance because we cannot be denied existence. This is about our lives, and if queer history, trans history, if politics of blackness and self-representation are so key in our lives, we just cannot sit down and not document and bring it forth.102 As in Helen Grace’s Amazon Acres archive, the cumulative effect of Muholi’s series is of the collective emergence of new subjectivities, new ways of being in the world. We bookend this chapter with these two bodies of serial work—the first only now seeing the light of day, forty years later; the more recent enjoying simultaneous exhibition across the hemispheres—as both affirm marginalised, non-heteronormative communities, and in the process harbour a subtle though wild, utopian and queer feminism. Okwui Enwezor, curator of Muholi’s work for Documenta in 2012, points to the ‘tension in bodies at rest; at other times her subjects appear proud, directly confront the camera’s gaze, and are gathered in poses redolent of earlier portraiture.’103 Raél

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Jero Salley characterises the beauty of Muholi’s sitters as ‘subversive resistance’, and praises the artist for essaying ‘the beauty and fragility of a community’.104 Like others discussed here, Muholi imagines beauty as a new form of collective sovereignty, as described at the start of this chapter as ‘a dynamic process of visualising yet-to-be-fulfilled possibilities in human relations’.105 The ‘beauty and fragility’ of both Grace’s and Muholi’s subjects creates affective spaces for action that lie within rather than outside given economies of representation. These bodies evoke pleasure and shared experience that remain unresolved and suspended, like a starting point that trips up the circular economy of identity politics.

Conclusion We conclude this introductory chapter by noting how recent work highlights a nonchalance with Western popular media and high art that has now become commonplace. This nonchalance was first enabled through feminism’s early politicisation of the cultural sphere, specifically addressing the ideological power of visual representations of femininity. This broadened to feminist analyses of high art and media representation that have been historically championed through feminist studio research. However, we have observed that feminist artworks have primarily and consistently exercised a corporeal destabilisation of representation. These actions have in turn helped to shift academic sociological and linguistic analyses of the sociocultural construction of gender, which had sought to reveal the ideological mechanisms of all-powerful and a priori representational systems. Today’s fluid and creative politics of the tweet and the street are informed in part by the feminist articulation of situated and enabling perspectives that focus on the body—as racialised, sexualised, gendered and otherwise inscribed, or indeed as stubbornly resistant. In many ways this has also enabled more porous relations between academic, art studio and grass-roots activism, whilst refuting a return to any simple, liberal-feminist politics of choice (‘Just Say No to Stereotypes’). Instead, we have noted that feminist artists research and re-route the imagery and styles of complex and situated corporeal histories. Today, feminist aesthetics works within a changing media environment, where the compelling image of brown and pink pussy hats thronging the streets suggests a savvier understanding of representational politics: the ‘visual grab and act’ of hashtag activism. Our survey of studio research indicates that feminism now sets its sights beyond representational politics per se, towards a politics of acts and ethics rather than identities.

Notes 1 Jane Clifton, Girl on the Wall, 1984. Clifton was a singer and frontwoman for the Melbourne new wave band Stiletto which had a number of releases on the Oz label. 2 See John Berger, Ways of Seeing, London: Penguin, 1972. 3 For introductory overviews see David Craig (ed.), Marxists on Literature: An Anthropology, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975, Terry Eagleton, Marxism and Literary Criticism, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976 and Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977.

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4 See for instance Patricia Edgar and Hilary McPhee, Media She, Melbourne: Heinemann, 1974. This picture book was assembled in the aftermath of the 1973 media study undertaken by the Women’s Committee of the United Nations Association of Australia (Victorian Division). 5 See Edgar and McPhee, 1974. 6 Meaghan Morris, ‘Feminist Criticism’, in Cinema Papers, November-December 1975, 208–209, reprinted in Catriona Moore (ed.), Dissonance: Feminism and the Arts 1970– 90, Sydney: Allen & Unwin/Artspace, Sydney, 1994, 31–38. 7 See for instance Australian photographer Sandy Edwards’ 1978 CSR series, which documented the tedious and repetitious nature of women’s work in a Sydney sugar refinery (Collection Art Gallery of New South Wales). The Art and Working Life Program was a joint initiative of the Australia Council for the Arts and the Australian Council of Trade Unions between 1982 and 1986. See Stephen Cassidy, Art and Working Life in Australia, Sydney: Australia Council, 1983. 8 See for instance Andrea Dworkin, Pornography: Men Possessing Women, London: Women’s Press, 1981. Note also late 1970s/early 1980s groups such as the New York radical feminist group Women Against Pornography (WAP) and Women Against Violence in Pornography and Media (WAVPM), a San Francisco activist group that played a very important role in the founding of WAP. From the ‘pro-sex’ point of view, see for instance opinions expressed in Ann Snitow, Christine Stansell and Sharon Thompson (eds), Desire: The Politics of Sexuality, London: Virago, 1984. 9 On the oft-quoted idea of the theoretical toolkit, see See Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, ‘Intellectuals and Power’, in Donald F. Bouchard (ed.), Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected essays and interviews by Michel Foucault (translated by Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon), Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980, 205–217. In this context, we also note the originality and global contribution to these debates of small, cooperative publishing ventures in the mid-1970s such as the Sydney-based Working Papers project. Many feminists read the Working Papers’ unauthorised translations of feminist, psychoanalytic and queer cultural theory to directly inform their work in women’s refuges and women’s health centres, rather than as academic texts. Thanks to Helen Grace for bringing this aspect of Women’s Liberation herstory to our attention. 10 Louis Althusser, ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (translated by Ben Brewster), New York: NYU Press, 2001. 11 Raél Jero Salley, ‘Zanele Muholi’s Elements of Survival’, African Arts, Winter 2012, 45 (4): 60. 12 Chrystal McKinnon, ‘Decolonise Your Feminism’ (with Kimberley Moulton and Paola Bella), National Gallery of Australia Annual Lecture, 12 November, 2020. 13 David Garneau, ‘Migration as Territory: Performing domain with a non-colonial aesthetic attitude’, Voz-à-Voz, Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council and the Toronto Arts Council, http://www.vozavoz.ca/feature/david-garneau accessed November 14, 2020. 14 See Catriona Moore and Catherine Speck, ‘How the personal became (and remains) political in the visual arts’, in Michelle Arrow and Angela Woollacott (eds), Everyday Revolutions: Remaking Gender, Sexuality and Culture in 1970s Australia, Canberra: ANU Press, 2019, 85–102 and Judith Papachristou, Women Together: A History in Documents of the Women’s Movement in the United States, New York: Knopf, 1976. 15 For instance, in photographs in the journal AIZ (1926–1939). 16 Helen Grace, email to authors, 19 June 2020. 17 Grace, email 19 June 2020. 18 Exhibited in Friendship as a Way of Life, curated by José Da Silva and Kelly Doley. Sydney: University of New South Wales Galleries, 8 May–21 November, 2020. 19 The term ‘the lesbian continuum’ was popularised by Adrienne Rich in her 1980 essay ‘Compulsory heterosexuality and lesbian existence’, later published in Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose 1979–1985 New York: Norton & Co, 1986, 23.

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20 For an illustrated account of Amazon Acres see Sandra Hall, Amazon Acres, You Beauty—Stories of Women’s Lands, Australia, Wollongong: Shall Publishing, 2016. 21 Helen Grace, cited by Neha Kale, ‘Windows into an alternative world’, Sydney Morning Herald, 7 May 2020, https://www.smh.com.au/culture/art-and-design/windows-into-an-a lternative-world-20200507-p54qoz.html accessed 29 November 2020. 22 See Sean Sayers, ‘Materialism, realism and the reflection theory’, Radical Philosophy, 33, Spring 1983, https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/issues/033 accessed 12 November 2020. 23 Grace, email, 19 June 2020. 24 See Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, New York: Routledge, 1990, Susan Bordo, Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993 and Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Towards a Corporeal Feminism, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994. 25 Butler, 1990, 145. Also useful in this context is Edwina Barvosa-Carter, ‘Strange Tempest: Agency, poststructuralism, and the shape of feminist politics to Come’, in Margaret Sönser Breen and Warren J. Blumenfeld (eds), Butler Matters: Judith Butler’s Impact on Feminist and Queer Studies, Burlington: Ashgate, 2005, 175–190. 26 See also in this context Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986. 27 See Sigmund Freud (1919). ‘The Uncanny’, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XVII (1917–1919): An Infantile Neurosis and Other Works, 217–256, http://www.arch.mcgill.ca/prof/bressani/arch653/winter2010/Freud_TheUnca nny.pdf accessed 25 June 2020. 28 See in this context Meaghan Morris, ‘The Pirate’s Fiancée’, in Meaghan Morris and Paul Patton (eds), Michel Foucault: Power, Truth, Strategy, Sydney: Feral Publications, 1979, 164. 29 See Catriona Moore, ‘Museum Hygiene’, Photofile (41), March 1994, 8–14. Also worth noting here Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s caution against the simple application of strategies that mirror masculine discourses on femininity, in isolation from substantive herstorical research. See Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Displacement and the discourse of woman, in Mark Krupnick (ed.), Displacement: Derrida and After, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983, 186. 30 See for instance the German Renaissance artist Hans Baldung Grien’s Three Ages of Woman and Death, painted in 1510; his Death and the Maiden, 1518–1520 and the modernist take of Gustav Klimt, The Three Ages of Woman, 1905. 31 Helen Grace, ‘Susan Norrie: “Objet d’Art”’, Art & Text, (31), Dec–Feb, 1989, 76. 32 Susan Norrie, ‘Susan Norrie Interview’, Value added goods, WEST magazine, University of Western Sydney 1990, 26. 33 Joan Riviere, ‘Womanliness as a masquerade’, in Hendrik M. Ruitenbeek (ed.), Psychoanalysis and Female Sexuality, New Haven: College and University Press, 1966, 213, quoted in Mary Ann Doane, ‘Film and the masquerade: theorizing the female spectator’, Screen, 23 (3/4), (September–October 1982), 81. 34 Hélène Cixous, ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, Signs, 1 (4), Summer 1976, 875–893. See also Nietzsche’s citation in Jennifer Thomas, ‘The question of Derrida’s women’, Human Studies, 16 (1/2) 1993, 167. 35 Spivak, 1983, 170. 36 See Butler, 1990, 145. 37 See in this context Kamau Brathwaite’s concept of ‘tidalectics’ in Florian Gargaillo, ‘Kamau Brathwaite’s rhythms of migration’, SAGE Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 53 (1), 16 June 2016, 155–168, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/ 0021989416650482 accessed 12 June 2020. 38 Correspondence with Joseph Kong, Gajah Galley, Singapore, 24 June 2020. See also Octora, exhibition catalogue, Singapore: Gajah Gallery, n.d. 39 This term is loosely taken from the exhibition title of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, Forming in the pupil of an eye, 12 December 2016–29 March 2017.

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40 The play between an all-penetrating vision, display and the opacity of artifice is taken from the leitmotif of the 2017 Kochi-Muziris Biennale, curated by artist Sudarshan Shetty, whose curatorial concept, ‘Forming in the pupil of an eye’, drew in turn from a story of a young traveller who journeyed far and wide to meet a sage who ‘looks both within and without’, and in so doing, the sage ‘assimilates the entire universe. In that single moment and one vision, she grasps its enormous multiplicity—internal and external—and reflects those multiple images back onto the boy and back into the space between them both. Through the generation and layering of visions, the Sage creates multiple understandings of the world, speaking those to the young traveller in front of her.’ Sudarshan Shetty, curatorial statement, Forming in the pupil of an eye, Kochi-Muziris Biennale, 12 December 2016–29 March 2017. Statement distributed by the biennial’s press team, cited by Emma Sumner, ‘Forming in the pupil of an eye,’ Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2016, Art Agenda, 12 December 2016–29 March 2017. 41 Octora, n.d. 42 See in this context Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015. 43 See for instance photo-media work from the 1980s by Australians Tracey Moffatt, Julie Rrap and Anne Ferran. 44 Grosz, 1994, 189. 45 Grosz, 1994, 191. 46 Tim Ingold, Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture, Abingdon: Routledge, 2013. 47 So Heidi McKenzie describes the work of Australian ceramicist Sandy Lockwood in ‘Heidi McKenzie, Materials, Making, and Movement with Sandy Lockwood’, Ceramics Monthly, (January 2020), https://ceramicartsnetwork.org/ceramics-monthly/ceramic-art-and-artists/ ceramic-artists/materials-making-and-movement-with-sandy-lockwood/ accessed 29 November 2020. 48 See in this context Dorothea Olkowski, Gilles Deleuze and the Ruin of Representation, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. 49 In the mid 1960s, Binns was working closely with Mike Brown, a member of a Sydney, pop/Neo-Dada group exhibiting between 1962 and 1963 as the ‘Annandale Imitation Realists’ (with Colin Lanceley and Ross Crowthall). 50 Vivienne Binns: Paintings and Constructions was held in 1967 at Watters Gallery in Sydney. All works in the exhibition are dated 1967. We discuss this work in more depth in the forthcoming ‘Creation Stories: Australian arts feminism’, in Angelique Szymanek, Jen Kennedy, and Trista Mallory (eds), Transnational Perspectives on Feminism and Art, 1960–1985, New York: Routledge, 2021. 51 Vivienne Binns, ‘Vivienne Binns in interview’, Scarlet Woman, Women in the Visual Arts special issue, August 1975, 8. 52 ‘Gilles Deleuze’, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, first published 23 May 2008; substantive revision 14 February 2018, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/deleuze/ accessed 15 September 2020. 53 Alice Maher, cited Tina Kinsella, ‘Corporeal Matters’, Visual Artists’ News Sheet (3), May–June 2018, 20–21. 54 Alice Maher, cited Cristin Leach, ‘Body and Soul’, The Sunday Times Culture Magazine, 25 March 2018, 18. 55 And as such, the work suggests an ontology of becoming, as theorised by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus (translated by Brian Massumi), Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. 56 Francis Halsall, ‘Vox Materia: Alice Maher’, Irish Arts Review (1) 2018, 74–75. 57 Cixous, 1976, 893. 58 Cixous, 1976, 893. 59 Maher in Kinsella, 2018, 18. 60 Maher in Kinsella, 2018, 18.

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61 Rachel Botha, ‘Alice Maher, Vox Materia’, Circa, 8 November 2018, https://circaa rtmagazine.net/ accessed 27 June 2020. 62 As trans folks in the US reminded cis women when they called out the pussy-centred culture of the 2016 post-election Women’s Marches. See discussion by the Crunk Feminist Collective, ‘Pussy don’t fail me now: the place of vaginas in Black feminist theory & organizing’, 23 January 2017, http://www.crunkfeministcollective.com/ 2017/01/23/pussy-dont-fail-me-now-the-place-of-vaginas-in-black-feminist-theoryorganizing/ accessed 1 February 2020. 63 Do Prado’s series was shown at the Cross Art Projects in Sydney in a group show titled ‘Feminage: The logic of feminist collage’, curator: Jo Holder, 2 August–15 September 2012. 64 Paula do Prado, ‘Heartstrings’, September 2018 blog, https://www.pauladoprado.net/ heartstrings accessed 29 November 2020. 65 Adrian Martin, ‘The desire of Maria Kozic’, Art & Text (2), Winter 1981, 18. 66 Cixous, 1976, 882. 67 Foley’s mother (Shirley Foley) found the image in the John Oxley Library, Brisbane. Fiona Foley, correspondence with the authors, 15 November 2020. See also Louise Martin-Chew, ‘Fiona Foley: In the company of strangers’, for the exhibition Dr. Fiona Foley: Who are these strangers and where are they going?, curated by Djon Mundine OAM, Ballarat: Ballarat International Foto Biennale, 24 August—20 October 2019, exhibition catalogue, 11. 68 Odette Kelada, ‘Suddenly from heaven like a weeping cloud: Fiona Foley and the art of transgressing silence’ in Fiona Foley, Who are these strangers and where are they going?, 8. 69 Édouard Glissant, Introduction à une poétique du Divers (translated by Charles Forsdick), Paris: Gallimard, 1996, 98; and Charles Forsdick, ‘From the “aesthetics of diversity” to the “poetics of relating”: Segalen, Glissant and the genealogies of francophone postcolonial thought’, Paragraph 37 (2), 2014, 160–177, https://www.euppublishing.com/ doi/pdfplus/10.3366/para.2014.0119 accessed 20 November 2020. 70 Dashiell Moore, ‘“Our write-to-write”: a poetics of encounter across Aboriginal Australia and the Caribbean’, PhD thesis, University of Sydney, 2020. For further analysis on the metaphorical resonance of the laghia beyond Glissant’s work, consider Louise Hardwick, ‘Dancing the unspeakable: rhythms of communication in “Laghia de la mort” by Joseph Zobel’, in Laura McMahon (ed.) Rhythms: Essays in French Literature, Thought and Culture, Bern: International Academic Publishers, 2008, 119–133. 71 Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation (translated by Betsy Wing), Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1997, 131. 72 Marjory Gerber, Vested Interests: Cross Dressing and Cultural Anxiety, New York: Routledge, 1992, 40. 73 D. Moore, 2020. 74 Éduard Glissant, in Manthia Diawara’s film Un monde en relation (One World in Relation, 2009), cited Ulrich Loock, ‘Opacity’, Frieze, 7 November 2012, https:// frieze.com/article/opacity accessed 15 June 2020. 75 Hetti Perkins described this curatorial-aesthetic strategy in ‘Repatriation, race, representation: a conversation between Ann Stephen, Hetti Perkins and Avenel Mitchell’, Photofile (40), November 1993, 16. Perkins was Curator of Aboriginal and Torres Straits Islander art from 1992–2011. Like Foley, Perkins was a founding member of the Boomalli Aboriginal Artists Co-operative in Sydney, and co-instigator of the historically significant Aboriginal Women’s Exhibition at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 1991. 76 Ted Mann, Guggenheim Collection online, https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/ 13131 accessed July 2020, 77 In 1999 Moffatt added a further ten images to the series. 78 Bruce James, ‘Interview with Tracey Moffatt for Arts Today’, with Michael Cathcart, ABC, producer Bruce James, 9 January 2001, http://www.abc.net.au/rn/legacy/p rograms/atoday/stories/s229128.htm accessed July 2020.

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79 Rex Butler and Morgan Thomas, ‘Tracey Moffatt: From something singular … to something more’, Eyeline 45, Autumn/Winter 2001, 25. 80 Butler and Thomas, 2001, 25. 81 Butler and Thomas, 2001, 25. 82 See in this context Jacqueline Millner and Catriona Moore, ‘“Performing oneself badly?” Neo-burlesque and contemporary feminist performance art’, Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art, 15 (1), 2015, 20–36. 83 Butler and Thomas, 2001, 25. 84 Butler and Thomas, 2001, 31. 85 Sara Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness, London: Duke University Press, 2010, 207. 86 Griselda Pollock, ‘Action, activism, and art and/as thought: a dialogue with the artworking of Sonia Khurana and Sutapa Biswas and the political theory of Hannah Arendt’, e-flux Journal, (2), June 2018, 5. 87 Pollock, 2018, 10. 88 Elizabeth Grosz, Time Travels: Feminism, Nature, Power, Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2005, 194. 89 Grosz, 2005, 186. 90 Claire Hemmings, ‘Affective solidarity: feminist reflexivity and political transformation’, Feminist Theory, 13 (2), 2012, 151, 147–161. 91 As was also noted by Butler and Thomas, 2001, 23. 92 The colloquial term ‘carnies’ (or also ‘showies’ in Australia) denotes those families travelling and working as employees across the sideshow, agricultural show and carnival circuits in regional USA, the UK and Australia. 93 The term ‘blak’ was coined by KuKu and Erub/Mer artist Destiny Deacon, who convinced curators Hetti Perkins and Claire Williamson ‘to alter their curated urban Indigenous exhibition to “Blakness: Blak City Culture (ACCA, Melbourne)”’ in 1994. See Kate L. Munro, ‘Why “Blak” not Black?: Artist Destiny Deacon and the origins of this word’, NTIV, 29 June 2020, https://www.sbs.com.au/nitv/article/2020/05/07/why-blak-not-black-artistdestiny-deacon-and-origins-word-1 accessed 20 November 20 2020. 94 Karla Dickens, ‘A Dickensian Circus’, exhibition catalogue. Brisbane: Andrew Baker Gallery, March 2020, http://www.andrew-baker.com/Karla_Dickens_A_Dickensian_ Circus_Sans.pdf accessed 29 November 2020, n.p. 95 Dickens, 2020. 96 ‘The New Colossus’ was an 1883 sonnet written by Emma Lazarus to help raise funds for the Statue of Liberty’s pedestal. It was dedicated to the statue as signifying the ‘Mother of Exiles’: ‘Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore, Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me.’ 97 On the history of Indigenous Australian boxing, from the early champions Jerry Gerome (1874–1943) and Ranold Richards (1910–1967) to Lionel Rose, Dave Sands and Tony Mundine, see ‘RING KINGS: A History of Aboriginal People & Boxing’, Speaking Out with Marissa Behrendt, ABC Radio National, May 2020, https://www.abc.net.au/radio/ programs/speakingout/speaking-out/12281708 accessed 29 November 2020. 98 These series were shown together at the Biennale of Sydney (March–September 2020) and Tate Modern (29 April–18 October 2020). 99 Emine Saner, ‘“I’m scared. But this work needs to be shown”: Zanele Muholi’s 365 protest photographs’, The Guardian, 14 July 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/arta nddesign/2017/jul/14/zanele-muholi-365-protest-photographs accessed 29 November 2020. 100 See Martha Schwendener, ‘Review: Zanele Muholi, a visual activist, presents “Isibonelo/ Evidence”’, The New York Times, 14 May 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/ 15/arts/design/review-zanele-muholi-a-visual-activist-presents-isibonelo-evidence.html accessed 29 November 2020. 101 Muholi is co-founder of the Forum for the Empowerment of Women (FEW), a Black lesbian organisation dedicated to providing a safe space for women to meet and organise and of Inkanyiso, a collective for queer activism and visual media.

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102 Muholi, cited Saner, 2017. 103 Okwui Enwezor, cited Raél Jero Salley, ‘Zanele Muholi’s Elements of Survival’, African Arts, 45 (4), Winter 2012, 60. 104 Salley, 2012. 105 Salley, 2012.

References Ahmed, Sara. 2010. The Promise of Happiness. London: Duke University Press. Althusser, Louis. 2001. ‘Ideology and ideological state apparatuses’, in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, translated by Ben Brewster. New York: NYU Press. Barvosa-Carter, Edwina. 2005. ‘Strange tempest: agency, poststructuralism, and the shape of feminist politics to come’, in Butler Matters: Judith Butler’s Impact on Feminist and Queer Studies. Burlington: Ashgate, 175–190. Berger, John. 1972. Ways of Seeing. London: Penguin. Binns, Vivienne. 1975. ‘Vivienne Binns in interview’, Scarlet Woman, (August): 8, 15. Bordo, Susan. 1993. Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body. Berkeley: University of California Press. Botha, Rachel. 2018. ‘Alice Maher, Vox Materia’, Circa (8 November), https://circaartmagazine. net/ accessed 27 June 2020. Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge. Butler, Rex and Thomas, Morgan. 2001. ‘Tracey Moffatt: From something singular … to something more’, Eyeline 45 (Autumn/Winter), https://www.eyelinepublishing.com/eyeline-45/ article/tracey-moffatt. Cassidy, Stephen. 1983. Art and Working Life in Australia. Sydney: Australia Council. Cixous, Hélène. 1976. ‘The laugh of the Medusa’, Signs, 1:4 (Summer): 875–893. Craig, David, ed. 1975. Marxists on Literature: An Anthropology. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Crunk Feminist Collective. 2017. ‘Pussy don’t fail me now: the place of vaginas in Black feminist theory & organizing’, 23 January, http://www.crunkfeministcollective.com/2017/01/23/ pussy-dont-fail-me-now-the-place-of-vaginas-in-black-feminist-theory-organizing/ accessed 1 February 2020. Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus, translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Dickens, Karla. 2020. A Dickensian Circus. Brisbane: Andrew Baker Gallery, exhibition catalogue, http://www.andrew-baker.com/Karla_Dickens_A_Dickensian_Circus_Sans.pdf accessed September 2020. Do Prado, Paula. 2018. ‘Heartstrings’, blog, https://www.pauladoprado.net/heartstrings Doane, Mary Ann. 1982. ‘Film and the masquerade: theorizing the female spectator’, Screen, 23 (3/4). Dworkin, Andrea. 1981. Pornography: Men Possessing Women. London: Women’s Press. Eagleton, Terry. 1976. Marxism and Literary Criticism. Berkeley: University of California Press. Edgar, Patricia and McPhee, Hilary. 1974. Media She. Melbourne: Heinemann. Felski, Rita. 2015. The Limits of Critique. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Foley, Fiona. 2017. Horror has a face. Brisbane: Andrew Baker Fine Art, November, exhibition catalogue, http://www.andrew-baker.com/Fiona_Foley_Horror_has_a_face.pdf accessed June 2020. Foley, Fiona. 2019. Dr. Fiona Foley: Who are these strangers and where are they going?, curated by Djon Mundine OAM. Ballarat: Ballarat International Foto Biennale, 24 August–20 October, exhibition catalogue.

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Forsdick, Charles. 2014. ‘From the “aesthetics of diversity” to the “poetics of relating”: Segalen, Glissant and the genealogies of francophone postcolonial thought’, Paragraph, 37 (2): 160–177, https://www.euppublishing.com/doi/pdfplus/10.3366/para.2014.0119 Foucault, Michel and Deleuze, Gilles. 1980. ‘Intellectuals and power’, in Donald F. Bouchard (ed.) Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews by Michel Foucault, translated by Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Freud, Sigmund. 1919. ‘The Uncanny’, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XVII (1917–1919): An Infantile Neurosis and Other Works, 217– 256, http://www.arch.mcgill.ca/prof/bressani/arch653/winter2010/Freud_TheUncanny. pdf accessed 25 June 2020. Gargaillo, Florian. 2016. ‘Kamau Brathwaite’s rhythms of migration’, SAGE Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 53 (1): 155–168, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10. 1177/0021989416650482 accessed 12 June 2020. Garneau, David. 2016. ‘Migration as territory: performing domain with a non-colonial aesthetic attitude’, Voz-à-Voz, Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council and the Toronto Arts Council, http://www.vozavoz.ca/feature/david-garneau Gerber, Marjory. 1992. Vested Interests: Cross Dressing and Cultural Anxiety. New York: Routledge. Glissant, Édouard. 1996. Introduction à une poétique du Divers, translated by Charles Forsdick. Paris: Gallimard. Glissant, Édouard. 1997. Poetics of Relation, translated by Betsy Wing. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan. Grace, Helen. 1989. ‘Susan Norrie: “Objet d’Art”’, Art & Text, 31 (Dec–Feb). Grosz, Elizabeth. 1994. Volatile Bodies: Towards a Corporeal Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Grosz, Elizabeth. 2005. Time Travels: Feminism, Nature, Power. Sydney: Allen & Unwin. Hall, Sand. 2016. Amazon Acres, You Beauty—Stories of Women’s Lands, Australia. Wollongong: Shall Publishing. Halsall, Francis. 2018. ‘Vox Materia: Alice Maher’, Irish Arts Review, 1: 74–75. Hardwick, Louise. 2008. ‘Dancing the unspeakable: rhythms of communication in ‘Laghia de la mort’ by Joseph Zobel’, in Laura McMahon (ed.) Rhythms: Essays in French Literature, Thought and Culture. Bern: International Academic Publishers, 119–133. Hemmings, Claire. 2012. ‘Affective solidarity: feminist reflexivity and political transformation’, Feminist Theory, 13 (2): 151, 147–161. Ingold, Tim. 2013. Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture. Abingdon: Routledge. Irigaray, Luce. 1986. That Sex Which Is Not One. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. James, Bruce. 2001. ‘Interview with Tracey Moffatt’, Arts Today, with Michael Cathcart, ABC producer Bruce James, 9 January, http://www.abc.net.au/rn/legacy/programs/a today/stories/s229128.htm Kale, Neha. 2020. ‘Windows into an alternative world’, Sydney Morning Herald, 7 May, https:// www.smh.com.au/culture/art-and-design/windows-into-an-alternative-world-20200507p54qoz.html Kinsella, Tina. 2018. ‘Corporeal matters’, Visual Artists’ News Sheet, 3 (May/June): 20–21. Leach, Cristin. 2018. ‘Body and soul’, The Sunday Times Culture Magazine, 25 March,18. Loock, Ulrich. 2012. ‘Opacity’, Frieze, 7 November, https://www.frieze.com/article/opazit %C3%A4t accessed 29 November 2020. Mann, Ted. Guggenheim Collection online, https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/13131 accessed July 2020. Martin, Adrian. 1981. ‘The desire of Maria Kozic’, Art & Text, 2 (Winter): 18–27.

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McKenzie, Heidi. 2020. ‘Materials, making, and movement with Sandy Lockwood’, Ceramics Monthly, January, https://ceramicartsnetwork.org/ceramics-monthly/ceramicart-and-artists/ceramic-artists/materials-making-and-movement-with-sandy-lockwood/ accessed 29 November 2020. McKinnon, Chrystal. Decolonise Your Feminism (with Kimberley Moulton and Paola Bella), National Gallery of Australia Annual Lecture, 12 November 2020. Millner, Jacqueline and Moore, Catriona. 2015. ‘“Performing oneself badly?” Neo-burlesque and contemporary feminist performance art’, Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art, 15 (1): 20–36. Millner, Jacqueline and Moore, Catriona. 2021. ‘Creation stories: Australian arts feminism’, in Angelique Szymanek, Jen Kennedy, and Trista Mallory (eds) Transnational Perspectives on Feminism & Art, 1960–1985. New York: Routledge, in press. Moore, Catriona. 1994. ‘Museum hygiene’, Photofile, 41, March: 8–14. Moore, Catriona and Speck, Catherine. 2019. ‘How the personal became (and remains) political in the visual arts’, in Michelle Arrow and Angela Woollacott (eds) Everyday Revolutions: Remaking Gender, Sexuality and Culture in 1970s Australia. Canberra: ANU Press, 85–102. Moore, Dashiell. 2020. ‘Our write-to-write’: a poetics of encounter across Aboriginal Australia and the Caribbean. PhD thesis, University of Sydney. Morris, Meaghan. 1979. ‘The Pirate’s Fiancée’, in Meaghan Morris and Paul Patton (eds) Michel Foucault: Power, Truth, Strategy. Sydney: Feral Publications. Morris, Meaghan. 1994. ‘Feminist criticism’, in Papers, Nov/Dec 1975, reprinted in Catriona Moore (ed.) Dissonance: Feminism and the Arts 1970–90. Sydney: Allen & Unwin. Munro, Kate L. 2020. ‘Why ‘Blak’ not Black?: Artist Destiny Deacon and the origins of this word’, NTIV, 29 June, https://www.sbs.com.au/nitv/article/2020/05/07/why-bla k-not-black-artist-destiny-deacon-and-origins-word-1 accessed 29 November 2020. Norrie, Susan. 1990. ‘Susan Norrie interview’, Value added goods, WEST magazine, University of Western Sydney. Olkowski, Dorothea. 1999. Gilles Deleuze and the Ruin of Representation. Berkeley: University of California Press. Papachristou, Judith. 1976. Women Together: A History in Documents of the Women’s Movement in the United States. New York: Knopf. Perkins, Hetti. 1993. ‘Repatriation, race, representation: a conversation between Ann Stephen, Hetti Perkins and Avenel Mitchell’, Photofile, 40, November: 12–18. Pollock, Griselda. 2018. ‘Action, activism, and art and/as thought: a dialogue with the artworking of Sonia Khurana and Sutapa Biswas and the political theory of Hannah Arendt’, e-flux Journal, 92 (June), https://www.e-flux.com/journal/92/204726/action-activism-and-art-and-as-thoug ht-a-dialogue-with-the-artworking-of-sonia-khurana-and-sutapa-biswas-and-the-political-the ory-of-hannah-arendt/ Rich, Adrienne. 1986. Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose 1979–1985. New York: Norton & Co. Sayers, Sean. 1983. ‘Materialism, realism and the reflection theory’, Radical Philosophy, 33, Spring, https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/issues/033 Salley, Raél Jero. 2012. ‘Zanele Muholi’s elements of survival’, African Arts, 45, Winter: 4, 60. Saner, Emine. 2017. ‘‘I’m scared. But this work needs to be shown’: Zanele Muholi’s 365 protest photographs’, The Guardian, 14 July, https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/ 2017/jul/14/zanele-muholi-365-protest-photograph accessed September 2020. Schwendener, Martha. 2015. ‘Review: Zanele Muholi, a visual activist, presents “Isibonelo/ Evidence”’, The New York Times, 14 May. Snitow, Ann, Stansell, Christine, and Thompson, Sharon, eds. 1984. Desire: The Politics of Sexuality. London: Virago.

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Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1983. ‘Displacement and the discourse of woman’, in Mark Krupnick (ed.) Displacement: Derrida and After. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2008. ‘Gilles Deleuze’, first published 23 May; substantive revision 14 February 2018, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/deleuze/ accessed 15 September 2020. Sumner, Emma. 2017. Forming in the pupil of an eye, Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2016, Art Agenda, 12 December 2016–29 March 2017 Thomas, Jennifer. 1993 ‘The question of Derrida’s women’, Human Studies, 16 (1/2). Williams, Raymond. 1977. Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

2 BEYOND PERFORMING IDENTITIES

Introduction Performance has re-emerged in recent years as a major form in contemporary art, privileged in zeitgeist-capturing biennales and project spaces around the world.1 A new generation of artists is exploring the relationship between the private and the public, the social and the personal, the body and the self, through works that seek direct forms of audience–artist interaction and exchange, and physical ‘enlivening’ or strategic embodiment of specific sites and notions of identity. Performance’s apparent ephemerality is also seen to raise interesting questions about its very nature, and, by extension, that of art more broadly: where it resides, how it operates in discourse, and how it is interpreted and remembered. This resurgence after some decades in abeyance begs the question as to how contemporary performance varies from its antecedents in the 1960s and 1970s. Performance receded from the scene partly in response to critiques of some of its original claims and assumptions, in particular around the de-commodification of art and the links between presence and authenticity. Debates about the exhaustion of identity politics also impacted on performance, given many artists were drawn to it for its capacity to challenge constructions of identity. Is it a coincidence that the surge of interest in performance art around the world in recent years has come at around the same time as the revitalisation of feminist concerns in art?2 In this chapter, we consider the contribution of feminist art and ideas to contemporary performance, in order to better understand performance’s current importance. We argue that understanding the emergence of performance through a feminist lens grants us unique insights into its re-emergence today, and that many of the rationales driving performance can be better understood through feminist analysis. A feminist approach might also suggest new ways to describe contemporary performance that do not rely on problematised terms such as ‘presence’ and ‘authenticity’. We begin with an overview of pertinent developments in feminist theory to provide a context for shifting DOI: 10.4324/9781003045175-3

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currents in contemporary art, before arguing the historical and theoretical links between feminist perspectives and the aspirations and qualities of performance art. We look first at the overlaps between the emergence of performance and the so-called second wave feminist movement, and consider early feminist works which explored the intimate relationship between flesh and power, and innovated ways to redefine (and question) female agency. We then use this context to analyse the work of contemporary artists who distil the insights of feminist performance art for their relevance to current explorations of social relations. Integral to our feminist methodology, as outlined in the introduction, is the grounding of our analysis in that work with which we are most familiar through our embodied experience, namely the work of Australian artists. But we expand our analysis to consider the practices of certain international artists selected for their affiliated sensibilities and approaches. In particular, we have developed our focus according to our discerning at least two broad approaches that negotiate some of the perceived shortcomings of the political valence of performance: one explores the failure of performing identity, and another distributes performance such that identity becomes diffused and diffracted. These trends speak in part to new materialist understandings of dispersed agency, together with recent critical attention to the links between affective and physical labour. Hence in this chapter we discuss the work of Australian artists Hannah Raisin, Anastasia Klose and Justene Williams, along with Hoda Afshar, Salote Tawale and Parachute for Ladies. We also consider Sonia Boyce (UK), Pushpamala N (India), Patty Chang (US) and Eisa Jocson (Philippines/Australia), along with the legacies of Marina Abramovic´ (Serbia/US) in contemporary performance.

Performance in the context of feminist thought Feminism has a long genealogy of theorising the body and materiality. From early on, feminism analysed biological differences used to justify discrimination against women, and looked to women’s lived, embodied experience: their personal stories. We soon moved on from seeing the body as a problem to be overcome, to considering it a powerful site for thinking and being otherwise. While feminism has always been concerned with representation—the way that femininity is constructed in part through how female bodies are represented—we have also always been attuned to how bodies manage to exceed representation. The unsayable, the inscrutable, intuited knowledge: feminism reclaimed these from pejorative terrain long ago, so anticipating and laying the groundwork for several recent developments in the humanities and the arts. Feminist theory has been at the forefront of ‘the ontological turn’ in philosophy linked to ‘new materialism’—that has seen a shift from epistemological questions to a renewed focus on the nature of pre-discursive realities—and the ‘affective turn’, that has seen emotions take centre-stage in a range of disciplines, including as a way to access life ‘that exceeds the social regulation of our existence’.3 As new materialist feminist Rosi Braidotti notes4, feminist philosophy combines ‘phenomenological theory of embodiment with Marxist—and later on poststructuralist—re-elaborations of the complex intersection between bodies and

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power’. This has had two major theoretical consequences. First, it rejects the dualistic division of mind and body, and nature and culture. And second, it combines critical consciousness with creativity; that is, it does not stop at deconstruction but goes on to imagine alternatives. Thus, concludes Braidotti, ‘feminist philosophers have introduced a new brand of materialism, of the embodied and embedded kind’.5 The women’s liberation movement of the 1970s and feminist pedagogy have been credited with ‘developing the first collectively articulated feminist “politics of emotion”, particularly through practices of consciousness-raising’,6 whose effects continue to resonate in contemporary feminism.7 While aware of the limits of such approaches, feminism continues to explore how the roles of emotion and affect, with their intimate connection to the imagination, might play in social transformation.8 As British-Australian feminist theorist Sarah Ahmed argues, emotions ‘are crucial to the very constitution of the psychic and social as objects … the very circulation of emotion allows different objects or bodies to take shape for us’.9 Feminist theory (informed as much by feminist practice) has also consistently sought to reconceptualise the nature of the self. Western philosophical traditions primarily posit the self as either the Kantian ethical subject or homo economicus, driven by a (apparently non-gendered!) moral ideal or rational self-interest, respectively. Both these models regard the self as homogenous, transparent and coherent, as autonomous and separated from its cultural and interpersonal setting as well as from the body. Feminist reconceptualisations have challenged all these assumptions, asserting that identity is always embodied and relational. The relational or interconnected self might be forged in its capacity for response-ability to otherness,10 or the capacity for love, friendship and cooperation with social groups that characterises humans as a biological species.11 Instead of conceiving of the mature self as the most ‘autonomous’—the most severed from sources of dependence such as the mother or the body—feminists propose that the self matures through enhanced capacities and desires to form social bonds. Feminist queer theory was key in overhauling approaches to identity and gender. As American theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick argued, ‘queer’ ‘can refer to: the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone’s gender or anyone’s sexuality aren’t made (or can’t be made) to signify monolithically’.12 These feminist preoccupations and their development over recent years provide a compelling context for contemporary art. A sense that identity is embodied and relational, that human social realities exist at pre-discursive, cellular levels, and that often incommensurable emotions are what drive and define us: such reconceptualisations find remarkable resonances in what have become the institutionally privileged practices of contemporary art, including participatory work (at times with a pedagogical dimension) and performance. We argue that to understand the (re)turn to the live body in art and to further the aims of such artistic projects, it is crucial to acknowledge this feminist context. To do so also means acknowledging that feminist theory and what it might tell us about art has been marginalised for

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spurious reasons, often on account of reductive readings. One particularly pertinent example is the way that art history has cast the schism between the so-called essentialism of feminist art of the 1970s and the social constructivism of feminist art of the 1980s, to the detriment of both; such caricatures have served to deny the relevance of such approaches to understanding the present.13 It might be worth our while to consider the nuances of such debates, especially as they address many questions of current interest such as the relationship between the pre-discursive and the representational, and effective feminist intervention.14 New materialist thought, for example, addresses the ‘essentialism problem’ by arguing for ‘the mutual entanglement’ of the material and the discursive, so shifting from ‘identity politics and biological essentialism in favour of a performative ontology’.15 New materialism ‘wants to do justice to the “material-semiotic,” or “material-discursive” character of all events’.16 The body thus ‘refers to the materialist but also vitalist groundings of human subjectivity and to the specifically human capacity to be both grounded and to flow and thus to transcend the very variables … which structure us’.17 As such, the subject ‘woman’ is not an essence but ‘the site of multiple, complex, and potentially contradictory sets of experiences, defined by overlapping variables, such as class, race, age, life-style, sexual preference and others’.18 According to Braidotti, to ‘activate socio-symbolic changes in the condition of women is ‘a radically anti-essentialist position’.19 Some new materialist feminists have also taken issue with the terms of feminist political engagement, in particular the practice of ‘critique’. American feminist theorist Karen Barad suggests that critique is ‘over-rated, over-emphasized, and overutilized, to the detriment of feminism’, and used more to dismiss and destroy than to imagine otherwise.20 Drawing on Donna Haraway, Barad proposes instead a ‘diffractive methodology’, that is: reading insights through one another, building new insights, and attentively and carefully reading for differences that matter in their fine details, together with the recognition that there intrinsic to this analysis is an ethics that is not predicated on externality but rather entanglement. Diffractive readings bring inventive provocations … They are respectful, detailed, ethical engagements.21 As American art historian Kate Mondloch reminds us, ‘we need to continue to explore, reinvent and interrogate the ongoing relevance of feminist theory to art practice, and perhaps above all the variegated and various forms that art (and art history) “informed by feminism” may take’.22 This describes our project: an investment in the creativity at the heart of feminism, driven by visionary fuel grounded in responsibility and accountability, in order to grant us fresh understandings of the past, the present and the future of performance art.23 The concerns of feminist theory and its creative re-thinking of bodies and their relationship to power and social change give us insights into both the emergence and re-emergence of performance.

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The return to the live body Received histories of performance art situate it within those practices that American art theorist Lucy Lippard termed the ‘dematerialisation of art’: performance was seen primarily as a challenge to high modernism’s reduction of art to an object of delectation or connoisseurship.24 Yet, as Lippard herself later reflected, actions and ideas soon proved just as liable to commodification as objects, while the democratising impulse accompanying art’s dematerialisation proved just as illusory; the ‘neutral elitist content and patronizing approach’ of such practices remained incomprehensible and alienating to a broader public.25At the same time as the limitations of the political project inherent to performance were hitting home, postmodern critiques in philosophy and art theory profoundly destabilised prevailing ideas about the human subject—its ability to know itself, to speak its own truth, to have a grounded identity. This dealt another blow to performance, the appeal of which had in large part been on account of its authenticity, its raw access to the material truth of embodied human experience through its supposed evasion of mediation: the live body of the artist, here in real time and real space, fronting up to the audience. In other words, performance failed in its objective to offer an alternative to art as product, namely an authentic, non-reproducible experience based on the co-presence of artist and audience in real time. Not only was performance reduced to the status of other art objects through the collection and trafficking of its traces and documentation, but its original philosophical rationale could not hold up against post-structuralist critiques of the subject. Given this failure, how do we explain the latter-day return of performance? Most accounts of the resurgence of performance point to factors associated with the state of advanced capitalist societies in the current millennium, in particular the alienating effects of spectacular culture and everyday mediated environments, and the reduction of the value of creativity to pure market metrics. To counter this mediated alienation, performance supposedly brings us back to the intimacy and immediacy of face-to-face communication, an inherently enriching experience that cuts out the (art market) middleman.26 Yet, as Portuguese performance studies scholar João Florêncio points out, such arguments betray that the discourse around performance art still subscribes to humanist, anthropocentric ideas—such as that of human agency and authenticity—that have been thoroughly problematised in art theory and philosophy.27 Some current critics of performance (and re-performance) privilege arguments based on the form’s original anti-commodity mission rather than consider other frameworks that may be more appropriate to contemporary performance.28 For example, in her influential critique of Marina Abramovic´’s re-commodification of performance in the guise of ‘re-performance’, American art historian Amelia Jones sets out to rebut what she alleges are the claims by critics, artists and museums that re-enactment of performance brings back presence. Jones asserts that Abramovic ‘continues to make what I would argue to be untenable claims for the authenticity and presence of live art’29, and cites a passage from one of the essays in the catalogue for Seven Easy Pieces as further evidence: ‘the performer brings forth his [sic] body as an energetic body that releases energy and allows it to circulate in

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the space and to energize spectators so that they sense the performer as well as themselves not only as intensely present, but as embodied minds’.30 In Jones’ view, performance destroys presence: it is already past even as the so-called original performance plays out. Claims otherwise take us for dupes: performance’s temporality and ephemerality do not ‘escape the marketplace’, but rather, ironically, to assert so only serves to further commodify both performance as an art form and the performer herself.31 Jones calls on us to ‘acknowledge this paradox self-reflexively rather than covering it over by clinging to an outdated, modernist notion of presence that relies on a mystified notion of artistic intentionality and that ultimately relies on and reinforces the circuits of capital’.32 However, this does not offer us any clues as to why artists (not just big name brands) continue to turn to performance as the most apt means to explore pressing contemporary issues. What Jones does not do, and what is more necessary, is attempt to complicate understandings of presence, or develop a language for performance outside discredited anthropocentric ideas. This is a question that American performance scholar Mechtild Widrich has addressed in her attempt to understand the relationship between the live act and documentation. Rather than advocate for ‘presence’ or deny the differences between mediated and unmediated experiences, Widrich suggests that ephemeral art practice creates more than one performance situation, and that ‘we need to differentiate discrete levels of mediation, without simply favouring one of them a priori’.33 A live event, after all, is thoroughly mediated, and documentations of such events are neither ‘indexes’ of what happened, nor fictions which cannot contain any truths, ‘but assertions of the reality of a past state of affairs’.34 Widrich’s attempt to complicate the nature of presence in analysing the differences between the live event and documentation find generative parallels in new materialist feminist attempts to radically re-think temporality (and thereby, causality). Using the framework of quantum physics, for example, Barad argues that ‘time … is not universally given, but rather that time is articulated and re-synchronized through various material practices … The “past” was never simply there to begin with, and the “future” is not what will unfold, but “past” and “future” are iteratively reconfigured and enfolded through the world’s ongoing intra-activity.’35 By complicating ‘presence’, including through complicating temporality, might we be better able to account for the renewed appeal of performance to artists, institutions and publics, and theorise its current value? Can feminist histories of ideas and art practice assist us? For instance, by accenting its feminist qualities, can we understand performance differently and complicate its anti-commodity rationale? Writing now in the thrall of the Covid crisis, we have seen the radical recasting of co-presence from nurturing of relationality to existential threat, and the physical proximity of performance usurped by digital platforms of interaction. At the same time, we have seen bodies on the line all around the world, defying stay-at-home orders to protest an even deeper existential threat, namely terminal racism.36 In the wake of such massive social shifts, performance will no doubt need some re-theorising. We can only point to that at this current juncture, although we do flesh out possible avenues of re-thinking in our Conclusion.

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Feminist histories, performative histories American art historian Peggy Phelan remarked that it might be surprising that early feminist artists engaged with performance to explore the relation between the personal and the political, given the sexism of early Happenings such as Yves Klein’s Anthropometries (1958–) and Ben Patterson’s Lick Piece (1963), which propagated stereotypes of clean man/dirty woman.37 Yet, as Lippard summed it up back in the 1970s: ‘When women use their own bodies in their art work, they are using their selves; a significant psychological factor converts these bodies … from object to subject’.38 Reflecting on her 1970s performance practice, Cheri Gaulke extrapolates: Performance is not a difficult concept to us women. We’re on stage every moment of our lives, acting like women. Performance is a declaration of self, who one is, a shamanistic dance by which we spin into other sites of awareness, remembering new vision of ourselves. And in performance we found an art form that was young, without the traditions of painting and sculpture, traditions governed by men.39 Young, but not entirely a new form in the 1960s, for performance had an existing tradition that dated at least as far back as the Futurists and Dadaists, if not to late nineteenthcentury cabaret, and certainly to what Jones calls ‘the Pollockian performative’ of the 1950s that made the body of the artist visible and helped to undermine the claims of modernism to aesthetic disinterest.40 It is also worth pointing out that First Nations’ cultural practices stretching back tens of thousands of years have always found a reciprocal intra-relationship between body and world at critical moments of gathering, or what we might call performance. This focus on the embodied subjectivity of the artist is certainly a key reason performance was so appealing to women artists in the 1970s, given the significant feminist explorations and enactments of the insight that the body is the principal site of power, which it both submits to and resists.41 Canadian art historian Jayne Wark’s recuperation of the key role played by feminist artists in conceptual art underlines this point. Wark maintains that the feminism of artists such as Martha Rosler, Adrian Piper and Eleanor Antin allowed them to forge links between conceptual methods and real world politics, and helped to move conceptual art beyond the ‘insularity’ of institutional critique.42 Piper, for instance, early in her practice sought to unleash ‘her own unpredictable and uncontrollable presence so as to induce a reaction or change’ in the audience in works she came to call Catalysis performances.43 Piper described such works—which entailed her undertaking everyday activities in public space but with some bizarre twist that singled her out, such as riding the subway with a towel stuffed in her mouth—as existing ‘only as a catalytic agent between myself and the viewer’.44 Piper’s embodiment of her concept allowed her to foreground her private experience as a woman in public space, rebut conceptual art’s ‘refusal’ of ‘subjectivity’, and expand its to-date limited theorisation of the relationship between the private and public realms.45 Piper’s work clearly evidences the intersections between feminism and performance at its inception.

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Performance art’s ‘deliberate transgressions of art/life boundaries, amateurish messiness, improvisational character, communal nature, and openness to the banal and everyday as well as to the realms of myth and ritual meant it was ideally suited to the feminist agenda of [the 1970s]’.46 That performance was ‘an art of actions’, as American art historian Kristine Stiles termed it47—where both performers and viewers are acting subjects who exchange and negotiate meaning ‘in the real social conditions of everyday life’—made it a good fit for emerging feminist work. Performance was seen as able to ‘instantiate the possibility for social and political change’. It became associated with feminist agency, the power to define oneself, to ‘show the show’ (as Rebecca Schneider put it48), that is, to self-reflexively stand alongside the ideological apparatus that represents one in culture, and to performatively imagine new realities.49 Performance’s links to the embodied subjectivity of the artist and the imagination of new realities made it an obvious vehicle to explore issues of identity. In her study of performance and identity, Enacting Others: Politics of Identity in Eleanor Antin, Nikki S. Lee, Adrian Piper, and Anna Deavere Smith, American art historian Cherise Smith observes that artists chose performance as the ‘most effective medium with which to expose the porous and malleable qualities of identity’, thereby suggesting ‘subjecthood is not a set of predestined characteristics but rather forms from continued practices’.50 Performance, she reminds us, retains ‘a quality of impermanence. It is marked temporally and associated with artificiality, a move away from the real. It thus implies mobility, potentially read as resistant to the strictures of identity’.51 These artists’ performances ‘point to a space between the disciplinary functions of performative acts and the possibilities of agency latent in performance’. As artists enact multiple selves, they challenge the terms of identity formation, as well as affirm and stabilise them. Artists can inhabit liminal positions to reveal ‘fractures in the fabric of hierarchical frameworks of identity positions’.52 Smith argues that, despite critiques of the politics of identity since the coalescence of civil rights movements, identity continues as a preoccupation for activists and artists alike.53 Consequently, she distinguishes between ‘identity politics’ and ‘the politics of identity’: while the former is exclusionary and troubled by essentialism (although at one time important to defend a different stance and to hear different voices), the latter is still necessary, given that ‘self-making’ remains an issue as struggles for social change are ongoing and require a re-articulation of terms. Smith observes that contemporary performance thus continues to engage with identity, even if such work may have only limited impact beyond the artist’s private, intellectual, psychic life.54 The problem remains, according to Smith, how to mobilise an audience: the very question driving Piper’s early work, and which Smith sees successfully addressed in very few practices55. On the other hand, Smith is suspicious of recent post-identity discourse that she sees as liable to de-politicisation and conservatism. The ‘politics of identity’ that Smith invokes is intimately tied with the essentialism debates which, as argued earlier, have been somewhat simplistically read. Indian feminist theorist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s ‘strategic essentialism’ was one theoretical manoeuvre that feminists used to claim more complex positions,

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allowing a nuanced response to asserting politically savvy common ground without making universalist claims. Spivak’s ‘withdrawal’ of her own term in the early 1990s reflects the ongoing problematics of the politics of identity. Explaining why she distanced herself from ‘strategic essentialism’ in a roundtable on feminist activist art, Spivak explained that she came to realise ‘that we were always essentialists of one sort or another. It is not possible to continue to live and think without the founding error of essences. The point was to be careful about how essentialism was used, rather than add to its use on another level of activity, and call it “strategic.”’56 What she witnessed in the take-up of the term, however, was contrary to her intentions, for rather than being situation-specific it seemed ‘to be a way of engaging an unexamined essentialism and insisting that it was theoretically correct, since it was only a strategy’.57 What many intersectional feminists have opted for are nuanced approaches to collective identification—whether based on gender, ethnic specificity, or culture—that are not ‘automatically to be an essentialist or to support static, hegemonic notions of identity’.58 As Jones acknowledges, we are definitively not ‘beyond’ identity.59 This is starkly evident in the age of #MeToo and #BLM, when contemporary performance artists of colour have reasserted the inherent politics of racial and gendered difference. As further argued in our concluding chapter, these tactics leverage not so much on the politics of presence, as on the power of the shared vulnerability of bodies.

Contemporary performance and the legacy of feminism For today’s practitioners, the rationale for performance has some continuities with earlier generations, although as this chapter argues, these need re-casting in view of the many questions arising from new theoretical approaches to identity, new artistic forms and new political realities. Performance artists today remain interested in an acting-subject exchanging meaning in the real conditions of everyday life and in the workings of ideology. However, the drive for self-determination and anticommodity is less pressing: for the most part, recent feminist artists act as if these battles have been won and lost, respectively. Performance for artists today might still be about Marina Abramovic´’s drive to push the body to its limits to overcome the mental blocks imposed by culture, but it might be less about representing ‘the body’ so as to elicit identification. Certainly, debates around essentialism, expanding intersectional awareness, globalisation and networked visual technologies have dramatically changed the context for feminist performance. Contemporary performance is taking on the perennial questions in new ways, including: how to ‘continue to expose the circuits of power through which subjects are identified and so positioned in culture’, and how to articulate ‘sexualized bodies across a range of feminisms, bodies that … enunciate varieties of agency that allow them to speak against the grain of racist, classist, sexist, anti-women’ discourses and practices.60 How to go about this of course remains contentious. In the following section, we discern a number of approaches evident in the practices of artists that answer the challenge of ‘why, and how, performance now?’ We argue that many current

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practitioners are developing innovative and politically acute performance strategies through mining the feminist archive, and either openly acknowledging their feminist debt, or at least accepting that many of the strategies and frameworks that inform their practice were pioneered by artists working within the broad feminist project and hence will always carry feminist DNA. This challenges the still prevalent disavowal of the significance of feminist discourses for performance.61 One approach we discern invokes performance as failure, and thus calls into question some received notions about the relationship of identity to performance. This work in part draws on feminist traditions to bring a self-reflexive regard for the limitations of performance as a form that harbours a certain absurdity at its heart. However, we argue that these works go beyond a critique of performance as such to unsettle notions of feminine and feminist identities. Another approach offers some provocative ways to conceive of presence, through the ‘diffraction’ of the artist’s body into multiple bodies, or the delegation of performance, including through practices that mobilise performance as diverse energised flows through bodies, materials and environments.

Post-Butler identity? The feminist performance of failure62 Is ‘performing oneself badly’, or in slapstick form, a critical rebuttal of earlier affirmative, deconstructivist and performative feminist strategies? Arguably, enacting failure—reclaiming a long line of feminine failures such as bad mothers, bad secretaries, bad teachers, and now, bad feminists—complicates any possible criticism, and drives towards inclusivity. By definition, loving one’s failure is a way of critiquing the normative standard. We discern in a number of current Australian practitioners possible insights into post-Butler theories of gender identity, for we argue that these artists enact a bad or failed performance of self that parallels the anti-identitarian desire amongst some contemporary queer theorists and activists to de-subjectivise ‘gay identity’.63 Australian artists such as Hannah Raisin, Anastasia Klose and Justene Williams (Figures 2.1–2.3) adapt slapstick humour to badly perform feminine, and feminist, identities. At the heart of their early performances and videos is a ‘kooky chick’ persona that enacts a hilarious yet troubling form of failure: the failure of conventional femininity, but also the failure of feminist identity, and with that, resistance to recuperation.64 We might understand this as ‘performing oneself badly’. The critical enactment of normative standards of femininity has been a lynchpin of feminist art since the 1970s and has been central in developing what we now commonly call ‘the politics of representation’. However, contemporary work does not attempt to prise open a critical gap between original and copy, between the real woman and a fraudulent femininity, or even try to clear a reflexive space for analysis within the performed artifice. These contemporary works often replay an established feminist as well as feminine aesthetic repertoire— the imagery, forms, materials, performative gestures and subject-matter from 1970s and 1980s feminist art—but in clownish form. In doing so, these theatrical performances use burlesque humour and desire to metaphorically swerve and switch established feminist performance tropes, to take us ‘somewhere else’.65

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Through cheerfully amateurish performances of failed femininity, Klose, Raisin and Williams upset idealisations of feminine beauty, grace or sexuality. They also dislodge deconstructivist manoeuvres associated with ‘the politics of representation’—the coolly analytic, critical enactment of culturally overcoded feminine beauty, as elaborated in the early work of Australian artists Fiona Foley, Linda Sproul, Barbara Campbell, Anne Ferran, Julie Rrap and many others. Contemporary work, in contrast, performs both feminine and feminist gestures awkwardly, reductively or excessively. Here, it is our squeamish response to the forced aesthetic joke (Raisin), the excessive materiality of costuming (Williams), and spectacularly flawed amateurism (Klose) that fails us, ‘does us in’ and swerves away from representational politics.66 These instances of ‘failed feminist art’ may dislodge what has become a set of predictable aesthetic strategies. Clowning foregrounds affect not critique, empathy not consciousness-raising, embarrassed laughter not structural insight or righteous indignation over cultural or social inequities. In Flowing Locks (2007) (Figure 2.1), Hannah Raisin replays 1970s Schneeman-esque liberatory ‘nude’ performances in a clownish body-suit replete with absurdly overgrown underarm and pubic hair. Her gestures come from ‘Voila!’ showgirl moments, themselves a cheap version of the Olympic ideal of Venus and classical nude statuary. The posture references both traditions, maybe at its historical intersection: the tableaux vivant, where the suitably body-suited model would pose in Rokeby Venus mode. However,

FIGURE 2.1

Hannah Raisin, Flowing Locks, 2007, performance still

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Raisin’s costume is a little too ill-fitting, her smile a childish grin. Her arms are outstretched revealing inappropriate hairy abundance, furling from her body like a revolutionary standard. The pose and the costume challenge both sexist tropes of hairless, waxed femininity, and 1970s-style nakedness, open and defiant; Raisin’s posture is far more clownish and humorous than its 1970s antecedents. The artist poses as both a camp signifier of ‘seventies feminist critique’ and jokes about lesbians and brush-cutters, but both in clownish form. Her costume and her grin wear her feminism loosely, with an insouciant, burlesque appeal to not take this naked hairy play all that seriously. The performance also falls short of 1990s riot-Grrrl style, energy or poise. In Sugar Coated (2010)—a frenetic look at gender roles and sexuality mixing film, sounds and live performance—Raisin swings from raunch to domesticity, as she lampoons and enjoys gender stereotypes in equal measure: she spills fish from her underpants, pours milk on her body outside a crowded theatre, and douses herself with water to dissolve her bathbomb bikini as she stands in a plastic shell tub. Raisin ‘fails’ in embodying the restrictive codes of femininity, while at the same time, through actively playing with and enjoying such codes, she ‘fails’ conventional feminist identity. Raisin’s early videos are fast-and-loose grabs of the artist’s absurd, low-tech performances. Raisin sits, legs astride, performing outrageous feats with her sex that displace the private vagina with the public mouth—the body part associated with speech, identity and agency. In one grab, the handheld footage records her ‘cunt smoking’, in another, eating. These gestures of body-part role reversal are simple and carry strong symbolic meanings with a long history in feminist critique—not least of course Luce Irigaray’s metaphor of woman’s two lips and her evocation of a uniquely feminine language. And while they are staged with an assured artlessness, these video performances also ‘over-share’. They disclose the artist in intimate moments, betraying not only her embarrassing behaviour, but also her fear of disempowerment and objectification. In yet another video, the half-naked artist breathlessly and desperately grinds her pelvis against a mirror, a cringe-worthy gesture of misplaced and frustrated desire, which doubles as a hilarious satire of stereotypical hetero coitus. In a manner that invokes the knowing grin of burlesque and the cracked carapace of the embarrassed performer laid bare, Raisin foregrounds her failure, producing a complex set of effects that releases erotic charge together with warm (rather than satirical) laughter and self-recognition. A similar sensibility is evident in the video/performances of Anastasia Klose, an artist now renowned for her exploration of personal failure. Klose puts herself in the way of embarrassment and mortification, amplifying the effect through public display and the witnessing of her own humiliation. The mise en scène for her work is more banal, less staged than Raisin’s: the public toilet features again, but without the artifice of the smoking vagina. With Klose, rather, the disabled toilet at art school is the scene of an awkward and less-than-explosive sexual encounter (In the Toilets with Ben, 2005), an encounter that is then re-lived in the company of her mother (Mum and I watch ‘In the Toilets with Ben’, 2005). The focus on sexual and romantic relationships, and its link to the perceived success of conventional femininity, continues in Klose’s best-known work, Film for My Nanna (2006) (Figure 2.2). This low-tech video follows Klose

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FIGURE 2.2

Anastasia Klose, Film for My Nanna, 2006, film/performance

walking through the streets of Melbourne dressed in a hand-me-down wedding gown, a raggedy cardboard sign hung on her neck that reads, ‘Nanna, I am still alone’. The effect is saved from abjection by the artist’s assured jollity as she willingly parades her unfulfilled desire and the disappointment she is deemed to be by parts of her family. This is no ‘victim’, but neither is it a subject who is actively rejecting and reinventing social expectations. Klose evinces an uncomfortable, mutable in-between to these two more familiar feminist stances, in a way that invokes the ambiguity of burlesque and the ‘swerve’ that ‘does us in’. Her approach betrays a gentle resignation to the mores used to judge success rather than a satirical critique, a knowing wink that acknowledges her own complicity in what some might see as commodifying rituals but also her ability to see their absurdity. Along with her desire for love, Klose subjects her other vulnerability, namely her career aspirations, to relentless needling. In Bonjour Paris! Je suis une artiste Aussie! (2007), Klose exposes her artistic ambition in the streets of Paris wearing a cack-handed sign, while in The Re-living Room (2012), she re-enacts a two-month period of unemployment, watching television, eating junk food and dancing to music video clips in The Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney. Discussing her first performance videos that marked a watershed in her career, Australian artist Justene Williams observed, ‘I’m making bad costumes and dancing badly’.67 It is significant that Williams describes her self-portrayal in works such as Bighead, Garbageface, Guards, Ghost, Derr Sonata (2009); Berlin Burghers Microwave (2010); and Crutch Dance (2011) (Figure 2.3) in terms that evoke a neo-burlesque performer. Williams rarely

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FIGURE 2.3

Justene Williams, Crutch Dance, 2011, video installation

performs live, but her work primarily comprises videos of her own performances that take place within sculptural sets she constructs from cheap, low-tech materials. The video footage is thoroughly worked, but the complex layering of imagery begins at the level of her body through high-concept costumes that radically change the artist’s form. Williams’ designs often obscure key markers of gender and identity such as face and breasts, rendering the artist machine-like; this is partly in homage to early modernist experiments with mechanical dancing. The performances feature jagged, unpredictable movements that serve to dissolve the artist’s body into other formal elements. While the set and costume design, as well as the post-production effects, are clearly the work of a skilled artist, Williams deliberately evokes an aesthetic of failure. The disposable raw materials Williams re-deploys remain evident throughout, foregrounding the artist’s DIY approach. The performer is lumpen, her movement lacks purpose and resolution, and the chaotic tenor of the work including its soundscape elicits lack of control. This is no slick, cool performer, ‘mastering’ the medium, but a performer admitting she’s at a loss, caught in a web of endless attempts. What, though, is Williams attempting? Is it a re-inscription of the body of the female artist that ‘de-genders’ her while situating her historically? Is it an evocation of the chaotic vitality at the heart of the art-making process that is all too often still cast as (male) genius? Is it a reminder that the absurd pointlessness of art is its ultimate value? In each of these alternatives is evident the central concern of our argument: how a conjunction of enjoyment, recognition of failure, and knowingness (be it sexual or institutional) in performance can interrogate contemporary feminine and feminist identities.

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Artists such as Hannah Raisin, Anastasia Klose and Justene Williams enact a bad or failed performance of self, both as failed feminine and feminist subject, and by ‘performing badly’ rebut unitary, affirmative and empowered identifications of neoliberal, equal-opportunity feminism. Their ‘anti-identificatory’ strategies also stop short of claiming any authoritative analytic purchase or representational critique. Enacting failure, and so reclaiming a long line of feminine failures, complicates any possible criticism, and drives towards a radical inclusivity. By definition, to love one’s failure is to swerve or elude both feminine and feminist standardisation.

Diffracted identity, multiple bodies and ‘delegated performance’68 In considering how to theorise performance and its particularity as a real-time live artform today—without recourse to problematised terms such as ‘agency’ and its metaphorical incarnation in the body of the artist—we argue we may find some insights in new materialism and its feminist forebears. We propose these may help us imagine performance in the contemporary period in ways that accentuate not agency, but action; not identity, but openness of materials and humans to each other, their correspondence, where the mindful or attentive bodily movements of the practitioner and the flows and resistance of materials respond to one another in counterpoint. Such a conceptualisation corresponds with British performance scholar Deirdre Heddon’s account of the integration of others’ identities in ‘autobiographical performance’ which she sees as connected to a feminist emphasis on relationships of interdependence, contexts and the ‘ethics of care’. According to Heddon, this tendency away from the autonomous subject leads performance away from a ‘moral’ judgement of ethics and towards a sense of ‘expressive collaboration’, or negotiation between people in deciding ethical behaviour, which arguably is very much the concern of much contemporary feminist performance art.69 Certain contemporary performance, such as more recent works by Marina Abramovic´ (Slovenia/US) and Sonia Boyce (UK) as well as that of Australian artists Parachute for Ladies and Salote Tawale, and what we might consider as distributed performances by Pushpamala N (India), Patty Chang (US/HK) and Eisa Jocson (Philippines), may help us imagine a new materialist vision of the body. In these practices, ‘the body’ figures not as a single embodied identity, but as multiple, energised flows, active not in the figure of the artist so much as in the bodies of participants more broadly, including other performers, facilitators and the audience.

Performance as energised flows In broad strokes, ‘new materialism’ sets out to radically re-think the dualisms central to Western thought by focusing on how action itself produces these oppositions, such as between nature and culture, body and mind, and human and non-human. By giving special attention to matter, long neglected in dualist thought, new materialism also focuses on ‘the emancipation of ma(t)ter’, and hence is by nature a feminist project.70 New materialism—or ‘agential realism’71—proposes that the mind is always material,

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that matter is necessarily something of the mind, hence that matter and meaning are mutually constitutive. In such a schema, the human body intra-acts as a thing among other things, ‘in an ever unfolding field of forces and energies’.72 New materialism deploys post-structuralist feminist views of the body, as proposed by Luce Irigaray,73 for instance, and synthesised in the work of Elizabeth Grosz,74 that argued that the body understood through fluids might be a productive way to reimagine an ethical relationship with the other. (Indeed, the capacity of fluids to undo certitudes and dilute boundaries is rich terrain for artists experimenting with reconceptualisations of performance, with American artist Patty Chang, discussed below, a good example.) In his book Making—inspired by a pedagogical experiment that brought together perspectives from art, architecture, anthropology and archaeology—Tim Ingold writes: In the living, dynamically composed body, person and organism are one. But … the body is also a thing … Objects and subjects can exist only in a world already thrown, already cast and fixed in final form; things by contrast are in the throwing. They do not exist so much as carry on …75 In such a view, bodies are sustained by their practice of leaking, of taking things in from their surroundings and in turn discharging them: ‘the same processes that keep [the body] alive also render it forever vulnerable to dissolution’.76 Conceiving of the human body in such a way, Ingold suggests, has a bearing on the question of material agency, which, he says, is ‘beside the point’, only arising ‘on account of the reduction of things to objects consequent upon the mistake of seeing material phenomena and artefacts as the final product of an idea first fully imagined in the mind’s eye—that is intention—before being brought to material form—that is, the completed art object’.77 Ingold persuasively argues that such a view is simply not borne out by the evidence, which suggests rather that things, bodies included, are always in process, never complete, and in whatever form, the result of a complex ‘carrying on’ that depends on the openness of materials and humans to each other. To use the term ‘agency’, argues philosopher Karen Barad, works against the relational ontology of new materialism, re-introducing humanist motifs such as independently existing individuals.78 Barad seeks a shift from seeing agency as the property of persons or things, to conceiving of it rather as an ‘enactment’, as ‘the possibilities and accountability entailed in reconfiguring material-discursive apparatuses of bodily production, including the boundary articulations and exclusions that are marked by those practices’.79 To counter claims that such an approach disempowers those seeking social change, Barad argues that ‘agency is about response-ability, about the possibilities of mutual response, which is not to deny, but to attend to power imbalances. Agency is about possibilities for worldly re-configurings’,80 which also entails re-thinking questions of social justice ‘in terms of a different kind of causality’.81 Ethics, inextricable from agency, is ‘about responsibility and accountability for the lively relationalities of becoming, of which we are a part … Responsibility … is a matter of the ability to respond. Listening for the response of the other and an obligation to be responsive to the other, who is not entirely separate from what we call the self.’82

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Against agency as understood in a humanist way, Ingold proposes ‘animacy’: ‘humans’, he says, ‘do not possess agency, nor do non-humans … rather they are possessed by action’:83 As a bundle of potentials in an ever unfolding field of forces and energies, the body moves and is moved not because it is driven by some internal agency, wrapped up in a package, but because as fast as it is gathering or winding itself up, it is forever unravelling or unwinding, alternatively breathing in and out.84 The work of Sonia Boyce, with its reliance on improvisational and spontaneous collaboration, might be understood in this way. In such a performance framework, the body is figured not as the artist’s identity but as energised correspondences between living beings. To use Ingold’s terms, we might suggest that the artwork does not exert the artist’s agency, but that many bodies coming together are possessed by action, action that through the facilitation of mindful exchange opens the possibility for an enhanced ethical space. This performance of many bodies—some trained, some not, all to some degree orchestrated and organised but also all allowed a measure of autonomy—is one way to conceive of performance beyond identities.85 Claiming Lygia Clarke and Suzanne Lacy as influences,86 Boyce is interested in ‘how meaning is constructed collectively and spontaneously through interactive performance’, her practice laying the ground for unrehearsed events that diffuse individual authorship and emphasise the intersubjectivity of experience.87 Rather than seeking to explore her own identity as a Black British woman and artist, Boyce creates opportunities for cultural differences to be articulated and considered in convivial, if not necessarily comfortable, encounters, her long experience as a pedagogue also mediating the work to render it inclusive and approachable. The openness in approach is partly driven by her own curiosity at what happens when people come together, by her desire to be surprised by what new conjunctions of bodies and intelligences might produce. One recent example that well demonstrates this mode of distributed performance is her mid-career retrospective at Manchester Art Gallery in 2018, where the artist was asked to contribute to the ongoing programme ‘The Gallery Takeover’. Boyce set in motion a range of interactions intended to create their own energy flows to unsettle received views on gender, race, and the role of institutions in legitimising them. The first of these was her re-engagement with one of the paintings in the collection, A Moor by James Northcote (1826), which depicts American Ira Aldridge, the first Black actor to play a Shakespearean role in Britain, as Othello; Boyce had long ago become captivated by this beautiful portrait with its many layers of racial associations. The second interaction was facilitated discussion with the gallery’s curators and volunteers to create a safe place for the expression of their feelings about what the gallery collected and displayed; these conversations revealed particular unease about the representation of women as artists and subjects, with one painting—Pre-Raphaelite Brother J.W. Waterhouse’s Hylas and the Nymphs—crystallising these feelings. The third interaction was the

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invitation of performance artist Lasana Shabazz and drag collective Family Gorgeous to respond in situ to these two paintings, with complete freedom; as Boyce notes, ‘I don’t direct … they had two hours to do what they wanted … I brought in a film crew (the event became a six-screen film, Six Acts, 2018) but I never look through the camera: people are there to do what they want to do’. Her only caveat was that ‘no one got hurt and nothing was damaged’.88 The remaining interactions, of course, were those between all the actants, including live audiences, the broader community and the media.89 In this distributed performance, what is highlighted is the inter-relatedness of ideas and bodies, private and public, personal and political, and the fluidity of these relationships and consequent openness to change. It is a way of exploring how racism and colonial legacies are affectively embedded in our very bodies, and how they interact, that Boyce has developed over many years, starting perhaps with The Audition (1997), a participatory performance inspired by the afro wigs sold in a dress-up shop. The artist put out an open call to come and be photographed wearing an afro wig; accepting all comers, in just one day she made over 900 images which speak to an ongoing process rather than ‘decisive moments’. Instigating her ethos of letting participants respond as they will without direction beyond the initial proposition, Boyce recalls that ‘[t]here was lots of laughter, which was partly to do with an unconscious response to what is actually a deep historical joke … the afro as a fragment of the African body occupies both desire and parody’.90 This mobilisation of the carnivalesque is more pointed in Crop Over (2007) (Figure 2.4), a film/two-channel video whose ostensible subject is the Kadooment, the annual Barbadian festival and parade that celebrates the sugar cane harvest. However, the real subject is how meaning around these traditions is created, their reliance and effect on embodied experience and connections, and the challenges of bringing these relays of meaning to life for a contemporary audience, given the long historical arm of colonialism. As British art historian Allison Thompson describes, Crop Over comprises a series of ‘related performances, some real and some staged’ whereby the artist constructs a pseudo-documentary, pseudo-pantomime collage of events that subtly reveals the multiple dimensions of this creolized spectacle, deliberately building up layers of interpretation and presentation that seek to identify, historicize and problematize these cultural icons.91 The intra-action of actants, human and non-human, during the process of staging and filming this distributed performance reflects back on the ostensible subject: Boyce recalls that the participants in the project encountered the vestiges of colonial power in a very direct way, by despite having permissions, not being welcomed into the great houses of the plantocracy in either Barbados or the UK. For example, while filming on the enormous grounds of Harewood House in Yorkshire, which was funded by the slave trade, without explanation her project was denied access to the stately home, even though the estate had lent its financial support.92

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FIGURE 2.4

Sonia Boyce, Mother Sallys, Crop Over, 2007, two-channel video installation

Framing Boyce’s recent practice as a form of distributed performance—where notions of presence, embodiment and identity are set in motion by way of a network of people, places and ideas—allows us to intuit its significance as an innovative feminist form which destabilises and creates new meanings by combining carnivalesque pleasure and deep historical research. Boyce’s strategic use of the archive, including the museum, as a site for distributed or delegated performance whereby received knowledges are unsettled, is an important form of feminist practice. Australian performance artists Parachute for Ladies (a Sydney-based collaboration between Jess Olivieri, Hayley Forward and diverse community participants) create opportunities for members of the public to take part in choreographed or composed actions to occupy public space differently. In Canon (2012), for example, the artists worked for several months with the Queensland Art Gallery’s assistants, that group of museum workers who are often overlooked whilst in full public view. On the opening weekend of the show, the assistants became impossible to ignore: their every step was marked by their tap-shoes, culminating in a choreographed dance, and this distributed performance was a way of complicating the assumed power hierarchies endemic to the gallery experience. Australian Fijian artist Salote Tawale has also experimented with distributed performance as a way to render autobiography and identity differently. Inspired by Lorna Simpson’s Momentum (2011)—a performance in which the artist choreographed a group of young African-American dancers to evoke a childhood experience in which her identity formation was poignantly foregrounded—Tawale moved on from photographic self-portraiture and live performance to working with movement, music and the energies of

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others. Through a general call-out, Tawale assembled other artists interested to participate in her alternative biography, working with them to develop moves derived from the many ways dance has acted as a means for Tawale to ‘identify’: Hollywood musicals, traditional Fijian rituals and hip hop are just some of the sources. This loose choreography was then performed in various art spaces, the dancers wearing masks based on one of Tawale’s self-portraits, but abstract enough to be dissociated from specific identity; after the formal sequence, the audience was invited into the space to dance free form. Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art provided a charged space for Tawale’s performance, necessarily invoking the history of institutional critique by artists such as Andrea Fraser, whose bodily interaction with the architecture, discourses and collections of the museum raised challenging questions about power. However, in Tawale’s instance, this ‘critique’ was less evident. The site worked more to foreground Tawale’s playfulness about her own ‘identity’ as an artist in this space that some equate with artistic legitimacy. Rather than affirm her ‘identity’ and ‘agency’ as such, we could see the performance as a diffraction of both, an affirmation of the relational, mutually constitutive nature of bodies and identities, and an enactment of agency as flows and forces rather than as the property of an individual. US/Hong Kong artist Patty Chang is another artist whose practice has changed from using her own body in (video) performance, including to explore how Asian identities are represented,93 to developing forms of distributed performance that connect many different people and sites and thus take the work beyond identity and personal agency. Two recent projects, The Wandering Lake (2009–2017)94 and Milk Debt (2019–), capture this multifaceted way of working which initiates flows of interaction between human and non-human elements, with the artist’s body now understood as mediating in diffracted and diffuse ways. Chang’s concerns and artistic methods appear to mobilise the discourse of fluids and their associations with psychoanalytically-informed feminist re-readings of culture, including of course Luce Irigaray’s theories on the seeping, leaky qualities of the feminine. Irigaray’s convincing analysis of Western culture’s unacknowledged debt to the mother is also evoked: Irigaray argues that the patriarchal order exists by repressing dependence on the maternal origins of life and marking the masculine instead as originary. This order feeds off the blood (and milk!) of women and leaves the fundamental debt unpaid; the mother is banished from memory and remains unmourned, and the patriarchy continues its domination.95 To recognise let alone pay the debt, as some of Chang’s work seeks to do, would amount to a radical rewiring of the cultural order. In keeping with that theme of fluids and their capacity for infiltration and transformation, The Wandering Lake references the real-world phenomenon of a disappearing and reappearing body of water, namely Lake Lop-nor located in Xinjiang Province in Western China, which in the mid-twentieth century was the subject of a book of that title by a European explorer. The story of the wandering lake resonated strongly with Chang’s concerns about human-induced climate change, but also with her own personal experience of an ageing body. Her performance began with an attempt to visit the original site, frustrated by restrictions on access due to partisan clashes in the region.

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The artist adapted by developing surrogates to invoke the wandering lake in Newfoundland and Uzbekistan, remote locations that speak of the diverse politics of water. In the video Invocation for a Wandering Lake, Part I (2015), Chang performs a ritual bathing of a dead whale, beached off the coast of Fogo Island, historically a fishing village, where cod fishing, its life source, is now forbidden.96 What might at first seem like an attempt at inter-species resuscitation—whale-beaching events can be mitigated by human intervention to keep the animals hydrated and as calm as possible before towing them back out to deep water—becomes an act of mourning, and soon after, a performance of futility. These sentiments are echoed in Invocation for a Wandering Lake, Part II (2016), where Chang washes the hull of a boat marooned on dry land, a potent symbol of the wilful water theft from the Aral Sea in Uzbekistan. Of a related work, photo installation Letdown (Milk) 2017, made at a similar time, Chang writes, I travelled to the Aral Sea in Uzbekistan which lost over 70% of its water due to Soviet era irrigation projects. I travelled to the waterline while along the way pumping breast milk (I had recently given birth to my son) into empty fish tins and cups, and photographing them. Uzbekistan is a police state where photography of infrastructure is limited; the intimate and abject images of discarded breast milk stand in as a daily record and for an inability to represent and read a landscape.97 Which brings us to Chang’s most recent dispersed performance, Milk Debt (Figure 2.5), that like many of her works brings the viscerally felt female body to touch the natural and cultural landscapes ravaged by the patriarchal order. The work began when in the summer of 2018 the artist began to make lists of her fears—‘death’, ‘burning in a fire’ and ‘smog’—as a way of attempting to manage her anxieties in the face of intensifying climate and political crises. The following year, she reached out to people in Santa Monica, Los Angeles, New York and along the Texas–New Mexico border, all places where she had upcoming exhibitions, to share their everyday fears in English, Spanish or Mandarin, collating them in a process akin to temperaturechecking the mental and social wellbeing of these communities. Chang then began building a script from the interaction of multiple voices, multiple bodies and multiple places, which would be recited by lactating members of those communities, expressing their milk through breast pumps, in a combination of video and live performance.

FIGURE 2.5

Patty Chang, Milk Debt (Hong Kong), 2020, performance still and script excerpt

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When the global pandemic hit in March 2020 and ‘Safer at Home’ measures were instituted, Chang reopened her ‘call for fears’ as she adapted her performance to this new crisis.98 The result is a work with a vertiginously unstable tone, that lurches from the humour of absurdity and futility to the despair of the litany of anxieties where there is literally no end in sight. Breast milk is for most of us our first sustenance, but perhaps just as significantly, its flow from the body of the mother to that of the child is an act of primordial intimacy. The ‘let down’ that activates that flow is a complex feedback loop of hormones, affects and physical sensations triggered by the mother’s feelings of love and wellbeing, by nurturing or even erotic thoughts. In embedding the spectrum of our fears, from the most apparently banal to the most existential, in this elemental (and near universal) incarnation of care, Milk Debt viscerally captures the inter-relation between politics, nature and bodies, and posits something beyond identity and individual agency as the condition of social change. Chang designs her performances as networked flows of vital fluids—water, breastmilk, blood, urine99—foregrounding interconnectedness rather than autonomous action. The Philippine artist Eisa Jocson first made her mark through her individual virtuosic dance performances that draw on her training in ballet and pole dancing as much as in visual arts: she won her first pole-dancing competition in Manila in 2010. But it is those works that mobilise the experiences and expertise of other dancers, and the broader socio-economic forces that fan out through those bodies, that now define her practice. In particular, Jocson is interested in the service that Filipino workers render the world as domestic helpers, nurses and caregivers, performers, seamen and in hospitality, in how their bodily labour circulates and generates capital essential to those economies they migrate to, in order to sustain families back home. She explores this by focusing on bodies and how they move, teasing out the flows and gestures they create under pressure of capital: affective labour operating under a model of ‘indentured mobility’.100 As Philippine art theorist Patrick D. Flores puts it, ‘Jocson fleshes out the Philippine body as a body of entertainment that mediates the pedagogy of its source, mimics its habits, and complicates the nature of the body’. Jocson describes one of her transitional works as a series of public interventions that moves the practice of pole dancing to the public landscape using urban fixtures as sites for play. These architectures of control strategically placed as constraints and disciplinary objects are transformed into playground fixtures for movement exploration. The pole dance vocabulary is used as a starting point to initiate other possibilities of moving in a given site with urban fixtures … The public intervention intends to provide an alternative practice and a different perspective towards how our bodies move within the urban landscape.101 While the performances are structured as ‘solos’, indeed bear that title, her body becomes a conduit to explore the exploitation of other bodies, across all genders. Her

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FIGURE 2.6

Eisa Jocson, Macho Dancer, 2013, stage performance

solo triptych of Death of the Pole Dancer (2011), Macho Dancer (2013) (Figure 2.6), and Host (2015) powerfully captures this way of working. These pieces are generally presented as live performance in dialogue with incrementally added videos and soundtracks that reveal the artist’s process, including the labour of dancers who inspired her and passed on their moves.102 In the first work, Jocson embodies the sinuosity and dexterity of feminine pole dancing moves, but for the second she trained to inhabit the gestures of the unique Philippine ‘macho dancers’—usually young men from poor backgrounds who gyrate erotically in dedicated bars for male and female spectators to the power ballads of Mariah Carey or the soft rock of Metallica. The artist has honed her own body through deep study and respect for the original form and practitioners of macho dance, as captured in the video excerpts. Jocson explains, I often visited a bar called Adonis close to my house. This club became my macho school where I asked macho dancers to become my mentors … I copied the movements and practiced every day, recording myself on video and reviewing what needed to be improved … I learned a whole new body language—posture, stance, walk, gestures, gaze, ways of gyration and undulation—all through the physical quality of my body and my muscles.103 According to Flores, ‘Central in this project is the affective labour of man performed in the woman’s body. The latter undergoes both physical change and social habit, ultimately complicating the notions of the feminine and the macho.’104 The artist’s facility with the bodily language of another gender is uncanny, serving to

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foreground ‘the glorified and objectified male body as well as a performance of vulnerability and sensitivity’, and specifically to embody how this ‘economically motivated language of seduction … employs notions of masculinity as body capital’.105 Macho Dancer was extended through workshops that the artist ran under the guise of the fictitious Philippine Macho Academy, featuring instructional diagrams that broke down the moves; this was another way to embed the debt she owed to her own instructors in creating this work, a means to identify and valorise participants, as well as to propagate technique. The final element of the triptych, Host (2015), takes a similar research and other-focused approach to Macho Dancer, although this time the artist worked with a Filipina trans woman who choreographed and performed shin buyo (new dance) repertoires for hostess clubs in Japan. Jocson calls Host ‘a one-woman-entertainment-service-machine’. In a more recent series, HAPPYLAND (2017) which features the artist working with Filipino performance artist Russ Ligtas and dancers from Ballet Philippines, Jocson more explicitly develops forms of distributed performance to continue her investigation of the flows of Filipino labour and their implication in the performance of commodified happiness and fantasy. Here the focus is the central role Filipino performers play in the Disney empire throughout Asia and the Middle East, although always in supporting parts, never in the main roles which are reserved for specific racial profiles; it is this convention the artist upends with her inhabitation of the Disney Princess. According to Jocson, ‘The entrenchment of American culture in the psyche of the Filipino people has produced disciplined bodies suitable for affective labour in the happiness empire.’106 This theme and mode of working is further explored in The Filipino Superwoman Band (2019) created in response to the phenomenon of Overseas Filipino Musicians (OFM), renowned in Asia and the Middle East for their work in cover and show bands in the entertainment industry, poorly paid to perform and reperform mostly American pop songs. Jocson’s performance work, like Boyce’s and Chang’s, both addresses and mobilises flows, of bodies, energies, ideas, inviting improvisation from other forces including not only other performers and audiences, but elements, materials and environments. The fluidity of these practices—materially embodied but always contingent and beholden to inter-relationship—signals their feminist insights and their creative capacity to imagine and realise alternatives to current social and political arrangements. These forms of contemporary performance, whose subject is in part the debts they owe to co-authors of all kinds, take it beyond identities and identity politics as generally understood, to materialise other kinds of political gestures and moves. Pushpamala N (b. 1956, Bangalore), one of India’s most renowned and influential contemporary artists, also extends performance well beyond her own body and identity through her wide experimentation with media including sculpture, video and photography, and collaborations with artists from the performing arts, literature and film. In the mid-1990s, she began her exploration of the politics inherent to representational genres and conventions by creating tableaux and casting herself in various roles referencing film and literature—an approach perhaps not dissimilar to that of Cindy Sherman or Yasumasa Morimura, but rendered

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FIGURE 2.7

Pushpamala N in collaboration with photographer Clare Arni, Cracking the Whip (after film still of J Jayalalithaa c 1970s), 2004, photographic series

distinctive and biting through her specific cultural perspective, her humour and her maximalist, archival tendencies that take the work well beyond the ‘film still’. Native Women of South India: Manners and Customs (2000–2004) (Figure 2.7), a collaboration with photographer Clare Arni, remains one of the signature works of her expanded performance. The artists recreated an old-world photographic ‘fantasy’ portrait studio, complete with painted backdrops, costumes and props, to re-stage well known images of South Indian women from vast archives of visual culture. As art critic Susie Tharu describes, Goddesses, political satire, film stills, calendar icons, votive and high art images, anthropometrical and ethnographic records, news and documentary photographs and a host of other images and image formats are cited and wittily cross-fertilized.

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The artists create a virtual population explosion that mimics the mood, energy and genius of the visual vernacular in contemporary India.107 The work was organised in four series, each made according to a different genre of photography—The Native Types, The Ethnographic Series, The Popular Series, and The Process Series—and when exhibited comprised over 250 photographs alongside the material traces of the studio. This maximalism, together with the repetition of the artist inside every image, creates a sense of continuous flow, and the emphasis on the materiality of the still photograph (as opposed to film language) potentially allows for a stickier, more embodied reading. As critic Ajay Sinha argues, Pushpamala’s desire for ‘being inside the image’ can thus be demonstrated in the details of a transcultural flow of bodies and images, and fully distinguished from the spatial and cultural practice of modernist iconophilia. Her use of photography … will become significant for describing the temporality of cinephilic allure as a form of what Taussig calls ‘tactile knowing’ emerging from inside the image world.108 Pushpamala N reprised this approach in The Body Politic (2019), which extended the archive mined in Native Women of South India to the visual symbols that endlessly circulate to create notions of the nation-state.109 Here, Pushpamala N reenacts the various personifications of India throughout history, incorporating a broad sweep of images that takes in all those bodies actively performing their ideologically assigned roles. She even sneaks in some non-staged snaps from her youth where, while on an art school excursion, she (unconsciously) performs what the nation-state expects of her, namely assuming a superior, ethnographic gaze when interacting with the Bengali folk artists she encounters. This gesture testifies not only to the artist’s always self-reflexive methods, but also to her playfulness and sense of humour which enliven all her work. Pushpamala N’s work shows up the absurdity of the performance of nation and national identity through the hysterical repetition of certain visual symbols, many of which rely on restrictive constructions of femininity. This has been an ongoing preoccupation for many feminist artists as experts in the link between images and power, and in possession of the tools to intervene in the ideological workings of the visual archive. Like Pushpamala N, Australian Iranian artist Hoda Afshar deploys photography as part of a performative practice: her process generally involves staging and invention as she believes such ambiguity is closer to reality than documentary as a genre. Much of her work attempts to re-route stereotypes of national identity, including those that pertain to what it is to be Iranian or Middle Eastern in her adopted country. Afshar takes issue not only with the public discourse and popular visual culture that goes to construct these ideas, but also with the complicity of contemporary artists. As she notes when describing the motivation behind her performative photo series, Under Western Eyes (2013–2014) (Figure 2.8),

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FIGURE 2.8

Hoda Afshar, Westoxicated #7, Under Western Eyes, 2013–2014, photograph

When I looked at the sort of artworks produced by Iranian or Middle Eastern artists that typically gained visibility here, and in the West generally, I noticed here too that often they reflected the same stereotypes … So often in these works the theme is basically identical, having to do with the struggle of Iranian women, being caught between the forces of tradition and modernity, their sexual lives and identity. And in each case, this ‘identical struggle’ is so often communicated using a single trope: the veil.110 In that series, Afshar has fun playing up to the stereotypes: she mashes the ‘traditional’ veiled woman with worn-out symbols of Western ‘freedom’, including junk food, Disney, fashion and Hollywood stars, while also satirising the conventions of morally serious documentary photography with splashes of the frivolity and the irreverence of pop art. The result is witty eye-candy with a hard edge, as the artist explains: the constant production of images of the female Islamic subject (as at once suppressed and secretly fashion-loving or sexually free: an object of fear and fascination) is bound up with a cleverly disguised form of cultural imperialism.111

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Afshar’s performance of the processes of identity construction allows for an unmooring of symbols, a playful slippage that renders the stereotypes strange: they no longer ring true.

Conclusion: the limits of performance? In 2012, Suzanne Lacy observed that ‘the art world has not made peace with the difference between intimate noticing/recording/analysis (from a theoretical or aesthetic position) and activist systems of transformation. But they are trying to.’112 We propose that Lacy’s comment reiterates an old chestnut very well, but that reading performance through distributed agency and fluidity as activist force by reference to a suite of contemporary practice might problematise this artworld conundrum. We might think of performance, as in the work of artists we discuss, as foregrounding and modelling distributed, affective labour and flows, thereby offering alternatives to forces of individual, proprietorial agency. In mobilising ideas that promote relation and contingency through embodied experiences, these performances contribute to feminism’s current concerns.

Notes 1 Verging on what performance theorist Amelia Jones has described as an ‘art world obsession’: Amelia Jones and Adrian Heathfield, Perform, Repeat, Record: Live Art in History, London: Intellect Books, 2012, 13 2 For example, WACK!: Art and the Feminist Revolution at MoCA LA, 2007, Global Feminisms at the Brooklyn Museum, 2007, and elles@pompidou at Centre Pompidou, Paris, 2009–2011, all some 10–13 years ago, although in Australia the examples have only intensified in the past eight or so years, with the institutional surveying of feminism now well in the sights of a groundswell of Australian artists, writers and curators, and recent staging of major all-woman and feminism-themed exhibitions and conferences. These include: artist-run feminist collective and gallery LEVEL established in Brisbane in 2010 to ‘level the playing field’; The F Word, an ongoing series of workshops, forums and exhibitions exploring feminist art today in Victoria 2013–2014; the Cruthers Collection of Women’s Art first major exhibition and symposium on the contribution of women artists to Australian life and culture at the University of Western Australia, Perth, 2012; the Gallery of Modern Art Brisbane’s all-woman Contemporary Australia: Women, 2012; The Performance Space, Sydney’s Sexes, a month-long programme of feminist- and queerinspired work, 2013; exhibitions in contemporary art spaces’ and commercial galleries’ focus on feminist humour and intergenerational feminist dialogues, 2013–2015; Contemporary Art and Feminism’s platform for discussion and events based at Cross Arts Projects and University of Sydney, 2013–2015; Unfinished Business: Perspectives on Art and Feminism at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne, 2017–2018 and Know My Name at the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 2020–2021. 3 Eve K. Sedgwick, Touching Feeling, 2003 cited in Carolyn Pedwell and Anne Whitehead, ‘Affecting feminism: questions of feeling in feminist theory’, Feminist Theory, 13 (2): 115–129, 2012, 117. 4 Rosi Braidotti, in Rick Dolphijn and Iris van der Tuin (eds) New Materialism: Interviews & Cartographies, Open Humanities Press, 2012, 21–22. 5 The cornerstone of this theoretical innovation is a specific brand of situated epistemology (Donna Haraway, ‘Situated knowledges: the science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective’, Feminist Studies 14 (3): 575–599, 1988, 595, which

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15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23

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evolves from the practice of ‘the politics of location’ (Rich, 1985) and infuses standpoint feminist theory and the debates with postmodernist feminism (Harding, 1991) throughout the 1990s: Braidotti, interview in Dolphijn and Tuin, 2012, 22. Boler, 1999, ix cited in Pedwell and Whitehead, 2012, 121. Pedwell and Whitehead, 2012, 121. Berlant, 2010, 116 cited in Pedwell and Whitehead, 2012, 122. Ahmed, 2004, 10 cited in Pedwell and Whitehead, 2012, 124. As argued by Kelly Oliver in Subjectivity without Subjects: From Abject Fathers to Desiring Mothers, Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998. As argued by Cynthia Willett in The Soul of Justice: Social Bonds and Racial Hubris, Ithaca; London: Cornell University Press, 2001. Sedwick, Tendencies, 1993 cited in Jones and Silver, ‘Queer feminist art history: an imperfect genealogy’, in Amelia Jones and Erin Silver (eds), Otherwise: Imagining Queer Feminist Art Histories, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015, 31. Kate Mondloch, ‘The difference problem: art history and the critical legacy of 1980s theoretical feminism’, Art Journal, 71 (2) 2012, 18–31. Note subRosa’s point that certain performance ‘incorporates both interventionist tactics and representation’, for example, VALIE EXPORT’s Tap and Touch Cinema; Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece; and various works by Martha Rosler and Adrian Piper. subRosa, in Flanagan et al., ‘Feminist Activist Art: a roundtable forum, August 2005’, NWSA Journal, 19 (1) 1–22, 2007, 4. Dolphijn and Tuin, 2012, 87. Dolphijn and Tuin, 2012, 90; Haraway, 1988, 595; and Karen Barad, ‘Posthumanist performativity: toward an understanding of how matter comes to matter’, Signs, 28 (3): 801–831, 2003, 810. Braidotti Interview: Dolphijn and Tuin, 2012, 33. Braidotti Interview: Dolphijn and Tuin, 2012, 34. Braidotti Interview: Dolphijn and Tuin, 2012, 34. Karen Barad interview, Dolphijn and Tuin, 2012, 49. Barad interview: Dolphijn and Tuin, 2012, 50, referencing chapter 2 of Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning, Durham: Duke University Press, 2007. Mondloch, 2012, 31. As Rosi Braidotti argues in her interview with Dolphijn and Tuin, 2012, ‘Faith in the creative powers of the imagination is an integral part of feminists’ appraisal of lived embodied experience and the bodily roots of subjectivity, which would express the complex singularities that feminist women have become. Donna Haraway’s work (1997, 2003) provides the best example of this kind of respect for a dimension where creativity is unimaginable without some visionary fuel. … The pursuit of practices of hope, rooted in the ordinary micropractices of everyday life, is a simple strategy to hold, sustain and map out sustainable transformations. The motivation for the social construction of hope is grounded in a profound sense of responsibility and accountability’, 36. Lucy Lippard, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972, 2nd edn, Berkeley; Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996 (1st edn, 1973). Lucy Lippard, ‘The pink glass swan: upward and downward mobility in the art world’, Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics, 1 (1): 1977, 83. For example, as Jones describes it, the ‘power’ of Abramovic´’s work ‘came from the various ways in which they surprised, confused, pressured, or otherwise destabilized gallery visitors or (in the case of pieces done in public) unsuspecting members of the general public’: Amelia Jones, ‘“The artist is present”: artistic re-enactments and the the impossibility of presence’, Drama Review, 55 (1): 16–45, 2011, 40. João Florêncio, ‘Ecology without nature, theatre without culture: towards an objectoriented ontology of performance’, O-Zone: A Journal of Object-Oriented Studies, 1: 118–127, 2014. Jones, 2011.

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29 Jones, 2011, 24. 30 Jones, 2011, 33, citing Erika Fische-Lichte’s essay ‘Performance Art—Experiencing Liminality’ in Marina Abramovic´: Seven Easy Pieces, Milan: Charta, 2007. 31 Jones, 2011, 34. 32 Jones, 2011, 43. 33 Mechtild Widrich, Performative Monuments: The Rematerialisation of Public Art, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014, 16–17. Widrich builds her argument with a compelling analysis of VALIE EXPORT’s Action Pants: Genital Panic ‘performance’, 1968. 34 Widrich, 2014, 30. 35 Barad interview, Dolphijn and Tuin, 2012, 66. 36 Black Lives Matter protests. 37 Peggy Phelan and Helena Reckitt, Art and Feminism, London: Phaidon, 2001. 38 Lucy Lippard, From the Center: Feminist Essays on Women’s Art, New York: E.P. Dutton, 1976, 124. 39 Josephine Withers, ‘Feminist performance art: performing, discovering, transforming ourselves’, in Norma Broude, Judith K. Brodsky, and Mary D. Garrard (eds) The Power of Feminist Art, The American Movement of the 1970s, History and Impact, New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1994, 160. 40 Amelia Jones, Body Art/Performing the Subject, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998, 86. 41 As famously formulated by Michel Foucault, and captured in Michel Feher’s ‘The body is at once the actualiser of power relations and that which resists power’, it is ‘the shifting field where mechanisms of power constantly meet new techniques of resistance and escape’: cited by Amelia Jones, ‘The return of feminism(s) and the visual arts, 1970–2009’, in M. Hedlin Hayden and J. Sjoholm Skrubbe (eds) Feminisms Is Still Our Name, Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010, 24. 42 Jayne Wark, ‘Conceptual art and feminism: Martha Rosler, Adrian Piper, Eleanor Antin, and Martha Wilson’, Woman’s Art Journal, 22 (1): 2001. 43 Wark, 2001, 45. 44 Piper, fn 30 cited in Wark, 2001, 45. 45 Wark, 2001, 46. 46 Withers, in Broude et al., 1994, 160. 47 See Kristine Stiles, ‘Uncorrupted joy: international art actions’, in Paul Schimmel and Kristine Stiles, Out of Actions: Between Performance and the Object 1949–1979, London: Thames and Hudson, 1998. 48 Rebecca Schneider, The Explicit Body in Performance, London: Routledge, 1997. 49 See Jayne Wark, Radical Gestures – Feminism and Performance Art in North America, Montreal: McGill Queen’s University Press, 2006. 50 Review of Cherise Smith, Enacting Others: Politics of Identity in Eleanor Antin, Nikki S. Lee, Adrian Piper, and Anna Deavere Smith, 2011, by Jayna Brown, ‘Art performance and post-identity’, in Art Journal, 71 (2): 2012, 120–123, 120. 51 Brown, 2012, 120. 52 Brown, 2012, 121. 53 Cherise Smith, Enacting Others: Politics of Identity in Eleanor Antin, Nikki S. Lee, Adrian Piper, and Anna Deavere Smith, Durham: Duke University Press, 2011. 54 Brown, 2012, 122. 55 Such as Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gomez-Pena. 56 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak in Flanagan et al., ‘Feminist Activist Art: a roundtable forum, August 2005’, NWSA Journal, 19 (1): 1–22, 2007, 17. 57 Spivak in Flanagan et al., 2007, 17. 58 Margo Machida in Flanagan et al., 2007, 19. 59 Jones in Flanagan et al., 2007, 20; Heddon believes the continued occurrence of feminist autobiographical performance in more recent times underscores the fact that we are not in a ‘post’ feminist era, but that boundaries concerning identity and otherness, or normative and difference, remain to be explored. Heddon discusses the

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work of ‘mct’ (a Glasgow-based company with a gay and lesbian agenda), Bobby Baker, Tim Miller and Joey Hateley, who all worked with autobiographical performance in the 1990s–2000s. Deirdre Heddon, Autobiography and Performance: Performing Selves, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Jones, 2010, 46. An example is the staging of a major performance art event in Sydney, 13 Rooms, curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist (Serpentine Gallery) and Klaus Biesenbach (MoMA PS1), 2013. The project featured 13 live acts, many of which re-staged well known works from the ‘canon’ of performance art that were first performed decades ago, including those by John Baldessari, and featured current big names like Santiago Sierra, and Allora and Calzadilla, with the Australian iteration provided by Nicole Beaumont and Sarah Clark. It proved a popular success, with tens of thousands of attendees, especially given the reputation of performance art as a ‘difficult’ medium. Yet, despite the fact that two of the main drawcards for the event, Marina Abramovic´ and Joan Jonas, pioneered performance and video art in the context of emerging 1970s feminist concerns (whilst acknowledging that Abramovic´ has publicly distanced herself from feminism, claiming she never heard of the term before leaving Yugoslavia: MoMA forum ‘The Feminist Future’, 2007), the contribution of feminism to the history of these vital contemporary media was not acknowledged. Mirror Check (1970), for example, was arguably depoliticised in the theatrical setting and retreated to mere ‘spectacle of female’. For John Roberts, central to the appeal of failure to artists is, paradoxically, the agency it provides to ‘deflate the conjunction of power and knowledge’. That is, artists can insert themselves in discourses in which they have no social investment, where exposure to embarrassment has no consequences, and by performing their incompetence, ‘provide the conditions for critical reflection’, a counter to a ‘culture where the truths of the dominant order perform an inflationary ideological role of triumphant elucidation’. The deliberate performance of failure can work to foreground the intimate relationship between knowledge-creation and error, that is, the idea that the pursuit of knowledge is concerned with what doesn’t work, or is not known or understood. This can have a transformative and liberating effect, serving to ‘expose the linguistic and ideological self-protection that dominates everyday discourse’ to perpetuate conformist thinking and behaviour: John Roberts, ‘The practice of failure’, Cabinet, 5, Winter: 2001, 2, 40. See José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, New York: NYU Press, 2009. Other examples of feminist-inspired contemporary Australian performance art are relevant to this discussion, including works by the Sydney-based collective Barbara Cleveland, Melbourne-based Margaret Mayhew, and Sydney-based Inez de Vega. With this in mind, it is worth noting those pioneering neo-burlesque performers who enjoyed a precarious niche within the art world due precisely to the theatrical instability of their burlesque performance, such as Karen Finlay’s Yams up my ass (1986), I like to smell the gas passed from your ass (1986); and Annie Sprinkle’s Deep Inside Annie Sprinkle video (1981) and her later Post Porn Modernist Show (1989). These performances were also seen to draw upon the pioneering body work of Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece (1964), Maria Abramovic’s Rhythm 10 (1973), Gina Pane’s Azione Sentimentale (1973), Adrian Piper’s Food for the Spirit (1971), Carolee Schneeman’s Interior Scroll (1975), Hannah Wilke’s I Object: Memoirs of a Sugargiver (1977–1978). See Lucinda Jarrett, Stripping in Time: A History of Erotic Dancing, London: Pandora, 1997, 195. See Katherine Liepe-Levinson for discussion on the swerve of burlesque and how it ‘does in’ the audience in her Strip Show: Performances of Gender and Desire, London; New York: Routledge, 2002, 35. Williams quoted in Tracey Clement, ‘Justene Williams: dumpster diva’, Australian Art Collector, (46), October–December: 2008, 30. The term ‘delegated performance’ appears in Claire Bishop’s 2012 October article, where it is defined as ‘the act of hiring non-professionals or specialists in other fields to undertake the job of being present and performing at a particular time and a particular

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place on behalf of the artist, and following his or her instructions’: Claire Bishop, ‘Delegated performance: outsourcing authenticity’, October, 140: 2012, 91. Bishop argues that in post-conceptual art, in which the fabrication or presentation of the work is increasingly undertaken by hired labourers, the idea or concept of a work is the only indicator of artistic authorship. Heddon, 2008. As Dolphijn and Tuin, 2012 map it, Manuel DeLanda and Rosi Braidotti first started using ‘neo-materialism’ or ‘new materialism’ in the 1990s to distinguish a cultural theory that did not privilege culture but attempts to re-think conventional dualisms; it is a notion evoked in what Donna Haraway, in The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People and Significant Otherness, Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003, would call ‘naturecultures’ and what Bruno Latour referred to as ‘collectives’: ‘The transversality of new materialism’, Dolphijn and Tuin, 2012, 93. Karen Barad’s term, for example, in Meeting the Universe Halfway, 2007. Tim Ingold, Making: Anthropology, Archeology, Art and Architecture, London; New York: Routledge, 2013. See for example Luce Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference, transl. Carolyn Burke and Gillian C. Gill, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993. See for example Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994. Ingold, 2013, 94. Ingold, 2013, 94. Ingold, 2013, 95. Barad interview: Dolphijn and Tuin, 2012, 54. Barad interview: Dolphijn and Tuin, 2012, 54. Barad interview: Dolphijn and Tuin, 2012, 55. Barad interview: Dolphijn and Tuin, 2012, 68. Here Barad cites Derrida: ‘No justice […] seems possible or thinkable without the principle of some responsibility, beyond all living present, within that which disjoins the living present, before the ghosts of those who are not yet born or who are already dead’: Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International [1993] 2006, xviii. Barad interview: Dolphijn and Tuin, 2012, 69. Ingold, 2013, 97. Ingold, 2013, 95. It is arguable that Marina Abramovic´’s reorienting of her practice towards teaching the Abramovic´ Methods, in performances such as the Serpentine and Kaldor projects, could be interpreted as distributed performance. Those moments of contact with a facilitator—as they accommodated their energy to the audience’s in a slow walk, or tucked them in under a blanket in a way few people had experienced since childhood—were inklings of a form of distributed or diffracted performance, something other than the artist’s presence and agency, and the whole commodified spectacle that Jones has so vehemently taken to task. Boyce interviewed by Jennifer Higgie in Frieze, https://www.frieze.com/article/sonia -boyce-30-years-art-and-activism accessed 27 October 2020. This interview appears in the print edition of Frieze, June–August 2018, issue 196, with the title ‘Work to be done’. Laura Cassidy Rogers, ‘Sonia Boyce’, Short Guide, All the World’s Futures: 56th Edition of La Biennale di Venezia, Okwui Enwezor (ed.), Venice: Marsilo Editore, 2015, 202. Higgie, 2018. The term actant is used here in reference to Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network Theory: See Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social. An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory, Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. Higgie, 2018. Allison Thompson, ‘Sonia Boyce and Crop Over’, Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism, 13 (2): 2009, 148–163. Higgie, 2018.

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93 For example, Melons (at loss), 1998. 94 Patty Chang: The Wandering Lake, 2009–2017 shown at Queens Museum, 17 September 2017–18 February 2018. In collection of White Rabbit Gallery, accession number 2018.022. 95 See Irigaray, ‘The “mechanics” of fluids’, in This Sex Which Is Not One (transl. Catherine Porter with Carolyn Burke), Ithaca: Cornell University Press, [1977] 1985, 106–118. Also Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, ‘Feminist philosophy’, 2018, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/feminist-philosophy/ accessed 27 October 2020. 96 Barbara Pollack, ‘Patty Chang: Female body and ecosystems’, 2017, https://www. cobosocial.com/dossiers/patty-chang-wandering-lake/ accessed 27 October 2020. 97 Patty Chang, Let Down (Milk), 2017, http://www.pattychang.com/letdown-milk accessed 27 October 2020. 98 Santa Monica Daily Press, 14 May 2020: https://www.smdp.com/patty-chang-milkdebt-preview-screening/190944 accessed 27 October 2020. 99 Another pertinent work of Chang’s here is Glass Urinary Devices, 2016; vestiges of her hilarious travel across China where she peed into hand-blown, sculptural devices along the Great Aquaduct as a homespun ‘eco’ action. 100 Patrick D. Flores cites Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt on affective labour: ‘In discussing affective labor, I turn to Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt who define the term as “labor in the bodily mode,” investing in the intimacy of human contact and interaction in their book Empire. According to them, “what affective labor produces are social networks, forms of community, biopower.” They continue that in affective labor, “the instrumental action of economic production has been united with the communicative action of human relations.” Patrick D. Flores, ‘Affective labour and the Philippine body’, paper presented to panel on Bodies Politic for 8th Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, 2016; Obieg, (2): 2016, https://obieg.u-jazdowski.pl/en/numery/azja/affective-labor-and-thephilippine-body accessed 27 October 2020. 101 Eisa Jocson cited by Flores, 2016. 102 Keith Gallasch, ‘Liveworks: Tetsuya Umeda, Eisa Jocson: process & experiment’, Realtime, 1 November 2017, https://www.realtime.org.au/liveworks-tetsuya-umeda -eisa-jocson-process-experiment/ accessed 27 October 2020. 103 Marlyne Sahakian, ‘Macho macho woman: Interview with Eisa Jocson’, Art Asia Pacific, 23 April 2014, http://artasiapacific.com/Blog/MachoMachoWomanInterview WithEisaJocson accessed 27 October 2020. 104 Eisa Jocson cited by Flores, 2016. 105 Eisa Jocson interviewed by Sahakian, 2014. 106 Eisa Jocson on ‘2017 Happyland Part 1: Princess’, 2017, https://eisajocson.wordpress. com/2017-princess/ accessed 27 October 2020. 107 Quoted on Pushpamala N’s website: http://www.pushpamala.com/projects/nativewomen-of-south-india-manners-and-customs-2000-2004/ accessed 27 October 2020. 108 Ajay Sinha, ‘Pushpamala N. and the “Art” of Cinephilia in India’, in Christiane Brosius and Roland Wenzlhuemer (eds) Transcultural Turbulences Towards a Multi-Sites Reading of Image Flows, Berlin; Heidelberg: Springer, 2011, 228. 109 Catalogue notes for Body Politic exhibition (2019) at gallery Nature Morte: https:// www.naturemorte.com/exhibitions/thebodypolitic/ accessed 27 October 2020. 110 Hoda Afshar interviewed by Nur Shkembi in Artist Profile, (45): 2018 and online at https://www.artistprofile.com.au/hoda-afshar/ accessed 27 October 2020. 111 Shkembi, 2018. 112 Andrea Bowers, Suzanne Lacy, and Maria Elena Buszek, ‘“Necessary positions” in feminist art: a conversation’, Art Journal, 71 (1): 2012, 138–150.

References Barad, Karen. 2003. ‘Posthumanist performativity: toward an understanding of how matter comes to matter’, Signs, 28 (3): 801–831.

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Barad, Karen Michelle. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press. Bishop, Claire. 2012. ‘Delegated performance: outsourcing authenticity’, October, 140: 91–112. Bowers, Andrea, Lacy, Suzanne, and Buszek, Maria Elena. 2012. ‘“Necessary positions” in feminist art: a conversation’, Art Journal, 71 (1): 138–150. Braidotti, Rosi. 2002. Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming. Cambridge, UK; Malden, MA: Polity Press/Blackwell Publishers. Brosius, Christiane and Wenzlhuemer Roland, eds. 2011. Transcultural Turbulences Towards a Multi-Sited Reading of Image Flows. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer. Broude, Norma, Brodsky, Judith K., and Garrard, Mary D., eds. 1994. The Power of Feminist Art: The American Movement of the 1970s, History and Impact. New York: Harry N. Abrams. Brown, Jayna. 2012. ‘Art, performance, and post-identity’, review of Enacting Others: Politics of Identity in Eleanor Antin, Nikki S. Lee, Adrian Piper, and Anna Deavere Smith, edited by Cherise Smith’, Art Journal, 71 (2): 120–123. Bullock, Natasha, Cole, Kelli, Hart, Deborah, and Pitt, Elspeth, eds. 2020. Know My Name. Canberra: National Gallery of Australia. Cassidy Rogers, Laura. 2015. ‘Sonia Boyce’, in Okwui Enwezor (ed.) Short Guide: All the World’s Futures: 56th Edition of La Biennale di Venezia. Venice: Marsilo Editore. Clement, Tracey. 2008. ‘Justene Williams: dumpster diva’, Australian Art Collector, 46. Delany, Max and Kristensen, Annika, eds. 2017. Unfinished Business: Perspectives on Art and Feminism. Melbourne: Australian Centre for Contemporary Art. Derrida, Jacques. 2006. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International. Abingdon: Routledge. Dolphijn, Rick and van der Tuin, Iris. 2012. New Materialism: Interviews & Cartographies. London: Open Humanities Press. Fischer-Lichte, Erika. 2007. ‘Performance art—experiencing liminality’, in Marina Abramovic´, Nancy Spector, and Erika Fischer-Lichte (eds) Marina Abramovic´: Seven Easy Pieces. Milan; New York: Charta. Flanagan, Mary, González, Jennifer A., The Guerrilla Girls, Machida, Margo, Meskimmon, Marsha, Rosler, Martha, Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, subRosa, and Jones, Amelia. 2007. ‘Feminist Activist Art, a Roundtable Forum, August 24–31, 2005’, Feminist Formations, 19 (1): 1–22. Florêncio, João. 2014. ‘Ecology without nature, theatre without culture: towards an objectoriented ontology of performance’, O-Zone: A Journal of Object-Oriented Studies, 1: 118–127. Flores, Patrick D. 2016. ‘Affective labor and the Philippine body’, Obieg, (2), https://obieg.ujazdowski.pl/en/numery/azja/affective-labor-and-the-philippine-body accessed 27 October 2020. Gallasch, Keith. 2017. ‘Liveworks: Tetsuya Umeda, Eisa Jocson: process & experiment’, Realtime, 11 January, https://www.realtime.org.au/liveworks-tetsuya-umeda-eisa-jocsonprocess-experiment/ Grosz, Elizabeth. 1994. Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism. Theories of Representation and Difference. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Haraway, Donna. 1988. ‘Situated knowledges: the science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective’, Feminist Studies, 14 (3): 575–599. Haraway, Donna. 2003. The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People and Significant Otherness. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press. Harding, Sandra. 1991. Whose Science? Whose Knowing? Thinking from Women’s Lives. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Hayden, Malin Hedley and Skrubbe, Jessica Sjöholm, eds. 2010. Feminisms Is Still Our Name: Seven Essays on Historiography and Curatorial Practices. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

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Heddon, Deirdre. 2008. Autobiography and Performance: Performing Selves. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Higgie, Jennifer. 2018. ‘Work to be done’, Frieze, 196, June–August, https://www.frieze. com/article/sonia-boyce-30-years-art-and-activism accessed 27 October 2020. Ingold, Tim. 2013. Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture. London; New York: Routledge. Irigaray, Luce. 1985. This Sex Which Is Not One, translated by Catherine Porter and Caroline Burke. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Irigaray, Luce. 1993. An Ethics of Sexual Difference, translated by Caroline Burke and Gillian C. Gill. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Jarrett, Lucinda. 1997. Stripping in Time: A History of Erotic Dancing. London: Pandora. Jones, Amelia. 1998. Body Art/Performing the Subject. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Jones, Amelia. 2010. ‘The return of feminism(s) and the visual arts, 1970–2009’, in M. Hedlin Hayden and J. Sjoholm Skrubbe (eds) Feminisms Is Still Our Name. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Jones, Amelia. 2011. ‘“The artist is present”: artistic re-enactments and the impossibility of presence’, Drama Review, 55 (1): 16–45. Jones, Amelia and Heathfield, Adrian. 2012. Perform, Repeat, Record: Live Art in History. Bristol, UK; Chicago, IL: Intellect. Jones, Amelia and Silver, Erin. 2015. Otherwise: Imagining Queer Feminist Art Histories. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Latour, Bruno. 1993. We Have Never Been Modern. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Latour, Bruno. 2005. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Clarendon Lectures in Management Studies. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press. Liepe-Levinson, Katherine. 2002. Strip Show: Performances of Gender and Desire. Gender in Performance. New York: Routledge. Lippard, Lucy. 1976. From the Center: Feminist Essays on Women’s Art. New York: Dutton. Lippard, Lucy. 1977. ‘The pink glass swan: upward and downward mobility in the art world’, Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics, 1 (1): 82–87. Lippard, Lucy. 1996. Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972: A Cross-Reference Book of Information on Some Esthetic Boundaries, 2nd edn. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. MoMA. 2007. The Feminist Future: Theory and Practice in the Visual Arts, 26–27 January 2007. New York: Museum of Modern Art. Mondloch, Kate. 2012. ‘The difference problem: art history and the critical legacy of 1980s theoretical feminism’, Art Journal (New York 1960), 71 (2): 18–31. Muñoz, José Esteban. 2009. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, Sexual Cultures. New York: NYU Press. Oliver, Kelly. 1998. Subjectivity Without Subjects: From Abject Fathers to Desiring Mothers. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Pedwell, Carolyn and Whitehead, Anne. 2012. ‘Affecting feminism: questions of feeling in feminist theory’, Feminist Theory, 13 (2): 115–129. Phelan, Peggy and Reckitt, Helena. 2001. Art and Feminism. Themes and Movements. London: Phaidon. Pollack, Barbara. 2017. ‘Patty Chang: Female body and ecosystems’, https://www.cobosocial. com/dossiers/patty-chang-wandering-lake/ accessed 27 October 2020. Rich, Adrienne. 1986. Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose 1979–1985. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. Roberts, John. 2001. ‘The practice of failure’, Cabinet Magazine, 5, http://cabinetmagazine. org/issues/5/roberts.php

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Sahakian, Marlyne. 2014. ‘Macho macho woman: interview with Eisa Jocson’, Art Asia Pacific, 23 April, http://artasiapacific.com/Blog/MachoMachoWomanInterviewWithEisaJocson Schimmel, Paul and Stiles, Kristine. 1998. Out of Actions: Between Performance and the Object, 1949–1979. London: Thames & Hudson. Schneider, Rebecca. 1997. The Explicit Body in Performance. London; New York: Routledge. Shkembi, Nur. 2018. ‘Hoda Afshar’, Artist Profile, 5 July, https://www.artistprofile.com.au/ hoda-afshar/ Sinha, Ajay. 2011. ‘Pushpamala N. and the “art” of cinephilia in India’, in Christiane Brosius and Roland Wenzlhuemer (eds) Transcultural Turbulences Towards a Multi-Sites Reading of Image Flows. Berlin; Heidelberg: Springer. Smith, Cherise. 2011. Enacting Others: Politics of Identity in Eleanor Antin, Nikki S. Lee, Adrian Piper, and Anna Deavere Smith. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2018. ‘Feminist Philosophy’, https://plato.stanford.edu/ entries/feminist-philosophy/ accessed 27 October 2020. Thompson, Allison. 2009. ‘Sonia Boyce and Crop Over’, Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism, 13 (2): 148–163. Wark, Jayne. 2001. ‘Conceptual art and feminism: Martha Rosler, Adrian Piper, Eleanor Antin, and Martha Wilson’, Woman’s Art Journal, 22 (1): 44–50. Wark, Jayne. 2006. Radical Gestures – Feminism and Performance Art in North America. Montreal: McGill–Queen’s University Press. Widrich, Mechtild. 2014. Performative Monuments: The Rematerialisation of Public Art. Manchester, UK; New York: Manchester University Press. Willett, Cynthia. 2001. The Soul of Justice: Social Bonds and Racial Hubris. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Withers, Josephine. 1994. ‘Feminist performance art: performing, discovering, transforming ourselves’, in Norma Broude, Judith K. Brodsky, and Mary D. Garrard (eds) The Power of Feminist Art, The American Movement of the 1970s, History and Impact. New York: Harry N. Abrams.

3 FEMINISM AND THE PEDAGOGICAL TURN IN ART

Introduction [Radical pedagogy] … involves experimenting with listening at the verge, a practice that engages with the not-yet at the heart of learning [and] foregrounds how learning creates its own value.1

Most modern and postmodern artists would have considered the description of their work as ‘didactic’ to be a stinging insult. While such artists may have been pursuing a political or critical project that they hoped would engage others in seeing the world differently, to be accused of communicating a ‘message’ with the clarity of a moral lesson would have amounted to a failure of artistic vision, which ideally should remain beyond definitive interpretation. The opaqueness of modern or postmodern art, intended to confound the intellectual and aesthetic capacities of the viewer, was thought to be integral to its ‘advanced’ nature, to its contribution to new ways of thinking and being. So, how is it that contemporary art, at least in certain incarnations, overtly positions itself as didactic? How do we account for what has been called the ‘pedagogical turn’ in contemporary art—which has involved the use of workshops, archives, libraries, reading groups, and a whole pedagogical apparatus that parallels the academic mise-en-scène in non-academic settings, typically galleries, museums or other art spaces?2 We argue that feminist theory and feminist art allows us both to trace the development of this trend and to understand its currency. To begin with, feminism is a political project, propelled by a desire to change the psychic and social conditions of all subjects. Feminist art is by definition activist and has consequently sought to transform audiences beyond art world initiates. Feminism’s early discovery of the relationship between one’s very (private, individual) subjectivity and the public sphere shaped its political strategy and from the outset tied transformation to teaching. Feminist consciousness-raising was based around personal story DOI: 10.4324/9781003045175-4

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telling; it provided space for many perspectives and acknowledged the relative nature of knowledge and its interconnection with power. While activism is not reducible to education, understanding the workings of social and political forces and one’s implication within them, let alone being able to imagine alternatives, requires expanded and changing consciousness. It is this very fertile field— the intersection of political consciousness, activism and education—that has preoccupied several leading cultural theorists in recent years, notably Jacques Rancière3— as well as many artists, searching for ways to understand political action beyond the predominant Marxist framework of ‘revealing’ the ‘hidden truths’ of exploitation. On account of its many experiments over several decades in social and psychic change, this is a field to which feminism contributes many insights. The art of institutional critique, which is credited primarily to conceptual artists intervening in major institutions in a Marxist ‘revelatory’ mode,4 has complex feminist antecedents and fellow travellers that give us a more fulsome view of contemporary pedagogical practices. While undoubtedly Joseph Beuys’ lectures as performance and radical pedagogical experiments are an important historical antecedent here, they ‘simultaneously challenged and reinforced the patriarchal power structure of the academy and the authority of the artist’,5 rather than offered an entirely new model of art as pedagogy. By contrast, it might be that a new model of art as pedagogy begins to emerge in Suzanne Lacy’s early public projects (discussed in detail below), which created works through personal story and supportive listening environments and have been retrospectively described as ‘expanded public pedagogy’.6 Through such expanded practice, feminist work reinserted the body and the psyche into institutional critique, and along the way helped open up the role of the artist to the curatorial function. Interventionist curating—including the interrogation of sites well beyond the conventionally understood institution, such as domestic spaces—has become another hallmark of contemporary art practice, which feminist analysis can help us unpack. As exemplified in Lacy’s work, feminist pedagogy has long-standing links to extra-mural art activities including exhibitions, public programmes and art publishing, informal art networks, campaign work, online resourcing and debate in the blogosphere.7 The rise of participatory projects in recent years has sharpened the focus on the intersection of politics, action, education and art. As British curator and theorist Helena Reckitt has convincingly argued, ‘relational aesthetics’ or participatory art may have been promoted as contemporary art innovations by critics and curators, but many of its approaches were evident much earlier in feminist art;8 there is more common ground in those projects that seek to teach and change perspectives and behaviours than in less politically motivated relational art.9 Moreover, much feminist art itself could also be characterised as pedagogical in form, concept, content and process.10 The pedagogical turn in art has also entailed ongoing debates about art education: its role within a neoliberal, technocratic society,11 and its particular characteristics that may offer an alternative discourse of tacit, embodied knowledge grounded in the personal experience of making. The principles of feminist pedagogy resound in the current rhetoric around student-focused teaching in tertiary education, that seeks to move the paradigm of good teaching away from ‘the sage

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on the stage’ towards ‘the guide on the side’.12 Few educators, however, who pay lip service to this rhetoric openly engage with the activist, socially and personally transformative impulse at the heart of feminist pedagogy, or acknowledge its contribution to currently mainstream discourses. Or for that matter are cognisant of the many thousand year traditions of intergenerational woman-to-woman teaching embedded in the culture of First Peoples. As American feminist art theorist Amelia Jones points out, much of the new art history, contemporary theory and cultural studies owe a supreme debt to feminism because the ‘insights of feminism provided crucial impetus for the opening up of disciplines which ultimately resulted in the formation of new interdisciplinary strategies of interpretation such as visual culture studies’, as much in scholarship as in education.13 In addition to these points of connection between feminist ethics, social practice and broader educational currents, we suggest that the pedagogical turn in art also signals acknowledgement of a crisis in care and a call to re-value acts of care as central to social change and sustainable practices. That art can model and indeed enact care—of civic spaces and practices, of self, of others—through innovative forms of pedagogy emerges as a significant contribution of artists discussed here. This chapter will consider first the relationship between pedagogy and feminism in the context of challenges to the modernist curriculum that dominated art schools in the 1970s and early 1980s, and how these dovetailed with emerging ideas around critical pedagogy (such as those expounded in Paolo Freire’s The Pedagogy of the Oppressed and bell hooks’ Teaching to Transgress).14 It will then synthesise some of the philosophical resonances between critical pedagogy and feminism, including suggesting links between these and care. The chapter then analyses that strand of contemporary art that incorporates pedagogical elements and the ethics of progressive teaching. Our focus is on artists/collectives who have contributed innovative art pedagogies from a variety of perspectives, such as intergenerational relaying of knowledge for cultural resilience, ongoing ‘social sculptures’ like workshops and artist-developed toolkits that aim for innovative activism, and new takes on conventional teaching forms such as lectures and seminars. In keeping with the methodology of this book, the analysis will be grounded in the Australian experience but will also consider selected international practices that reflect similar concerns. Artists and artist groups discussed include Australians BC, LEVEL, Euraba Papermakers, Warmun community, Soda_Jerk, Emily Floyd, Alex Martinis Roe and Elvis Richardson, as well as Vanessa German (US), Anita Dube (India), Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook (Thailand) and Caroline Woolard (US).

Feminist pedagogy challenges the modernist art school In her 1994 book Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom,15 written in response to her own experiences as a university student and educator, American cultural critic bell hooks recounts how the institution’s assumptions about her own ignorance and the controlling power of the teachers she encountered dulled students’ enthusiasm for learning and resulted overwhelmingly in teaching obedience to authority. The only class where she felt engaged was in women’s studies, where

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the power dynamics were radically different. Here, the emphasis was on sharing rather than transmitting knowledge: the teachers exposed their vulnerabilities, acknowledged the students as full persons and valued their pre-existing expertise, and strove to connect what the students were learning to their overall life experience. One of hooks’ inspirations was the influential Brazilian educator Paolo Friere, whose The Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Fr. 1968) founded the practice of critical pedagogy. Critical pedagogy encourages the transformation of students from passive recipients to active knowers who see themselves as agents of social change. But it is also transformative for the teacher, who actively reflects about what and how they teach, and about how who they are affects how they teach, seeing teaching as part of a process of self-realisation. Feminist pedagogy remains a critical pedagogy that positions gender and power as central issues in education. Freire’s ideas dovetailed with feminist calls for changes to professional art education from the early 1970s. In Australia, for instance, they fostered learning and teaching methods that differed from the traditional atelier-model, the technical school’s ‘demonstrate-and-copy’ approach, and the informal ‘floor walk’ teaching style favoured in the new post-war art colleges. In hindsight, we see that these art institutions absorbed feminism’s critical pedagogy in a limited fashion so as to intensify the progressive, nineteenth-century principles of elementary art education, which had been modified to fit the pedagogic ethos of modernism with its experimental, studentcentred modern arts curriculum. Yet relations between the modern and the feminine have always been ambiguous. Importantly, feminist pedagogy was non-hierarchic and informal in structure, critically supportive and self-consciously experimental. It required from all participants ‘a high level of involvement, energetic and intelligent discussion and argument, tolerance for others’ ideas, and a conscious sense of development’.16 As such, feminist approaches were at best accepted as a correction to perceived discrepancies between institutional bearings and actualities. The most progressive school philosophy or pluralistic course structure may bear little relation to what actually takes place in the tutorial or studio workshop. At most, they form evaluative markers with which to identify problems and sketch ideal outcomes. In 1970s Australia, the structural problems facing women in art education were obvious. In 1976– 1977, Melbourne Women’s Art Register (WAR) member Bonita Ely and others researched the discrimination facing women in art education.17 These surveys drew attention to the fact that, historically, the vast majority of post-secondary art students and arts-crafts teacher trainees were women. However, men comprised most of the teaching staff, especially in tenured positions, at senior levels and in studio areas. Feminist criticism of staffing discrepancies soon broadened to address questions of assessment, teaching methods, curricula and resources, arguing that the post-war tertiary art education reforms were failing to meet fundamental requirements of the majority of students. Feminists adopted a two-pronged strategy: pedagogic experimentation and affirmative action. In relation to the first, the art school was posited as a hot-house for exploring the hitherto unrecognised and aesthetically challenging character of

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women’s art. Autonomous ‘Women and Art’ courses developed to meet student demand, such as Jude Adams’ 1975 thirteen-week course at Alexander Mackie College and the Workers’ Education Association in Sydney, and Ann Stephen’s 1976– 1979 course at Preston Institute of Technology in Melbourne.18 These were initially a corrective supplement within the tertiary art curriculum, and were strategically linked to curatorial experiments with inclusive all-women exhibitions to create available resources on women artists past, present and future.19 The 1975 exhibition and publication Australian Women Artists: One Hundred Years 1840–1940, the 1976 launch of LIP Magazine (the first interdisciplinary Australian feminist arts journal) and the Women’s Art Register Extension Project were much-needed research, development and teaching materials for the new women’s studies courses that in turn generated further archival activity in developing education kits on lost or forgotten women artists, writers, performers, architects, photographers and film-makers.20 Feminist teachers and students discovered that women artists’ work was largely invisible within the formalist language then spoken in the art school. Even the residual Romantic creed of spontaneity and self-expression—a guiding tenet of modernist pedagogy—proved difficult in that women students embodied and expressed the wrong kind of ‘self’ and from the wrong set of art materials. 1970s art pedagogy tutored modernist ideas of self-expression through limited art historical tropes of cultural alienation (Van Gogh’s ear), penetrating vision (Picasso’s piercing eyes) and gestures of selfactualisation (Pollock’s muscular arm). It was unfamiliar with the alienation of domestic labour or suburban neurosis, and could not cope with self-realisation through central core imagery, tampon installations or mothering performances. Feminine self-expression looked messy, formless and embarrassingly confessional, reflecting upon experiences and aspirations that did not fit the gendered, modernist stereotypes.21 Women and Art courses fostered ‘herstorical’ archival retrievals and used the consciousness-raising model of the Women’s Liberation Movement to invent a new artistic subject: ‘feminist art’. The slogan ‘the personal is political’ generated an open-ended artistic repertoire of self-consciously feminine imagery, feelings and responses. Specific visual and verbal forms such as diaries or family album work, personal testimonies, image analysis and related interpretive art commentary, skillsharing workshops, and the practical, confessional exercise of ‘doing the circle’ directed artistic self-clarification and valorised collectivity and emotional honesty.22 As Women’s Art Register organiser Bonita Ely observed, (The student) may want to express something very personal in their work. If they’ve had a baby, if they’ve had a miscarriage they may want to make a statement about that. If they’ve become involved in the cycles of nature and would like to express a very personal affinity through their menstrual cycle they could very well be made to feel embarrassed about such work and find that experience has to be sublimated or sidestepped.23 Feminist pedagogy engendered self-expressive techniques that re-routed the residual romantic role of the self-portrait (traditionally a privileged pathway to an

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existential and transformative truth about the human condition). Consciousness raising-style teaching collectivised and politicised this modern preoccupation with the self as Other. Students looked hard in the mirror and discussed how they felt themselves to be ‘ready-made’, pieced together from alien forms. Unsatisfied, they generated images of their mothers, sisters, friends and lovers in an impossible search for a more authentic self-reflection.24 Students working in a non-experiential mode resisted the anti-intellectualism of the studio and also faced institutional incomprehension. Complaints of feminist didacticism, theoreticism and obscurity became a perennial art school whinge, as the theoretical impetus of feminism contradicted the pedagogical priorities of modernism.25 The interdisciplinary feminist mix of art theory and studio practice enabled women to recognise their position within language and meaning, as students focussed on ideas of feminine subjectivity as a vector of competing, often contradictory discourses. These political and theoretical issues often determined open-ended, project-based ‘assessments’.26 This was a more radical version of what leading Australian conceptual artist Ian Burn had called the ‘self-externalisation’, or avant-garde ‘humanism’ of Conceptual Art.27 However, using art to share women’s fragmented social experience implied a social collectivity that challenged the liberal individualism of the formalist canon, the lone conceptualist gesture and the ‘do your own thing’ counter-cultural ethos of the time. In demanding that art education address the questions of women’s experience, feminism intensified the ambitions of the humanist, post-war education agenda. The integration of personal and professional identity, a holistic approach to learning and the encouragement of student cooperation was integral to women’s studies courses. When they emerged, these helped keep the comprehensive tertiary institution realisable (ironically, these very qualities are at the heart of the rhetoric of contemporary neoliberal university learning and teaching with its trumpeting of student-centred learning).28 Yet, the most commonly accepted model—the single semester women’s studies elective—was never anything more than a voluntary corrective and supplement to existing programmes, even amid ongoing calls for equitable employment opportunities and resourcing of women artists’ work. Despite this fundamental flaw, the introduction of elective courses was championed by feminists and (grudgingly) adopted by the art school because they were strategic and achievable. Demands for change in staffing quotas appeared unrealisable in the short term without Equal Employment Opportunity legislation, and the art school’s elective structure and liberal philosophy allowed room for the incorporation of a Women and Art course without undue or protracted conflict. Feminist pedagogy relied on the efforts of part-time/casual junior staff, curators and unwaged artists. Autonomous courses were valued by participants, yet have always been vulnerable to vagaries of part-time teaching budgets, timetabling and staffing. In 1978 artist and educator Jude Adams (Flinders University, South Australia) expressed a commonly held view that the one-off Women and Art course remained vulnerable to staffing changes and attitudes and was a limited vehicle for effecting structural changes within art education.29 Fellow traveller Suzanne Archer also held that gender studies electives

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should be transitional vehicles for change rather than permanent fixtures, due to institutional ghettoisation, reductive categorisation and stereotyping.30 In hindsight, the sporadic introduction of one-off women’s studies electives helped to realise the humanist orientation of the art school, which could then avoid broader structural change whilst marginalising its feminist constituency. Despite its pedagogical innovations, women’s studies remained a correctional supplement to the studio curriculum through to the 1990s, when it fell in art school popularity that has only recently been reversed.31 These early links between pedagogy, feminism and artistic practice form an important antecedent to contemporary pedagogical practices. Feminist art and artists have for many decades been key players in progressive interventions in education, in methodology and philosophy as well as content. It is a front of activism that is still far from achieving basic aims. A 2009 international survey of feminist pedagogy by British feminist art historian Katy Deepwell for the online feminist art journal n.paradoxa registered numerous comments regarding a sustained anti-feminist backlash within the budget-cutting tertiary art sector. Many reported difficulties encountered in ‘teaching to transgress’ in a managerial university environment that has prioritised a cost-effective, mass teaching core curriculum and that has increasingly standardised timetabling, resources, learning outcomes and assessment tasks.32 Notwithstanding its influence on contemporary art practice, history and theory, the tendency was for women’s studies to be taken as one form of specialisation, allowing other theoretical and studio areas to remain unaffected by feminist initiatives. The core curriculum of most art theory courses taught in the art schools Deepwell surveyed remained canonical surveys.33 Not surprisingly, in this context, feminist art was increasingly taught (if at all, or as a guest lecture) as simply another ‘ism’: a feral 1970s offshoot of conceptual art, carrying over through the 1980s in the work of a small handful of internationally known North American artists (Sherman, Kruger, Holzer et al.). With feminist art periodised as an art historical movement, students learnt to be careful of potential professional ghettoisation associated with ‘the F word’. At the same time, however, the Euroamerican feminist publishing field has supported ground-breaking art historical research on women artists past and present, ensuring that at least a few women artists appear in canonical art history surveys.34 Prices for the sale of women’s artworks have risen, and women artists are now regularly exhibited in significant if not equitable numbers.35 Art school faculty ratios have also changed as women gained access to teaching positions in studio areas; and while the number of women holding executive positions does not reflect the higher ratios of female students and practicing artists, at present 10 of Australia’s 19 tertiary visual arts schools or programmes are headed by women.36 Many women are employed as tertiary art educators, as they are in the public and private gallery and museum sector, but the glass ceiling stopping them from gaining top executive positions has not definitively shattered yet although it may be gradually cracking.37 Gender studies electives are creeping back into the art school curriculum on an ad hoc basis, prompting feminist art educators to take stock of earlier radical teaching practices and their marginalised institutional history.38 Whilst structural

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changes to the university art education sector remain hamstrung in a period of shrinking options for professional art education, feminists are voicing long-standing calls for mainstreaming feminism within a changing curriculum. In the short term, the gender studies elective still offers an important space for experimental and critical pedagogy within the institution, as a necessary relay to exciting feminist pedagogical explorations off-campus.

Feminist pedagogy: philosophies in practice The authors of the interdisciplinary ‘Feminist pedagogy’ (2002) distil its basic principles as: 1.

2.

3. 4. 5.

6.

a re-formation of the relationship between teacher and student, through a collaborative classroom where risk-taking is encouraged and where power is viewed as energy, capacity, and potential, rather than domination empowerment, where rather than integrating students into the logic of the present system, education becomes ‘the practice of freedom’, teaching students to deal creatively with reality and to learn to participate in transforming their world building community, where teachers and students build a trusting environment in which all members are respected and have an equal opportunity to participate privileging voice, through fostering multiple authorities, allowing different classroom dynamics and voices to emerge respecting the diversity of personal experience, through validation that promotes respect, enhanced empathy, better critical thinking skills, and broader understanding of truths challenging traditional pedagogical notions: such as that knowledge and teaching methods can be value free. Feminist teachers challenge the origins of ideas and theories, the positions of their promoters, and the factors influencing how knowledge comes to exist in its present form.39

We see embedded in these not only the legacies of earlier feminist experiments in political consciousness raising, but also many current philosophical trends motivated by intersectional equity, environmentalism and the desire for new ways of doing politics, such as Félix Guattari’s ‘three ecologies’ and Jacques Rancière’s notion of ‘the ignorant schoolteacher’.40 We also see here some of the fundamentals of the ethics of care, for example: the need to move from applying generalised standards of what is just to individual subjects, towards understanding people’s fundamental interdependence; the need to recognise that people deserve consideration in proportion to their vulnerability; and the need to focus on specific and detailed knowledge (rather than generalised assumptions) to determine how to safeguard and promote the interests of those involved.41 The term ‘feminist pedagogy’ itself is often credited to American feminist artist and arts education pioneer Judy Chicago. Chicago’s programme introduced ‘circlebased pedagogy’ which combined the consciousness-raising circles the women’s movement had borrowed from Mao Tse-tung with managed group dynamics.42

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Chicago’s key pedagogical strategies in these group sessions became personal narrative and collaboration,43 strategies that led many students to ‘enact’ their experiences, and their trauma, through rituals and story telling. American artist Suzanne Lacy called this ‘therapeutic theatrical exercise[s]’ but of course it would later be recognised as pioneering forms of performance art.44 As later scholars have recognised, performance offered the raw material of body and lived experience to the artist, but also—through body-to-body relations—allowed a greater sense of identification with viewers: the optimal match between the personal and the political.45 This identification with viewers opened out performance to the public realm more broadly, including the media-sphere which other forms of feminist activism were beginning to leverage. Such steps were creating a new kind of art spectator, a ‘social viewer’, as British feminist art historian Griselda Pollock put it, who ‘resists the “specularity” of the sexualized representation of women … and assumes the “position of the [artwork’s] imagined partner”’.46 Lacy and Leslie Labowitz’s Three Weeks in May (1977) is widely recognised as an influential innovation in feminist art pedagogy in its creation of diverse and numerous ‘social viewers’. By situating the work in non-art, public spaces and caucusing for many months to articulate a range of organisations with a stake in Los Angeles’ alarming rape statistics, Lacy and Labowitz’s ‘social viewers’ included the perpetrators of sexual violence against women, Los Angeles citizens whose attitudes about sexual violence against women ranged from outrage to indifference, as well as survivors of sexual assault. Artfully set up ‘zones of interperformance’ that tallied the instances and locations of sexual assaults in real time aimed to initiate ‘processes of collective recovery and political empowerment’47 and ultimately to ‘influence cultural attitudes and transform stereotypes’48 by making possible ‘empathetic connections among individuals, whether artists, police, hotline counsellors, self-defence instructors, politicians, or the women who shared their stories about rape’.49 In addition, the work’s pedagogical force reached out into media stories—which ironically served to highlight the media’s default inattention to sexual abuse—as well as into more intimate spaces within gallery walls where visitors could find safe circles in which to share their stories of abuse. Three Weeks in May hence operated on at least three levels—public civic space, the media, interior narratives—three key platforms for ‘restructuring visual reality’ and delivering feminist pedagogy.50 Lacy, informed in part by Chicago’s Feminist Art Program at the California State College at Fresno and the California Institute of the Arts (Cal Arts) in Los Angeles, took the activism–feminism–pedagogy relationship into innovative terrain whose influence resonates strongly today. As British feminist art theorist Katy Deepwell argues, Lacy integrated education as a key element of ‘new genre public art’, and in so doing contributed to our understanding of contemporary art as pedagogical.51 As contemporary artists engage in ‘expanded public pedagogy’, Lacy’s tools have become a classic lexicon.52 Her own influences are significant, as they again remind us of the intimate links between feminist philosophies and politics and the genealogy of contemporary art. In particular, it was Lacy’s close association with Alan Kaprow which she herself credits with equipping her with certain ideas that she

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repurposed towards feminist performance and new genre public art. For example, ‘happenings’ modelled how art could become politically meaningful by engaging ‘directly in life’, how it could demand direct audience response, and ‘erase the barrier between artwork and viewer’, and in doing so, find its place ‘on the streets, in the community, and in other alternate spaces’ where bodies could participate, through art, in processes of healing.53 And, of course, in the processes of learning. Feminist pedagogy demands change and does so in a manner that accents our shared embodiment, through voice, laughter, movement, touch and pleasure. One of the driving agents of feminist pedagogy is embodiment: the assertion that, as British Australian feminist theorist Sarah Ahmed puts it, ‘Knowledge cannot be separated from the bodily world of feeling and sensation; knowledge is bound up with what makes us sweat, shudder, tremble, all those feelings that are actually felt on the … skin surface where we touch and are touched by the world’.54 Feminist pedagogy foregrounds the generative intersections between performance and teaching: improvisation, voice, gesture, movement and interaction produce us as teachers, students and agents in the world.55 The teacher’s body has long been a site of critical consideration. For example, in Pedagogy: The Question of Impersonation (1995) American feminist theorist Jane Gallop observed that the classroom’s performativity constitutes and locates teacher and student bodies in a political, social and political context.56 Approaching teaching as performance allows us to valorise different forms of knowing that emphasise the active, hands-on participation and practical connection of ‘knowing how’ and ‘knowing who’ as against the empirical observation and critical analysis mode still dominant in the academy, that is, ‘knowing about’. Teaching is a performance art; like a performance, it is composed of elements such as script, enactment, improvisation, audience, role, expected effect. As American performance studies scholar Richard Schechner observes, performance takes place as action, interaction and relation.57 This insight provides an alternative to seeing teaching as a science: research-based evidence; or medical practice: diagnosis of student error treated by guidance; or as technology, that is, a combination of strategies. Approaching teaching as performance invokes staging and suggests that it can be re-staged, staged otherwise, to produce different effects. To approach teaching and learning as performance means to emphasise phronesis rather than techne and episteme, in Aristotle’s model, that is, teaching as practical reasoning through actions, as opposed to teaching as technical knowledge of self-contained strategies and universal knowledge of science.58 The capacity of the arts to connect viewers bodily, sensorially, to the experience of others and loosen the imagination for seeking alternative ways of being, or more specifically to highlight the embodied nature of historical inquiry, has been increasingly recognised.59 The arts have been credited with facilitating participants to explore collective and embodied ways of knowing in ‘becoming aware of their own power as cultural maker and (re)makers’.60 Feminist pedagogy intersects here with critical race theories and indigenous epistemologies, developing approaches that attempt to reconceive the hierarchised dichotomy between reason and emotion, thought and feeling, culture and nature, East/West and North/South, and in

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so doing not only reveal social structures and inequity, but imagine new ways of relating.61 Many new social justice-based approaches draw on feminist pedagogies such as story-telling, seeking shared vulnerability, and speaking from embodied specificity, to challenge the status quo and provoke change by refiguring dominant discourses, subjectivities and institutional structures.62 For example, feminist pedagogy scholar Elizabeth Ellsworth asks, ‘What might be possible and thinkable if we were to take pedagogy to be sensational?’63 In her interrogation of critical pedagogy, Ellsworth argues for the need to move away from ‘reason’ and undermine the expectation of a voice of authority with privileged access to authentic experience or appropriate language.64 Feminist pedagogy as embodied and relational is not confined to the initial event: it becomes ongoing, lived through the body, as the different encounters and configurations of power and knowledge become impetus for experiment and exploration. Such pedagogy may entail tactile making, such as knitting in the work of Canadian artist, curator and educator Stephanie Springgay, who suggests ‘knitting [is] an active reworking of embodied experience [that] involves pedagogies of touch’65 where knowing is constantly interrupted and deferred ‘by the knowledge of the failure-to-know, the failure to understand fully, once and for all’.66 As Springgay argues, shifting the terms of representation, knitting and all of its tensions and contradictions may eventually produce transforming ideas—ideas that may work toward thinking about the world relationally, where ‘the goal is not to undo our ties to others but rather to dis-entangle them; to make them not shackles but circuits of recognition’.67 Unsettling and rupturing the limits of normalcy and representation, pedagogies of touch help us ‘get underneath the skin of critique … to see what grounds have been assumed, what space and time have remained unexamined’.68 To be relevant, responsive and critically engaged, pedagogy needs to be thought of as something in the making, as an embodied, experiential and relational process that is irregular, peculiar or difficult to classify only when viewed from the centre of dominant educational discourses. This positions feminist pedagogies somewhere in between ‘dangerous dialogues’ that test discourses of normalcy69 and practices of care that underline relational acts of attentiveness, responsibility, competence and responsiveness.70

Contemporary debates on art as pedagogy and the debt to feminism The principles of feminist pedagogy—including how they were developed by the influential work of Lacy through creation of a new ‘social viewer’ and multiple platforms for artwork that included private and public spaces—are also evident, although not necessarily avowed, in several recent discourses that attempt to reimagine politics to address contemporary challenges. For example, feminist pedagogy, with its accent on shared knowledge, participation and the validation of personal experience, resonates with the critique of predominant modes of political art by philosopher Jacques Rancière. His well-known Emancipated Spectator extends the argument of his earlier book The Ignorant Schoolmaster, in which he challenges

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us to consider equality as a starting point in education rather than a destination, and urges us to channel the equal intelligence that all possess to facilitate intellectual growth in multiple directions.71 The principles of feminist pedagogy are also thoroughly threaded through Felix Guattari’s ‘three ecologies’ and Irit Rogoff’s ‘academy as potentiality’, both approaches privileged in recent creative arts educational contexts.72 Rancière is often heralded as ‘dismantling the master/student (or actor/spectator) hierarchy of the traditional educational structure’, and thereby setting up ‘new conditions of possibility for the production of knowledge’.73 He proposes that pedagogy takes place not when knowledge is imparted, but when a kind of self-esteem is awakened in the student, particularly those excluded from privilege.74 Focusing on the book as the mediating object between teacher and student, teaching becomes ‘active’ when the book liberates a dormant capacity for independent thought and students regain some nominal autonomy and agency.75 How far is this from the pedagogy of the oppressed and concurrently developed feminist pedagogies? Rancière’s key contribution is generally conceived as the ability to cut through the impasse of politically motivated art which sought primarily to ‘activate’ the ‘passive’ viewer produced by the society of the spectacle. As Israeli art historian Vered Maimom suggests, ‘What is implied in his argument is that the very project of “activating the viewer”—which is the condition for the formation of community—might hinder the possibility of thinking about what constitutes that community and, by extension, politics.’76 That is, it is not a question of revealing the secret working of power, or ‘raising awareness’ of injustice and inequity, but of radically changing what is sayable, who is visible, in the discourses of power. And this requires a kind of pedagogy that moves beyond any ‘rational’ notion of ‘common sense’ to create new realms of intelligibility and visibility with radically different creators. In counter-distinction to the now familiar form of political art whereby the artist takes the role of ‘activating the viewer’ and which serves to perpetuate inequality, Rancière campaigns to radically change those who participate in the community of knowledge and the terms of that participation beyond ‘rational communication’.77 What we see in the ‘return’ of the imaginary and fictional is an effort to reconsider appearance not as that which conceals ‘facts’, but as a productive mechanism that enables processes of subjectivisation beyond ‘empirical’ counts.78 For fictionalised and spectacular enactment are necessary to reimagine community. The problem is not one of representation, of indicating membership of a marginalised group, but of becoming a political subject.79 It is ‘enforced consensus over imaginary collective identities (“axis of evil” versus freedom and democracy) that engenders real violence’, so that critical practices need to ‘explore … the specific materiality of the imaginary and its forms of operation as these are constitutive of social formations’, rather than ‘continue searching for the “real” telepathic community’.80 American cultural theorist Grant Kester has questioned how radical Rancière’s approach really is. While he casts himself as a ‘champion of subversive modes of reading and viewing’,81 Kester argues his proposition differs little from traditional forms of ‘aesthetic education’, for what is ultimately promoted is reflective insight

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where readers are ‘dependent on their experience of the book to bring them out of this deluded state’, rather than newly created forms: The decisive form of agency is no longer creative in the traditional sense (the capacity, for example, to bring new forms into existence) but, rather, the ability to provoke reflective insight. This insight itself becomes the locus or content of creative practice.82 This, Kester says, retains key elements of traditional ‘aesthetic education’, namely the ‘bringing-to-consciousness of the unenlightened by an advanced cadre of artists and poets’.83 While there is some merit in Kester’s objection to Rancière’s emphasis on ‘the book’ and the process of critical reflection—even from positions of conventional ‘ignorance’ which bring to bear different criteria of value—as not radical enough, Rancière’s valorisation of the transformative power of aesthetic knowledge and its inclusive, democratic impulse certainly corroborates feminist pedagogies. At the heart of Rancière’s argument is imagined alternative ways of knowing and learning which take us beyond the uncovering of hidden ideological predispositions, and where the embodied aesthetic experience plays a key role. Another perspective to consider is critical theorist Felix Guattari’s notion of the three ecologies—environmental, social and mental—as a way to reconstitute social and individual practices away from what he perceived as the dead-end of psychoanalytically inspired post-structuralist approaches and strategies.84 These, Guattari argued, with their legitimacy derived from scientific discourses, have more affirmed the status quo than offered future alternatives, by separating out the mental, social and environmental spheres, and by their inability to think ‘transversally’. The three ecologies are underpinned by a different logic, not ‘that which makes possible the intelligibility of discursive acts’ but rather ‘the logic of intensities, the logic of selfreferential existential assemblages … . not of totalised human subjects, but of part objects’.85 Such a logic is one of process and movement, which seeks to grasp existence ‘in the very act of its constitution’ whereby it breaks with the totalising frame and manifests as ‘processual lines of flight’.86 Guattari elaborates that ‘when expressive rupture takes place, repetition becomes a process of creative assemblage, forging new incorporeal subjects, abstract machines, and universes of value’. He continues: The hope for the future is that the development of the three types of ecological praxis … will lead to a redefinition and refocusing of the goals of emergency struggles … let us hope that ecological, feminist, and anti-racist activity will focus more centrally on new modes of production of subjectivity … on modes of knowledge, culture, sensibility, and sociability … whose source lies in incorporeal systems of value.87 Guattari argues that these interconnected spheres—social, mental and environmental—need to be addressed at the same time to confront ‘capitalist power on the mental ecology of daily life, whether individual, domestic, conjugal, neighbourly,

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creative, or personal-ethical’.88 He calls for dissensus, for ‘the singular production of existence’ to counter capitalism’s ‘massive subjective aggregates which it hooks up to notions of race, nation, profession’. So social ecology needs to activate isolated and repressed singularities, to promote ‘new solidarities … a new gentleness’, and to facilitate the coexistence of singularities rather than the Marxian resolution of opposites.89 Guattari observes that the new logic has affinities with that of the artist: it is responsive, willing to follow a work through sudden changes and to ‘reevaluate the ultimate goal of work and human activities in terms or criteria other than those of profit and productivity’.90 Ultimately the need is for new systems of value, ‘of profitability in the social and aesthetic sense, of the values of desire etc.’91 Guattari relies on Walter Benjamin’s distinction between information and story telling to wrap up his point: story telling does not aim to convey the pure essence of a thing, like information or a report. It sinks the thing into the life of the story teller in order to bring it out of him again.92 ‘Ordinary methods of education’ are not up to a values revolution, Guattari contends, but pedagogy is critical to such fundamental change.93 Guattari’s call to action was taken up by SenseLab, an interdisciplinary and international research institute based at Concordia University, Canada, which founded the Three Ecologies Institute. This current, practical application of the three ecologies to university education is of particular interest given its embrace of long-standing principles of feminist pedagogy: collaboration, event-based, self-organisation, live interaction, ‘performative as an improvised dance’, with the desire to recover education as a ‘realm for creative exploration of personal and collective potential and free inquiry into fundamental questions of life and values’.94 It also involves risk of the unknown and uncertainty, and the possible disorientation and demoralisation that may result, hence can only thrive with the creation of safe spaces. To nurture this, the Institute emphasises ‘finely honed techniques of relation’, ‘collective techniques, of care and conviviality, of concern for the collectivity of the event of learning’: The traditional role of teacher or professor will be inflected toward that of the facilitator. The facilitator sets in place initial conditions to jump-start the process and accompanies its unfolding as guide, coordinator, or orchestrator.95 One of the founders of SenseLab, Canadian cultural theorist Erin Manning, elaborates in her ‘10 Propositions for a radical pedagogy, or how to rethink value’,96 which riffs heavily off Guattari: Learn to listen from the middle of the many conversations … Value what is in excess of curriculum … Value is often allied to what can be articulated. What of the forces in experience that are felt but remain ineffable? What of other ways of expressing that defy articulation?97

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The accent is on embodied relation, on listening with the body and with movement, tuning into that ever-changing energy between beings so as not to land on the predetermined and the evident, but to remain open to the possible: A practice of collective learning is about the movement of thought, engaging thought at the immanent limit where it is still fully in the act … In study, what we seek is not the homogenization of thinking-doing but the creation of conditions for encountering the operative transversality of difference at the heart of all living.98 Again, riffing off Guattari and feminist pedagogy (albeit not openly), in Academy as Potentiality, British curator and theorist Irit Rogoff argues for an ‘understanding of “education” as a platform that could signal a politics’.99 She puts forth the concepts of potentiality and actualisation in an attempt to rethink the academy as a space for speculation and experimentation, for the invention of subjects as they emerged and were recognised, rather than for the manufacture of knowledge products. For Rogoff, the museum can become a site for experimental pedagogies to counter ‘the professionalization, technocratization, and privatization of academies that result from the Bologna reforms and … the outcome-based culture that characterize[s] higher education in Europe today’, and indeed in universities around the world.100 In Rogoff’s schema, potentiality means ‘a possibility to act that is not limited to an ability’, while actualisation ‘implies that certain meanings and possibilities embedded within objects, situations, actors, and spaces carry a potential to be “liberated.”’.101 Both concepts operate within ‘a complex system of embeddedness – one in which social processes, bodies of learning, individual subjectivities cannot be separated and distinguished from one another’.102 That is, radical pedagogy is relational and responsive, concerned more with ‘distribution and dissemination’, with the ‘ability to formulate one’s own questions’, than with content.103 In an earlier text where she discusses creative approaches, Rogoff explains that she finds ‘the notion of “without” a very productive one because it intimates process rather than method and alludes to a condition in which you might find yourself while doing work’.104 This ‘without’ resonates with Ellsworth’s suggestion that relational pedagogy demands a ‘withdrawal’ of self, to disengage from assumed embodied knowledge and to open up to re-articulation.105 A pedagogy that is inter-embodied promises ‘unlimited open-endedness’, ‘an indeterminate, unspecifiable future’.106 Rogoff also casts withdrawal as productive, in particular in the way collectivity is nurtured when we ‘look away’ (or withdraw) from the objects of our own fascination and hence free up the space to imagine new forms of engagement constituted with, in and through the body.107 Rogoff is careful to distinguish the relational and open pedagogy necessary to change the terms of political engagement with ‘pedagogical aesthetics’ in which, a table in the middle of the room, a set of empty bookshelves, a growing archive of assembled bits and pieces, a classroom or lecture scenario, or the promise of a conversation have taken away the burden to rethink and dislodge daily those dominant burdens ourselves.108

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Rather, the kinds of radical pedagogical practices might include projects such as the Copenhagen Free University (founded in 2001), Playshop (2004), the Momentary Academy (2005), the School of Panamerican Unrest (2006–2007), New York’s Dalton and Powhida (#class, 2010, NYC Winkleman Gallery), Vidokle’s unitednationsplaza (2006–2007), and Night School (2008–2009), are all a far cry from the Beuysian model of pedagogical art.109 The Copenhagen Free University, for example, founded by Danish artists Henriette Heise and Jakob Jakobsen in their apartment, set up a free space for learning without teachers, only co-participants, for the communication and distribution of ideas.110 Ellsworth asserts that contemporary art creates potentialities and possibilities in new spaces and unanticipated contexts. As a ‘corporeal pedagogy’, contemporary art puts ‘diverse and occasionally warring ideas, identities, sensibilities, traditions—and people—into relation with each other, actually or imaginatively’,111 and thus is imbued with the potential for creating new forms of corporeality, embodiment, knowing and being.112 The principles of feminist pedagogy and the insights and strategies of feminist art are threaded through these approaches. Now we turn to how contemporary artists, grounded in the Australian experience but with consideration of certain international counterparts, have enacted and interpreted this pedagogy.

The pedagogical turn in art: feminist approaches from Australia and beyond Many of the projects that represent the pedagogical turn in contemporary art have not adequately honoured their feminist antecedents. Hence here we focus on a range of recent artists who unambiguously merge their feminist activism and their pedagogy, mixing curatorial, pedagogic and inter-disciplinary practice. Semi-performance, semiinstallation, sometime-Happening, curatorial laboratory: feminist learning is now elaborated in a variety of social spaces as ‘pop-up’ pedagogy which temporarily collapses the formal divisions between creative practice, performance, display and activism. These off-campus spaces of feminist invention and conversation resemble trans-generational roundtables to assay second, third and beyond wave ideas and strategies under very different art world conditions to those of the 1970s. The ‘guide by the side’ teacher–student relation is now more likely to look like the artist sitting next to you on the picnic rug: a designated space for listening, talking, eating, making, laughing. Thus, new knowledge may be forged by social relations, creating situations beyond what can be conceptualised in advance. Moments of learning arise when temporally specific communities emerge as people come together not by any subjective affiliation but with a shared investment in, or curiosity about, thinking things differently.113 In creating a new ‘social viewer’, can a different subject be produced? In a variety of ways this is the question driving the work of Australian artists BC, LEVEL, Euraba Papermakers, senior women artists of the Warmun community, Soda_Jerk, Emily Floyd, Alex Martinis Roe and Elvis Richardson, and international counterparts Vanessa German (US), Anita Dube (India), Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook (Thailand) and Caroline Woolard (US). We focus on these artists, grounded in our lived experience in

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Australia, because they bring feminist insights, values and methods to pedagogical practices through various tactics: they create spaces for unexpected pedagogical encounters through gestures of hospitality; they playfully reinvent the lecture/seminar; they affectively and aesthetically pass on intergenerational knowledge and protection; and they design value-changing, privilege-busting toolkits. Inspired by playground design, brightly coloured and beautifully finished, Melbourne-based Emily Floyd’s installations, often in public spaces, conflate play, pedagogy and art to loosen up the viewer’s disposition to learn. The appealing material presence of these objects and the physical interaction they invite are key to this conceptual loosening, or ‘active learning’ to use radical educator Rudolf Steiner’s phrase. As Australian critic Wes Hill observes, ‘Similar to the way in which children play with building blocks, viewers are directed toward the process of engaging with the constructed components of her work, where ‘meaning’ remains open-ended’.114 According to Floyd, ‘contemporary art itself is the most current form of alternative education’, and exhibitions can function as ‘a series of forms that might temporarily free us from the act of explaining’, activating play as a form of creative problem-solving.115 Her practice uses sculpture, toy-making and print to create hands-on learning environments that embody her research into the overlap between activism and experimental education. The learnings embedded in Floyd’s work often link historical feminist battles with the pressing concerns of today, such as the ongoing privileging of masculine values, the precarious, feminised nature of creative labour, and the reversal of hard-won rights to universal education. In her work she is keen to ask how historical examples of self-organised counter-education—such as Eddie and Bonita Mabo’s Black Community School, Gary Foley’s pedagogical performances or Ruth Crow’s Eureka Youth League activities—might help rethink contemporary struggles.116 For Floyd is all too aware that the pedagogical turn in contemporary art and the museum’s increasing investment in its public programme arm coincide with the broader stripping of resources from public education. Take Floyd’s work at the Venice Biennale 2015 (Figure 3.1), an outdoor sculpture ensconced in the Giardino Delle Vergini at the northern end of the Arsenale, housing a library dedicated to critical perspectives on labour. A hybrid of outdoor furniture, playground equipment and modernist form, the work invited weary Biennale visitors to sit, and while there, play around, take the time to think and sift through ideas, read something out loud, reflect on what had been encountered in the exhibition while making links to the cultural conditions that make it possible. For the library texts foreground how the work conditions of artists reflect the more brutal exploitation of immaterial labour on which Western capitalist economies depend. This work found a number of different iterations back in Australia in the series Field Libraries, many of which were installed in grass roots community spaces such as suburban libraries. Floyd’s innovative feminist pedagogy also occupied the central exhibition space of Australia’s femo-buster exhibition, Unfinished Business (2018, ACCA, Melbourne). Co-designed with renowned feminist designer Mary Featherstone, The round table, 2017, gathered audiences in its comfortable embrace, providing shared seating for rest, focus of discussion and

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FIGURE 3.1

Emily Floyd, Labour Garden, 2015, installation

vantage point for reflection. As co-curator Max Delany explains, the work draws on a 1977 design by Featherstone which honoured the humble kitchen table, so often the incubator of consciousness raising and feminist collective activism.117 Hospitality—a generous and inclusive gesture of care grounded in the domestic sphere—also distinguishes the art-pedagogy of Brisbane feminist art collective LEVEL (2010–2018) which since 2012 hosted meals (dinner parties, picnics) to bring people together for convivial political discussion.118 This series of events comes under the rubric title We need to talk and aims to revalue the analytic force of personal-political experience. Topics for talking include women’s experience of life, art and work, and how structural inequities in culture and society hamper women’s self-realisation. In June 2014 for instance, a themed picnic (Recipe for a Revolution) on the Gallery of Modern Art (GoMA) forecourt at the opening of the Harvest exhibition provided a critical focus for the exhibition through discussing food and revolution: ‘Bring along your favourite recipe (and a plate of food if you can), and join the conversation on the feminist picnic rug as we ask what role food plays in women’s lives, whether the kitchen is a playground or a battleground, and how we can use the idea of the “recipe” – a shared set of ingredients and methods – as a way forward to a better world. Together we will develop a recipe for a revolution.’119 (Figure 3.2) The 2014 staging of loosely structured conversation as a feminist art form extended LEVEL’s open-ended strategies of ‘talking feminism’ into the art gallery, as a site for investigative and critical feminist pedagogy outside the art school. Conversation Pieces opened on International Women’s Day 2014 with performance and installation works that engaged audiences with ideas associated with contemporary feminist art practice (such as ‘subjectivity, humour and intimacy’) through physical,

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FIGURE 3.2

LEVEL, We need to talk (Recipe for a Revolution), 2014, participatory event at Queensland Gallery of Modern Art, (QAGOMA), Brisbane

verbal or textual dialogues and exchanges.120 A related LEVEL exhibition, THIS IS NOT THE WORK, continued this exploration of pedagogic-performative art-curatorial practice. It both documented, curated and elaborated a selection of international community-engaged artist projects to follow the pathways of women-centred social networks: ‘The projects documented in this exhibition are examples of artists working with women and community in challenging and unpredictable ways, demonstrating feminist strategies and a commitment to non-hierarchical and collective structures.’121 LEVEL’s approach finds many parallels in feminist art circles around the world, including The Black Lunch Table, an ongoing collaboration between artists Jina Valentine and Heather Hart (USA) which intends to fill holes in the documentation of contemporary art history. The Black Lunch Table aims to produce discursive sites, at actual and metaphorical lunch tables, where cultural producers of colour can have conversations on a whole range of social issues affecting local communities, but also engage in peer-to-peer workshops, oral archiving and edit-a-thons to address the racial and gender bias on Wikipedia.122 This hospitality model also captures the generous creative facilitation of Meta Moeng in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, whose inclusive and accessible projects include ‘feminist edu-art’ ventures (she was project manager for Sa Sa Bassac), project spaces such as Kon Len Khnhom (which translates to ‘my place’) and its next-door co-operative marketplace Sthani Station for young Cambodian creatives, and the ‘teach-in’ library space which works as an accessible art library-resource centre.123 These spaces are necessarily multi-functional: workshop-exhibition space, space for get-togethers, talks and discussions in a country with near-zero state support for the arts.

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The Sydney-based collective BC (formerly Brown Council and Barbara Cleveland: Frances Barrett, Kate Blackmore, Kelly Doley and Diana Smith) developed a variety of ‘phronetic’ pedagogical interactions as integral to their feminist performance practice. For example, Remembering Barbara Cleveland (2011–) is an ongoing project that focuses on the practice of the (imagined) Australian performance artist Barbara Cleveland, who worked predominantly in Sydney in the 1970s until her untimely death in 1981: ‘Despite her significant output of work, Cleveland remains largely unknown in the history of Australian art and the canon of performance art internationally.’124 Remembering Barbara Cleveland includes mock archival documentary footage of Cleveland’s performance works, along with lectures on the nature of performance, memory and art history (Figure 3.3). This work provides a critical echo and commentary on recent international re-presentations of iconic feminist performance works from the 1970s and 1980s by Marina Abramovic´, Carolee Schneeman, Yvonne Rainer and others. As BC observe of their own ‘mockumentary’ homage, ‘through their re-performance, BC give voice to this mythic feminist artist … Through honouring the life and work of Cleveland, BC seek to question who is written in and out of art history, and how narratives are constructed and re-presented.’125 BC member Kelly Doley complemented the Barbara Cleveland suite with her solo project Yes and No: Things Learned About Feminism (Boxcopy, Brisbane, October 2014), for which Doley invited 16 people from a range of backgrounds to teach her about feminism. Doley then ‘condensed’ these eclectic lessons into a series of 90 brightly-painted posters of catch phrases and slogans, which are ‘contradictory, mixing the cliché with the ambivalent, the old fashioned with the relevant, the

FIGURE 3.3

Barbara Cleveland, Making History, 2016, live performance

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important and the silly. The fluorescent mixed messages and sentiments offer no answers or solutions. But this fits. Contemporary feminism by its very definition is confusing, unfinished, hard to define and temporal.’126 The Barbara Cleveland project works in part as pedagogy through irony: what we are being presented with by artists in an apparently earnest tone is a reminder of all the gaps in formal art, curatorial and art historical curricula that unthinkingly elide those practices that have not been conventionally archived, and even then, those practices that do not fit readily within the established canon.127 How much of pedagogy, even in creative fields, remains an exercise in killing imagination and creative thinking? Irony is also a key tactic in the pedagogy-focused art of Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook, a prominent Thai public intellectual and academic recognised as one of South East Asia’s leading video artists. Her most renowned work takes the form of ironic pedagogy, seminar-style discussions and lectures whose attendees are less than conventional, among them stray dogs, cadavers and Thai villagers, subjects who are marginalised by normative social structures. Araya’s experience as an educator has been a major impetus to her practice, a recognition that conventional pedagogical methods fail us in part by not acknowledging what we already know or by imposing strictures on the capacity to think imaginatively. She once quipped that, ‘Thai people have a saying, that you teach something to a person who knows about it better than you.’128 One of her more controversial works is the video The Class (2005), which she exhibited in the Thai Pavilion of the Venice Biennale in 2005. Here, Araya delivers a lecture about death to six cadavers lying in white sheets before her. The artist had for many years worked with the anatomy department of a large hospital in Chiang Mai which had granted her access to their morgue, and where she had filmed corpses in different scenes and arrangements. In this video she talks gently but insistently to her ‘class’, occasionally leaning in to try to ‘catch’ their questions, which she articulates and answers herself. In an interview, Araya observed the similarities between university lecturing and speaking to her (many stray) dogs, how ‘you always speak a question and an answer because they can’t answer you. You have to guess.’ And that means you ‘often speak alone’. She added that when the work was shown at the Biennale, ‘some curators and critics said, “You talk like you’re speaking to viewers but you’re actually speaking to yourself.”’ She ‘thought that was an interesting reaction’.129 Araya’s deadpan wit is pitch perfect: victims of conventional pedagogy, her students are ‘bored to death’. But beyond this damning irony, the work also opens up a conversation about death, gender, desire and Buddhist melancholy, bringing to public discourse a distinctly discomfiting entanglement of intensities which has its own pedagogical effect. Asian Studies scholar Arnika Fuhrmann has argued that the broader sweep of Araya’s work—including performances where she would read and sing to corpses and even dress them—has an ‘explicit pedagogic intent to initiate public discussions on femininity and sexuality in Thailand’.130 Since the 1980s, she argues, ‘Araya’s work has continually problematized what it means for women to make their desires publicly known’, offering a ‘Thai-inflected, cosmopolitan feminist model of desire’ and invoking the death ritual for its ‘sensory and affective potentials’. That is, Araya’s work effectively queers the conventional role that death plays in

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Buddhist pedagogy where contemplating the corpse is ‘supposed to let the viewer understand and affectively experience the futility of attachment’.131 In another pedagogical twist, Araya’s Two Planets (2007–2008) and Village and Elsewhere (2011) series documented the reactions of Thai villagers, farmers and monks to large-scale reproductions of so-called masterpieces of Western art set up in their everyday surrounds, such as rural villages, markets, and Buddhist temples. The works included Artemisia Gentileschi’s Judith Beheading Holofernes together with Jeff Koons’ Untitled with Thai villagers, Millet’s The Gleaners and Thai farmers, and Manet’s Luncheon on the Grass and Thai villagers. The videos capture how the viewers make sense of what is before them without the assumptions imposed by the pedagogical armature of Western art and its institutions. The resulting comments are hilarious not only because they manage to lampoon certain art historical sacred cows, but also because they are genuinely creative, cutting through niceties of value to the ostensible subject of the paintings, namely the passions of the human body: hunger, sex, violence. As Araya observes, The image should not be too clever—it should concern people’s lives, and allow them to improvise. A monk said of the Koons [juxtaposed with a depiction of Judith and Holofernes]: ‘That man has two wives—that’s why he was killed!’ … Villagers talk about Manet’s Luncheon on the Grass and make dirty jokes.132 This work, like The Class, emerges in part from Araya’s experiences as a tutor at Chiang Mai University, where she was struck by her students’ hesitancy in critically discussing those artworks anointed as ‘greats’ of the Western canon. The ambit for original thought had been so thoroughly circumscribed that reactions were by rote, in accordance with received interpretation, rather than by dint of really looking and allowing visual pleasure to have its sway. Araya’s videos are remarkable for their ability to skewer conventional art historical pedagogy, while at the same time performing their own teaching manoeuvre on the works’ subjects and on their ultimate viewers, reminding us that embodied openness to, and trust of, different knowledges is at the heart of feminist pedagogy. The bloodless abstraction of the academic seminar is a theme also taken up by Indian conceptual artist Anita Dube. Dube’s background as an art historian and critic grants her particular insight into the powerful assumptions behind words, and whose interdisciplinary practice as artist/critic/curator/art historian/organiser in a national context with limited arts infrastructure resonates with that of Araya and Meta Moeng. In Keywords (2005), Dube’s concern was how to ‘give body to things by experimenting with materials and embodying words’.133 A collaboration with emerging architect Asim Waqif, the work was devised to contribute to the creation of a culture of inclusive critical discourse and dialogue at KHOJ studios in Delhi, a space run by artists for artists ‘with a focus on building networks, developing alternative pedagogies, and learning through collaboration and exchange’.134 In a workshop setting, Dube carved letters out of buffalo meat and put words together based on the group’s brainstorming of culturally and politically ‘key’ words, such as

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Ethics and Love. She then invited the group to analyse the words with her, but instead of these words remaining two-dimensional symbols on a whiteboard, they were now literally incarnated, tactile and smelly, their actual heft and mass a visceral reminder of their power and of how it is bodies that inhabit concepts: the word made flesh. Dube’s work also captures the embodied performance of feminist pedagogy. In 2018, Dube curated the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, where one of her stated aims was to configure a ‘politics of friendship where pleasure and pedagogy can co-exist and dream together’. As Dube explained, I feel that the coming together of pleasure and pedagogy is the only way forward in these times of increasing identitarian closure. … Through open source platforms via the still available freedoms of the internet, along with an open mic and blackboards to scribble on, people will be encouraged to share, in any language or medium, content that means something to them—whether that is an academic lecture, a popular film song, or a poem.135 Dube’s ‘politics of friendship’ that accentuates the importance of affiliation to nurture the pleasure of pedagogy also informs Australian artist Alex Martinis Roe’s approach. While many post-conceptual artists work with historical material—such as museum archives or interviews with significant yet overlooked figures—Martinis Roe’s work is distinguished by its very deliberate engagement with past modes of feminist pedagogy, in particular workshops and consciousness-raising groups. Roe attempts to embed these pedagogical encounters and techniques in her research methods and in the presentation of her findings, developing an artistic practice that acts very much like social science and historical research and its transmission. Areas of particular interest include that period of 1970s feminism which intersected with labour rights and worker education campaigns, exploring how to break out the ideas of feminist philosophers from the glass vitrines of historicisation and disperse them by way of intergenerational conversations. Genealogies; Frameworks for Exchange (2011–12) (Figure 3.4), for example, is a ‘multi-part project [that] facilitated embodied theoretical exchange among different people from different cultures, generations and practices’.136 A conversation between the artist and Luce Irigaray created the first node in a network that then expanded with ‘a series of online videoconference conversations between [Irigaray’s] own interlocutors and female writers who are important to them’, augmented by workshops where the philosopher’s thoughts, in their multiple iterations, guided the development of different forms of listening and thinking. As the artist notes, ‘[d]ocuments from these workshops joined the edited online videoconference recordings in exhibitions, which all included an opportunity for the visitor to engage directly with the project themselves’. Throughout, the mode of knowledge creation, interpretation and transmission are foregrounded so the relationship between textual and embodied theoretical exchange becomes a focus. In addition, the content produced by the network of exchanges is archived in affiliated organisations as well as libraries, furthering its pedagogical reach. In non-writing histories

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FIGURE 3.4

Alex Martinis Roe, Frameworks for Exchange: Workshop on Genealogies and Spaces Between Authorships, 2012, participatory workshop

(2012), Martinis Roe gently teases apart the elements underpinning the pedagogical power of the gallery and the canon of art history by creating a feedback loop of slideshow, note-taking and face-to-face sitting which marks the time and retains the body without appearing to produce any substantive knowledge. The work foregrounds that it is in these intervals that ‘the content’ is created, that is, that conventional pedagogical methods operate largely through assumptions about their authority and objectivity, which allow them to propagate established ideas while at the same time delegitimising alternative ways of learning. Several performance artists have experimented with the lecture performance with similar questions in mind. Performance theorist Lucia Rainer proposes that the ‘lecture performance’, instead of ‘lecture’ or ‘performance’, triggers a process of re-definition that ‘evokes reflection on which research and knowledge practices are privileged, marginalized, and excluded’, and makes possible the ‘undermining [of] standardized frameworks, frames and framings to which art and academia are traditionally affiliated’.137 Soda_Jerk (Dan and Dominique Angeloro) have for decades collaboratively mined the archives of popular culture to stitch together raucous satires of contemporary mores and national narratives. While their earlier work was more focussed on asserting the right to plunder the electronic and digital image flow— from the multinational corporations which own the copyright to most film and TV content—their later work turned increasingly poetic. In video pieces such as The Dark Matter series, for example, female screen icons confront their younger selves or poignantly reflect on the constricted personae the studios forged on their behalf. Soda_Jerk’s most recent work is also their most celebrated, and signals a return to

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broader satire: Terror Nullius is a mash up of narrative film and news footage which paints a sorry picture indeed of Australian national character. There is a strong didactic element here, a Semiotics 101 of xenophobia, misogyny and racism as embedded in symbols of national identity, which has parallels in their early work’s demonstration of ‘how to’ culture jam to resist the colonisation of our imaginary. Given this consistent engagement with pedagogy, it is no surprise that Soda_Jerk have experimented with the cinema-lecture, or what they call a ‘live video essay’. In The Carousel (2011)138 (Figure 3.5)—a nice play on words that references the slide carousel so beloved of pre-digital art history undergraduates as much as the fairground flight of fancy—Soda_Jerk perform a live narration that guides the audience through ‘an eclectic matrix of film samples’ that ‘conjoin[s] media theory, mysticism, deconstruction, kung-fu, vintage sci-fi, zombie flicks and techno horror’.139 Soda_Jerk insert their live bodies into a cinema installation, pulling the audience out of reverie to link the experience to a pedagogical one. In a gesture that reasserts authorship, the artists interrupt the image flow, arrest habitual meaning-making, and remind us how tendentious are these juxtapositions that we are mostly inured to. Bodily presence is vital here to the pedagogic intent, inviting an affective connection that tests the magical reality-effect of the screen. As Carly Whitefield observes, ‘In a manner akin to—if not entirely indiscernible from—the public or academic lecture, these performances foreground the central agency of the artist in visual mediation.’140 Whitefield also notes the rise of ‘lecture performances’ within ‘cinematic milieu’, that offer ‘an expanded form of practice’ and create ‘new discursive frameworks through which the moving image and its exhibitionary modes might be conceived’.141

FIGURE 3.5

Soda_Jerk, The Carousel, 2011, lecture performance

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Whitefield connects this recent ‘pedagogic turn’ to practices of early cinema, when showings were accompanied by the ‘inventor’ explaining the technology or using the magic lantern to illustrate a wide range of topics. She writes, ‘A century later—amidst new concerns for the interpretation of new modes and politics of image production and dissemination—lecturers have once again begun to populate the space of the cinema.’142 Soda_Jerk’s latest video lecture project Vertical Cut (in development) layers multiple perspectives on the life, work and death of Ana Mendieta—including ‘landbody artwork, critical writings on minimalism, psychoanalytic film theory, Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), Alain Resnais’ L’Année dernière à Marienbad (1961) and the texts of Robert Smithson and George Kubler’—to trace ‘the lines of force that deform the perceived value and meaning of the art object as it moves through time’.143 The feminist pedagogy of Pittsburgh-based, self-described ‘citizen artist’ Vanessa German developed in long-term engagement with the children of her neighbourhood, and is distinct for its raucous, maximalist assemblages of found materials. A self-taught practitioner who ‘grew up making art’, before she ‘necessarily called [her]self an artist’144 German worked as an educator in artist-in-school programmes set up to ‘heal communities of color through engagement’. She soon became deeply disillusioned by this type of pedagogy: I watched people taking advantage of children, taking money from programs for children, all while saying they were doing something good, giving themselves pats on the back. That pain piled up inside of me, on top of recognizing all around me that as neighbors and communities, we were not able to be with each other: We were losing eye contact, and unable to hear each other’s stories.145 This insight likely played a part in the turn German’s practice was to take not long after she moved into Homewood, a suburb renowned for its disadvantage and gun violence, inhabited primarily by Black families, many of them single-mother led. German’s work is deeply tied to where she lives, her materials drawn from the detritus of her urban setting, including broken toys, cast-off furniture and disused clothes, even repurposed structural components of run-down houses like banisters and stairs. Not long after she moved in to Homewood, so the story goes, her expansive working methods and materials overflowed onto her front porch, and it was here, open to circumstance, that she encountered the local children who, intrigued by her activities, began stopping by to see what she was up to. Rather than accepting their offer to assist with her latest sculpture, German instead set them up with space and materials to make their own art, always available and supportive, never prescriptive nor judgmental: ‘no sign-ups, no classes, some oversight, lots of healing and safety’.146 This is at the heart of what constitutes a citizen, in German’s view: creating the conditions whereby another can take action of their own accord and come to realise their own power. As she says, I inhabit my citizenship as your neighbor, as a human, as a black person, as a gay person, as an American, as much as I can … so that I could say to people, ‘You can decide too. As a human citizen, you can decide all by yourself.’147

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The activities on German’s front porch soon became known as Love Front Porch, and eventually transformed into the permanent, community-supported and funded ARTHouse in 2015, described as ‘a therapeutic nucleus where residents regularly gather to counter the trauma of gun violence’,148 where ‘experiencing the power of making art as unconditional love was life changing’.149 On entering the ARTHouse you are welcomed by the ARTHouse poem by RB Mertz inscribed on the front steps: Being at the ARTHouse Where you realise You had wings the whole time.150 This invitation to step into your own power made possible by the unconditional love of your community is the core of German’s Black queer feminist pedagogy. With the children of the neighbourhood, and then their families, the artist’s offer of that space and time for self-initiated learning, and the protection it provides from the racism and disempowerment of the world, is clearly evident. But this is also an invitation German makes more broadly through her artwork, by which she hopes to share her insight that despite these everyday horrors, ‘sheer, utter, luminous rightness was always available’.151 German offers us the option of ‘adventuring in, and through and around curiosity … I am trying to find out if I am strong enough in the parts of myself that are very young—to move away from painful and glittery distraction. The clearest way I am able to do that is by making things.’152 And when we encounter these ‘things’ or ‘power figures’153—her sculptures, altars and collages—we educate ourselves in our own protection and resilience. German continues: I am in Love with the deep survival, elastic resilience and ordinary, creative, genius of Black People. For the ways that we make ourselves bright against the slaughter of our own names—acts of ordinary, restorative, creative insistence. The insistent force of making, seeing, playing, protection—loving—whose evidence shapes the culture of a society that never visioned the Black Body into freedom, resources, or power.154 German’s work, whether as ARTHouse initiator and facilitator, or as maker of sensational power objects and installation, has a deep pedagogical dimension. It is a pedagogy that springs from the ethics of love, of integration in community, of learning to love yourself. In proffering stories of warning and protection to her Black community, in reminding them that whatever happens, love awaits them—powerfully crystallised in her front porch signs that implore ‘Don’t shoot: we love you’ (2011)155—she invites them to recognise the power they each hold to change the world and survive its injustice. Intergenerational pedagogy through art for survival also marks the work of First Peoples group Euraba Artists and Papermakers from north-western New South Wales

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in Australia. Founded by nine senior Goomeroi women from the communities of Toomelah and Boggabilla in 1999, Euraba Papermakers is a commercial enterprise that specialises in handmade paper produced from offcuts from the cotton industry, a major locally grown crop. At the same time, Euraba Papermakers is a community educator and a site for nurturing the vital deep affective relations needed to sustain culture; this includes reviving language lost through the mission years, rewriting the community’s history through artworks, and mentoring youth returning to the community after time in the juvenile justice system. The ethos of teaching is ‘side by side’, of ‘everyone learning together’, that reflects ‘the philosophy of Euraba showing the way, leading by example and walking together to help people find themselves’. Euraba women often collaborate with outside artists, who are selected to help lessen the gap between generations so that ‘the young people see us working with fresh ideas in a new way’.156 One example is the project Illuminate (2013),157 where the Euraba papermakers invited Wiradjuri and Kamilaroi artist Jonathan Jones and long-standing collaborator film-maker Matthew Priestly to work with them to create a replica mission home from paper, animated with sound and projections. Illuminate combines traditional and contemporary practices, but more importantly becomes an interface for Goomeroi youth to connect with the cultural value of their elders, where the process of making becomes a vital site of broader pedagogy (not unlike that of the Palawa women’s re-learning the tradition of shellnecklace making discussed in Chapter 5). Ngali-ngalim-boorroo (For the Women) is a large-scale ongoing project developed by senior Gija women at Warmun Art Centre in Western Australia.158 The Warmun Art Movement emerged in a pedagogical context, namely the Two-Way educational focus at the local school in the late 1970s, and pedagogy remains central to art practice in Warmun today. The artworks made by the community, including paintings and videos, ‘not only express beliefs, opinions, stories, feelings and histories, but they capture them for future generations to come’—their purpose is largely to share knowledge and offer learning opportunities.159 (Figure 3.6) The Gija elders, including Mabel Juli, Shirley Purdie, Phyllis Thomas and Shirley Drill, among others, take the young women in their community on bush trips to different parts of Gija Country to share time and teach them what they feel is important, like traditional language, song and dance, hunting, bush tucker, stories about life and love, visits to Ngarranggarni (Dreaming) sites and special places connected to family histories. This form of intergenerational teaching and learning is integral to cultural resilience and community sustainability: art-making as well as the artefacts created are key to distinguishing these interactions as driven by conviction and love, in contrast to the roles the elders play in the colonial social structures as health professionals and teachers, for example. This is not always straightforward or comfortable. As artist facilitator working with the women Alana Hunt notes, ‘Colonisation is a raw, very destructive and continuing part of everyday life here. Ngali-ngalim-boorroo is driven by the ideas and actions of these senior women who are finding their own ways to live, share and laugh in spite of the cultural, ecological and political ruins they have witnessed.’160 As Hunt explains,

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FIGURE 3.6

Phyllis Thomas and Betty Carrington with their work in Ngali-ngalim-boorroo (For the Women), 2014, video stills

These women have the power to change the weather, to talk to spirits, to feed hungry bellies with fat fish and sweet honey, to weave stories and sing songs that will wake up the Country, to show the way to Ngarranggarni places, to find water and the best fishing spots, to cut the right kind of wood for cooking and for making smoke that will keep the mosquitos off the sleeping babies. This process draws from what they themselves were taught and fills it with confidence in its potential to impact problems that their community shoulders and sometimes seem intractable …161 Integrated, community-based Indigenous pedagogy has played a vital role in the over 60,000-year survival of the culture of Australian First Peoples. It is a pedagogy deeply ingrained in a range of cultural practices and creatively adapted to many athand technologies, including indigenous community radio in remote and urban communities which supports indigenous music and language, and more recently, the digitisation of heritage. For example, The Mulka Project from Yirrkala, North East Arnhem Land (as featured in The Biennale of Sydney 2020)162 includes digitalised performances, song and mapping of kinship relations and country, that creates ‘a cyclical work with no beginning, middle or end, akin to the seasons of Yolngu kinship. Each moment in the work is a valid entry point or exit point.’163 Under the leadership of community elders/traditional owners, Mulka is a ‘total’ package that seeks, through art, to sustain and protect Yolngu cultural knowledge. Mulka integrates production house, recording studio, digital learning centre and cultural archive, as well as print workshop, arts and crafts workshop and exhibition space, and networked relation of artists, all managed by Yolngu law and governance. From the deeply culturally integrated art pedagogy of Australian First Peoples, which includes the passing of intergenerational women’s knowledge, let’s now consider the work of feminist artists producing pedagogical social change toolkits. In 2016, the Melbourne-based artist Elvis Richardson self-initiated and published ‘The CoUNTess Report’,164 (Figure 3.7) In 2019 Richardson worked with Amy Prcevich and Miranda Samuels to produce an updated set of numbers for the CoUNTess Report, this time supported by the Sheila Foundation and the National Association for the Visual Arts.165 The project entailed a year of literally counting the number of

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FIGURE 3.7

Sadie Chandler (graphic) and Elvis Richardson, CoUNTess Project: The Pool of Artists, 2016, poster

women with measurable successful outcomes in the Australian art world: the number of women in major public exhibitions or represented by commercial galleries; the number of women whose work was featured in headline reviews or art journals; the number of women who won competitive creative grants and prizes. At face value, the results were not so damning (and in some areas much improved on the 2016 numbers): in many parts of the arts ecology, including artist-run spaces and some state institutions, women are claiming close to 50% representation. This apparent parity however masks the fact that well over 70% of art students and practicing artists are indeed female. The results speak to ongoing structural issues, as well as some targeted work in recent years by growing feminist consciousness, a phenomenon in which the CoUNTess project has played an important role. For Richardson, ‘CoUNTess’ began over a decade ago as a way to wrangle the difficulties of forging a sustainable art career in Australia as a woman, a mother, a

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person of a certain maturity. She would gather data to identify and quantify the obstacles she faced, then transform the statistics into witty and appealing graphs, published on her own artist website and not necessarily distinguished from her art practice—including conceptual work inspired by found photographic archives which Richardson has always positioned more broadly. Gathering and sharing the data was a coping mechanism, a way of evidencing that the closed doors she encountered in attempting to further her career were neither figments of her imagination nor rooted solely in personal rebuffs. Her personal project, however, soon became a powerful pedagogical method and—perhaps ironically—began attracting the interest, invitations and funding that Richardson had long been seeking for her art practice. For several years, Richardson’s practice has maintained this pedagogical focus: an artist undertaking the social science research normally outsourced to bureaucrats and academics, widely disseminating the stats in a language and within a context that would gain substantive traction in the Australian arts community. In 2019, Richardson passed the baton for the CoUNTess project to the next generation, her ongoing work now turbo charged through her pedagogical intervention, artists, educators, administrators and curators now tooled up and savvy about grass roots gender equity. The CoUNTess project in part seeks to hold arts institutions accountable and provide them with easily digested data about the inequity that needs tackling, perhaps even at times to the point of pulling the ‘name-and-shame’ game. But it also provides a toolkit for artists, to know the drill, be able to argue their case, but more so, to reassure them, as Richardson did for herself, that systemic sexism, institutional blind spots and unconscious bias are real, thus offering protection against the neoliberal discourse that holds each individual responsible for their own lack of ‘success’ as conventionally measured. The practice of US-based artist and organiser Caroline Woolard (b. 1984) operates in similar ways, although the research she undertakes and the resources she gathers and produces for artists, communities and institutions are focused on understanding neoliberalism enough to game it for the common good. This means a forensic focus and creative improvisation on solidarity economics, including how to work interdependently and how to operate with alternative forms of monetary and non-monetary exchange. Marco Arruda of the Brazilian Solidarity Economy Network defines a solidarity economy as one that does not arise from thinkers or ideas; it is the outcome of the concrete historical struggle of the human being to live and to develop him/herself as an individual and a collective … innovative practices at the micro level can only be viable and structurally effective for social change if they interweave with one another to form always-broader collaborative networks and solidarity chains of productionfinance-distribution-consumption-education-communication.166 Woolard’s projects have consistently facilitated the accessible sharing of knowledge at the heart of critical pedagogy. In 2009, she helped found the Trade School, an online peer-to-peer learning platform where participants could propose and take classes from

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a random, community-driven curriculum, funded through barter arrangements. In 2015 Woolard, together with Susan Jahoda and Emilio Reynaldo Martinez Poppe, published Of Supply Chains167, a teaching tool and workbook designed to help artists trace the life cycles of artworks and hence become more conscious of the many different social, economic, political resources, networks and relationships involved in making art, including labour that may well go unacknowledged and uncompensated. It aims to shake the myth that remains all too prevalent that art is created by an individual artist, and to make evident that art becomes possible only by virtue of relationships and interconnections. By asking specific questions about the choices artists make in the processes of conceptualising, making and exhibiting art, the workbook ‘invites a practice of reflection and narration about supply chains’168. Of Supply Chains borrows but repurposes the language of capitalist production and commerce, as in this iteration, the supply chain is not a linear progression, but a circular economy that takes in the use of waste as a raw material, for example. Moreover, Of Supply Chains visualises practices rather than maps specific infrastructures. Woolard has also drawn on the specific insights of artists and their creative processes, as well as their social and economic needs, in her advocacy; initiating and contributing to organisations that aim to highlight the unjustifiably high cost of arts training and advocate for affordable spaces for creative practice. In 2015, for instance, with Paula Segal and others she co-founded the New York City Real Estate Investment Cooperative,169 which brought hundreds of local, small investors together to enter the real estate market guided by values of solidarity to create affordable and ethical housing and working options. One of her more recent projects is The Study Center for Group Work.170 Study Center, like Of Supply Chains, offers an online toolkit, but the focus has been expanded to a wider audience beyond arts communities. Indeed, this initiative appears more like an attempt to educate those ‘in art spaces, collectives, worker-owned businesses, art classes, and working-groups’ in the ways that artists manage group work, and hence to model different approaches to facilitating others, including in democratic processes and deliberations. Woolard wants to help build a ‘musculature of shared decision making and of shared work’ that might enliven civic processes and grass roots democracy: to this end the Center’s extensive and beautifully designed website provides an online resource of lesson plans, readings and objects; gatherings for artists to share resources; and accessible public training in methods of listening, attention and collaboration.171 Among the resources are lesson plans on how to run a wikipediathon by Art + Feminism172 … which loops us back to the pedagogical work of CoUNTess and the many ongoing feminist collaborations between artists and educators intent on embodying transgressive pedagogy in diverse, holistic and pleasurable ways.173

Conclusion This chapter has demonstrated the integral role feminism plays in progressive pedagogy and vice versa, and the creative ways feminist values and methods have been extended and adapted by artists to educate communities, the art world and the general public. We considered how artists and art practice effect intergenerational relaying of

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knowledge for cultural resilience; how ongoing feminist ‘social sculptures’ like workshops and artist-developed toolkits achieve innovative forms of activism; and how feminist humour and ingenuity not only offer new takes on the conventions of lectures and seminars, but interrogate fundamental underpinnings of pedagogy by proposing a model of interrelatedness and openness founded on the ethics of care.

Notes 1 Erin Manning, ‘Propositions for a Radical Pedagogy, or How to Rethink Value’ in Kevin M. Leander and Christian Ehret (eds), Affect in Literacy Learning and Teaching: Pedagogies, Politics and Coming to Know, New York; London: Routledge, 2019. 2 In 1994, English scholar Gerald Graff predicted that the ‘future of theory’ would be in the redirection of attention to pedagogical issues in ‘The pedagogical turn’, Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association, 27 (1), Spring 1994: 65–69. 3 See Jacques Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991; Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, London; New York: Continuum, 2010; and The Emancipated Spectator, London: Verso, 2011. 4 For example, Hans Haacke, as discussed by Vered Maimon in ‘The third citizen: on models of criticality in contemporary artistic practices, October, 129, Summer: 2009, 85–112. 5 A benevolent father he might have been, but a father he was nonetheless. See Kristina Lee Podesva, ‘A pedagogical turn: brief notes on education as art’, Fillip (6), Summer: 2007. 6 Vivien Green Fryd, ‘Suzanne Lacy’s three weeks in May: feminist activist performance art as “expanded public pedagogy”’, NWSA Journal, 19 (1), Spring: 2007, 23–38. 7 Recent Australian exhibitions and related events have foregrounded pedagogical, transgenerational exchanges. These include Backflip! Humour in Feminist Art (Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne, 2012, curator: Laura Castagnini), Contemporary Australia: Women (Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, 2012, curator: Julie Ewington), A Different Temporality: Aspects of Australian Feminist Art Practice 1975–1985 (Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne, 2011, curator: Kyla McFarlane), The Baker’s Dozen (University of Technology Gallery, Sydney, 2012, curator: Lorna Grear), No Added Sugar: Engagement and Self-determination/Australian Muslim Women Artists (Casula Powerhouse, Sydney, 2012, curator: Rusaila Bazlamit), Curating Feminism exhibition and conference (University of Sydney, 2014, organising curator: Jacqueline Millner), Shapes of Knowledge (Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne, 2019, curator: Hannah Matthews), Doing feminism/Sharing the world (Victoria College of the Arts and other venues, Melbourne, 2017–2018, organising curator: Anne Marsh), Know My Name: Australian Women Artists 1900 to Now (National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 2020, curators: Deborah Hart and Elspeth Pitt). 8 Helena Reckitt, ‘Forgotten Relations: Feminist Artists and Relational Aesthetics’ in Angela Dimitrakaki and Lara Perry (eds), Politics in a Glass Case: Feminism, Exhibition Cultures and Curatorial Transgressions, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013, 131–156. 9 Vered Maimon (2009) suggests that ‘relational’ work by Pierre Huyghe and Walid Raad for example has distinct activist qualities. 10 See for instance art projects and discussion in Conversation Pieces (Boxcopy Contemporary Art Space, Brisbane, curator: Rachael Haynes). Artists included Catherine or Kate, Agatha Gothe-Snape, Alex Martinis Roe, Hannah Raisin, Scott Ferguson (Erica Scott and Brooke Ferguson), and Courtney Coombs and Caitlin Franzmann, 2014; and Yes & No: Things Learnt About Feminism exhibition by Kelly Doley at Boxcopy, 2014, http://www. kellydoley.com/Things-Learnt-About-Feminism-1 accessed 27 October 2020. 11 As Irit Rogoff puts it, ‘the technocratization, and privatization of academies that result from the Bologna reforms and to the monitoring and outcome-based culture that characterize higher education in Europe today’: Irit Rogoff, ‘Turning’, e-flux journal, November 2008, 4.

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12 Alison King, ‘From sage on the stage to guide on the side’, College Teaching, 41 (1), Winter, 1993, 30–35. 13 Amelia Jones, The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader, London: Routledge, 2003, 3. 14 Paolo Freire, The Pedagogy of the Oppressed, London: Penguin [1972] 1996; bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom, New York: Routledge, 1994. 15 bell hooks, 1994. 16 Barbara Hall describing her 1977 co-ed art and gender course at the Canberra School of Art, cited in Janine Burke, ‘A survey of women’s art theory courses and feminine sensibility’, LIP, 1978/79, Melbourne: Women’s Art Register, 60–61. 17 Bonita Ely, ‘Women’s Art Register Extension Project’, LIP, 1978, 64–66. 18 The first course on Australian women’s history was mounted in 1972 by Beverley Kingston; a year later, Jean Curthoys was appointed as a tutor to Sydney University’s philosophy department to offer a women’s studies course, following student and staff pressure. 19 In 1974 the Sydney Women’s Art Movement (WAM), and in 1975 the Melbourne Women’s Art Forum and Women’s Art Register, were established. In April 1974 a pioneering feminist exhibition of work by women artists, film-makers and videomakers was mounted at the George Paton and Ewing Galleries, University of Melbourne, titled A Room of One’s Own (curators Kiffy Rubbo and Meredith Rogers). For a broader listing of pioneering WAM-associated exhibitions see selected chronology in ‘The Women’s Liberation Movement and the visual arts: a selected chronology, 1969– 90’ by Barbara Hall in Catriona Moore (ed.), Dissonance: Feminism and the Arts 1970– 90, Sydney: Allen & Unwin; Artspace, 1994, 277–284. 20 See Janine Burke, Australian Women Artists: One Hundred Years, 1840–1940, Melbourne: Ewing and George Paton Galleries, 1975 (curator: Janine Burke). 21 See for instance Carol Duncan, ‘Virility and domination in early twentieth century vanguard painting’, Artforum, 12 (4): 30–39, 1973; Cindy Nemser, ‘When greatness is a box of Wheaties’, Artforum, 14: 60–64, 1975. 22 On the confessional apparatus see Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, New York: Pantheon Books, 1978. A common procedure was spelled out in the second Sydney Women’s Art Movement Newsletter: ‘1. Select a topic. 2. Go around the room, each woman speaking in turn. Don’t interrupt, let each woman speak up to fifteen minutes, and then ask questions only for clarification. 3. Don’t give advice, don’t chastise, don’t be critical. 4. Draw generalisations after everyone has spoken or before that go around the room and talk again. 5. Draw political conclusions – if you can. 6. Keep the group below ten women. 7. In order to develop trust and confidence don’t repeat what has been said in the group. 8. This is not a therapy-encounter or sensitivity group situation.’ Sydney Women’s Art Movement Newsletter, No. 2, September 1974, 1. 23 Bonita Ely, ‘Sexism in art education’, The Women’s Show Conference Papers, 1977, 48. See also Ely, ‘Sexism in education’, paper delivered at the Alternative Art Education Conference, Preston Institute of Technology, 30 June 1977, subsequently published in Charles Merewether and Ann Stephen (eds), The Great Divide: An Ongoing Critique of Australian Culture Under Capitalism: Reviews of Oppositional Cultural Work and an Examination of Socialist Models (no publisher’s imprint), Fitzroy, Vic, 1977, 102. 24 For example, Marie McMahon and Vivienne Binns’ work in EVE: Experiments in Vitreous Enamel, Watters Gallery, 1975; Ponch Hawkes, Our Mums and Us, Brummels Gallery of Photography, Melbourne, 1976; much of the work, including student work, shown in the 1977 Women and Art exhibition, Experimental Art Foundation (South Australia Women’s Art Movement), 1977. 25 See Griselda Pollock, ‘Art, art school, culture: individualism after the death of the artist’, Block, No. 11: 1985, 8. 26 For instance, at Sydney University in 1983 staff (Helen Grace) and students collectively made a theoretically and aesthetically experimental super-8 film. Helen Grace, paper delivered at ‘Teaching to Transgress’ Feminist Pedagogy Field Day, University of Sydney, 29 March 2014. 27 Ian Burn, ‘The ’sixties: crisis and aftermath’, Art & Text, (1), Autumn: 1981, 50.

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28 The University of NSW’s website reference is just one example among virtually all Australian universities: https://teaching.unsw.edu.au/student-centred-teaching accessed 28 October 2020. 29 A more contemporary example of this phenomenon is the University of Sydney course Contemporary Art and Feminism, introduced in 2015 in the Critical Studies stream of the Bachelor of Visual Arts. Upon the departure of its academic proponent from the university in 2017, the course was discontinued. 30 Suzanne Archer, cited in Janine Burke, ‘A survey of women’s art theory courses and feminine sensibility’, LIP, 1978/79, Melbourne: Women’s Art Register, 61. 31 For example, Contemporary Art and Feminism elective at Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney, 2015–2017. In some UG visual arts courses in Australia, students are able to take Gender Studies electives. 32 Alas, these impulses have been turbo-charged in the wake of the pandemic in Australia, as universities reel from the loss of income from international students and engage in extreme austerity measures driven by the blinkered notion of the ‘job-ready graduate’ armed with technical skills rather than critical thinking and system-questioning innovation. 33 Irina Aristarkhova et al., ‘Notes from the frontline’, n.paradoxa: International Feminist Art Journal, 26, July 2010 (Feminist Pedagogies issue edited by Katy Deepwell), 17–19, 28–29, 38–39, 76–77. 34 See for instance Julian Bell, Mirror of the World: A New History of Art, London: Thames & Hudson, 2007; A Companion to Contemporary Art Since 1945 (edited by Amelia Jones), Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2006; Hugh Honour and John Fleming, The Visual Arts: A History, 7th rev. edn, Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2005; David Wilkins, Bernard Schultz, and Katheryn Linduff, Art Past / Art Present, 5th edn, Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2005; Martin Kemp, ed., The Oxford History of Western Art, New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. 35 See Maura Reilly, Keynote address, Curating Feminism, University of Sydney Conference, October 2014; see Elvis Richardson, CoUNTess Report, 2016; and Amy Prcevich, Elvis Richardson, and Miranda Samuels, CoUNTess Report, 2019; see work of Guerrilla Girls, https://www.guerrillagirls.com/ accessed 28 October 2020. 36 Email dated 29 October 2020 to the authors from ACUADS, the national art and design school peak body in Australia. 37 Tara Watson, ‘Women hit glass ceiling in gallery jobs’, Visual Arts Hub, 20 October, 2014, http://visual.artshub.com.au/news-article/features/museums/women-hit-glass-cei ling-in-gallery-jobs-246170 accessed 28 October 2020; CoUNTess Report and Prcevich et al., 2019, 7, which doesn’t address academic positions but does address gallery CEOs and curatorial: director CEO 61.36% women, 38.63% men across the sector as a whole but 87.5% men and 12.5% women across state galleries; executive staff 48.47% women, 51.52% men across the sector as a whole (comparable at state gallery level); curators 76.31% women, 23.68% men across the sector as a whole (comparable at state gallery level). 38 For example, in 2014 the University of Sydney’s art school, Sydney College of the Arts, hosted a ‘Teaching to Transgress’ Field Day that explored contemporary takes on feminist teaching principles, in both what is taught and how in the creative arts and art history and theory. 39 Lynne M. Webb, Myra W. Allen, and Kandi L Walker, ‘Feminist pedagogy: identifying basic principles’ Academic Exchange Quarterly 6, 67–72: 68–71, 2002. 40 Rancière, 1991; 2011; Félix Guattari, ‘Three ecologies’, New Formations, (8): 1989. 41 See for example Berenice Fisher and Joan Tronto, four phases of caring, as expounded in Joan Tronto, Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care, New York: Routledge, 1993, 105–108; Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More than Human Worlds, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017. 42 Katy Deepwell. 1999. ‘Suzanne Lacy: new genre public art’, n.paradoxa: International Feminist Art Journal, 4: 25–33, 1999, 24. 43 Deepwell, 1999, 25–26.

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44 Suzanne Lacy and Lucy R. Lippard, ‘Political performance art: a discussion by Suzanne Lacy and Lucy R. Lippard’, Heresies, 17: 22–25, 1984, 22. 45 Deepwell, 1999, 26; Amelia Jones, ‘Dis/playing the phallus: male artists perform their masculinities’, Art History, 17 (4): 546–584, 1994, 549. 46 Griselda Pollock, ‘Screening the seventies: sexuality and representation in feminist practice – a Brechtian perspective’, in Pollock, Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism, and the Histories of Art, Florence: Taylor & Francis, 212–268, 2012, 246. 47 Jennifer Fisher, ‘Interperformance: the live tableaux of Suzanne Lacy, Janine Antoni, and Marina Abramovic´’, Art Journal, 56 (4): 28–33, 1997, 30. 48 Suzanne Lacy, ‘The name of the game’, Art Journal, 50 (2): 64–68, 1991, 65. 49 Jeff Kelley, ‘The Body Politics of Suzanne Lacy’ in Nina Felshin (ed.), But Is It Art? The Spirit of Art as Activism, Seattle: Bay Press, 221–249, 1995, 238. 50 See Green Fryd, 2007. 51 Suzanne Lacy (ed.) Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art, Seattle: Bay Press, 1995, 12; Deepwell, 1999, 25. 52 Deepwell, 1999, 25. 53 Lacy, 1991, 65. 54 Sarah Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotions, New York: Routledge, 2004. 55 A further understanding of proximity has been taken up by corporeal phenomenologists such as Marcel Merleau-Ponty and feminist scholars such as Elizabeth Grosz, Sara Ahmed and Jackie Stacey, who argue that knowledge is produced through bodied encounters, as cited in Stephanie Springgay, ‘Knitting as an aesthetic of civic engagement: re-conceptualizing feminist pedagogy through touch’, Feminist Teacher, 20 (2): 111–123, 2010, 120. 56 Jane Gallop, Pedagogy: The Question of Impersonation, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995. 57 Richard Schechner, Performance Studies: An Introduction, New York: Routledge, 2006. 58 Eliot Eisner, ‘From episteme to phronesis to artistry in the study and improvement of teaching’, Teaching and Teacher Education, 18 (4): 375–385, 2002. 59 See Lee Anne Bell and Dipti Desai, ‘Imagining otherwise: connecting the arts and social justice to envision and act for change: Special Issue Introduction’, Equity & Excellence in Education, 44 (3): 287–295, 2011, 287; Elizabeth Ellsworth, Places of Learning: Media, Architecture, Pedagogy, New York: Routledge, 2005; Maxine Greene, Releasing the Imagination: Essays on Education, the Arts, and Social Change, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1995; bell hooks, 1994; Chantal Mouffe, ‘Artistic activism and agonistic spaces’, Art & Research, 1 (2): 2007, 1– 5; Jacques Rancière, ‘Aesthetic separation, aesthetic community: scenes from the aesthetic regimes of art’, Art & Research, 2 (1): 2008, 1–5; and Stephani Etheridge Woodson, ‘Performing youth: youth agency and the production of knowledge in community based theatre’, in Amy L. Best, Representing Youth: Methodological Issues in Critical Youth Studies, New York: NYU Press, 2007, 284–303. 60 Community-based artist and scholar Stephani Etheridge Woodson’s chapter in Best, 2007, 29. As Springgay, 2010, 111 argues, ‘Many feminist scholars, such as Leila Villaverde and Sharon Rosenberg have begun to unsettle pedagogy as tactile’. 61 See, as cited in Bell and Desai, 2011; Sandy Grande, Red Pedagogy: Native American Social and Political Thought, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004; Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples, Albany, NY: Zed Books, 1999. On critical race theories, see Bryan McKinley Jones Brayboy, ‘Toward a tribal critical race theory in education’, Urban Review, 37 (5), December 2005, 425– 446; Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, Critical Race Theory: The Cutting Edge, Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2013; Gloria Ladson-Billings and William F. Tate, ‘Towards a critical race theory of education’ in Stephen Ball (ed.), Sociology of Education: Major Themes, London; New York: RoutledgeFalmer, 2000. 62 Bell and Desai, 2011, 290. 63 Ellsworth, 2005, 24. 64 Ellsworth, 2005, 310.

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65 Springgay, 2010, 119. 66 Janet Miller, Sounds of Silence Breaking: Women, Autobiography, Curriculum, New York: Peter Lang, 2005, 130, cited in Springgay, 2010, 119. 67 Springgay, 2010, 120, citing Marnina Gonick, Between Femininities: Ambivalence, Identity, and the Education of Girls, Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003, 185. 68 Springgay, 2010, 122, citing Kaustuv Roy, ‘Power and resistance: insurgent spaces, Deleuze, and curriculum’, Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, 21 (1): 2005, 29. 69 Springgay, 2010, 120: ‘Rather, as [Leila] Villaverde suggests, it is important that pedagog(y)ies engage with “dangerous dialogues” in “order to expose the complexity of inequity and our complicity in it”’ [in Leila Villaverde, Feminist Theories and Education, New York: Peter Lang, 2008, 125]. 70 Joan C. Tronto and Berenice Fisher’s four elements of caring, Tronto, 1993. 71 Rancière, 1991, 2011. 72 See Guattari, 1989; and Irit Rogoff, ‘Academy as potentiality’, in Irit Rogoff and Angelika Nollert (eds), A.C.A.D.E.M.Y., Revolver, 2006. 73 According to Jen Kennedy, however, this is ‘a premise that the practices constituting the art-as-school paradigm struggle to realize’, in Jen Kennedy, ‘School’s in: contemporary art and the educational turn’, C Magazine, 109: 2011, 23. 74 Grant Kester, ‘The noisy optimism of immediate action: theory, practice and pedagogy in contemporary art, Art Journal, 71 (2): 86–99, 2012, 95. 75 Kester, 2012, 95–96. 76 Maimon, 2009, 95. 77 Rancière, cited in Maimon, 2009, 94. 78 Maimon, 2009, 103. 79 Maimon, 2009, 105, 111. Maimon cites a work by Pierre Huyghe, Streamside Day Follies (2003) as an example. 80 Maimon, 2009, 112. 81 Kester, 2012, 97. 82 Kester, 2012, 98. 83 Kester, 2012, 98. 84 Guattari, 1989, 134. 85 Guattari, 1989, 136. 86 Guattari, 1989, 136. 87 Guattari, 1989, 138. 88 Guattari, 1989, 138. 89 Guattari, 1989, 139. 90 Guattari, 1989, 142. 91 Guattari, 1989, 140–145. 92 Guattari, 1989, 147, citing Roland Barthes, ‘The story teller’, Illuminations, London: Fontana, 1973, 91–92. 93 Guattari, 1989, 143 94 SenseLab – 3e, http://senselab.ca/wp2/ accessed 10 November 2020. 95 SenseLab website. One technique which recurs throughout the Institute’s literature is food sharing. 96 Published in Radical Pedagogies, Inflexions, 2015. 97 Erin Manning, ‘10 Propositions for a radical pedagogy, or how to rethink value’, Inflections, 8: April 2015. 98 Manning, 2015. 99 Irit Rogoff, ‘Turning’, E-Flux Journal, 2008, 6, https://www.e-flux.com/journal/00/ 68470/turning/ accessed 10 November 2020. 100 Rogoff, 2008, 4. 101 Rogoff, 2008, 4. 102 Rogoff, 2008, 4. 103 Rogoff, 2008, 7–8. 104 Peggy Phelan and Irit Rogoff, ‘“Without”: a conversation’, Art Journal, 60 (3): 2001, 34.

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105 Stephanie Springgay, ‘Corporeal pedagogy and contemporary video art’, Art Education, 61 (2): 18–24, 2008, 22, citing Ellsworth, 2005. 106 Springgay, 2008, 22, citing Ellsworth, 2005. 107 Springgay, 2008, 22, citing Rogoff, 2008. 108 Rogoff, 2008, 8. 109 Cited in Podesva, 2007. 110 https://www.copenhagenfreeuniversity.dk/ accessed 11 November 2020. 111 Ellsworth, 2005, 126. 112 Ellsworth, 2005, cited by Springgay, 2008, 23. 113 In an ‘exchange situation’ on the topic of knowledge production at the Copenhagen Free University in March 2002 with Howard Slater, Josephine Berry, Jakob Jakobson and Henriette Heise, cited in Kennedy, 2011, 23. 114 Wes Hill, ‘In Focus: Emily Floyd’, Frieze, 17 May 2013, https://www.frieze.com/a rticle/focus-emily-floyd accessed 11 November 2020. 115 Megan Monte, ‘Emily Floyd: an alternative education’, Australia Council website, 1 July 2015, https://www.australiacouncil.gov.au/arts-in-daily-life/artist-stories/emilyfloyd-an-alternative-education/ accessed 11 November 2020. 116 Emily Floyd in Monte, 2015. 117 Max Delany, ‘Unfinished business’ in Max Delany and Annika Kristensen (eds), Unfinished Business: Perspectives on Art and Feminism, exhibition catalogue, Melbourne: Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, 2017, 16. 118 LEVEL co-directors included Courtney Coombs, Alice Lang, Rachael Haynes, Caitlin Franzmann, Anita Holtsclaw and Courtney Pedersen. 119 ‘We need to talk feminism and food’, 23 June 2014, artist’s statement, https://blog.qa goma.qld.gov.au/we-need-to-talk-feminism-and-food/ accessed 11 November 2020; in the ‘We need to talk’ gallery installation for SEXES (Performance Space, Carriageworks, Sydney, curators: Bec Dean, Deborah Kelly and Jeff Khan, 25 October–1 December 2012) and earlier that year via a series of dinner parties, ‘Food for Thought’, for Next Wave Festival, Melbourne, and banner workshop at the Basement, Brisbane. 120 Conversation Pieces, curator: Rachael Haynes (Boxcopy Contemporary Art Space, Brisbane, 8–29 March 2014). Exhibiting artists were Catherine or Kate, Agatha Gothe-Snape, Alex Martinis Roe, Hannah Raisin, Scott Ferguson, and Courtney Coombs & Caitlin Franzmann. 121 Curatorial Statement, THIS IS NOT THE WORK: Feminist collectives, collaboration and curating, curated by LEVEL, 9–27 September 2014, The Block, QUT Creative Industries Precinct. 122 http://blacklunchtable.com/ accessed 11 November 2020. 123 https://moengmeta436318243.wordpress.com/bio/ accessed 11 November 2020. 124 See Barbara Cleveland: Artist’s Talk, hosted by Monash University Museum of Art, 2017, https://vimeo.com/274809455 and http://www.barbaracleveland.com.au/ accessed 30 July 2019. 125 Artist’s statement, http://browncouncil.com/works/this-is-barbara-cleveland accessed 29 September 2014. 126 Kelly Doley, Yes and No: Things Learnt about Feminism, Boxcopy, Brisbane, October 2014, posted 16 October 2014, https://www.facebook.com/events/315136032003618/?ref= 51&source=1 accessed 11 November 2020. 127 The CAF project Future Feminist Archive (2015), which comprised a year-long series of artist residencies in various places around NSW and in exhibitions and symposia in multiple venues, was specifically focused on filling the gap in archival maintenance of the feminist record, in gathering personal and neglected collections of feminist art and art writing and bringing it into public recognition and documentation: see http:// contemporaryartandfeminism.com/ffa accessed 11 November 2020. 128 Araya interviewed by Karen Rosenberg, ‘Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook on lecturing the dead, and the art of the one-sided conversation’, in Artspace online, 30 January 2015,

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https://www.artspace.com/magazine/interviews_features/meet_the_artist/araya-rasdja rmrearnsook-interview-52592 accessed 11 November 2020. Araya interviewed by Rosenberg, 2015. Arnika Fuhrmann, ‘Making contact: contingency, fantasy, and the performance of impossible intimacies in the video art of Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook’, Positions, 21 (4): 769–799, 2013, 770. Fuhrmann, 2013, 771, 772, 774, 780. Araya interviewed by Rosenberg, 2015. https://khojworkshop.org/programme/anita-dube-asim-waqif/ accessed 11 November 2020. https://khojworkshop.org/programme/anita-dube-asim-waqif/ Srinivas Aditya Mopidevi, ‘Anita Dube’, Ocula Magazine, 8 December 2018, https:// ocula.com/magazine/conversations/anita-dube/ accessed 11 November 2020. Alex Martinis Roe, artist’s website, https://alexmartinisroe.com/Genealogies-Fram eworks-for-Exchange accessed 11 November 2020. See Lucia Rainer, On the Threshold of Knowing: Lectures and Performances in Art and Academia, Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2017. Performed live at various art venues and festivals in Australia and internationally 2011–2016. Soda_Jerk, https://www.sodajerk.com.au/lecture_performance.php?l=20120924215904 accessed 21 October 2020. Carly Whitefield, ‘The lecture performance in cinematic practice’, http://sodajerk. com.au, accessed 31 July 2019. Carly Whitefield, ‘The lecture performance in cinematic practice’. Carly Whitefield, ‘The lecture performance in cinematic practice’. Soda_Jerk, https://www.sodajerk.com.au/lecture_performance.php?l=20121206085956 accessed 21 October 2020. Maggie Bullock interviews Vanessa German, ‘The future of work: the “citizen artist” bringing hope to Pittsburgh’s Homewood’, Shondaland, 17 April 2019, https://www.shonda land.com/inspire/a27168640/vanessa-german-citizen-artist-pittsburgh-homewood/ accessed 21 October 2020. Bullock, 2019. Piotr Orlov interviews Vanessa German, ‘The magical, citizen art of Vanessa German’, Afropunk, 6 December 2019, https://afropunk.com/2019/12/the-magical-citizenart-of-vanessa-german/ accessed 21 October 2020. Bullock, 2019. Vanessa German, ‘i take my soul with me everywhere i go’, Georgia Review, 70 (2): 335–352, 2016. Hilary Robinson, ‘Local community: Vanessa German’, in Reckitt, Helena (ed.), Art of Feminism: Images that Shaped the Fight for Equality, 1857–2017, San Francisco/ London: Chronicle Books/Tate Publishing, 2018, 234. Cited by Robinson in Reckitt, 2018, 234. Yard Concept, ‘A conversation: Vanessa German’, Fort Gansevoort Gallery, Spring 2020, https://static1.squarespace.com/static/55ee2fc1e4b0c1020ff7e01a/t/5e690006e8d9fa 2fd4f9f1cb/1583939592023/Vanessa+German+SPR+20+Yard+Concept.pdf accessed 11 November 2020. Yard Concept, 2020. ‘Power figures’ is ‘a term [German] adapted from the central African tradition of nkisi nkondi (Congolese for “spirit hunter”), guardian statuettes carved out of wood and pierced with nails and other sharp objects. When she began she was not directly conscious of her artistic connection to the nkisi nkondi, but felt her instinctual inheritance … ’, in German, 2016. https://static1.squarespace.com/static/55ee2fc1e4b0c1020ff7e01a/t/5dc59c3412c0d8640d de4d7d/1573231671048/Vanessa+German_Trampoline_Press+Release.pdf accessed 11 November 2020.

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155 Camila Arbelaez, ‘Vanessa German’s Art House: a stronghold against gentrification’, Brown Political Review, 13 November 2017, https://brownpoliticalreview.org/2017/ 11/vanessa-germans-art-house-stronghold-gentrification/ accessed 21 October 2020. 156 Aunty May Hinch, Gloria Woodbridge, Aunty Joy Duncan, Marlene Hinch and Adrienne Duncan, interviewed by Kate Ford, edited by Jo Holder, Boggabilla, October, 2014, in Curating Feminism catalogue, Sydney: University of Sydney, 2014, 38–39. 157 The work was first exhibited on Goomeroi land before being shown at Sydney’s Art Gallery of New South Wales. The project was a partnership developed by Euraba Artists and Papermakers and Beyond Empathy, a collaboration between Aunty May Hinch, Leonie Binge, Lola Binge, Donald Cubby, Paul Mackie, Matthew Priestly, Jonathan Jones and community members. 158 Warmun is one of the largest Aboriginal communities in the East Kimberley, and given its official ‘viability’, has been afforded considerable infrastructure. 159 Alana Hunt, Curating Feminism, curatorial statement, SCA 2014. 160 Alana Hunt, 2014. 161 Anna Crane, Alana Hunt, Mabel Juli, Shirley Purdie, Betty Carrington, Phyllis Thomas and Nancy Nodea, ‘Ngali-Ngalim-Booroo (for the women)’, Curating Feminism catalogue, Sydney: University of Sydney, 2014, 27. 162 The Mulka Project at Nirin, 22nd Biennale of Sydney, https://www.biennaleofsyd ney.art/artists/mulka-project/ accessed 12 November 2020. 163 The Mulka Project, in Brook Andrew et al, Nirin: 22nd Biennale of Sydney catalogue, Sydney: Biennale of Sydney, 2020, 286. 164 Elvis Richardson, ‘The CoUNTess Report’, 2016, www.thecountessreport.com.au accessed 21 October 2020. 165 Prcevich et al., ‘The CoUNTess Report’, 2019. 166 Marcos Arruda, Solidarity Economy and the Rebirth of a Matristic Human Society, World Social Forum 4 proceedings, Mumbai, India, 20 June 2005, https://www.tni.org/en/article/ solidarity-economy-and-the-rebirth-of-a-matristic-human-society accessed 12 November 2020. 167 Caroline Woolard and Susan Jahoda, Of Supply Chains (draft), 2016, http://caroline woolard.com/static/uploads/texts/08_CarolineWoolard_pedagogySample.pdf accessed 12 November 2021. 168 Woolard and Jahoda, 2016. 169 Caroline Woolard, ‘NYC Real Estate Investment Cooperative’, http://carolinewoola rd.com/system/nyc-real-estate-investment-cooperative/ accessed 12 November 2020. 170 The Study Center grew from a pilot programme that took the form of an exhibition called WOUND, The Study Center for Group Work, curated by Stamatina Gregory, at Cooper Union in 2016–2017. 171 Caroline Woolard, Study Center for Group Work, 2016–present, http://studycollaboration. com/ accessed 12 November 2020. 172 Future Feminist Archive also ran wiki-a-thon workshops at The National Centre for Creative Learning at Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art on 26 October, 2014. 173 For example, from 2014 CAF Australia initiated and continues innovative wiki-a-thons and ‘teach-ins’ (https://www.contemporaryartandfeminism.com), while in 2018 Futuwonder, a new woman’s art collective in Bali, Indonesia, gathered a group of volunteers to run ‘Puan Empu Seni: Edit-a-thon’ within a fun and learning environment at Rumah Sanur-Creative Hub, with the aim to make a very significant contribution to Balinese art: https://lifeasartasia.art/2019/01/23/empowering-balinese-woman-artists-futuwonder/ accessed 12 November 2020.

References Ahmed, Sara. 2004. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. New York: Routledge. Andrew, Brook et al. 2020. Nirin: 22nd Biennale of Sydney. Sydney: Biennale of Sydney.

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Arbelaez, Camila. 2017. ‘Vanessa German’s Art House: a stronghold against gentrification’, Brown Political Review, 13 November, https://brownpoliticalreview.org/2017/11/vanessagermans-art-house-stronghold-gentrification/ Aristarkhova, Irina, Milevska, Suzana, Martinez-Colado, Ana, Moore, Catriona, et al. 2010. ‘Notes from the Frontline’, N.Paradoxa: International Feminist Art Journal, 26 (July): 17–19, 28–29, 38–39, 76–77. Arruda, Marcos. 2005. ‘Solidarity economy and the rebirth of a matristic human society’, Mumbai: TNI, https://www.tni.org/en/article/solidarity-economy-and-the-rebirth-of-a-ma tristic-human-society Ball, Stephen J. 2000. Sociology of Education: Major Themes. London; New York: RoutledgeFalmer. Bell, Julian. 2007. Mirror of the World: A New History of Art. London: Thames & Hudson. Bell, Lee Anne, and Desai, Dipti. 2011. ‘Imagining otherwise: connecting the arts and social justice to envision and act for change’, Equity & Excellence in Education, 44 (3): 287–295. Best, Amy L., ed. 2007. Representing Youth: Methodological Issues in Critical Youth Studies. New York: NYU Press. Bullock, Maggie. 2019. ‘The future of work: the ‘citizen artist’ bringing hope to Pittsburgh’s Homewood’, Shondaland, 17 April, https://www.shondaland.com/inspire/a27168640/vanessagerman-citizen-artist-pittsburgh-homewood/ Burke, Janine. 1975. Australian Women Artists: One Hundred Years, 1840–1940. Melbourne: Ewing and George Paton Galleries. Burke, Janine, ed. 1978/79. ‘A survey of women’s art theory courses and feminine sensibility’, Lip, 3: 63–64. Burn, Ian. 1981. ‘The sixties: crisis and aftermath’, Art & Text, 1 (Autumn): 49–65. Crane, Anna, Hunt, Alana, Juli, Mabel, Purdie, Shirley, Carrington, Betty, Thomas, Phyllis, and Nodea, Nancy. 2014. ‘Ngali-Ngalim-Booroo (for the women)’, Curating Feminism, 27. Sydney: University of Sydney. Deepwell, Katy. 1999. ‘Suzanne Lacy: new genre public art’, N.Paradoxa: International Feminist Art Journal, 4: 25–33. Delany, Max, and Kristensen, Annika, eds. 2017. Unfinished Business: Perspectives on Art and Feminism. Melbourne: Australian Centre for Contemporary Art. Delgado, Richard, and Stefancic, Jean. 2013. Critical Race Theory: The Cutting Edge, 3rd edn. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Dimitrakaki, Angela, and Perry, Lara, eds. 2013. Politics in a Glass Case: Feminism, Exhibition Cultures and Curatorial Transgressions. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Duncan, Carol. 1973. ‘Virility and domination in early twentieth century vanguard painting’, Artforum, 12 (4): 30–39. Eisner, Elliot W. 2002. ‘From episteme to phronesis to artistry in the study and improvement of teaching’, Teaching and Teacher Education, 18 (4): 375–385. Ellsworth, Elizabeth Ann. 2005. Places of Learning: Media, Architecture, Pedagogy. New York: RoutledgeFalmer. Ely, Bonita. 1977. ‘Sexism in art education’, The Women’s Show Conference Papers, 48. Ely, Bonita. 1978. ‘Women’s Art Register Extension Project’, LIP, 60–61. Felshin, Nina, ed. 1995. But Is It Art?: The Spirit of Art as Activism. Seattle: Bay Press. Fisher, Jennifer. 1997. ‘Interperformance: the live tableaux of Suzanne Lacy, Janine Antoni, and Marina Abramovic’, Art Journal, 56 (4): 28–33. Ford, Kate. 2014. ‘Aunty May Hinch, Gloria Woodbridge, Aunty Joy Duncan, Marlene Hinch and Adrienne Duncan’, in Jo Holder (ed.) Curating Feminism (catalogue), 38–39. Sydney: University of Sydney.

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Foucault, Michel. 1978. The History of Sexuality, 1st American edn. Social Theory, 2nd edn. New York: Pantheon Books. Freire, Paulo. 1972. Pedagogy of the Oppressed, rev. edn. London: Penguin. Fuhrmann, Arnika. 2013. ‘Making contact: contingency, fantasy, and the performance of impossible intimacies in the video art of Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook’, Positions, 21 (4): 769–799. Gallop, Jane. 1995. Pedagogy: The Question of Impersonation. Theories of Contemporary Culture v. 17. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. German, Vanessa. 2016. ‘i take my soul with me everywhere i go’, Georgia Review, 70 (2): 335–352. Graff, Gerald. 1994. ‘The pedagogical turn’, Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association, 27 (1): 65–69. Grande, Sandy. 2004. Red Pedagogy: Native American Social and Political Thought. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Green Fryd, Vivien. 2007. ‘Suzanne Lacy’s three weeks in May: feminist activist performance art as “expanded public pedagogy”’, NWSA Journal, 19 (1): 23–38. Greene, Maxine. 1995. Releasing the Imagination: Essays on Education, the Arts, and Social Change. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Grosz, Elizabeth. 1994. Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism. St Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin. Guattari, Félix. 1989. ‘The three ecologies’, translated by Chris Turner. New Formations, no. 8. Hill, Wes. 2013. ‘In Focus: Emily Floyd’, Frieze, May, https://www.frieze.com/article/ focus-emily-floyd Honour, Hugh, and Fleming, John. 2005. The Visual Arts: A History, 7th rev. edn. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall. hooks, bell. 1994. Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. New York: Routledge. Horstman, Richard. 2019. ‘Empowering Balinese woman artists – FUTUWONDER’, Life as Art Asia (blog), 23 January, https://lifeasartasia.art/2019/01/23/empowering-balinese-womanartists-futuwonder/ Jones, Amelia. 1994. ‘Dis/playing the phallus: male artists perform their masculinities’, Art History, 17 (4): 546–584. Jones, Amelia. 1998. Body Art/Performing the Subject. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Jones, Amelia. 2003. The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader. London: Routledge. Jones, Amelia, ed. 2006. A Companion to Contemporary Art Since 1945. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Jones Brayboy, Bryan McKinley. 2005. ‘Toward a tribal critical race theory in education’, Urban Review, 37 (5): 425–446. Kemp, Martin, ed. 2004. The Oxford History of Western Art. New York: Oxford University Press. Kennedy, Jen. 2011. ‘School’s in: contemporary art and the educational turn’, C Magazine, no. 109: 16–23. Kester, Grant. 2012. ‘The noisy optimism of immediate action: theory, practice, and pedagogy in contemporary art’, Art Journal (New York 1960), 71 (2): 86–99. King, Alison. 1993. ‘From sage on the stage to guide on the side’, College Teaching, 41 (1) Winter: 30–35. Lacy, Suzanne. 1991. ‘The name of the game’, Art Journal, 50 (2): 64–68. Lacy, Suzanne, ed. 1995. Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art. Seattle: Bay Press. Lacy, Suzanne, and Lippard, Lucy. 1984. ‘Political performance art’, Heresies, (17): 22–25. Ladson-Billings, Gloria, and Tate, William F. 2000. ‘Towards a critical race theory of education’, in Stephen Ball (ed.) Sociology of Education: Major Themes. London; New York: RoutledgeFalmer, 322–342.

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Leander, Kevin M., and Ehret, Christian, eds. 2019. Affect in Literacy Learning and Teaching: Pedagogies, Politics and Coming to Know. New York; London: Routledge. Maimon, Vered. 2009. ‘The third citizen: on models of criticality in contemporary artistic practices’, October, 129 (August): 85–112. Manning, Erin. 2015. ‘10 Propositions for a radical pedagogy, or how to rethink value’, Inflections, no. 8 (April): 202–210. Merewether, Charles, and Stephen, Ann, eds. 1977. The Great Divide: An Ongoing Critique of Australian Culture Under Capitalism: Reviews of Oppositional Cultural Work and an Examination of Socialist Models. Fitzroy, Vic. Miller, Janet L. 2005. Sounds of Silence Breaking: Women, Autobiography, Curriculum. Complicated Conversation, v. 1. New York: Peter Lang. Monte, Megan. 2015. ‘Emily Floyd: an alternative education’, Australia Council: Artist Stories (blog). 1 July, https://www.australiacouncil.gov.au/arts-in-daily-life/artist-stories/emilyfloyd-an-alternative-education/ Moore, Catriona, ed. 1994. Dissonance: Feminism and the Arts 1970–1990. St Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin in association with Artspace. Mopidevi, Srinivas Aditya. 2018. ‘Anita Dube’, Ocula Magazine, 8 December, https://ocula. com/magazine/conversations/anita-dube/ Mouffe, Chantal. 2007. ‘Artistic activism and agonistic spaces’, Art & Research, 1 (2): 1–5. Nemser, Cindy. 1975. ‘When greatness is a box of Wheaties’, Artforum, 14: 60–64. Orlov, Piotr. 2019. ‘The magical, citizen art of Vanessa German’, Afropunk, 6 December, https://afropunk.com/2019/12/the-magical-citizen-art-of-vanessa-german/ Phelan, Peggy, and Rogoff, Irit. 2001. ‘‘Without’: a conversation’, Art Journal, 60 (3): 34–41. Podesva, Kristina Lee. 2007. ‘A pedagogical turn: brief notes on education as art’, Fillip, no. 6. Pollock, Griselda. 1985. ‘Art, art school, culture: individualism after the death of the artist’, Block, no. 11: 8–18. Pollock, Griselda. 2012. Vision and Difference Feminism, Femininity and Histories of Art, 3rd edn. Florence: Taylor & Francis. Prcevich, Amy, Richardson, Elvis, and Samuels, Miranda. 2019. ‘The CoUNTess Report’, https://countess.report/ Puig de la Bellacasa, María. 2017. Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More than Human Worlds. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Rainer, Lucia. 2017. On the Threshold of Knowing: Lectures and Performances in Art and Academia. Bielefeld: transcript Verlag. Rancière, Jacques. 1991. The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation. Stanford, CA.: Stanford University Press. Rancière, Jacques. 2008. ‘Aesthetic separation, aesthetic community: scenes from the aesthetic regime of art’, Art & Research, 2 (1): 1–15. Rancière, Jacques. 2010. Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, Steve Corcoran (ed.) London; New York: Continuum. Rancière, Jacques. 2011. The Emancipated Spectator. London: Verso. Reckitt, Helena, ed. 2018. Art of Feminism: Images That Shaped the Fight for Equality, 1857– 2017. San Francisco/London: Chronicle Books/Tate Publishing. Richardson, Elvis. 2016. ‘The CoUNTess Report’, http://www.thecountessreport.com.au/ Rogoff, Irit. 2006. ‘Academy as potentiality’, in Irit Rogoff and Angelika Nollert (eds) A.C. A.D.E.M.Y., Revolver. Rogoff, Irit. 2008. ‘Turning’, E-Flux Journal, November, https://www.e-flux.com/journal/ 00/68470/turning/

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Rosenberg, Karen. 2015. ‘Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook on lecturing the dead, and the art of the one-sided conversation’, Artspace, 30 January, http://www.artspace.com/magazine/ interviews_ features/araya-rasdjarmrearnsook-interview Schechner, Richard. 2006. Performance Studies: An Introduction, 2nd edn. New York: Routledge. Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. 1999. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. Albany, NY: Zed Books. Springgay, Stephanie. 2008. ‘Corporeal pedagogy and contemporary video art’, Art Education (Reston), 61 (2): 18–24. Springgay, Stephanie. 2010. ‘Knitting as an aesthetic of civic engagement: re-conceptualizing feminist pedagogy through touch’, Feminist Teacher, 20 (2): 111–123. Student-Centred Teaching, UNSW Teaching Staff Gateway. 2016. https://teaching.unsw. edu.au/student-centred-teaching Tronto, Joan C. 1993. Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care. New York: Routledge. Villaverde, Leila. 2008. Feminist Theories and Education. New York: Peter Lang. Watson, Tara. 2014. ‘Women hit glass ceiling in gallery jobs’, ArtsHub Australia, 20 October, https://visual.artshub.com.au/news-article/features/museums/tara-watson/women-hitglass-ceiling-in-gallery-jobs-246170 Webb, Lynne M., Allen, Myra W., and Walker, Kandi L. 2002. ‘Feminist pedagogy: identifying basic principles’, Academic Exchange Quarterly, 6 (January): 67–72. Wilkins, David, Schultz, Bernard, and Linduff, Katheryn. 2005. Art Past / Art Present, 5th edn. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall. Woolard, Caroline. 2016. ‘Study Center for Group Work’, Caroline Woolard (artist’s website), http://studycollaboration.com/ Woolard, Caroline. n.d. ‘NYC Real Estate Investment Cooperative’, Caroline Woolard, http://carolinewoolard.com/system/nyc-real-estate-investment-cooperative/ Woolard, Caroline, and Jahoda, Susan. 2016. ‘Of supply chains (draft)’, Caroline Woolard, October, http://carolinewoolard.com/static/uploads/texts/08_CarolineWoolard_pedagogy Sample.pdf Yard Concept. 2020. ‘A conversation: Vanessa German’, Fort Gansevoort (gallery website), https:// static1.squarespace.com/static/55ee2fc1e4b0c1020ff7e01a/t/5e690006e8d9fa2fd4f9f1cb/1583 939592023/Vanessa+German+SPR+20+Yard+Concept.pdf

4 CRAFTIVISM A material ethics of care

Introduction In response to US art historian Linda Nochlin’s famous question, ‘Why have there been no great women artists?’,1 feminists have long argued that women have always contributed to culture; however the fact is that they ‘speak’ from historically marginalised positions within that culture—spaces that for too long have been ‘hidden from history’.2 By attending to these spaces and revaluing women’s traditional arts, feminists challenged spurious delineations between what is private and public business, what is domestic and what is political. In the first instance, we contend that these demarcations make little sense when describing how First Nations crafting maintains the multifaceted responsibilities of traditional women’s business as well as economic, cultural and environmental survival strategies. Non-Indigenous feminist crafting also stops short of any simple celebration of ‘women’s culture’. Our focus here is on textiles, which have provided a complex platform for negotiating class, gender and colonial relations, and which share a common historical under-valuation: as creative care, as making do, as maternal labours of love, as unpaid or underpaid domestic labour, and as institutional, mission (reservation) and souvenir arts.3 Across these and other sites, feminist crafting continues to unravel the gendered and hierarchical binaries of Western thought that oppose art and craft, masculine and feminine, the universal and the particular, public and private. In so doing, feminism refuses to simply revalue craft’s moral high ground of heart and hand against the conceptual primacy of cognition in the fine arts, or the material particularities of interpersonal, family and community support over generalisable universal rights. This chapter demonstrates that feminist crafting refutes this dualism, and is often practised as a collective or community pursuit that associates individual actions with broader visions for cultural change; a personalpolitical practice that now goes under the common moniker of ‘craftivism’, as first popularised by US writer Betsy Greer: DOI: 10.4324/9781003045175-5

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Craftivism is the practice of engaged creativity, especially regarding political or social causes. By using their creative energy to help make the world a better place, craftivists help bring about positive change via personalized activism. Craftivism allows practitioners to customize their particular skills to address particular causes.4 We start by indicating how First Nations crafting complicates distinctions between care and rights. We discuss projects that in different ways embody the intertwined elements of Australia’s 2019 NAIDOC slogan: ‘Voice. Treaty. Truth’5, to demonstrate how Aboriginal and Torres Straits Islander craftswomen combine truth-telling with cultural and community maintenance and environmental care in their work and as they work. Indigenous Australian women have been ‘spinning, looping, weaving and dyeing’ plant fibres since the beginning of the Dreamings,6 and following settlercolonial invasion in 1788, their creative string and weave have asserted cultural continuity and rights to land, sea and law in the face of historical colonial dispossession, kidnapping and slavery (including domestic exploitation by the ‘white missus’). Crafting as truth-telling exercises personal-political power and is a prerequisite for reconciliation politics and ultimately constitutional change. Through this chapter we will argue that feminist crafting enacts the tenets of moral philosophy whilst sidestepping the latter’s gendered quandary of opposing universal rights and a relationally based ethics (‘what is right?’ versus ‘how to respond?’7). We suggest that the inclusive, personal-political driver of feminist crafting puts paid to the historical separation of public and private spheres—and by extension, the distinction between universal rights and relational responsibilities. Indeed, many contemporary artists pay tribute to longstanding crafts traditions within socialist and feminist mass movements—the embroidered trades union banner, the suffragette brooch, sash and handkerchief—that link universal rights such as free assembly, wage justice and franchise with very material individual and community acts of taking care and caring for others. We argue that feminist crafting considers such theoretical oppositions as being an unnecessary choice, and in doing so we align feminist art politics with interventions within moral and political philosophy and associated social sciences. Such alignments are especially important today, in light of our increasingly Manichean political culture and declarative moral rhetoric (of ‘we’re right/you’re wrong’) that are eroding our democratic systems and are fuelled by right-wing and social media platforms.8 In making this argument, we discuss the historical antecedents of batik work at Ernabella and Utopia in Central Australia, the Women’s Domestic Needlework Group, the saltwater crafting of Dulcie Greeno and Esme Timbery, the multi-media textile work of Narelle Jubelin, Sera Waters, Raquel Ormella, Liam Benson and in the US Natalie Ball, and the ‘Occupy’-styled activism of the Knitting Nannas Against Coal Seam Gas.

‘Voice. Treaty. Truth’ … and craft Crafting has always been a valued aspect of law, care and trade within Aboriginal Australia. It has also formed an important platform for dealing with the non-Indigenous

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world; for instance, from the seventeenth century to 1908, cultural and economic interaction between Tiwi and Yolngu communities and Indonesians through the Macassan trepang (edible sea cucumber) trade led to woven cloth becoming a valued commodity in Tiwi and Yolngu society and a power object in mortuary ceremonies.9 Since British invasion in 1788, Aboriginal women across the continent have used textiles to maintain law, culture and country and for economic survival. For instance, Pitjantjatjara women from the Ernabella community in the Musgrave ranges of South Australia had been spinning and making walka tjuta (meaningful designs, yet separate to Tjukurpa—Dreaming, law10) that were incorporated on knotted rugs, moccasins, handloom weaving and fabric painting for cushion covers and clothing at the Ernabella mission school and craft room from 1948.11 From the early 1970s, Ernabella batik and tie-dye became a model for other women’s art centres such as Utopia,12 where from 1976 batik has been used to assert cultural identity and economic independence, and to demonstrate the powerful nature of art as evidence for showing connection to country, helping the Anmatyerre and Alyawarre peoples to gain freehold title to their lands under the Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act of 1976.13 Batik also played a part in establishing and resourcing the homelands (or outstation) movement in this period, where Aboriginal peoples moved back onto their ancestral lands to maintain country and law.14 Batik is a portable, DIY medium, and the women could use whatever was at hand for heating the wax (old saucepans, frying pans, even old hub-caps) and handmade brushes (later using cantings) for applying the wax, and flour drums on the open fire to boil the wax out.15 Utopia Batik thus helped to support the movement away from larger towns and centres to smaller, scattered communities on traditional lands. As Hilda (Cookie) Menmatwek Pwerl recalled of the remote batik camps, When we all moved back to (our) country, to Atneltyey, and at Atneltyey we used to do batik. We kept on doing batik there and in all the outstations. Debra (Speedie) used to hand out all the batik materials, then the following morning she used to go around picking up the batiks and handing out payments. She used to do the rounds of all the different communities where we lived—Ngkwarlerlanem, Soakage Bore, and the others. We used to finish boiling all the batik, and she’d come back on Friday and collect them and hand out the batik money.16 The spaces of Indigenous art production, reception and exchange—the bush camp, ceremonial ground or remote art centre as well as urban studios and galleries—are inter-related and often communal sites of art and education, land ownership and custodianship, law and kinship.17 In this sense, feminist understandings of the domestic sphere are challenged and extended, for ‘the domestic’, as a privileged location of personal experience, need not denote specific home or studio spaces in the Westerncolonial sense. Unlike Ernabella Batik, women associated with the Utopia camps used their rich store of traditional visual symbolism, derived from their awely or ceremonial performance, which are practised ‘to hold and look after their country, promote feelings of happiness, health and well-being in the community. They sing to ensure that

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bush plants continue to grow in abundance, bush animals proliferate, and to make babies healthy and fat.’18 As Kathleen Petyarre explained in 1988: We paint the women’s ceremonies on the batik, the stories that our father’s mothers taught us. Well now we put all these stories on batik, our grandfather’s stories. It’s good to represent our ceremonial designs on batik. That’s women’s business, that awely—men have their own business, atywerreng or sacred objects. They might paint these things themselves—they’ve got their own business. Us women have our own separate ceremonies.19 We cite this short history of Ernabella and Utopia batik as a reminder that, alongside their (better-recompensed) countrymen making hand-crafted objects (and from the early 1970s also painting in acrylic for white audiences), women’s textiles were a forerunner to the so-called Aboriginal Art Revolution that accelerated through the 1980s and which retrospectively re-validated Indigenous craft as fine art rather than as ethnographic artefact or domestic souvenir. For instance, Anmatyerre elder Emily Kgnwarreye had developed a fluency of hand from her dazzling experiments in batik on silk cloth, drawing upon the stories from her father’s paternal country line—the arlatyey or atnwelarr (pencil yam), kam (yam seed), ankerr (emu) and related dreamings associated with her father’s country of Alhalker and its sibling country Atnangker.20 She later found that painting was a more immediate and easier medium to work with: I gave up whatisname—fabric—to avoid all the boiling to get the wax out. I got a bit lazy—I gave it up because it was too much hard work … continually boiling and boiling the fabric, and lighting the fires, and using all that soap powder—over and over—that’s why I gave it up and changed over to canvas then—it was easier.21 Once Kgnwarreye moved from batik on fabric to painting on large canvases in acrylic in 1990 (aged 85), she was ‘discovered’ by white male critics and curators and was thereafter showcased in international museum shows.22 In this period, emerging First Nations curators also helped to relocate crafted objects from the ethnographic museum to the art gallery, by isolating and re-framing hand-crafted objects through a modernist hang and use of minimal wall texts.23 This curatorial shift from anthropology to fine art helped to dissolve imposed boundaries between art and craft, contemporary and ‘traditional’, correcting the idea that fibre work was without aesthetic value and ceremonial and political import, eliding distinctions that have never existed in First Nations cultures.

Feminism and the crafts movement In this same period, feminist artists retrieved non-Indigenous crafting from the attics and basements of (uncollected) social history. In the West, the mid-twentieth-century resurgence of studio crafts had reclaimed the moral high ground of nineteenth-century Arts and Crafts Movement ideology through privileging

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traditional Western, Chinese and Japanese master-craftsman models.24 While many women were also at the forefront of the post-war studio crafts movement,25 the impetus of Women’s Liberation challenged the professionalisation of studio craft traditions for marginalising the gendered, social dimension of amateur, domestic, popular, communal and collective practices. Indeed, the lessons to be learnt from women’s traditional arts formed a major focus of second wave feminism. Craftivists strayed from the studio and gallery to seek ambiguous and unpredictable public contexts, where the feminist proposal of sisterhood suggested that women might share kitchen, bathroom and bedroom experiences. How, for instance, was the Women’s Liberation stall at the 1975 Sydney Royal Easter Show received? The display of craftwork—cheap and accessible hand-printed T-shirts and posters, hand-made badges, jewellery and ceramics—was a creative adjunct to assembled pamphlets on contraception, women’s health and rape crisis centres.26 Multicultural crafting in community arts and trade union-based Art and Working Life projects in the 1970s and 1980s also extended Australian feminism’s nonhierarchical modus operandi to explore intersectional alliances. The Women’s Domestic Needlework Group aligned the aesthetic and social historical value of domestic textiles through art historical studio research into little-known craftswomen, blurring distinctions between professional and amateur designers. This research was exhibited as The D’Oyley Show: An Exhibition of Women’s Domestic Fancywork (1979).27 These ventures in feminist crafting revalued ideas of social function and cultural meaning that had historically bound the decorative and applied arts. Given its connection with everyday life, craft is a valuable platform from which to explore the gendered, diurnal phenomena of domestic experience, changing work practices, and familial, social and environmental relations. The somatic and experiential eloquence of craft objects extended the idea of aesthetics as an explanation of art, to the use of art as an explanation of life, and vice-versa.28 Through our crafted objects, we could grasp our historical process.29 The D’Oyley Show: An Exhibition of Women’s Domestic Fancywork was accompanied by a series of ten silk-screened posters. One of these documented the astounding dexterity of Yolngu string figure creator Narau, from Yirrkala in Arnhem Land, and tells us that she is demonstrating ‘one of over two hundred distinctive string figure designs she knows’. Her string figures or matjka are ingenious, ephemeral designs communicating landscape, plants, weather, animals and man-made objects, using looped string, ‘assisted by the teeth, neck, elbows, knees and toes when necessary’ as anthropologist Frederick McCarthy recorded in his study and collection of Yolngu string work for the Australian Museum in 1948.30 Art historian Robyn McKenzie has noted more recently how string work connects family to law and land: ‘Lengths of decorated string are festooned from poles in ceremony, symbolically linking different clans and their territories, and linking past, present and future generations.’31 They are usually created by one though sometimes by other performers, sitting closely together, and virtuoso performers like Ngarrawu Mununggurr (McCarthy’s principal collaborator) built an astonishing repertoire of string patterns. Many of these are no longer current, and older

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women (some near-contemporaries of Ngarrawu Mununggurr) remembered this skill through workshops for the travelling 2013 exhibition String Theory: Focus on Contemporary Australian Art: If they recalled particular techniques, and took pleasure in the fluidity of the manipulations, they might not necessarily remember the correct order in which movement built upon movement in sequence to achieve a particular outcome—the figure they were searching for. Then they might work it out. Having ‘got it’ once, the next time they might ‘fluff it’—a cause for laughter. The process could be testing, if not painful, shadowed as it was by the knowing sense of a loss that was not merely personal.32

The aesthetics of listening The above testimony suggests that crafting allows women to come in close and help deal with anger and sadness at cultural loss, or the ambivalence we feel towards women’s historical lack of opportunities. Feminist crafting has respectfully chronicled how mothers, aunties and grandmothers creatively negotiated socially and economically constricted lives within the Western nuclear family through an ‘aesthetics of listening’ to women’s varied experiences across a range of community settings—a forerunner to what is now commonly considered part of the ‘post-Documenta 11’ curatorial platform.33 Mothers’ Memories, Others’ Memories (MMOM, 1979–1981) was one such pioneering listening project that curated an inter-generational and multicultural material history of (non-Indigenous) Australian women’s domestic creativity.34 A cornucopia of domestic needlework, crochet, knitting, painting, drawing, pottery, home decoration, diaries, albums and letters was collected and discussed in weekly consciousness-raising crafting workshops, later exhibited as a mixed media installation at a shopping centre in the outer western Sydney suburb of Blacktown.35 As project coordinator and Sydney Women’s Art Movement member Vivienne Binns described, ‘I had become increasingly interested in the hidden history and socialisation of women—looked at them from a feminist perspective.’36 Project participants spoke of the difficulties they experienced when trying to shed a positive light on their mothers’, aunts’ and grandmothers’ experiences, without romanticising the maternal past. Re-crafting these domestic labours allowed second wave feminists to validate yet interrogate exquisitely crafted testimonies to pleasure, passion, poverty, immigration and exploitation. These tricky ambiguities reflected the complicated relation feminism has with patriarchal family structures, on the one hand, and the emotional investment we all have with family life. As MMOM participant, filmmaker and academic Laleen Jayamanne noted, ‘It is not as simple as we are for or against the family. We are all in it and we love it and we hate it at the same time. Just because you criticise, it doesn’t mean you reject it, because you are in it in some form of another—and you desperately want it at some point.’37 These magisterial yet marginalised community ‘memory cycle’ projects, as they were then called, curated the aesthetic and social eloquence of domestic arts to

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produce some of the finest and most challenging work of the period. They provided an aesthetic and affective dimension to contemporary feminist debates around productive and reproductive labour, including the low wages paid for women’s work, women’s emotional, creative and physical labour in the home, the invisible and insidious ‘double shift’, lack of accessible and affordable child-care and the many difficulties facing artist-mothers.38 Feminist crafting roughed-up the hierarchies of fine arts/crafts that had marginalised a wealth of creative work, stressing process over finished product and tidy exhibition. Curating ‘the personal as political’ upset canonical ideas of art’s proper subject matter, processes and materials. As a social intervention within the gallery circuit, this work was unquestionably challenging. Mainstream critics were confounded: along with the visceral horror of nappy installations, tampon mobiles, washing performances and central core imagery, domestic textiles raised thorny issues of aesthetic quality and progressivist history that flew in the face of still-prevailing modernist and subsequent (studio- and gallery-focussed) postmodern paradigms. This challenge remains largely unacknowledged today, for the work’s experimental nexus between the domestic, the real and the experiential condemned it to a marginal art-historical status. Sanitised art world censure meant that a lost world of conceptual crochet, dripping-red tampon and body art, aroma-rama installations and cleansing performances have remained institutionally uncollectable.39 It is important to acknowledge these marginalised forerunners of the recent ‘artisanal turn’ in contemporary art. We need to recognise the decades of intersectional feminist crafting that pioneered and continues to inform today’s Biennale and Documenta-endorsed penchant for embodied, non-traditional media such as textiles. In turn, we applaud current feminist, queer and non-Western voices that continue to explore the analytic force of regional, domestic and sub-cultural crafting. As Black and Burisch observe, ‘This emphasis has made room for reconsideration of crafts(wo)manship, performativity, mindfulness, tacit knowledge, skill sharing, DIY, anti-capitalism and activism’ that continues to test the expanded field of contemporary art practice.40

Broader frameworks of care: the ethics debate The analytic insights of feminist crafting connected with a broader scrutiny of caring and maintenance in the home and workplace, out of which theories of care in the often-overlapping spheres of psychology, moral philosophy and political science were developed. In the early 1980s, American ethicist Carol Gilligan championed moral frameworks that emphasised care, compassion and contextualisation. She observed how we as individuals are entangled in a web of dynamic relationships, within particular contexts and circumstances. Ethics is partly how we express and sustain these relationships, so that ‘emotion has a significant role in creating connection and motivating action’.41 Gilligan noted of her clinical investigations in the early 1980s how feelings in particular help to facilitate women’s ethical responses, contra the more mainstream assessment (e.g. Kohlberg) that women score lower in developmental models of moral response. As Gilligan responded:

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The moral imperative … (for) women is an injunction to care, a responsibility to discern and alleviate the ‘real and recognizable trouble’ of this world. For men, the moral imperative appears rather as an injunction to respect the rights of others and thus to protect from interference the rights to life and self-fulfillment … The standard of moral judgement that informs (women’s) assessment of the self is a standard of relationship, and ethic of nurturance, responsibility, and care.42 Gilligan contrasted the relational language of care with those abstract theories privileging atomistic ethics of justice, non-interference and self-realisation.43 The distinctions between Gilligan’s and Kohlberg’s work would soon become known as the ‘justice–care’ debate, which assumed a particularly gendered and antithetical division on questions of moral development. In their co-written article, ‘What is the justice–care debate really about?’, four Australia- and US-based ethicists (Leslie Cannold, Peter Singer, Helga Kuhse and Lori Gruen) summarised the justice–care division before drilling down for greater clarity: The notion that moral reasoning engaged in by women might differ from that engaged in by men has raised the question whether virtually all of philosophical ethics is oriented toward the way in which men, rather than women, think about ethics. The difference in male and female reasoning is sometimes described as the difference between an ethic of justice and ethic of care.44 To be sure, care has not been at the forefront of Western moral and political thinking, as against more abstract ideas of justice, and feminists like Gilligan cogently argued for this blind spot to be rectified. Nel Noddings later elaborated this gender binary, arguing for ‘natural caring’, as epitomised in the mother–child relation, as a privileged basis for an ethics of care.45 Critics in turn observed that the history of Western philosophy, from Aristotle to Hegel and beyond, has assumed women’s so-called ‘natural’ propensity to care, based on their biological reproductive primacy and privileged social role as child-carers. These assumptions have been shared throughout the sciences and humanities, including the arts, helping to historically consign women to the confines of the domestic sphere, family and community voluntarism.46 The ensuing essentialist debate within feminist moral philosophy, political sociology and ethics challenged the historical distinctions made in the West between care and justice—the one based on autonomy, certitude and moral judgement based on individual rights and universal values, the other on relational support.47 Gilligan and Noddings later shifted emphasis to acknowledge that justice and care are not mutually oppositional, and that care is foundational to justice:48 Care is a feminist, not a ‘feminine’ ethic, and feminism, guided by an ethic of care, is arguably the most radical, in the sense of going to the roots, liberation movement in human history. Released from the gender binary and hierarchy, feminism is neither a women’s issue nor a battle between women and men. It is the movement to free democracy from patriarchy.49

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Virginia Held further bolstered Gilligan’s position by adding that, ‘the view of the ethics of care as supporting the traditional subordination of women is seriously mistaken. What could be more revolutionary than upsetting the gender hierarchy of patriarchy in the most basic ways we think about how we ought to live and what we ought to do?’50 Emphasising the overarching relational aspect of the care ethic, Held notes that ‘Caring should not be understood as self-sacrifice. Egoism versus altruism is the wrong way to interpret the issues.’ Rather, ‘We want what will be good for both or all of us together.’51 The Dutch political theorist Selma Sevenhuijsen later commented on this dialogue between political activism and philosophical discourse, affirming that the ‘modern women’s movement … has challenged the self-evidence of women’s caring role … (and) in recent years … a change has begun to take place: care is now recognised as an important part of our existence, and the idea that care does not necessarily have to be opposed to independence and self-realisation is becoming more widely accepted’.52 We reference this debate to observe its relevance to feminist crafting and to note that, outside the academy, feminist artists have always used their skills, materials and processes to demonstrate care and justice as intimately bound together. A delicately-crocheted lace d’oyley by Sydney Women’s Art Movement member Frances (Budden) Phoenix in 1980 demanded ‘Get Your Abortion Laws Off Our Bodies’, alongside a neatly-worked silhouette of a woman in a Victorian-era crinoline, her fist upraised to ward off hovering symbols of capital, church, medicine and the legal apparatus. Phoenix crocheted her craftivist textile as an integral part of her campaign work for women’s reproductive rights, and it appeals to universalist tenets of justice by opening up the possibility for multiple voices and languages in moral discourse. Like other crafted assertions that the personal is political, it epitomises how care and justice may thus ‘inhabit each other’.53

Materiality and process: grounding an ethos of care Australian crafts historian Grace Cochrane elaborated craft’s materialist ethos by observing that: The interaction between ideas, skills and materials has always been a very tangible and often emotional relationship, both for the people making objects in this way, through feeling, touching, shaping and reshaping, and for people who use them for functional and symbolic purposes. A crafts approach involves a physical as well as an intellectual understanding of what one is working with.54 Over the centuries, the ethical values of care in crafting have derived from these embodied skills and the sheer labour hours spent with materials and media. Feminists brought an activist purpose to the long-standing pleasures of thoroughly testing and mastering one’s material, the joy of playful experimentation with form, the fun in transposing material from one context to another and discovering unexpected connections, and the delight of sensory stimulation. Alison Pearlman argues that this ethical dimension arises from the artist developing

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attention and respect for a material other than his or her ego, an empathy with another’s distinct properties, laws, or conventions. A long-time activist artist develops a respect for his or her sphere of political activity because social institutions are sometimes obdurate, have their own logic, and require patience to render pliable. The long-time activist artist’s empathic relation to his or her materials is not so different from that of other craftspeople, such as the sushi chef who gains a respect for fish and the knives and other tools of the trade. Developing the empathic dimension of creativity requires duration and intensity of engagement with particular media.55 The Madrid-based Australian artist Narelle Jubelin’s long-standing material researches epitomise this empathetic dimension. She makes a virtue of the slow speed and laborious precision afforded by single-thread petit point—coloured cotton thread stitched into silk mesh—that she has called ‘sewings’.56 These crystallise the intense focus of the miniature as her preferred pictorial format, which she carefully frames and embeds within loose, site-specific installations of objects and images. Gallerist Amanda Rowell observes that Jubelin’s deployment of her small petit points punctuate her installations ‘like a conjunction in a grammatical structure to give additional context, give alternatives, give reasons or give unexpected information’.57 In this way, Jubelin embeds personal memories and archival imagery within broad conversations about objects and images circulating within the global currencies of imperial trade and modernism. Her recent work researches a relational field of intellectual and social history of the built environment: modernist architecture and its utopian belief in the possibility of affordable mass housing encounters the lives and experiences of those who inhabit its vernacular forms, exploring ‘that peculiar somatic mix of physical structure and emotional afterlife that the idea of home holds’.58 In 2019 she inserted her small petit point series Owner Builder of Modern California House, 200159 (Figure 4.1) in the lounge-room of a house designed by leading architect Sydney Ancher for modernist artists Margot and Gerard Lewers (1955, 1962, now part of the Penrith Regional Gallery), part of a collaborative project titled The Housing Question. Nestled amid the elegant, purpose-built book-shelving of the Ancher House lounge-room are Jubelin’s stitched renditions of photographs her father Raymond took whilst building the family’s suburban Sydney home in 1964. Curator Julie Ewington prompts us to make more personal reflections of this juxtaposition, suggesting how Jubelin’s counterpoint of architectural modernism and its popular, DIY forms ‘embody a far more complex connection with the site of the family home’. She cites fellow Australian artist Margaret Morgan in commenting that, as Jubelin ‘renders the image, each knot is tied and cut like an umbilical cord, each stitch a mark of separation and remembrance, a break and a link to the artist’s childhood home, and to the modernism whose child she also is’.60 The skilful labour of transforming textile materials may also provide a ‘slow reveal’ of uncanny contents—in Sera Waters’ case, of closeted family stories that intersect with the British, Irish, Scottish and German settler-colonisation of South Australia, her home state,

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FIGURE 4.1

Narelle Jubelin, Owner Builder of Modern California House (detail), 2001, installation

where she sees herself as ‘a present-day beneficiary of settler colonisation’ on Kaurna land. The artist notes how she is ‘using the very stuff which makes homes comforting and safe, to disturb them’.61 With the familiar stitch and pull of hand embroidery, Waters détournes domestic materials (found tablecloths, towels, sheets, bedspreads and wallpapers) as uncanny décor within the gallery (Figure 4.2). She uses phrases like ‘stories absorbed by’ and ‘stains seeping out’ to describe the unsettling storage capacity of domestic textiles. She sees herself not as stitching interpretive historical imagery into her fabrics, so much as allowing historically repressed imagery of Aboriginal dispossession to seep through, as these stories are always already ‘embedded within their fibres’.62 Craft’s relation to the everyday, its functional and decorative relation to the body and to the domestic, means that craft does not ‘analyse the textual universe’63 in the conventional sense. Craftivism is not ‘about’ politics, but rather acts within our material, lived experience, and as such, crafting personal-political reflection—uncertain, pleasurable and communal—is a powerful form of experiential agency.

Materiality and process: interdisciplinary thinking and hybrid objects Feminism is interdisciplinary by nature and history, and lends itself to coalitional action. Our discussion of craftivism as a basis for an ethics of care also acknowledges that contemporary artists often work at the intersection of a number of (possibly competing) media, disciplines or cultural formations (Emily Kame Kgnwarreye: batik, customary law and environmental care; Narelle Jubelin: petit point and architecture; Sera Waters: white work or wool work and colonial history). These intersections hybridise craft media, yet as Pearlman observes, crafts-based artists ‘share a certain developmental approach. Their

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FIGURE 4.2

Sera Waters, Basking (2016–2017), mixed media

media are givens, a prioris underlying the conception of individual works. The artist’s creative development goes hand-in-hand with their exploration of those media’s potentialities.’64 This materially-based developmental approach resonates with Australian craft histories, despite the fact that we have never enjoyed a tradition of large scale craft production nor strong regional craft industries.65 Outside of the master-craftsman tradition, the idea of singular fundamentals of craft ‘history, theory and philosophy’66 gain little traction in multicultural, colonial settler societies like Australia, which are characterised by hybrid settler and Indigenous crafts traditions. A case in point is the delicate, shell-worked objects crafted by fourth generation Bidjigal shell artist Esme Timbery and her family,67 which emphasise the historical, material eloquence of such hybrid craft practices (Figure 4.3). They embody traditional foraging and shelling skills and strengthen ties to country that have been maintained by generations of saltwater people on the New South Wales south coast. They also ally with the colonial culture of recycling, bricolage and adapting, a self-styled creativity that Michel de Certeau describes more broadly as a ‘secondary production’ in the use of objects of utility.68

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FIGURE 4.3

Esme Timbery, Shellworked Slippers, 2008, installation

Timbery gestures to this informal tradition through a localised way of making do, and taking care.69 Her shell work embodies a way of being in and perceiving the social world through its materials: craft skills, entangling feelings and subtle perceptions understood through the body and through use. These affective, tacit and somatic knowledges— craft’s felt dimension—‘makes caring possible’.70 Timbery’s shelled slippers specifically honour the prodigious, formal ornamentalism of souvenir arts. This structuring, decorative design principle has been a well-trodden means of cross-cultural travel: in the 1880s, when the Timbery, Simms and Ryan families moved between the New South Wales south coast and the United Aboriginal Mission at La Perouse in Sydney’s southern outskirts, traditional shelling skills were repurposed for the tourist market.71 The families sold shelled cardboard objects (moccasins and slippers, trinket boxes and later, models of the Harbour Bridge) alongside boomerangs, clubs and fish-hooks made by the men.72 Timbery asks us to ‘walk a mile in her shoes’: shelled slippers, booties and mules that point to material and stylistic mutations developed by generations of colonised peoples along the colonial convent and missionary routes, trading posts and inter-colonial exhibitions of the modern Imperium. Indeed, we could trace the iconography, style and materials of her shelled slippers back through Victorian eclecticism and hand-craft ideology and tutelage of the Arts and Crafts Movement.73 Reaching further back, we see her moccasin templates fabricated in early eighteenth-century Quebec from bark and moosehair and embroidered with the sun and the cross of the four cardinal directions, stitched by metis Ursuline nuns applying the skill and aesthetics of French embroidery to lessons learnt from their Mi’kmaq and Huron mothers, who were also producing decorated

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moccasins and boxes for French curio buyers.74 Timbery’s shell-worked slippers carry forward this epic travelling theory75 of survival, stylistic ornamentation and cross-cultural appropriation. They are ‘care objects’: at once a means of maintaining saltwater knowledge, a platform for valued skill transfer and the sustained use of local materials, and they express a centuries-old, savvy perception of tourist preferences. These slippers are stylistically undecidable—both beautiful and grotesque—for souvenir arts have always played a witty game with materials and forms.76 Elaborated ornamentation is a ‘principle of dismemberment’ as cultural historian Michael Carter describes, which involves taking parts from a whole and inserting them into a different totality through miniaturisation, substitution and the elaboration of forms and materials.77 Timbery artifices both Aboriginality and European forms within a new, ornamental order, just as caricature mixes mimesis and distortion to transform both elements. Her mirrored switching of schematised, decorative elements (shells = Sydney Harbour Bridge or shells = slippers) leaves previous distinctions behind. Indeed, the very idea of a host object or base concept and additional ornamental element disappears, such is the witty travelling theory of subaltern ornamentation. In this way Timbery’s Harbour Bridge humorously deforms the iconic, iron-and-granite span gracing Sydney Harbour. The wit of the work is its ghost status, which reveals a series of truths (for instance, those concerning coastal sustenance versus mercantile shipping; crafting and engineering; domestic and public; progress and tradition). But for the Timbery families, whose forebears worked as labourers on the Bridge’s building site, and further back had shelled and fished for millennia in Sydney’s waterways, these objects ask us: which is the ghost? The shell-worked or concrete versions? In a similar vein, the Oregon-based artist Natalie Ball pushes the culturally dishevelling logic of ornamentation to surrealist limits. She collages multicultural materials together— literally stitching or binding dissonant cultural motifs and materials (coyote skull and jawbone, sinew thread, plastic dolls, beaded deer-hide moccasins and the US greenback) in I Bind You Nancy, 2018; additionally, synthetic wig tube sock in When Harry met Sally. I mean, when my Mom met my Dad. I mean, when my ancestors met my Ancestors. I mean when a lace front met smoked skin, 2018, to tell stories of self and place in the neocolonial world, and how kinship and relation are central to First Nations survival. These traumatic cornucopia feel punishing yet exuberant; we sense an ‘abundant agency in myriad situations meant to foreclose upon it’.78 Ball’s beaded, sewn and bundled combinations of fashionable leisure wear, Modoc and Klamath souvenir arts and power objects gather intergenerational and intertribal connections within the Pacific Northwest, drawing upon matrilineal family crafting traditions to collide those ‘internal and external discourses that shape Indian identity’.79 Her auto-ethnographic studio research relates African-American slavery, English soldiery, and the frontier resistance of Ball’s great great grandfather Chief Kientpaush (also known as Captain Jack), who led Modoc resistance during the Modoc War of 1872. As the artist proposes, ‘my work is always in discussion with racial narratives critical to understanding of both the self and the nation and necessarily, our shared experiences and histories’.80 Each element of these combinatory sculptures is ‘built upon physical and narrative relationship, illustrating conflict, change, specificity and impermanence in a single gesture. Milk glass on elk hide, waxed thread or sinew, hair, shells, green paper and

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teeth become a constellation, marking approximate distance between generations, a moment, a glance, or well-worn and worded story.’ Together, they ‘assert sovereignty’, as Northern Chumash artist and curator Sarah Biscarra Dilley describes.81 Ball’s deerhide and polyester aesthetic compresses the very material intersections present in her life— make-do practice as a form of resistance—to challenge reductive expectations of Indigeneity and mixed heritage. As a mother, she notes the frustrations of never having enough: time and space. But I always try to work through that with materiality: working through what I want to say, how I’m saying it through material … I’m reinserting myself into these spaces and reclaiming these spaces, and a lot of times, they’re spaces of trauma … So I’m just trying to introduce my kids to these spaces, reintroducing them on our own terms.82 First Nations artists in other regions also craft hybridised power objects as inter-disciplinary platforms for de-colonial and environmental action. Like Timbery and Ball, the Inuit artist Taqralik Partridge fabricates emblematic objects using domestic materials at hand—dishcloth, beading, dental floss, discarded plastic, recycled Inuit garments. For instance, her delicate glass beadwork apirsait panels (2020) emblematise creatures—aiviq, nanuq, tiriranniaq, tulugak, tuttuk—found in Inuit Nunangut (Inuit homeland): ‘spiritual helpers that are called on in times of need’.83 Partridge summons these creatures through a dual practice of crafting and writing, which is in Inkutitut, also in English translation and in the Sydney Aboriginal language Dharug chalked across the gallery wall for the 2020 Biennale of Sydney, as simple and evocative as her apirsait helpers: we had endless land bottomless wells clear sweet air to fill a million million breaths and never never would it run out and how how today is it that we can see the edge of this and how how today can we not84

Craft and relation, self and other We have described how crafts ethics is materially based and inter-disciplinary. As with care ethics more broadly considered, we also note that crafting arises from relationship: from knowing and feeling for others, both those close at hand as well as those whose lives and experiences we can only imagine. Australian artist Michele Elliot’s found, stitched and reformulated clothing Whitewash (2013) is a case in point.85 The work affirms

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the intimacy of mending clothes by hand. You hold to your body an object that regularly touches someone else’s body; you pierce it and fondle it; you might even bring it your lips as you bite off the excess thread. In these times of mass manufactured, disposable fashion, getting out the home sewing kit is becoming a thing of the past: it’s quicker and easier to simply replace an article by buying another. Yet that moment with someone else’s clothes in your hands can bring you closer not only to them, but also to that other body, the one that first created the piece. They have had close contact with this cloth too, but their labouring presence, skills and value have been practically erased by the giant wheels of globalisation. In Whitewash, Elliot selects her discarded clothes partly on account of their origins, partly on their sculptural appeal. She then fashions them with dressmaking pins before running over them with needle and thread in patterns that resemble contour lines on a map. As the stitched garments gather along the wall in Elliot’s installation, their accumulation suggests the inexorable phenomena of our times: the mass displacement of peoples, the mass waste of throwaway cultures that is the flip side of constant growth, and the conjunction between the two in a world where the value of human life varies wildly depending on class, gender and nationality. We describe here how crafting moves beyond the domestic environment or a maternal model of care as caritas, as championed in Gilligan and Held’s model.86 For instance, Sydney artist Raquel Ormella entertains questions of compassion and inclusion in industrial work spaces through the visual expression of hard-won entitlements and wage justice alongside communitarian ideals.87 Ormella incorporates a variety of industrial work-wear in trades unionstyled banners to mark the centenary of Australia’s 2017 General Strike (Lily Whites, 2017)88 (Figure 4.4). These small commemorations were displayed as a community honour-roll in the old Eveleigh Railways Yards in Redfern, and then hung as part of a community performance above the front verandahs of identified worker’s cottages in the (now gentrified) surrounding suburbs. As the artist recounts: In the newspapers of the day, the workers are unnamed masses on the picket line and at the rallies in the Domain … I want to imagine a way that at least some of the strikers can be acknowledged. That their actions and convictions can be honoured in present, and in this way, prompt descendants to share more names … I imagine cycling a morning route, stopping at each house to call out a worker’s name, and placing a small, personalised banner with union symbol—the handshake and white lily—on its facade. Each banner made with recycled contemporary work clothes … Clothes that speak of our labour; easier, cleaner and better paid because of many strike actions.89 Ormella’s community roll-call and her thickly embroidered diaries (All these small intensities, 2017) mark small streams of subjectivity that eddy and flow and bump up against what cultural theorist Stuart Hall and others have described as the broader river of ‘capital H History’.90 Her crafty insertions of personal and family story within broader histories of industrial relations, global commodity markets and our

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FIGURE 4.4

Raquel Ormella, A handshake with the past (detail—George N. Emmett, Lily White) 2017, cotton, used business shirts and work wear

extraction industries (Workers’ Blues, 2016) bring acts of care and the assertion of rights (workers’ rights, egalitarianism, environmental justice) into relation rather than as an opposition. The moral principles of organised labour are directly related to the lived experience and agential force of localised, working class culture; crafted here as an ethical practice that emerges from material and familial realities and does not hover above them as meta-critique or commentary.91 Ormella’s crafting thus grounds US healthcare scholar Suzanne Gordon’s summary that ‘caring … is not something that one person does to another. Caring exists in relationships and flourishes or sours depending on the social context.’92

Self and other: beauty and unselfing The projects we have examined so far show how feminist craft displays a materially based, inter-disciplinary and relational care ethic that can move us beyond family and community to relate wider cultural and political stories. As we noted in the chapter introduction, crafting may serve as a form of truth-telling. First Nations Australian curator Tess Allas describes the exquisite Tasmanian shell necklaces of Dulcie Greeno and her extended family in these terms, as embodying ‘a long history of tradition, colonisation, war, resistance, survival and celebration’93 (Figure 4.5). Tasmania’s prolonged and bloody frontier wars are well documented,94 and busts of the iconic, surviving Palawa elder Truganini (c. 1812–1876), sculpted by the English artist Benjamin Law in 1835, show her resolutely wearing her shell necklace as a defining feature of cultural resistance.95 The tradition of stringing shell necklaces gathered during the autumn low tides and made up during winter96 has been maintained for millennia around Bruny Island, Robbins Island and the coastline around Woolnorth. As artist

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FIGURE 4.5

Dulcie Greeno, Shell Necklace, 1998, maireener shell (Phasianotrochus irisodontes) on polyester cotton thread

and writer Lola Greeno explains, ‘the early tribal women gathered shells from those places they then walked to exchange shells with other nations for ochre’.97 After invasion, the commercial trade in Truganini Necklaces or Hobart Necklaces by Palawa (and settler colonial) makers lasted through the early twentieth century.98 Another of Greeno’s daughters, Patsy Cameron, explains how the women pierced each shell with a tool made from a jawbone and sharpened lower incisor of a kangaroo or wallaby. The shells were then threaded on kangaroo tail sinews or on string made from natural fibres, smoked over a fire, and rubbed in grass to remove their outer coating and reveal the pearly surface. The shells were later polished with penguin or muttonbird oil. … European colonisation introduced new tools and materials … Needles and cotton or synthetic thread enabled the women to incorporate smaller shells into increasingly intricate designs.99 The technologies brought by colonisation meant that after 1803 necklaces became longer and looped, using smaller shells, and while impractical for daily hunting activities, were a ‘courageous assertion of identity and a continuation of their culture at a time when their world was being taken apart’.100 Contemporary

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craftswomen observe that the maireeners (rainbow kelp shells) are best picked by wading out into the shallows. Although the live shells are difficult to gather and clean for stringing, they are nonetheless worth the effort to maintain colour and lustre.101 Allas adds that Green and blue marineers, oats, black crows, toothies, helmets, riceies, white cockles, gull and penguin shells are used frequently by the women today … Like the most precious of jewels, the shell-strung necklaces of the Tasmanian Aboriginal women glow with their histories and quietly whisper their stories of clever survival.102 The viewer bends close to look and senses her own face glowing in the pearly lustre of these stringed shells. This feeling of reflected glow is akin to the aesthetic experience described by American writer Elaine Scarry of ‘unselfing’: a sensory, aesthetic appreciation of beauty that she feels may help us intensify ‘the pressure we feel to repair existing injuries’ and attend to injustice.103 Scarry holds that beauty incites its replication and compels us to bring something of reciprocal beauty into the shared field of vision, to expand its presence. The experience of beauty—our face aglow in the lustre of these polished and oiled maireener shells—arrests us, lifts us up and places us back somewhere else; we become ‘adjacent’. In this way the experience of crafted beauty incites a radical de-centring that transforms our sensibility, and we are momentarily ‘unselfed’, in contrast to the usual protection, guarding and advancing of the self.104 This ‘glow’ hones our acute powers of attention and helps us see the world afresh. This physical but also borderline, emotional and mental awareness is accompanied by reflective thought, so that our cognitive as well as sensual receptors are activated, and we become mentally and emotionally alert to the shells’ murmured ‘stories of clever survival’.105 This also resonates with art historian Norman Bryson’s description of the experience of beauty as activating the imagination through a ‘series of small astonishments’: a heightened awareness and an altered mode of thinking in comparison to the passivity of visual culture in our post-industrial culture. Our close looking, wonder and delight in the reflective glow of these polished shells loosens relations between self and other, prompts empathy and allows fresh thoughts to emerge.106

Self and other: community crafting Does our focus on feminist craft as an ethical care practice slip into the warm, bourgeois bath of Arts and Crafts Movement femininity, albeit in updated, hipster guise? We introduced this chapter with Parker and Pollock’s advice to seek and valorise those spaces where women are creatively contributing to the culture. We noted that this has meant understanding how First Nations crafting assists cultural, economic and political sovereignty, and how amateur crafting within the home and the community are labours of love that are central to social and economic (re) production. We also observed how feminist crafting actively reflects upon the

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monetised circuits of cultural tourism and globalised labour. So how do contemporary cottage industry craft revivals fit into this schema? A quick scan through internet DIY sites today reveals a popular return to previously disparaged domestic arts practices amongst younger consumers. Whilst high-street shop rents are prohibitive, the internet has enabled small-scale business models to flourish, so that ‘amateur producers with no formal training can set up a creative business’ as Australian cultural historian Susan Luckman notes.107 Luckman holds that the Etsy. com online marketplace and spin-off physical markets have helped to enable and commodify the love of handcrafted materials, processes and labour associated with the mid-nineteenth-century Arts and Crafts Movement—itself a response to the social and economic upheavals of the industrial revolution. Then, as now, handcrafted design and decoration were wielded as defences against the dehumanising effects of capitalism: arts and crafts objects were dignified by harbouring within them the duration of the artist’s effort; they affirmed the inherent nobility of manual labour. The hand-rendered wallpaper designs of William Morris and the delicate Celtic Twilight embroideries of Susan (‘Lily’) and Elizabeth Yeats stood ‘against corporate labour … and for individual self-determination’, against disembodiment in all its forms and for ‘the potential of the human body at work’.108 It is salient to register these historical antecedents grounding the current convergence of feminism and popular craft: the nineteenth-century Arts and Crafts Movement was informed by both feminism and utopian socialism, and craftswomen were in the forefront of the movement as it spread and diversified along commercial, colonial and neocolonial traderoutes.109 The Arts and Crafts Movement reinforced the discourse of men’s and women’s separate spheres, and yet the glorification of domestic arts paradoxically helped to build a moral platform for women’s suffrage and related political actions in the public sphere. The small-scale production of hand-crafted articles in the late nineteenth century was driven by white, middle-class female consumers who valued superiority in taste and quality afforded by the handmade. The crafty twenty-first-century hipster and inner-city sewing circle update this stereotype of white privilege. Craft historian Bruce Metcalf gives more credence to today’s revaluation of arts and crafts qualities, including its arduous and demanding technique and its associations with the domestic sphere. Contemporary craft, Metcalf argues, may lay claim to an historicist, oppositional communalism.110 Does this sit at odds with the social atomisation of today’s digital technologies? Paradoxically, these have enabled the explosion of crafts practices and small businesses. Indeed, Luckman wryly notes how the blogosphere fetishises ‘the material, the tactile, the analogue. In the digital age, almost seventy years since the Frankfurt School first railed against the “culture industry’s” commodification and standardization of all art, the analogue becomes Othered, different, desirable.’111 Elaborating on the irony of the current moment, Tonya Jameson also proposes that ‘Creating something with our hands gives us a false sense of control at a time when we have so little.’112 In a similar vein, Fiona Hackney observes that craft’s current high media profile ‘may be read as a means of addressing the problems and anxieties surrounding the acceleration of modern life

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(unemployment, the strain of new work processes and their effects on physical and mental life)’.113 Has feminism helped to craft a nostalgic retreat into a genteel, white women’s culture, or has it enabled a progressive and communal politics? As women’s studies academic Elizabeth Groeneveld cautions, the politics of crafting has always been context specific. It is true that in most Western countries, the middle-class privileges of the arts and crafts ‘embroidering public’ are maintained, as the Riot Grrrl yarn bomber, stitch ‘n’ bitch session and feminist craft blog do not usually associate knitting with furnishing the necessities of quotidian life. Yarns can be expensive, and industrially produced items are cheaper to purchase. In class terms, the current revolution in crafting maintains the historical shift in women’s domestic arts from economy to luxury, and sits at that politically ambiguous nexus of white privilege, complicity and resistance.114 However, we would also argue that it is superficial and reductive to chastise contemporary crafting as simply an example of white privilege, a nostalgic retreat to nuclear family homemaking values as a buffer against our unstable, neoliberal economy and society. For one thing, environmental and fair-trade awareness has also fuelled these negative responses to globalised industrial production, which has led to self-consciously ethical purchasing and consumption, along with a sense of DIY empowerment (‘feeling a sense of achievement when making something with your own hands. It’s about taking a stand or making a statement against this modern, disposable age of mass production and consumption that is leading the world into environmental and economic ruin.’115) Secondly, many of these knitted and sewn objects (embroidered and knitted banners, pussy hats and balaclavas) take to the streets as Facebook- and Instagram-oriented campaign materials. Important to our discussion here is the observation that popular craft production and consumption, as an active response to the current situation, is finally in step with (and owes much to) long-standing feminist elaborations of the creative, analytic and activist possibilities of traditional domestic arts.116 Moreover, the soft power of crafting in company (in a street protest or yarn bomb, in a multicultural embroidery workshop, or even online via your Instagram feed or Covid-19 Zoom session) maintains all-too-rare, communal pleasures of social connection that dovetail with, rather than undermine, the non-violent, embodied presenteeism of the Occupy Movement. In all instances, feminist crafting is an active practice of personal-political care. We also observe that popular and folk crafting are facilitated and not foreclosed or bypassed by the social media and digital communications technologies that are now a central organising vehicle for mass social movements. Indeed, technology extends the reach of craftivism beyond the world’s urban centres to the suburbs, country regions and remote Indigenous communities. Canadian crafts writers Andrea Black and Nicole Burisch observe a widespread politicisation of the crafts in recent years, taking on issues of globalisation, capitalism, urbanity and environmentalism.117 While new communications technologies might mean that radical craftivism is not the same animal it was forty years ago, ‘Craftivists and artists who use politically engaged crafting methods continue to hybridize their practices by

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joining craft, technology, the politicization of digital space, public spaces and traditional arts venues.’118 The digital space now forms just another part of knit/ weave/print/sequin gatherings: community-based and connective, trans-local textile workshops and skill exchanges.119 Liam Benson’s collaborative and inter-disciplinary projects with diverse western Sydney communities are cases in point. These craft conversations address complex and evolving interrelations between personal, familial, community and national identity. Benson and his collaborators insist that community crafting can generate a ‘sense of the potential for social inclusion, a delight in the material, an ability to harness the exotic and the gaudy within a conceptual frame, and a sheer revelry in the notion that anything goes’, as Rebecca Coates notes of fellow artist Raquel Ormella’s crafting.120 Benson’s Participatory Community Embroidery series (2013– 2017) let loose the dishevelling joys of ironic textu(r)al play that we associate with camp aesthetics into a welcoming conversation on multicultural and community inclusion. Benson recalls of this four-year workshop that: I met all these women from different cultural backgrounds. Connecting with this community was a light bulb moment, I realised the future of what I was trying to do in my work was going to be through interaction and nurturing relationships and conversations.121 Crafting has always been an agile platform for community dialogue. Sewing beads and sequins is a laborious and time-consuming way of making art, and project participants affirmed the importance of taking time to meditatively sew and talk around the worktable: (Sewing) gives us a lot of time to just sit and talk, about who we are, where we come from, where we live now and what are our connections with those places … also to share culture, background stories and history. … This is the core of what community should be.122 The project’s three story circle objects include a suspended and sequinned map (Participatory Community Embroidery: You and me, 2017) (Figure 4.6) on semi-transparent organza. The map design is derived from the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS) map delineating Aboriginal language groups across the country, which enabled the workshop’s non-Indigenous crafters to partake in a deep acknowledgement of the country on which they sew.123 The second element in the project is a beaded and sequinned commemorative wreath (Thoughts and Prayers, 2017); and the third element is a creatively deconstructed Australian flag that is decorated through community conversations about what our flag should include. The sewing circle collectively spoke over nine community languages, and brought with them as many crafting traditions, and they welcomed the opportunity to move away from British colonial history to reimagine a more representative and inclusive ensign (Participatory Community Embroidery, Untitled (flag) (2017). Here folk craft goes beyond

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FIGURE 4.6

Liam Benson (with community of makers), Participatory Community Embroidery, You and Me, 2013–2017, glass seed and bugle beads, sequins, cotton, organza

style and commodity to create what Benson describes as a ‘shared, organic, freeflowing, bric-a-brac cultural space that embraces difference. Like queer culture, folk culture is made by all sorts of people coming together from all different places and connecting through dance, dressing up, playing music and creating language.’124 The project’s folkloric soft power also suggests the organic and communal nature of epic storytelling, and its associated good counsel. The Marxist cultural critic Walter Benjamin thus described how tales are often recounted in company (unlike the modern novel, which is read in isolation) and are thus embedded in communal life: The storytelling that thrives for a long time in the milieu of work—the rural, the maritime, and the urban—is itself an artisan form of communication, as it were. It does not aim to convey the pure essence of the thing, like information or a report. It sinks the thing into the life of the storyteller, in order to bring it out of him again. Thus traces of the storyteller cling to the story the way the handprints of the potter cling to the clay vessel.125 We would add to this oft-cited association between story telling and crafting that these traces of ‘life matters’ also imprint through the personal-political ethos of feminist crafting. The crafted objects discussed in this chapter convey powerful stories (through the reflective glow of a shelled necklace or the sequined aspirations of multicultural inclusion, for instance). We connect with each story through the affective force of materials that welcome us to attend and think more deeply on their transformation.

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Our encounter parallels Benjamin’s observation that oral tales are often prefaced with the circumstances in which the teller comes across its key elements (‘I was on my way to … ’; ‘I heard this story from … ’). So too, crafted objects may prompt an associative response or anecdotal story by way of provenance of meaning, which sets the story in motion (‘I used my father’s work overalls to … ’, ‘My mother’s wedding ring; a simple, gold band … ’). We might also imagine a sequined national flag fashioned from rainbows and shooting stars when considering Benjamin’s observation that all great storytellers share a freedom with which they move up and down the rungs of their experience, as on ‘a ladder extending downward to the interior of the earth and disappearing into the clouds is the image for a collective experience to which even the deepest shock of every individual experience, death, constitutes no impediment or barrier’. Benjamin reminded us that fairy-tale outcomes (‘living happily ever after’) are predicated on the moral of the tale, so that a story may be valued for its ‘good counsel’: ‘whenever good counsel was at a premium, the fairy tale had it, and where the need was greatest, its aid was nearest’.126 In similar vein, we would argue that the feminist ethics of craft, as we have described in this chapter, embody good caring and good counsel. Like Benjamin’s story teller, craft may embody those ethical practices that Joan Tronto and others consider to be the basis for how our democracy imagines a ‘good citizen’.127

Crafting and the Occupy Movement We have described instances of craftivism forming part of the ‘performative democracy’ (spontaneous, non-institutional mass actions by citizens, often using art and social media to organise and spread the message) which has been valued by Peter Weibel and others as the art form of the twenty-first century. Many would agree that a widespread sense of disenfranchisement and lack of faith in existing political organisations has prompted creative forms of activism that rely upon and uphold basic human rights (such as the freedom of assembly, a living wage or civil rights)128 and crafting now forms part of the creative work of the Occupy Movements. Chari Larsen introduces artist Jemima Wyman’s crafty homage to the creativity of Occupy-style protest by noting today’s renewed focus on crowds, collective action and theorisations of radical or agonistic formulations of democracy … Deficiencies in representative democracy and the unequal distribution of wealth have led to a new type of spontaneous, noninstitutional mass protest. Broadly speaking, radical democracy calls for the expansion of democracy beyond minimalist forms of participation.129 Wyman’s materially-rich collages indirectly cite influential ‘post-68’ thinkers (Laclau, Mouffe, Rancière) who argue that liberal democracies should incorporate conflict as an integral part of their deliberative and reflective process.130 We discuss other manifestations of this approach to art as politics in our chapter on art and public space.

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We opened this chapter by claiming that today’s materially-based arts activism has long-standing crafty antecedents, and that an important facet of current activist aesthetics can be traced to the performative dimension that intersects feminist practices of crafting and caring. Following Tronto and Noddings, the American philosopher Maurice Hamington goes so far as to call acts of caring ‘performances of caring’. Extrapolating from Judith Butler’s work on how iterations of gender performance construct gender identity, Hamington asserts that caring can be described as a performance of actions on behalf of others … Iterations of caring actions instantiate care as aspects of individual identity. In this manner, moral identity can be said to be a performance grounded in iterations of ethical actions that fit or resist social norms.131 While neither Butler nor Hamington is referring to culturally marked performance art or theatre, their comments offer insights into the ethos of care practised within craftivism and feminist performance art associated with public ritual, flash actions and graffiti. Perhaps the best-known case in point is yarn bombing, as a high-profile, popular face of feminist craftivism, or knittivism, as it is better known in the UK and US: ‘knittivism: n 1 a doctrine emphasising vigorous or militant knitting activity, e. g. the use of knitting in mass demonstrations, urban interventions, in controversial, unusual or challenging ways, esp. political, causes. 2 the systematic use of knitting for political ends.132 According to Moore and Prain, yarn bombing merges ‘the disciplines of installation art, needlework, and ‘street art’ … [and] consists of the clandestine act of fastening knitted or crocheted items to fixtures in public places’.133 Activist knitters stand against corporate consumerism, a form of anti-monument, (re)humanising and democratising public space. The punch, Moore and Prain contend, is the anarchic, hipster displacement, deployment or abandonment of the (cherished) domestic craft item into the urban public arena.134 This certainly characterises the make-do savvy of Kate Just’s knitted Reclaim the Night banners, Tal Fitzpatrick’s silky embroidered ‘Fuck the Patriarchy’ placards, the Knitting Nannas Against Gas (KNAG) knit-ins, folkloric camp community actions, and Riot-Grrl, Occupy and Extinction Rebellion street-wear. The knitted ‘pink pussy’ beanie and Pussy Riot balaclava are commonly worn as identifiable symbols of resistance to state authority. Street protest craft is predicated on a neo-Dada, individual eccentricity, and yet the anonymity of the wearer or user also paradoxically liberates the individual into the collective agency and power of a driving idea. As Pussy Riot activist Nadya Tolokonnikova wrote from prison to Slavoj Žižek shortly before her release, ‘The masks that members of Pussy Riot wear hold, if any, a therapeutic function: yes, we belong to a generation raised on irony, but we also put on masks to reduce that impotent irony. We go out in the streets and speak plainly, without varnish, about the things that matter most.’135 Jemima Wyman’s dizzy collages, knitted balaclava-

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ponchos and ‘Tanya’-styled136 jungle flannos honour this aesthetic strategy of hiding in the light of both the Instagram and CCTV cameras: an effective, dual form of camouflage and social media promotion through colour-coded mass protest wear. Both Tolokonnikova and Wyman appreciate how the protest mask allows the subject to surreptitiously return the gaze, to multiply and to create a disturbance in the visual field. As Slavoj Žižek wrote in turn of Pussy Riot’s balaclava’ed anonymity: Their message is: IDEAS MATTER. They are conceptual artists in the noblest sense of the word: artists who embody an Idea. This is why they wear balaclavas: masks of de-individualization, of liberating anonymity. The message of their balaclavas is that it doesn’t matter which of them got arrested—they’re not individuals, they’re an Idea. And this is why they are such a threat: it is easy to imprison individuals, but try to imprison an Idea!137 The KNAG also hide in plain sight. Like the Pussy Riot balaclava, KNAG crafting offers campaigners the ‘liberating anonymity’ of both the Instagram-friendly communal gesture and the social camouflage of the stereotyped sweet little old lady: We get together a group of women in their prime of life, who appear to be mild, middleclass and conservative (you can dress up/down). They make their presence felt in the war against unconventional gas mining, other forms of non-sustainable energy and nasty rapacious greed … The idea of the Knitting Nannas is that of the iron fist in the soft fluffy yellow glove—there aren’t many scarier things than a forthright woman in her prime.138 KNAG’s scary agency reaches deep into knitting history, to reference in carnivalesque form the notorious tricoteuses or ‘knitting women’ popularised and demonised through the evil character of Madame Defarge in Charles Dickens’ classic novel of the French revolution, A Tale of Two Cities. During the Terror, Defarge and her fellow revolutionary sans culottes supposedly sat beside the guillotine, calmly knitting the famous Liberty or Phrygian caps, bearing witness in the break between public executions. KNAG has gained momentum since its inception in 2012 at a disingenuous bush picnic, where the nannas similarly sat, knitted and bore witness to younger, radical conservationists who were putting their bodies on the line to stop bulldozers gaining access to agricultural land for coal seam gas exploration in Lismore, in northern New South Wales. They now knit in coalition with antifossil-fuel-mining women’s groups across the political spectrum, including the Growling Grannies Against Coal Seam Gas and other First Nations traditional owners against large-scale fracking across the Northern Territory,139 the usually conservative Country Women’s Association, farmers, graziers and regional citizenry, as well as greenies and artists: ‘We sit, knit, plot, have a yarn and a cuppa, and bear witness to the war against those who try to rape our land and divide our communities.’140 Covid-19 notwithstanding, KNAG has extended its encampment

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model by ‘locking on’ to mining and port infrastructure, occupying the street fronts of regional and metropolitan politician’s offices, the doors of mining companies’ offices amidst the high foot traffic of downtown Sydney, in suburban shopping centres, supporting rallies and community events, in flash mobs, on the Net, ‘and whatever else works’.141 Their distinct yellow and black is now liberally knitted and crocheted across a range of clothing and protest paraphernalia: We usually knit in yellow and black to identify with ‘Lock the Gate’ triangles that are mounted at the entrance to many properties. Our knitting choices range between functional items for sale such as beanies, tea cosies and toys, to more symbolic objects. These include triangles in many sizes that echo ‘Lock the Gate’ versions, long lengths of knitting which are thrown across gates and roads in imminent danger of invasion by drill rigs, cushions for protectors who may be uncomfortably immobilised for long periods of time when ‘locked on’ and chainsleeves to prevent lock-on blisters.142

Conclusion This chapter has outlined how the underlying ‘personal is political’ tenets of feminist crafting understands care as a complementary facet of justice, as embodied, historical and social; not coming under the natural or special purview of women, and not only directed towards those closest to us. At first glance, the local quilting bee or remote community batik workshop would seem to personify Gilligan’s emphasis on the ethics of care as privileging small-scale, often intimate connections and relational exchanges. Craft has historically been associated with pre-industrial, small-scale communities ‘and the face-to-face relationships which they foster’.143 Yet we have argued that the materiality of craft practices and the intimate crafting of relationships and objects helps to strengthen the relational link between craft, care and politics: the materials and communally-based processes described in this chapter address broader economic, environmental, social problems that are characteristically large-scale, and thus may inform political practice. This is where the feminist tenet of the ‘personal is political’ has helped to expand craft ethics to include an ethics of justice, to do the political work required of it, so as to move ‘beyond the immediacy of one’s own family, or group, or clan, to the wider world of unknown others’.144 This chapter has argued that such communitarian practices extend outwards, as craft’s relational ethos helps to maintain and express the specificity of First Nations, multicultural, feminist and queer subjectivities whilst fostering relationships with those around them, as a starting point for ethical action, unlike an ethic of justice.145 We have also underscored our ethical concept of craftivism as both a communal and agonistic space, one that can emphasise shared differences within the lives of many women.146 In this, craftivism is a handy platform for coalition building. The examples discussed here involve hard work and often difficult conversations, and

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the skill sets of feminist crafting extend beyond facility with elk hide, needles, shells and wool to encompass the acknowledgement and respect for self and other. We note here the African-American activist and singer Bernice Johnson Reagon’s belief that frustration, anxiety and danger to one’s identity often arise when doing coalition work, as ‘Most of the time you feel threatened to the core and if you don’t, you’re not really doing no coalescing.’147 We have argued that feminist crafting fosters this ‘coalescing’: interpersonal, community and trans-local encounters from which we might build a rich coalitional politics. While crafting an ethics of encounter may often threaten perspectives and practices that we take as fundamental to our identity,148 we would add, following Hamington, that creating such a ‘knowledge of the other creates the potential to care.’149

Notes 1 Linda Nochlin, ‘Why have there been no great women artists?’ (1971), Women, Art and Power and Other Essays, New York: Harper & Rowe, 1988, 145–177. 2 See Griselda Pollock and Rozsika Parker, Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981; and Rozsika Parker, The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine, London: Women’s Press, 1984. 3 Clive Edwards, ‘“Home is where the art is”: women, handicrafts and home improvements 1750–1900’, Journal of Design History, 19 (1): 11–21, 2006. See also in this context Parker, 1984 and Lucy Lippard, ‘Making something from nothing (toward a definition of women’s “hobby art”)’, in Glenn Adamson (ed.) The Craft Reader, Oxford; New York: Berg, 2010, 483–490. 4 Betsy Greer, ed., Craftivism: The Art of Craft and Activism, Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2014; and Knitting for Good: A Guide to Creating Personal, Social and Political Change Stitch by Stitch, Boston; London: Trumpeter, 2008. 5 NAIDOC—the National Aborigines and Islanders Day Observance Committee—pays homage to earlier Aboriginal political groups in the 1920s and hosts an annual week of celebration of the history, culture and achievements of Australian Aboriginal and Torres Straits Islander peoples. Each year NAIDOC proposes a differently themed focus. In 2019, this was ‘VOICE. TREATY. TRUTH. We invite you to walk with us in a movement of the Australian people for a better future’, www.naidoc.org.au accessed 29 November 2020. 6 Judith Ryan, ‘A history of painted and printed textiles in Aboriginal Australia’, in Judith Ryan and Robyn Healy (eds) Raiki Wara: Long Cloth from Aboriginal Australia and the Torres Strait, Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria, 1998, exhibition catalogue, 10. 7 See Carol Gilligan, ‘Moral orientation and moral development’, in Alison Bailey and Chris J. Cuomo (eds) The Feminist Philosophy Reader, Boston: McGraw-Hill, 2008, 469. 8 Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion, New York: Pantheon Books, 2012. 9 James Bennett, ‘Tiki Ikat: Indonesian and Australian textile art’, Art and Asia Pacific, 1 (3): 1994, 94. 10 Nyukana Baker, cited Judith Ryan, 1998, 13. 11 In 1971, white arts advisors Winifred Hilliard, Jennifer Isaacs and Mary White recommended that New York artist Leo Brereton teach the Ernabella women batik technique, and the women’s skills in batik were consolidated during a 1975 trip to the Batik Research Centre in Yogyakarta. The three artists included Nyukana Baker and Jillian Davey. See Winifred Hilliard, ‘The story of Ernabella Arts’, in Ryan, 1998, 35–36. 12 Utopia outstation is on lands flanking the Sandover river, part of the traditional country of the Eastern Anmatyerre and Alyawarr speaking peoples. Jenny Green, Suzie

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Bryce and Pitjantjatjara artist Nyankula Brown (from the Fregon outstation and arts centre) introduced tie-dying, then wood-block printing and later batik (with the help of Julia Murray from 1978), as part of adult education craft classes at Utopia in 1976. Jenny Green, ‘Singing the silk: Utopia Batik’, in Ryan, 1998, 38–49. See also Utopia: A Picture Story: 88 works on silk: the Robert Holmes à Court collection, exhibition catalogue, Adelaide: Tandanya, October 1989; and Out of Indonesia: Collaborations of Brahma Tirta Sari, curated by Joanna Barrkman, Darwin: Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory, 2005, https://www.brahmatirtasari.org/articles.html accessed 29 November 2020. This exhibition catalogue documents batik workshops with artists from Utopia and Ernabella and Fibre Face 3, curated by Joanna Barrkman, Darwin: Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory, and Yogyakarta: Taman Budaya Gallery, May 2011. For broader discussion on producing and marketing women’s work in remote art centres see Felicity Wright, ‘Marketing from the Top End’, Artlink 12 (2): 1992, 46–47; James Bennett, ‘Screenprinting the Tiwi way: an element of spontaneity’, Artlink 12 (2): 1992, 59–60. The Act enabled the Utopia pastoral lease to be purchased for the community by the Commonwealth that same year (this area now falls within what is commonly known as the Ngaanyatjarra Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara—NPY—homelands). See ‘Sustaining Aboriginal Homeland Communities’, Social Justice Report, Canberra: Australian Government, 2009, 109, https://humanrights.gov.au/sites/default/files/con tent/social_justice/sj_report/sjreport09/pdf/sjr_ch4.pdf accessed 29 November 2020. Hilda (Cookie) Menmatwek Pwerl, 1998 (transl. Jenny Green), in Jenny Green, ‘Singing the silk: Utopia Batik’, in Ryan, 1998, 41. Pwerl, in Ryan, 1998, 41. Alana Hunt, ‘Ngarli Ngarlim-Boorroo (For the Women)’, in Jacqueline Millner, ed., Curating Feminism, Sydney: University of Sydney College of the Arts, 2014, 22–28, 3; and Shirley Purdie, ‘Ngarli Ngarlim-Boorroo (For the Women)’, 28, 44. Examples include the work with textiles (basketry, weaving) in the Coordong and Maningrida (Babbarra) women’s art centres; fabrics, fashion and batiks practiced by Bima Wear and Tiwi designs (Jilamara Arts, Darwin), Merrepen arts (Daley River), Daluk Daluk (Jabiru) and Munupi Arts (Melville Island), amongst others in the Top End. Jenny Green in Ryan, 1998, 44. Kathleen Petyarre, Atneltyey (1988) (transl. Jenny Green,) in Jenny Green in Ryan, 1998, 44. Jenny Green notes that countries can be related to each other in the same way as are people and Dreamings. See Jenny Green, ‘Singing the silk: Utopia Batik’, in Ryan, 1998, 44. See also Jenny Green, ‘Kin and country: aspects of the use of kinterms in Arandic languages’, MA thesis, Department of Linguistics and Applied Linguistics, University of Melbourne, 1998. Emily Kame Kgnwarreye, Utopia (1990) (transl. Jenny Green), in Jenny Green in Ryan, 1998, 47. Including the all-woman showing (with Waarnyi-Gulf region artist Judy Watson and Yvonne Koolmatrie, a Ngarrindjeri artist from the Coorong in South Australia) at the Australian Pavilion in the 1997 Venice Biennale. Curators were Brenda L. Croft (Gurindji/Malngin/Mudpurra) and Hetti Perkins (Arrernte/Kalkadoon). Kgnwarreye’s work was included in the Arsenale exhibition. We note here the path-breaking 1994 Maningrida weaving exhibition at Museum of Contemporary Art (curator Djon Mundine) that showed that a sensitive installation of woven objects could bring together Indigenous cultural beliefs and the modernist aesthetic hang that isolated objects within a spectacular play of space and light. See Grace Cochrane, The Crafts Movement in Australia: A History, Sydney: New South Wales University Press, 1992. For instance, Marea Gazzard and Darani Lewers, discussed in Cochrane, 1992. ‘Sally’, ‘Women’s Liberation at the Easter Show’, Scarlet Woman (1): 1975, 26–28.

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27 The Women’s Domestic Needlework Collective included Marie McMahon, Francis Budden, Joan Grounds, Bernadette Krone, Kathy Letray, Patricia MacDonald, Noela Taylor and Loretta Vieceli. See Domestic Needlework Group, The D’Oyley Show: An Exhibition of Women’s Domestic Fancywork, Sydney: Watters Gallery, October 1979. This show was a forerunner of later interpretive collections of domestic textiles. See for instance the quilt collection housed in the Pioneer Women’s Hut, Tumbarumba, New South Wales. 28 As claimed, for instance, in the exhibitions Symmetry: Crafts Meet Kindred Trades and Professions, curated by Kevin Murray (Melbourne: Craft Victoria, 1994); and The Somatic Object, curated by Sue Rowley (Ivan Dougherty Gallery, University of New South Wales, April 1997). 29 As a delicately crocheted and embroidered 1979 d’oyley by Sydney artist Frances Phoenix (Budden) proclaims, ‘Needlework provides all the information needed for a history of women’s aesthetic thought’. This slogan is adapted from US writer Rachel Maines’ article ‘Fancywork: the archaeology of lives’, Feminist Art Journal, Winter: 1974/75: ‘Textiles can provide the kind of social, psychological, political and sexual information that is needed for a structured history of women’s aesthetic thought.’ Phoenix’s d’oyley was exhibited in The D’Oyley Show at Frank Watters Gallery, Sydney in 1979. 30 F.D. McCarthy, ‘String figures of Australia’, Australian Museum Magazine 12 (9): 1958, 279, cited Robyn McKenzie, ‘The string figures of Yirrkala’, String Theory: Focus on Contemporary Australian Art, curated by Glenn Barkley, exhibition catalogue, Sydney: Museum of Contemporary Art, August–October 2013, 22. 31 McKenzie, 2013, 20. See also Robyn McKenzie, ‘One continuous loop: making and meaning in the string figures of Yirrkala’, PhD thesis, Interdisciplinary Cross-cultural Research, School of Archaeology and Anthropology, Australian National University, 2016. 32 McKenzie, 2013, 22. One result of these workshops was a suite of etchings which, in their still, elegiac beauty, respond in part to the collection of 192 figures collected and mounted in 1948 by anthropologist Fred McCarthy for the Australian Museum in Sydney. 33 See Catriona Moore and Jo Holder, ‘A feminist curator walks into a gallery … ’, in Jacqueline Millner and Catriona Moore (eds), Feminist Perspectives on Art: Contemporary Outtakes, Abingdon; New York: Routledge, 2018, 9–23. 34 See Vivienne Binns, ‘Mothers’ Memories, Others’ Memories’, LIP: A Feminist Journal of women in the visual and performing arts, 80: 1980, 38–45. 35 Mothers’ Memories, Others’ Memories was also exhibited in partial form at the University of New South Wales and at the 1979 Biennale of Sydney. Elements of this project were further developed as a rack of postcards as From the highway of life, printed in colour vitreous enamels and shown at the 1981 Australian Perspecta survey of Australian contemporary art, curated by Bernice Murphy, exhibition catalogue, Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales, 1981, 46–47. 36 Binns, 1980, 39. 37 Laleen Jayamanne, in Binns, 1980, 42. 38 See Jude Adams and Helen Sherriff, ‘Women and kids’, in Women’s Art Movement, Adelaide, South Australia, 1978–79, Adelaide: Women’s Art Movement, 1980, 30. See also in this context Domestic Contradictions, curator Julie Ewington (Power Gallery of Contemporary Art, University of Sydney, June–July 1987). This thematic, gallerybased show referenced current debates around domestic labour and domestic violence, amongst other issues. 39 Catriona Moore, ‘Museum hygiene’, Photofile, 41, March: 1994, 8–14. 40 Andrea Black and Nicole Burisch, ‘Craft hard, die free: radical curatorial strategies for craftivism in unruly contexts’, in Glenn Adamson, ed., The Craft Reader, Oxford; New York: Berg, 2010, 610. Also see in this context Jack Bratich and Heidi Brush, ‘Fabricating activism: craft-work, popular culture, gender’, Utopian Studies, 22 (2): 233–260,

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41 42 43

44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59

2011; Otto Von Busch, ‘Exploring net political craft: from collective to connective’, Craft Research, 1 (1): 113–124, 2010; Maria Elena Buszek, ed., Extra/Ordinary: Craft and Contemporary Art, Durham; London: Duke University Press, 2011; Mandy Moore and Leanne Prain, Yarn Bombing: The Art of Crochet and Knit Graffiti, Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2009, 17. Maurice Hamington, Embodied Care: Jane Addams, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Feminist Ethics, Urbana; Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2004, 15. Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982, 159–160, cited Susan Mendus, Feminism and Emotion: Readings in Moral and Political Philosophy, London: Macmillan, 2000, 99. Mendus, 2000, 99. Carol Gilligan’s highly influential and controversial text was in large part a rejoinder to Swiss-born, Harvard-based psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg’s methods and interpretive ‘rights and justice’ frame in developing his theory of six developmental stages of morality. From 1969 Kohlberg had been building on Jean Piaget’s work on childhood development (1932) and produced two volumes of Essays on Moral Development (1: The Philosophy of Moral Development, 1981; 2: The Psychology of Moral Development, 1984). Kohlberg’s research framework views moral development as the development of justice reasoning. One of Gilligan’s methodological critiques of Kohlberg’s research is that his male-only participants were given hypothetical, that is, decontextualised, moral dilemmas. Gilligan’s findings in In a Different Voice instead proposed an ‘ethic of care’, stemming from her apparently radical methodology of including female responses to reallife ethical dilemmas in her studies. See Leslie Cannold et al., ‘What is the justice–care debate really about?’, Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 20: 357–377, 1995. Cannold et al., 1995, 357. Nel Noddings, Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984, 130. Mendus, 2000, 100. See Carol Gilligan, Nona Lyons, and Trudy Hanmer, Making Connections: The Relational Worlds of Adolescent Girls at Emma Willard School, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990, 321, cited Hamington, 2004, 17. Nel Noddings, Starting at Home: Caring and Social Policy, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002, 22, cited Hamington, 2004, 28. Gilligan, ‘Moral injury and the ethic of care: reframing the conversation about differences’, Journal of Social Philosophy, 45 (1): 2014, 101. Virginia Held, ‘The ethics of care as normative guidance: comment on Gilligan’, Journal of Social Philosophy, 45: 2014, 107. Held, 2014, 112. Selma Sevenhuijsen, Citizenship and the Ethics of Care: Feminist Considerations on Justice, Morality, and Politics, London: Routledge, 1998, vi. Susan Hekman, Moral Voices, Moral Selves: Carol Gilligan and Feminist Moral Theory, University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999, 32, cited Hamington, 2004, 30. Grace Cochrane, paper delivered to Challenging Craft, International Conference, Gray’s School of Art, Aberdeen, September 2004. Alison Pearlman, ‘Craft matters’, Afterimage, 32 (1): 2004, 7. In contrast, see also Rosalind Krauss, A Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition, London: Thames & Hudson, 2000. Narelle Jubelin, ‘Artist’s statement’, The Housing Question, curator: Julie Ewington, exhibition catalogue (Sydney: Penrith Regional Gallery, July 2019), 10. Amanda Rowell, ‘Narelle Jubelin’, Biographical notes, https://thecommercialgallery. com/artist/narelle-jubelin/biography accessed 29 November 2020. Julie Ewington, ‘What is “the Housing Question”?’, The Housing Question, curator: Julie Ewington, exhibition catalogue (Sydney: Penrith Regional Gallery, July 2019), 6. The full title of this series is Owner Builder of Modern California House, details of colour slides taken by Raymond Douglas Jubelin during the construction of his family home in 1964.

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60 61 62 63 64 65

66 67 68

69 70 71 72

73 74 75 76 77 78 79

Size of lot:.75 acres; area of house: approx 1700 square feet exclusive of patio and garage below patio; one storey; living-dining room, kitchen, 1 bathroom, laundry room, 2 toilets, 2 bedrooms, study; brick veneer, wood frame, ½ timber, ½ concrete floor (2000–1). Ewington, 2019, 6; and Margaret Morgan, ‘Housing’, in Isabel Carlos and Narelle Jubelin, Narelle Jubelin: Plantas y Plantas/Plants and Plans, exhibition catalogue (Lisbon: CAM, Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, 2013), 95–105. See Miriam Kelly, ‘Sera Waters: Domestic Arts’, Artlink, 37 (4): 48–54, 2017, https://www. artlink.com.au/articles/4643/sera-waters-domestic-arts/ accessed 29 November 2020. Waters, cited Kelly, 2017. Stacey Alaimo and Susan Hekman, ‘Introduction: Emerging models of materiality in feminist theory’, in Stacey Alaimo and Susan Hekman (eds) Material Feminisms, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008, 15. Pearlman, 2004, 6; and Noris Ioannou, ‘Fleeting Visions Craft 2000’, Broadsheet, 21 (3): 1992, reporting on the 1992 National Craft Conference in Perth, Craft 2000. See also Darani Lewers, ‘The crafts in crisis’, Art Monthly Australia, March: 1992, 14–16. See Margriet Bonnin, VACB Publications Review Report, Sydney: Australia Council, 1988; also Terry Smith, ‘Craft, modernity and postmodernity’, unpublished paper presented at the Interventions Conference, Wollongong University, July 1992; articles in ‘Thinking Craft/Crafting Thought’ Special issue of Artlink, 12 (2): 1992; Julie Ewington, ‘What’s in a name? The art/craft debate again’, Craft Australia, (1): 1986, 108–109, 122; Noris Ioannou, The Culture Brokers: Towards a Redefinition of Australian Contemporary Craft, Adelaide: State Print, 1989; and articles in Bon Thompson, ed. Forceps of Language; An Anthology of Critical Writing, Sydney: Craft Realities, 1992. See Ioannou, 1992 and Darani Lewers, 1992. Notably Esme Timbery’s late sister Rose Timbery and daughter Marilyn Russell. See in this context Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (transl. Steven Rendell), Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. See also Patsy Healey, Toni Warburton, and Susan Ostling, Being with Objects, curated by Helen Stephens, exhibition catalogue (New South Wales: Orange Regional Gallery, April 1995), np. Stephens, 1995, np. Hamington, 2004, 45. ‘Queen Emma’ Timbery, a famed shell-worker, was featured in a 1910 solo exhibition in London. Maria Nugent, ‘Emma Timbery’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, http s://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/timbery-emma-13218 accessed 29 November 2020. These were sold at Circular Quay and Botany Bay, at the Sydney Royal Easter Show, at ‘the Loop’ at La Perouse (site of the old United Aboriginal Mission) and later at Laddie Timbery’s Bidjigal Aboriginal Art and Crafts Gallery at Huskisson on the New South Wales south coast. See Museum of Contemporary Art website, https://www. biennaleofsydney.art/artists/esme-timbery/ accessed 29 March 2020. See Catriona Moore, ‘Craftwork: Margaret Preston, Emily Carr and the welfare frontier’, Journal of the History of Culture in Australia, Annual, 24–25, 57–82, 2006. See Ruth B. Phillips, Trading Identities: The Souvenir in Native North American Art from the Northeast, 1700–1900, Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999, in Moore and Prain, 2009. See Edward Said, ‘Travelling theory’, in The World, the Text, and the Critic, Boston: Harvard University Press, 1983, 226–247. Moore and Prain, 2009. See in this context Michael Carter’s description of Victorian and Edwardian ornamentation, ‘On ornamentation’, in Putting a Face on Things: Studies in Imaginary Materials, Sydney: Power Publications, 1997, 111–154. ‘Natalie Ball’, in Tarah Hogue, Sarah Biscarra Dilley, Freja Carmichael, Léuli Eshra-ghi, and Lana Lopesi (eds) Transits and Returns, exhibition catalogue (Vancouver Art Gallery and Institute of Modern Art, 2019), 53. ‘Natalie Ball’, Feminist Art Collective, https://www.factoronto.org/2015-exhibition accessed 29 November 2020.

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80 ‘Natalie Ball’, Indigenous, Race, and Ethnic Studies, University of Oregon website, https://ethnicstudies.uoregon.edu/natalie-ball accessed 25 November 2020. 81 Sarah Biscarra Dilley, ‘a constellation, a story, a mirror, a map: on material, movement, and narrative in the work of Natalie Ball’, in The Commute, curated by Freja Carmichael, Sarah Biscarra Dilley, Léuli Eshra-ghi, Tarah Hogue and Lana Lopesi, exhibition catalogue (Brisbane: Institute of Modern Art, 22 September–22 December 2018), https://ima. org.au/exhibitions/the-commute/ accessed 25 November 2020. 82 Natalie Ball, cited Hannah Steinkopf-Frank, ‘Existence as resistance: artist Natalie Ball creates art to reclaim her identity’, Herald and News, 10 October, 2017, https://www.hera ldandnews.com/news/local_news/existence-as-resistance/article_40d89b35-5a5c-56239e1b-7e2ab02ef88a.html accessed 25 November 2020. 83 Artist’s statement, NIRIN: 22nd Biennale of Sydney, curated by Brook Andrew, exhibition catalogue (Sydney: Biennale of Sydney, 2020), 278. 84 The Dharug translation for NIRIN was by Carina Morino. 85 Michele Elliot, Whitewash, Wollongong: Wollongong City Gallery, 2013. 86 See Virginia Held, ‘Liberty and equality from a feminist perspective’, in Neil MacCormick and Zenon Bankowski (eds) Enlightenment, Rights and Revolution: Essays in Legal and Social Philosophy, Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1989, 214–228. 87 See Roxana Jesse Lynch, ‘Is care a practice?’ in Care: An Analysis, Leuven: Peeters, 2016, 201–236. 88 This work was shown in the exhibition 1917: The Great Strike, curated by Nina Miall and Laila Ellmoos (Sydney: Carriageworks, September 2017). The title of the work, Lily Whites, refers to those more notorious ‘pure’ strikers who held out for the full six weeks of the strike, many of whom went on to be labour union leaders. 89 Raquel Ormella, from Instagram feed, email with the authors, 25 November 2020. 90 Stuart Hall, ‘The local and the global: globalization and ethnicity’, in Anne McClintock, Aamir Mufti, and Ella Shohat (eds) Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation, And Postcolonial Perspectives, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997, 173–187. 91 See in this context Alaimo and Hekman, 2008, 2, 8. 92 Suzanne Gordon, ‘Feminism and caregiving’, in Suzanne Gordon, Patricia Benner, and Nel Noddings (eds) Caregiving: Readings in Knowledge, Practice, Ethics, and Politics, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996, 262. 93 Including Greeno’s daughter Betty Grace, sister Corrie Fullard, daughter-in-law Lola Greeno, niece Jeanette James (Palawa language) and Bernice Condie (Bangana and Manalagena language). See Tess Allas, ‘The luminous line’, String Theory, 2013, 96. 94 See Lyndall Ryan, The Aboriginal Tasmanians, St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1981; and Tasmanian Aborigines: A History Since 1803, Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2012. 95 Photographs from 1866 also show Truganini wearing her necklaces. It is probable that Truganini also made the shell necklaces returned (along with her bracelet) to Tasmania from the Royal Albert Memorial Museum in 1997. 96 Lola Greeno, correspondence with the authors, 2 November 2020. 97 Greeno, 2020. 98 These were sold both in Hobart and through outlets such as Launceston’s Wonderland Curious & Souvenirs shop. See Patsy Cameron, ‘Shell necklaces’, The Companion to Tasmanian History, n.d., http://www.utas.edu.au/library/companion_to_tasmanian_his tory/S/Shell%20necklaces.htm accessed 25 November 2020. A good reference is the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery catalogue for the exhibition Kanalaritja: An unbroken string (touring nationally 2017–2019); and Julie Gough and Cynthia Colli, Lola Greeno: Cultural Jewels, Sydney: Object: Australian Design Centre, 2014. 99 Patsy Cameron, National Museum of Australia collection notes, n.d., https://www. nma.gov.au/explore/collection/highlights/tasmanian-aboriginal-shell-necklaces accessed 25 November 2020. 100 Cameron, n.d. 101 Cameron, n.d. 102 Allas, 2013, 96.

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103 See Jacqueline Millner, Conceptual Beauty: Perspectives on Australian Contemporary Art, Sydney: Artspace, 2010, 36. 104 Scarry describes this response in the literary context of Iris Murdoch’s and Simon Weil’s work, as discussed by Jacqueline Millner, 2010, 36. 105 Millner, 2010, 112. 106 Norman Bryson, Looking at the Overlooked: Four Essays on Still Life Painting, London: Reaktion Books, 1990. 107 Susan Luckman, ‘The aura of the analogue in the digital age: women’s crafts, creative markets and home-based labour after Etsy’, Cultural Studies Review, 19 (1): 2013, 249. 108 Luckman, 2013, 249. 109 Moore, 2006, 57–82. 110 Bruce Metcalf, ‘Contemporary craft: a brief overview’ [1999] in Jean Johnson (ed.), Exploring Contemporary Craft: History, Theory and Critical Writing, Toronto: Coach House Books, 2002, 16–17, 22. 111 Luckman, 2013, 249. 112 Tonya Jameson, quoted in Kirsty Robertson, ‘Rebellious doilies and subversive stitches: writing a craftivist history’, in Maria Elena Buszek (ed.) Extra/Ordinary: Craft and Contemporary Art, Durham; London: Duke University Press, 2011, 191. 113 Fiona Hackney, ‘“Use your hands for happiness”, home crafts and make-do-andmend in British women’s magazines in the 1920s and 1930s’, Journal of Design History, 19 (1): 2006, 23. 114 Elizabeth Groeneveld, ‘“Join the knitting revolution”: third wave feminist magazines and the politics of domesticity’, Canadian Review of American Studies, 40 (2): 2020, 5. 115 Jo Waterhouse, Indie Craft, London: Laurence King, 2010, 10; cited Luckman, 2013, 255. 116 Clive Edwards, ‘“Home is where the art is”: women, handicrafts and home improvements 1750–1900’, Journal of Design History, 19 (1): 11–21, 2006. See also in this context Parker, 1984 and Lucy Lippard in Adamson, 2010, 483–490. 117 Andrea Black and Nicole Burisch, ‘Craft Hard, Die Free: Radical Curatorial Strategies for Craftivism in unruly contexts’, in Adamson, 2010, 609–619. 118 Black and Burisch in Adamson, 2010, 609–619. 119 Translocal examples not already mentioned here include Elastic / Borracha / Elástico (2012 Timor-Leste Mobile Residency Archive (Sydney: Cross Arts Projects, 2012); the ‘Loops and Knots’ festival of ‘weaving across waters’ which prefigured The Commute (Brisbane: Institute of Modern Art September–December 2018), and later Layover (Auckland: Auckland Artspace, February 2019) and Transits and Returns (Vancouver: Vancouver Art Gallery, September 2019–February 2020). See Transits and Returns, exhibition catalogue (Brisbane: Institute of Modern Art, 2019), 16–17. The important cultural practice of possum skin cloak making and ornamentation has been revived up and down the east coast of Australia through the efforts of practitioners like Brisbane-based artist Carol McGregor (of Wathaurung/Scottish heritage) working with Yorta Yorta cloakmaker Glennys Briggs to introduce cloakmaking back to south-eastern Queensland (Skin Country, 2018) and the skill-sharing practices of Wiradjuri and Gamilaroi artist and academic Lynette Riley. See Lynette Riley, ‘Cloak for Pearl Gambanyi Gibbs’ and ‘Working with the life and work of Pearl “Gambanyi” Gibbs’, in Millner and Moore, 2018, 59–69. 120 Rebecca Coates, ‘I hope: Instagram and the political stitch’, in I hope you get this: Raquel Ormella, curated by Rebecca Coates and Anna Briers, exhibition catalogue (Victoria: Shepparton Art Museum, 2018), 15. 121 Liam Benson, cited Lucy Stranger, ‘Liam Benson: I have a Wealth of Unconditional Love, and It’s Yours if You Want It’, Art Almanac, October 2017, 40. 122 Liam Benson, cited Elle Murrell, The Design Files, 19 October 2017, https://thede signfiles.net/2017/10/liam-benson/ accessed 29 November 2020. 123 Benson notes that this element of the project was inspired through conversations with Darug Elder Kerrie Kenton within a WeAve workshop at Parramatta Artist Studios, and guided in part by Wamba Wamba man Steven Lindsay Ross, who also lives in western Sydney.

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124 Benson, cited Murrell, 2017. 125 Walter Benjamin, ‘The storyteller: reflections on the work of Nikolai Leskov’, 1936, 5, https://arl.human.cornell.edu/linked%20docs/Walter%20Benjamin%20Storyteller. pdf accessed 25 November 2020. 126 Benjamin, 1936, 11. 127 Joan Tronto, Who Cares?, How to Reshape a Democratic Politics, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015, 7 128 See Peter Weibel, ed., Global Activism: Art and Conflict in the 21st Century, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015. 129 Chari Larsen, ‘Jemima Wyman’s many masks’, Artlink, (37): 36–41, 2017. 130 See Chantal Mouffe, ‘Preface: Democratic politics today’, in Chantal Mouffe (ed.) Dimensions of Radical Democracy: Pluralism, Citizenship, Community, London: Verso, 1992, 1–16; and Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical and Plural Democracy, London: Verso, 1985. 131 Hamington, 2004, 677–678. 132 Definition from http://www.glittyknit-tykitty.co.uk, cited Stephanie Springgay, ‘Knitting as an aesthetic of civic engagement: re-conceptualizing feminist pedagogy through touch’, Feminist Teacher, 20 (2): 2010, 113. 133 Moore and Prain, 2009. 134 See also in this context Chari Larsen’s perceptive discussion of Jemima Wyman’s work (Larsen, 2017, 36–41). 135 Nadya Tolokonnikova, cited Hans Rollman, ‘“Pussy Riot is a mask”: the prison letters of Nadya Tolokonnikova and Slavoj Žižek’, Pop Matters, 2014, https://www. popmatters.com/188056-pussy-riot-is-a-mask-the-prison-letters-of-nadya-and-zizek2495592500.html accessed 25 November 2020. 136 By ‘Tanya’ we are referring to the Argentine-born revolutionary and spy Haydée Tamara Bunke Bider (19 November 1937–31 August 1967), better known as ‘Tanya’ or ‘Tania the guerrilla’, who fought in the Cuban revolution. Her arresting presence, wearing the beret of the Cuban People’s Defence Militia, is not as iconic (nor as monetised) as that of her comrade Che Guevara. 137 Slavoj Žižek, ‘The true blasphemy: Žižek on Pussy Riot’, Critical Legal Thinking: Law and the Political, August 2012, originally published on Dangerous Minds, http://critica llegalthinking.com/2012/08/20/the-true-blasphemy-zizek-on-pussyriot/ accessed 25 November 2020. 138 Knitting Nannas website, https://knitting-nannas.com/what.php accessed 25 November 2020. 139 See the Growling Grannies’ video interviews and call to Northern Territory government and Land Council for sit-down talks, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bO_ gP5H28Ns&feature=youtu.be accessed 25 November 2020. 140 Statement, Knitting Nannas Against Coal Seam Gas, http://www.knitting-nannas. com/ accessed 25 November 2020. 141 Statement, Knitting Nannas. 142 Statement, Knitting Nannas. 143 Mendus, 2000, 105. 144 Mendus, 2000, 106. 145 See Cheshire Calhoun, ‘Justice, care, and gender bias’, Journal of Philosophy, LXXXV: 1988, 456. 146 Mendus, 2000, 104. 147 See Bernice Johnson Reagon, ‘Coalition politics: turning the century’, in Barbara Smith (ed.) Homegirls: A Black Feminist Anthology, New York: Kitchen Table/Women of Colour Press, 1983, cited Romand Coles, Rethinking Generosity: Critical Theory and the Politics of Caritas, Ithaca; London: Cornell University Press, 1997, 191. 148 Coles, 1997, 190–191. 149 Hamington, 2004, 5.

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Bibliography Adams, Jude, and Sherriff, Helen. 1980. ‘Women and kids’, in Women’s Art Movement Adelaide, South Australia, 1978–1979. Adelaide: Women’s Art Movement, 30. Adamson, Glenn, ed. 2010. The Craft Reader. Oxford; New York: Berg. Alaimo, Stacey, and Hekman, Susan, eds. 2008. Material Feminisms. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Allas, Tess. 2013. ‘The luminous line’, String Theory, 2013, 96–97. Andrew, Brook, ed. 2020. Nirin: 22nd Biennale of Sydney, Exhibition catalogue. Sydney: Biennale of Sydney. Bonnin, Margriet. 1988. VACB Publications Review Report. Sydney: Australia Council. Barkley, Glenn, ed. 2013. String Theory: Focus on Contemporary Australian Art, exhibition catalogue. Sydney: Museum of Contemporary Art. Benjamin, Walter. 2020. The Storyteller: Reflections on the Work of Nikolai Leskov [1936], https:// arl.human.cornell.edu/linked%20docs/Walter%20Benjamin%20Storyteller.pdf accessed 25 November 2020. Bennett, James. 1992. ‘Screenprinting the Tiwi way: an element of spontaneity’, Artlink, 12 (2): 59–60. Bennett, James. 1994. ‘Tiki Ikat: Indonesian and Australian textile art’, Art and Asia Pacific, 1 (3): 94. Binns, Vivienne. 1980. ‘Mothers’ Memories, Others’ Memories’, LIP: A Feminist Journal of women in the visual and performing arts, 80: 38–45. Bratich, Jack, and Brush, Heidi. 2011. ‘Fabricating activism: craft-work, popular culture, gender’, Utopian Studies, 22 (2): 233–260. Bryson, Norman. 2017. Looking at the Overlooked: Four Essays on Still Life Painting [1990]. London: Reaktion Books. Buszek, Maria Elena, ed. 2011. Extra/Ordinary: Craft and Contemporary Art. Durham; London: Duke University Press. Calhoun, Cheshire. 1988. ‘Justice, care, and gender bias’, Journal of Philosophy, 85 (9): 451–463. Cameron, Patsy. 2020. ‘Shell necklaces’, in The Companion to Tasmanian History, nd, https:// www.utas.edu.au/library/companion_to_tasmanian_history/S/Shell%20necklaces.htm accessed 25 November 2020. Cannold, Leslie, Singer, Peter, Kuhse, Helga, and Gruen, Lori. 1995. ‘What is the justice– care debate really about?’, Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 20: 357–377. Carter, Michael. 1997. ‘On ornamentation’, in Putting a Face on Things: Studies in Imaginary Materials. Sydney: Power Publications, 111–154. Coates, Rebecca, and Briers, Anna, eds. 2018. I hope you get this: Raquel Ormella, exhibition catalogue. Victoria: Shepparton Art Museum. Cochrane, Grace. 1992. The Crafts Movement in Australia: A History. Sydney: New South Wales University Press. Coles, Romand. 1997. Rethinking Generosity: Critical Theory and the Politics of Caritas. Ithaca; London: Cornell University Press. de Certeau, Michel. 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life (transl. Steven Rendell). Berkeley: University of California Press. Domestic Needlework Collective. 1979. The D’Oyley Show: An Exhibition of Women’s Domestic Fancywork, exhibition catalogue. Sydney: Watters Gallery. Edwards, Clive. 2006. ‘ “Home is where the art is”: women, handicrafts and home improvements 1750–1900’, Journal of Design History, 19 (1): 11–21. Ewington, Julie. 1986. ‘What’s in a name? The art/craft debate again’, Craft Australia, (1): 108–109.

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Ewington, Julie. 1987. Domestic Contradictions, exhibition catalogue. Sydney: Power Gallery of Contemporary Art, University of Sydney. Ewington, Julie, ed. 2019. The Housing Question, exhibition catalogue. Sydney: Penrith Regional Gallery. Feminist Art Collective. https://www.factoronto.org/participants/mixed-media/natalie-ball/ Gilligan, Carol. 1982. In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Gilligan, Carol. 2008. ‘Moral orientation and moral development’, in Alison Bailey and Chris J. Cuomo (eds) The Feminist Philosophy Reader. Boston: McGraw-Hill. Gilligan, Carol. 2014. ‘Moral injury and the ethic of care: reframing the conversation about differences’, Journal of Social Philosophy, 45 (1): 89–106. Gordon, Suzanne, Benner, Patricia, and Noddings, Nel, eds. 1996. Caregiving: Readings in Knowledge, Practice, Ethics, and Politics. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Gough, Julie, and Colli, Cynthia. 2014. Lola Greeno: Cultural Jewels. Sydney: Object: Australian Design Centre. Green, Jenny. 1998. ‘Kin and country: aspects of the use of kinterms in Arandic languages’, MA thesis, Department of Linguistics and Applied Linguistics, University of Melbourne. Greer, Betsy. 2008. Knitting for Good: A Guide to Creating Personal, Social and Political Change Stitch by Stitch. Boston; London: Trumpeter. Greer, Betsy, ed., 2014. Craftivism: The Art of Craft and Activism. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press. Groeneveld, Elizabeth. 2020. ‘“Join the knitting revolution”: third wave feminist magazines and the politics of domesticity’, Canadian Review of American Studies, 40 (2): 259–277. Hackney, Fiona. 2006. ‘“Use your hands for happiness”, home crafts and make-do-andmend in British women’s magazines in the 1920s and 1930s’, Journal of Design History, 19 (1): 23–38. Haidt, Jonathan. 2012. The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion. New York: Pantheon Books. Hall, Stuart. 1997. ‘The local and the global: globalization and ethnicity’, in Anne McClintock, Aamir Mufti, and Ella Shohat (eds) Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation, and Postcolonial Perspectives. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 173–187. Hamington, Maurice. 2004. Embodied Care: Jane Addams, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Feminist Ethics. Urbana; Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Held, Virginia. 1989. ‘Liberty and equality from a feminist perspective’, in Neil MacCormick and Zenon Bankowski (eds) Enlightenment, Rights and Revolution: Essays in Legal and Social Philosophy. Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 214–228. Held, Virginia. 2014. ‘The ethics of care as normative guidance: comment on Gilligan’, Journal of Social Philosophy, 45: 107–115. Hogue, Tarah, Biscarra Dilley, Sarah, et al. 2018. The Commute, exhibition catalogue. Brisbane: Institute of Modern Art, https://ima.org.au/exhibitions/the-commute/ accessed 25 November 2020. Hogue, Tarah, Biscarra Dilley, Sarah, et al. 2019. Transits and Returns, exhibition catalogue. Vancouver: Vancouver Art Gallery and Institute of Modern Art. Ioannou, Noris. 1989. The Culture Brokers: Towards a Redefinition of Australian Contemporary Craft. Adelaide: State Print. Ioannou, Noris. 1992. ‘Fleeting Visions Craft 2000’, Broadsheet, 21 (3). Kelly, Miriam. 2017. ‘Sera Waters: domestic arts’, Artlink 37 (4): 48–54, https://www. artlink.com.au/articles/4643/sera-waters-domestic-arts/ Krauss, Rosalind. 2000. A Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition. London: Thames & Hudson. Lewers, Darani. 1992. ‘The crafts in crisis’, Art Monthly Australia, (March): 14–16.

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Laclau, Ernesto, and Mouffe, Chantal. 1985. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical and Plural Democracy. London: Verso. Larsen, Chari. 2017. ‘Jemima Wyman’s many masks’, Artlink, (37): 36–41. Luckman, Susan. 2013. ‘The aura of the analogue in the digital age: women’s crafts, creative markets and home-based labour after Etsy’, Cultural Studies Review, 19 (1): 249–270. Lynch, Roxana Jesse. 2016. ‘Is care a practice?’, in Care: An Analysis, Ethics of Care 5. Leuven: Peeters, 201–236. Maines, Rachel. 1974/75. ‘Fancywork: the archaeology of lives’, Feminist Art Journal, 3 (4): 1–3. McKenzie, Robyn. 2013. ‘The string figures of Yirrkala’, String Theory: Focus on Contemporary Australian Art, curated by Glenn Barkley, exhibition catalogue. Sydney: Museum of Contemporary Art, August–October 2013. McKenzie, Robyn. 2016. ‘One continuous loop: making and meaning in the string figures of Yirrkala’, PhD thesis, Interdisciplinary Cross-cultural Research, School of Archaeology and Anthropology, Australian National University. Mendus, Susan. 2000. Feminism and Emotion: Readings in Moral and Political Philosophy. London: Macmillan. Metcalf, Bruce. 2002. ‘Contemporary craft: a brief overview’ [1999], in Jean Johnson (ed.) Exploring Contemporary Craft: History, Theory and Critical Writing. Toronto: Coach House Books. Millner, Jacqueline. 2010. Conceptual Beauty: Perspectives on Australian Contemporary Art. Sydney: Artspace. Millner, Jacqueline, ed. 2014. Curating Feminism. Sydney: University of Sydney College of the Arts. Millner, Jacqueline, and Moore, Catriona, eds. 2018. Feminist Perspectives on Art: Contemporary Outtakes. Abingdon; New York: Routledge. Moore, Catriona. 1994. ‘Museum hygiene’, Photofile, 41 (March): 8–14. Moore, Catriona. 2006. ‘Craftwork: Margaret Preston, Emily Carr and the welfare frontier’, Antipodean Modern: The Journal of the History of Culture in Australia, 25: 57–82. Moore, Mandy, and Prain, Leanne. 2009. Yarn Bombing: The Art of Crochet and Knit Graffiti. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press. Mouffe, Chantal. 1992. ‘Preface: Democratic politics today’, in Chantal Mouffe (ed.) Dimensions of Radical Democracy: Pluralism, Citizenship, Community. London: Verso, 1–16. Murray, Kevin. 1994. Symmetry: Crafts Meet Kindred Trades and Professions, exhibition catalogue. Melbourne: Craft Victoria. Murrell, Elle. 2017. ‘Liam Benson’, The Design Files, https://thedesignfiles.net/2017/10/liambenson/ accessed 29 November 2020. Nochlin, Linda. 1988. ‘Why have there been no great women artists?’ [1971], in Women, Art and Power and Other Essays. New York: Harper & Rowe, 145–177. Noddings, Nel. 1984. Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education. Berkeley: University of California Press. Noddings, Nel. 2002. Starting at Home: Caring and Social Policy. Berkeley: University of California Press. Nugent, Maria. 2020. ‘Emma Timbery’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, https://adb.anu. edu.au/biography/timbery-emma-13218 accessed 29 November 2020. Parker, Rozsika. 1984. The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine. London: The Womens’ Press. Pearlman, Alison. 2004. ‘Craft matters’, Afterimage, 32 (1): 6–7. Phillips, Ruth B. 1999. Trading Identities: The Souvenir in Native North American Art from the Northeast, 1700–1900. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Pollock, Griselda, and Parker, Rozsika. 1981. Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

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Riley, Lynette. 2018. ‘“Cloak for Pearl Gambanyi Gibbs” and “Working with the life and work of Pearl ‘Gambanyi’ Gibbs”’, in Jacqueline Millner and Catriona Moore (eds) Feminist Perspectives on Art: Contemporary Outtakes. Abingdon: Routledge, 59–69. Robertson, Kirsty. 2011. ‘Rebellious doilies and subversive stitches: writing a craftivist history’, in Maria Elena Buszek (ed.) Extra/Ordinary: Craft and Contemporary Art. Durham; London: Duke University Press, 184–203. Rollman, Hans. 2014. ‘“Pussy Riot is a mask”: the prison letters of Nadya Tolokonnikova and Slavoj Žižek’, Pop Matters, https://www.popmatters.com/188056-pussy-riot-is-a-ma sk-the-prison-letters-of-nadya-and-zizek-2495592500.html accessed 25 November 2020. Rowley, Sue. 1997. The Somatic Object, exhibition catalogue. Sydney: Ivan Dougherty Gallery, University of New South Wales. Ryan, Judith, and Healy, Robyn (with contributions by James Bennett et al.) 1998. Raiki Wara: Long Cloth from Aboriginal Australia and the Torres Strait, exhibition catalogue. Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria. Ryan, Lyndall. 1981. The Aboriginal Tasmanians. St Lucia: University of Queensland Press. Ryan, Lyndall. 2012. Tasmanian Aborigines: A History Since 1803. Sydney: Allen & Unwin. Said, Edward. 1983. ‘Travelling theory’, in The World, the Text, and the Critic. Boston: Harvard University Press, 226–247. ‘Sally’. 1975. ‘Women’s Liberation at the Easter Show’, Scarlet Woman, (1): 26–28. Sevenhuijsen, Selma. 1998. Citizenship and the Ethics of Care: Feminist Considerations on Justice, Morality, and Politics. London: Routledge. Springgay, Stephanie. 2010. ‘Knitting as an aesthetic of civic engagement: re-conceptualizing feminist pedagogy through touch’, Feminist Teacher, 20 (2): 111–123. Steinkopf-Frank, Hannah. 2017. ‘Existence as resistance: artist Natalie Ball creates art to reclaim her identity’, Herald and News, 10 October, https://www.heraldandnews.com/ news/local_news/existence-as-resistance/article_40d89b35-5a5c-5623-9e1b-7e2a b02ef88a.html accessed 25 November 2020. Stephens, Helen, ed. 1995. Being with Objects, exhibition catalogue. New South Wales: Orange Regional Gallery. Stranger, Lucy. 2017. ‘Liam Benson: I have a wealth of unconditional love, and it’s yours if you want it’, Art Almanac, October, 40. Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, 2017. Kanalaritja: An Unbroken String, exhibition catalogue. Thompson, Ben, ed. 1992. Forceps of Language; An Anthology of Critical Writing. Sydney: Craft Realities. Tronto, Joan. 2015. Who Cares?, How to Reshape a Democratic Politics. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Von Busch, Otto. 2010. ‘Exploring net political craft: from collective to connective’, Craft Research, 1 (1): 113–124. Weibel, Peter, ed. 2015. Global Activism: Art and Conflict in the 21st Century. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Wright, Felicity. 1992. ‘Marketing from the Top End’, Artlink, 12 (2): 46–47. Žižek, Slavoj. 2012. ‘The true blasphemy: Zizek on Pussy Riot’, Critical Legal Thinking: Law and the Political, August. Originally published on Dangerous Minds: http://criticallegalthinking. com/2012/08/20/the-true-blasphemy-zizek-on-pussyriot/ accessed 25 November 2020.

5 AVANT GARDENING Western landscape, ecofeminism and First Nations’ care for country

Introduction: three petitions for environmental care Climate change and environmental destruction are the most pressing global issues of our age, and the most dodged by our governments. On the positive side: Australian First Nations have the longest living traditions of land care on the planet, stretching back over 60,000 years, or the eternal present of the Indigenous Dreamtime.1 As critical terms within the artworld, art aligned with deep ecology and ecofeminism are relative newcomers. In the post-war period, environmentally conscious artists embraced nature through humbling gestures of reconciliation, challenging the modernist belief in the dominance of man as rational being, along with its correlate, the environmental and social degradations of industrial capital. Ecofeminism informed many of these actions, and highlighted the gendered dualistic thinking underpinning Western understandings of nature (culture–nature, masculine–feminine, Western–non-Western) through inter-species and intersectional (ecological) actions.2 Ecofeminism also informs recent scholarship associated with deep ecology and the ‘new materialism’ that similarly realigns our understandings of life and agency. These challenges have helped to transform Western landscape painting and have fuelled site-specific sculptural projects, introduced recycling and land remediation as valid artistic processes, and prompted gallery-based installations as a relay for environmental education in the broadest sense. In turn, ecofeminism has been challenged, most potently by First Nations art, with white feminists now having to face up to their part of colonising nations.3 As a result, contemporary ecofeminism is intersectional and rarely asserts a generalised gynocentric force of nature (Gaia or Mother Earth).4 First Nations, non-Indigenous environmentalism and ecofeminist desires for environmental justice are often complementary, while at times they remain incommensurate, creating a dynamic, affective art field.5 DOI: 10.4324/9781003045175-6

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To set the scene for our analysis of how this dynamic field shapes and is shaped by contemporary art, we begin by noting three historically significant, visual ‘petitions’ for environmental sustainability. We explore the inter-relationship of these three environmental petitions to generate links between art practice and other forms of political agency, and in this, we note how ecofeminism has been a pivotal force in forging an inclusive approach to art as a radical platform for ecological communication. We argue that Indigenous and ecofeminist art and philosophy have hastened the rejection of the dualism underpinning Western attempts to recover paradise lost, and that the romantic search for harmony between people and nature is now re-cast in the activist framework of social and environmental justice.6 In 1963, Yolngu elders petitioned the Australian Federal Government against the alienation of traditional lands for bauxite mining at Yirrkala in the Northern Territory. The bi-lingual petition was bordered by a painted summation of environmental knowledge, care and ownership over their landed estates of North East Arnhem Land: landscape features and clan designs specify ownership and responsibilities for country, one Yirritja and the other Dhuwa, on two pieces of stretched stringy-bark.7 The bark petition (as it is now known) offered non-Indigenous Australians a rare opportunity to understand the creation and maintenance of the region, with its complex relations of Indigenous ownership, custodianship and obligation. Tragically, we originally ignored this opportunity to understand a comprehensive, deep knowledge of the environment that had hitherto kept it in productive balance. Unsuccessful in the short term, nonetheless the 1963 petition paved the way for the Federal Government’s 1976 Land Rights (NT) Act.8 In 1972, equally traditional, picturesque views of Lake Pedder in Tasmania’s south west by the landscape photographer Olegas Truchanas were reproduced as campaign materials to save the lake from being flooded for hydro-electricity. They were projected as slides to packed audiences at Hobart Town Hall to illustrate a pristine wilderness, by definition a veritable terra nullius that was in danger of being irretrievably lost. Tasmanian writers Peter Grant and Jonathon Holmes recall how Western Romantism’s landscape legacy was an essential component of early conservation battles, which were fought over the meaning of wild places. Truchanas and his friend Peter Dombrovskis’ photographs ‘showed scenes most urban dwellers would never visit in person, [but] they communicated an idea and an ideal of wilderness that worked more powerfully on the imagination than any number of arguments could have.’9 The Australian art historian Ian MacLean adds that the iconic power of the sublime landscape stems from an aesthetic of ‘both catastrophe and hope’.10 The photographs were successfully used in full-colour posters, calendars and full-page newspaper ads in the lead up to the game-changing 1983 Australian federal election which saw the social democratic Labor Party come to power, in part because they campaigned to save the wilderness. The Franklin remained a wild river, and nearly half a century later Truchanas’ photographs are still showcased on the activist group The Wilderness Society’s website. These two visual ‘petitions’ diverged on questions of ownership, habitation and care. Despite its popularity, fine print and singular image landscape photography has

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come under sustained criticism for an essentialist rendition of Mother Nature, the evasion of ongoing Indigenous habitation and its easy co-option by the advertising and tourism industries. Trawlwoolway artist Julie Gough reminds audiences that the Tasmanian wilderness has never been terra incognita or terra nullius. Her videos and materially rich gallery installations (Tense Past, Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, 2019) explore Palawa habitation and frontier violence across the landscapes of Tasmania. Her video works track Gough as she walks across country, stopping to post modest notices on trees, fence posts and telegraph poles to remind us that we too are going about our business on historical massacre sites. This understated and heart-wrenching project drives home an acknowledgement of well-tended, sovereign estates that were never ceded. Notwithstanding their formal beauty, we acknowledge that our beloved regional landscape tradition is itself premised on the invasion and ruination of other peoples’ country, locating aboriginality as its precondition. From an Indigenous point of view, humans are fully imbricated in the natural world, and the idea of an abjected space of utter wildness or wilderness makes no sense. On the contrary. Gurindji elder Daly Pulkara sadly described over-grazed cattle country in the Victoria River district of the Northern Territory as being ‘just wild’. In conversation with the Australian ethnographer and ecologist Deborah Bird Rose, Pulkara compared this ‘wildness’ with quiet country – the country in which all the care of generations of people is evident to those who know how to see it. Quiet country stands in contrast to the wild: we were looking at a wilderness, man-made and cattle-made. This ‘wild’ was a place where the life of the country was falling down into the gullies and washing away with the rains.11 Indigenous art has gone head-to-head with Western landscape traditions and has helped to win hearts, minds and a fair share of battles for Native Title and environmental justice. Most Australians now acknowledge that post-colonial reconciliation and environmental sustainability are related issues. At the same time, Western conventions of the sublime and the picturesque landscape have remained effective campaign materials. Hardly an election goes by without sighting comparisons made between lush, dripping rainforest and blackened clear-fell.12 Whilst the historical tensions between Indigenous stewardship and Western ideas of a culturally abject, sublime wildness still sporadically reappear in the economic and political arenas,13 on the whole, these two powerful visions of the landscape have jogged along in creative disequilibrium through decades of environmental struggle. The third petition we note by way of introducing the key themes of this chapter is relatively unknown, having been hidden from history through lack of documentation and critical appraisal within the art world. As Olegas Truchanas’ iconic views of Lake Pedder were spearheading the modern Greens movement in Tasmania, Australian post-object artists started to create more open-form and sitespecific work at the Mildura Sculpture Triennials (1969–1978). From 1973 the Triennial extended to incorporate dry scrubland along the Murray River and the

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event became known as Mildura Sculpturescape. The Sculpturescape (a ‘postChristo landscape’ as curator Tom McCullough called it14) soon became a privileged art historical bookmark for progressive sculpture influenced by minimalism, post-object art and arte povera. More radical works were context-dependent, systematic and procedural (sculpture as idea), and were often aligned with deep ecology.15 Sculpturescape helped to launch the careers of a new generation, yet we observe that during its so-called heroic years, the participation of women artists dropped to around 10%.16 Amongst the 10% was a prescient ecofeminist work nestling quietly amid the clamour of conceptual noise. Artists Alison Cousland and Margaret Bell used their 15 x 17 x 20 allotment on the site of an old rubbish tip to plant a garden (Untitled, 1975).17 This modest work of environmental remediation simultaneously recognised the conditions of the site and accommodated relationships of dependency and human debt to the sustaining others of the Earth.18 The work also bears the historical legacy of Western depictions of the intimate landscape as a beloved corner of nature that is perceived as both cognate and sensate, and that expresses a mutually enriching experience and platform for land care based on respect rather than control. This artwork thus also represents the (historically unacknowledged) challenges of ecofeminism, in particular, the critique of hierarchically structured oppositions driving Western humanism’s relation to nature, including artistic terms such as figure and ground, those foundational couplets underpinning the proprietary occupation and development of the Earth. The historically gendered view of nature as feminine and/or racially other to the West has posed philosophical and political challenges for feminism, specifically how to activate more multiple, relational and trans-subjective ecological actions. Some feminists found the gendering of nature empowering and used it to challenge the presumptions separating human action from the natural world. Australian artist Jill Orr, for instance, grounded her long-standing ecological performances around a gynocentric view of nature: ‘I am always aware of a connection with the earth; things born of the earth, return to the earth, life needing the earth, but also its femaleness, motherearth, upon which we establish rituals of living and coping: surviving.’19 Moreover, as writer and curator Julie Ewington reminded audiences in 1994, a predominance of women artists have used natural materials and forces in their sculptural and performance work. ‘This agency is important’, she argued, for ‘it is in direct contradiction to the influential western notion, at least as old as the philosophy of Aristotle, that women and the earth alike are passive, receptive, nurturing vessels, properly dominated by men.’20 Competing tendencies within Australian ecofeminism have never been as sharply defined and defended as in the United States,21 and Ewington’s savvy affirmation of female agency through care rather than stereotyped Earth Mother passivity is key to understanding the ecofeminist art discussed in this chapter. These projects help to modify ideas originally associated with the Western Romantic tradition of natura naturans—a Latin term coined during the Middle Ages, meaning ‘nature naturing’, or more loosely, ‘nature doing what nature does’ (as the Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge defined it, nature in the active sense22)—through gallery-based experiments in natural systems of growth and decay, open-ended testing of species

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boundaries and projects of land remediation and the recycling of natural and industrial waste materials. These projects renew Romantic concepts of nature as an active force, with a will of its own (as against the monotheist dualism of creation), testing art practices and materials that ‘do’ rather than simply ‘are’. This chapter takes as its methodological guide these three intersecting approaches to country—Western representations of landscape, First Nations’ care for country, and ecofeminist processual projects—to generate a critical dynamic that Bandjalung curator Djon Mundine might describe as an ‘estuarine’ mingling of freshwater and saltwater. He borrows the term from the Yolngu clans of Arnhem Land, who use water as a tool, a model for philosophising. The estuarine area of a river has different plant species along its bank. The constant renewal where fresh and salt mix and return is known as ganma. This is used as a metaphor to describe a different kind of mixing: mixing Balanda thought from overseas (saltwater) and indigenous wisdom from the land (fresh water) to create new life and ways of thinking.23 We would add that this ganma process generates new ways to consider commonalities and differences in approach in artworks on site on traditional lands, in polluted waterways, across melting glaciers, in art galleries and online: diverse projects and actions motivated by the urgent need to change prevailing attitudes and actions. While many of these arguments have been made through painting and photographic media, this chapter will focus on diffuse sculptural practices, including site-specific and open-form sculpture and reparative performance works, as well as gallery-based, sculptural installations and waste-recycling projects that explore anti-anthropocentric thinking as a platform for ecological ethics and environmental education. Artists discussed in this chapter include the Tjanpi Desert Weavers from Australia’s Central and Western Desert regions, the Boolarng Nangamai (Together Dreaming) Art Centre south of Sydney, along with non-Indigenous Australian artists Sasha Grbich, Patricia Piccinini, Cat Jones, Barbara Campbell, Sarah Goffman, Bonita Ely and Rox de Luca. These artists’ work is discussed alongside their US colleagues Mary Mattingly, Basia Irland, Chrissie Orr and Jenn Hartt; Indonesian artists Tita Salina and Irene Agrivina; Sámi artist Sissel M. Bergh; and Maureen Gruben from Canada’s Northwest Territories.

Reading the landscape/reading country The classical ideals of Western landscape painting shifted through the eighteenth century to become a locus for thinking about what were then considered ‘universal’ human values such as individual freedom, equality, fraternity—the moral bedrock of modern Western subjectivity.24 One outcome was a Romantic reaction against corrupt absolutist or theocratic regimes and the search for an Edenic, primordial space in which to reinvent humanity. The Romantic idea of nature as wild and majestic was fuelled by the remote, New World landscapes of the Imperial adventure, host to aesthetic and spiritual renewal, the reconciliation between ‘man’ and nature, subject and object.25 A

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proprietorial gaze over foreground, middle ground and far horizon could contemplate a seemingly natural and objective optical order26 from a quasi-objective, disinterested and autonomous vantage-point.27 Defining moral qualities could be discerned in this mythic pastoral or wilderness: we metaphorically associate the panoramic landscape with freedom, possibility and future, for it presents an incongruous ‘synthesis of nearness and remoteness’, as Australian art historian Avenel Mitchell observes.28 So much for modern hubris: today we more regularly return this sorry gaze in panoramic shots of environmental catastrophe caused by climate change and industrialised agriculture, looking at burnt forests and degraded watercourses, or the spooky colour coding of bleached coral and salt encrusted soil, with a guilty sense of proprietary responsibility. Contemporary artists now use the panoramic view, often aided by the ubiquitous drone camera, to measure and bear witness to the devastating environmental effects of rapacious settler-colonialism. Deborah Bird Rose observes that Aboriginal people read the land differently, as ‘country’, to use the colloquial Aboriginal English term for ‘a place that gives and receives life. Not just imagined or represented, it is lived in and lived with … country is a living entity with a yesterday, today and tomorrow, with a consciousness, and a will toward life.’29 Country thus refers to culturally-inherited tracts of land and is the bedrock of culture, as the Earth is vested with the power and knowledge of ancestorial creator beings. Rose cites an old song-poem by way of example. The Bulbul Bird was composed by the man known as Waljbira (translated from Ngarluma—part of the Ngayarda language group from the Pilbara of Western Australia) and reads the country as home and nourishment for body, mind and spirit: Bulbul is here Follow the stony creek, your track to northern shores! Bulbul is here This pool is “water throughout the year”; Stir my heart and also give rest.30 Waljbira reads the country as lived and multi-dimensional, unlike landscape in the Western sense of a 360-degree view to be rendered pictorially in two dimensions, ‘or as an abstract scene waiting to be filled’, as art historian Mary Eagle comments: ‘The Aborigines envisioned journeys and represented them in songs and images according to the waterholes, food resources, people, land rights, rites and permissions involved.’31 Unlike the Western landscape, in many First Nations communities, customary law determines the power and function of representing country, maintaining distinctions between visual representations, dance, ritual, poetry, song and a ritualised use of language. Law dictates the cultural declarations of inter-related themes of possession, identity and custodianship. In this way, First Nations art has helped others to read the country in terms of customary obligations to the land, waterways, sea and sky. This interconnective reading of country is vibrantly expressed in the communally crafted sculpture group Kungkarrangkalnga-ya Parrpakanu (Seven Sisters Are Flying) (2015) (Figure 5.1). These grass sculptures formed just one part of a massive

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FIGURE 5.1

Kungkarrangkalnga-ya Parrpakanu (The Seven Sisters Are Flying), 2015. Held by Ngaanyatjarra makers (L–R): Miriam Iwana Lane, Claudia Yayimpi Lewis, Mildred Lyons, Jennifer Mintiyi Connolly, Elaine Warnatjura Lane, Angilyiya Tjapati Mitchell, Paula Sarkaway Lyons, Jennifer Nginyaka Mitchell, Mrs Davidson, Nora Nyutjanka Davidson, Janet Nyumitji Forbes, Freda Yimunya Lane. Mixed media.

commission to trace the generative Seven Sisters songline32 from west to east across the top of the Australian continent. The figures were created by the Tjanpi Desert Weavers through staged bush camps,33 and indicate how such large-scale, craftivist projects thrive across remote Australian communities through the broad uptake of mobile phones and social media. They help to create a pan-Aboriginal collectivity and map an alternative view of the Australian continent.34 Like other remote arts organisations, Tjanpi Desert Weavers have evolved into an autonomous, women-only platform from which to do business with the male-run, white art establishment. They value the autonomy of their women-only art practice, as they perform separate ceremonies which are central in reading, mapping and caring for land, culture and kin. Moreover, the gendering of nature in First Nations’ art and law is not aligned to a binary framework of hierarchical thinking (as in the common Western dualisms of nature–culture, feminine–masculine). The strict demarcations between women and men’s business arise from the belief that ‘Dreaming men and

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women sometimes walked separately and thus created gendered spaces’, as Deborah Bird Rose notes.35 Thus there are specific women’s places, which are nourished by women-only ceremony, bush-care and knowledge, and are associated with specifically female iconographic and ritual traditions. This independence of place and Law gives women a valued autonomy and power.36 As women from Borroloola on the McArthur River (Northern Territory) explain, We are Aboriginal women. We talk for our hunting business, ceremony business. We used to go hunting, we can’t wait for the men … we go hunting and feed the men too … And we having other ceremony our own with the woman herself, that important, nobody see … When we have the big ceremony business and we can’t see men.37 For the all-women Seven Sisters camps, a senior artist worked with a junior artist on each of the figures to maintain inter-generational knowledge and tjanpi (grass) weaving skills. As the featured artists Yaritji Young, Freda Brady, Maringka Tunkin and Tjungkara Ken noted: We are all kanguru pulka, big sisters, to the young women. Like in the Seven Sisters story—we must teach and protect our young sisters. This is like our painting, too. When we work together as a family, we are learning and teaching each other and our young sisters and daughters … this important Tjukurpa [sacred knowledge, law].38 The artists talked, laughed and sang ceremonially as they softened, clumped, bound and stitched desert spinifex grasses with coloured wools and raffia to form the tjanpi figures, ‘singing the sisters to life’.39 These actions re-created an important stage of the epic songline of the Seven Sisters (of the Pleiades star cluster, in the constellation Taurus) that stretches from Roebourne in the Pilbara of Western Australia across many language groups including the Martu, the Ngaanyatjarra and the Aṉ angu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara peoples, deep into Central Australia. The seven Napaljarri sisters are ancestor beings who were chased across the country by a lustful sorcerer, a shape shifter. But he is of the wrong skin group and cannot take any of the sisters for his wife. They flee in an epic journey across country, protecting each other from his ambushes and trickery, sometimes feeling almost sorry for him, at other times taunting him. Where they travelled and stopped, ate, danced, and then flew up to become stars, they created natural formations that remain today. This enacted songline thus also indicates kinship relations, and is used to locate important waterholes and available bush tucker, and to describe seasons and weather. As far south as Menindee in New South Wales, the Ngiyambaa Elder, bushworker and singer Fred Biggs could study the night sky to predict weather patterns: … then there’s those Seven Sisters, travelling Across the sky. They make the real cold frost.

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You hear them when you’re camped out on the plains. They look down from the sky and see your fire And “Mai, mai, mai,” they’d sing out as they run Across the sky. And, when you wake, you find Your swag, the camp, the plains, all white with frost.40 At the Tjanpi Weaving camps in Central Australia, the Pleiades star cluster rises soon after sunset and keeps a low trajectory above the horizon. Its proximity to the Earth is reflected in the woven materials themselves, ‘created from native grasses (tjanpi) and materials found in the desert to create forms which appear both rooted in the red soil and reaching for the heavens’.41 We need to respect First Nations’ land ownership and custodianship as the basis for potential non-Indigenous stewardship. The complex production process of the Seven Sisters project, and its gallery-based and online circulation, signifies decolonial relations with the natural world which acknowledge Indigenous, colonial and anti-colonial myths and images, as South Australian arts writer Stephanie Radok muses, ‘layered on top of each other to make a richer, deeper place’.42 Inuvialuk artist Maureen Gruben adopts a similarly holistic approach when reading the Arctic environment around Tuktoyaktuk in Canada’s Northwest Territories. Like the Tjanpi Weavers, Gruben uses culturally resonant and site-specific materials to convey her tacit life-knowledges of and attachment to a specific place. Considering Gruben’s work, Secwépemc Nation curator Tania Willard asks, ‘How do we give back to the land? How do we relate to another’s territory without the burden of colonial history that unmaps our belonging?’ Willard partially answers her questions through reference to the artist’s materially-based reading of the Arctic landscape: a crafts-based practice informed by ‘both traditional and contemporary traces—years of Indigenous women’s experience’.43 Gruben’s installation objects transform caribou antlers, sinew and hooves, polar bear fur, beluga intestines, wolf fur, whale bones, seal skins and gathered kelp: recycling to honour every part of animal and plant. These are additionally worked with readily available industrial or commercial materials like resins, vinyl, bubble wrap and metallic tape, flattening distinctions between humans and other life-forms, and critically linking life in the Western Arctic with global environmental and cultural issues such as melting ice, persistent organic pollutants and Indigenous hunting rights.44 As the artist noted of her 2018 mixed-media work Delta Trim, ‘I love mixing traditional and industrial materials, because that’s the world that we live in today.’45 Gruben’s intuitive, material détournements draw inspiration as much from her volatile Arctic environment as from her formal art training. West Coast Canadian writer Kyra Kordoski describes the shift and switch of the Arctic’s genius loci: Change happens in different ways. It can be imperceptible; it can be violent. There are also periods in between these extremes when everyday predictability melts away, when what is familiar palpably shifts … Tuktoyaktuk elders describe Ungalaq, the west wind, as a phenomenon that amplifies rising tides,

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softening the ground and rearranging features of hamlet and landscape by releasing things which the earth had secured, from tethered dogs to entire smoke houses.46 For Stitching My Landscape (2017) (Figure 5.2)47 Gruben drilled 111 ice-fishing holes in zig-zag formation to mark out 305 m (1,000 feet) across an expanse of the frozen Arctic ocean around the Ibyuq Pingo, the highest pingo in the Arctic. These domed, ice-filled hills are created by permafrost and are used as navigational aids and hunting viewpoints for generations of Inuvialuit people. Ibyuq is estimated to be at least 1,000 years old and resonates deeply in local cultural memory: ‘Mangilaluk, a man who Tuktoyaktuk elders refer to as the community’s first chief, passed on the story of three polar bears who came to Ibyuq Pingo looking for women to be their mothers.’48 Gruben honours the landmark by ceremonially feeding 300 metres of bright red broadcloth—laboriously split in half by hand and rolled into large balls—across the ice and into each ice-fishing hole, to form a stitched pattern stylistically akin to the beautifully worked delta trim that adorns Inuvialuit drum dancing parkas.49 This minimalist performance was partially prompted by a memory Gruben had of her brother ‘harvesting seal and flinging red guts across the snow’, a compelling, reparative

FIGURE 5.2

Maureen Gruben, Stitching My Landscape, 2017, video still

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gesture ‘as if she was mending an open wound’.50 The artist sews a zig-zag pattern across the ice to suggest the to-and-fro of family memories, Indigenous hunting rights and sustainable subsistence economies. The work’s personal-political layering is underscored by the video soundtrack, which Kordoski notes is made from the ‘traditional chisel that had belonged to Gruben’s father, working the ice. It has been slowed down such that each moment of contact becomes reminiscent of a heartbeat.’51 Gruben’s work layers Inuvialuk and non-Indigenous knowledge systems and ways of knowing the physical world—akin to the ganma or esturine thinking of Yolngu epistemology—in what is now a commonly acknowledged form of nature literacy in contemporary art. This layered practice is also the guiding principle and subject of Sámi artist Sissel M. Bergh’s poetic research and recount of Sámi knowledge of the Norwegian coast of Møre and Trøndelag (knowhowknow, 2015–2020). For the 2018 arts festival Rugged, weathered, above the sea, which took place aboard the Hurtigruten, Norway’s historic mail boat, Bergh commandeered the ship’s speaker system to enumerate the Sámi names and forgotten memories of places seen from the boat whilst sailing down the coast.52 Her ambitious #tjaetsie (water) video documentary also starts out locally, from the degraded and over-fished coastline off Norway to travel and talk with those involved in fishing, ocean science, fish farming, boat building, and others living and working with the ocean, including those beings ‘who hide from our eyes, beyond the reflective surface of the sea’.53 Through the film we are struck by the guilty knowledge of being continually watched by the ocean goddess Gorrijh gujne/spawning lady, protector of the seas, to whom ‘We have forgotten to listen. Birredh birredh dallah/Please come now to our rescue.’54

‘Vibrant matter’ and the new materialism We have described how contemporary artists read the natural world through performative and materiality-based sculptural works that layer competing First Nations and colonial cultural perspectives. We now focus on ecofeminist sculptural projects that look to a sentient nature to challenge the anthropocentric blind spots of the Western landscape tradition. First in the 1960s, and then with a vengeance from the 1980s, nature has lurked in the art gallery in a repressed state, resurfacing as Gothic, indoor site-machines. These hyper-realised or fetishised artistic souvenirs were forerunners to the now familiar, speculative genres of cli-fi and eco-horror. Nature entered the gallery to accent relation, fragility and loss, and to challenge the ‘backgrounding’ of women, non-Western races and nature that has been foundational to Western humanism.55 These gallery installations test the boundaries of the passive sculptural object by incorporating elements that were actively creative rather than something simply created.56 A balance between conceptual sophistication, aesthetic beauty and low energy/water usage are key to evaluating this sub-genre of sculptural installation. This ecological balance of sculptural aesthetics and environmental science extends Elaine Scarry’s suggestion, as discussed in Chapter 4, that beauty may hone acute powers of attention within the viewer, bringing about an unconscious ‘unselfing’ that helps us to see the world afresh; in this case, creating an empathetic sense of wonder at the productive drive of organic and

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inorganic matter.57 This mix of scientific precision and aesthetic wonder resonates in Indonesian artist Irene Agrivina’s 2019 gallery-based research on the 70 million-year-old symbiotic relationship between the azolla fern and anabaena, a microscopic blue-green cyanobacterium. Her project A Perfect Marriage uses eco-friendly materials to work and learn from this co-evolving, mutually beneficial relationship, in order to explore the potential of photosynthesis to produce biofuel and textile dyes, and to purify water.58 The gallery as site-machine similarly grounds Australian artist Janet Laurence’s longstanding experiments with nature’s organic chemistry, and fellow Australians Joyce Hinterding’s and David Haines’ more recent explorations in acoustic and electromagnetic phenomena. These projects transform the gallery with the wonder of the science laboratory, space observatory and natural history museum. They generate intangible yet very active, material forces such as the capacities of plant life and the unstable properties of combined materials (liquids, rope, lead, chemicals, electricity) as catalysts for chance and alchemical transformations. They prompt surprise and wonder, which American philosopher Phillip Fisher contrasts with the fearful defamiliarisation and shock of the sublime, as being a more enabling and ethical aesthetic experience that is grounded in delight and discovery, and hence, may potentially prompt us to notice, to care, and to move to action to protect and propagate.59 Over the decades, ecofeminist artists have articulated new ways of experiencing the inter-relationship between humans and their environment. These ideas have also informed more recent theories of materialism, including US political theorist Jane Bennett’s contention that not only are objects alive because of their capacity to shape the inter-relationships of which they are a part, but that humans are entangled in a complex web of active bodies and materials. If we rethink the human/object dichotomy in this way, it leads us to accept that ‘any action is always a trans-action, and any act is really but an initiative that gives birth to a cascade of legitimate and bastard progeny’.60 The ecofeminist re-imagination of relations between spirit, nature and human—all to some extent driven by the prospect of impending ecological disaster— provides a fertile context for the work of Australian artist Patricia Piccinini. From the 1990s Piccinini has challenged conventional views of the duality of nature and culture through compelling material experiments that manifest in human/technology hybrids. Her sculptural objects question Western philosophical traditions privileging mind over body and the placement of the human subject and cognition at the apex of life on Earth. One key source for Piccinini has been Australian philosopher Val Plumwood’s idea that the West’s master form of rationality has been unable to acknowledge its dependency on nature, relegating nature to the sphere of ‘inferior’ others and distorting our knowledge of the world in a way that threatens our very survival.61 In response, Piccinini imagines a world where such hierarchies no longer pertain; a world in which machines and matter get amorous and feel family-bound (The Lovers, 2011; The Pollinator, 2018) (Figure 5.3), where marvellous creatures evolved from the unpredictable interaction of disparate genetic material provide human comfort (Kindred, 2018), and where objects call out to us, reminding us of the limits of our power and the rich possibilities of listening to intelligences other than our own (The Naturalist, 2017).

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FIGURE 5.3

Patricia Piccinini, The Pollinator, 2018, silicone, fibreglass, hair, polystyrene, steel

In Bennett’s evocation of an ethics of ‘vibrant’ or ‘lively’ matter, ‘the goal [is] a polity with more channels of communication between members’, where ‘humans learn to hear or enhance our receptivity for “propositions” not expressed in words’. Bennett continues: In a world of lively matter, we see that biochemical and biochemical–social systems can sometimes unexpectedly bifurcate or choose developmental paths that could not have been foreseen, for they are governed by an emergent rather than a linear or deterministic causality. And once we see this, we will

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need an alternative both to the idea of nature as a purposive, harmonious process and to the idea of nature as a blind mechanism.62 The ecofeminist projects noted here capture this very impulse, the irrepressible productive drive of the world, where organic and inorganic matter interact in complex ways that belie the assertion of human will, where the very notion of ‘an environment’ comes into question, given it assumes a distinction between humans as agents and their context as passive. For Piccinini, matter may rapidly evolve from a medium, suggesting it may ‘unexpectedly bifurcate’ at any time, cohering but momentarily into novel aesthetic forms. Piccinini’s practice is grounded in drawing, and here we sense a compulsive energy, together with the porosity of things: as Bennett argues, it is in the nature of bodies, whether organic or inorganic, to be susceptible to infusion and contagion by other bodies. By dint of being nothing but body, nothing but matter, then, Piccinini’s drawings and sculptures refuse the mind/body schism. Piccinini hopes through her objects to ‘open up’ sensuality, to force a certain proximity that might loosen our access to intimacy and acceptance. Her work brings to mind Bennett’s description of ‘vital materialists’ whose ‘sense of a strange and incomplete commonality with the outside may induce (us) to treat non-humans—animals, plants, earth, even artefacts and commodities—more carefully, more strategically, more ecologically’.63 This experience of a shared material presence beyond immediate form allows us to intuit the commonality of the particles that vibrate within us. Adelaide artist Cat Jones’ Somatic Drifts V1.0 (2014)64 explores this relational, sensory experience by prompting psychosomatic perceptions of transindividuation and a powerfully liminal flow between things. These perceptions generate the sense of ‘becomingother’ that Australian artist and writer Andrew Goodman lauds as protean ecology. Participants lie on a padded surface in a black box and watch themselves in a virtual mirror screen above, listen to the artist’s voice and tonal drones, and feel themselves gently touched by the artist. The mirroring effect is based on mirror therapy for conditions such as phantom limb and chronic pain often experienced by amputees, and as such it makes subtle temporal mis-registrations of the recorded image through splitting the screen down the central line of the body. Goodman describes how the participant thus views a series of mirrored metamorphoses that allows no settling of self: Half the body is replaced with a different body of the same sex … and then to a (whole) body of another gender … . a beach spinifex grass is placed in their hands and they are asked to smell a scent of wet earth … . Jones touches one side of their head, while in the projection (the head) … is replaced by the image of the spinifex … . The video (finally) shows their reflection as half plant, half human, then fully plant.65 This rhizomic sensory feedback prompts a radical loss of selfhood (participants variously observe ‘It was like death … So very peaceful’, ‘My bones became the

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branch’, ‘I felt my flesh fell away’, ‘I felt happy being a plant. It took me out of the equation’, ‘It was loving and caring and fragile’).66 These borderline experiences prompt an emotional awareness and empathy with other entities, so that one might start to think ‘If I was the plant, what would be my priorities, what would I need?’.67 Indeed, many of Jones’ participants discussed Somatic Drift in terms of trans-species pain, longing and healing.68 While Jones’ inspiration might align with elements of post-structuralist anthropology,69 her participants’ somatic and psychological opening of self to the vibrant matter of the natural world presents a very different epistemology to First Nations cosmology. For instance, Yolngu artist Banduk Marika explains her clearly understood customary laws of kinship: I will pick an important image like the goanna which represents my link with the ancestral creator Djankawu. … I do a bit of heron, because of my mother. I can do heron, I can do crocodile, squid and octopuses, because they’re all my mothers, they are my mothers.70 Marika’s individual dreamings walked in the shape of these species, and created kinship relations between people, species and country. In contrast, the participants of Somatic Drift experience a shifting to something well beyond the human within a very Western context, as Jones would attest. The ecofeminist imagination at work in these projects materially confronts us with the different modalities of objects, setting us up for interactions that heighten our sense of the thingness of the world, including ourselves. Bennett suggests that such an approach allows passage to a more complex and more ethical view of what it means to occupy this planet, where human/object, human/environment and material/spirit are understood not as separate, but as integrated. With this understanding could come an enhanced political agency that is at home with mystery and uncertainty, and that operates holistically rather than privileging the place of the human subject, and in particular, reason.

‘Conversing’ material forces Outside the gallery, ecofeminist art extends the potential of the mimetic tradition through a sympathetic openness to nature, ‘experienced as something which speaks to us, affects and engages us’.71 In a superficial sense, these projects resonate with the canonical conceptual and Land Art rambles of Long, Fulton and Goldsworthy, who had used the natural environment as a dramatic theatre of consciousness by placing objects in the landscape as a means by which one could reorient oneself in space and time. Despite their ‘look, no hands’ approach, these earlier environmental sculptures nonetheless conceived the landscape as the ground for a human self-orientation and self-realisation through affirming the creative centrality of artistic vision. In contrast, ecofeminist artists interact with the environment as just one element among others within a relational and democratic field of ‘conversing’ material forces.72 Some stop short at the ‘oceanic’ loss of self73 that Piccinini and Jones

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propose: Adelaide artist Sasha Grbich, for example, uses natural materials that obdurately refer to themselves. These are not inert materials awaiting the artist’s transformation, but rather express the rationality of natural systems and phenomena as the subject of the work. Grbich’s Wind Work (Windy Point) (2016) (Figure 5.4) is part of long-standing research into acts of attention within specific environments (including Very Local Radio, 2015; and with Kelly Reynolds, Last Nights in Cities, 2019; Nettling, 2020). Wind Work (Windy Point) (2016) recorded and orchestrated the sound of gusts and breezes, but the artist acknowledges that it ‘is near impossible to record the sound of the wind. Wind takes voice through touch and its vibration on a microphone causes distortion. The digital trace becomes broken sound—a static filled ungraspable voice.’74 She thus instead accompanies the wind on site with sounds created in her studio using early cinema technology (rolling drums and canvas), wind machines that are activated at the recording site, ‘creating an echo of the unintelligible language of moving air’.75 This imaginative conversation with elemental forces recalls Emily Dickinson’s poetic immersion in and with a divine nature: ‘The Drop that wrestles in the Sea / Forgets her own locality – / As I – toward Thee.’76 In a similar vein, the ecofeminist philosopher Barbara Freeman considers that Roni Horn’s River Thames photographs evoke a sublime aesthetic experience that privileges respectful difference rather than slave to/mastery over nature, and that is open to processes of change and

FIGURE 5.4

Sasha Grbich, Wind Work (Windy Point), 2016, still from two-channel video work

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renewal. She evokes both Horn and Dickinson to challenge the Western heroism of the sublime as grounded in a fundamentally masculinist rationale, an experience that aspires towards some sense of control, however impossible, over an awesome nature. Grbich’s ambitious conversation with the wind recalls another, possibly feminist sublime, for like Dickinson and Horn she ‘describes a crisis of representation experienced by a subject who “enters into relation with an otherness—social, aesthetic, political, ethical, erotic—that is excessive and unrepresentable”’.77 In acknowledging the ‘incalculable otherness’ of the world, Grbich stops short of both traditional accounts of the sublime and Bennett’s undifferentiated field of vibrant matter. Contra the indistinguishability framework of deep ecology, Wind Work (Windy Point) attends to others in nature without dissolving boundaries, suggesting that respect for difference may be a necessary foundation for developing an environmentalist ethic, as Plumwood would also maintain.78 Australian artist Barbara Campbell’s Ex Avibus project, 2014–2019, also respectfully attends to the lives and habits of other species as a means of learning and healing. Her spellbound attention to birdlife was initially given focus in a period of bereavement: attending to birds simply going about their business around her became a source of reflection and self-care.79 While Campbell does not become-bird, she maintains the very human capacity for wonder at avian agency as a foundation for unselfing and trans-species empathy. For Well There You Are, 2015 (from the Ex Avibus project) Campbell joined other bird-lovers in Roebuck Bay, 25 kilometres from Broome in the north-western Australian coast, to farewell flocks of shorebirds commencing their 29,000-kilometre flight north across the Pacific to their Northern hemisphere breeding grounds (along what is known as the East Asian-Australasian Flyway).80 Humans have long wondered at the birds’ adaptive capacities to navigate and survive such distances. The artist takes this wonder as a starting point, finding herself ‘drawn to their mysteries but also to the effect they have on the humans under their spell’.81 She credits the unfolding patterns of bar-tailed godwits as they sweep overhead as design templates for her mural-scaled, sweeping charcoal drawings. A nearby screen shows Campbell’s private performance of re-embodying the event she had witnessed. As Australian curator Katrina Liberiou describes, ‘Dressed in black, contrasting with the white of the paper, she draws the movement of the birds across the paper in charcoal. Shadowing their flight-path, her form multiplies, creating her own flock as a narrative across the screen.’ (Figure 5.5).82

Remediation and recycling: aesthetics and instrumentality Art projects aiming to remediate degraded environments or recycle industrial and commercial waste necessarily combine aesthetic and instrumental values and layer (often incommensurate) registers of cultural meaning. As we have argued more broadly of ecofeminist art, the dynamic relation between cultural knowledges, disciplines and materials is what carries the work; that is the work. We now pause to consider a final competing element: the artworld’s difficulty in formally evaluating the instrumental values of ecological art. As US art historian Victor Margolin argues,

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FIGURE 5.5

Barbara Campbell, Well There You Are, 2015, still from single channel video

We will need a new aesthetic to embrace the three categories of object, participation, and action without privileging the conventional formal characteristics of objects. In this aesthetic, the distinctions between art, design, and architecture will blur as critics discover new relations between the value of form and the value of use.83 Margolin’s call for a green aesthetic is necessarily contingent, as no singular cultural framework could prescribe or embrace the diversity of ecological art actions. We nonetheless observe that many so-called ‘use values’ have already entered our practice as artists, critics and historians. We now feel comfortable in altering our Western art vocabulary to indicate bush tucker, groundwater, tidal patterns and rainfall as common artistic motifs. Art processes may include (though not exhaust) practices of fire-stick farming, direct seeding, hand-planting, feral pest control and water sampling.84 Adelaide artist Gavin Malone articulated this common view in describing an expanded skill set for Western landscape art back in the 1980s: It is easy to consider a sculptural form to be a river valley, paint strokes to be the planting of trees, shrubs and grasses, the grubbing of fennel and poisoning of blackberry to be the editing of superfluous content. … To manipulate an urban, rural, or remote landscape, to change its aesthetic from degraded to sustainable, to mediate and act on the way people understand and live in the bio-physical world, can be and is art.85 Malone’s expanded repertoire of sculptural or painterly techniques indicate how ecology generates new aesthetic values of sustainability, biodiversity, environmental

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activism and cultural protocols, although the critical and art historical language for these seemingly instrumental outcomes often remain under-developed beyond their use as simple descriptors.86 Undoubtedly our critical language will broaden as authors, subjects, objects and processes change, as Margolin asks. What is important to register is that including the remediation of degraded environments into our aesthetic vocabulary has already raised our standards of ‘land literacy’, as Ray Norman terms the ability to read and appreciate the signs of health (and ill-health) in the landscape.87 The final section of this chapter responds to Margolin’s call for a green aesthetics by discussing works that acknowledge First Nations’ ownership and care for country, and pursue feminist methods for reaching beyond the artworld to engage other social spaces. Australian artist Bonita Ely has developed this inter-related studio method to research Australia’s mismanaged Murray-Darling river system. She has logged the ecological, economic, personal, cultural and aesthetic health of the Murray since the mid-1970s through regular water sampling, fieldwork sketches and notes, and through personal accounts and photographic documentation of riparian life. These have been assembled over the years in inter-locking sculptural and photographic installations, and through public art and gallery-based performance work. This two-way fieldwork–gallery relay is important. Like Margolin, Ely insists on environmental usefulness as an aesthetic value, and in doing so she renovates the primacy of discourse in Western artistic practice, which has traditionally been based on the fact that artists need not be accountable to produce something useful. The idea of cultural autonomy has traditionally given artworks special status in the museum.88 Ely exploits this ongoing tension and discursive power usually granted to ‘disinterested’ images and objects to maintain the possibility for gallery-based art to be a useful platform or relay for ecological activism. In 2014, for instance, the continuing degradation of the Murray prompted Ely to revisit an engaging, agitprop 1980 performance, Murray River Punch, where the artist had dressed as a suburban shopping mall chef and cheerfully whizzed together river water, rabbit dung and super-phosphate fertiliser in a blender, then handed out the dubious beverage in paper cups to startled shoppers. In the ensuing decades, the health of the river system has worsened through severe droughts and the compound effects of corrupt water markets. Successive federal and state governments over-sell water rights to agribusiness, squabble over water use, and stall on much-needed environmental flows. Blue-green algae, turbidity, acid sulphate contamination, salination, mass fish kills, dried-up lakes and red river gum dieback are recurrent by-products from privatising Australia’s most valuable resource. Ely (with fellow artist Emma Price) updated Ely’s earlier recipe for disaster in lab-coat scientific garb in the gallery, using ingredients taken from decades of systematic riparian documentation, collection and water sampling. Ely’s work is a good example of localised, site-specific and process-driven work. The artist grew up on the Murray, and brings first-hand familial and community knowledge of the river to bear on her studio research, moving outwards from

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personal experience to acknowledge Indigenous knowledges and adapt scientific methods and inter-disciplinary collaborations, reading Australia’s stressed artery through a local-to-global lens. In contrast, US-based artist Basia Irland contextualises such discrete, site-specific projects as details in a global series on the world’s waterways. She blends traditional aesthetic and instrumental values in her work through the formal unification of the multiple and the series. A Gathering of the Waters (begun in 1995 along the Rio Grande) (Figure 5.6) employs a trans-geographic and trans-cultural aesthetic template that is adapted for local community research and action. Her global-to-local aesthetic tool kit includes the repetition of ritualised actions (collecting water and gifting), and the sculptural template of the reliquary or repository, with its talismanic or magical efficacy. Irland uses this repeatable format to generate localised creative perspectives of rivers, waterborne diseases, and water scarcity across the globe. At each location, Irland collaborates with local communities and biologists, botanists and stream ecologists to map and help remediate each watercourse.89 In 2007 A Gathering of the Waters brought communities together along Boulder Creek in Colorado, from its origins in the Arapaho Glacier to its confluence with the St Vrain. The creek provides a large portion of the City of Boulder’s drinking

FIGURE 5.6

Basia Irland, A Gathering of the Waters international projects: Boulder Creek Repository, Continental Divide to Confluence (worn), 2007, recycled truck and bicycle inner tubes, aspen branch, beaver stills, glass vials with creek water samples, photographs, canteen, logbook, watershed maps

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water. A video component of the work shows participants bending and scooping creek water into an old canteen, which is passed on downstream to the next water collector. The water is decanted, frozen and then carved in the shape of a 250pound book, its pages open and scripted with a locally resonant yet globally legible ‘ecological language’ or ‘riparian text’,90 in this instance, embedded mountain maple, columbine flower and blue spruce seeds, and small stones. This ephemeral sculpture was returned into the stream to melt and release its regenerative contents (Ice Receding/Books Reseeding). As the artist explains, I work with stream ecologists, biologists, and botanists to ascertain the best seeds for each specific riparian zone. When an ecosystem is restored and the plants grow along the riverbanks they give back to us by helping sequester carbon, mitigating floods and drought, pollinating other plants, dispersing seeds, holding the banks in place (slowing erosion), creating soil regeneration and preservation, acting as filters for pollutants and debris, supplying leaf-litter (for food and habitat), promoting aesthetic pleasure, and providing shelter/ shade for riverside organisms including humans.91 The ice-book is paired with another openpaged ‘hydrolibro’, here depicting a USGS (United States Geological Survey) hydrograph of the stream flow to show the cumulative changes wrought through climate change (‘less snow pack, earlier snow melt and diminishing glaciers’).92 A third sculptural repository is created to be worn, like a backpack. At Boulder Creek this is fashioned from old inner tubes of car tyres (used to float downstream in summertime), which is suspended from beaver-cut sticks found from a beaver dam downstream. It contains reliquaries specific to the river that local participants have gathered and gifted (notes, photos, a map of Arapaho Glacier) that hang from the backpack sculpture, sitting snugly in pouches made from used bicycle tyres (‘Boulder sports a large bicycle community’). Along the bottom of the repository also hang 47 water-sample bottles, one for each mile of the creek, that jingle rhythmically when worn. These ritualised actions and hand-crafted sculptures that actively restore riparian areas find another life through gallery installation and discussion, maintaining a dynamic tension between formal and instrumental aesthetic values throughout.

The intimate landscape In arguing for projects that incorporate utility within Western aesthetics to dislodge the anthropocentric fixity of the landscape tradition, we now test this idea alongside projects that renovate rather than refute Western landscape traditions. Of interest here is the lesser sub-genre of the intimate landscape that was particularly popular in the inter-war years in settler-colonies like Australia, and that historically appealed more to women artists than the heroic and panoramic ‘vision splendid’93 that was so closely linked to the national story of economic progress. The intimate landscape’s mythic base in peasant culture promotes an idealist continuum between

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past and present. This relation of mutual aid also claims ancestry in the English landscape garden tradition, expressing that dynamic and productive relation between art and nature, where nature aids art, and the artist/gardener aids the creation of future nature: a ‘shared good’, as David Cooper describes.94 Avenel Mitchell observes in the Australian context that traditional images of the country garden, orchard and bush clearing offered settler-colonials the sensual experience of belonging within a known place, a comforting image of humanised nature as the mechanisation of agriculture accelerated through intensive clearing of land for cropping and wool production through the first half of the twentieth century. In this contested space, the intimate view also fed the promotion of native flora in suburban gardens, the emergence of bushwalking and conservation movements, and the professionalisation of botany and ecology. This was the space of the Field Naturalists’ Club (1880, Victoria), the Gould League of Bird Lovers (1910, New South Wales) and Society of Women Artists’ sketch-club (1910–1934, Sydney), where experiential and empirical apprehension of the intimate bush opened the artist to the lived world. The sensory attributes of the bush were valued, Mitchell attests, because they were distinctively, privately, almost secretly known.95 Artists working with the intimate landscape explore (Ruskinian) empirical and imaginative relations between cognition, emotion and sensory perception through physical immersion in nature: a sensory, tacit knowledge of place as a valued basis for self-consciousness and environmental sustainability. We argue that elements of the intimate landscape, which so appealed to women artists due to its expression of local attachment and a respectful, two-way productivity with nature, was of course predicated on colonial dispossession. Yet today these features of the intimate landscape may nonetheless also complement current Indigenous land management.96 The intimate landscape endures today in the image of small-scale sustainable farming, for instance, and is host to the permaculturalist and community gardener. Following Cousland and Bell’s 1975 ecofeminist planting at Mildura Sculpturescape, these contemporary expressions of modest, productive stewardship renovate the earlier regional landscape sub-genre as grass-roots activism. A good example is US artist Mary Mattingly’s miniaturised yet productive and ecologically sustainable living sculpture moored off the coast of Pennsylvania (Wetland, 2014–2016) (Figure 5.7). This liveable, floating ‘future-pirate, sea-punk’ ecosystem provides food for its inhabitants and features water as an environmental commons.97 The sculptural ecosystem is built to resemble a partially submerged building (an image of rising waters that resonates in any coastal community) and contains living and work/performance spaces. It rests upon a barge with outliers fabricated from materials recycled from the urban waste stream, including ‘rainwater collection and purification, greywater filtration, dry compost systems, outdoor vegetable gardens, indoor hydroponic gardens, and floating edible gardens (and wetlands gardens) circling the perimeter.’98 In the North American context, Mattingly’s project infers a Thoreau-styled self-sufficiency, ‘a human experiment in microcosm’, as the artist explains.99 The work’s intimate scale facilitates public understanding of human inter-connectivity with other species and natural forces, as the project participants grow food, check water

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FIGURE 5.7

Mary Mattingly, Wetland, 2014–2016, video still

purity and manage the sculpture’s ecosystem.100 This model for intimate, reciprocal relations with nature through communal stewardship also resonates in Chrissie Orr and Jenn Hartt’s ‘SeedBroadcast’ projects, which combine art and arid land agriculture in New Mexico. The group networks across the state through a retrofitted and solarpowered bread truck, The Mobile Seed Story Broadcasting Station (prompting memories of the travelling agit-prop trucks and trains that toured Russia during the 1917–1918 revolution). The station is a ‘seed story shout-out vehicle committed to examining the inter-connections between people and agriculture through performance, listening, and sharing of stories, resources, and seeds’.101 These projects blur traditional boundaries of public art, performance and community-based environmental care: artworks that come under the rubric of social practice, discussed in more depth in Chapter 6. In Australia (as elsewhere) this revised understanding of the intimate landscape would necessarily acknowledge First Nations ownership and stewardship. Many of the artworks from Australia’s northern Indigenous communities, whilst extremely diverse, nonetheless in some ways employ local materials, are community based, activist-oriented and relate to long-held beliefs that everything is inter-related.102 This work has helped link ecology and art to identity and cultural survival.

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Conversely, loss of identity is seen to go hand-in-hand with environmental degradation.103 In Gerringong, down the south coast from Sydney, as in other metropolitan and regional communities, local native grasses have been grown for community weaving/basketry workshops at the Boolarng Nangamai (Together Dreaming) Art Centre from 1999.104 The garden helps to filter a coastal stream in Gerringong’s industrial hub, and forms part of a native reforestation seed-saversand-propagation nursery. Indigenous community art-gardens are best evaluated for their raw and value-added products, and for the ways they extend local cultural knowledge of country across the generations, strengthening family and community, and maintaining unbroken or endangered cultural practices: another way of mixing formal and instrumental outcomes. There are practical similarities here, and so we might productively explore resonances between the Western landscape tradition of the intimate view, found today in a variety of sustainable gardening and reclamation projects, and First Nations concepts of working on country as a combined economic, aesthetic and environmental venture.

Green audits and recycling projects We have noted the two-way relay between on-site ecological actions and art gallery exhibition practices. Sustainability is an important driver and regulator of this complex, green aesthetic. In the late 1980s a few spectacularly inert, gallery-based installations of eco-art in the US had prompted Artforum critics to loudly question the value of simply bringing nature into the gallery. Slick gallery packaging wrapped around environmental crises was not necessarily edifying, critics argued, particularly if the work itself embodied substantial amounts of water and energy.105 Audiences are now able to ask whether gallery-based environmental exhibitions are actually worth it, or are they at base just another show? As indicated by Bell and Clousland’s 1975 garden, ecofeminist projects understand art as an active, creative and sustainable force. This feminist concern for the environmental impact of artworks, processes and objects has prompted informal green audits and the use of recycled materials. Studio residencies commonly screen PETs [polyethylene terephthalates], the use and disposal of toxic materials, and the removal or alteration of flora. ‘What’s wrong with tying this artwork to this tree?’ or ‘What do you normally do with the waste toxic resins you use in your work?’ are now common questions.106 As artist Evan Holloway elaborated in Artreview: Don’t use fiberglass. Direct sculptural methods produce less waste than indirect methods. Quit promoting the idea of an international art world and instead cultivate regional art scenes. A tremendous amount of waste is generated by shipping and hyping artworks internationally. Art fairs generate tons and tons of waste and encourage a lot of jet fuel usage … Galleries don’t have to be repainted after every show. Maybe we don’t need so many posters and catalogues. We shouldn’t ignore the things directly within our power.107

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FIGURE 5.8

Tita Salina, 1001st island – the most sustainable island in archipelago, 2015, video still

The green audit has itself become an exhibition sub-genre,108 an institutionally active force in generating (at least token) self-awareness by offering valuable data to the individual institution, artist, curator and audience to push for structural change and to focus on those concrete areas over which we have some control.109 In this context, recycling is now a common artistic practice which introduces the circular economy as an aesthetic motif, material and process. Recycling projects are usually site-specific, often collective and community-based, and closely aligned with social protest movements and/or local economies. For instance, the beautiful sculptures and worn objects woven from ghost nets—the plastic debris of the international fishing industry that washes up on Australia’s northern shores—create both use value and exchange value for remote communities in the Top End and augment the objectives of Indigenous Rangers’ Working on Country programs.110 Indonesian artist Tita Salina’s elegant construction of a floating island of plastic rubbish is similarly aligned with local economies and social protest. Her 1001st island – the most sustainable island in archipelago, 2015 (Figure 5.8) was a deceptively literal intervention in Indonesia’s highly polluted Jakarta Bay. Local, small-scale fishing industry and coastal communities are in crisis, and the city itself is threatened by rapid land sinkage due to unregulated groundwater extraction to provide drinking water for Jakarta’s 10 million inhabitants. Curator Carol Cains explains the work’s title as: The government’s solution to the complex environmental and social issues is to build a giant sea wall across the bay to transform it into a man-made lagoon protected from flooding, populate it with new artificial islands, and redevelop the foreshore areas, moving existing coastal communities outside the city precincts. Many are sceptical about the efficacy of the plan and criticise it as scientifically dubious, socially discriminatory and financially irresponsible.111

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Salina worked with local fishermen to collect and wrap a large pile of plastic rubbish from the bay in a fishing net. This artificial island was then dragged behind a fishing boat into the bay (on video we notice the piles of debris lining this polluted watercourse as we pass, and consider how plastic waste and other by-products of first world commodity capitalism affects regions like Indonesia so strongly). The artist is cast adrift on this floating, plastic island as it is released out into the bay, ‘to become the 1001st island in the chain of islands north of Jakarta known as the Thousand Islands. Ironically, due to plastic’s longevity and because it floats on water, the island is almost indestructible.’112 Through drone camera footage we look down on the artist-castaway aboard her island of floating waste: a hapless gesture that is visually arresting and engaging in its absurd literalism. Salina’s action is one of many playful, public interventions developed with fellow artist Irwan Ahmett under the title The flame of the Pacific, which references the region’s famed geological status (the Ring of Fire) to explore the environmental, economic and political instability and tensions in the communities of the Pacific region. This collaborative performative platform, including a literal platform made of plastic waste, creates an imaginary space where these issues can be addressed.113 We mention how Salina’s recycled plastic island is constructed through processes of literalism and playful substitution. Many artists working with recycling employ this surrealist or situationist logic, which we canvassed in Chapter 4’s discussion of ornamentation in souvenir arts. For Salina and Ahmett, recycling is a form of creative urban play, a material resource and a methodology for public intervention (for example, Trash ball 2, 2013, a giant rubbish ball collected and rolled through the streets by artists and the community). Recyling as play-power, problem-identification, creative method and readymade material also drives Sydney-based artist Rox de Luca to string subtle, colourcoded plastic waste which she collects on her daily beach walks into beautiful sculptural forms that spill and loop across gallery walls and floors. Whether worn, draped, suspended or inhabited, they reprise the cheap, industrial materials proclaimed by Soviet Constructivist corner-reliefs during a more utopian period of design history. This haptic return of the repressed within the heterotopic space of the gallery extends righteous anger about our throwaway culture and our concern with the ethics of living sustainably.114 Fellow Sydney artist Sarah Goffman adds a further détournement to the circular art economy. Like de Luca, Goffman’s plastic and cardboard transformations are suffused with an ambivalent love for beautiful objects, and by the delight that creating and beholding such beauty can bring. An inveterate collector, Goffman has for years honed her eye to pick out beauty in the most unlikely places—the gutter, the recycling bin—indeed, wherever something is discarded or overlooked as useless (Figure 5.9). Beauty for Goffman is all the more poignant when it is unexpected, as when it emerges from transformations born of resourcefulness. Like the value of play for Salina, beauty for Goffman then becomes a grass-roots survival strategy, a clever defence against the ugliness of inequity, greed and conspicuous consumption. Goffman discovers what is resilient and timeless in what was thought to be only the superfluous packaging for ‘the real thing’. She creates trompe l’oeil sculptures and

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FIGURE 5.9

Sarah Goffman, Asian table, 2017, PET plastics, enamel paint, permanent marker, hot glue

installations inspired by the aesthetics of museum-worthy Asian antiquities, using plastics collected during regular gleaning rounds of the street or local doorknocking. Touched by the artist’s wit, a transparent doughnut box becomes a sacred scroll, a takeaway container lid a willow pattern plate, a PET bottle a Ming vase. While the artist is interested in the idea of fakery, these exquisite works are not trying to fool us; rather, they are a reminder that the world is indeed not all appearances. Their irony is not detached but pinpoints the hubris of consumerism as much as our tendency to equate monetary value with moral value. This suggests an art for a post-growth economy. It modifies Margolin’s deep ecology aesthetics by finding beauty in thrift and improvisation rather than endless expenditure, an art that inverts the hierarchies of value that disempower the 99%.

Conclusion: feminist avant-gardening This chapter has charted some of the ways that our aesthetic focus responds to the dynamic historical tensions between Western landscape traditions, the deep customary insights of First Nations’ art, and ecofeminism’s non-dualistic thinking about humans and environmental forces. The Western landscape tradition has been thoroughly modified by First Nations and ecofeminist art and by locally resonant environmental activism. These intersectional approaches have helped us to more critically develop our senses and unsettle the old divisions between mind and body, subject and object, self and nature. Ecofeminism enables the fact and feeling of being part of a threatened

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nature.115 Perception through the senses—the original meaning of the term aesthetics—is now understood as a precondition and correlate of ecological activism. The intersections discussed in this chapter generate links between art practice and other forms of political agency, and in this, we note how ecofeminism has forged an inclusive approach to art as a radical platform for ecological communication.

Notes 1 Stephen Gilchrist, Everywhen: The Eternal Present in Indigenous Art from Australia, 5 February–18 September 2016, Special Exhibitions Gallery, Harvard Art Museums. ‘Everywhen’ is an eternal present incorporating the deep past of ancestral creator beings (Dreamtime), and contemporary artists who ‘sing the country’ in their art. See also Margaret Sommerville, ‘Always unfinished business: of singing the country’, Bubbles on the Surface III, exhibition catalogue (Melbourne: Switchback Gallery, March 2008), 5. 2 Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, London; New York: Routledge, 1993, 19–40. 3 Vivien Johnson, ‘Banduk Marika interviewed by Vivien Johnson, Sydney, 1986’, in Catriona Moore (ed.) Dissonance: Feminism and the Arts 1970–90, Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1993, 198. See also Aileen Moreton-Robinson, Talkin’ up to the White Woman: Indigenous Women and Feminism, 20th Anniversary Edition, Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 2020. 4 See Carol J. Adams and Lori Gruen, ‘Groundwork’, in Carol J. Adams and Lori Gruen (eds) Ecofeminism: Feminist Intersections with Other Animals and the Earth, New York: Bloomsbury, 2014, 7–36. For a more critical review of this tendency within ecofeminism see Janet Biehl, Rethinking Ecofeminist Politics, Boston: South End Press, 1991. 5 Andrew Goodman, ‘Black magic: fragility and flux and the rewilding of art’, in Erin Manning et al. (eds) Immediations. Art, Media, Event, London: Open Humanities Press, 2018, 134–160. 6 As noted in an international context by US writer Victor Margolin, ‘Reflections on art and sustainability’, Beyond Green: Toward a Sustainable Art, University of Chicago; New York: Independent Curators International, 2006, 21. 7 This bark petition had followed the re-alignment movement on Elcho Island, in which Yolngu elders unveiled some of their most sacred items alongside the Yirrkala church (the 1962 ‘church panels’). See Bain Attwood, Rights for Aborigines, Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2003, 215–236; and Djon Mundine, ‘Saltwater’, Saltwater: Yirrkala Bark Paintings of Sea Country, curated by Djon Mundine, exhibition catalogue, Yirrkala: Buku-Larrngay Mulka Centre & Jennifer Isaacs Publishing, 1999, 20–27. 8 To celebrate this event, senior artist and traditional owner Wandjuk Marika sent a Yalangbara digging stick to Canberra to reinforce the agreement and to remind governments of their obligations. Both iconic items are now on permanent display in Australia’s Federal Parliament. 9 Peter Grant, ‘Wild art at the World’s End’, Artlink, 21 (1): 2001, 14. 10 Ian McLean, ‘Sublime futures: eco-art and the return of the real in Peter Dombrovskis, John Wolseley and Andy Goldsworthy’, Transformations, (5): 2002, 6. 11 Daly Pulkara, cited Deborah Bird Rose, Nourishing Terrains, Australian Aboriginal Views of Landscape and Wilderness, Canberra: Australian Heritage Commission, 1996, 19. See also Deborah Bird Rose, Reports from a Wild Country: Ethics for Decolonisation, Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 2004, 4–5; and Anne O’Brien, ‘Conserving land through kindly use and reciprocity’, in Nicholas Holm and Sy Taffel (eds) Ecological Entanglements in the Anthropocene, Washington, DC: Lexington Books, 2016, 100–101. 12 As commented by Felicity Wade, ‘Who’s going to save me?’, Photofile (76): 2006, 62. See also ‘Wilderness Society’, https://www.wilderness.org.au/about/story accessed August 2019.

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13 As in the tussle between the Wilderness Society and the Cape York Indigenous cattle industry through the 2000s. See ‘Australian Story’, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, 28 May 2007. See also Noel Pearson, ‘The ideal equilibrium’, The Weekend Australian, 9–10 June: 2007, 21. 14 Tom McCullough, ‘Preparation for Sculpturescape ’73’, printed information sheet sent out to invited sculptors, October 1972, n.p. 15 Ross Grounds’ Ecological Well (1973), for instance, excavated a deep bunker in which audiences could re-orient themselves within an inclusive, inter-species lifeworld. 16 Anne Sanders notes that while women participated in the 1961 Triennial at a relatively high (for the period) 31%, McCullough’s peer review selection process heavily relied on an all-male coterie of sculptors lecturing in the metropolitan art schools: Ann Sanders, ‘Made in Mildura’, Art Monthly, (246): 39–44, 2013, 39. Women’s participation plummeted through 1973–1975, then nudged up to 17% by 1978 as a result of pressure from women’s art groups: Ann Sanders, The Mildura Sculpture Triennials 1961–1978: an interpretative history, PhD thesis, Australian National University, 2009, 160. Sanders observes that ‘the drop in women’s participation coincided with the increased importance and role of sculptor-teachers as selectors at the Mildura Triennials. Employment in the expanding colleges of advanced education art schools, particularly in Melbourne, favoured men.’ fn 317, 160. 17 Noel Sheridan from the Experimental Art Foundation awarded Untitled one of the several non-purchasable exhibit awards, no doubt to help offset costs of preparing and planting the 15 x 20 x 17-metre garden bed. Bell later exhibited in the 7th Triennial in 1978. 18 Plumwood, 1993, 196. 19 Jill Orr, artist’s statement, quoted in Anne Marsh, Body and Self: Performance Art in Australia, Sydney: Oxford University Press, 1993, 143. 20 Julie Ewington, ‘In the wild: nature, culture, gender in installation art’, in Catriona Moore (ed.) Dissonance: Feminism and the Arts 1970–90, Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1994, 228–229. 21 On these differences see Noel Sturgeon, Ecofeminist Natures: Race, Gender, Feminist Theory and Political Action, New York; London: Routledge, 1997; Plumwood, 1993; Janet Biehl, Rethinking Ecofeminist Politics, Boston: South End Press, 1991; Adams and Gruen, 2014. 22 See for instance Coleridge’s 1795 version of ‘The Eolian Harp’: Wilson, Douglas Brownlow, ‘Two modes of apprehending nature: a gloss on the Coleridgean symbol’, PMLA, 87 (1): 1972, 42–52. 23 Mundine, 1999, 20. 24 See for instance Ian McLean’s quote from Slavoj Žižek in ‘Sublime futures: eco-art and the return of the real in Peter Dombrovskis, John Wolseley and Andy Goldsworthy’, Transformations, (5): 2002, 6. 25 See in the Australian context Bernard Smith’s foundational study European Vision in the South Pacific, New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 1985; Bernard Smith, Imagining the Pacific: In the Wake of the Cook Voyages, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press; Miegunyah Press, 1992; Tim Bonyhady, Images in Opposition: Australian Painting 1801–1890, Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1985; and The Colonial Earth, Melbourne: Miegunyah Press; University of Melbourne Press, 2000; National Gallery of Australia, Wadsworth Atheneum, and Corcoran Gallery of Art, New Worlds From Old: 19th Century Australian & American Landscapes, exhibition catalogue, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, CT; Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, 1998. 26 See also in this context Martin Jay, ‘Scopic regimes of modernity’, in Scott Lash and Jonathon Friedman (eds) Modernity and Identity, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992, 184; and Norman Bryson, Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze, London: Macmillan, 1983, 89–94. 27 Bryson, 1983, 103. See also Zygmut Bauman, ‘Strangers: the social construction of universality and particularity’, Telos, (78): 1988/89, 17–18.

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28 In her discussion of the Australian inter-war panorama and intimate landscape, Avenel Mitchell cites Yi-Fu Tuan’s suggestion that ‘space lies open; it suggests the future and invites action’. Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience, London: Edward Arnold, 1977, 54, cited Avenel Mitchell, ‘The harvest of a quiet eye: the intimate expression of nature in Australian landscape painting from the late nineteenth century to c.1940’, MPhil thesis, Department of Art History and Film Studies, University of Sydney, 1997, 101. 29 Rose, 1996, 7. 30 C. von Brandenstein and A. Thomas, ‘Taruru: Aboriginal song poetry from the Pilbara’, Adelaide: Rigby Ltd, 1974, 45, cited Rose, 1996, 7. 31 Mary Eagle, ‘Traditions of representing the land in Aboriginal art’, Art & Australia, 37 (2). 32 In Australian Aboriginal law, a songline is a route through the landscape which was/is travelled by ancestral creator beings during the Dreamtime, and which features a series of landmarks that relate to creation events that happen during this time. 33 The project commenced at a two-week bush camp at a remote Seven Sisters site at Kuru Ala, in Western Australia, and finished at a campsite just outside Papulankutja, in the Blackstone Ranges between the Western and Great Victoria deserts. It was commissioned for the exhibition Songlines: Tracking the Seven Sisters, on show at the National Museum of Australia, 15 September 2017 to 28 February 2018. 34 Jennifer Biddle notes this in her discussion of fibre and textile crafting across the Aṉ angu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (NPY) communities from Blackstone in 1995, assisted by then-developing hand-held mobile phones and related internet technologies, which fostered the spread of images and ideas across communities, and the participation of some 400 women from three (main) language groups across the 350,000 square kilometre NPY Women’s Council membership region. See Jennifer Loureide Biddle, Remote Avant-garde: Aboriginal Art under Occupation, Durham; London: Duke University Press, 2016, 112. See also in this context Marcia Langton, ‘Foreword’, Tjanpi Desert Weavers (compiled by Penny Watson for Tjanpi Desert Weavers), Ngaanyatjarra Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Women’s Council, Sydney: Macmillan, 2012, 9. 35 Rose, 1996, 36. 36 See Johnson, 1993, 195. 37 ‘Borroloola Women speak’, 1983, in Fay Gale (ed.) We Are Bosses Ourselves, Canberra: Australian Institute of Indigenous Studies, 71, cited Rose, 1996, 37. Rose adds that ‘The translator added a note saying that she had been involved in a women’s ceremony, and it is so secret that it was difficult for the women to speak of it in public.’ 38 https://www.nma.gov.au/exhibitions/songlines 39 https://www.nma.gov.au/exhibitions/songlines 40 Fred Biggs and R. Robinson, Altjeringa and other Aboriginal Poems, Sydney: AH and AW Reed, 1970, 5, cited Rose, 1996, 9. See also ‘Briggs, Frederick (Fred) (1866– 1935)’, Obituaries Australia, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, http://ia.anu.edu.au/biography/briggs-frederick-fred-15222/text26427 accessed 27 November 2020. 41 Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, website, https://www.mca.com.au/artistsworks/works/2013.63A-G/. See also David Wroth, ‘The Seven Sisters Story’, Japingka Gallery, 2015, https://japingkaaboriginalart.com/articles/star-dreaming-seven-sisters/ accessed 25 November 2020. 42 Stephanie Radok, ‘Pip Stokes: Unfolding the night’, Art and Australia, 39 (4): 2002, 544. 43 Tania Willard, ‘The smell of the land when you climb Ibyuq Pingo’, UNGALAQ (When Stakes Come Loose), exhibition catalogue (Grunt Gallery, Vancouver, 9 June–29 July 2017). 44 Maureen Gruben, https://www.maureengruben.com/about. See also Clint Burnham, ‘QULLIQ: In Darkness, Light’ (Libby Leshgold Gallery, Vancouver, 2018). 45 Maureen Gruben, in ‘ART SEEN: Maureen Gruben’s materiality ranges from polar bear bones to bubble wrap’, Vancouver Sun, 6 March 2018.

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46 Kyra Kordoski, ‘Shift; Rise: Maureen Gruben’s UNGALAQ (When Stakes Come Loose), exhibition catalogue (Grunt Gallery, Vancouver, 9 June–29 July 2017). 47 Stitching My Landscape (2017) was commissioned for LandMarks 2017/Repéres2017 (Partners in Art; Parks Canada), curated by Tania Willard, Tuktoyaktuk, NWT, April– June 2017. 48 Kordoski, 2017. 49 Kordoski, 2017. 50 Caoimhe Morgan-Feir, ‘What we want to see in 2018’, CanadianArt, 4 January 2018), n.p. 51 Kordoski, 2017. Kordoski recounts how: ‘Ibyuq has been a site of profound comfort and healing throughout Gruben’s life. In 1997, she spent a night on Ibyuq with a friend. They had crossed the channel that winds around its base on a driftwood raft lashed together with a rope her father had given to her specifically for that purpose. That night, she used a needle and a thread coated in charcoal from their campfire to hand-stitch a traditional Inuvialuit facial tattoo that would ultimately consist of three lines on her chin: one mark for each of her sons. Thirty years later, in stitching the surrounding sea ice with red broadcloth, the artist has expanded an intimate, personal moment out into a communal, global context via entwined sculptural and performative events.’ 52 Arnisa Zeqo, ‘Sissel M. Bergh’, Coast Contemporary, 2018, https://coastcontemporary.no/ commissions-2018/commissioned-artists-2018/sissel-m-bergh accessed September 2020. 53 #tjaetsie (water) knowhowknow, 2017 HD video, 18:03 min, shown at NIRIN, 22nd Biennale of Sydney, curated by Brook Andrew. The film is part of an ongoing series; a second film, #elmie (in production) concerns sky, air, weather, storm/snow/wind/ rain, in south Sami language. 54 Sissel M. Bergh, ‘Artist’s statement’ in NIRIN, 22nd Biennale of Sydney, curated by Brook Andrew, exhibition catalogue (Sydney, 2020), 266. 55 Plumwood, 1993. 56 Jan Avgikos, ‘Green peace’, Artforum, 29 (8): 1991, 104–110. 57 See Jacqueline Millner, Conceptual Beauty, Perspectives on Australian Contemporary Art, Sydney: Artspace, 2010, 176–181. 58 Irene Agrivina, A Perfect Marriage, artist residency, Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore (July–September 2019). Agrivina is also a founding member and current codirector of House of Natural Fiber in Yogyakarta, and also co-founded XXLab in 2013, a feminist collective focusing on arts, science and free technology. 59 Phillip Fisher, Wonder, the Rainbow, and the Aesthetics of Rare Experiences, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003. 60 Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010, 100–101. 61 Plumwood, 1993. 62 Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 112. 63 Bennett, 2010, xi. 64 Cat Jones, Somatic Drifts V1.0 (2014), excerpts of performance on Vimeo, https://vimeo. com/user6170446 accessed April 2020. 65 Goodman, 2018. 66 Video and written responses of participants, https://catjones.net/2014/05/27/somaticdrifts-v1-0/ accessed August 2019. 67 So asks Cat Jones’ collaborator, the ‘bioneer’ ethnographer and ecologist Monica Gagliano in her 2018 book, Monica Gagliano, Thus Spoke the Plant: A Remarkable Journey of Groundbreaking Scientific Discoveries and Personal Encounters with Plants, Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 2018. 68 Jones views her facilitating role as a mediatised, shamanic experience, ‘traditional knowledges … that have been blocked’: Cat Jones in conversation with Monica Gagliano, podcast with Bec Dean for DLUX Media, ‘The Constellations’, Sydney, 9 June 2019, http://www.dlux.org.au/dluxpodcasts/2019/6/9/ep9-the-plants-with-cat-jones-ampmonica-gagliano; Goodman, 2018.

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69 Michael Taussig, Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991. 70 Banduk Marika, in Johnson, 1993, 202. 71 Gerard Boeme, in David Roberts, ‘Aura and aesthetics of nature’, Thesis Eleven, 36 (1): 127–137, 1993, 129. 72 See for instance Catriona Sandilands, The Good-Natured Feminist: Ecofeminism and the Quest for Democracy, Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1999, 181. 73 See Romain Rolland’s letter to Sigmund Freud on the ‘oceanic feeling’ that Freud later incorporates in his more ambivalent theorisation of the oceanic, as aligned with the death drive. Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 18 [1920], 64. 74 Sasha Grbich, Artist’s statement, Wind Work, 2016, http://163.53.230.7/~sashagrb/ works/wind-work/ 75 Grbich, 2016. 76 Emily Dickinson, Selected Poems of Emily Dickinson, J. Reeves (ed.), London: Heinemann, 1959. Especially, ‘The Drop that wrestles in the sea’, 284; ‘I saw no Way – The Heavens were stitched’, 85. 77 Barbara Freeman, The Feminine Sublime Gender and Excess in Women’s Fiction, Berkeley; Los Angeles; London: University of California Press, 1995, 97. 78 See Plumwood, 1993, 186–187; Christian Diehm, ‘Arne Naess, Val Plumwood, and deep ecological subjectivity: a contribution to the deep ecology–ecofeminism debate’, Ethics and the Environment, 7 (1): 24–38, 2002. 79 Barbara Campbell, ‘Ex Avibus: Distributed performance by way of migratory shorebirds on the East Asian-Australasian Flyway’, PhD thesis, University of Sydney, 2016, 1–2, https://ses.library.usyd.edu.au/handle/2123/15816 accessed 29 November 2020. 80 Katrina Liberiou, ‘Introduction’, Ex Avibus, exhibition catalogue (University of Sydney Art Gallery, June–August 2015), 3. 81 Barbara Campbell, cited by Liberiou, 2015, 3. 82 Liberiou, 2015, 3. As the viewer steps through the gallery space she ‘triggers’ a set of responsive voice samples; a series of utterances—‘You’ve got a rippa’, ‘Wonderful’ and ‘Well how about that’—speech performances by a fellow birder, incidentally recorded by Campbell as she videoed the flocks taking off. 83 Margolin, 2006, 29. 84 Stephanie Radok and Gavin Malone, ‘Remediation as art’, Artlink, 25 (4): 47, 2005. 85 Gavin Malone, ‘The ecology of art or art as ecology’, Broadsheet, 27 (7): 5, 1998. 86 The positive value of critical description has, however, been ably argued by New Zealand art critic Justin Paton in ‘The shadow economy’, Art Monthly Australia, (200): 9–11, 2007. 87 Ray Norman, ‘Reading the waters’, Artlink, 21 (1): 10–13, 2001. 88 Margolin, 2006, 24–25. 89 See Basia Irland, Water Library, Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2007. Irland describes projects she has created in Africa, Canada, Europe, South America, South East Asia, Japan and the United States, and later projects in the Netherlands in other work: see Basia Irland, Reading the River, exhibition catalogue (Museum De Domijnen, Uitgever, 2017). Her more recent work has been based in Egypt, Ethiopia, India and Nepal, thanks in part to her regular blog for National Geographic. 90 Amanda Boetzekes, cited Basia Irland, ‘Boulder Creek’, http://www.basiairland. com/projects/video%20and%20audio/boulder-creek.html accessed October 2020. 91 See Irland, ‘Boulder Creek’. 92 Basia Irland, A Gathering of the Waters, Boulder Creek Repository, Continental Divide to Confluence (worn), 2007, http://www.basiairland.com/projects/video%20and%20audio/ boulder-creek.html accessed October 2020. For other projects, hydrolibros have been made from local found materials such as lichen, shells, slate, mine tailings and concrete fragments. 93 Mitchell, 1997.

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94 David Cooper, A Philosophy of Gardens, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006, 28, 39; cited Ingrid Periz, ‘What makes a garden?’, in Janet Laurence, What Can a Garden Be?, exhibition catalogue (Breenspace, October 2010). Instances of art-nature co-productivity range widely, from 1990s projects associated with Waterworks, South Australia Country Arts Trust, Adelaide, curator Catherine Murphy, to the native grasses garden planting at the Casula Powerhouse in Liverpool, south-west Sydney, which were regularly harvested for community grass-weaving workshops. 95 Mitchell, 1997, 44–45. 96 See Bruce Pascoe, Dark Emu, Broome: Magabala Books Aboriginal Corporation, 2014. 97 Tom Newman, WetLand, documentary video, 2017, https://marymattingly.com/htm l/MATTINGLYWetland.html 98 WetLand partnered with the University of Pennsylvania’s Program in the Environmental Humanities and Bartram’s Garden through the spring of 2017. WetLand was docked on the banks of the Schuylkill River at Bartram’s Garden and was used as a space for classes, residencies and public programming. See Mary Mattingly, homepage, https://marymattingly.com/html/MATTINGLYWetland.html; and Newman, 2017. 99 Newman, 2017. 100 Mattingly further developed this pedagogical, sculptural eco-model with Swale (2017 +), a floating barge growing edible produce and promoting stewardship of public waterways (water as a commons). This public, mobile food forest is planted atop a 5000 square foot barge moved and moored around New York City and Brooklyn. 101 Seed Broadcast, ‘Seed: climate change resilience’, n.d., https://www.seedbroadcast. org/SeedBroadcast/SeedBroadcast_Projects.html accessed 10 October 2020. 102 So said Julie Ewington, then education officer at the Queensland Art Gallery in her paper ‘Installation and environment in South East Asia’, Topographies Conference, Centre for Environmental and Ecological Art, Townsville, 5–7 August 1996, as reported by Chris Downie, ‘Topographies’, Periphery, (25): 10, 1996. 103 This point was made by Perc Tucker Gallery Director Ross Searle in his paper ‘The art of survival’ at the 1996 Topographies Conference: Downie, 1996, 10. 104 See ‘Teaching and learning at Boolarng Nangamai’, Koori Coast, http://livingknowledge. anu.edu.au/learningsites/kooricoast/15_boolarng.htm accessed 20 November 2020. 105 Avgikos, 1991, 104–110. 106 Grant, 2001, 15; Richard Smith, ‘Sustainability labelling and artworks! What’s that?’, Artlink, 25, (4): 39, 2005. 107 Evan Holloway, ‘Question and answer’, Artreview (2): 49, 2006. See also the Slow Art Manifesto, Slow Art Collective, https://www.slowartcollective.com/portraiture. 108 For instance, Lucas Ihlein’s Environmental Audit at Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art (2010), commissioned for the art and environment exhibition In the Balance: Art for a Changing World, calculated the lighting + electricity + air conditioning on the third floor of the museum for the 72 open days of the show. 109 Tellingly, Ihlein was only able to elicit three (more junior) artists in the exhibition to self-audit their projects, and his online industry participants were largely art school students, gallery volunteers and lower-paid museum workers rather than curatorial staff or higher museum management. 110 National Indigenous Australians Agency, ‘The Indigenous Ranger Program’, https:// www.niaa.gov.au/indigenous-affairs/environment/indigenous-ranger-program 111 Carol Cains, ‘Tita Salina’, Contemporary Worlds: Indonesia, exhibition catalogue (National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 2019), n.p., https://nga.gov.au/contemporaryworlds/ artists.cfm?artistirn=50074 accessed 20 November 2020. 112 Cains, 2019, n.p. 113 To date the artists have built networks with local communities in 16 projects across Taiwan, China, Japan, Indonesia and New Zealand, and through collaborative ‘everyday acts of social disobedience … intervened in the status quo through art’. See Irwan Ahmett and Tita Salina, ‘The Ring of Fire’, NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore, 2019.

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114 See Jacqueline Millner, ‘Sarah Goffman’, Australian Art Collector, (60): 102–103, 2012. 115 David Roberts, ‘Aura and aesthetics of nature’, Thesis Eleven, (36): 128, 1993.

Bibliography Adams, Carol J., and Gruen, Lori, eds. 2014. ‘Groundwork’, Ecofeminism: Feminist Intersections with Other Animals & the Earth. New York: Bloomsbury, 7–36. Ahmett, Irwan, and Salina, Tita. 2019. ‘The Ring of Fire’, NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore, exhibition catalogue, http://ntu.ccasingapore.org/events/irwan-ahmett-a nd-tita-salina-the-ring-of-fire/ Attwood, Bain. 2003. Rights for Aborigines. Sydney: Allen & Unwin. Avgikos, Jan. 1991. ‘Green peace’, Artforum (April): 104–110. Bauman, Zygmut. 1988/89. ‘Strangers: The social construction of universality and particularity’, Telos, (78) (Winter): 7–42. Bennett, Jane. 2010. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Bergh, Sissel M. 2020. ‘Artist’s statement’, NIRIN: 22nd Biennale of Sydney, curated Brook Andrew, Sydney, exhibition catalogue, 266. Biddle, Jennifer Loureide. 2016. Remote Avant-garde: Aboriginal Art under Occupation. Durham; London: Duke University Press. Biehl, Janet. 1991. Rethinking Ecofeminist Politics. Boston: South End Press. Bonyhady, Tim. 1985. Images in Opposition: Australian Painting 1801–1890. Melbourne: Oxford University Press. Bonyhady, Tim. 2000. The Colonial Earth. Melbourne: Miegunyah Press; University of Melbourne Press. Burnham, Clint. 2018. QULLIQ: In Darkness, Light. Libby Leshgold Gallery, Vancouver, exhibition catalogue. Bryson, Norman. 1983. Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze. London: Macmillan. Campbell, Barbara. 2016. ‘Ex Avibus: Distributed performance by way of migratory shorebirds on the East Asian-Australasian Flyway’, PhD thesis, University of Sydney. Cains, Carol. 2019. ‘Tita Salina’, Contemporary Worlds: Indonesia. Canberra: National Gallery of Australia, https://nga.gov.au/contemporaryworlds/artists.cfm?artistirn=50074 Dickinson, Emily. 1959. Selected Poems of Emily Dickinson, J. Reeves, ed. London: Heinemann. Diehm, Christian. 2002. ‘Arne Naess, Val Plumwood, and deep ecological subjectivity: a contribution to the deep ecology–ecofeminism debate’, Ethics and the Environment, 7 (1): 24–38. Downie, Chris. 1996. ‘Topographies’, Periphery (25) (November): 10. Eagle, Mary. 1999/2000. ‘Traditions of representing the land in Aboriginal art’, Art & Australia, 37 (2): 236–244. Ewington, Julie. 1994. ‘In the wild: nature, culture, gender in installation art’, in Catriona Moore (ed.) Dissonance: Feminism and the Arts 1970–90. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 228–248. Fisher, Phillip. 2003. Wonder, the Rainbow, and the Aesthetics of Rare Experiences. Boston: Harvard University Press. Freeman, Barbara. 1995. The Feminine Sublime Gender and Excess in Women’s Fiction. Berkeley; Los Angeles; London: University of California Press. Freud, Sigmund. 1975. Beyond the Pleasure Principle, in Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud [1920], Vol. 18. New York: Vintage. Gagliano, Monica. 2018. Thus Spoke the Plant: A Remarkable Journey of Groundbreaking Scientific Discoveries and Personal Encounters with Plants. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books.

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Gilchrist, Stephen. 2016. Everywhen: The Eternal Present in Indigenous Art from Australia, curated by Stephen Gilchrist, exhibition catalogue, Harvard Art Museums, Boston, February–September. Goodman, Andrew. 2018. ‘Black magic: fragility and flux and the rewilding of art’, in Erin Manning et al. (eds) Immediations. Art, Media, Event. London: Open Humanities Press, 134–160. Grant, Peter. 2001. ‘Wild art at the World’s End’, Artlink, 21 (1) (March): 15–17. Grbich, Sasha. 2016. ‘Artist’s statement’, Wind Work, http://163.53.230.7/~sashagrb/works/ wind-work/ Gruben, Maureen. 2018. ‘ART SEEN: Maureen Gruben’s materiality ranges from polar bear bones to bubble wrap’, Vancouver Sun, 6 March. Holloway, Evan. 2006. ‘Question and answer’, Art Review, (6) (August): 49. Irland, Basia. 2007. Water Library. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Irland, Basia. 2017. Reading the River, exhibition catalogue, Museum De Domijnen, Uitgever. Jay, Martin. 1992. ‘Scopic regimes of modernity’, in Scott Lash and Jonathon Friedman (eds) Modernity and Identity. Oxford: Blackwell, 178–195. Johnson, Vivien. 1993. ‘Banduk Marika interviewed by Vivien Johnson, Sydney, 1986’, in Catriona Moore (ed.) Dissonance: Feminism and the Arts 1970–90. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 195–204. Kordoski, Kyra. 2017. Shift; Rise: Maureen Gruben’s UNGALAQ (When Stakes Come Loose), exhibition catalogue, Grunt Gallery, Vancouver, 9 June–29 July. Liberiou, Katrina. 2015. ‘Introduction’, Ex Avibus, exhibition catalogue, University of Sydney Art Gallery, June–August. Malone, Gavin. 1998. ‘The ecology of art or art as ecology’, Broadsheet, 27 (7): 5. Margolin, Victor. 2006. ‘Reflections on art & sustainability’, in Beyond Green: Toward a Sustainable Art, curated by Stephanie Smith, exhibition catalogue, Smart Museum, University of Chicago and Independent Curators International, New York. Marsh, Anne. 1993. Body and Self: Performance Art in Australia. Melbourne: Oxford University Press. Mattingly, Mary. n.d. Homepage, https://marymattingly.com/html/MATTINGLYWetla nd.html McLean, Ian. 2002. ‘Sublime futures: eco-art and the return of the real in Peter Dombrovskis, John Wolseley and Andy Goldsworthy’, Transformations, (5), http://www.cqu. edu.au/transformations Millner, Jacqueline. 2010. Conceptual Beauty, Perspectives on Australian Contemporary Art. Sydney: Artspace, 176–181. Millner, Jacqueline. 2012. ‘Sarah Goffman’, Australian Art Collector, (60): 102–103. Mitchell, Avenel. 1997. ‘The harvest of a quiet eye: the intimate expression of nature in Australian landscape painting from the late nineteenth century to c.1940’, MPhil thesis, Department of Art History and Film Studies, University of Sydney. Morgan-Feir, Caoimhe. 2018. ‘What we want to see in 2018’, Canadian Art, (4) (January): n.p. Moreton-Robinson, Aileen. 2020. Talkin’ up to the White Woman: Indigenous Women and Feminism. Brisbane: University of Queensland Press (20th Anniversary Edition). Mundine, Djon. 1999. ‘Saltwater’, Saltwater: Yirrkala Bark Paintings of Sea Country, curated by Djon Mundine, exhibition catalogue, Buku-Larrngay Mulka Centre, Yirrkala and Jennifer Isaacs Publishing. National Gallery of Australia, Wadsworth Atheneum, and Corcoran Gallery of Art. 1998. New Worlds From Old: 19th Century Australian & American Landscapes, exhibition catalogue, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, CT; Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.

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Newman, Tom. 2017. WetLand, documentary video, https://marymattingly.com/html/ MATTINGLYWetland.html Norman, Ray. 2001. ‘Reading the waters’, Artlink, 21 (1): 10–13. O’Brien, Anne. 2016. ‘Conserving land through kindly use and reciprocity’, in Nicholas Holm and Sy Taffel (eds) Ecological Entanglements in the Anthropocene. Washington, DC: Lexington Books, 91–106. Pascoe, Bruce. 2014. Dark Emu. Broome: Magabala Books Aboriginal Corporation. Paton, Justin. 2007. ‘The shadow economy’, Art Monthly Australia, (200) (June): 9–11. Pearson, Noel. 2007. ‘The ideal equilibrium’, The Weekend Australian (9–10 June): 21. Periz, Ingrid. 2010. ‘What makes a garden?’, in Janet Laurence: What can a garden be?, exhibition catalogue, Breenspace, Sydney, October. Plumwood, Val. 1993. Feminism and the Mastery of Nature. London; New York: Routledge. Radok, Stephanie. 2002. ‘Pip Stokes: unfolding the night’, Art and Australia, 39 (4): 544. Radok, Stephanie, and Malone, Gavin. 2005. ‘Remediation as art’, Artlink, 25 (4). Roberts, David. 1993. ‘Aura and aesthetics of nature’, Thesis Eleven, (36): 127–137. Rose, Deborah Bird. 1996. Nourishing Terrains, Australian Aboriginal Views of Landscape and Wilderness. Canberra: Australian Heritage Commission. Rose, Deborah Bird. 2004. Reports from a Wild Country: Ethics for Decolonisation. Sydney: Angus and Robertson. Sanders, Ann. 2009. ‘The Mildura Sculpture Triennials 1961–1978: an interpretative history’, PhD thesis, Australian National University. Sanders, Ann. 2013. ‘Made in Mildura’, Art Monthly, (246) (May): 39–44. Sandilands, Catriona. 1999. The Good-Natured Feminist: Ecofeminism and the Quest for Democracy. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press. Seed Broadcast. n.d. ‘Seed: climate change resilience’, https://www.seedbroadcast.org/Seed Broadcast/SeedBroadcast_Projects.html accessed 10 October 2020. Smith, Bernard. 1985. European Vision in the South Pacific, 2nd edn. New Haven; London: Yale University Press. Smith, Bernard. 1992. Imagining the Pacific: In the Wake of the Cook Voyages. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press; Miegunyah Press. Smith, Richard. 2005. ‘Sustainability labelling and artworks! What’s that?’, Artlink, 25 (4): 39. Sommerville, Margaret. 2008. ‘Always unfinished business: of singing the country’, in Bubbles on the Surface III, exhibition catalogue, Switchback Gallery, Melbourne, March. Sturgeon, Noel. 1997. Ecofeminist Natures: Race, Gender, Feminist Theory and Political Action. New York; London: Routledge. Taussig, Michael. 1991. Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Tjanpi Desert Weavers. 2012. Tjanpi Desert Weavers, compiled by Penny Watson for the Ngaanyatjarra Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Women’s Council. Sydney: Macmillan. Wade, Felicity. 2006. ‘Who’s going to save me?’, Photofile, (76) (Summer): 62. Willard, Tania. 2017. ‘The smell of the land when you climb Ibyuq Pingo’, in UNGALAQ (When Stakes Come Loose), curated by Tania Willard, exhibition catalogue, Grunt Gallery, Vancouver: 9 June–29 July. Wilson, Douglas Brownlow. 1972. ‘Two modes of apprehending nature: a gloss on the Coleridgean symbol’, PMLA, 87 (1): 42–52. Wroth, David. 2015. The Seven Sisters Story, exhibition catalogue, Japingka Gallery, Freemantle, https://japingkaaboriginalart.com/articles/star-dreaming-seven-sisters/ Zeqo, Arnisa. 2018. Sissel M. Bergh, exhibition catalogue, Coast Contemporary, https://coa stcontemporary.no/commissions-2018/commissioned-artists-2018/sissel-m-bergh

6 FEMINIST WORLDS Re-imagining community and publics

Introduction In attempting to grapple with how to respond politically to the death drive of neoliberal global capitalism, French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy urges us to, ‘ask anew what the world wants of us, and what we want of it, everywhere, in all senses, all over the world and for the whole world, without (the) capital of the world but with the richness of the world’.1 He elaborates: if the world, essentially, is not the representation of a universe … nor that of a here below, but the excess – beyond any representation of an ethos or of a habitus – of a stance by which the world stands by itself, configures itself, and exposes itself in itself, relates to itself without referring to any given principle or to any determined end, then one must address the principle of such an absence of principle directly.2 This demands not that we signify the world, or assign it a proper sense, but that we involve ourselves completely with the world: ‘it is the extremely concrete and determined task—a task that can only be a struggle—of posing the following question to each gesture, each conduct, each habitus and each ethos: How do you engage the world?’3 Nancy calls on us to ‘make worlds’, non-totalising and immanent, through our everyday being in the world.4 We may take some cue about how this ‘making worlds’ might be practised from another French philosopher: Jacques Rancière’s views about the role of aesthetics. Rancière maintains that artworks help shape the social world, that ‘the way we create art is intimately bound up with fundamental forms of intelligibility, with material signs and images which describe ways of being, seeing and doing. Art, then, plays a key role in articulating the distribution of the sensible which governs any given social order’.5

DOI: 10.4324/9781003045175-7

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To underline the importance of aesthetics to politics, Rancière famously said that ‘The real must be fictionalised in order to be thought.’6 Artists informed by feminism have wrestled with these challenges in many creative ways over the years, ‘making worlds’ and ‘fictionalising the real’ in their attempts to imagine and realise a feminist world. These challenges often demand an engagement with spheres beyond the conventional spaces of art—like the gallery and the studio—into the ‘public’ realm of everyday transactions where people come together with strangers and randomly encounter the behaviours and ideas of those with whom they may have nothing in common. Of course, what the ‘public’ constitutes—and indeed how it is constituted—remains highly contentious. Feminist theory has made significant contributions here, problematising the entrenched notion of the (gendered) division between private and public worlds and expanding conceptions about where the public operates and how it can be harnessed for social and political change. Feminist critiques have also had in their sights the co-option of the public by the state, including the use of art—such as more traditionally understood ‘public art’—for the purpose of aligning the neoliberal agendas of commerce and politics, at times imposing a singular purported ‘common good’ without acknowledging, let alone promoting, counter views. Feminist art practices re-imagining the public have focused on forming and connecting to disparate and often yet-to-be imagined communities; they have embraced and welcomed contingency, aspiring to remain open and incomplete; they attempt to replace official processes and procedures with interpersonal unpredictability and risk underpinned by the trust and deep listening that underlines care; they re-inhabit places and spaces to interrogate embedded narratives and amplify previously silenced voices. ‘Public’ feminist art practices work towards creating safe places for expressing what is often repressed, offering licence to laugh, enjoy and lampoon in ‘public’, and seeking to upend commonly understood ‘truths’. At the same time, they generously proffer aesthetic expertise and provide access to decision-making not often available to the ‘unaccredited’. By working in such experimental ways, which defy conventional measures of value and success and put the emphasis on encounter, it is arguable that feminist artistic engagements outside the gallery and studio move on the neoliberalist endgame around public art. Perhaps every epoch thinks of itself as ‘in crisis’, but it is hard to deny that in current times we face an unprecedented threat: climate emergency on an unimaginable scale and of such catastrophic consequence that human action alone will be unable to assuage. In 2020, the climate emergency has been supplanted in urgency by a global pandemic which has infiltrated the darkest corners of neoliberal societies, pinpointing existential systemic weaknesses in institutions and policies, leading to mass loss of life and livelihoods. At the same time, we face a lurch to the right in Western politics and the rise of racist and misogynist discourse, widespread corrosion of our democracies, an ever-deepening trust deficit in civic institutions, and a crisis of care, whereby the maintenance of capitalist structures by reproductive and affective labour can no longer be disavowed and taken as given. In such conditions, how to re-conceive of and activate ‘the public’ becomes

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urgent, and intersectional feminisms have been quick to react, mobilising globally to literally put their bodies on the line.7 For instance, in assessing the impact of the Women’s March in the US in 2017, Pamela Moss and Avril Madrell write: Their collective work entreats feminists to go beyond personal levels of comfort and move into spaces full of trepidation so as not to let rallying cries eradicate difference and to listen to the silence that is protest … Without this movement toward uneasiness, toward awkwardness, toward discomfort, feminists may contribute to normalizing economic and social injustices as women across difference continue to be subjects and objects of systemic discrimination, economic exploitation, powerlessness, systematic marginalization and state violence … we must be open to possibility.8 This chapter makes a feminist analysis of art that seeks to extend and complicate ideas of community and the public, and insists on the activist nature of spatial interventions. It begins by recapping some key ideas in feminist conceptions of public space and the kinds of strategies that have emanated from these theoretical insights. It then undertakes close readings of a diverse set of works that engage with public spaces in an attempt to re-work and re-imagine ways of being together: from tactics of antagonism to different kinds of community building with an emphasis on contingency, to rewriting existing public places to make visible what was previously unseen, to exploring how we might collectively remember and commemorate in more inclusive and expansive ways. Our focus is primarily on Australian artists, in observance of our methodological emphasis on the local and bodily experienced, but we contextualise the innovative aspects of these works by reference to select international practices. Hence in this chapter we discuss Angelica Mesiti, Bianca Hester, Deborah Kelly, Cigdem Aydemir and Natalie Thomas (as Natty Solo), and international counterparts Lhola Amira, Marisa Williamson, Nona Faustine and Teresa Margolles.

Perpetually reconceiving the public: feminist perspectives Feminist thinking has been fundamental to the project of rethinking public space as the site for political action, given the revolutionary ideas that the personal is political, and that the delineation of private and public spheres is ideologically driven to entrench and perpetuate exploitative power relations. But beyond critiquing existing political realities, feminist ideas and practices have also proposed new ways of conceiving of and creating the public that might facilitate the forging of feminist worlds. Key to this has been the contribution of feminist political philosophers who have argued for notions of the public and public spaces to be understood as relational and contingent, founded not on a rights-based, justice discourse but rather on discourses of need, care and non-identitarian collectivities.9 Turkish American philosopher Seyla Benhabib suggests this moves ideas of the public along from widely held leftist perspectives grounded in Habermasian critique of the colonisation of the lifeworld and Foucault’s surveillance society.10

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Benhabib’s re-reading of Hannah Arendt’s concept of public space was influential in re-orienting feminist theories of the public towards the associational and dialogic. Benhabib was concerned to work in complex articulation of private and public spheres, observing that ‘contemporary feminist theory, in its refusal to articulate a positive conception of privacy, has undermined some of its emancipatory thrust’.11 While Arendt had alienated many feminist thinkers intent on rendering social issues the centre of public debate with suggestions that the public sphere had suffered as a result of its encroachment by the social, Benhabib’s analysis recuperates Arendt’s concepts to forge useful tools for feminist world-making. Arendt distinguishes between agonistic and associational public action, where the former is based on competition of demands, while the latter represents the collaboration that emerges when people ‘act in concert’. This is ‘where freedom can appear’, when different forms of power are generated by different ways of coming together, the key being the way public discourse takes place: ‘when freedom emerges from action in concert there can be no agenda to predefine the topic of public conversation’.12 American feminist political theorist Nancy Fraser in The Fortunes of Feminism13 tracks the history of feminist theorising of the politics of the public from an emphasis on redistribution and remaking the political economy in the 1970s, to transforming culture through recognition and identity in the 1980s and 1990s, through to what she calls ‘representation’ in the early 21st century. Fraser proposes that the contemporary period calls for an integration of these different fronts of engagement: feminism cannot ignore ‘the evisceration of democracy and assault on social reproduction waged by finance capitalism’ and must fight destabilisation on all fronts, namely financial, ecological and social reproduction. And it must do so by simultaneously addressing redistribution, recognition and representation, engaging with other anti-capitalist movements, non-identitarian politics and revised socialist feminisms across national borders. Fraser argues that in today’s public sphere, contests are no longer focused on what is owed as a matter of justice to members of a political community, but rather on who is a member of the community and which is the relevant community, which poses a major challenge about ‘who should count’. In this context, a feminist revaluation of who should count is necessary: Whereas distribution foregrounds impediments rooted in political economy, and recognition discloses obstacles grounded in the status order, representation conceptualises barriers to participatory parity that are entrenched in the political constitution of society.14 American phenomenologist Iris Marion Young’s alternative feminist notions of the public sphere help amplify this idea: her vision is of a partial, engaged, and embodied civic public which is carnivalesque, erotic and heterogenous, in counter-distinction to the patriarchal and ideological notion of the public sphere as impartial, objective and detached.15 Casting the public sphere and its potential as a site for transformation as erotic was famously proposed by American ‘black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet’ Audre Lorde:

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In touch with the erotic, I become less willing to accept powerlessness, or those other supplied states of being which are not native to me, such as resignation, despair, self-effacement, depression, self-denial …16 Lorde evokes that sense of being connected to the most powerful and knowledgeable part of ourselves, deep in our bodies, and beginning to ‘live from within outward’ so as to bring that power into the world around us, to thus render ‘our acts against oppression … integral with self, motivated and empowered from within.’17 The bodily drive of public activism is key here, in part because it sites politics in the realm of live and lived bodies, in part because it acknowledges the alignment between private and public self, and in part because it affirms the positive affective dimensions of political action that can help foment solidarity across differences. As Lorde offers, The sharing of joy, whether physical, emotional, psychic, or intellectual, forms a bridge between the sharers which can be the basis for understanding much of what is not shared between them, and lessens the threat of their difference.18 It is a truism now, after several decades, that identity politics has had limited traction in transforming the values of Western societies towards inclusivity and equality. The accent on difference, we have seen, can cut both ways: to affirm multiplicity but also to divide us, in particular those who imagine and wish to realise alternatives to neoliberal patriarchy. Identity politics also almost inevitably takes us back to the subject positions defined by reference to the dominant power, and hence while effective for a time to ‘lessen the pressure of assimilation’, simultaneously dissolves particularity in favour of the unity of a singular Other.19 In light of this, Lorde’s exhortation from the 1970s is still relevant and exciting today. And it is corroborated by the notion of relation, evident both in the recently recuperated theories of Martinican poet, novelist and theorist Édouard Glissant,20 and in care ethics and associated political theories.21 In Poetics of Relation, Glissant argues that relation allows us to conceive of decolonial identity outside the limitations of resistance or submission, which is vital given these dialectic subject positions originate with, and continue in relationship to, the oppressor.22 In coming to relation, Glissant sees the recognition of a shared world of infinite difference. As Australian art historian Henry Skerritt summarises, Instead of fixed places of origin, he offers sites of connectivity, where multiple histories and ways of being can coexist. Instead of roots, he offers the dynamic process of creolization, a poetics defined by its openness to transformation. Instead of a world of nations, he offers the archipelago, an image of the world in which we are all connected while remaining distinct.23 Relation is at the heart of feminist care ethics also. Feminist care ethics proposes a values revolution: to prioritise inter-relation and interdependence over individuality and autonomy, to reward acts driven by the collective wellbeing of communities and ecologies rather than those motivated by self-interest. In so doing, in

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effect feminist care ethics asks that we upend the patriarchy. As one of its founding voices, American ethicist and psychologist Carol Gilligan, asserts, feminism, guided by an ethic of care is arguably the most radical … liberation movement in human history. Released from the gender binary and hierarchy, feminism … is the movement to free democracy from patriarchy.24 American philosopher Virginia Held adds, ‘What could be more revolutionary than upsetting the gender hierarchy of patriarchy in the most basic ways we think about how we ought to live and what we ought to do?’25 Rather than demanding self-sacrifice and mere recognition of affective labour, care ethics asks far more fundamental questions. It asks that we accept that to thrive requires interaction and inter-relation; it asks us to work towards reintegrating how we live after the dissociation imposed on us by the patriarchal and neoliberal ideologies that currently dominate our economics and politics. For example, as climate scientists have warned us,26 climate denialism relies on dissociating what we know, according to scientific evidence and lived experience, from how we live our lives—our overconsumption, dependence on fossil fuels, and class and north/south inequality. Care ethics invites us to bring together the causes and effects of environmental, social and political devastation, and to address those causes at the source, namely the neoliberal values we currently live by, those embedded in and legitimised by political processes and economic decisions. To care about democracy—to develop ways to meaningfully listen to diverse voices, is also to care about our planet—to conceive of all elements including human beings without hierarchising their value, and it is also to care about others and self—to see in each decision and action the consequences beyond the individual, indeed to see beyond the individual tout court.27 We should acknowledge that what empowers us to act in the first place is ‘indebtedness to the other’, urges Dutch art theorist Jan Verwoert: ‘When you care for someone or something this care enables you to act because you feel that you must act, not least because when you really care to not act is out of the question … ‘there is no no’.28 It is inter-relatedness that sits at the source of ethical action. Verwoert maintains that care ‘remains unconditional and therefore excessive’ and ‘deprived of a safe symbolic mandate’ because it is ‘empowered by the need of the other’ which is always undeterminable. To evoke this openness and responsiveness at the heart of care, Verwoert points to a painting of St Jerome and the lion: the lion … walked into St. Jerome’s study one day, thorn in paw. Jerome, being a translator, no certified cat-doctor, unprepared and without symbolic mandate, plucked the thorn anyway, initiating a social mode of conviviality with the wild cat without a contract, economy or grand narrative to symbolically validate it. The only reason for this being possible was perhaps that his study … was a semi-public space, open to the occurrence of such events.29 Yet, to insist on relation as a passage to forms of solidarity for political action is not to elide the pain, difficulty and discomfort of working together, although it is to

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insist on its necessity. Collectivities are time based and contingent, emerging from localised conditions30 and the ‘discrepancies … that bond them’.31As Rancière puts it in The Emancipated Spectator, The collective power shared by spectators does not stem from the fact that they are members of a collective body or from some specific form of interactivity. It is the power each of them has to translate what she perceives in her own way, to link it to the unique intellectual adventure that makes her similar to all the rest in as much as this adventure is not like any other.32 A claim to solidarity, to a feminist universality, can be a powerful gesture, one not delegitimised by the paradoxes within: just ask French curator Camille Morineau who proclaimed that women artists are writing a universal history of art,33 or American/French historian Joan W. Scott who proposes that the paradox whereby women need to both accept and refuse sexual difference in politics was the constitutive condition of the long struggle by women to gain the right of citizenship.34 Questioning and expanding what is public, exploring ways to be together, collectivise, and find solidarity, while at the same time loosening the ground of public spaces so as to give voice to new and different narratives: this is the work of the feminist-inspired art and artists discussed in this chapter, work which brings creativity, materiality and affect to undertake the vital task of civic care.

Making public spaces feminist: contemporary artistic responses Contingency and community The more global one is, the more local one desires to become.35

Angelica Mesiti’s work is an ongoing improvisation around some of the big questions—power, cultural difference and the role of art—that preoccupy those artists and thinkers hoping to emerge from the exhausted zeitgeist of neoliberal globalisation. In her recent work, Mesiti has crafted a unique story telling style that relies less on words than on sound and rhythm, less on image than on texture and movement, one that locates political animacy less in the professional artist than in everyday creativity. With a background in video and performance, including formative years as a member of The Kingpins, a four-woman group notorious for their humorous gender-bending interventions, Mesiti brings together the cinematic and community to powerful effect. She has refined an emotive audio-visual language grounded in the lived experience of actual individuals rather than based on representations. It is the presence of different intelligences that makes her work so powerful: combining aesthetic erudition and empathy, Mesiti renders these palpable without ever over-determining or appropriating them, nor on the other hand remaining a mere chronicler. This way of working first emerged in The Begin Again (2011) (Figure 6.1), a joint project between the artist and the community of the southern Sydney suburb of

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FIGURE 6.1

Angelica Mesiti, The Begin Again, 2011, video still

Hurstville, auspiced by the local council and coordinated by Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art. Mesiti worked for several months with local residents, spending time with and eventually filming them as they partook of various community-based recreational activities, such as ballroom dancing, singing and car pimping. The final cuts—four videos and one kinetic installation—were then installed over two evenings in open spaces in the central shopping strip, from bus depot to civic plaza to rooftop car park. The public, a combination of art crowd and locals, including the protagonists featured in the various works, attended in droves: the Hurstville mall was abuzz not with shopping but on account of less instrumental factors. The Begin Again is significant not only to the development of Mesiti’s practice, but also because it offers a compelling model of ‘community art’, a way of connecting art and community in generative ways; community is, unsurprisingly, another central focus of Jean-Luc Nancy’s in his attempts to reactivate the political in contemporary times.36 The ‘community arts’ most commonly associated with grass-roots artmaking that emerged in the 1970s did not meet this challenge, as British author Justin Lewis surmises, [Community arts] has failed to make art and culture more accessible to most people. Far from challenging or storming the citadels, it has remained a harmless and irrelevant skirmishing on the sidelines … Perhaps most importantly, the community arts movement has let the elitist aesthetics of the dominant subsidised culture off the hook. Most community artists were opposed to this cultural elitism, and yet, by forming a separate entity, ‘the community arts’, they allowed themselves to be appropriated by it.37

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Despite myriad attempts, how to effectively reconcile so-called ‘elitist aesthetics’ with authentic community engagement and participation remains a conundrum for many artists who position their practice as political and potentially transformative. How do you neither de-skill the artist nor professionalise the community, but rather embrace both the limits of their expertise, and different types of knowledge? Mesiti’s approach is to have many authors, everyday people performing their sometimes-extraordinary talents, but to clearly assert her artistic vision throughout, evident in the high production cinematic aesthetics—she works with professional cinematographers and producers38—that is now a hallmark of her practice. Such an approach may avoid the problems around cultural value that have dogged community arts, while also facilitating a particular kind of cultural citizenship: participation along with self-styling and cultural value.39 In The Begin Again we witness the origins of Mesiti’s breakout work, the fourchannel video installation Citizen’s Band (2012) that saw her national and international reputation rise to the point that in 2019 she represented Australia in the Venice Biennale, with the commission of Assembly (2019), a work which specifically addressed the question of how to re-imagine democracy given its current endangered state. Citizen’s Band (2012) portrays the link between art and everyday resistance.40 Here Mesiti has captured four street performers, each interpreting the musical traditions of their diverse cultural backgrounds in semi-private reverie, weaving their old worlds into their new realities. Each is captured in sumptuous cinematography and highquality sound in their public spaces of improvisation and performance, the images projected in rotation on individual walls to harness the audience’s attention so that they can be enjoyed as if in real time. Few contemporary art works evoke such beauty—an aesthetic experience that is able to take us beyond our puny subjectivities with their dependence on established social hierarchies, to an expansive sense of collective empathy, association and polyphony. Citizen’s Band, where many voices come together to create a dissonant and polyphonic space animated by multiple identities, not harmonious but nonetheless beautiful, prefigures the conceptual and formal concerns of Assembly.41 In this film installation, Mesiti has once again engaged in ‘a gendered way to making work that’s very collaborative’ and brought together a wide range of creative practitioners who enact a relay of translation from one artistic form to another, from one language to another, from aesthetics to ethics.42 Against the gravitas of the architecture of democracy, namely the senate chambers of Australia and Italy, Mesiti has choreographed the interaction of poets, composers, dancers and singers from a sweep of cultural backgrounds and generations, beginning with a simple mise-enscene of a single stenographer and gradually building into ever more complex and potentially chaotic scenarios. Yet the grace and beauty remain, trademarks of Mesiti’s aesthetics and conceptual intent. In this exchange of energy, where all elements are equally accommodated—from the protest sign language of the Nuits Debouts to Indigenous dance traditions to young classical musicians—Mesiti ‘has summoned the fragile possibility of cooperation across social and political boundaries’.43 As Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri proffer:

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Horizontal democratic assemblies do not expect or seek unanimity but instead are constituted by a plural process that is open to conflicts and contradictions. The work of the assembly … is to find ways to link different views and different desires such that they can fit together in contingent ways … a concatenation of differences.44 Rancière maintains that artworks help shape the social world, that ‘the way we create art is intimately bound up with fundamental forms of intelligibility, with material signs and images which describe ways of being, seeing and doing. Art, then, plays a key role in articulating the distribution of the sensible which governs any given social order’,45 in part by ‘fictionalising the real’. Mesiti’s work operates in just this way, a contemporary take on the Realist legacy that locates political agency not in the professional artist but in everyday creativity. Mesiti’s work attempts to re-imagine public spaces and collectivity through aesthetics. A similar impetus underpins the work of Bianca Hester, although her methods are distinguished by her long-standing concern with materiality. Hester aims in her work to re-distribute the material relations between objects, places and bodies to create the conditions for unexpected and newly insightful states and behaviours. Her work explores the multiple movements, materialities and actions at play within and across various sites, generating and interposing other temporalities in order to open up possibilities for how we might engage, encounter and occupy place. These gestures and actions are often enacted over time, with props, fragments and residues that emerge from the project’s dense range of processes, assembled into exhibitions and installations. She hopes through her particular methods to underline the ‘indeterminacy’ of matter—the basic building blocks of all phenomena—so as to encourage openness to imagining different ways of being and relating.46 The ‘artist’ then is neither so much an individual nor a persona, but ‘distributed across a field of relations’ where ‘they are compelled to grapple with forces and negotiate responsively and dialogically’ with ‘materials, sites, forces, ideologies, people and politics’.47 As such, the ‘artist’ operates in a state of self-reflective uncertainty and risk. Recent works attempt to operate within contested places, in order to activate a shift from singular, authoritative narratives towards an expanded ecological understanding of place—where multiple forces converge and are held in tension, and within which we are profoundly entangled. In order to create these conditions of potential transformation, Hester designs a framework for participation, engaging in a form of ritual making. As the artist asserts, her attempt to facilitate non-hierarchical engagement, and her commitment to ongoing processes of negotiation no matter how difficult, embody an ethics of care which ‘is the legacy of feminism in operation and at work’.48 One of Hester’s early works which proved pivotal for future practice is Please leave these windows open to enable the fans to draw in cool air during the early hours of the morning (2010). This project was hosted by a contemporary art space, the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art in Melbourne. The artist’s aim was to create a ‘holding environment’49 where participants could feel safe and stimulated to experiment. Within the gallery, the artist ‘marked out an arena for the experience

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of and negotiation with a range of possibilities’ and established a framework aimed at unleashing the unexpected.50 For example, she instructed certain participants— including peers, students and family members—to perform certain actions in the space, such as clapping hands or blowing a whistle, but to do so randomly and unannounced to create a sense of ‘unpredictable liveness’. She also erected a sign that read: actions will occur intermittently, which art theorist Andrew Benjamin argued positioned the exhibition as an enduring activity rather than the presentation of an existing work. In announcing actions to come, this sign granted future actions ‘immaterial presence’: materially anticipated but not necessarily materially actualised.51 But making a space of possibility where a ‘rethinking-making of material relations was most active’52 required the artist’s orchestration of a ritual. She was present throughout so as to underline that the work had limits—rules of engagement, so to speak—but that these were in constant flux depending on the complex interactions of all the different elements—people, places, things and their interactions. As the artist explains, like in St Jerome’s encounter with the lion, she sought to assert ‘an ethic of negotiation … with what arose and with whoever happened to be present … [T]he metaphorical door was left open and a commitment to working with whatever passed across the threshold became paramount.’53 Through that inclusive generosity and invitation to contingency, Hester hopes to imagine a different kind of public discourse beyond unification and identification: An attempt to ‘centre’ meaning … [is] based on the logic of unification in which art is subject to an interpretive will that seeks to contain, centre and identify through a linear or narrative ‘progression’. I think this is at the heart of an arrogant anthropocentrism. Instead, working with multiple modalities is a tactic used to perform a de-stabilisation of the site of experience in order to bring about an encounter with the indeterminate and the durational.54 Hester’s design of participatory frameworks to loosen public space continued in ensuing years in ever-expanding sites and with widening reach. A world fully accessible by no living being (2011) was developed for Melbourne’s central plaza, Federation Square. By circulating a set of ‘propositions’ or ideas for individual interventions, setting up a ‘holding environment’ by means of a cinder-block wall in the centre of the plaza where the actions could be witnessed, and continually publishing documentation of the actions performed, Hester designed a ritual to stimulate the personal reclamation of public space. In Fashioning Discontinuities (2014) (Figure 6.2), presented during the 19th Biennale of Sydney, Hester nominated charged locations around Sydney, certain objects and gestures, and a group of collaborators, and designed a ritual to interpret and experience these sites in multiple ways. In one element, Solar Objects: Various objects held toward evening’s diminishing westerly light, artefacts constructed for the purpose were held towards the setting sun by a group of people, with the aim to ‘engage the sun at a particular moment in its trajectory across the sky, and witness the recurring relationship it makes to the materials of the earth that stand in its fleeting pathway’.55 In another element, Sonic alterations of constructed space with metal objects, a group of people, who

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FIGURE 6.2

Bianca Hester, Fashioning Discontinuities: annexing a patch of grass, temporarily, 2014, amendment to the Pioneer Lawn, Royal Botanic Gardens, Sydney

then invited members of the public to join in, set large steel rings spinning on their own axes. The spinning rings in their interaction with the ground and bodies created a sonic field that ‘seized the space’ and ‘repositioned these sites from their familiar function to becoming sound-generating surfaces’.56 The work, dispersed over many sites and bodies, also entailed the negotiation with Sydney’s Botanical Gardens to refrain from tending a little patch of grass as a marker of time; the transfer of a tonne of earth from the gardens to the exhibition space on Cockatoo Island; and the gathering of colleagues, friends and strangers in an improvised ‘agora’ to discuss the issues raised by the call for artists to boycott the Biennale on account of the implication of certain members of its Board in profiting from Australia’s cruel asylum-seeker regime via their business connections.57 Hester’s work, then, creates rituals to allow participants to experience and interpret the places they inhabit with openness and creativity, and to reflect on the inter-connectedness of their bodies, actions and environments so as to potentially

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transform their relationship with public space into a form of activism.58 Hester’s visions for a reactivated public sphere emerge from experimentation with many ways of collaborating informed by feminist methods of ‘ongoing processes of negotiation, intergenerational exchange and localized scales of engagement’ that have allowed her to experience ‘the intensification and empowerment of working collectively in ways that overflow the patriarchal tendencies for individualization, competition and performance’.59 As Hester reflects, It is through the relationships that have been forged and fostered through these many collaborations that long-reaching and sustainable forms of practice, thought and action [have] been enabled, in a time when developing an ethos of care in the current cultural climate is at its most urgent.60 This feminist ethos of care and collaboration also informs Deborah Kelly’s re-imagining of ‘the public’ in projects that facilitate the creation of all kinds of relationships through the process of hands-on, collectivised artmaking. Such projects have included her commemoration of the twentieth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre by helping to devise a choreographed dance of the famed ‘Tank Man’ who, armed only with his little plastic shopping bags, faced down the might of the Chinese military. Tank Man Tango (2009) entailed the dance steps being disseminated around the world to be performed by all-comers in ‘public’ places in simultaneous homage to this act of extraordinary courage by an ordinary citizen. Kelly has a diverse practice, but one of the constants has been collage, a form long associated with political critique and culture jamming, which readily lends itself to many hands as well as many sources. Kelly made her mark with a series of collages in the tradition of Hannah Hoch, having serious fun queering the ludicrous representations of women and femininity in popular culture which she extracted from her hoard of books and magazines discarded by others. She brought this spirit to her desire to contribute to changing the toxic public discourse around refugees and asylum seekers in Australia. The culmination was No Human Being is Illegal (in all our glory) (Figure 6.3), created originally for the 19th Biennale of Sydney in 2014.61 The work entailed a long process of engagement and participation by dozens of members of the public, both as subjects and makers, with volunteer subjects chosen by project participants in a silent ballot. Twenty life-sized photographic portraits were then produced, within which are embedded the stories of countless others: the nude portraits provided the ‘blank canvas’ to which collaged elements were applied like tattoos by over 230 people participating in artist-facilitated collage workshops. To the artist, the interest in the work was evidence of the strong community desire to be part of a public gesture of welcome and affirmation towards asylum seekers and refugees. The makers were provided with the artist’s huge ‘graveyard of books’ from which to hand-cut images in response to how each nude subject had described themselves and their interests. Kelly insisted on the process being an ‘analogue island in a digital slipstream’ as the slow, real-time materiality of working this way was integral to the sense of connection and

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FIGURE 6.3

Deborah Kelly with collaborators, No Human Being is Illegal (in all our glory), 2014– 2019; and Latai Funaki Taumoepeau teaching workshop participants, Sydney, 2014.

accountability participants developed for each other, the nude subjects and the work. According to Kelly, ‘the imagery entwines all that were involved in a form of social exchange, acceptance and celebration of individuality’.62 Kelly has applied the collaborative collage model she developed in No Human Being is Illegal (in all our glory) to facilitate the diversification of notions of the public working with various communities in Australia. In the New South Wales rural town of Albury, for example, the nude portrait depicted local circus performer Simone O’Brien, whose lifethreatening injuries after a catastrophic fall from poor rigging are etched as a scar from breast to pubic bone. The collaged portrait was an opportunity for the local community to ‘rebuild’ and rehabilitate her body, and for O’Brien themself to recast their disability by publicly claiming their vulnerability and allowing it to be honoured. Kelly engaged the broader Albury community by asking for donations of unwanted gold—such as old jewellery—to form the centrepiece of the collage, namely a cast replica that transmuted Simone’s scar into something precious. Kelly has also worked with locals from the Queensland town of Noosa on a collaged portrait of Aboriginal trans man Jeremy Anderson. Kelly invites members of the public to creatively re-imagine received views of queerness, able-bodied-ness and asylum seekers, facilitating a slow, handson process which literally reconfigures the representation of ‘others’ while allowing time for intercultural conversation and the nurturing of forms of solidarity.

Expanding public space: the politics of visibility Imagine a bunch of feminist artists and artworkers wearing rebranded everyday workwear—hi-vis safety vests and jackets, emblazoned with ‘art lover’, ‘curator’, ‘photographer’, ‘critic’, ‘driver’ and ‘feminist’—on a bus tour of the city of Melbourne, declaiming and parading from the financial to the nightclub district, from the retail strip to street art sites. This was the queering of that notorious

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FIGURE 6.4

Natalie Thomas, Natty Solo: One woman, one camera, no film, 2014, blog image

monetisation of public space, the tourist sightseeing bus trip, as realised by Australian artist Kim Donaldson under the auspices of Melbourne-based artist Caroline Phillips’ f-word project.63 Mobilising discourses of difference in public by animating Melbourne’s Central Business District with the clearly marked bodies, voices, thoughts and arguments of feminist artists, writers and curators, the bus tour also created a space of ‘intra-activity’ and carnivalesque solidarity.64 The politics of visibility, via humour, is also the weapon of choice of Australian artist Natalie Thomas, working as Natty Solo in another manifestation of the public sphere, the internet, via her blog (Figure 6.4). Natty Solo wants us to see more but see differently. With an unfaltering eye for gendered power relations, she makes visible the machinations that drive the Australian art world, luring and sustaining our gaze with her insider knowledge (she still gets invited to the parties!) and her withering wit. What might appear like a fun show that counters the unfair perception that fashion is mere frippery, under Solo’s treatment is revealed as an exercise in base mercantilism: in exchange for providing ‘excellent pop up retail outlets for fashion houses always hungry for new markets’, the museum gets ‘a kiss, of love, bang on the lips’ in the form of big brand affiliation and (many more than usual) bums on seats.65 Yet the public loses out on the discomfiting interactions that some art demands and many artists hope for. On another issue, what might appear as an opportunity for a whole lot of artists to find buyers for their work and a big,

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diverse slice of contemporary art for punters to enjoy, is revealed as tawdry and dissatisfying: as Solo perfectly sums it up, ‘Art Fairs are to art, what Tinder is to relationships: an outcome orientated solution for time-poor customers that induces option anxiety and can mess with your head’.66 The real winners are not the artists nor the public but the ‘big distribution channels for art and culture’, the art equivalents of Stan and Spotify, which make a killing while artists ‘turn fan-girl’, incapable of negotiating a better deal for themselves. Thomas’s Natty Solo blog serves to problematise and expand the public sphere by bringing feminist satire to bear on the gender-inflected exclusions at the root of the neoliberal art world. The politics of visibility, via humour, are deployed to different effect by Sydney-based Cigdem Aydemir. Aydemir makes live performance, video and public interventions that explore the intersection of race, religion and gender in contemporary Australia. She brings to her practice the perspective of a Muslim background and a playful approach to the fraught and dangerous experience of living amid the ‘War On Terror’ and increasingly overt expressions of racism and misogyny. Her work satirises fear-mongering narratives about Islam and women while potentially widening the ambit of safe public spaces for marginalised identities. Aydemir’s signature material is the veil, which she has transformed from charged garment to shape-shifting sculptural phenomenon. Stretched and overflowing, monstrously enveloping, concealing and revealing, in Aydemir’s hands the veil is always multivalent and generative, let alone humorous, never reducible to sign of either religious observance or oppression. An early work, Extremist Activity (ride) (Figure 6.5), 2011,67 is a live performance where the artist, fully covered in niqab,

FIGURE 6.5

Cigdem Aydemir, Extremist Activity (ride), 2011, live performance

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offered pedestrians in a busy inner Sydney street a lift on her bicycle. This entailed the passenger and parts of the bike being enclosed within the surprisingly accommodating veil, forming unexpected and confounding shapes far removed from conventional associations. As the artist notes, the Extremist Activity series—which entailed several performances in urban settings—‘was, in part, a response to the Islamophobic fear of Muslim women who could be hiding “anything” under their veils, as well as a tongue-in-cheek look at the stereotype of Muslim extremeness. Forms worn on the body create and exaggerate voids whilst parodying the proper disclosure of that space.’68 In accenting that void between body and dress, such works remind us how that void is filled with extraneous social and political agendas. The enveloping, indeed architectural, potential of the veil was stretched further in Site Occupied 2, 2012.69 The original version was limited to a gallery room where the niqab of a woman standing in the centre covered the room’s entire floor and prevented the viewer’s entry: a literal enactment of body occupation but also of the multivalent power of the niqab. Site Occupied 2 scaled this up to become (temporarily) embedded into the monumental architecture of the foyer of Carriageworks, a multiple-use arts centre in Sydney’s inner suburbs housed in a decommissioned railway yard. Viewers were enveloped in the niqab interior, a 44-metre-long steel tunnel running underneath the artist whose face alone could be seen floating above the tunnel’s entrance: a contemporary take on Niki de Saint Phalle’s historically significant ‘accessible sculpture’ Hon – en Katedral (She – a cathedral).70 The installation’s scale, its reference to previous street performances, and the incidental foot traffic elevated Site Occupied to public status, contributing to feminist redefinitions and reclaiming of public space. In 2015, Aydemir performed I WON’T LET YOU OUT OF MY SIGHT on some of Sydney’s most popular inner city beaches, Maroubra, Cronulla and Bondi.71 The work marked the tenth anniversary of the infamous ‘Cronulla riots’, a series of ugly confrontations between different ethnic groups—primarily ‘Anglos’ (who dominate the ranks of lifeguards) and ‘Middle Eastern’ as identified in press and police reports—for the right to occupy the prized beachfront spaces iconic of Australian identity. The incidents served to irrupt the repressed racial tensions in different corners of Australian society, in particular in the wake of the ‘War on Terror’ and the pathologising of Islam in right-wing political and media discourses, a painful reminder of the unfinished business of Australia’s ‘multicultural experiment’. Picking up this frayed edge, Aydemir performs as a burqini-clad lifeguard, a merging of the two opposed groups fighting for ascendancy and a challenge to the passivity and invisibility of Muslim women. Aydemir ‘patrols’ the beach in a ritual of hapless anxiety and care, at times awkwardly overcome by sea or sand in a way that speaks to the difficulty, the inherent failure, of re-defining contested public spaces. As Rachael Haynes and Christopher Handran write in the catalogue essay, In her humorous re-enactment of heroic and sexualised tropes of the surf lifesaver, the artist plays the roles of both the watcher and the watched, questioning relations of power and the gaze and operations of surveillance and agency.72

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This search for an embodied, visible cipher to problematise racially- and genderdriven ideas of who has freedom to occupy public space in its many guises, including the digital realm, continues in one of Aydemir’s more recent works, The New National Sport, 2018.73 Over eight hours on a public court, the artist, dressed in the tennis equivalent of a burqini, faces the onslaught of a tennis-ball machine which shoots a salvo every time the word ‘terror’ is tweeted on social media. Again, the body of the artist is severely tested, as the duty to rebut racist and misogynist preconceptions that delimit her agency smacks up against her (and by extension, social) endurance, made all the more empathic by the slapstick tone of the work. Aydemir has also brought her humour into more conventional public spaces in a series of works that play around with colonial-era public statues. Plastic Histories, 201674 reprised a work initially made in Bloemfontein, South Africa in 2014.75 The artist shrink-wrapped a number of ‘important gentlemen’ in pink condom-like sheaths; rendering them into grotesque and suggestive shapes which only highlighted how redundant these vestiges of colonialism had become, as few could remember who lay beneath the plastic covering. In Australia, Plastic Histories took place in Hobart, the capital of Tasmania, renowned as one of the most brutal colonial-era outposts of invasion whose dark past has been effectively mined by the tourism industry as a form of Southern Gothic. Hobart and its tourism have recently been transformed by the opening of the Museum of Old and New Art (MONA)—a private museum that trades off its wacky founder’s obsession with sex and death—whose Dark MOFO festival commissioned Aydemir’s intervention in the city centre. The licence the city grants the museum on account of its economic contribution to Tasmania becomes another discourse in Aydemir’s cocky and vibrant work, which is a feminist riff off the power scramble over public space, collective memory and the possibility of alternative futures. The politics of visibility also underpin the works of Lhola Amira, whose practice includes ‘Appearances’ and ‘Constellations’, comprising photography, video and sculptures in public space (Figure 6.6). One critic called Amira’s overarching project ‘decolonising Africa in high heels’.76 Looking for Ghana & the Red Suitcase (2017), for example, documents Amira’s journey to Ghana: in eye-catching jumpsuit, turban and six-inch heels, Amira dramatically but tortuously makes THEIR way across Accra at the slow pace THEIR shoes demand, walking and clambering from taxi to motorbike through the city’s distinctive crowded public spaces such as the markets and the beach. The images are beautiful, sepia toned, a collaboration with leading Ghanaian artists including renowned filmmaker Wanlov Kubolor and photographer Francis Kokoroko, with a soundscape by musician Eli. While endurance plays a role in this performance, it is more pride and assertion: both the strength and vulnerability of bodies are embedded in the arc of Amira’s journey, with THEIR immersion in the ocean at the end a moment of sensual release and healing. Amira’s walk effects a queering of the ‘artist as walker’ tradition (dominated by white males such as Richard Long, who walked with entitlement on what was assumed as neutral ground) and is more deliberate than a Situationist dérive. Amira claims they are ‘looking for Africa in Africa’, adding:

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FIGURE 6.6

Lhola Amira, Philisa: Ditaola (To Heal: Divining Bones), 2019, appearance

The only Africa we get to see is written by white anthropologists, captured through a white gaze. I can’t be nostalgic about the past, because that past is engineered by oppressors. I have this nostalgia about a future I do not know. It’s important to imagine Africa alongside breaking her.77 Walking through public space in the trappings of a painfully restrictive yet defiant hyperfemininity performs ‘a militant re-mapping of the urban spaces of the first African country to gain independence from European colonization’.78 According to Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe, Africa is not a defined, isolated place, but a troubled relation between itself and the rest of the world which plays out at political, psychic and sexual levels, recycling the projection of Western fantasies and fears. Africa is now writing its narrative as a deterritorialised, restless body in motion.79 Curator Mariella Franzoni cites Mbembe in her analysis of Amira’s walking ‘appearances’, which she claims ‘break the tension between media hypervisibility and historical erasure’ and aim at ‘restoring the totality of a politically dehumanized, queer black body’.80 Two companion works augment the scope of Amira’s appearances to take in Sweden and South Africa. In the film LAGOM [Swedish for ‘There is enough for everyone’]: Breaking Bread With The Self-Righteous, Amira’s striding figure through Sweden’s cool, hyper-designed spaces makes for a very different set of discourses. This is a country haunted by deeply buried colonial and eugenicist skeletons which enjoys a latter-day reputation as a ‘good’ global citizen and ‘advanced’ social democracy.81 In this context, the ‘indiscreet othering gazes’ that meet Amira are

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particularly confronting. Amira changes the tone in SINKING: Xa Siqamla Unxubo, which is focused on a historical event of national significance—the loss at sea of a contingent of Black South Africans forced to serve Britain during the First World War—to which the artist responds by gathering local womxn-healers in a gesture of collective healing.82 Amira asserts83 that THEIR work contributes neither to resistance nor resilience, but to joy and ‘radical indigenous self-love’, neither to reclaiming nor re-writing Africa, but to claiming it in the first instance, to affirming life rather than accepting the imposition of ‘an economy of death’ where how you die is more important than how you live, and death becomes the ultimate form of domination.84 THEIR ‘appearances’ claim space where black bodies enact joy and can exist outside of colonial violence. Through that joy, Amira hopes, can also come healing: historical wounds might be cured when ‘acts from the dimension of the present … engage with—and influence— the possibilities of our past and the memories of our future’.85

Remembering differently In hoping to heal historical wounds, Amira’s practice necessarily ventures into questions of memorialisation. Performance studies scholar Mechtild Widrich coined the term ‘the performative monument’ to signal how the general distrust of the very idea of a monument in the 1960s has moved in more recent times towards ‘a conscious involvement of the person and its architectural surrogates’.86 Amira makes the point that what renders traditional monuments ‘dangerous’ is their assertion of power over public spaces and their assumption of a kind of immortality, contrary to the contingency at the heart of performance.87 Creating healing spaces, by contrast, begins from our common ‘insignificance’ and openness to constant becoming.88 Another artist who has extended notions of the performative monument and crafted new ways of remembering is American Marisa Williamson. Her work connects present-day spaces with the past, unsettling memory by introducing unacknowledged stories and voices, engaging with questions of race and gender, labour and freedom, and trading in parafictions and imaginings. She invites the community to join her in building something new out of historical material, troubling ‘the fourth wall’ by foregrounding how her own life as an artist and woman of colour harbours ‘known and unknown literal and figurative ancestors’.89 Williamson is particularly interested to create an embodied experience of history for the audience. Williamson’s feminist and anti-colonial values drive her to ‘self-narrativise’ the stories of those historical figures, often women, who have not been memorialised as radicals and revolutionaries and ‘appropriated by victors’, but whose ‘creativity, compromise, survival and decision-making’ make up so much more of America’s history.90 For several years, the artist has been developing a body of work, including public participatory performances, centred on the historical figure Sally Hemings, an enslaved woman whose relationship with President Thomas Jefferson spanned 40 years and produced six children, four who survived to adulthood. In

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bodily retracing the life of Sally, ‘back and forth across the Atlantic, in the city of Paris, over time, and choreographed in the kitchen, the bedroom, and up and down the stairs’, she seeks ‘a definition of “space” in terms of her own making’.91 Williamson plays Sally ‘as a hybrid of myself and her’ which affects the artist as well as the audience, whom she hopes will access a felt experience of history and ‘the black body’. She adds, playing Hemings allows me to lean into my own discomfort, press discomfort on to others, and force a confrontation between the black body that looks historical, the contemporary black woman miming history, and the audience.92 A key aim is to make vulnerability and discomfort public, and so claim space for different bodies and ways of being. As such, Williamson’s performances take the form of public spatial interventions. In What Would Sally Do? (2014?) the artist as Hemings interacted with visitors on the grounds of Monticello, Jefferson’s selfdesigned house and plantation, now a national heritage public museum. In Sweet Chariot (2017) (Figure 6.7), Williamson developed an augmented reality walking tour, taking the viewer on a ‘video scavenger hunt’ on the trail of a fictional character named Amelia Brown in search of Black freedom in Philadelphia’s past, present and future.93 In The Hope and the Dream of the Slave: A walking tour (2018) the artist walked in Hemings’ imagined footsteps, animating local Charlottesville monuments through her perspective and encouraging participants to understand, in their own bodies, how the built environment continues to do the work of colonialism.94

FIGURE 6.7

Marisa Williamson, Congo Square (2017) sweet chariot, video still/digital photograph, performer: Noelle Lorraine Williams at Washington Square, Philadelphia, PA

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Brooklyn-based Nona Faustine’s work also enlivens historically repressed sites, particularly in her local area, creating spectacular counter-monuments to local African American lives in a period marked by the rapid gentrification of New York’s boroughs,95 and honouring battles for freedom and equality in ‘meditative reflections of a history Americans have not come to terms with’.96 She mixes conventions of heritage tourism and public memorials with those of the photographic self-portrait and documentary, to remember differently significant historical sites that are burdened with memories of slavery, African American labour and activism. Faustine’s strong physical presence projects historical self-assertion and anger that Black Lives Matter. Sporting elegant, low-heeled white shoes as props for reckoning popular memories, she costumes her semi-naked body in a white apron-skirt, stringed with a belt of children’s white booties, as a nod towards Hattie McDaniel’s character Mammy from the 1939 slavery epic, as in Not Gone With The Wind Lefferts House, Brooklyn (2016). Her bared breasts also pay indirect homage to the long-standing body activism of anti-colonial struggle, dating back to women’s protests across the African continent around the turn of the nineteenth century, when African women often used nudity, baring breasts or sometimes buttocks in protest against colonial administrators, thus ‘forc(ing) men with power to look at them on their own terms’.97 More recently, in 2016, Grahamstown students bared breasts to protest against sexual violence and invasive forms of misogynist shaming and harassment. As South African journalist Sisonke Msimang explains, ‘Compellingly, they used an old format alongside new technology to transmit their message. Fully aware of the camera lenses and of the potential for their images to go viral, the activists demonstrated that they are capable of both making and amplifying a scene.’98 In 72 Canal, Sojourner Truth’s Home (2016), Faustine stands bare-breasted on a busy sidewalk, holding a sign hand-written with Truth’s famous line, ‘Ar’n’t I A Woman?’. We are reminded of how feminist and anti-slavery activists such as Sojourner Truth asserted her ‘shared differences’ within the fledgling women’s movement as an African American feminist. And of how, as the artist asserts from her personal experience, ‘Black women like me were invisible in the art world’.99 The remembrance of stories of trauma caused by systemic gendered violence is approached in a distinct way by Mexican artist Teresa Margolles, although, like Williamson and Faustine, she seeks to have those stories register physically in her audience. Focused on the brutalities narcoviolence wreaks on women in her homeland, Margolles often works by transposing the indexical traces of those acts from the public realm into the intimate, intense mode of gallery viewing. The general public rarely has direct access to a crime scene, mostly consuming such events via sensationalist media reports which serve to desensitise readers and normalise the culture of violence. Margolles aims to bring this violence home while also providing spaces of contemplation. To her, the task of artists is to ‘poeticise pain and misfortune’, to ‘filter the horror so that the audience can witness it’.100 In more recent work, Margolles has also enlisted public participants in gathering these remnants of horror, mobilising more bodies in public space to commemorate the women whose deaths are dismissed as business as usual.

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In De Que Otra Cosa Podríamos Hablar? (What else could we talk about?),101 Margolles exhibited the remnants from crime scenes she had collected from her tours of afflicted zones, including blood-soaked cloths, shards of glass and sound recordings. Sangre Recuperada (Recuperated blood) was a series of muddy rags used to clean up murder scenes; Mesa (Table) was a bench made from solidified fluids collected at the site of a murder; Narcomensajes (narco messages) comprised blood-stained fabrics which recorded in stitch the invective found with the bodies of victims of public executions, such as ‘Así Terminan las Ratas’ (That’s how rats end up), and ‘Para Que Aprendan a Respetar’ (So you’ll learn respect). The objects were meagre, deliberately dwarfed by the installation design and the palazzo’s grandeur. Mexican art theorist Néstor García Canclini suggests that the power of the work was that, rather than reproducing the original scene, it evoked its ‘imminence, in the smells, the washcloths soaking up red stains, the loudspeakers broadcasting the voices of witnesses’.102 As such, as US-based LGBTQ studies and Women’s Studies scholar Ivan Ramos proposes, the work brings us into ‘the physical and embodied dimensions of the spaces that we, the living, continue to inhabit—not only those that the dead once did’.103 This is a key point for Ramos in his argument that Margolles’ work ‘expand[s] conceptions of mourning beyond the limitations of the narcissism of recognition’ and thus transforms it into a public act.104 Margolles amplified the public nature of the De Que Otra Cosa Podríamos Hablar? through several additional components. In Embajada (Embassy), she extended the installation by using bloodied rags to cover up the windows of the US Pavilion across town in the Giardini; in Tarjetas Para Picar Cocaína (Cards to cut cocaine), she distributed 10,000 credit cards emblazoned with the image of a corpse as the official exhibition invitation; and in Limpieza (Cleaning), she orchestrated a daily performance where Mexican emigrés wiped the floor of the exhibition with a mixture of blood and water, ensuring that all exiting visitors would walk bloody traces throughout the city. Ramos argues that by integrating the bodies of those who have died ‘into the architecture and landscape of the building, Biennale, and city itself’, and by inscribing the ‘deathly remains upon the bodies and actions of those attending the exhibit’, Margolles succeeds in ‘relocating the crime scene from its specific locality into a shared geopolitical context’. Margolles’ approach also serves to acknowledge that ‘Mexican violence is not simply a local phenomenon, but a transnational export that is facilitated by both American and European policies and forms of complicity’.105 This double action, that brings together the matter of the dead and the living, takes mourning beyond an individual action towards a collective reckoning. This move from individual to collective death and mourning through the imbrication of the public in the actual remnants of violence also marks La Búsqueda (2), 2014, Venice Arsenale 2019. Here Margolles relocated structural elements from the city of Juárez on the US/Mexico border, synonymous with industrial-scale femicide, into the gallery space: a stretch of wall riddled with bullet holes from an habitual murder site, and glass bus-shelter panels plastered with peeling DIY missing person posters, eerily rattling to the low-frequency sound Margolles recorded of the train traversing the city. These fragments of Juarez’s urban fabric are silent witnesses of horror now materially yielding not individual stories but ‘a call for a collective, public response of mourning

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FIGURE 6.8

Teresa Margolles, Aproximación al Lugar de los Hechos (Proximity to the scene), 2020, performance documentation

and action’.106 Margolles more directly mobilised the public in her work for the 2020 Biennale of Sydney, Aproximación al Lugar de los Hechos (Proximity to the scene), 2020 (Figure 6.8). Together with a team of volunteers, she visited public sites in Sydney where women and trans women had been murdered, using sponges and water to soak up whatever infinitesimal remnant particles of bodily fluids, odour, hair and skin remained. Margolles then collected the water and fed it through an irrigation system designed to continuously drip, with droplets evaporating immediately on contact with hotplates beneath. As the artist explains, each drop signifies an individual life, but each evaporation is never complete: it leaves a stain.107 She adds, ‘The stabbed body, open in multiple wounds, in its interior lays the evaporating remains, drop by drop like a never closing wound, always suppurating.’108 The traces of the dead are always in different ways carried by the living, but Margolles creates rituals and encounters that compel us, bodily, to be present to that reality and our possible complicity, thereby developing a deeply affecting way to remember in public.109

Conclusion In this chapter we have argued for the vital contribution feminist understandings and creative interpretations of public space make towards imagining pasts, presents and futures not beholden to toxic ideologies and power structures. Feminist artists continue to re-imagine the public in a variety of generative ways, including

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cultivating perpetual contingency in response to changing communities, flipping the dynamics of visibility, interrogating narratives embedded in the built environment of specific places, and enlivening the bodies of the public to previously silenced voices. Feminist re-imaginings of the ‘public’ work towards creating safe places for expressing what is often repressed, offering licence to laugh, enjoy and lampoon in ‘public’. They also contribute to the values revolution our societies sorely need, away from neoliberal assumptions around autonomous individuals and towards an acknowledgment of our fundamental inter-relatedness and interdependence. Rather than conceiving the public polity as an agonistic, competitive space, these practices posit connective–coalitional alternatives, polyphonic but not harmonious, where we are all in our embodiment vulnerable but also complicit and responsible. As such, feminist artistic engagements generatively pivot the neoliberalist endgame around public art.

Notes 1 Jean-Luc Nancy, The Creation of the World or Globalization, transl. François Raffoul and David Pettigrew, Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007, 35. 2 Nancy, 2007, 47. 3 Nancy, 2007, 53. 4 The 2009 Venice Biennale curated by Daniel Birnbaum was subtitled ‘Making Worlds’. 5 Ian James, The New French Philosophy, London: Polity Press, 2012, 131. 6 Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, transl. Gabriel Rockhill with afterword by Slavoj Žižek, London; New York: Continuum, 2006, 38. 7 For example, women’s marches and women’s strikes around the world, including in Poland to overturn abortion laws, in US in response to Trump’s election and thereafter, vegan activism, Black Lives Matter, Slut Walks. 8 Pamela Moss and Avril Maddrell, ‘Emergent and divergent spaces in the Women’s March: the challenges of intersectionality and inclusion’, Gender, Place and Culture, 24 (5): 613–620, 2017. 9 See Nancy Fraser, Fortunes of Feminism: From State-Managed Capitalism to Neoliberal Crisis, London: Verso Books, 2013. See also Iris Marion Young’s social connection model of responsibility versus liability model: the social connection model is forwardlooking, suggesting that all those who contribute through their actions to structural processes that result in injustice have a (political) responsibility to remedy that injustice: Iris Marion Young, ‘Responsibility and global justice: a social connection model’, Social Philosophy and Policy, 23 (1): 102–130, 2006. See also Seyla Benhabib, ‘Feminist theory and Hannah Arendt’s concept of public space’, History of the Human Sciences, 6 (2): 97–114, 1993; and Audre Lorde, Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power, Brooklyn, NY: Out & Out Books, pamphlet series 3, 1978. 10 Benhabib, 1993. 11 Benhabib, 1993, 100. 12 Benhabib, 1993, 104. 13 Fraser, 2013. 14 Fraser, 2013, 13. 15 Young, 2006 cited in Benhabib, 1993, 109. 16 Lorde, 1978. 17 Lorde, 1978. 18 Lorde, 1978.

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19 Marcia Langton, ‘Well, I Heard It on the Radio And I Saw It on the Television’: An Essay for the Australian Film Commission on the Politics and Aesthetics of Filmmaking by and about Aboriginal People and Things, Sydney: Australian Film Commission, 1993, 32. 20 In particular as argued in Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, transl. Betsy Wing, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997. 21 See for instance, Carol Gilligan, ‘Moral injury and the ethic of care: reframing the conversation about differences’, Journal of Social Philosophy, 45: 89–106, 2014; Virginia Held, Justice and Care: Essential Readings In Feminist Ethics, New York: Avalon Publishing, 1995; Virginia Held, The Ethics of Care: Personal, Political, and Global, Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2006; Suzanne Gordon, Patricia Benner, and Nel Noddings (eds), Caregiving: Readings in Knowledge, Practice, Ethics, and Politics, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996; Joan Tronto, Moral Boundaries. A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care, New York; London: Routledge, 1993; Susan Hekman, ‘Moral voices, moral selves: about getting it right in moral theory’, Human Studies, 16 (1/2): 143–162, 1993; Martha Nussbaum, Sex and Social Justice, New York: Oxford University Press, 1999; Selma Sevenhuijsen, Citizenship and the Ethics of Care: Feminist Considerations on Justice, Morality, and Politics, London: Routledge, 1998; Jan Verwoert, ‘I can, I can’t, who cares?’, Online Open, 1 November 2009, www.onlineopen.org/i-can-i-can-t-who-cares accessed 16 November 2020. 22 Glissant, 1997, 17. 23 Henry F. Skerritt, ‘Book Review: Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation’, blog post, 16 August 2012, https://henryfskerritt.com/2012/08/16/book-review-edouard-glissantpoetics-of-relation/ accessed 13 November 2020. 24 Gilligan, 2014, 101. 25 Virginia Held, ‘The ethics of care as normative guidance: comment on Gilligan’, Journal of Social Philosophy, 45: 107–115, 2014, 107. 26 Naomi Klein, On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal, New York: Simon & Schuster, 2019; Naomi Klein. ‘Care and repair: left politics in the age of climate change’, Dissent, 67 (1): 97–108, 2020. 27 As we write, the world is facing the coronavirus pandemic, an exemplary case of how only by prioritising collective wellbeing, given we are all connected, will we be able to meaningfully minimise the threat to human life. 28 Verwoert, 2009. 29 Verwoert, 2009. 30 Angela Dimitrakaki, Gender, artWork and the Global Imperative: A Materialist Feminist Critique, Manchester; New York: Manchester University Press, 2013, 209–246, 241 31 Ellyse Mallouk, ‘The generous object: the relational and the aesthetic in contemporary art’, PhD thesis, California College of the Arts, Oakland, CA, 2010, 60–61. 32 Rancière, 2011, quoted in Mallouk, 2010, 61. 33 Camille Morineau, Women Artists:elles@centrepompidou, exhibition catalogue (Eng.) (Centre Pompidou, Paris), 2009. 34 See Joan W. Scott, Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996. 35 Hou Hanru, ‘If you were to live here … ’, The 5th Auckland Triennial, exhibition catalogue (Auckland Art Gallery, 2013), 12. 36 See for instance Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1991. 37 Justin Lewis. Art, Culture and Enterprise: The Politics of Art and the Cultural Industries, London; New York: Routledge, 1990, 243. 38 In the case of The Begin Again and Citizen’s Band, this has been Bonnie Elliott and Bridget Ikin. 39 For an interesting discussion of different manifestations of community arts in contemporary Australia, see Rimi Khan, ‘Reconstructing community-based arts: cultural value and the neoliberal citizen’, PhD thesis, University of Melbourne, 2011, http://minerva-access. unimelb.edu.au/handle/11343/35996 accessed 16 November 2020.

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40 The installation features four street musicians. Mesiti has captured each individual performance in full, using minimal camerawork and editing in respectful deference to the music and musician. Lois Geraldine Zongo slaps the surface of the water in a Parisian public pool, finding an astounding range of tones and pitches in a virtuosic percussive display that she has transported from the rivers of her native Cameroon. As she slips back into the water, the image fades and the next screen lights up with the melancholy song of Algerian Mohammed Lamourie, accompanied by his muchmended Casio keyboard inside a carriage of the Paris Metro. As passengers board and alight, Lamourie observes only his own private rhythm, the music piercing this everyday ritual with loss and longing. The next image takes us half-way across the globe to the inner Sydney suburb of Newtown and the sounds of Mongolian throatsinger Bukhchuluun Ganburged vibrating outside the 7/11, while on the final screen we see a solitary Brisbane taxi driver, Sudan-born Asim Goreshi, eyes closed, head swaying gently as his crystal-like whistling cuts through the night. 41 Angelica Mesiti, interviewed by Elli Walsh in Artist Profile, (46): 2019, https://www. artistprofile.com.au/angelica-mesiti/ accessed 16 November 2020. 42 Mesiti in Walsh, 2019. 43 Julie Ewington, ‘“Assembly” by Angelica Mesiti at Venice Biennale’, The Monthly, 2 June 2019, https://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2019/june/1559397600/julie-ewington/ assembly-angelica-mesiti-venice-biennale accessed 16 November 2020. 44 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Declaration, self-published text, 2012, https://antonione griinenglish.files.wordpress.com/2012/05/93152857-hardt-negri-declaration-2012.pdf accessed 16 November 2020. 45 James, 2012, 131. 46 Hester relies on feminist new materialism, in particular the work of Elizabeth Grosz, including Becoming Undone: Darwinian Reflections on Life, Politics and Art, Durham: Duke University Press, 2011. 47 Bianca Hester, ‘The shaggy edge of open’, unpublished paper, 2014a. 48 Bianca Hester, ‘Embodying convergences: caring to commit’, unpublished paper for the panel Curating Public Space, Curating Feminism Conference, SCA, University of Sydney, 25 October, 2014b. 49 The notion of a ‘holding environment’ was first conceived of by D.W. Winnicott in the context of object–relations theory, and recently developed by the feminist political and legal theorist Bonnie Honig, Antigone, Interrupted, New York: Harvard University Press, 2013. 50 Hester, 2014a. 51 Andrew Benjamin, ‘Stalling: notes on the work of Bianca Hester’, in Please leave these windows open to enable the fans to draw in cool air during the early hours of the morning, exhibition catalogue (Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne), 2010, 83–86. 52 Hester, 2014a. 53 Hester, 2014a. 54 Charlotte Day and Bianca Hester, ‘Five points of view’, in Please leave these windows open to enable the fans to draw in cool air during the early hours of the morning, exhibition catalogue (Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne), 2010, 74–77. 55 Quotes available at artist’s website, http://www.biancahester.net/?q=node/361417 accessed 16 November 2020. 56 Quotes available at artist’s website: http://www.biancahester.net/ accessed 16 November 2020. 57 Hester was among the first group of artists to call for a boycott and took part in organsing the protest through consultation with groups representing asylum seekers. Ultimately however she chose to remain so as to use her work as a platform to discuss the substantive issues raised by the boycott. For a full account, see Bianca Hester with Jacqueline Millner, ‘The practice of remaining perpetually contingent’, in Jacqueline Millner and Catriona Moore (eds) Feminist Perspectives on Art: Contemporary Outtakes, Abingdon; New York: Routledge, 2018, 90–102.

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58 It is an approach also evident in the interventions of artists such as Sasha Grbich and Heidi Angove, whose Very Local Radio allows people in public to tune in to the unpredictable sounds produced by particular public places via a portable internet radio transmitter assembled in a shopping trolley pushed by Grbich. See Mick Douglas (editor and curator), Performing Mobilities: Traces, exhibition catalogue (RMIT University, Melbourne), 2016, 112. 59 Hester, 2014b. 60 Hester, 2014b. 61 The entire work has since been acquired by the Wellcome Trust in London and is on permanent display in their London gallery as part of the exhibition ‘Being Human’. 62 Deborah Kelly, artist statement, Bodies of Work, Penrith Regional Gallery, 2016 from email correspondence between authors and the artist, 29 March 2019. 63 The f-word series of events, curated by Melbourne-based artist Caroline Phillips, experimented with a distributed model of making, exhibition and discussion, attempting to step into public space to connect the artist’s ideas to sites where they really matter but also where they may be transformed by the material cross currents of public discourse. The f-word comprised five elements: a dinner party, a regional forum, two exhibitions in regional galleries, and a bus tour. 64 Rick Dolphijn and Iris van der Tuin, ‘Matter feels, converses, suffers, desires, yearns and remembers’, in their New Materialism: Interviews and Cartographies, London: Open Humanities Press, 2012, n.p. 65 From Natty Solo blog, ‘New Kids on the Block: Next Wave Festival’, 15 June 2016, https:// nattysolo.com/2016/06/15/new-kids-on-the-block-next-wave-festival/ accessed 16 November 2020. 66 From Natty Solo blog, ‘Unwoke money’, 28 November 2018, https://nattysolo.com/ 2018/11/28/unwoke-money/ accessed 16 November 2020. 67 Live performance on 11 August 2011 at the Vanishing Point Gallery, Newtown, Sydney. In 2017, Aydemir developed this idea into one-on-one performance piece in which two actors (the artist—a veiled Muslim woman—and a participant) shared a simulated motorcycle ride through an archetypal Australian landscape. At the end of the ride, each participant was given a polaroid photograph taken from the journey with the hand-written caption ‘#illridewithyou xo’: The Ride, 2017, HD video with sound, 99 performances each 10–13 minutes duration. Live performances on 26 September–7 October, 2017, Proximity Festival, Perth. 68 Cigdem Aydemir website, http://cigdemaydemir.com/EA_ride.html accessed 16 November 2020. 69 Installation at Carriageworks, Sydney SEXES festival, 26 October–1 December 2012; live performance on 25 October and 24 November 2012, curators Bec Dean, Deborah Kelly, and Jeff Khan. 70 From the collaborative exhibition by Nike de Saint Phalle, Jean Tinguely, and Per Olof Ultvedt, Hon—en katedral (She—a cathedral), Moderna Museet, Stockholm, 1966. 71 Dual-channel HD video with sound, 10:21 min, live performances on 2–4 October 2015; first exhibited at Boxcopy, Brisbane, http://cigdemaydemir.com/iwlyooms.htm l, accessed 16 November 2020. 72 Rachael Haynes and Christopher Handran, catalogue essay for Cigdem Aydemir: I Won’t Let You Out of My Sight, Brisbane: Boxcopy, 2015, http://cigdemaydemir.com/Cigdem_ Aydmir_Exhibition_Catalogue.pdf accessed 16 November 2020. 73 Cigdem Aydemir, The New National Sport, live performance on 8 December 2018, Argyle Square, Melbourne, presented by Artshouse, Melbourne. 74 For example, Sir John Franklin at Franklin Square, Hobart, shrink-wrapped for Cigdem Aydemir’s Dark Mofo installation Plastic Histories, 10–21 June 2016. 75 Plastic Histories was a multifaceted project comprising of three main components for the Vryfestival in Bloemfontein, South Africa. This included the physical shrink-wrapping of two monuments on the University of the Free State (UFS) main campus; the development of an augmented reality application for four monuments in the city of Bloemfontein; and an exhibition of digital prints, video and physically shrink-wrapped busts from

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76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84

85 86 87

88 89 90

91

92 93 94 95

the UFS permanent art collection, in the Johannes Stegmann Art Gallery, 2014, http:// cigdemaydemir.com/plastic_histories.html accessed 16 November 2020. Valeria Geselev, ‘Decolonising Africa—in high heels’, 12 May 2017, https://smacgallery. com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/Lhola-Amira_2017_Decolonising-Africa-%E2%80% 94-in-high-heels.pdf accessed 16 November 2020. Amira quoted by Geselev, 2017. Press release from L&B Gallery, Barcelona for the exhibition Lhola Amira, Ditaola, Divining Bones, 14–30 November 2019, https://www.artsy.net/show/l-and-b-gallery-lhola-amiraditaola-divining-bones accessed 16 November 2020. See Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. Mariella Franzoni on ‘Lhola Amira: Looking for Ghana & The Red Suitcase’, Loop Barcelona, 2017, https://loop-barcelona.com/artist-video/looking-for-ghana-the-red-suitcase/ accessed 16 November 2020. Albeit its ‘let it rip’ public health response to the coronavirus pandemic in 2020 has sorely tested this reputation. The term womxn is an alternative spelling of women/woman to avoid the sexism perceived in those words, which derive from the words ‘men’ and ‘man’, and to signal the inclusion of transgender and nonbinary people. Lhola Amira in a video conversation with Brook Andrew for NIRIN: 22nd Biennale of Sydney, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GHRWWswhEm4 accessed 16 November 2020. Achille Mbembe proposed the notion of ‘necropolitics’ to describe how ‘the ultimate expression of sovereignty resides … in the power and the capacity to dictate who may live and who must die’: Achille Mbembe, ‘Necropolitics’, Public Culture, 15 (1): 11– 40, 2003, 11. Franzoni, 2017. Mechtild Widrich, Performative Monuments: The Rematerialisation of Public Art, Manchester, UK; New York: Manchester University Press, 2014, 10. One example might be the difference between a public sculpture and a march: in recent years Australia’s annual national ritual of mourning for those killed in war, the Anzac Day March, has been the locus of potent challenges to conservative ideals of the sacrifice of the white male soldier. In the 1980s, groups joined the march (unauthorised) to remember women raped in war, while in 2019 Aboriginal elder Aunty Wendal Pitchford broke new ground by leading a contingent to commemorate those killed in the Frontier Wars at the time of invasion. Amira with Brook Andrew, 2020. Marisa Williamson, artist statement from website, http://www.marisawilliamson.com/ about accessed 16 November 2020. A. Will Brown, ‘Marisa Williamson: “I want to make history alive in people’s worlds”’, interview with Marisa Williamson, Studio International, 13 March 2015, https://www. studiointernational.com/index.php/marisa-williamson-interview-sally-hemings-slavemistress-thomas-jefferson accessed 16 November 2020. Marisa Williamson, ‘Sally Hemings: on fugitivity and stasis’, presentation in the session ‘In Search of African-American Space’ for the Double Operative: Language/Making symposium, Pratt Institute, 2016, https://doubleoperative.com/symposium/ accessed 16 November 2020. Brown, 2015. This project was developed together with Monument Lab, a public art and history studio based in Philadelphia, https://monumentlab.com/projects/marisa-williamsonsweet-chariot-the-long-journey-to-freedom-through-time accessed 17 November 2020. The Hope and the Dream of the Slave, Hemings Foundation website, https://www. hemingsfoundation.org/new-page accessed 17 November 2020. Nona Faustine, ‘Intersectionality in the studio’, The Archive (68): n.d., Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, https://www.leslielohman.org/archive/intersectionality-in-the-studionona-faustine accessed 17 November 2020.

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96 Nona Faustine, ‘Nona Faustine confronts history through portraiture’, Race and Revolution blog, 16 July 2016, https://raceandrevolution.wordpress.com/2016/07/11/nonafaustine-confronts-history-through-portraiture/ accessed 17 November 2020. 97 Sisonke Msimang, ‘South Africa’s topless protesters are fighting shame on their own terms’, The Guardian (South Africa), 5 May, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/ma y/05/south-africas-topless-protesters-are-fighting-shame-on-their-own-terms accessed 17 November 2020. During the 1929 women’s anti-colonial revolt in Nigeria, Ogu Umunwanyi (in Igbo) or Ekong Iban (in Ibibio), women took to the roads using pre-colonial practices, including using their bodies as a tool to protest British colonial corruption. In 1961, Pauline Opango Lumumba removed her Paris frocks to lead mourners bare-breasted across Leopoldville in protest at the assassination of her husband Patrice, undisputed hero of the Congelese independence struggle and the Democratic Republic’s first prime minister; while in Kenya, Wangari Maathai urged the protesting mothers of detainees to strip when threatened by security officers, weaving ‘traditional beliefs on nudity and gender together with contemporary political struggles’ against the autocratic Daniel Arap Moi administration. In the 1990s, women in Dobsonville, Soweto stripped naked in front of bulldozers to prevent their homes from being dismantled. See Nanjala Nyabola, ‘Wangari Maathai was not a good woman. Kenya needs more of them’, African Arguments, 6 October 2015, https://africana rguments.org/2015/10/06/wangari-maathai-was-not-a-good-woman-kenya-needs-many -more-of-them/ accessed 23 November 2020; Adedeji Ademola, ‘Why Patrice Lumumba’s widow marched bare-breasted across Leopoldville in 1961’, Face2Face Africa, 17 January 2019, https://face2faceafrica.com/article/why-patrice-lumumbas-widow-marched-ba re-breasted-across-leopoldville-in-1961 accessed 23 November 2020; Tamar Garb, ‘Painting/politics/photography: Marlene Dumas, Mme Lumumba and the image of the African woman’, Art History, 43 (3): 588–611, 2020. 98 Msimang, 2016. 99 Faustine, The Archive (68): n.d. 100 Ralph Rugoff, ed., Biennale Arte 2019: May You Live in Interesting Times, exhibition catalogue (Biennale di Venezia, V. 1 or 2, 2019), 291. 101 De Que Otra Cosa Podríamos Hablar? (What else could we talk about?), installation and interventions (Mexican Pavilion at the Palazzo Rota Ivancich, Venice Biennale 2009). 102 Iván A. Ramos, ‘The viscosity of grief: Teresa Margolles at the scene of the crime’, Women & Performance, 25 (3): 298–314, 2015. 299. 103 Ramos, 2015, 299. 104 Ramos, 2015, 300. 105 Ramos, 2015, 310–314. 106 La Búsqueda (2) (The Search), 58th Venice Biennale, May You Live in Interesting Times, curator Ralph Rugoff, wall label, Arsenale, 2019. 107 Teresa Margolles, NIRIN: 22nd Biennale of Sydney, 2020, https://www.biennaleof sydney.art/artists/teresa-margolles/ accessed 17 November 2020. 108 Margolles, 2020. 109 Cuban artist Tania Bruguera’s work for NIRIN: 22nd Biennale of Sydney, 2020 offers another poignant approach of circulating memory through the bodies of the public. In UNNAMED, participants chose a name from a small box, and had that name tattooed on a limb by a professional tattooist. Each name was one of the 751 people killed between 2015 and 2018 in the course of standing up for the environment, victims of resource-related violence perpetrated by colonisers and private companies. Participants read aloud details about the environmental martyr while chatting about them with the tattooist as she worked. Personalising this ongoing tragedy the artist sees as an ‘antidote to indifference, feelings of insignificance and inaction’, for not only is a phenomenon of epic proportions with multiple effects in all areas of human life brought home to the body, but that body will carry that name out into the world, the living bearing the dead in remembrance. https://www.biennaleofsydney.art/artists/tania-bruguera/ accessed 17 November 2020.

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References Ademola, Adedeji. 2019. ‘Why Patrice Lumumba’s widow marched bare-breasted across Leopoldville in 1961’, Face2Face Africa, 17 January, https://face2faceafrica.com/article/ why-patrice-lumumbas-widow-marched-bare-breasted-across-leopoldville-in-1961 Andrew, Brook. 2020. NIRIN: 22nd Biennale of Sydney. Sydney: Biennale of Sydney. Benhabib, Seyla. 1993. ‘Feminist theory and Hannah Arendt’s concept of public space’, History of the Human Sciences, 6 (2): 97–114. Benjamin, Andrew. 2010. ‘Stalling: notes on the work of Bianca Hester’, in Please leave these windows open to enable the fans to draw in cool air during the early hours of the morning. Melbourne: Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, 83–92. Brown, A. Will. 2015. ‘Marisa Williamson: “I Want to Make History Alive in People’s Worlds”’, Studio International, 13 March, https://www.studiointernational.com/index. php/marisa-williamson-interview-sally-hemings-slave-mistress-thomas-jefferson Day, Charlotte, and Hester, Bianca. 2010. ‘Five points of view’, in Please leave these windows open to enable the fans to draw in cool air during the early hours of the morning. Melbourne: Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, 74–77. Dimitrakaki, Angela. 2013. Gender, ArtWork and the Global Imperative: A Materialist Feminist Critique. Manchester; New York: Manchester University Press. Dolphijn, Rick, and van der Tuin, Iris. 2012. New Materialism: Interviews & Cartographies. New Metaphysics. London: Open Humanities Press. http://openhumanitiespress.org/ books/download/Dolphijn-van-der-Tuin_2013_New-Materialism.pdf Douglas, Mick, ed. 2016. Performing Mobilities: Traces. Melbourne: RMIT University. Ewington, Julie. 2019. ‘“Assembly” by Angelica Mesiti at Venice Biennale’, The Monthly, 2 June, https://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2019/june/1559397600/julie-ewington/assemblyangelica-mesiti-venice-biennale Faustine, Nona. 2016. ‘Nona Faustine confronts history through portraiture’, Race and Revolution (blog), 16 July, https://raceandrevolution.wordpress.com/2016/07/11/nona-fa ustine-confronts-history-through-portraiture/ Franzoni, Mariella. 2017. ‘Lhola Amira: Looking for Ghana & The Red Suitcase’, Loop Barcelona, https://loop-barcelona.com/artist-video/looking-for-ghana-the-red-suitcase/ Fraser, Nancy. 2013. Fortunes of Feminism: From State-Managed Capitalism to Neoliberal Crisis. London: Verso Books. Garb, Tamar. 2020. ‘Painting/politics/photography: Marlene Dumas, Mme Lumumba and the image of the African woman’, Art History, 43 (3): 588–611. Geselev, Valeria. 2017. Decolonising Africa—in High Heels, Smac Gallery, 12 May, https://smacga llery.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/Lhola-Amira_2017_Decolonising-Africa-%E2%80% 94-in-high-heels.pdf Gilligan, Carol. 2014. ‘Moral injury and the ethic of care: reframing the conversation about differences’, Journal of Social Philosophy, 45 (1): 89–106. Glissant, Édouard. 1997. Poetics of Relation, transl. Betsy Wing. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Gordon, Suzanne, Benner, Patricia E., and Noddings, Nel, eds. 1996. Caregiving: Readings in Knowledge, Practice, Ethics, and Politics. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Grosz, Elizabeth. 2011. Becoming Undone: Darwinian Reflections on Life, Politics, and Art. Durham: Duke University Press. Hanru, Hou. 2013. ‘If You Were to Live Here … ’, in The 5th Auckland Triennial, exhibition catalogue, Auckland Art Gallery. Hardt, Michael, and Negri, Antonio. 2012. ‘Declaration’, self-published, https://antonione griinenglish.files.wordpress.com/2012/05/93152857-hardt-negri-declaration-2012.pdf

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Held, Virgina. 1995. Justice and Care: Essential Readings in Feminist Ethics. New York: Avalon Publishing. Held, Virginia. 2006. The Ethics of Care: Personal, Political, and Global. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press. Held, Virginia. 2014. ‘The ethics of care as normative guidance: comment on Gilligan’, Journal of Social Philosophy, 45 (1): 107–115. Hekman, Susan. 1993. ‘Moral voices, moral selves: about getting it right in moral theory’, Human Studies, 16 (1/2): 143–162. Hester, Bianca. 2014a. ‘The shaggy edge of open’, unpublished paper. Hester, Bianca. 2014b. ‘Embodying convergences: caring to commit’, unpublished paper for the panel Curating Public Space, Curating Feminism Conference, SCA, University of Sydney, 25 October 2014. Honig, Bonnie. 2013. Antigone, Interrupted. New York: Cambridge University Press. James, Ian. 2012. The New French Philosophy. Cambridge; Malden, MA: Polity Press. Khan, Rimi. 2011. ‘Reconstructing community-based arts: cultural value and the neoliberal citizen’, PhD thesis, University of Melbourne, http://minerva-access.unimelb.edu.au/handle/ 11343/35996 Klein, Naomi. 2019. On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal. New York: Simon & Schuster. Klein, Naomi. 2020. ‘Care and repair: left politics in the age of climate change’, Dissent (New York) 67 (1): 97–108. Langton, Marcia. 1993. ‘Well, I Heard It on the Radio and I Saw It on the Television’: An Essay for the Australian Film Commission on the Politics and Aesthetics of Filmmaking by and about Aboriginal People and Things. Sydney: Australian Film Commission. Lewis, Justin. 1990. Art, Culture and Enterprise: The Politics of Art and the Cultural Industries. London; New York: Routledge. Lorde, Audre. 1978. Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power. Pamphlet 3. Brooklyn, NY: Out & Out Books. Mallouk, Elyse. 2010. ‘The generous object: the relational and the aesthetic in contemporary art’, PhD thesis, California College of the Arts, Oakland, CA. Mbembe, Achille. 2001. On the Postcolony. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Mbembe, Achille. 2003. ‘Necropolitics’, Public Culture, 15 (1): 11–40. Millner, Jacqueline, and Moore, Catriona, eds. 2018. Feminist Perspectives on Art: Contemporary Outtakes. Abingdon; New York: Routledge. Morineau, Camille. 2009. Women Artists: Elles@centrepompidou. Paris: Centre Pompidou. Moss, Pamela, and Maddrell, Avril. 2017. ‘Emergent and divergent spaces in the Women’s March: the challenges of intersectionality and inclusion’, Gender, Place and Culture, 24 (5): 613–620. Msimang, Sisonke. 2016. ‘South africa’s topless protesters are fighting shame on their own terms’, The Guardian, 5 May, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/may/05/ south-africas-topless-protesters-are-fighting-shame-on-their-own-terms Nancy, Jean-Luc. 1991. The Inoperative Community. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Nancy, Jean-Luc. 2007. The Creation of the World or Globalization, transl. François Raffoul and David Pettigrew. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Nussbaum, Martha Craven. 1999. Sex and Social Justice. New York: Oxford University Press. Nyabola, Nanjala. 2015. ‘Wangari Maathai was not a good woman. Kenya needs more of them’, African Arguments, 6 October, https://africanarguments.org/2015/10/06/wangari-maathaiwas-not-a-good-woman-kenya-needs-many-more-of-them/

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Ramos, Iván A. 2015. ‘The viscosity of grief: Teresa Margolles at the scene of the crime’, Women & Performance, 25 (3): 298–314. Rancière, Jacques. 2006. The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, transl. Gabriel Rockhill. London; New York: Continuum. Rugoff, Ralph, ed. 2019. Biennale Arte 2019: May You Live In Interesting Times. 2 vols. Venice: Biennale di Venezia, https://www.labiennale.org/en/biennale-store/biennalearte-2019-%E2%80%93-may-you-live-interesting-times Scott, Joan W. 1996. Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Sevenhuijsen, Selma. 1998. Citizenship and the Ethics of Care: Feminist Considerations on Justice, Morality, and Politics. London: Routledge. Skerritt, Henry F. 2012. ‘Book Review: Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation’, blog post, 16 August, https://henryfskerritt.com/2012/08/16/book-review-edouard-glissant-poetics-of-relation/ Solo, Natty. 2016. ‘New Kids on the Block: Next Wave Festival’, blog post, 15 June, https:// na ttysolo.com/2016/06/15/new-kids-on-the-block-next-wave-festival/ accessed 16 November 2020. Solo, Natty. 2018. ‘Unwoke money’, blog post, 28 November, https://nattysolo.com/ 2018/11/28/unwoke-money/ accessed 16 November 2020. Tronto, Joan C. 1993. Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care. New York: Routledge. Verwoert, Jan. 2009. ‘I can, I can’t, who cares?’, Online Open, 1 November, https://www. onlineopen.org/i-can-i-can-t-who-cares Walsh, Elli. 2019. ‘Angelica Mesiti’, Artist Profile, (46) (June), https://www.artistprofile.com. au/angelica-mesiti/ Widrich, Mechtild. 2014. Performative Monuments: The Rematerialisation of Public Art, 1st edn. Manchester, UK; New York: Manchester University Press. Williamson, Marissa. 2016. ‘Sally Hemings: on fugitivity and stasis’, Double Operative: Language/Making conference, Pratt Institute, New York. Young, Iris Marion. 2006. ‘Responsibility and global justice: a social connection model’, Social Philosophy and Policy, 23 (1): 102–130.

7 CONCLUSION Feminist arts activism—doing politics differently

At an artist’s talk in a Melbourne art school in late 2020,1 a student asked why, now that ‘we all talk about feminism’, that ‘feminism is everywhere’, we make no mention of Women’s Liberation? We were struck by this desire to return the practice of feminist art to its social movement origins, and we thus conclude our book with a short consideration of feminist art and activism. Common wisdom describes the diffusion of Women’s Liberation as a grass roots mass movement in Australia into fragmented yet still potent areas of struggle within the neoliberal backlash of the 1980s and 1990s: from what Griselda Pollock described in a broader context ‘a feminism of resistance’ to one of ‘persistence’.2 This shift is marked by many historical overlaps and competing ideological positions (as for instance in debates around essentialism in this period) which cannot be subsumed under any simple decadeist or ‘waveist’ (as in second, third or fourth wave) chronicle, which simply feeds ‘bad feminist memory’.3 Certainly by the later 1980s Australian feminists started to make inroads in different professional sites: the artworld, the academy, the media, trade unions, the state bureaucracies, NGOs. This diversity has informed interventionist actions for equity, difference and inclusion, from calling out misogyny within our Federal Parliament and armed services to street murals calling for (and then celebrating) the legal recognition of alternative family forms. In the booming 1980s cultural sector, feminist art enlivened the artworld and the academy, opened new areas of scholarship such as gender and cultural studies, and radically challenged the canonical stories of art history. Were academic feminists and artists re-imagining cultural activism in relative isolation from other sectors of society, to paraphrase the student’s question? Not at all, for the driving challenge of the so-called ‘cultural turn’ in the 1980s was precisely to re-think what politics could be in a post-industrial and postmodern economy and society, where traditional politics (symbolised by the street march and the general strike on the one hand and parliamentary processes on the other) DOI: 10.4324/9781003045175-8

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were seen to be losing ground. This book has outlined how feminists engaged this problem and continue to invent new ways of doing art and doing politics. In the 1960s and 1970s, feminist cultural politics helped a shift away from the machista ‘manifesto avant-gardism’ that characterised both late modernism and the sectarian jostling of tendencies within the New Left. While feminist cultural interventions have often been noisy, we have been more concerned with researching, making and changing than with declaring fixed positions or a priori political programmes. Yet we recognise that the political and cultural backlash of the 1980s and 1990s— the so-called ‘culture wars’ amid which emerged that pernicious term ‘postfeminism’—to an extent isolated the artworld and the academy, and made it harder to create and maintain the connections needed for a broadly-based, social movement. Times change: the ‘politics of the street’ has returned in digitally blended form and we are in a moment that demands feminist coalitional action within and alongside the Occupy Movements, climate change campaigns, #MeToo and Black Lives Matter. The seemingly simple question—how can feminism translate into a social movement today?—is a wake-up call for feminists working in the academy and the artworld to keep reaching beyond these contexts to re-develop a grass roots politics of alliance. An interesting recent turn is feminist artists extending their practice into the formal sphere of political institutions, seeking and securing seats in local legislatures by campaigning on their expertise as artists, highlighting how artists have particular insights into community issues and the capacity for creative solutions.4 Our book has considered how feminist artists have helped to create ‘use value’, to borrow the Marxist term, in meeting very human needs: speaking to power’s gendered relations and imagining non-exploitative ways of living, loving and language. But more than this: feminist art is useful in framing these values of critique and connectivity as open-ended questions. Our concluding comments consider this active and questioning connectivity from an organisational perspective: feminist art as an activist politics of alliance, with three main strategic emphases, namely, decolonisation; reimagining the art/life divide, and problematising ‘equality’ politics. Throughout the book we have noted subtle shifts in approach: from the 1970s, personal-political artworks across all media aligned with consciousness-raising practices that proposed shared female experiences as a baseline for connective relationships and social actions. The nature of this connection was further mooted and tested in the essentialist debates of the 1980s, particularly within academic circles, where corporeally based feminisms opened to coalitional politics. For decolonial feminists like María Lugones, Oyèrónké Oyeˇ wùmí and others,5 ‘gender is a colonial imposition in tension with non-modern cosmologies, economies, and modes of kinship (the “coloniality of gender”)’.6 In the North American context, the Latino artist Judy Baca told Suzanne Lacy: Ethnicity won’t join a white feminist agenda. It will transform it. It will become the central agenda of feminism, as rightly it should, because we are the majority… the groundwork laid by white feminists of the 1970s, that body of knowledge, will be a resource, but we will have to redefine it according to

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the experience of women of colour … I can’t relate to the universality of all women. We make these bridges tentatively, we don’t make assumptions, we build a relationship slowly … It’s a long struggle, a long time building bridges.7 These open questions and shifting political priorities have indeed transformed Western feminist concepts of a trans-cultural, non-racialised and classless sisterhood of assumed common interests (‘women against the patriarchy’), which tended to flatten out both differences and connections between women. Many socialist and First Nations women and women of colour have long-standing intersectional organisational experience, and their insights inform the more democratic politics of alliance that characterises current left-wing activism. Where does the art studio fit here? We have discussed craftivist, environmentalist and pedagogical projects that critically investigate this quality of feminist political action. We saw how Australian artist Alex Martinis Roe, for instance, reaches back to the inclusive feminist concept of affidamento that was practised within the radical socialist-feminist Milan women’s bookshop cooperative in the 1970s—loosely translated as ‘trustment’ and support in another’s difference—as a creative model of grass roots feminist activism that is relevant to the present, a practical way to explore alliance and solidarity across differences.8 In privileging connectivity, feminism has also brought together the heterogenous spaces of grass roots action and the traditional isolation of the artist’s studio. Recall how second wave feminism intervened in a Euro-American artworld that was experiencing paralysis. In the 1960s, many progressive artists took to the streets and barricades to protest against the Vietnam War and to support nuclear disarmament, workers’ struggles and civil rights, and then returned to the isolated studio to solve the historical (formalist) problems of late modernism. This disjunction between the radical politics of the studio and that of the street had not been breached since constructivism, Dada and surrealism: all-too-brief moments when the Western artistic and political avant-gardes were in alignment.9 By shrugging off the mantle of modernist avant-gardism and insisting upon the relevance and legitimacy of hitherto ‘non-art’ subjects, embodied research methods, materials, forms, processes and spaces, feminism has helped to transform the ecology of contemporary art to better reflect the ethical objectives of artists and their audiences. We use the term ‘ecology’ in a broad sense here, to accommodate projects that expand Western liberal ideas of artistic authorship and include communal and cooperative production and reception where audiences become creative interlocutors and disperse identity. In reconsidering the historical disjunct between the studio and the street, feminism dovetails with, and draws upon, centuries of de-colonial cultural resistance by linking the artworld to other social spaces through a porous art practice. A third strategic point informing this book is to move beyond liberal ideas of equal opportunity feminism. From the 1970s the Women’s Art Movements in Australia and elsewhere politicised the artworld by agitation around ‘representation’ in at least two senses of the word: for equal representation (equitable employment opportunities to allow a more inclusive and diverse range of perspectives); and the politics of

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representation (the critique of oppressive gender and sexual inscriptions, the refusal of fixed identities and the attempt to imagine and act otherwise). These twinned strategies (affirmative action and aesthetic exploration) sought the equal representation of women artists’ work in our galleries, collections, art media, art schools and universities as part of broader aesthetic and political aims. The idea was not to simply add a few women to the artistic canon, or to move a few artworks by First Nations or women of colour around the museum,10 but to transform the canon and its institutional and market supports altogether, by exploring the hitherto unrecognised and institutionally challenging character of feminine aesthetics, which reaches out beyond the artworld as an active agent of cultural politics.11 Calls for affirmative action within the museum have thus been paired with autonomous, capacity-building actions like all-women shows closely aligned with the Women’s Liberation movement, Women and Art courses, all-women studio workshops, reading groups and feminist publishing.12 These platforms have been intense, exploratory and theoretically challenging. They also remain unbelievably precarious, reliant on the efforts of part-time or casual junior staff, curators and unwaged artists. Autonomous action has always been vulnerable to vagaries of financial, timetabling and staffing ebbs and flows.13 As British academic Angela Dimitrakaki observes in the international curatorial context, ‘The rise of female curatorial collectives compels us to think at least about how the curatorial field of labour is not crowded with Harald Szeemanns but has opened up to the energies of precarisation, flexibilisation and feminisation.’14 The lesson to be learnt here is that feminist aesthetics must always be accompanied by affirmative action campaigns, and vice versa. As a two-pronged strategy of equity and difference, feminist activism has yielded slow yet significant alterations to the Australian artworld. Australian feminists have crunched the numbers since 1972,15 reporting uneven lurches in women’s representation in public sector galleries, from 17% in 1973 to a bare 25% by 1984.16 In this period, feminism had to negotiate its partial artworld institutionalisation: its containment as academic poststructuralist theory and highly selective (often tokenistic) museum-installed art. Despite our attempts to mainstream feminist art, arguably we lacked the clout to structurally alter an accelerating 1980s romance with the globalised museum and market sectors, both here and overseas.17 Notwithstanding the ‘postfeminist’ backlash, the tally had crept up 10% in some areas to 35–40% by 2014, although in some sectors women’s representation had gone backwards, apart from First Nations’ women’s representation, which had started from a scandalously low base. In the past decade, affirmative action has become more mainstream, and by 2018 women comprised over 50% of artists represented in Australian biennales and in the more agile contemporary public and commercial sectors.18 Researchers have sadly noted that this swift and recent swing in Australian attitudes and actions towards women in the arts has not been matched by overseas data, which ‘often reflects little or no change in representation’.19 The recent spate of all-women exhibitions here and elsewhere also suggests that half a century of mainstreaming women artists’ work remains conditional (in some instances, welcoming all-women ‘femo-busters’ whilst ignoring the institutional and/or discursive implications of gender, culture, sexual and race issues in the work inherent in the exhibitions). It is therefore too early to rest on laurels and stop counting: our local history of women’s artworld employment

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FIGURE 7.1

Tomorrow Girls Troop, Empowerment March (Sophia University, Tokyo), 2019

opportunity shows the damaging impact of easy reversals and lingering lazy art history and curatorial practices. Major gains are still to be made getting women from non-white backgrounds and artists with differing abilities into the art history syllabus, on gallery walls, on boards, on the museum payroll, and in secure teaching positions (women currently comprise only a third of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art held in our national collection, for instance).20 These statistics show that the non-Indigenous artworld has yet to catch up with shifts in First Nations politics. In this same half century, the force of Land Rights and the outstations movement,21 allied with community employment programmes at former missions or government settlements, created spaces in which to assert First Nations’ art and craft as an important cultural, political and economic platform. Regional and remote women’s centres now often host an art studio, and independent women’s organisations—including the Ernabella and Utopia batik groups, along with Bábbarra Designs at Maningrida in the Northern Territory, Bima Wear at Wurrumiyanga on Bathurst Island, The Akay Aoilia Women’s Art Centre at Aurukun in Far North Queensland, the Tjanpi Desert Weavers (APY lands)—have become a focus for cultural maintenance. They are also independent platforms from which women artists can do business with the white, still male-dominated artworld. As Ngaanyatjarra, Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara (NPY) Women’s Council co-founder Tjunmutja Myra Watson argued in 1980: ‘We (women) all hold strong Tjukurpa and we don’t want to see our culture lost … If we don’t talk up for ourselves, our rights, we get nowhere.’22

Caring through a ‘politics of acts’ How does arts feminism ‘do art differently and do politics differently’ according to our argument here? First, we noted how feminist artists have investigated the

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FIGURE 7.2

Womanifesto, Womanifesto workshop group at Boon Bandam Farm, Kantharaluk, North-East Thailand, 2001, participatory activity; courtesy Womanifesto

representation of gender, sexuality, race and ethnicity in popular culture and art history, and in turn asserted more fluid and varied experiences of female subjectivity. Artists registered excessive (including failed or under-performing) gendered subjectivities and sexual proclivities that complicated the representational demand to be middle class, white, straight and good looking. White feminists also learnt from First Nations’ perspectives that proposed a decolonising non-essentialism as a starting point for resistant acts of sovereignty, rather than investigating the politics of media/high art representation as a (postmodern) end in itself. Feminist artists broadened their sights beyond the circularity of representational politics, towards a politics of acts rather than of identities. Feminist and queer photography and performance work have since playfully performed social failure and resilience, projecting an affective power that falls short of the semiotic excess that characterised post-structuralist academic thinking on the feminine. We argued that the revival of contemporary performance has been buoyed by feminist concerns in art. Contemporary feminist performance enlivens specific sites and notions of identity, and explores the intimate relationship between flesh and power, questioning, diffusing and multiplying female agency through audience–artist interaction and exchange. We considered how calls for equal opportunity and more progressive art training led to the invention of an independent, pedagogical mise-en-scène in non-academic settings, typically galleries, museums or other art spaces, fomenting a broader, socalled ‘pedagogic turn’ in contemporary art. Since the 1970s, feminists have

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fabricated a loosely networked pedagogical apparatus through use of studio workshops, archives, libraries, reading groups and performative teach-ins to provide space for many perspectives and to acknowledge the relative nature of knowledge and its interconnection with power.23 Across these diverse spaces, we noted how feminist pedagogy has always been provisional, just as concepts of feminist aesthetics have never settled. Both are active practices always in the making. The performance lecture, remote bush art camp or discussion picnic are embodied, experiential and relational processes that remain irregular and difficult to classify according to the increasingly standardised, outcome-oriented ‘graduate qualities’ of tertiary art training.24 Indeed, we noted that feminist art pedagogy more closely tallies with those informal practices of care that underlie relational acts of attentiveness, responsibility, competence and responsiveness, as described by political philosopher Joan Tronto.25 Renewed attention to the materiality of feminist arts and crafting from the 1990s also helped to sideline the linguistic models that underpinned psychoanalytic analyses of gender and sexual identities. Material practices could directly link to generative and generous acts of non-essentialised common cause and care. Feminist crafting, with its underlying relational tenets of ‘the personal is political’, privileged small-scale, often intimate exchanges. Craft has historically been associated with pre-industrial communities ‘and the face-to-face relationships which they foster’.26 Feminist crafting in the studio, multi-cultural sewing circles in suburban community halls or knitting at anti-fracking blockades create varied relationships and objects that address broader economic, environmental and social problems, and thus may inform political practice. These densely material, communitarian practices extend outwards through craft’s relational ethos; they express group specificity, common cause and differences between people as a starting point for ethical action. We argued how feminist material practices of care are embodied, historical and social, and work as complementary to rights-based discourses of justice27 that often fall short of meeting relational needs. We argued that feminism contributes new artistic perspectives on art and environment by confronting the lingering and gendered view within Western thought of nature as feminine and/or racially other. Ecofeminist artists have challenged this framework with inter-species and intersectional or ecological actions, learning and benefitting from the dynamic tensions between First Nations environmental care and those ideas of wilderness and development embedded on the Western landscape tradition. Ecofeminism shares the First Nations’ viewpoint that humans are fully imbricated in the natural world. Ecofeminism also informs recent scholarship associated with deep ecology and the ‘new materialism’ that realigns our understandings of life and agency, or animacy. These challenges have further transformed the anthropocentric terms whereby Western landscape traditions read the land to express self-realisation through divine or proprietorial connection, to help build an educative, ecological ethics. We noted how feminist participatory actions often have a community base developed through listening to other voices and opening up overlooked spaces of cultural

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agency. The commonalities and differences that feminist social practice helps to cultivate seeks a respectful political culture that remains open, accessible and democratic. It is useful to recall how feminist community-based arts and associated forms of social practice carnivalise public spaces, helping to generate creative visual strategies for inclusive political actions. Social practice has also multiplied through less physical places, as has grass roots politics more broadly. Feminist social practice art nonetheless retains ‘the street’ as an important interventionist site for creatively putting one’s body on the line, and we note that the smallest or most private political gestures and acts of care and responsibility may be instantly amplified online. Blended activism often relies on the potential strength of anonymity, although this does not guarantee safety, and we note the problem of unregulated, leaky and commoditised online activity, where assertion or even presence can so easily be hacked and doxed (as highlighted by Gamergate) by asking: for who, by whom, and why? The knitted Reclaim the Night banner and pussy hat, or those blended and ritualised actions aboard the LGBTQIA Mardi Gras float, the networked flash mob, use of colour coded street wear and iconic props now make the visual culture of grass roots protest immersive and participatory, televisual and Instagrammable, spectacular and festivalised. Within today’s experience economy, new technologies amplify private political gestures and acts of responsibility, and feminism has been an important force in bringing private–public spaces together in a relational rather than dichotomous fashion.

The personal is political: practising alliance The idea that personal life has political implications (and vice versa) lies at the heart of feminism and of this book. Consciousness raising methods derived from Women’s Liberation, such as supportive group reflection on the political implications of women’s personal experience, found their way into feminist aesthetics as an interrogative tool and a means to assert, diffuse and multiply agency. It’s time to acknowledge how feminism introduced this expanded field of the everyday, the domestic and the collective into the artworld—it has now become an aesthetic norm in global exhibitions of contemporary art, with artists creating ‘diurnal’ projects responding to local problems, working with local art co-ops, unexpected sites, walks and mapping to engage memory and place.28 This book has tried to understand the varied ways that ‘the personal is political’ has shifted both the way we do art and the way we do politics. This slogan is still relevant today, in prompting intersectional reflection on how experiences of gender are also articulated by race, class, sexuality, disability, religion and geography. Feminist art has invented and tested a creative and activist politics that is more nuanced and enabling than both modernism’s oppositional avant-gardism and the traditional political creed of ‘human solidarity’. The personal is political at home, in the studio, workplace or on country. It asks us to reflect and enact what French-Israeli artist Bracha Lichtenberg-Ettinger and others term ‘wit(h)ness’:29 creative acts of being together, of bearing witness, and ‘standing with’ others of this Earth in ways that are as powerful as Sisterhood.

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Notes 1 Alex Martinis Roe, ‘Artist’s Talk’, Victorian College of the Arts, 24 August 2020, moderated by David Sequeira, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y93n3_l0WhU& feature=youtu.be accessed 23 November 2020. 2 Griselda Pollock, keynote, ‘Where are we now?’, ‘Know My Name’ Conference, National Gallery of Australia, 10 November 2020. 3 Griselda Pollock, ‘Where are we now?’, 2020. 4 For example, artist Philipa Veitch was elected to Randwick Council in Sydney, New South Wales in 2017, and is currently serving as Deputy Mayor, while artist Gabrielle de Vietri was elected to Yarra Council in Melbourne, Victoria in 2020, and is currently serving as Mayor. Both belong to the Greens Party. 5 See in this context María Lugones, ‘Heterosexualism and the colonial/modern gender system’, Hypatia, 22 (1): 186–219, 2007; María Lugones, ‘Toward a decolonial feminism’, Hypatia, 25 (4): 742–759, 2010; and Oyèrónké Oyeˇ wùmí, The Invention of Women—Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses, Minneapolis; London: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. 6 Noëlle McAfee and Katie B. Howard, ‘Feminist political philosophy’, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2018, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/feminism-political/#Dem Fem accessed 23 November 2020. 7 Judith Baca, cited by Suzanne Lacy, ‘Affinities: thoughts on an incomplete history’, including a conversation with Judith Baca, in Norma Broude, Judith K. Brodsky, and Mary D. Garrard (eds) The Power of Feminist Art: Emergence, Impact and Triumph of the American Feminist Art Movement, New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1994, 274. 8 See Alex Martinis Roe, To Become Two (2014–2017), which examines context-specific ‘cultures of gathering’ as a point for contemporary reflection. See also her Genealogies/Frameworks for Exchange (2011); Non-writing histories (2012); The Practice of Doing (2013); and Our Future Network (2017), https://alexmartinisroe.com/ accessed 23 November 2020. 9 Peter Wollen, ‘The two avant-gardes’, Readings and Writings: Semiotic Counter-Strategies, London: Verso, 1982. 10 Brenda Croft, panel presentation for ‘Alternate Histories’ at ‘Know My Name’ Conference, National Gallery of Australia, 11 November 2020, https://nga.gov.au/knowm yname/conference.cfm accessed 23 November 2020. 11 This and related points have been discussed in the context of Contemporary Australia: Women, curated by Julie Ewington (Queensland Gallery of Modern Art, 2012); and Know My Name: Australian Women Artists 1900 to Now, curated by Deborah Hart and Elspeth Pitt (National Gallery of Australia, 2020–2021). The Know My Name project was prompted in part by the acknowledgement that only 25% of artworks in the Australian art collection at the National Gallery of Australia are by women. 12 The first interdisciplinary Australian feminist arts journal was LIP (1976–1984). See Barbara Hall, ‘The women’s liberation movement and the visual arts: a selective chronology 1969–90’, in Catriona Moore (ed.) Dissonance: Feminism and the Arts 1970–90, Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1994. 13 As widely reported in the n.paradoxa special issue on ‘Feminist pedagogies’: Vol. 26, July 2010, https://www.ktpress.co.uk/nparadoxa-volume-details.asp?volumeid=26 accessed 23 November 2020. 14 Angela Dimitrakaki cites contemporary curatorial collectives such as Why, How and for Whom? (Zagreb, 1999), who maintain feminism’s long-standing programmatic and anticapitalist work of ‘curating critique’ rather than simply ‘curating art’. Angela Dimitrakaki, Gender, artWork and the Global Imperative: A Materialist Feminist Critique, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013, 220. 15 See Barbara Hall, ‘Women in the arts’, Scarlet Woman Special Visual Arts Issue, 8 March 1975, reprinted in Moore 1994, 278. In June 1974, the Sydney Women’s Art Movement also surveyed the situation facing women artists in Sydney galleries and collected by the Art Gallery of New South Wales. They found 22% of artists shown in

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16 17 18 19

20 21

22 23 24 25 26 27 28

29

commercial galleries that were women. The Art Gallery of New South Wales reported that its collection held paintings by only nine women. Galvanised, the Women’s Art Movement then surveyed women students’ experiences and expectations at the National Art School (then called East Sydney Tech), following the landmark exhibition 50 Years of the National Art School, showing work by only two women artists. This was followed up in 1977 when Bonita Ely and others researched the structural discrimination facing women in art education. Artworkers Union (NSW), Affirmative Action for Women in the Visual Arts, Sydney: Artworkers Union, 1985. Dimitrakaki, 2013, 203. The CoUNTess Reports from 2016 and 2019. Unfortunately the CoUNTess Reports did not differentiate between First Nations and non-Indigenous artists, http://www.the countessreport.com.au/ and https://countess.report/ accessed 23 November 2020. Amy Prcevich, Elvis Richardson, and Miranda Samuels, CoUNTess Report, 2019, https:// countess.report/content/2019_countess_report.pdf. We note that this research informed the 2020 Know My Name projects at the National Gallery of Australia, in recognition of the need for equitable representation and diverse viewpoints to be expressed in Australia’s premier national gallery. Genevieve Grieves, ‘Where are we now?’, Keynote paper, ‘Know My Name’ Conference, National Gallery of Australia, 10 November 2020. See Fred Myers and Nicolas Peterson, ‘The origins and history of outstations as Aboriginal life projects’ in Fred Myers and Nicolas Peterson (eds), Experiments in Self-determination: Histories of the Outstation Movement in Australia, Canberra: Australian National University Press, 2016, 1–22. See full statement on the Ngaanyatjarra, Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara (NPY) Women’s Council, https://www.npywc.org.au/ accessed 23 November 2020. As documented and discussed at the Contemporary Arts and Feminism ‘Teaching to Transgress’ exhibition, workshops and discussions, Sydney University College of the Arts, 2014. Note for instance the standardised learning outcomes and graduate qualities promised by the University of Sydney, https://www.sydney.edu.au/students/graduate-qualities.html accessed 23 November 2020. Joan Tronto’s four elements of care, first articulated in Joan C. Tronto, Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care, New York: Routledge, 1993. Susan Mendus, Feminism and Emotion: Readings in Moral and Political Philosophy, London, Macmillan, 2000, 105. See Cheshire Calhoun, ‘Justice, care, gender bias’, Journal of Philosophy, 85 (9): 451–463, 1988, 45. We see these long-standing feminist practices informing the ‘post-Documenta 11’ curatorial platform, including site-specific and community-based projects associated with that and following Documenta exhibitions, including those of Thomas Hirschhorn, Huit Facettes and Alfredo Jaar. Bracha Lichtenberg-Ettinger, ‘Traumatic wit(h)ness-thing and matrixial co/in-habit(u) ating 1’, Parallax, 5 (1): 89–98, 1999.

References Art Forum. 2020. Faculty of Fine Arts and Music, University of Melbourne, https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=y93n3_l0WhU&feature=youtu.be. Artworkers Union (NSW), ed. 1985. Affirmative Action for Women in the Visual Arts. Sydney: Artworkers Union. Broude, Norma, Brodsky, Judith K., and Garrard, Mary D. eds. 1994. The Power of Feminist Art: The American Movement of the 1970s, History and Impact. New York: Harry N. Abrams.

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Calhoun, Cheshire. 1988. ‘Justice, care, gender bias’, Journal of Philosophy, 85 (9): 451–463. Dimitrakaki, Angela. 2013. Gender, ArtWork and the Global Imperative: A Materialist Feminist Critique. Manchester; New York: Manchester University Press. Lichtenberg-Ettinger, Bracha. 1999. ‘Traumatic wit(h)ness-thing and matrixial co/in-habit (u)ating 1’, Parallax (Leeds, England), 5 (1): 89–98. Lugones, María. 2007. ‘Heterosexualism and the colonial/modern gender system’, Hypatia, 22 (1): 186–219. Lugones, María. 2010. ‘Toward a decolonial feminism’, Hypatia, 25 (4): 742–759. McAfee, Noëlle, and Howard, Katie B. 2018. ‘Feminist political philosophy’, in Edward N. Zalta (ed.) Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2015/ entries/feminism-political/#Aca Mendus, Susan. 2000. Feminism and Emotion: Readings in Moral and Political Philosophy. London: Macmillan. Moore, Catriona, ed. 1994. Dissonance: Feminism and the Arts 1970–1990. St Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin in association with Artspace. Myers, Fred, and Peterson, Nicolas. 2016. Experiments in Self-Determination: Histories of the Outstation Movement in Australia. Canberra: ANU Press. Oyeˇ wùmí, Oyèrónké. 1997. The Invention of Women—Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses. Minneapolis; London: University of Minnesota Press. Prcevich, Amy, Richardson, Elvis, and Samuels, Miranda. 2019. ‘The CoUNTess Report’, https://countess.report/ Richardson, Elvis. 2016. ‘The CoUNTess Report’, http://www.thecountessreport.com.au/ Tronto, Joan C. 1993. Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care. New York: Routledge. Wollen, Peter. 1982. Readings and Writings: Semiotic Counter-Strategies. London: Verso.

INDEX

Entries in italics are works of art, unless otherwise indicated. Page numbers in italics indicate a figure. Aboriginal culture 112, 130, 168, 170–176, 182, 197n32 see also First Nations; importance of craft 130–132; language groups depicted in art 143, 150–151; representation of dispossession 139; stewardship of land and country 170–173 Abramovic´, M. 50, 53–54, 63, 104 Academy as Potentiality (book) 99 active teaching and learning 96 activism 1, 2, 5, 85–86, 186 see also individual protest movements; blended activism 244; craftivism 6, 129–130, 132–134, 152–155; ecofeminism 168, 171, 178–182, 243; and feminism 237–345; and pedagogy 100–116; in public spaces 215–216 Adams, J. 89, 90 aesthetics 204–205; and community engagement 212–213 Afshar, H. 50, 74–76, 75 agency, discussion of term 64–65 Agrivina, I. 172, 179 Ahmed, S. 51, 94 Ahmett, I. 193 Aldridge, I. 65 Allas, T. 145, 147 Amazon Acres, lesbian-feminist commune 18–20; Amazon Acres (H. Grace) 18, 38 Amira, L. 206, 221–223 Anderson, J. 217

Année dernière à Marienbad, L’ (film) 110 Antin, E. 55 apartheid 37 Aproximación al Lugar de los Hechos (Proximity to the scene) (T. Margolles) 227 Archer, S. 90–91 Arni, C. 73, 73–74 Arruda, M. 115 ARTHouse (V. German) 111 Así Terminan las Ratas (That’s how rats end up) (T. Margolles) 226 Asian table (S. Goffman) 194 Audition, The (S. Boyce) 66 Australian Women Artists: One Hundred Years (exhibition) 89 authors, background of 2–3 Ayanda & Nhlanhla Moremi’s wedding (Z. Muholi) 37 Aydemir, C. 206, 219–221, 219 Baca, J. 238–239 Ball, N. 130, 142–143 Barad, K. 52, 54, 64 Basking (S. Waters) 140 batik 131–132 BC (artist collective) 87, 100, 104–105 bead work 143, 150–151 beauty, experience of 145–147, 178–179 Begin Again, The (A. Mesiti) 210–212, 211 Bell, M. 171, 189, 191

Index 249

Benjamin, A. 214 Benjamin, W. 98, 151–152 Bennett, J. 179–181 Benson, L. 130, 149, 151 Bergh, Sissel M. 172, 178 Berlin Burghers Microwave (J. Williams) 61–62 Beuys, J. 86 Big Ox (M. Schapiro) 25 Bighead, Garbageface, Guards, Ghost, Derr Sonata (J. Williams) 61–62 Binns, V. 17, 25–27, 26, 28, 134 Bird Rose, D. 170, 173, 174–175 birds, in art 184 Biscarra Dilley, S. 143 Black, A. 135, 149 Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement 1, 15, 35–36, 57, 225, 238 Black Lunch Table, The (J. Valentine & H. Hart) 103 blood 70 body, the: bodily fluids 70, 89; materialist conception of 63, 63–76 Body Politic, The (Pushpamala N) 74 Bonjour Paris! Je suis une artiste Aussie! (A. Klose) 61 Boolarng Nangamai (Together Dreaming) Art Centre 172, 191 Botha, R. 28 Boyce, S. 50, 63, 65–67, 67 Braidotti, R. 50–51, 52 Brave Beauties (Z. Muholi) 37 breast milk 70 Brodsky, J. 7 Broude, N. 7 Bryson, N. 147 Bulbul Bird, The (poem) 173 Burisch, N. 135, 149 Burn, I. 90 Butler, J. 20, 153 Butler, R. 33 Cains, C. 192 Cameron, P. 146 Campbell, B. 59, 172, 184, 185 care and caring 6–7, 87, 89, 101–102, 130, 135–137, 143–145, 216, 242–244 Carousel, The (Soda_Jerk) 109, 109 Carrington, B. 113 Carter, M. 142 Catalysis (A. Piper) 55 Chang, P. 50, 63, 68–70, 69 chapters, descriptions of 7–9 Chicago, J. 92–93 cinema 16, 109, 110, 183, 210, 212 circles, working in 17, 92–93, 150

Citizen’s Band (A. Mesiti) 212 citizenship 110–111, 152 Civil Rights movement (1954–68) 14 Cixous, H. 22, 28, 30 Class, The (A. Rasdjarmrearnsook) 105–106 Cleveland, B. 104–105, 104 climate change 205, 238; and contemporary art 168; as driver for art 179; students striking for 1 clothing, act of mending 143–144 coalitional action 2, 14, 17 Cochrane, G. 137 collage 30, 142–143, 152, 216–217 colonialism 223–224; and intimate landscapes 189 community: crafting 147–152; engaging with 1, 7, 205; Indigenous art gardens in 191; Indigenous pedagogy 113; peer-to-peer learning in 115–116; representation of non-heteronormative 18–20, 38; 1970s community arts 211–12; working with 110 Conversation Pieces (LEVEL collective) 102–103 Cooper, D. 189 cottage industry craft revival 148 CoUNTess Project: The Pool of Artists (S. Chandler) 114 country, Aboriginal reading of 173–175, 186 Cousland, A. 171, 189, 191 COVID-19 pandemic 54, 70, 205 Cracking the Whip (Pushpamala N) 73 crafting 243; in Aboriginal Australia 130–132; and community 147–152; craftivism 6, 129–130, 132–134, 152–155; relationship with care and caring 137 crochet 134, 135, 137, 153, 155 Crop Over (S. Boyce) 66–67, 67 Crow, R. 101 Crutch Dance (J. Williams) 61–62, 62 curators and curation 132 curricula, women in 90–92 dance 61–62, 67–68, 70–72, 212, 216; as metaphor for decolonialism 31–32 Dark Matter (Soda_Jerk) 108 de Certeau, M. 140 de Luca, R. 172, 193 De Que Otra Cosa Podríamos Hablar? (T. Margolles) 226 Death of the Pole Dancer (E. Jocson) 71 decolonialism 150–151, 242; Zanele Muholi 37–39 Deepwell, K. 88–91, 93 democracy, performative 152–155 Dickens, C. 154

250 Index

Dickens, K. 17, 36, 36–37 Dickensian Circus, A (K. Dickens) 36–37 didacticism, in art 85, 90, 109 digital performance 54 Dimitrakaki, A. 240 Dinner Party (J. Chicago) 25 do Prado, P. 17, 29, 29–30, 32 Doane, MA. 22 Documenta (Z. Muholi) 38 Doley, K. 104–105 Dombrovski, P. 169 domesticity and creativity 6, 8, 18, 60, 70, 89, 102, 129, 131–137, 148–149, 244 D’Oyley Show: An Exhibition of Women’s Domestic Fancywork 133 Dreamings and Dreamtime 112, 130, 168, 175–176, 182, 197n32 Dube, A. 87, 100, 106–107 Eagle, M. 173 ecofeminism 168, 171, 243; sculpture 178–182 ecological art, evaluation of 184–188 education 5–6; debates about 86–87 Elliot, M. 143–144 Ellsworth, E. 95, 100 Ely, B. 88, 89, 172, 186–187 Emancipated Spectator (book) 95–96 Embajada (Embassy) (T. Margolles) 226 embroidery 6 see also sewing emotions, at centre of disciplines 5, 50, 51, 89–90 Empowerment March (Tomorrow Girls Troop) 241 Enacting Others (book) 56 environmental sustainability: conservation petitions in Australia 169, 171; First Nations 168 Enwezor, O. 38 Ernabella community 130, 131–132 Ernst, M. 27 ethics 1, 2, 130, 135–137; aesthetics as 16; connection with care 6–7; proto-ethical energy 35 ethnicity, representations of 241–242 Etsy 148 Euraba Papermakers 87, 100, 111–112 Ewington, J. 171 Ex Avibus (B. Campbell) 184 Extremist Activity (ride) (C. Aydemir) 219, 219–220 Faces and Phases (Z. Muholi) 37, 38 failure: of artistic vision 85; in feminist performance 58–63

Family Gorgeous drag collective 66 family structures, feminist relationship with 134–135 Fashioning Discontinuities (B. Hester) 214, 215 Faustine, N. 206, 225 Featherstone, M. 101–102 femininity: in nature 171; representations of 13–20, 50; staged deconstruction of 20–24 feminism: and activism 237–244; in Australia 2–3; authors’ approach to 3–7; coalitional 2; contemporary priorities 35; corporeal 24–30; craftivism 129–130; crafts movement 132–134; ecofeminism 168, 178–182; and histories of performance art 55–57; links to contemporary issues 1–2; pedagogical philosophy 87–95; pedagogy 85–87; and performance of failure 58–63; in public spaces 210–227; rationale for exploring performance through 49–52; relationship with patriarchal family structures 134–135; second wave response to female representation 14–20 Ferran, A. 59 Field Libraries (E. Floyd) 101 Filipino Superwoman Band (E. Jocson) 72 Film for My Nanna (A. Klose) 60–61, 61 First Nations 2, 3, 6, 15, 16, 19, 112–113, 113; acknowledgment of country stewardship 186, 190; approach to nature 170; avoidance of tropes 35–36; connecting with country 173–175; crafting 129, 130; culture of women teaching women 87; curation of art and craft 132; representation of 240–241; repurposing of colonial archives 30–31 Fisher, P. 179 flame of the Pacific, The (T. Salina & I. Ahmett) 193 flash mobs 155, 244 Florêncio, J. 53 Flores, P. D. 70, 71–72 Flowing Locks (H. Raisin) 59, 59–60 Floyd, E. 87, 100, 101–102, 102 Foley, F. 17, 30, 32, 59 Foley, G. 101 folk craft 150–151 For the Women (Warmun Art movement) 112–113, 113 Foucault, M. 4 fracking, protests against 153–155 Frameworks for Exchange (A. Martinis Roe) 108 Friere, P. 88 frottage 27

Index 251

Fruitful corsage, bridal bouquet, lingering veils (S. Norrie) 21 Fuhrmann, A. 105–106 Gallop, J. 94 Garneau, D. 16 Garrard, M. 7 Gathering of the Waters, A (B. Irland) 187, 187–188 Gaulke, C. 55 gender 20, 238; artistic approaches to 7–8, 33–34, 51, 57, 60, 65, 70–71, 116, 153, 209–212, 218–219; bias on Wikipedia 103; constructions of 14, 15, 19, 24–25, 39, 242; in education 88, 90–92; female crafting 129–137; instability of roles 31–32; intersectionalism 244; politics of 6; representations of 241–242; and violence 225; in Western view of nature 168–175, 243 Gerber, M. 31–32 German, V. 87, 100, 110–111 Gilligan, C. 135–136, 144 Gleaners, The (J-F. Millet) 106 Glissant, É. 31–32 globalisation 57, 144, 148, 149, 210, 240 Goffman, S. 172, 193–194, 194 Goldblatt, D. 38 Gordon, S. 145 Gospel of the Lenses, The (Octora) 23 Gough, J. 170 Grace, H. 17–20, 18, 21, 38 Grant, P. 169 grass weaving 175 Grbich, S. 172, 183–184, 183 Greeno, D. 130, 145–146, 146 Greeno, L. 146 Greer, B. 129–130 Groeneveld, E. 149 Grosz, E. 4, 20, 24–25, 35, 64 Gruben, M. 172, 176–178, 177 Guattari, F. 92, 96, 97–98 Haines, D. 179 Halsall, F. 28 Hamington, M. 153 Handran, C. 220–221 handshake with the past, A (R. Ormella) 145 HAPPYLAND (E. Jocson) 72 Haraway, D. 52 Harbour Bridge (E. Timbery) 142 Hard Hitting Sister II (K. Dickens) 36 Hardt, M. 212–213 Hart, H. 103 Hartt, J. 172, 190

Haynes, R. 220–221 Heddon, D. 63 Held, V. 137, 144 Hemings, S. 223–224 Hemmings, C. 35 Hester, B. 206, 213–216 Hill, W. 101 Hinterding, J. 179 Hitchcock, A. 110 Holloway, E. 191 Holmes, J. 169 Hoods (J. Chicago) 25 hooks, b. 87–88 Hope and the Dream of the Slave, The (M. Williamson) 224 hospitality, in art 101, 103 Host (E. Jocson) 71, 72 humanism 64, 90, 91, 171, 178 Hunt, A. 112–113 Hyla and the Nymphs (J. W. Waterhouse), Sonia Boyce engagement piece 65 I Bind You Nancy (N. Ball) 142 I WON’T LET YOU OUT OF MY SIGHT (C. Aydemir) 220–221 ice, working with 188 identity: concepts of 51–52, 56–57; identity politics 16, 39, 49; loss of, and environmental degradation 191 Ignorant Schoolmaster, The (book) 95–96 Illuminate (Euraba Papermakers) 112 Indigenous peoples see Aboriginal culture; First Nations industrial relations 144–145 inequality 4, 37, 96, 209, 225 Ingold, T. 24–25, 64, 65 interdisciplinary working 139–143 intergenerational work 6, 8, 87, 101, 107, 112, 142, 175, 216 intimate landscapes 188–191 Invocation for a Wandering Lake Part II (P. Chang) 69 Irigary, L. 4, 60, 64, 107 Irland, B. 172, 187–188, 187 Jahoda, S. 116 Jayamanne, L. 134 Jefferson, T. (President of the USA 1801–1809) 223–224 Jocson, E. 50, 63, 70–72, 71 Jones, A. 53–54, 55, 57, 87 Jones, C. 172, 181–182 Jones, J. 112 Jubelin, N. 130, 138, 139 Judith Beheading Holofernes (A. Gentileschi) 106

252 Index

Kaprow, A. 7, 93–94 Kelada, O. 30 Kelly, D. 206, 216–217, 217 Kester, G. 96–97 Keywords (A. Dube) 106 Kgnwarreye, E. 132 Klose, A. 50, 58, 60–61, 61, 63 KNAG (Knitting Nannas Against Gas) 130, 153–155 knitting 6, 95; knittivism 130, 153–155 Kohlberg, L. 136 Kordoski, K. 176–177 Kristeva, J. 4 Kubler, G. 110 Kungkarrangkalnga-ya Parrpakanu (Seven Sisters Are Flying) 173–174, 174 La Búsqueda (2) (T. Margolles) 226 Labour Garden (E. Floyd) 102 Lacy, S. 3, 7, 76, 86, 93–94, 95, 238–239 LAGOM: Breaking Bread With The SelfRighteous (L. Amira) 222–223 Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act (1976) 131, 169 landscape: intimate landscapes 188–191; Maureen Gruben’s Arctic work 176–178; views of 172–178; Western traditions 243 Larsen, C. 152 Laurence, J. 179 lesbians 18–19, 37, 60, 207–208 Letdown (Milk) (P. Chang) 69 Lettrism 15 LEVEL 87, 100 LEVEL art collective 102–103, 103 Lewis, J. 211–12 Lichtenberg-Ettinger, B. 244 Limpieza (Cleaning) (T. Margolles) 226 LIP Magazine 89 Lippard, L. 7, 53, 55 listening projects 134–135, 243–244 Looking for Ghana & the Red Suitcase (L. Amira) 221–222 Los Angeles, sexual assault data in art 93 Luckman, S. 148 Luncheon on the Grass (C. Monet) 106 Mabo, Bonita 101 Mabo, Eddie 101 Macho Dancer (E. Jocson) 71, 71–72 MacLean, I. 169 Madrell, A. 206 Mahler, A. 17, 27, 27–28 Maimom, V. 96 Making (book) 64 Making History (B. Cleveland) 104

Malone, G. 185–186 Manning, E. 98–99 Mapplethorpe, R. 38 Margolin, V. 184–186, 194 Margolles, T. 206, 225–227, 227 Marika, B. 182 Martin, A. 30 Martinis Roe, A. 87, 100, 107–108, 108, 239 Marxism 5, 13, 50–51 materialism: conceptions of 63–76; and process 137–143, 179 materials, non-toxic 191–192 Mattingly, M. 172, 189–190, 190 Mbembe, A. 222 McCarthy, F. 133 McKenzie, R. 133 McKinnon, C. 16 media and materials, mindful engagement with 137–143 memorialisation 223–227 Mendieta, A. 110 Mertz, R. B. 111 Mesa (Table) (T. Margolles) 226 Mesiti, A. 206, 210–213, 211 methodology, of discussing environment 172 MeToo movement 1, 15, 28, 35–36, 57, 238 Mildura Sculpture Triennials 170–171, 189 Milk Debt (P. Chang) 68, 69 Mitchell, A. 173, 189 Mobile Seed Story Broadcasting Station (C. Orr & J. Hartt) 190 Moeng, M. 103, 106 Moffat, T. 17, 32–35, 34 Momentum (Simpson, L.) 67 Mondloch, K. 52 Moor, A (J. Northcote), Sonia Boyce engagement piece 65 Moore, M. 153 Morgan, M. 138 Morimura, Y. 72 Morris, W. 148 Moss, P. 206 Mothers’ Memories, Others’ Memories (material history project) 134 Muholi, Z. 17, 37–39 Mulka Project, The 113 Mundine, D. 172 Mununggurr, N. 133–134 Murray River Punch (B. Ely) 186 Muslim identity 219–221 My Horizon (T. Moffat) 33 Nancy, J-L. 204, 211 Narau, artist 133–134

Index 253

Narcomensajes (T. Margolles) 226 Native Women of South India: Manners and Customs (Pushpamala N) 73–74 Natty Solo 206, 218–219, 218 Natty Solo: One woman, one camera, no film (N. Thomas) 218 nature: conceptions of 171–172, 243; interaction with 182–183 Negri, A. 212–213 New National Sport, The (C. Aydemir) 221 Ngal, G. 131 Ngali-ngalim-boorroo (For the Women) (Warmun Art Movement) 112–113, 113 No Human Being is Illegal (in all our glory) (D. Kelly) 216–217, 217 Nochlin, L. 129 Noddings, N. 136 Norman, R. 186 Norrie, S. 17, 21, 21–22 Not Gone With The Wind Lefferts House, Brooklyn (N. Faustine) 225 n.paradoxa (journal) 91 O’Brien, S. 217 Occupy movement 1, 15, 149, 238; and crafting 152–155 Octora 17, 23, 23–24, 30, 32 Of Supply Chains (workbook) 116 1001st island (T. Salina) 192 Orientalism 22–24 Ormella, R. 130, 144–145, 145 Orr, C. 172, 190 Orr, J. 171 Owner Builder of Modern California House (N. Jubelin) 138–139, 139 Para Que Aprendan a Respetar (So you’ll learn respect) (T. Margolles) 226 Parachute for Ladies 50, 63, 67 Parker, R. 6 participatory art 86, 94–95, 213–217, 224, 243–244 Participatory Community Embroidery series (L. Benson) 150–151; You and Me 151 Partridge, T. 143 Pasadena Lifesavers (J. Chicago) 25 patriarchy 33, 68, 136, 208, 209; surreptitious resistance to 35 Pearlman, A. 137–138 pedagogy 5–6, 86; in contemporary art 85; debates about 95–100; feminist and critical pedagogy 87–95; international feminist approaches 100–116 Pedagogy: The Question of Impersonation (book) 94

Pedagogy of the Oppressed, The 88 Perfect Marriage, A (I. Agrivina) 179 performance 1, 242; Cigdem Aydemir 219–220; lecture performance 108; limitations of 76; performative democracy 152–155; performative movement 223; re-emergence and feminist context 49–58; teaching as 94 Perkins, H. 32 personal experience, as political 16, 17, 21–22, 85–86, 89–90, 129–130, 130, 137, 139, 178, 244 Petyarre, K. 132 Phelan, P. 55 Philisa: Ditaola (To Heal: Divining Bones) (L. Amira) 222 philosophy 50, 53, 130, 135–137, 169; in education 88, 90–91, 112 Phoenix, F. 137 photography 7, 14, 21, 183, 186, 242; Alice Mahler 27–28; Deborah Kelly 216–217; Helen Grace 17–20; Hoda Ashfar 74–76; Karla Dickens 36–37; landscape 169; Lhola Amira 221–223; Nona Faustine 225; Octora 23–24; Olegas Truchanas & Peter Dombrovski 169; Patty Chang 69; Pushpamala N 72–74; repurposing archival (Fiona Foley) 30–31; Scarred for Life series (T. Moffat) 32–35; Sonia Boyce 66; Zanele Muholi 37–39 Piccinini, P. 172, 179–181, 180 Piper, A. 55, 56 Planets, The (A. Rasdjarmrearnsook) 106 Plastic Histories (C. Aydemir) 221 Please leave these windows open … (B. Hester) 213–214 Plumwood, V. 6, 179 politics: action in public spaces 206–210; activism, cultural relationship with 15; conditions for action 35, 39; in contemporary context 2; new left 13–14; relationship with aesthetics 204–205; of representation 4–5, 14–20; understanding action 86 Pollinator, The (P. Piccinini) 180 Pollock, G. 3–4, 93, 237 Poppe, E. R. M. 116 pornography, reinterpretation of 15, 25, 28–30 Portals (T. Moffat) 33 potentiality 99–100 Prain, L. 153 Prcevich, A. 113–115 Priestly, M. 112 project spaces 103, 116

254 Index

psycholoanalytic theory 4, 15, 20, 22, 31, 68, 97, 243 public spaces: feminism in 7, 210–227; political action in 206–210 Pulkara, D. 170 Pushpamala N 50, 63, 72–74, 73 Pussy Riot 153–154 queerness and queer aesthetics 19, 30, 105–106, 216, 216–218, 221; pedagogy 111; photography and performance 242; theory and term definitions 51; viewpoints 37, 37–38 radical pedagogy 98–99 Rainer, L. 108 Rainer, Y. 104 Raisin, H. 50, 58–60, 59, 63 Rancière, J. 5, 86, 92, 95–97, 204–205, 212–213 Rasdjarmrearnsook, A. 87, 100, 105–106 Reckitt, H. 86 Reclaim the Night 244 recycling projects 143–144, 168, 172, 189, 191–194, 193 reflection theory 13–14 remediation 168, 171–172, 185–186 Remembering Barbara Cleveland 104 representation: decolonialism as lens for feminist art 31–32; politics of 239–240; and social reality 4; Western systems of 22–23; of working class life 32–35 research questions, list of 2 resistance 16, 27, 38–39, 208, 212; de-colonial 31, 239; embodied in shell necklaces 145; feminine display as 32; Modoc resistance 142; to patriarchal convention 35; public craft as 6; pussy hats as 153 Resnais, A. 110 Richardson, E. 87, 100, 113–115 Riviere, J. 22 Rogoff, I. 96, 99–100 Rosler, M. 55 round table, The (E. Floyd & M. Featherstone) 101–102 Rrap, J. 59 Salina, T. 172, 192, 192–193 Salley, R. J. 38–39 Samuels, M. 113–115 Saner, E. 37 Sangre Recuperada (Recuperated blood) (T. Margolles) 226

Scarred for Life series (T. Moffat) 32–35; Heart Attack 34 Scarry, E. 147, 178–179 Schechner, R. 94 Schneeman, C. 104 scientific experimentation, as art 179 sculpture 21, 117, 182, 188, 220; Emily Floyd 101; interpreting landscapes and country 171–178; Mary Mattingley 189–190; Natalie Ball 142–143; Patricia Piccinini 180–181; Sarah Goffman 193–194; Vanessa German 110–111 Sculpturescape 170–171, 189 Sepiasiren (P. do Prado) 29, 29–30 Seven Easy Pieces (M. Abramovic´) 53–54 Seven Sisters, songlines of 175–176 Sevenhuijsen, S. 137 72 Canal, Sojourner Truth’s Home (N. Faustine) 225 sewing 6, 138, 144, 148, 150, 243 sexual assaults, data used in art 93 sexuality 15, 20, 25, 37, 51, 59, 60, 105, 242, 244 see also gender Shabazz, L. 66 Shell Necklace (D. Greeno) 146 shell work 140–142, 145–147 Shellworked Slippers (E.Timbery) 141 Sherman, C. 72 Simpson, L. 67 Sinha, A. 74 SINKING: Xa Siqamla Unxubo (L. Amira) 223 Site Occupied 2 (C. Aydemir) 220 Smith, C. 56 Smithson, R. 110 social change and social movements 1, 13–14, 113–114 see also individual movements; art engaging with 35; despite COVID-19 stay-at-home orders 54 social media, as organising platforms 149–150 Soda_Jerk 87, 100, 108–110, 109 Solar Objects (B. Hester) 214 Somatic Drifts V1.0 181–182 Some Lads (T. Moffat) 33 Somnyama Ngonyama, Hail the Dark Lioness (Z. Muholi) 37 songlines 174, 175, 197n32 Sonic alterations of constructed space with metal objects (B. Hester) 214–215 spaces, for creative practice 103, 116, 242–243 Spivak, G. Chakravorty 22, 56–57 Springgay, S. 95 Sproul, L. 59

Index 255

Stephen, A. 89 stereotypes: of femininity 13–14, 17, 20, 89, 93, 148, 154, 171; First Nations 30; gender 55, 60; of Muslim women 171; national identity 74, 74–76 Stiles, K. 56 Stitching My Landscape (M. Gruben) 177 storytelling 151–152 string figures 133–134 String Theory: Focus on Contemporary Australian Art 134 Study Center for Group Work, The (C. Woolard) 116 Subversive Stitch, The (book) 6 Sugar Coated (H. Raisin) 60 sustainability 1, 87, 112, 169, 170, 185–188, 191–194 Sweet Chariot (M. Williamson) 224 Tale of Two Cities, A (book), Madame Defarge knitting in 154 Tank Man Tango (D. Kelly) 216 Tarjetas Para Picar Cocaína (Cards to cut cocaine) (T. Margolles) 226 Tawale, S. 50, 63, 67–68 teaching: active 96; gender imbalance in art institutions 88–91; as performance 94 Teaching to Transgress (book) 87–88 Terror Nullius (Soda_Jerk) 109 textiles 129–135, 139 Tharu, S. 73–74 The Re-Living Room (A. Klose) 61 theatre: cross-dressing in 31–32; natural environment as 182 Thomas, M. 33 Thomas, N. 218–219 Thomas, P. 113 three ecologies theory (Guattari) 96, 97–98 Three Weeks in May (S. Lacy & L. Labowitz) 93 Tiananmen Square massacre 216 Timbery, E. 130, 140–142, 141 Tjanpi Desert Weavers 172, 173–175, 174 Tolokonnikova, N. 153–154 trauma, depiction of 32–34, 93, 142, 143, 225–227 Tronto, J. 152, 243 Truchanas, O. 169 truth-telling 16, 32, 35–36, 130, 145 Under Western Eyes (H. Ashfar) 74–76 Untitled (J. Koons) 106 urine 70 Utopia art centre 130, 131–132

Vag Dens (V. Binns) 25, 26 vagina and vulva, depictions of 25–27, 28, 60; pink pussy hats 153–154, 244 Valentine, J. 103 Vertical Cut (Soda_Jerk) 110 Vertigo (film) 110 video: Anastasia Klose 60–61; Angelica Mesiti 210–212; Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook 105–106; Basia Irland 187–188; Cigdem Aydemir 219–221; Eisa Jocson 71–72; feminist identity 58; Hannah Raisin 60; Julie Gough 170; Justene Williams 61–63; Lhola Amira 221–223; Marisa Williamson 223–224; Mary Mattingley 189–190; Maureen Gruben 176–178; Patty Chang 69; Sasha Grbich 183–184; Sissel M. Bergh 178; Soda_Jerk 108–110; Sonia Boyce 66–67; Tita Salina 192–193; Zanele Muholi 37 Village and Elsewhere (A. Rasdjarmrearnsook) 106 visibility, politics of 217–223 Vox Hybrida 7 (A. Mahler) 27 voyeurism 19–20, 25 Waljbira (poet) 173 Wandering Lake, The (P. Chang) 68–69 Wark, J. 55 Warmun community 87, 100, 112–113 water, working with 186–188 Waters, S. 130, 138–139, 140 We need to talk (Recipe for a Revolution) (LEVEL collective) 103 weaving 6, 130, 131, 175, 191 Well There You Are (B. Campbell) 184, 185 Westoxicated #7, Under Western Eyes (H. Ashfar) 75 Wetland (M. Mattingley) 190 What Would Sally Do? (M. Williamson) 224 When Harry met Sally. I mean … (N. Ball) 142 white privilege, in contemporary craft 148–149 Whitewash (M. Elliot) 143–144 Whitfield, C. 109–110 Widrich, M. 54, 223 Williams, J. 50, 58, 61–62, 61–63 Williamson, M. 206, 223–224 Wind Work (Windy Point) (S. Grbich) 183, 183–184 Womanifesto, Womanifesto workshop 242 women of colour (WOC) 2, 15; avoidance of tropes 35–36 Women’s Art Register (Melbourne) 88, 89

256 Index

Women’s Domestic Needlework Group 130, 133 Women’s Liberation movement 14, 17, 19, 51, 89, 133, 237, 240, 244 Woolard, C. 87, 100, 115–116 working-class representation 32–35 world, conceptions of 4, 204–206 world fully accessible by no living being, A (B. Hester) 214

Wyman, J. 152, 153–154 yarn bombing 149, 153 Yeats, E. 148 Yeats, S. ‘Lily’ 148 Yes and No: Things Learned About Feminism (K. Doley) 104–105 Yirrkala, petition against bauxite mining 169 Žižek, S. 153, 154