Know My Name: I Remember, They Remember, We Remember

By Elspeth Pitt

As we celebrate Australian woman artists with an expansive new exhibition, curator Elspeth Pitt explores the historical narratives of gender in art.

Know My Name: Australian Women Artists 1900 to Now brings together work by women artists. But there are other, deeper aims—to isolate moments in which women led progressive practice; to identify points at which their experience, unique to gender, facilitated new forms of art and cultural commentary; to suggest stylistic and intellectual relationships between artists through time; to inflect extant history with women’s living memory. In these ways the project aims to enrich the linear, male-dominated narratives we’ve typically known.

Lynda Draper Black widow, 2019 ceramics, glazed hand-built earthenware 120 x 96 x 86 cm National Gallery of Australia, Canberra The Sidney and Fiona Myer Family Foundation Fund 2019 Photo credit: National Gallery of Australia

While predicating an exhibition along the lines of gender is in many ways a complex undertaking, it represents in this instance an opening up, not a closing down, in that its aim is to enrich and at times overturn the dominant narratives. To do so is necessary, still, as the work of women even now remains lesser known and is by implication lesser valued. One has only to look at the collections of Australia’s cultural institutions to understand that the art of women is not represented to the same depth or degree as that of men.

This is not the first exhibition dedicated to women’s art held in Australia, and it draws on the remarkable scholarship of those who have dedicated their professional lives to the advocacy of women’s work. However, while the reach of this exhibition is historical its impetus is contemporary. The Me Too movement may have originated as a campaign against sexual violence but its cultural impact has been equally significant, inspiring many projects focused on women’s art, and compelling the kind of critical review undertaken by women and feminist art historians of the 1970s who ‘recovered’ artists of the early twentieth century neglected in general histories and public collections.

Now, curators are considering work made by women in the latter part of the twentieth century, some of which, given its performative and materially fluid nature, was collected infrequently or partially and now risks being neglected—even forgotten.

In recognising the cyclical nature of forgetting and remembering, this essay considers some of the circumstances that have impacted the development of women’s art, and the related production of history and discourse, since the 1970s. Any exhibition in its impermanent drawing together of works of artist an action that marks a moment in time; this one, too, is a gesture made against neglect, an appeal to remember, and to keep remembering.

An Artistic Tradition

In the catalogue for The women’s show, an exhibition of work by women artists held at venues across Adelaide in 1977, a list of figures was given.

Neither Jansen’s History of art (1962), recommended by the New South Wales Board of Senior Studies for years 11 and 12, nor Gombrich’s The story of art (1950) included a single woman artist. In Larousse’s Encyclopedia of modern art (1965) 134 women and 1796 men were referenced as having produced art after 1900. For women who aspired to be artists in the mid-to-late twentieth century it was often through projects like The women’s show which were underpinned by collective work and knowledge sharing that a life in art became possible. But it was also by looking back and re-writing the dominant histories that women recognised they were part of an artistic tradition that was not new but continuing.

Ethel Carrick The market, 1919 private collection, courtesy of Smith & Singer Fine Art

In an Australian context, the process of re-writing narratives that had excluded or diminished women occurred in a sustained manner from the 1970s, pioneered by curators and academics including Janine Burke, Julie Ewington, Joan Kerr and Kiffy Rubbo. Like revisionist and feminist art historians internationally they often employed two approaches in their work. One involved retrieving ‘lost’ or ‘forgotten’ artists and placing them within pre-existing art historical narratives. The other, in recognising that these frameworks were inherently flawed, disregarded them wholly to develop new ones. Although these methodologies were sometimes regarded as antithetical, with the insertion of women into existing narratives regarded as a concession to prejudiced histories, some projects evidenced the value of combining both approaches.

One of these was Janine Burke’s Australian women artists: one hundred years 1840–1940 which opened at the Ewing and George Paton Galleries in 1975. The first such undertaking of its kind in Australia, it predated comparable international surveys including Ws: 1550–1950 (Brooklyn Museum, 1977) and the ’78 Hayward annual (Hayward Gallery, 1978). Assembled by Burke at the age of 23 in little over six months, it brought together 71 works from collections across Australia.

While its catalogue now seems modest (slim, glue-bound, monochromatic) its then unusual format combined art historical essays that drew from and critiqued existing histories by William Moore and Bernard Smith, and long-form artist recollections by Grace Crowley and Margel Hinder, with each given equal weight. Embodying the delicate interplay of history and living memory, Burke suggested the pliancy of the former and the evident richness of the latter as a resource for further enquiry, and in doing so produced a document at once grounded, formative, burgeoning and perhaps most importantly, generative.

Her partial focus on women modernists made it one of several projects of the 1970s that facilitated the restoration of women artists including Grace Cossington Smith and Dorrit Black into the histories of modernism, and resulted in the acquisition of their work into public collections.

But it is something different to understand the practices of artists outside of more familiar frameworks, even if it had been a struggle to initially place them there. The painter and printmaker Dorrit Black, for example, has become closely aligned with the story of modernism but her work of the mid-1930s and 1940s eschewed its earlier dynamism in favour of efforts to portray a resonant and archaic energy evident in paintings such as In the foothills 1942 and The olive plantation 1946. Similarly, the work of photographer Olive Cotton, which from its inception was finely attuned to the rhythms of the natural world, set her practice apart from more typical iterations of modernist photography emphasising architectural pattern and vertiginous perspective. Although curators and academics have rightly argued for Black and Cotton’s recognition as key modernists, their art frequently operated outside of its more obvious tenets, compelled instead by distinct individualism. A quality that grew as their work matured, it was one also forced by personal circumstance and their exclusion — chosen and otherwise — from galleries, societies and artistic networks. Combined with continual economic uncertainty and the demands made on them by family, their practices were frequently drawn inward rather than outward, into the realm of idiosyncrasy and, often, originality.

The experiences of artists such as Black and Cotton suggest the inadequacy of art historical models that rely on ever forward moving trajectories of clearly defined, collective movements. Given this, it is unsurprising that subsequent generations of art historians have relied less on narratives based on groups and manifestos, and have turned to biographical and literary approaches that allow the retracing of their subject’s movements, permit speculation and imaginative conjecture, and facilitate the full integration of a subject’s art and life as opposed to their being obliquely referenced within self-reflexive art histories. Helen Ennis, Jennifer Higgie and the American writer Quinn Latimer are some of the authors who have in recent years forged and refined these approaches.

A dependence on advancing a history according to conceptions of outwardly avantgarde practices is also problematic in so far as these exclude more traditional artforms. As argued by Rex Butler and ADS Donaldson, there are certain types of progressive work that developed within tradition.

The figurative portraits and interiors of artists including Ethel Spowers, Agnes Goodsir and Janet Cumbrae Stewart, for example, may not seem radical, but they are pioneering in their evocation of women’s sexual desire and same-sex relationships. In her essay on Cumbrae Stewart in this volume, Juliette Peers considers the discomfort often implicit in discussions of the artist’s work, her early critics downplaying its keen sensuality, her later ones smarting at its seemingly complicit use of the academic idiom of the nude study, typically employed by men.

Agnes Goodsir Girl with cigarette, c.1925 Bendigo Art Gallery Bequest of Mrs Amy E Bayne, 1945 Photo credit: National Gallery of Australia

Grace Cossington Smith Study of a head: self portrait, 1916 National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Purchased with funds from the Marie and Vida Breckenridge bequest 2010 Photo credit: National Gallery of Australia

En Intime (The Intimate)

Corresponding with the advances of feminism in the 1970s, a specific collection of art practices inspired by women’s domestic experience emerged. In one sense, this work may be seen as a continuation of still life and interior painting produced by artists earlier in the century, which, in counter to en plein air—an approach to painting in nature often associated with male artists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries— was described as en intime.

Carrol Jerrems and Virginia Fraser’s A book about Australian women, published by Outback Press in 1974, undertook to document the lives of a diverse group of women—from artists to activists to sex workers—many of whom were photographed and interviewed in their homes. Jerrems’ remarkable ability to elicit connections with her subjects is perhaps bestevidenced in the beautiful sequence of photographs of the actress Sylvanna Doolan who over the course of four frames is clear-eyed but cautious, then guarded; collapses into candid laughter, before arriving at a forthright and relaxed kind of openness. The interviews that accompany the 129 photographs are characterised by a similar sense of candour. One woman describes the first time she was raped, another speaks of her abortion; others detail their feelings about marriage, and their relationship to the then burgeoning women’s movement. But while the photographic subjects are named, the interviewees remain anonymous.

The congruence of the personal and private emerges and recedes, and an evident complication between the clarity of the photographs and the anonymity of the accompanying text is arguably used on some level to suggest implicit, shared experience.

A sense of intimacy, its connection to domesticity, and the ways in which these qualities could operate at once in tandem and in challenge to the cool detachment of the art gallery was the focus of Micky Allan’s first solo exhibition Photography, drawing, poetry: A live-in show, held in 1978 at the Ewing and George Paton and Watters galleries, in Melbourne and Sydney respectively. For both presentations Allan brought the domestic space in which her work had been conceived into the realm of the gallery, and, in doing so, encouraged viewers to experience her art in a comfortable setting over a prolonged period of time. Coinciding with an approach to presentation that coalesced lived and performative aspects, the work she exhibited encompassed ‘high’ and ‘low’ art forms, including hand-coloured photographs which she described as demonstrating her interest in ‘synthesising’ and ‘crossing borders between media’.

Allan’s democratic, iconoclastic approach to both presentation and media are defining characteristics of her work and that of other artists of the era including Bonita Ely and Jude Adams. The frameworks and collecting policies of state and national galleries, however, which tacitly rely on the accrual of objects by curatorial departments arranged by media (painting, sculpture, photographs, drawings, prints) has entailed that their materially fluid and performative art has rarely been acquired in depth or at all. Whereas one might suppose that the representation of women artists increased in institutional contexts as the twentieth century progressed, it remains that the most radical work of the period— involving spaces, performances, actions, challenges to the sacrosanctity of individual media, and approaches to material combining high and low art—have in many cases not been holistically or even partially preserved. Furthermore, the documentation of these works has at times been dismissed as ephemera and deemed unworthy or irrelevant to collections predicated on the idea of unique, valuable objects.

Barbara Cleveland Bodies in Time, 2016 (still) single channel HD video (13 minutes 46 seconds)

The original documentation for Bonita Ely’s Murray River Punch 1980, among the first examples of a performance work that combined feminist and environmental strategies, influential and often cited, remains in the artist’s collection.

Given that the institution has not always been open to, or capable of, collecting these works forces the question of whether it can adequately represent forms of art that exist outside of narrowly defined and self-referential art histories. While one of the great subjects of western art, the Madonna and Child, has been revered and endlessly repeated, women’s own experience of mothering as distinct from religious evocation or aesthetic ideal is a subject that has seldom appeared in conventional histories or presentations of Australian art, but is one that occurred with increasing frequency as the twentieth century advanced. Initiated by Vivienne Binns at the University of New South Wales and continued in Blacktown, Mothers’ memories, others’ memories 1979–81 involved a diverse group of women who recalled, discussed and gave visual expression to their matrilineal heritage at a time when women’s personal histories were not widely valued or recorded. One of the eventual forms of Binns’ collaborative work comprised postcards in vitreous enamel, each screenprinted with an image drawn from a participant’s family album. Outwardly, the work is charming, moving, homespun, but the way in which its method of production corresponds with its subject is also significant. The evident tension between the postcard as something momentary and ephemeral, and vitreous enamel which is delicate then strengthening, embodies the transition of an individual’s personal memory into a collective history. The work also challenges the idea of history’s apparent primacy over memory. Mothers’ memories, others’ memories invited multiplicity, participation, touch and discussion, and drew attention to the necessity of memory when enriching histories that can so often seem immutable.

Lindy Lee Seed of a new moon, 2019 flung bronze 120 cm diameter Photo credit: Aaron Anderson

Despite the continuing proliferation of works that have made mothering their focus, there is not (to my knowledge) a comprehensive study exploring the aesthetics and approaches, common or otherwise, of this subject in recent Australian art. There is, however, ample material. Jude Adams recalled that, ‘since having a child, floors and household fixtures have assumed a different significance for me…My perspective is directed downwards’, her subsequent work revealing this descendant looking as, ‘a contemplative, creative gaze’. On the birth of her first child, Mazie Karen Turner spoke of becoming accustomed to the ‘scatter’ of things which she translated into a manner of working and a characteristic aesthetic, gathering toys and household items into tumbling arrangements that she recast as sweeping blueprints.

Elizabeth Gower’s Found images series 1984–89 discloses a domestic impetus for abstraction, its ostensibly nonfigurative forms revealed, with sustained looking, as the outlines of bottles, prams and chip packets. Barbara Hanrahan’s fractious linocuts portray an imagined childbirth that coalesces the cutting of the linoleum block with the painful opening of the body. Even these few examples give a sense of the richness of this work for iconographic, material and broader art historical study.

Elspeth Pitt is curator Australian Paintings and Sculpture (20-21 Centuries) National Gallery of Australia, Canberra and is co-curator of Know My Name: Australian Women Artists 1900-now which opened at the NGA on the 14 November.