Exhibitions

The title of this show, Feminism Never Happened, is—of course—a conceit. Feminism did happen. Not only did it happen, but few of the works in the show could or would have been made if it hadn’t. Nevertheless, the title prompts you to consider the work here, if only for a moment, outside the current pluralistic framework of feminist art—as if feminism had never happened. Why?

These days, there are many feminisms. Rex Butler has argued that, as feminist art can now take virtually any shape, it is impossible not to make feminist art. Indeed, feminist art seems to have all the bases covered. It can be deep and cavernous or shallow and cosmetic. It can be tightly patterned or monstrously organic. It can be confessional and true or feigning and duplicitous. It can be abject or genteel, political or mystical. It can confront gender as deeply contingent, a 'social construction', or accept it as fundamental. It can embrace 'femininity' or repudiate it. It can align women with nature or reject the very idea as sexist. If 'bad girl' feminists attack middle-class values as patriarchal, prefering the rude and transgressive, other feminists celebrate politeness and decorum, as if middle-class values were always already feminist. Etcetera. Perhaps it is not exactly that every thing in art is feminist, but that utterly polarised and mutually exclusive things are: what one feminism promotes another necessarily opposes.

A recent flurry of influential historicising feminist-art shows—including WACK!, Global Feminisms, and Elles@centrepompidou—have argued the centrality of feminism to contemporary art, marshalling a diversity of women's art practice within a feminist frame. However, this downplays antagonisms within the broad expanses of feminist art and women's art. Resisting this approach, Feminism Never Happened is interested in both feminist and anti-feminist possibilities in work habitually located within feminist art. It includes works by women artists from Australia and New Zealand which can be read within a feminist frame but can also be seen to trouble it: Del Kathryn Barton, Pat Brassington, Kirsty Bruce, Jacqueline Fraser, Anastasia Klose, Fiona Lowry, Fiona Pardington, Yvonne Todd, and Jemima Wyman. The show includes works which relish traditional gender roles, which romanticise sex-crime landscapes, which savour glamour photography, which narcissistically parade pathetic victim status, which appropriate male-gaze pornography, which imagine a polymorphously perverse Eden, which indulge mixed feelings about haute couture and svelte models, and which vacillate between come-on and critique. [image: Kirsty Bruce]

Serbian artist Marina Abramovic has been called the grandmother of performance art. Her works have often involved pain and endurance. In Art Must Be Beautiful, Artist Must Be Beautiful, her iconic 1975 performance-for-video, she agressively combs and brushes her long hair, teasing it up, while repeating 'art must be beautiful, artist must be beautiful'. Her voice and expression betray her pain. In watching the video, one senses that the camera has taken the place of a mirror. Abramovic's simple act is open to interpretation. It has been seen as exemplifying a feminist critique of expectations on women to be beautiful, and yet it is compelling viewing precisely because the artist is so beautiful. The work can be read as masochistic, but also as ascetic—with the artist entering a trance-like state, 'freeing body and soul from the restrictions imposed by culture and from the fear of physical pain and death'. As Abramovic has became one of the most famous figures in contemporary art, it is now also easy to read the work retrospectively, as a meditation on celebrity and self-image. In 1999 Abramovic said, 'At that time, I thought that art should be disturbing rather than beautiful. But at my age now, I have started thinking that beauty is not so bad.' Thanks to Sean Kelly Gallery, New York, and Nederlands Instituut voor Mediakunst, Montevideo/Time Based Arts, Amsterdam.

Peter Madden draws much of his imagery from old issues of National Geographic, plundering and reworking its discredited 'empire of signs' to forge his own. His surrealistic pictures, objects, and installations have a watchmaker level of detail and intensity. They have been described as 'microcosms' and 'intricate kingdoms thick with flying forms'. A creator of metaphor-rich other-worlds, the New Zealand artist has one foot in the vanitas still-life tradition and other in new-age spirituality. On the one hand, he is death-obsessed: a master of morbid decoupage. (Moths and butterflies—symbols of transient life—abound. His assemblages in bell jars suggest some Victorian taxidermist killing time in his parlour.) On the other hand, with his flocks, shoals, and swarms of quivering animal energy, Madden revels in biodiversity. His works manage to be at once morbid and abundant, rotting and blooming, creepy and fey. Madden's exhibition has been supported by Creative New Zealand.

Over the last fifty years, New York film artist Ken Jacobs has made a massive contribution to experimental film and expanded-cinema performance. He is known for his pioneering two-hour 1969 structuralist film Tom, Tom, The Piper's Son, which probes, deconstructs, and reorganises a D. W. Griffith short. In recent years, Jacobs has moved into video, creating a number of works based on nineteenth and early twentieth-century stereoscopic photographs. He plays with the juxtaposition, overlay, and stroboscopic alternation of right-eye and left-eye images to generate a variety of spatial and kinetic illusions and phenomenological effects, often keyed back to the subject matters of the original images, which include children labouring in a factory and faces in a crowd. The films come with health warnings for epileptics. Jacobs explains, 'The throbbing flickering is necessary to create "eternalisms": unfrozen slices of time, sustained movements going nowhere and unlike anything in life.' He advises his viewers to 'sail through any initial discomforts; the brain is a muscle that can be sluggish and grumpy when asked to learn new tricks.' A joint project with OtherFilm, as part of Queensland Festival of Photography.

Ken Jacobs recently released Star Spangled to Death, an epic six-and-a-half-hour cine-collage that he began making in 1956. It has been described as 'an exhaustive, sprawling history of America ... as seen through the eyes of those on the margins'. Star Spangled to Death maps everything that fascinates and distresses the filmmaker about his country, presenting America as imbroglio of warped ideologies. The film intercuts found footage (including a Nelson Rockefeller campaign film, inflammatory racist cartoons, and old-time nudie shorts) with whimsical footage Jacobs shot between 1957 and 1959 featuring two of his outcast artist pals: avant-garde legend Jack Smith, who wanders the streets dressed in outfits improvised from garbage seeking to engage strangers, and frustrated tenement-dweller Jerry Sims, who complains endlessly about anything and everything. The New York Times called it 'the ultimate underground movie, subversive, and frequently hilarious'.
 A joint project with OtherFilm.
 

Shaun Gladwell is known for his videos of people engaged in acts of physical virtuosity. His subjects—himself and others—have typically been practitioners of urban subcultures, like skateboarding, BMX-bike riding, break-dancing, and capoeira. Gladwell slows down the action to allow us to analyse it. Suggesting a meditative state for performer and viewer, his videos attend to the body (its weight, its flexibility, its centre of gravity) but also suggest transcendence. His MADDESTMAXIMVS: Planet & Stars Sequence was created as Australia's contribution to the 2009 Venice Biennale.

In MADDESTMAXIMVS, Gladwell's multi-screen work Centred Pataphysical Suite finds various performers continually spinning on the spot. Alongside, his Endoscopic Vanitas—a video camera within a rotating human skull—presents a live-feed, surveying of the space of the mind. In juxtaposing these works, Gladwell makes a deft analogy between turning in the world and turning in our heads, contrasting the abstractness of thought with the fragile materiality which facilitates it.

The heart of MADDESTMAXIMVS is a set of videos shot in the Australian outback. In Planet & Stars Sequence: Barrier Highway, Gladwell spray-paints scenes of the cosmos, then paints them out, negating them. In Interceptor Surf Sequence, he 'surfs' into the horizon on top of a black V8 Interceptor, in the manner of wing-walkers of old. In Apologies 1-6, he arrives on a motorcycle, to tend to kangaroos killed on the road, gently carrying them off for burial. The title could be a veiled reference to The Apology to Indigenous people. These deeply romantic works are haunted, not only by Australian film actors Mel Gibson (Mad Max) and Russell Crowe (Maximus in Gladiator) but also by art history: Leonardo's Vitruvian man, Sydney Nolan's helmeted Ned Kelly, and Joseph Beuys (How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare).

While extremely contemporary in its format, MADDESTMAXIMVS is steeped in art history, and revisits a nationalism associated with a previous period of Australian art and the old archetype of the hero exiled to the wilderness. It is unclear what level of investment or irony prevails. Gladwell puts a brave new spin on existentialist big-themes.

Seemingly infuriated by the old avant-garde presumption that artworks should criticise and challenge their publics, their subject matter, and the art of the past, the artworld is currently enjoying what Rex Butler has dubbed a 'post-critical' turn. Pop Life, a show which recently debuted at London's Tate Modern, celebrates artists who aim to please and entertain, who embrace commercialism and populism, and want their audiences to like them. They include Andy Warhol, Jeff Koons, Damian Hirst, and Takashi Murakami. Scott Redford vs. Michael Zavros brings this idea home, pitting two local post-critical artists—both born and bred on the Gold Coast—against one another.

Photo-realist painter Michael Zavros paints beautiful things beautifully. His subjects include good shoes, bespoke suits, dandified pretty boys, pedigree horses, handbags, elegant interiors, mansions, formal gardens, and fountains. Zavros presents a fantasy world of refinement, privilege, and perfection, where the quality of his own painting style is cross-referenced with his quality subject matter. We tend to link criticality with self-reflexivity, but, although Zavros's work is not critical of its subjects, it is sharply self-reflexive: his 'trophy' paintings refer to their own status as collectibles, his 'interiors' are made for collectors to hang in their own homes, he exhibited paintings of handbags in a handbag store. Zavros is affirmative, never ironic or conflicted. Even when his works reference the vanitas tradition or the Narcissus myth, Zavros overrides any negative associations, endorsing luxury goods and self-absorption pure and simple.

While Zavros celebrates elite style, Scott Redford is more aligned with youth and pop culture. In the 1990s, he was a Queer artist, criticising mainstream values. But, in the twenty-first century, he seemed to turn his back on criticality to celebrate the Gold Coast, its bling and teen surf culture. He embraced the language and pitch of commercialism: brands, decals, fluro-colours, and industrial production. These days he doesn't mind people saying his works look like merchandise, in fact he proposed to turn Australia's pavilion at Venice into a surf shop.

Are Zavros and Redford simply affirmative and uncritical, or do their projects offer critical leverage on our desire for criticality? [image: Michael Zavros]

Semiconductor (Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt) worked with raw satellite data to make Brilliant Noise, their video portrait of the Sun. Sifting through thousands of computer files in the data vaults at NASA, they reorganised still images from Earth-orbiting satellites into time-lapse sequences. The images contain interference from a variety of natural and man-made sources. The sound is natural solar radio, with white noise coming from cosmic rays hitting the satellite camera's CCD. Embracing artifacts from the capturing process, they create a unique view of the electromagnetic universe and the technologies we use to see it. 

Catalogue Essay