The exhibition Keeping Things Together was organized to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Australian Women:s Art Register collection. This occasion should have been a moment of deep pride and inspiration, but instead, it was the polar opposite.
As I walked around the exhibition at the University of Melbourne’s George Paton Gallery, it felt like I had time traveled back to the 1970s when women artists felt isolated, sidelined and separated from the mainstream. After five decades, it was very frustrating to see an exhibition of contemporary women artists which felt so incoherent and jumbled—it did a disservice to the Women:s Art Register and to women artists in general.
And I feel justified in my criticism because when I lived in London in the late 1970s and early 80s, I curated (with three other women) and exhibited in an exhibition called Women’s Images of Men. It was highly successful and broke attendance records at the Institute of Contemporary Art and demonstrated that women artists were creating outstanding work, despite being undervalued and marginalized. The exhibition went on to tour the country and inspired a book by the same name. (Mind you, my name was omitted in the essay in the book about the history of the exhibition, so I am no stranger to being marginalized even by other women.)
Half a century later in Melbourne, these women artists also had to deal with another hurdle—geography. It was very difficult to locate the George Paton Gallery on the University of Melbourne campus and my friend and I had to resort to using GPS tracking to find it. And when we arrived, the gallery was empty with no visitors. The liveliest thing about the entire experience was the young woman behind the gallery counter. Partially, I blame this lack of energy on the space itself: it felt confined like I was entering the nose of a Boeing 747 minus the windows.
An uninviting space, plus the uneven quality of the artworks made it feel like we were attending the exhibition as an act of filial duty. This well-intentioned exhibition felt impoverished and joyless.
If the Art Register’s achievements were seen as important, the exhibition would have been held in a more accessible space and not hidden away in a well-meaning educational maze. (The George Paton Gallery was a model for presenting experimental art from the mid-1970s, but it has fallen on hard times since moving from its original home in 2022, and now, sadly, it feels like an afterthought in the visual arts in Melbourne.)
So, I am issuing a challenge to younger women artists to revive and reinvigorate powerful public conversations around the central role that we can play in challenging the status quo from climate change to the issues stemming from male violence. But this doesn’t mean girls can’t have fun. Look at the recent Yayo Kusama exhibition at the Victorian National Gallery that was vibrant and exciting!
As Keeping Things Together demonstrates, we can’t rely on well-meaning intentions to present women artists’ work effectively. In this instance, women artists appear to be nearly forgotten if not entirely lost.
