The Artlink Archive Project: Jacqueline Millner and the art writer’s marathon

As an arts writer who began their career in the mid-90s, in the wake of the high-water mark of critical theory in art schools’ art history departments, I’ve always been conscious of the links between philosophical developments (and fashions), and art writing in its various guises. I have also been aware of the swing from privileging the text to the centering of the object in all its materiality, and the parallel blurring of the lines between artist and writer alongside the rise of the artist-researcher. These broader moves and the role of, and effect on, art writing are of particular interest because of their implications for the feminist project, a central concern in my practice as a writer and educator. It was, after all, feminist readings and applications of Michel Foucault and psychoanalysis that first spurred my thinking as an arts writer. These complex relationships between power, ideology, images and bodies brought an understanding and a meta-language to my lived experience. This essay tracks developments in feminist art writing by reference to key issues in the Artlink archive: “Art and the Feminist Project” (1994) and “Positioning Feminism” (2017), with some reference to “Men’s Business: Masculinities Reflected” (1996) and “Sexing the Agenda” (2013). Artlink has been a major site for the publishing of feminist discourse, promoting writers and artists both in and outside of dedicated issues. Inflected through the lived experience of writing about (often) women’s art, this article offers a historiographical backward glance to help understand the present state of feminist art writing, and Artlink’s history in this field.

Beginnings: 1994

In 1994, plans were well underway for the staging of the National Women’s Art Exhibition in 1995. This commemoration of the twentieth anniversary of International Women’s Year, led by Joan Kerr and Jo Holder, would unite hundreds of artists, art writers, curators, and art institutions in a common goal. The energetic rallying of the preparatory phase permeated the discourse, with projects and writings focused on feminist themes and practices emerging around the country, such as the National Gallery of Victoria’s (NGV) Celebrating Women program, shows commemorating the 100th anniversary of South Australia’s women’s suffrage, and major exhibitions by feminist giants Barbara Hanrahan and Ann Newmarch. 1994 also saw the launch of RealTime Arts, a free national broadsheet which foregrounded new hybrid art forms and considered a wide spectrum of experimental creative practices — including dance, electronica, visual art, performance, and film — in critical conversation. This was an apt context to promote feminist practices and it imbued my coverage and writing as visual arts editor in the original editorial committee led by Keith Gallasch and Virginia Baxter. In 1994, I published my first piece of arts writing commissioned by Jo Holder, then editor of Photofile, a theoretical take on a feminist action that I undertook with four other art school friends, ‘culture jamming’ a sexist underwear billboard; the legal case became ‘a storm in a D-cup’ in the press after the magistrate, the formidable Pat O’Shane, claimed that the real crime had been committed by the advertisers! A more ambitious essay followed, again in Photofile, that critiqued the identity politics of the time by reference to critical theories of community. Republished in Anne Marsh’s Doing Feminism: Women's Art and Feminist Criticism in Australia (2021), these documents of my experience in 1994 are hardly emblematic of the so-called ‘postfeminist’ decade.^[1]

This view is affirmed by Artlink’s “Art and the Feminist Project” (14: 1, Autumn 1994), the journal’s second thematic issue on feminism (the first was in 1984). The issue reflects the diverse feminist thinking and activities of the time: the still live negotiation of essentialism, poststructuralist feminist critiques and associated anxieties around figurative work; concerns about the representation of women in the artworld; how to teach feminism in art schools; the distinctiveness of feminist engagement with ‘new technologies’; and the foregrounding of personal story in Indigenous women’s work.

Juliet Peers’ “Nourishment for Tough Times”, a wrap of Bring a Plate: the Feminist Cultural Studies Conference at the University of Melbourne in 1993, offers a snapshot of then-current theoretical concerns. Peers recounts that keynote speaker Elspeth Probyn established the theme of feminism as ‘negotiation and choice’ and remarks on the ‘conscious disavowal of essentialism and the moral fervour of 1970s’.^[2] Ongoing attempts to ‘reconcile poststructuralism with radical feminism’ have progressively favoured the former according to Peers: ‘[F]ew Western European philosophies of equally widespread intellectual currency have treated the feminine with such consistency and centrality’.^[3] While this move is reflected in several perspectives here, so too is the arduous process of negotiation as evidenced by vestiges of that ‘moral fervour’ and cautions about the potential excesses of poststructuralist art criticism. “Bring a Plate…” brought up lingering issues of women’s supposed prudery undermining their radical credibility, a debate taken up in feminist academic Sheila Jeffreys’ passionate argument that BDSM has no place in a feminist aesthetic: ‘whilst it is precisely the eroticised inequality of women that forms the excitement of sexuality for men and women too, the equality of women is hard to envision and will be very hard to achieve’.^[4] Given the developments and shifts in subsequent decades, Jeffreys’ case seems dated. Nevertheless, some of her points are pertinent to the current (somewhat manufactured) stand-off between Gen Xers and Zoomers on the damage wreaked by the mainstreaming of pornography and its conflation with ‘sex positivity’.^[5] What Jeffreys suspects to be the moral equivalence of poststructuralism also riled Donald Brook, who takes a deliciously sardonic poke at the excesses of poststructuralist art criticism that claims a critical text ‘will always betray the object of interpretation’. Brook argues that such ‘high theory’ in its arrogance abrogates all responsibility and reveals nothing about an artwork, leaving us none the wiser about how to do criticism that does not reaffirm established hierarchies.^[6]

While “Art and the Feminist Project” features a great deal of figurative art — from Rosslynd Piggott’s paintings to Susie Hansen’s sculpture and Ella Dreyfus’ photography — anxieties about moral positioning, essentialism, and the risks of representing the (female) body weave through several contributions. At core seems to be a fear of going against the grain of what is perceived as the feminist orthodoxy of the time: the Marxist and psychoanalytically informed anti-ocularcentrism of British film theorist Laura Mulvey and British art historian Griselda Pollock, among others. Closer to home, Artlink contributing editor Stephanie Radok crafts a gentle defence of four artists whom she considers art world outliers because they ignore theoretical positions and feminist texts: in the mid-1990s, Adelaide based Heather Ellyard, Annette Bezor, Janette Moore and Anna Platten remained committed to exploring individual experience through figurative painting and continued to draw on second wave ideas of natural rhythms and mythological representations of women that Radok acknowledged as ‘outdated.’ Artist and academic Barbara Bolt worries that in making figurative paintings she may have ‘fallen headlong into the trap of presenting images of women’s bodies as the objectified other, object of male desire and subject to the scrutiny of the invasive male gaze’,^[7] but rebuts her own anxieties by asserting that to remain invisible is ‘to leave unchallenged the dominant notions of gender and sexuality’.^[8] In the mid-1990s, the choice between categorisation as ‘lesbian artist’ or remaining invisible was a paradox Bolt summarised as ‘now that I am out, I find that I am in’.^[9] Writer Amanda King also clocks this change in feminist strategy from Mulvey-influenced ‘absenting oneself’ to recognising that it is ‘better to be seen and to take control of how [one is] seen’ in her comparison of Linda Sproul and Barbara Campbell, two artists who in the mid-1990s were among the ‘women currently leading the field of performance art’.^[10] This strategy is of particular relevance to Sproul’s ‘angry woman’ persona, which King positions more squarely (and positively) in the activist camp less indebted to feminist theory than to body-art and ‘70s campaigns for social equality. By contrast, King suggests Campbell belongs to a new type of ‘intellectually based feminist artist who makes use of art historical research and analytical discourse’,^[11] inadvertently describing a mode of practice that has since come to pervade contemporary performance.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, contributors to the 1996 issue “Masculinities” (16:1, Autumn 1996) were less concerned with justifying their focus on figurative representations of male bodies in addressing feminism-inspired shifting notions of masculinity. The (nude) male body in these feminist interpretations is rendered as ordinary and mutable, not the reverse ‘object of the gaze’ but a continuum of bodily vulnerability. Allison Archer argues that Krystyna Petryk’s ‘soft and sensual’ photographic portrayals that emulate classic female nudes ‘demystify masculinity’, exposing the unsustainable dichotomies at its heart: ‘heterosexual desire, yet misogyny, homosocial relationships, yet homophobia’.^[12] Simon Cardwell makes photos of ‘ordinary and vulnerable men’, while Rox de Luca’s All Meat No Veg (1995) captures men’s penises stripped of phallic associations, as Paul Allatson argues, thus ‘foregrounding the ascriptive inadequacies of conventional ideas of masculinity to account for the ambivalent messages emanating from the mediated male bodies on view’.^[13]

While distinctions between second wave and 1990s feminist approaches are frequent in “Art and the Feminist Project”, the relative value ascribed to each varies. In her review of what was one of the few texts on Australian feminist art, Sightlines: Women’s art and feminist perspectives in Australia by Sandy Kirby (1992), artist and academic Jude Adams describes a glossy coffee table book not suited to capturing the grainy ephemera of much feminist art, concluding that it might assert the multiple feminisms of the 1990s, but still adopts the ‘positive’ rhetoric of the 1970s rather than undertaking a more critical analysis of feminist practice at the time. In a similar vein, Adams’ reflections on ‘women and art’ electives in tertiary courses positively acknowledges how the changing titles reflect the shift from ‘adding to’ in the ‘70s and ‘80s to ‘transforming’ knowledge in the ‘90s, from excavation and reclamation to strategies of cultural critique.^[14] And yet, despite the conceptual radicalism of such strategies, continuing structural inequalities suggest that no strategy should be discounted, as Melissa Cater’s research on the status of women in the Australian artworld concludes: ‘the hierarchy of the artworld recognises and reveres the master painter, values his artworks which can be easily classified into defined art movements, and pays and rewards him accordingly’.^[15]

Nonetheless, the perceived feminist prioritising of personal experience, either as an ‘articulation of a woman’s life, thought, being, desire, or a more explicit political assertion about how women live in the patriarchy’^[16] is what two critics argue distinguishes emergent ‘90s Indigenous art and new media work by women. Discussing (newly coined) ‘cyberfeminists’ Linda Dement, Virginia Barrett and VNS Matrix, Nicholas Zurbrugg writes that the ‘renewed emphasis upon personal and collective reminiscence …suggests that electronic creativity is perfectly compatible with personal themes’,^[17] while John Kean with Karen Dayman discerns a shift from the ‘epic sagas of the Dreaming’ to personal stories and autobiography for the purpose of community agency in the work of Indigenous women painters from Western Australia.

Clearly, in 1994 the personal was still very much the political, as artists and writers and the emergent hybrid artist/writer/researcher (myself included) sought how to position themselves and their work most strategically in the wake of poststructuralism, identity politics, queer theory, new digital technologies and continuing structural inequalities. At core was the question of how to establish some common ethical ground, without sacrificing the insights of poststructuralism; and how to find community with those with whom ‘we’ apparently have nothing in common; of how to conceive and imagine ‘home and the world beyond the politics of difference’ (the title of my 1994 essay in Photofile).

Interregnum: 1995–2016

As my arts writing developed into the new millennium, I continued to mix academic research and study with catalogue essays, reviews and features for broader audiences, attempting where possible to honour the principle of writing close to embodied experience and in conversation with the makers. But the consistent thread linking all these disparate efforts was still a vision of commonality with difference and diversity, mediated by the aesthetic encounter, of how to understand art as a catalyst for thinking the world otherwise. Such a vison was founded on feminist critiques of power and on feminist values — body-centric, disclosing position, embedded in relationships of dialogue and collaboration, concerned with pleasure and play, resisting of polarizing thought and rigid structure. I was not only taken with the fluid nature of Foucault’s conception of power but also with Luce Irigaray’s politics of overflow and stickiness to develop an ethical facing of the Other; its an ethic intimately connected with my experience of motherhood as expansive, connected, responsible, and emboldened. Irigaray’s is a powerful feminist project that has inspired many artists.

The anthology Conceptual Beauty (2010) was an opportunity to revalorise the role of aesthetics in developing ethical positions in the work of many contemporary artists, including Tracey Moffatt. The book paved the way for what was to become a far more explicit positioning of the feminist project as the driver of my work as a writer and educator. In late 2013, Catriona Moore, Jo Holder and I founded the research group Contemporary Art and Feminism (CAF) which for the following three years, through hosting, exhibiting, and publishing, facilitated the creation of a powerful network of feminist artists, students, educators, writers and curators who contributed to rethinking what might be: transgressive teaching (2014), Curating Feminism (2014), a Future Feminist Archive (2015), and, to reclaim ‘90s feminist screen culture from the postfeminist dustbin Femflix (2016).

The publication of Artlink’s second special feminist issue “Sexing the Agenda” that explored the transgressive body and performance, including a focus on self and selfhood ‘in the name of QLGBT+’, ideas of family, gender on the battlefront, Indigenous women’s stories, and memories of gendered institutional violence. Similar areas of focus and approaches informed many CAF activities, including the anthology Feminist Perspectives on Art: Contemporary Outtakes (2018) that brought together the reflections of CAF participants.

Consolidations: 2017

In 2017, Adelaide-based intergenerational duo Jude Adams and Brigid Noone hosted FRAN (The Feminist Renewal Art Network) FEST, ‘a month long, state-wide open-access festival featuring exhibitions, events and symposia to value and reflect both the history and contemporary practice of Australian feminism and art’.^[18] FRAN FEST sought to ‘highlight inter-generational and intersectional dialogue, investigate the legacy of second-wave feminist art and explore the nature of contemporary feminist art’, in commemoration of the legacy of the influential The Women’s Show of 1977 (and inspired by the National Women’s Art Exhibition of 1995). Adams and Noone also credit CAF for some of the inspiration for FRAN FEST, and Catriona Moore and I were honoured to present the keynote in the symposium that included a diverse array of feminist scholars, curators, and artists. No doubt FRAN FEST and CAF constituted part of the ‘groundswell of recent and forthcoming exhibitions, conferences, clusters of research and practice’^[19] that editor Eve Sullivan cites as the rationale for Artlink’s fourth special feminist issue, “Positioning Feminism” (2017).

This issue testifies to the continuity of many feminist concerns albeit in changing socio-political and cultural contexts. Many of the practices featured here are still concerned with the objectifying gaze and the power dynamics inherent in the act of looking; with materiality, relations and relationship, including in the domestic sphere; with the under-representation of women in art collections and in the digital world. Several contributions focus on work with deep roots in the 90s, including painting and performance forged amid the specific conceptual debates outlined above.^[20] But in line with developments in feminist theories, Sullivan also rallies engagements with emergent care and environmental ethics, with ‘new’ political theories of mass movements, and an explicit assertion of intersectionality (as distinct from preceding feminist critiques that also addressed discrimination based on race, sexuality, and class before the term ‘intersectionality’ became common parlance).^[21]

As a reminder of the circularity of ideas, Wes Hill’s review of Jenny Watson’s retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art in 2017 cites the mid-90s ‘war on the image’^[22] — the ‘anti-ocular and anti-painting’ orthodoxy of influential feminist theorists that had artists worried then — to make the point that Watson transcended these postmodern debates. Her project is no timid defence of figuration, but a triumph of anti-essentialism,^[23] whereby the artist asserts her ‘right to look’, […] ‘to arrange the visible and the sayable’, rejecting ‘a master-image of art historical trends’. Watson, argues Hill, confounded common distinctions between style and content, critique and complicity, conceptualism and expressionism, and echoing Elspeth Probyn in 1993, interpreted ‘feminism as women can do anything they want to’.

In the same issue, Shaune Lakin’s interview with Justine Varga picks up ongoing anxieties about the gaze and figurative art, in this case, in relation to photographic portraiture; its troubled history has been picked apart by both postcolonial and feminist theorists, leading artists to experiment with alternative modes in which to evade the camera’s objectifying power. Varga’s Maternal Line (2017) is one such experiment: it was made without a camera in collaboration with the subject (the artist’s grandmother), from materials including her saliva, resulting in a photograph that bears the almost invisible traces of their interaction. When Varga’s work won the Olive Cotton Award for Photographic Portraiture, the critical outrage, including claims that ‘feminism had got in the way of good photography’,^[24] underlined that these anxieties remain live. Varga’s work has long been concerned with the materiality and performativity of photography, which she acknowledges are now commonplace, but the interview draws out her feminist inflection of this territory: the artist’s desire to complicate the act of looking, her debt to other women artists in being able to value her creative labour, and her focus on the significance of relationships in the creation of a portrait.^[25] Some of these concerns, as well as an explicitly political and humorous take on the objectifying gaze and the power dynamics inherent in the act of looking, are distilled in Cigdem Aydemir’s video Bombshell (2013), one of my favourite works featured in both this issue and in “Sexing the Agenda.”^[26]

Continuing insights from feminist interrogations of the domestic sphere, including experiments with traditional crafts and ‘women’s fancywork’ that invoke the materiality of relations, are the focus of curator Miriam Kelly’s reading of Sera Waters’ work. Waters might be, as Barbara Campbell was described in the 1990s, an ‘intellectually based feminist artist who makes use of art historical research and analytical discourse’. Like Campbell, Waters works through the active entanglement of writing, making, and personal and historical political research, across multiple fields. These include memory studies, social histories, personal ancestry, craft and textile history, and settler colonial studies, all read through a feminist lens. As Kelly outlines, Waters explores the complex and troubled histories of her settler ancestors, in particular the maternal line, who through their ‘home-making’ acts of care were instrumental to the colonial project and the dispossession of First Nations peoples. Using inherited and found domestic objects and textiles, Waters embroiders and unstitches, with time itself a material key to working through the white artist’s place in lands whose sovereignty was never ceded.^[27] By titling her 2017 body of work Domestic Arts — and drawing more on the continuing legacy of Rozsika Parker than on Betsy Greer —Waters raises questions about the relevance of such an approach in contemporary times, including the legitimacy of these aesthetics to explore the violence of ongoing colonization; these ideas resurface in her Storied Sail Cloths (2021) in the 2022 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art. The reclaiming of the ‘subversive’ capacity of textiles, especially those closely affiliated with holding and tending vulnerable bodies, is deployed to different effect in Linda Dement’s “Cyberfeminist Bedsheet” as a ‘festering yeast growth, circuit wired organism’.^[28]  On this ‘rumpled unclean bedsheet’ coagulate key elements from ‘90s feminist theory —  early cyber-theorists Allucquére  Rosanne ‘Sandy’ Stone and Sadie Plant, and writers of abjection such as Georges Bataille and Kathy Acker — and the names of contemporary artists,^[29] evoking cyberfeminism as ‘unreliable, unformed, unfinished.’^[30]

Dement and Waters demonstrate the ongoing capacity of feminist methodologies emerging from the domestic to handle the largest of historical and political themes while effectively grounding those explorations in personal experience. Fighting the ‘ongoing battle’ for recognition of that capacity is a challenge that the Cruthers Collection of Women’s Art has set itself: ‘domestic and family life’ is one of the focus themes of this once-private private collection, as are ‘gender and body’, ‘politics and environment’, and an emphasis on self-portraiture and still life.^[31] Consequently, identity politics and the risk of homogenising individual statements ‘into a category of institutionalized difference: women’s art’^[32] haunts the collection, as then-curator Gemma Weston acknowledges, along with the discomfort some artists express about being collected and exhibited on the basis of gender.^[33] Weston nevertheless defends women’s shows/collections ‘as long as inequality persists’, as they provide both a response to a history of blinkered institutional vision and an opportunity to examine how useful categorisation of ‘women’s art’ is for the broader feminist project today.

Vigilance and advocacy around women’s institutional representation are stalwart carryovers from earlier feminist revisionist art histories and campaigns to ‘fill the canonical gaps’, as well as theories of social change. We can’t under-estimate the emergence of social practice in the 1990s as a major form of contemporary art for its re-valorising of much earlier Marxist theories of mass, culturally-led mobilisations for political transformation as framed by the likes of (Gramscians) Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, and the dissensus of Jacques Ranciere and radical democracy of Slavoj Zizek. Writer Chari Larsson’s reading of Jemima Wyman’s feminist collaborations and convergence of performance, art and theatre invokes all these familiar worthies,^[34]  along with the modernist avant-garde strategy of photomontage. Another affirmation of ‘90s-style social and political theories comes from artist Courtney Coombs: ‘queer feminism proposes a position that moves beyond identifying, outing and eliminating women’s oppression to expand the focus to the strictures that enable oppression,’ advocating for experiments that produce difference and equality at the same time. This, they claim, renders queer feminism ‘intersectional at its core’.^[35] Coombs however is rightfully sceptical of the buzzword status of ‘intersectionality’. They argue for the power of queer feminism that is not bound by binary logic or genders, that revels in being on the margins (that is, ‘not in, but out’) and insists on ‘on the potentiality… of another world’.^[36] Analysing Frances Barrett’s performance Curator (2015), Coombs suggests one way that such potentiality might be realised is through ‘careful listening and care taking’.^[37]

Care, and its transformative potential, is further developed in artist Sasha Grbich’s reading of ecologically engaged, feminist practices in Aotearoa, signalling important (and relatively new) theoretical terrain for feminist scholarship and art-making.^[38] Citing new materialist Jane Bennett and other care theorists, Grbich homes in on care ethics’ attentiveness to the interconnections between human and non-human matter and the potential for ‘fundamental changes to subject/object power relations’ to follow.^[39] Grbich also emphasizes the links between environmental politics and Indigenous practices, and their respective connection to female-led communities that step into the intimacy and insecurity inherent to collaboration.^[40] Invoking care ethics elder Carol Gilligan, Grbich distils the politics of care ethics as long-term processes of responsive methods where relationships are foregrounded and inductive and experiential knowledge is welcomed: it is this values revolution that might advance ‘the movement to free democracy from patriarchy’.^[41]

In response to the continuing feminist preoccupation with the predominance of ‘ocularcentrism’ and the power relations that come with it, in 2018 I suggested that the question for some contemporary artists is how to rewire habitual ways of seeing, or craft ways of ‘feeling seeing’, rather that averting the visual. I argued that through video installations/performances, (for example Angelica Mesiti’s work), attempts to disarticulate the process of meaning-making through vision by rewiring it via the senses of hearing and touch.^[42] This might, momentarily, sever the link between what we see and what we think and offer a second of hesitance and doubt that can potentially lead to new perspectives.^[43] This conscious, embodied hesitancy is intimately linked with attentiveness and openness, and recognition of our continual interaction and relationship with other elements, beings, matter: the central concerns of care ethics, which in recent years has guided my art writing.^[44] In care ethics, our attentiveness to our entanglement, to our reciprocal relations and to ‘others’ of all kinds, is a form of ethical inquiry. Close relationships become the source of a morality, and the values of trust, solidarity, mutual concern and empathic responsiveness move from the private to the public realm to become foundational models for ethical behaviour in the art world as much as in the wider society.^[45]

This positioning of my feminist thinking about art accommodates my evolving and revolving concerns through recent decades. It also resonates with the desires that animate much feminist art writing embedded in the generative pleasures of material experimentation and aesthetic discovery — desire for a more responsive and responsible form of justice, for a better honed attention to personal and social needs, for a greater possibility for solidarity. These sustained desires remind us of the eternal returns that feminism brings through intergenerational exchanges between readers/writers and artists/educators continually shaping ethics, aesthetics and future issues for the feminist writer.