Ecologies of Place and Memory (Lauren Berkowitz, Rosemary Burke, Torquil Canning, Lola Greeno, Ruth Hadlow, Sieglinde Karl and Louise Weaver)
Time & Tide (Rowena Gough, Gay Hawkes, Lin Li, Pilar Rojas and Catherine Truman)
Both curated by Bridget Sullivan
Plimsoll Gallery, Centre for the Arts, Hobart
May 22 - June 14 (Ecologies)
June 19 - July 12 (Time)
Julie Robb is the executive director of the Arts Law Centre of Australia. The centre advises artists and those involved in exhibitions and publication of risky material of the cultural responsibilities to make efforts to find ways of exercising their privileges. Looks at the current practices.
Explores the 'pornographic' in the public domain. Art isn't an excuse for pornography, because pornography simpy exists. Art has remained a realm within which a vast range of ideas can be explored and tested. There are no questions of ethics or morality in art. This starts to get more exciting as art gets closer to life.
Porn is a safety valve, big business, a cabinet of curiosities, a staging theatre for many contradictions and inversions: male submission, female dominance, intricate identity and gender crossings, and the validity of female desire. Pleasure is misunderstood in a society where is commodified, exchanged and consumed displaced into food, wine, cars....Discusses the works of Jane Burton, Mary Fallon, Catherine Mackinnon, Marcia Pally and W.H.Auden.
The artist writes about her interest in feminism and much of what is written seems intrinsically fetishistic. Her aim was to try to create a democratic, woman friendly fetish language.
Curated by Neville John O'Neill for the Canberra Contemporary Art Space.
Tandanya, National Aboriginal Cultural Institute, Adelaide
10 July - 16 August 1998
Women need to fight for an alternative pornography. Women need a pornography that addresses all the alternatives of our sexuality, in every format, so that there's something for everyone....Farmer interviewed porn star Lydia Lunch on her visit to the MRC in Adelaide.
Editorial: hypocrisy in our attitude to sex. It is both celebrated and maligned, and the censorship laws allow young people to view explicit violence while classifying sex for adults only, based on psuedo-scientific analysis of 'normal' or 'aberrant'. This history of public attitude from the Enlightenment on, libertinism a radical opposition to status quo, advertising and porn, and artists exercising self-censorship.