art

THE PRESENT LIMBO

Margaret McGuire

Joan Kerr and Jo Holder (eds)
Past Present: The National Women's Art Anthology
Craftsman House $49.50pb, 224pp
90 5704 14 13

THE COVER, A METALLIC BLUE and black with a touch of flesh pink uses a photo of a white serviette folded in the shape of a nun's veil, vacant against the black. A more insensible introduction to a book on art is hard to envisage -- the only other striking thing is how heavy it is. There is something peculiar about the duotone reproductions inside the book; the second tone, after black, looks suspiciously like the same pink also used as a banner heading each chapter. It has the effect of tonalising everything indifferently. Perhaps this book, in another fifty years, will be consulted by occasional readers the way the feminist anthologies of the 1930s have been, for a few inclusions, and in wonder at the dominance of the ephemeral, the parochial. Kerr's contribution to Australian art history is prodigious, but the resources which have gone into this prestige publication are in excess of the product. As to the recent art that is its raison d'être, why it's hardly here at all. The frontispiece, of a painting by Bea Maddock, is 'Solitary' indeed -- and emptied of the effect of her medium, the densely worked encaustic surface. The greater part of female creativity in the late twentieth century lies outside the parameters of this anthology.
      Ostensibly it is the culmination of the National Women's Art project based on the 1995 celebrations for the twentieth anniversary of International Women's Year. Kerr explains in her introduction: 'Past Present is the third and final contribution to the National Women's Art project, a collaborative enterprise I initiated in 1993.' The 'Art project' was supported by the College of Fine Arts at the University of New South Wales. With a large grant from the Australian Research Council, Heritage: The National Women's Art Book, an encyclopedic record of women artists at work up until 1955 was the first and will remain the most useful contribution. Its publication by Craftsman House in 1995 was followed by the National Women's Art Exhibition, a series of individual exhibitions organised independently across the country in public and private galleries to celebrate the anniversary. The third and last section of Past Present, compiled by Jo Holder, documents and examines a selection of these exhibitions; it also includes some documentation on the representation and reception of women artists in public collections since 1975. The first two sections, of essays forming the major part of the book, are sorted into 'Polemics' and 'Case Studies'; the categories don't always hold; not all the essays deserve the name and some are too slight for chapters.
     The introduction is studded with the rhetoric of yesteryear -- erstwhile feminists have joined 'the vipers of the press', we are both in limbo and at war, we are the nation. One enemy dubbed Professor Kerr Madame Mao when she began her project. She playfully accepts her nickname here and explains that her Large Grant from the ARC was just enough to employ her a Gang of Four. Their cultural revolution won tremendously in 1995 by 'repatriating Australian visual culture from a past that looks shabby, emulative, white, male and impoverished', sustained by 'a cultural diet...restricted, predictable and unsatisfying.' The battle so recently won now has to be fought again. We are in danger -- even among 'the feminists in our midst' -- of forgetting that climactic, or was it climacteric, year of triumph. Art writing in this country has got 'the Alzheimer's disease'.
      This anthology promises the 'retrieval of a multi-coloured, many layered past married to the most vital, historically aware work being done by recent artists (that is, women)' with a sustained focus on how this art 'creates valid new resonances in Australian art across time, medium, race, place and even gender.' (This last partial concession to the exercise of creativity is refuted at length in the learned chapter, 'The Inescapability of Sexual Difference'.) That Kerr posits 'race' between 'medium' and 'place', as something creativity transcends, is thoughtless, as if Australia was indeed already reconciled and reconstituted. Much of the material in all three sections and precisely half the essays in 'Case Studies' revisit the sequestered time-frame of Heritage -- the historical essays on taxidermists, tableau performers and cartoonists for example, remain neatly segregated on the other side of the chasm between then and now. A chapter on Elizabeth Durack and Eddie Burrup appears in 'Polemics' while being a case study, to give just one example of how this most organised book fractures and falls apart as it tries to encompass the present. That its publication was supported by the Centre for Cross-Cultural Studies -- an Australian Research Council Special Research Centre at the Australian National University -- is regrettable.

Incomplete:

THE PRESENT LIMBO

Margaret McGuire

Margaret McGuire is a Melbourne reviewer.