Context, lenses, and women artists
Context matters!
Immediately, when I think of context mattering, I think of women and art. Why are there no female equivalents to the male giants of Western art? Why are there so few women comparable to the towering male artists in our local and regional contexts? Why? Historically, the opportunities to develop talent that were afforded to one were not afforded to the other. Girls of Leonardo’s time could not apprentice with a master artist unless their father was a forward-thinking master artist himself. And even in such a context they were restricted in the techniques they could learn and the skills they could develop – no fresco painting and no study of the male or female nude. Thus, at a time when fresco paintings that included figures helped to establish an artist’s worth and stature, these avenues for asserting one’s depth of skill were not available to women.
Indeed, context matters.
Until the 1970s and second-wave feminism, it was assumed that women could not and had not made great art. The names of fabulous women artists of the European Renaissance were little known while the names of Michelangelo and the others were known. No Sofonisba Anguissola. Until the 1970s, Artemisia Gentileschi’s name was little known along with that of other women artists who stood out within the Western tradition and among their contemporaries. No Properzia de Rossi. However, as scholars and researchers operating under a feminist ethos questioned the absence of women in the art history texts, a lessthan-pretty picture emerged. Despite being known and celebrated in their lifetimes, many had been forgotten. No! They had been erased from history. de Rossi’s carving on fruit pits continues to astound and marvel but she was forgotten. Meanwhile, many other skilled women artists worked in the studios of fathers and husbands and thus their output had been subsumed in the output of the male master artist in whose studio they worked. La Tintoretta/Marietta Robusti. Others had simply been forgotten.
I think of my art school days pouring over the old, worn copy of Jansen’s Art Through the Ages. I turned the pages searching, wondering, “Where is she? She must be here! Keep turning the pages.” I recall my classmate descending the dilapidated interior stairs of the old colonial structure declaring, “Textiles are for girls!” It did not matter that I hated the idea of tying fabric to then submerging it in dye. Somehow my double X chromosome had determined my place in art before I could be sure of my likes and dislikes. I recall the tutor who declared that I was weak and could not pursue sculpture because it was determined I could not build muscle or needed to carve blocks of wood to make sculpture. It did not matter that I had carved my ceramic tools from hardwood and that my tools rivalled those of any male student. I was female and, therefore, weak and incapable of carving wood so I should not pursue studies in sculpture. Gendered bias was at play and I knew it. What could I do? I poured over the pages of the history text looking for her – looking for them – to justify my desire to paint and my desire to sculpt. They were not there. All it seemed I could hope for was space to amuse myself as someone with a Y chromosome had said to me.
When I didn’t find the humans with XX chromosomes in the pages of the aged unenlightened art history book I had retrieved from forgotten shelves in the art school, I found them in the Umana Yana. On the temporary walls installed within the Umana Yana, I met the landscapes of Margaret Dookun (d. 2018) and O’Donna Allsopp (1928-2019) in an exhibition. I was struck by their works’ capacity to draw me into the picture plane through the illusion of depth and expansive space. It was also at the Umana Yana that I met the wonderfully gossipy pictures of Maylene Duncan (1960/61-2003). The time I speak of is very long gone, but not too distant. Maggie, O’Donna, and Maylene are all no longer with us. But looking at their work within the National Collection it is clear that each in her way aspired to excellence.
However, looking at their work with a feminist art critical lens offers a different sort of understanding and appreciation. Looking with a feminist art critical lens invites the viewer to consider how gender and the roles ascribed to it could have contributed to the work created. Did gender inform the subject and content of the work? Duncan’s market scenes which are mostly populated by women, and her scenes of women chatting (possibly gossiping) over a fence with the washing nearby suggest a particular gendered lens of looking. The women she sees and makes us see work, engage in business, and busyness. Duncan’s women neither lounge awaiting or inviting a sexualised lens of looking nor do they stand as purveyors of evil. Thus, this lens of looking allows the viewer to consider how women are typically and historically presented in images – objects of sexuality or harbingers of evil and moral decay.
While gender may inform content, it can also account for technical shortcomings of a work. Thus, this lens of viewing encourages one to consider how the demands of normative gender roles may impede the development of superior skills because doing so requires practice and study and these require time. In other words, the demands on women as caregivers and nurturers can be viewed as accounting for any technical shortcomings in the work. Feminist art critics recognise that the demands of motherhood, the responsibilities of being a spouse, and other actions to satisfy a normative gendered role leave women with little time to make art and thus great art. After all, making art is not a straightforward endeavour.