'I waited for a long time', Catalogue essay, 'Que des femmes / Only women' exhibition at Factory 49

que des femmes... only women...

This exhibition is dedicated to the memory of Barbara Halnan (Artist 1941 - 2021)

Factory 49 49 Shepherd St Marrickville Sydney 2204

Thurs - Sat, 1-6 pm (+61) 2 9572 9863 sydney@factory49.org www.factory49.org.au

24 Nov (opening 6-8pm) to 4 Dec 2021 On-line 18 Sept to 13 Nov 2021

Alexandra Kennedy

Barbara Halnan

Elke Wohlfahrt

Annelies Jahn

Elisabeth Bodey

Jan Handel

Anya Pesce

Elizabeth Day

Karen Benton

Kate Mackay

Louise Blyton

Lynne Eastaway

Mandy Burgess

Margaret Roberts

Melinda Clyne

Michelle Le Dain

Pam Aitken

Nicola McClelland

Pamela Leung

Ro Murray

Sara Lindsay

Susan Andrews

Nicole Ellis

Pia Larsen

Sandra Curry

Rox De Luca

Sarah Fitzgerald

Sue Callanan

Susan Buret

Wendy Kelly

Que des Femmes / Only women at Factory 49 is but one of a series of satellite exhibitions positioned to reflect and respond to the main biennale event in France. Such a collaboration continues what has always been very much a feature of the non-objective scene - a community of artists, with extensive international networks, driven by an ethos of inclusiveness, united by a mutual appreciation for the field of art and a desire for its ongoing development and dialogue. Characteristic too is that it exists in an alternative current, capable of running independently (though often merging with) the art market, gallery system and public programs.

This year the theme Only women is a shift in focus from the work to the makers, from aesthetics to gender. It is a positioning that arguably introduces worldly issues of identity, discrimination and politics into a space otherwise known, and often appreciated for, its collected absence of reference to objects in the world.

Lisa Pang Sep 2021

1st edition of 100

Biennale curator Roland Orepuk

International curator Billy Gruner

Factory 49 co-curators Lisa Pang and Anya Pesce

Images courtesy of the artists

Catalogue design Pam Aitken

September 2021 ©

I waited for a long time.

Carmen Herrera

Que des Femmes / Only women at Factory 49 is but one of a series of satellite exhibitions positioned to reflect and respond to the main biennale event in France. Such a collaboration continues what has always been very much a feature of the non-objective scene - a community of artists, with extensive international networks, driven by an ethos of inclusiveness, united by a mutual appreciation for the field of art and a desire for its ongoing development and dialogue.

Characteristic too is that it exists in an alternative current, capable of running independently (though often merging with) the art market, gallery system and public programs. This year the theme Only women is a shift in focus from the work to the makers, from aesthetics to gender. It is a positioning that arguably introduces worldly issues of identity, discrimination and politics into a space otherwise known, and often appreciated for, its cool and collected absence of reference to objects in the world.

An exhibition titled as this one is does not take place in a cultural void but puts the place of women artists and art by women within a particular context. Broadly, this is the politically charged context of revelations of #MeToo, #BLM, Inside the Canberra Bubble and the reality of continuing marginalisation. More specifically in the arts, and like the work of the Guerilla Girls in the US, The Countess Report in Australia reveal continuing inequities for women in terms of representation and pay in the arts.i In an effort to address these inequities, there has been a wave of what has been termed corrective curationsii. These take the form, as here, of womenonly shows, or of retrospective redress for overlooked artists or of a redefinition of women’s work as art. Just within the last few years there have been several women-centric exhibitions at significant museums; Women Take the Flooriii, Modern Australian Womeniv, Borrowed Sceneryv, Elles font l’abstractionvi, Know My Name.vii These are spotlight moments in which art institutions drew from existing collections to highlight art by women. Commercial galleries followed the trajectory, voicing an I Am Hereviii.Then there have also been the revisionist or rediscovery shows, where previously neglected or undiscovered women artist are finally given historical recognition - Margel Hinder: Modern in Motionix, Joy Hester: Remember Me, House of Ideas: Modern Womenx, and of course the successive and highly successful Hilma Af Klint Paintings for the Future and The Secret Paintings exhibitions just part of a worldwide interest in her work.xi Recently, I saw Another Energyxii, an exhibition that impressively moved the focus to show 16 women artists aged between 71 and 105, selected for the sustained consistency of their practices. The shrinking divide between craft and art, and its associations with female domesticity and hobby have also been a source of expanded interest, as exhibitions and promotion of textile / fibre artists and craft-based approaches demonstrate; think of the abstract quilts made by the women of Gee’s Bend Alabamaxiii, of Anni Albersxiv, of belated revivals of pattern and design, even textile sales at auction housesxv. In these works, and curations, medium and materials previously considered women’s work are reclaimed as political, a subversive stitchingxvi patched into the category of contemporary art. Ours is certainly a period of vital rediscovery of artists from recent and distant pasts.xvii While these redress, revision and reframing approaches have curatorial justification of course, for artists the other (dark) side of correction is the problematic taint of tokenism. At the conception of this exhibition at Factory 49 I asked the 30 invited women artists to share how they felt about being in a women-only show, and most felt it to be a good thing but a slightly

uncomfortable question. One voiced a common view, I am an artist who happens to be a woman, not a woman who is an artist. There is also a general feeling that we would rather move beyond shock and anger, beyond decrying the relegated, undervalued, forgotten (without doing so, ever) but simply, working and showing within our arts community, and beyond. At Factory 49 that is a community of artists working non objectively, and within a much broader global network, forming a unique circle.

Overall, the exhibiting momentum of recent years is laudable as a response to the rather grim statistics. In Australia The Countess Report watches and counts every 4 years. At last count (2019), the representation of women had significantly improved. 75% of art school graduates were female. In terms of artists representation, the numbers went from 25% at the National Gallery of Australia, to 33% at state galleries, 48% at art fairs, 50% at biennales (not this one), 52 % at commercial galleries (incidentally, 52% also of art prize winners) and finally, arriving at 61% at ARIs. In the analysis, the Countess notes a significant swing of the pendulum in Australia and this is particularly when we note that overseas data often reflects little or no change in representation.xviii Compare Artnet research (2019) of prominent US museums over the past decade: only 11% of acquisitions and 14% of exhibitions were of work by women artists.xix Indeed, while within this Biennale of non-objective art there is an explicit recognition that the selection of a women-only show is a political gesture, one of our time; a time when the question of gender equality arises on a daily basis,xx this is balanced by the reality that in all previous five editions of the biennale, there has been a careful commitment to gender parity.xxi Which bring us to the reconciliation of gender within this genre, and to this biennale. To merge the stories of women in art with non-objective art could be seen to be an exercise in politicising the purity and it is interesting that while I stated earlier that an exhibition titled as this one cannot be considered in a void, much of the genre welcomes and makes work of the void. Even its own language states what is not there; not objects, not figures, not representation. It represents an approach and an aesthetic that is pared back. It is reductive; minimal, and yet, it is also concrete, geometric, even abstract. Processes are apparent, experimentation is adapted to serialisation and always, materials and methods are manifest. Those of us that practice in and are drawn to this type of work value its detachment from the world, its refinement and economy of visual language and ultimately, its freedom, even to examine itself as a subject.

Much of its historical lineage is associated with breaking with the past, new beginnings and spiritualism. All this questing and searching brings with it an enduring, expanded modernity evolving within Contemporary art.

I remember at art school, taking an elective on women artists and as an exercise being shown successive slides of paintings and asked to gender identify. It was impossible, even with figures and representation involved. I was tempted to find a jocular title for this accompanying exhibition essay about the attendant difficulty of seeing what wasn’t there – of squinting to see Guerilla girls dancing on a dark night of discrimination among a field of black monochrome squares. A recent women-only non-objective show referencing the Black Square lineage contained the observation that the show is in fact a gender-neutral visual experience, but by no means unfeminine…it would be a ludicrous idea for an exhibition to identify feminine visual traits as its primary concern. Yet the neutral gender visual perspective of contemporary reductive art is nevertheless full of new and often subtle understandings, complex shifts in language, and much needs to be fathomed.xxiiThis surely points to ongoing development of this field, where this visual language we know well, identified as neutral, can be viewed as a formal surface, but one read with an awareness of activity in the substrate. The surfaces are, but they also hint at the

possibility of discourse beneath; a more nuanced understanding of references to, even derivations from, the world we are in. Part of the activity of artists is living and thinking about our time, and we do this utilising objects and concepts from objective reality, a sort of nonobjective reality.xxiii Indeed, this type of critical challenge has surrounded the advent of Hilma and ensuing scholarship; how to situate her paintings? She abandoned representational painting in 1906 in favour of painting the invisible, what lies beyond languagexxivand in a hermetic practice, built an alternative and strikingly abstract lexicon of geometric formsxxv but she was not racing to be the first abstract artist, rather to reference esoteric visions-as-image.

This exhibition is a confluence - artists, women, and non-objective arts practice in 2021. There are 30 artists participating and I don’t intend to attempt a visual analysis of works. Of the space they claim for the role of gender in their work or of its bearing on non-objectivity, while I asked the question, their responses were as varied and energetic as their works. As subtle as a feminised renaming, as liberating as the vaunted freedom of working without narrative, as implicit as a resemblance to a particular type of fabric weave being understood as an expansion of idea. There are materials that speak of process and allude to concept; a map remade, the found, the gleaned and salvaged, the familiar as well as the glossily manufactured. A garland of weathering guilt. Methods of making loom large, manipulations of hot colour, shredded and rewoven family histories, comfort knitted while away from home. A performed monochrome.

Hand, the absence of hand. A silenced, compliant monochrome. There are dialogues across history; visual conversations with Sophie Taeuber, Louise Nevelson, Hilma Af Klint, the women weavers of the Bauhaus. A colour-coded discussion with Paul Klee. Space features often; the live space of now, imagined space, remembered space – and, given the time of exhibition within a time of pandemic, the prophetic virtual space of proposed installations. Space is also framed, squared off, fenestrated and diagrammed. Bodies and corporeality are present in layered imaging, orchestrated gesture and in the pressure of a hand. Equally defensibly, an answer or clear position on the place of gender in the work was avoided altogether and the work presented to speak for itself, or perhaps in metaphor. It is up to you.

This corner of the artworld - this factory, this biennale, and its collective satellites, have done much to sustain and progress artists’ commitment to the non-objective genre. By participating in a collegiate way, by continuing to be artist-led, artist-run and artist-centred, the flow of exhibitions, exchange and discussion continues to meander onwards. More of a platform than a hierarchy, it is a field where respect and recognition between artists transcends trends of market and museum. The space for Que des femmes / Only women within it is an opportunity – to open up a Pandora’s box for (Australian) culture: it provokes a multitude of wonderful questions about other (others’) points of view about life and art; it gives unexpected ideas room to flourish; and it welcomes previously overlooked stories and experiences. For this is one of the fundamental revelations of feminist art and scholarship over the last half-century: that women have different life experiences to draw on, different stories to tell, and engage with media and practices that are deeply embedded within female experience.xxvi Last words There is a saying, “If you wait for the bus, the bus will come.”

I waited almost a century for the bus to come, and it came!

Carmen Herrera

Lisa Pang Sep 2021

i

The Countess Report, 2019, www.countess.report online Reilly, Maura, “Havens or Prisons: Are Women-Only Exhibitions Still Needed” in Art Basel online, Jan 2018 iii Women Take the Floor Exhibition, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 2018 iv Modern Australian Women Exhibition, National Gallery of Victoria, 2018 v Borrowed Scenery Exhibition, Campbelltown Art Centre, 2019 vi Elles font l’abstraction Exhibition, Centre Pompidou, 2021 vii Know My Name: Australian Women Artists 1900 to Now Exhibition, National Gallery of Australia, 2020-1 viii I Am Here, Arthouse Gallery, Sydney 2021 ix Margel Hinder: Modern in Motion Exhibition, Art Gallery of New South Wales, 2021 x Joy Hester: Remember Me & House of Ideas: Modern Women Exhibitions, Heide Museum of Modern Art, 2020-1 xi Hilma Af Klint: Paintings for the Future Exhibition, Guggenheim Museum NYC, 2019 and Hilma Af Klint: The Secret Paintings, Art Gallery of New South Wales, 2021 xii Another Energy Exhibition, Mori Art Museum Tokyo, 2021 xiii We will Walk: Art and Resistance in the American South Exhibition, Turner Contemporary Margate, 2020, UK xiv Anni Albers Exhibition, Tate Modern London, 2018-9 xv Lin, Brenda, Textiles: The Art of Women’s Work, Sotheby’s Online journal, 2020 xvi Parker, Rozsika, The Subversive Stitch, The Womens Press Ltd: 1984, UK xvii Smith, Roberta, “Pattern & Decoration: A Movement That Still Has Legs” in The New York Times Art Review online, Aug 5, 2021 xviii The Countess Report 2019, Ibid. at 9 xix Halperin, Julia & Burns, Charlotte, “Museums Claim They’re Paying More Attention to Female Artists. That’s an Illusion” in ARTNET News, online, 19 Sept 2019 xx Que des femmes … Only women … Online Exhibition promotion, Sept 9, 2021, www.pontdeclaix.fr xxi Que des femmes … Only women … Online Exhibition catalogue, 6th biennale internationale d’art non objectif de la ville de pont de claix, 18 Sept – 13 Nov 2021, www.pontdeclaix.fr xxii Gruner, Billy, Gender Neutrality in Reductive Art, ICONS \ W-13 Exhibition Catalogue Essay, Kiev Non Objective, Kiev 2018 xxiii This broad conception is also theorised as a Discursive Geometry by Mark Starel (Poland) and as a New Modern by Billy Gruner (Australia) et al. xxiv Obrist, Hans Ulrich, “Hilma Af Klint: Painting the Unseen” in Hilma Af Klint: Seeing is Believing, Goethe Institute, London: 2016 xxv Fer, Briony, “The Outsider Inside Herself”, Ibid. xxvi Ewington, Julie “Know My Name (and Hers, and Hers Too…)” in Know My Name Virtual Conference Resource Pack, National Gallery of Australia,2020, at 9 ii