Lost Property

The Artswipe

The Global Village, 2007
Photograph (no print edition because we ran out of trees to make paper)

The Artswipe encountered this street sign today in a quaint suburban village in the western suburbs of Sydney and felt a surge of Public Sphere Pride. "Sustainability St: It's a village out there". This street sign really should have been in last year's Biennale of Sydney. It's the kind of text art Australia is crying out for. Speaking of art and the western suburbs, Artswipe popped into the Penrith Regional Gallery and the Lewers Bequest today to see the much anticipated Vivienne Binns retrospective. When I was at art school we all considered Ms Binns a legend. Binns is one of those artists who is really iconic for a couple of significant works, which unfortunately overshadows an art practice still going strong. Cases in point: Binns made a landmark community art project called Mothers Memories, Others Memories (1979-81) which was significant for the way it engaged a community of women in Blacktown, a suburb in Western Sydney. Binns also made iconic feminist paintings like Phallic Monument and Vag Dens in the 1960s. The latter features a big psychedelic vagina with teeth (luckily no orthodontic braces). It's 1970s second wave feminist art par excellence. You know, all anti-aesthetic and angry and political. If feminism was battery operated, you'd need D-size Duracel because making the personal political can require quite a bit of charge! It's a message that must be heard - a message about owning your vagina, owning your politics. Perhaps even your teeth as well. I've often dreamed about my teeth falling out: common dream stock I've heard. If I have that dream again, I'll check whether my teeth have fallen into my vagina, doubling probably as a Lost Property depot ("So that's that's where the remote control went!") Come to think of it, even though she's been regarded by critics and historians for works such as these, the rest of Vivienne Binns' oeuvre is kind of like art historical lost property. Fortunately this great show, curated thoughtfully by Merryn Gates, remedies that.

Vivienne Binns
Nylon over the Lachlan, 2006
Acrylic on canvas 130.3 x 165.3 cm
Courtesy of Penrith Regional Gallery & The Lewers Bequest

The Vagina Monoblogs

The Artswipe

What is it you kunst face? 2006

Mobile phone photo

I was watching Oprah recently interviewing "age-defying women." It has to be my second favourite Oprah episode (after the one where, as shown above, she works at McDonalds for a day to prove she can be a proletariat if she damn well feels like it). In this episode about "age-defying women" Oprah waxes lyrical with a 50something woman who has kept a youthful visage because she applies vaginal cream on her face daily. This was totally inspired. Basically this vaginal face cream woman is a performance artist and she doesn’t even know it. She may as well be at the forefront of feminist art practice.

By "feminist" I don’t mean bland post-feminist crap (a myth probably invented by Carrie Bradshaw). I am talking about the real stuff: second wave feminism. Where women burnt their bras, worshipped their vaginas, ran with wolves, sculpted with tampons, made the nappy happy and politicised the domestic. They also got real angry at marches and rallies. They loved other women, not always because they were lesbians, but because men are pigs. These second wave womyn would never be seen watching The L Word – or at least they would not admit it. They’d be queuing around the block for tickets to a Barbara Hammer retrospective.

The best thing about the second wave was it allowed you to say “cunt” in a critical context. Specifically because many feminist artists of this era made, what they affectionately called, “cunt art.” Flowers became vaginal signifiers and whirling spiral forms (barbed with the occasional dentata) hypnotised viewers into accepting menopause as a pause from men. To list such pioneers would mean citing the likes of Judy Chicago, Lynda Benglis, Hannah Wilkes, Carolee Schneeman, Vivienne Binns, Barbara Kruger, Jenny Holzer, The Guerrilla Girls, Mary Kelly, among many others. Their more contemporary counterparts are artists like Tracey Emin (before she stopped drinking), Le Tigre (before they covered The Pointer Sisters’ “I'm so Excited”) and Australian dragking foursome The Kingpins (before they terrorised Starbucks). Why am I going on about this anyway?

Blame Oprah – she makes me think of kunst.