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Little could I guess that, 44 years after I began my practice as an arts feminist, I'd be writing about an exhibition titled 'Unfinished Business: Perspectives on art and feminism'. It was unimaginable in 1974 that the same disparities would need to be addressed, the same lacunae exist, the same frustrations remain febrile and relevant. That year, I co-curated 'A Room of One's Own: Three Women Artists', probably Australia's first feminist group show. My fellow curators were Kiffy Rubbo, director of the Ewing and George Paton Galleries, and Lynne Cooke, then a final-year honours student at Melbourne University. It was Lynne's and my dissatisfaction with the patriarchal bias of our art history course that prompted us to start talks with Kiffy that led to the exhibition, which included work by Lesley Dumbrell, Julie Irving and Ann Newmarch.
That wave of 1970s feminist art activity brought forth, Australia-wide, exhibitions, both historical and contemporary, the Women's Art Movement with its attendant slide registers, journals and publications, research, networks and intense discussions. It was a naively optimistic time. We believed we could change the art world, and for good. And it ended, at the start of the 1980s, not with a whimper but a bang. In 1981, the influential exhibition 'A New Spirit in Painting' opened at London's Royal Academy. Only one of the 45 artists was female - Susan Rothenberg. It celebrated the new art movements: the Italian (all-male) transavantgarde, inaugurated by curator Achille Bonito Oliva. In Germany, the painterly neo-expressionism of Georg Baselitz and Anselm Kiefer came to prominence. There was also Mary Boone's gallery in New York which included the superstars Jean-Michel Basquiat, David Salle and Julian Schnabel.
Women artists seemed to suddenly disappear. Feminism was not only a dirty word but an embarrassing one. I knew women artists who had identified with and been part of the women's art movement who junked their commitment because they believed it could harm their careers. The rest of us just shut up or got on, more quietly, more subversively, with our feminist projects because no-one in the wider art world was interested. We were a style that had gone out of fashion. We were a force rendered (relatively) powerless....