News

As a Woman I Have No Country

9 November 2007

Byline:	Pamela Gerrish Nunn (University of Canterbury)
Source:	Humanities Research Network

A paper given at Transformations '07: Composing the nation: ideas, peoples, histories, languages, cultures, economies, the Congress of Te Whāinga Aronui The Council for the Humanities (VUW, Wellington, 27-28 August 2007).

Image: Woman's Art, Robert McDougall Gallery
A major currency of the women's art movement of the 1970s was one that nowadays seems intellectually untenable: truth. As the American scholar Linda Nochlin wrote in 1974 in an essay tellingly called 'Towards a Juster Vision', "it is only through truth that you can arrive at what is really the whole point of the women's movement - the achievement of justice" ("Art in Society" quoted Loeb,11). From this the conviction arose that feminism would first expose and then correct the massive libel that had been perpetrated by the existing visual culture. It is preferred in the post-modern climate to express this rather as Bridget Sutherland did for the 1993 exhibition Alter/Image: "The feminist artist works to disrupt a world view that has been moulded by centuries of male control and blatant capitalist conspiracy" (p. 57). Howsoever, as the editor's reply to a reader's letter in the second issue (1977) of New Zealand feminist magazine Spiral put it, "The women's art movement is expanding our insights about ourselves, our place in society, and our vision of a better society" (p.54). Identity was a fundamental concern to this project, for if they were to speak for themselves women had to know who they were. As Wendy Laks wrote in that same issue of Spiral, under the title "I am giving Birth to Myself", "Current feminism [...] can be seen to be grappling with the whole question of identity and trying to establish new images for women."( p.13) What place national identity had in that effort is the question I am going to address here.

The English writer Virginia Woolf, a heroine of the northern hemisphere women's movement, had declared that national identity was redundant for woman, and distracted her from realising a sense of her own self: 'As a woman, I have no country. As a woman, I want no country. As a woman, my country is the whole world!' (Three Guineas, 1938, ch. 3). But then, in Linda Nochlin's words, "Those who have no country have no language" (Hess and Nochlin, 11) - a concern which was reiterated throughout the women's movement in the northern hemisphere. For the French writer and thinker Simone de Beauvoir, by whom the northern hemisphere women's liberation movement set much store, a sense of self, a realisation of one's one's own identity, was a prerequisite for cultural participation (De Beauvoir, part VII:"The Independent Woman"). Of the many feminists of the 1970s who warmed to de Beauvoir's analysis, US feminist Shulamith Firestone elaborated: "The tool for representing, for objectifying one's experience in order to deal with it, culture, is so saturated with male bias, that women almost never have a chance to see themselves culturally through their own eyes...Thus because cultural dicta are set by men, presenting only the male view, women are kept from achieving an authentic picture of their reality" (Firestone, 177-8). This matrix of language, identity and the making of culture was encapsulated by another US spokeswoman, the African American Audre Lorde, when she famously declared that the master's house will not be dismantled with the master's tools - directing those who would dismantle the status quo to expect an idenity quite other than that espoused by those they saw as their opponents.

Unsurprisingly, then, when Juliet Batten, one of the most active members of the women's art movement in this country, addressed the Women's Studies Association annual conference in 1980, she spoke under the title "Women artists: is there a female aesthetic?" All her references were from the northern western world, including some whom I have mentioned: thinkers Virginia Woolf and Simone de Beauvoir, activists Lucy Lippard, Shulamith Firestone and Judy Chicago, artists Eva Hesse and Barbara Hepworth. Her question had been answered by American feminists Judy Chicago, Miriam Schapiro and Lucy Lippard, who had declared that there was most definitely a female aesthetic: a language if not common to all female artists then preferred by them. This homogenising notion was not widely supported in the international feminist art discourse, except insofar as it might evidence the historic proscription and prescription of women's creative opportunities and the programming of their imaginations.(i) Typical of the conditional reception given to this idea is the Spiral 3 editorial comment that although Chicago and Marilyn French "suggest implicitly that art is one expression of life experience common to all women" (p.1), "as women artists look to their common experience they see the need for all women's creativity to be recognised, they see that it exists everywhere, if only spasmodically in public". When the women's art movement referred to 'women' as one seamlessly oppressed, slandered and victimised class, it meant thereby to draw women out of the stratagems of patriarchal society by which women were taken for granted as a subject group for diverse purposes such as patriotism and eroticism and individualised only as competitors for approval, safety and favour conferred by their relations to men. The idealistic rhetoric of a universal seamless sisterhood which was going to raise its own voice in contradiction of patriarchal doctrine, was an effective propagandistic overstatement such as all political bodies employ to mobilise their constituency and dumbfound their opponent with the scale and comprehensiveness of the worm's turn. That strategic and idealistic universalism had to give way though to the realisation that women's common subordination did not preclude their difference from each other as well as their difference from the man-made stereotype. The contention that the man-made image of woman was false and harmful came to be argued not only on the ground that it denied the possibility of self-determination to the female sex, but that it allowed women no identity that was not based on their biology, and also that it belied the existing variety amongst women.

Feminist art determined to bring forward the missing pieces of the picture to expose the ideological function of the existing image of woman and articulate dissident views of the world. The principal aim was to allow independent, self-defining female voices to be heard, for women's art to bear witness, to show woman to women themselves and to re-educate men in what woman was, wherever she was: to deny both stereotype and archetypes with an infinite variety of specificities theretofore oppressed by the systems created by male privilege.

How did this show up in the work of feminist artists here? Juliet Batten gave a second paper at the Women's Studies 1981 conference, entitled "Emerging from Underground: the women's art movement in New Zealand". Her premise was that "this movement is like no other movement in the history of art, for it is the first time that such a movement has been initiated and led by women. The second point is that whereas most art movements have been based on radical stylistic innovations [examples], the women's art movement is not. The key factor is not style but content. Women are now discovering a new centre from which to work. The assumption of female identity becomes the starting point for unlocking new subjects in art, some of them scarcely touched over the centuries of art history (e.g. birth, nurturing, female sexuality, female views of men, of ourselves)." (p. 69) She listed the main themes of the New Zealand women's art movement's work as "political art, domesticity, sexuality/spirituality, redefining the self, our female heritage, female relationships, personal disclosure and collaborative/collective work" (p. 67): Image: Bridie Lonie Untitled in the Women and Violence exhibition, Women's gallery, 1980. In this she echoed Allie Eagle writing in Spiral 3 of the 1977 Women's Environment in Christchurch: "we could make parodies on public images of women, make references to our vulnerability, our powerlessness and our powerfulness, show woman's self-images (countering the heavily popularised images of woman by man), work communally, make tributes to women's collaborative abilities" (p.28).(ii) There was nothing explicit or indeed even implied here about national identity, and the work that came out of this crucible, such as Jane Zusters' serial photograph Portrait of a Woman marrying herself (1977: image), used starting points recognisable around the world in a range of nations:" The metaphor of marrying oneself implied a woman taking responsibility for her own life" as the artist herself said of this piece (quoted in Evans et al,163).

The awareness of historic art present in both Batten's and Eagle's lists hints at the importance to the women's art movement of the art that women anywhere had already made. Perversely, as Christchurch artist Tiffany Thornley said in writing about the first Women's Arts Festival in Christchurch (February 1979; no.2 a year later): "Another contradiction that we live with [here] is that though on the whole only men make it, our most famous artists have been women such as Katharine Mansfield and Frances Hodgkins!" (Spiral 4, p.22). The enthusiasm here for the glorious regiment of women brought into the limelight by feminist art historians from the early 1970s on was nicely attested to by Jacqueline Fahey's painting My skirt's in your f---ing room of 1978-9 (image) which shows Nochlin and Harris' Women Artists catalogue prominently in the foreground.

Thus in this vein:
Carol Shepheard, drawing (1983: image); Claudia Pond Eyley, Self-portrait with famous women's paintings (1981: image). It was possible to find in this work matter similar enough to that furnishing women's lives in the late 20th century for geography and ethnicity to be no barrier at all to empathy: here, using the works of Mary Cassatt, American in Paris: Cassatt shield (image); Matariki Artemisia mural, women's gallery (1981: image), using Heather McPherson's poem.

The art of past women was to help woman in the present find her voice, and if the female voice was to be not only resuscitated but established in the cultural discourse, the authenticity of the first person, speaking in the moment, was a crucial weapon in the movement's armoury. It defied patriarchy to deny that women were the experts on themselves - as if, like the Ancient Mariner's account of himself, the artist was saying 'this happened to me', 'I was there', 'This was how I became who I am', or "This is what I want to be". So the artist was heard autobiographically in her titles, the authority of her viewpoint informing her composition.

This international - although largely white - pool of inspirational figures became more local only as a feminist history of New Zealand art grew up as part of this country's art movement (Image: Anne Kirker, New Zealand Women Artists, 1982), seeming to offer role-models of equivalent stature from this country's cultural past.

In general, the evidence suggests that actors in the movement here found their situation much like that in the US and the UK with incidental local flavour: thus Allie Eagle writing of the 1977 Women's Environment in Christchurch (image): "In our women artists group we recognized that something BIG and powerful and female is missing in our male dominated culture" (Spiral 3, p.29)... "Mostly the images and messages we made were not crude propagandist statements, but instructing and revealing and often shattering statements about womanhood ... real images that do not correspond to the illusion of patriarchal kiwi life ... I think what could be seen and felt was some linked understanding between women about our common oppression - unpaid labour, child care, house care, being intimidated by male world values..." (p.34-5) Thus Sylvia Siddell's works (Washing Machine 1977: image) could have been made anywhere that western plumbing was available, but was recognisable also to those who didn't have that convenience, but knew about the sexual division of labour which allocated care of the domestic to women. It was not ignored that this investigation was going on in this particular place, but it was not fundamental to the problem that it was here that it was being scrutinised. Artists who made the location of their subject evident did so in diverse ways. This might mean that some artists always showed a greater consciousness of place, or that sometimes an artist would and other times she wouldn't. This series of work by Barbara Strathdee (Children of the colonials II 1984: image) made explicit reference, both visual and verbal, to the New Zealand situation of her subject-matter. Or Fiona Clark: "For me the way this exhibition is presented and has evolved is a challenge to our traditional New Zealand values..." (Women view Women, nationally touring 1987, unpaginated: image). From 1982-5 she was taking photographs (including Nga Whaea O Te Moana, featuring Te Atiawa women) that showed women who wouldn't have been seen outside New Zealand, female figures rooted in this country and clearly living in this particular society. Or Robin White (Florence at Harbour Cone: image), in whose compositions the natural settings represented locate the works in this country. Or Margaret Dawson, e.g. Victor's delusion, 1987: image, whose photo works with their local settings and references made her New Zealand's Cindy Sherman of the time. Whether negatively, as here, or positively, as here - Jane Zusters Deep End 1991: image - when those local role-models were seized upon, they were very potent: thus Zusters: "Deep End is the first picture where I explore my own cultural identity as a New Zealander." (Afterwords solo show, Aberhart North Gallery Auckland, 1993).

The self-consciousness in the subject-matter of these artists and the pointedly subjective approach was perhaps most challenging to the public when the artist spoke of something that was truly universal, her body, speaking as the owner and inhabitant of that body who empathised with other owners of like bodies worldwide. This was not a local, national, regionally specific passport-carrying body but primarily and emphatically a gendered body - the body that made a person a man or a woman but did not in itself declare a person to belong to any race or country: Allie Eagle Oh yes we will resist, we will, 1978: image. The authority of the first person in titles collaborates with the visual vocabulary of revelation, suggesting that the artist was showing truths which had been previously denied or unsuspected. And within this area of work could also be seen the menstruating body, the post-abortion body, the pregnant body... Even in her corporeality, the artist was speaking about herself as a thinking subject, not an imagined object; as an existential actor, not a passive tool of another's will; Vivian Lynn's 1972 collages (image) are evoked, where she re-invented the life drawings she had been obliged to make as art student many years before. If the artist spoke as a member of an embodied class, entitled to draw an us out of her representative me - it was the class of sisters, demonstrated vividly to the NZ public by the United Women's Conventions and their accompanying events, and later the Women's Gallery in Wellington (opened 1980, continuously till 1984: image) - a class whose members would decide the grounds and extent and conditions of their own homogeneity, thank you very much.

Geographical specificity, then, featured in the women's art movement's programme depending on individual concerns, but never at the risk of eclipsing gender as the primary concept. This was most clear in respect of Batten's performance work with the land (e.g. Te Henga: image) and the theme of peace or the nuclear question, seen in the work of Claudia Pond-Eyley and groups like the Pramazons (1983,walking from Whakatane to Gisborne: image) - but still these works in themselves aligned with like work in the UK and the US (i.e. Greenham Common), and perhaps the most powerful local reference any art made in this country could make was to use what has perhaps been conspicuous by its absence from this discussion so far, taha maori, in any shape or form.

I have not yet addressed the degree to which what I have been describing applied to maori women: it is not a question I have overlooked but I have separated out the material by which to account for it in an attempt to respect aspects of tapu held dear by at least some of the artists whom I'll now bring into my discussion. There had been a very visible maori presence at the 1973 and 1975 United Women's Convention, and the first maori women's conference called in that same feminist spirit was held in November 1978 [in Auckland], so it wouldn't be correct to assume that feminism in this country had been a pakeha idea to which maori women attached themselves if they so wished or were permitted. Some maori comment has suggested unequivocally, indeed, that it was the women's art movement that gave such artists as Emare Karaka, Robyn Kahukiwa and Kura Rewiri the platform on which their present reputation stands (Mane-Wheoki, 2005, p.24) and that an exhibition like "Whakamaemae" (Wellington, 1988: image), so emblematic of the state of maori women's art by that time, would not have occurred but for the women's art movement.

The person who has addressed this question most articulately then and since is Ngahuia Te Awekotuku, activist and art historian, who in speaking to the Piha Women's Conference in January 1978, asserted the following: "The endeavour to live her Maori-being will inevitably lead the Maori woman into compromising her woman-being with the demands of what has become, through the last 150 years of cultural redetermination and upheaval, a basically machismo socio-cultural environment... If we want change we must seize that power [from them]. Moving ever onward, we reclaim the mana of Hinenui Te Po". (Mana Wahine Maori, p.62-3). Even so, work such as Robyn Kahukiwa's The Choice (1974: image) and Who am I?(1979: image) has been both claimed and refuted as examples of first-wave feminist art. The same artist's widely known series Wahine Toa (Hinetitama, 1980: image), begun in 1980, has however been seen from the start as well described by the term 'feminist art',obviously foregrounding the issue of gender identity; Kahukiwa's presence in the manifestly feminist exhibition orgnaised by the Women's gallery in 1981 "Mothers" can also be noted. Furthermore, she and the other members of the Haeata collective (who?), formed in 1983-4 to produce the 1985 Herstory diary, were clearly involving themselves in the larger feminist project, indeed, enriching and honing it by the emphases of their take on gender as maori women. Their collective exhibition, "Karanga Karanga", in Wellington in 1986, further confirmed this. It is at this point, however, that the luxury, the privilege of Woolf's position should come into focus; and little more was at stake for a pakeha woman of this country to adopt that stance of rejecting nation; but how much more for a maori woman, as Te Awekotuku indeed implies? Writing at a point at which the womens art movement had dispersed, she felt that "While most of our contemporary women artmakers remain safely within the warmth of the pa harakeke [meaning happy to identify with their race but not taking up gender identity as contestible ground], a brave new generation has come forth, and their art is unashamedly aggressive, political and personal - they tell the world about us - our experiences, our perceptions!" - and she named on this occasion Kura Te Rewiri, Shona Rapira Davies, Maureen Lander, Emare Karaka, Merata Mita, Robyn Kahukiwa and Lisa Reihana (MWM intro, 1991, p.14). Overall, then, the huge significance for this discussion of maori involvement in the women's art movement is that it insisted that gender was an issue of identity for this country.

In 1990, Irish artist Mary Kelly made the simple claim in relation to her entire oeuvre, "The question I want to raise is, What is a woman?" (Kelly:Interim,18) The women's art movement wanted also to pose Marcia Tucker's concomitant questions, "How is our subjectivity - what we believe ourselves to be - constituted in and by the social order? And, finally, who is doing the constituting?" (ibid.). Thus New Zealand's feminist artists in their various activities redefined matters already apparently codified and categorised, but also contributed to what Tucker has described as "naming what has not been named, writing what has escaped being written, making visible what has never been seen" (Kelly:Interim,25). Although their endeavour was apparently negligent of national identity, perhaps their pursuit of these questions was a necessary precursor to the question of a modern national identity. Perhaps a national identity for women had not in fact been defined up till then: national identity had perhaps been an identity fit merely for men - fitted merely to men - living in this country, and it was simply a gender identity that women living here had been ascribed or offered, when it came down to it. Insofar as the New Zealand identity pakeha and maori was thus exposed as having been predicated on masculinity, the women's art movement can be said to have impinged on national identity by repudiating it. British art activists Mary Kelly and Marie Yates stated in 1980: "Within the broader frame of social purpose in the 70s, it was feminist art that pioneered the now constant re-examination of our identities and our politics" (Kelly/Yates,41). If nowadays national identity is in the spotlight here, it may be because the women of this country can afford to allow it space, because after their insistence thirty years ago that its complicity in the more fundamental question of gender be sorted out, it's an identity that can now be made available to people of both sexes born and living in this country.

Endnotes
i) Essentialism is discussed by Priscilla Pitts in Alter/Image, pp.18-21
ii) Another list could be made, of exhibitions at the Women's gallery: Women and violence, Self image, Sexuality, Mothers, Spirituality, Women and the Environment, Diaries, Maori women's art, Political posters, Fabric, Prints. Alter/Image list looking back in 1993: "the recovery of alternative histories and particular experiences; the recognition of the ideological basis of representation, the politics of space and the gender-specific nature of looking; the colonisation of the body; and the interactivity of gender, sexuality and identity" (p. 8)

References
Barton and Lawler-Dormer, Alter-Image: feminism and representation in New Zealand art 1973-1993, Wellington/Auckland, 1993.
De Beauvoir, Simone. The Second Sex. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1972 (1949).
Evans,Lonie and Lloyd eds. A Women's Picture Book:25 women artists of Aotearoa.Wellington:GPO,1988.
Firestone, Shulamith. The Dialectic of Sex. New York: William Morrow,1970.
Hilliard, Lucie-Smith, Mane-Wheoki, The Art of Robyn Kahukiwa, Auckand: Reed, 2005.
Kelly, Mary/Yates, Marie. "Artists on the Seventies". Studio International (no.991/2,vo..195,1981):41.
Kelly, Mary. Post-Partum Document.London:Routledge Kegan Paul,1983.
Mary Kelly: Interim, New Museum of Contemporary Art,New York,1990.
Lippard, Lucy. From the Center:feminist essays on women's art.New York:Dutton,1976.
Mulvey, Laura."Post-Partum Document by Mary Kelly", Spare Rib(no.53,1976):40.
Te Awekotuku, Ngahuia. Mana Wahine Maori, Auckland: New Women's Press, 1991.