'Know my name' is a welcome initiative by the National Gallery of Australia, and its director Nick Mitzevich, to highlight the ongoing contribution by women artists to Australian art.
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In the National Gallery of Australia collection of Australian art, women artists make up only about a quarter of the collection and the gallery is determined to change this. I suspect that the imbalance in other major art galleries, for example, the Art Gallery of New South Wales, may be even more extreme.
In what I think is a unique event in this gallery's history, the gallery launched an all-night, all-day function, 'Know my name' campaign from 10pm on Friday 24 May for 24 hours. On the menu was a pop-up bar, galleries, DJ and stories concerning remarkable Australian women artists. The gallery said the initiative was "a call for equal power, respect and recognition for female creators. This is just the beginning. Join us."
In the mid-1980s in New York appeared an anonymous feminist group of female artists called Guerrilla Girls. Their mission was to fight gender and racial inequality in American art museums. These women wore guerrilla masks and highlighted the inequality in the representation of women artists in the art galleries of New York, most memorably with their most famous poster, 'Do Women Have to Be Naked to Get Into the Met. Museum?' in 1989.
It has been almost half a century since Linda Nochlin published her polemical essay 'Why have there been no great women artists?' Part of her answer was that the reason was similar to the answer to the question 'Why have there been no great Eskimo tennis players?' In short, the whole arts industry has discriminated against creating the conditions for great women artists to appear. Traditionally, the academies discouraged the training of women to be artists and those who did sneak past, such as daughters of artists who trained at home, the gatekeepers stopped from staying in the limelight.
Different waves of feminism sought to write women artists into a history of art, some by discovering neglected artists and inserting them into an existing canon. Others offered readings of women's art suggesting that women artists were biologically different from male artists and made art with a different aesthetic, while others still argued that there existed female-dominated art mediums - for example needlework and patchwork quilts - and these needed to be reinserted into the canon of museum art. All of these strategies have appeared in Australian art galleries and museums and are particularly evident in the art collections in Canberra.
In recent times, there has been a move towards radical affirmative action. In April 2018, the Baltimore Museum of Art announced a plan to deaccession seven works by white, male post-war artists, including Franz Kline, Kenneth Noland, Any Warhol and Robert Rauschenberg, to raise funds to purchase art by African American and female artists.
Subsequently, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (who deaccessioned a Mark Rothko) and the Art Gallery of Ontario have announced a similar move for a similar purpose.
Other institutions have opted for an alternative strategy of appointing female art directors and female art curators and the 'letting go' of their male counterparts. The expressed purpose is to have more exhibitions of women artists and to acquire more of their work. Here an interesting case study is the great Dia Art Foundation in New York that is famous for its exhibitions of male minimalist and Land Art pioneers such as Robert Smithson and Donald Judd. Since the appointment of Jessica Morgan, from the Tate, to the directorship of Dia in 2015, the new shows have included the work of Dorothea Rockburne, Michelle Stuart, Anne Truitt and Charlotte Posenenske, and Morgan has made acquisitions of significant work by Mary Corse and Nancy Holt.
These moves have not been universally popular, but the idea that the art of the major public collecting institutions should more accurately reflect the diversity of the population is difficult to argue against.
Arguments concerning calibre of the artwork are also difficult to substantiate, as the very ideas of what constitutes 'good' or 'great' art, some could argue, are in themselves social constructs made by the very same male-dominated art community that has largely excluded women artists. Perhaps Nora Heysen was a more interesting artist than her dad, Hans Heysen, and Clarice Beckett and Grace Cossington Smith only became 'great' artists posthumously.
If the purpose of the 'Know my name' campaign by the National Gallery has been to start a national conversation about inclusion and diversity in the Australian art scene then that in itself will be a major achievement.
