School of Culture and Communication - Research Publications
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ItemWhen historic time meets Julia Kristeva’s women’s time: the reception of Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party in Australia( 2008)One of the first visual arts events of the 1988 bicentennial year was the staging of The Dinner Party (1979), a monumental artwork by the North American artist Judy Chicago at the Melbourne Exhibition Buildings. Completed in 1979, The Dinner Party has become emblematic of a particular form of feminist art practice: namely that which makes visible the body of women in both a literal and metaphoric sense. An enormous installation, The Dinner Party is a triangular table setting at which places are laid for the women that are missing from conventional historic narratives. The place settings include elaborate crockery with each plate adopting vaginal imagery that evokes particular characteristics of each woman's historic contribution.While attracting extremely high visitor numbers whenever the work is exhibited, the artwork itself has been widely criticised. The Melbourne exhibition of this work was no exception. However on this occasion there was an added dimension to the criticism: a parochial resistance to the importation of a foreign artwork. In this paper I explore this specific instance of border crossing in feminist art practice, and the claims made by many Australian art critics that superior work was being produced by local women artists. These arguments involved assertions that The Dinner Party’s visual aesthetic was dated, that Australian artists had adopted a similar imagery prior to Chicago and that whatever impact the work might have had in 1979, by 1988 it could only be regarded as a relic.
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ItemArt: a form of speech, but not like any other?( 2002)Protection of art occurs under Australian law in only a narrow range of circumstances where works of artistic merit are exempted from otherwise unlawful acts. In this paper I suggest that this approach to protection appears to be based on the idea that while art may constitute a form of expression, it is a particularly benign form. In fact it is likely that when art attempts to engage in the realm of the political it is at risk of falling outside of these protections. I go on to examine a number of issues that arise as a result of art being regarded as protected speech under the United States’ First Amendment. In conclusion I suggest that before entrenching a protection along the lines of the First Amendment in any future Australian Bill of Rights, further consideration is needed as such protection is limited by a provision that defines art as speech and offers protection solely against state censorship.