Lilith 17: 2008

Wonders Taken for Signs: The Cultural Activism of the Australian Women’s Movement as Avant-Garde Reformation

Margaret Henderson

You can’t lug the corpse of your father all over the place.
Apollinaire (c.1914)

[M]y case is that from 1969 to 1974 ... this was indeed a classic pure ideas period akin to the rise of cubism in 1940-08 or any of those great burstings forth. I think one of the huge questions we have to ask is, how did this spring forth? And why was it such a phenomenal rupture? That word, ‘rupture’, comes up for me all the time.
Suzanne Bellamy, Australian feminist artist

Although many of the historical accounts and evaluations of the second wave Australian women’s movement thus far written acknowledge the cultural ‘wing’ or dimension of the women’s movement as one of its major successes and a potent legacy, little detailed attention is paid in feminist histories to its cultural manifestations.1 The analysis of women’s movement culture is left to the various realms of cultural criticism – literary studies, film studies, and so on. Even here the historical narrativisation is limited, as studies centre on a particular genre or discipline, and/or do not intend to be histories. This is not to disparage these excellent studies, or genre-based approaches; however, a broad ranging cultural history of the Australian women’s movement remains to be written.

This gap is significant, because culture, as a form of protest, resistance, and critique, has been a major part of the feminist legacy – think feminist theatre, art, fiction, and film. Social movements, and especially the women’s movement, reserve a special role for, and mobilise an expanded definition of, culture.2 For the women’s movement, culture is or does the following: consciousness-raising practice; material and behavioural building blocks of a fundamentally transformed social structure; a rediscovery and creation of an oppositional female-oriented culture; and political praxis: acting as a vanguard for the creation of a women’s culture and feminist social order. Culture, then, is creative in two senses: it makes feminist identities, groups and objects come into being and cohere, and culture is a mode of liberation – political, personal, historical and social. 2

Culture’s crucial role in feminism has not escaped various theorists. According to Alberto Melucci, a distinctive feature of social movements, and particularly the women’s movement, is that they ‘operate as signs, in the sense that they translate their actions into symbolic challenges to the dominant codes’ which ‘subvert the logic of the dominant ones’.3 Melucci argues that the cultural dimension of radical groups is only intensified in the context of late capitalism where ‘power is exercised in the control of codes, [and] antagonism lies in the ability to resist and, even more, to overturn dominant codes’.4 Indeed, he claims that ‘the main production [of the women’s movement] is that of feminine cultural codes’.5

As befitting a symposium on histories of feminist representation, this paper would like to use Melucci’s provocative evaluation of the women’s movement as a starting point for a cultural history of the Australian women’s movement. In this paper, I wish to explore just how, where, and why the Australian women’s movement broke the codes of the dominant culture and created its own codes in a range of cultural forms from 1970 through the 1980s. Both Susan Magarey and Ann Curthoys term the extraordinary cultural output of the women’s movement as a ‘cultural renaissance’.6 I wish to follow and extend that description, proposing that the women’s movement was indeed a rebirth of women’s cultural production, but a rebirth that took a specific form, not of the secular humanist culture usually associated with the term ‘renaissance’, but a rebirth taking the form of the historical avant-gardes of the early twentieth-century as theorised most comprehensively by Peter Bürger.7 By a brief survey of Australian feminist writing and publishing, film and journalism, radio, music, theatre and performance, and the visual arts, I will argue why the Australian women’s movement can be conceptualised as a reformation of the avant-garde, and what this framing makes possible for feminist, radical, and mainstream histories. My paper’s title comes from the literary critic Franco Moretti’s study, Signs Taken for Wonders.8 In this work he takes a number of the wonders of western literature, such as James Joyce’s Ulysses, and reads them as literary sign systems and signs of political and social realities. I reverse Moretti’s formulation for my purposes: I argue that when analysed collectively, the various forms of cultural activism of the Australian women’s movement are indeed wonders, and wonders that are signs of the most advanced expression of political art in the late twentieth-century Australia.

First, let us take a brief look at the nature of the historical avant-garde. My use of the term is derived largely from Bürger’s study, Theory of the Avant-Garde which, as his key phrase ‘the historical avant-garde’ suggests, emphasises the historical specificity of the avant-garde, and avoids depoliticising it into simply a set of aesthetic techniques and/or collapsing its movements into modernism. In Bürger’s account (not without its shortcomings), the historical avant-garde refers to a number of European cultural movements in the early twentieth century, namely Dada, early surrealism, the Futurists and Russian constructivism.9 The avant-garde’s defining quality was its ‘attack on the status of art in bourgeois society. What is negated is not an earlier form of art (style) but art as an institution that is unassociated with the life praxis of men’.10 The avant-garde is, therefore, concerned with critiquing the function of art, namely, its ideological and practical separation from life, usually termed the autonomy of art, and the effects a work or text can have in such an institutional location.11 The institutional setting of art is a prime concern for the avant-gardists because they realised this potentially limited the effectiveness of art as a political weapon: function may undercut a work’s political content.12

This primary concern with the institutional setting of art has three main implications for the avant-garde’s practices: in how the work is conceptualised, how it can be produced, and how it can be received. First, Bürger notes montage as a key technique changing the nature of art works. The insertion and superimposition of ‘readymade’ images in an art work means that for the first time since the Renaissance, the part or fragment of the work is autonomous from the whole.13 Because the technique of montage questions traditional notions of the work of art, Bürger defines the avant-garde work as two things: nonorganic, and as a manifestation rather than a work. Montage also negates the primacy of the individual as producer, for who is the ‘creator’ of the work?14

Montage changes practices of reading and reception as well. The privileging of the part at the expense of the whole breaks the hermeneutic circle, that is, the mode of interpretation whereby ‘the parts can be understood only through the whole, the whole only through the parts’. From this arises the avant-garde’s notorious shock effect: we are forced to read the art object differently, to confront contradiction, and this, ideally, will lead to changes in life praxis.15 As Richard Murphy explains, ‘In a sense then, the avant-garde’s attack is directed more than anything else against the bourgeois construction of social reality in all its guises’.16 Moreover, the questioning of art’s separation from life (which montage symbolises) also challenges, by implication, the separation of the roles of audience and producer so that the individual act of reception is negated. ‘This is what is meant by Breton’s demand that poetry be practiced (pratiquer la poesie). … producers and recipients no longer exist’.17

While Bürger argues that the avant-garde failed, with its hope for art merging with life mutated by the operations of popular culture and commodity aesthetics, it is equally accurate to see it as liquidated: by Stalinism, Fascism, and Nazism.18 The avant-garde did, however, leave a powerful legacy, which is where the women’s movement comes in. It represents a break in western art: first, by destroying the concept of the organic work of art, thus making us think about and read a text differently.19 Second, ‘the place of political engagement in art was fundamentally changed’, extending the problem of the political effectiveness of art to the institutional as well as on the formal plane.20 And I would add a third, related effect: the avant-garde posed a powerful challenge to the separation of spheres: art from life, art from politics, and life from politics. These separations were seen as crucial blockages to human freedom.

When We Dead Awakened

To read the Australian women’s movement as a reformation of a misogynist and sexist male avant-garde is neither to posit the women’s movement as a pale imitation of ‘the real thing’, nor as a dutiful or rebellious daughter; instead, the women’s movement is a late twentieth-century return of the historical avant-garde’s repressed: those images and exclusions which haunted the movement re-emerge not as fragmented parts of the avant-garde text, but as avant-gardiste praxis.21 Jean-François Lyotard comments that ‘the true process of avant-gardism was in reality a kind of work, a long, obstinate and highly responsible work concerned with investigating the assumptions implicit in modernity’.22 Further, contra the contemporary unfashionability of avant-gardism, Lyotard argues that such a project is crucial if we are to avoid repeating what he calls, ‘the West’s modern neurosis – its schizophrenia, paranoia etc., the source of the misfortunes we have known for two centuries’.23 In keeping with the gender blindness of postmodern theorists, he suggests that this role is taken up by postmodernism. I argue, however, that it is the women’s movement which fills this role, as it performs the long, obstinate and highly responsible work of investigating the gendered assumptions implicit in late modernity and beyond. And it is feminist culture that elaborates an ‘initial forgetting’ (to use Lyotard’s words) of both the historical avant-garde and patriarchal late modernity. In effect, the women’s movement re-forms key elements of the historical avant-garde and thereby extends its project, with similarly major consequences for politics and culture.

So what makes the Australian women’s movement an avant-garde reformation? Hubert Van Den Berg’s summary definition of the historical and the neo avant-gardes applies equally to Australian women’s movement culture: ‘a self-understanding as avant-garde … also … the combination of radical aesthetic innovations with the attempt of revolutionizing not only artistic practices, but society as a whole’.24 As I will show, the women’s movement radically reformulated, and in a similar ideological direction, all levels of the field of art and culture identified by Bürger as characterising the historical avant-gardes, namely, the conceptualisation of the work of art, relations of cultural production, relations of reception, and aesthetic techniques. Most important, however, is the women’s movement’s reunification of political and artistic avant-gardism, a unity which was lost in the 1930s.25

Before discussing these levels let us note the conditions of emergence for feminist art and culture, for again, there are uncanny parallels between the historical avant-garde and the women’s movement; furthermore, the institutional setting of art is crucial for the avant-garde project. The late 1960s can be characterised by growing political unrest of a new form, namely, in the shape of new social movements such as students, and Anti-Vietnam war activists, and ongoing conservatism of the dominant culture.26 The tactics of what is commonly termed the New Left or the Youth Movement included a cultural dimension, such as street theatre, underground newspapers, music and so on; moreover, its politics and culture was strongly anti-tradition and vanguardist in self-understanding.27 Protest was not just at a political caste or party or system, but an entire way of life. So in certain of these groups we have a challenging and merging of the separate spheres of art, politics, and everyday life; a clear oppositional stance vis-à-vis the dominant culture; and a revolutionary politics that attempted to connect with earlier revolutionary movements, strategically, ideologically, and in terms of imagery and rhetoric. This was the politico-cultural terrain in which the nascent women’s movement found itself.

As you well know, the revolutionary critique did not extend to women’s oppression.28 And as women realised their marginalisation from progressive politics, and the need to organise politically on their own terms, they also realised their marginalisation, if not invisibility, from western culture. The exclusion of women from culture is a theme reiterated in countless interviews, articles, and documents from women’s movement cultural activists. For instance, as an answer to the question, ‘Why women’s films?’ Barbara Alysen’s gives this reply in 1979: 'We live in a world where the dominant ideas are shaped by men, where our major institutions are controlled by them and where the thoughts, aspirations and lives of women are denied expression'.29

So, as the separate spheres of art, politics, and the everyday become unsettled, the glaring separation of women from culture continued. Add to these the women’s movement’s foundational critique of the separation of the personal from the political, and its thoroughgoing critique of conventional and radical politics, and you have the location and dynamics from which the women’s movement can emerge as late twentieth-century avant-garde.30

Rethinking Culture

Like its distant predecessor, the women’s movement fundamentally reconceptualised the art object across the spectrum of its cultural activism. First and foremost we should recognise the political purpose of art for the women’s movement. Although most of the movements comprising the historical avant-garde had leftist politics, and some had close connections with revolutionary movements, the women’s movement displays an intrinsic, indeed organic connection between its culture and its identity as a political movement.31 Culture was engaged in for political purposes, and culture was inseparable from the movement. In the words of feminist film makers Sarah Gibson and Susan Lambert: ‘We were both feminists, active in the Women’s Liberation Movement before we became filmmakers. Video was our first experience of having access to skills and tools for communicating ideas. We weren’t into learning skills for skills’ sake, but rather to articulate our feminism, which we called propaganda’.32

Second, women’s movement cultural activism had to challenge standard definitions (whether of the work or of the artist), evaluative schemes, canonisations and traditions, and generic boundaries.33 The omission of women from the cultural record meant the search for a women’s tradition and/or the addition of women’s histories to the standard ones.34 It meant the questioning of what makes an artist, what is good art or literature, and what its purpose was. Feminist cultural activism also took shape in the quest for a female or feminine aesthetic to counter the repression of the feminine.35

And given these issues, feminist culture rejected the primary (and gendered) structuring device of late modern culture, namely, the binary of high and popular culture.36 Those debates concerning high, mass, and popular culture that characterised conservative and radical cultural theory, criticism and practice throughout the twentieth century were made somewhat redundant in a feminist critique of all cultural practices and representations, and in the feminist analysis of the gendered nature of binary oppositions and their too neat answers.

Relations of Production

Considering this rethinking of culture, the artist, and women’s limited role in cultureit is not surprising that the relations of cultural production were radically transformed in feminist practice. While Bürger judges the historical avant-garde to have negated the individual as producer/creator but not necessarily to have replaced it with a collective mode of production, the women’s movement is, in contrast, unambiguously collective.37 The collective, as defining structure of the women’s movement, is signifier par excellence of its cultural politics. It features in the proper names of cultural organisations for example, Earth Works Poster Collective, or takes shape in the synonyms of the group or the cooperative, such as Sydney Women’s Film Group, and the Women’s Movement Literature Co-operative. Collectivism, as a strategy to demystify artistic production, to challenge the bourgeois artist figure and ideology of individualism, and to overcome women’s isolation, is the creative ethos powering feminist culture, whether in textual production or distribution. In the case of film, the auteur theory was rejected in favour of a non-hierarchical collective structure of film making, ‘one in which all the creative and technical roles were shared among the group’.38 In theatre, scripts arose out of workshops. Women artists formed groups so as to overcome isolation and self-doubt.39 Further, in this emphasis on collectivity and skill-sharing, the women’s movement challenged the dichotomy of amateur and professional.

The women’s movement also collectivised the means of cultural distribution. Anna Couani notes the women’s movement’s role in setting up presses such as Tantrum, Redress, and Sybylla, and thus promulgating women’s writing: ‘and these provided women’s writing with a market, an audience, an infrastructure’.40 Collectives produced newspapers and journals such as MeJane, Mabel, Girl’s Own, and Scarlet Woman. The Feminist Film Workers set up a specialist feminist film distribution wing; ‘Words for Women’ distributed feminist publications.41 The Adelaide Women’s Art Movement set up its own gallery. From the beginning, feminist cultural activists knew the crucial role of institutions as well as signifiers.

Modes of Reception

At this level, again, the women’s movement reformed and extended the ethos and practices of the historical avant-gardes. A major characteristic of the women’s movement was a reconfiguration of the realm of reception, which occurred in three ways: a collective mode of reception, a questioning of the distinction between producer and receiver, and a different hermeneutic practice. Paralleling the attempt to de-individualise and to collectivise the act of cultural production was the emphasis on collective reception which was linked not only to a critique of the ideology of individualism and the monadic experience of art, but to the purpose of women’s movement culture as well. Culture was agit-prop, not for solitary contemplation or to encounter the sublime, but to raise consciousness and foment activism.

How were these ideals realised? Films, for example, were shown to small groups with the makers present, and the screening followed by a discussion session. Women’s movement theatre and performance used a similar technique. Even the arguably most solitary pursuit of writing encouraged a collective mode of reception through writers’ workshops and readings at feminist bookshops. Feminist culture was not so much a work or text purchased for private consumption, but would be more accurately characterised as a manifestation of the women’s movement’s politics (to use Bürger’s term), which worked towards producing a collective moment of reception. This was further accentuated by the venue for these events: theatre, film screenings, book launches, exhibition openings, women’s dances, occurring in spaces outside the mainstream sites of cultural happenings—on factory floors, women’s prisons, university refectories, schools, Salvation Army halls, and women’s centres. Art was happening in everyday life, not in the palaces of establishment culture.

Such an emphasis on a collective mode of reception led to an undermining of the distinction between cultural producers and receivers. By being encouraged to participate in and to evaluate the work or event, the audience is recast as an active collaborator rather than passive consumer. The use of a feministic set of evaluative criteria for cultural production further empowers the audience and decentres dominant ideologies of culture. The strong bonds of identification between audience and artist also troubles the producer-receiver dichotomy. And the anti-elitist dynamic of feminist culture, with its attendant project of demystifying art and techne, and a DIY ethos, refuses the cult of the genius-artist, instead encouraging an egalitarian notion of cultural participation.

Many of the texts produced by the women’s movement culture demand a different practice of interpretation than that required by the dominant culture. This is not surprising, considering that the major quest by many feminist cultural activists is to create a new, untainted language that addresses the erasure of women from western cultural traditions. In feminist texts the receiver is implored to read ‘otherwise’: to be active and critical, to be estranged from hegemonic cultural codes, to rethink what might be the signs of belonging for a woman in a feminist world. Such a feminist reading practice, like its early twentieth-century predecessors, largely refuses the hermeneutic circle and the comfort of the organic work of art. The parts do not easily add up to the meaning of the whole; instead, dissonance – whether cognitive, subjective, or political – is the more likely result of many feminist texts.

Feminist Texts, Feminist Manifestations

As was the case with the historical avant-garde, the women’s movement used a range of aesthetic strategies and styles, making it difficult, if not contradictory, to argue for a feminist style.42 It is possible, however, to identify three tendencies that are widespread in, and symbolise the location of, women’s movement cultural production. These are the tendency to experimentalism, the use of montage and the fragment, and the centrality of ‘experience’.

Feminist experimentalism marks every genre used: there is a clear quest to change the genre at one or more of its fundamental level(s). Experimentalism may have been enacted by the use of visual or aural montage, as in film and radio; or in the case of performance, the use of hyper-stylised acting styles42; in the form of women’s writing, the fracturing of syntax and narrative; in posters, the technique of collage; in feminist bands, the refusal of musical generic boundaries themselves; while a similar refusal of the boundaries between art and craft characterises the experimentalism of feminist visual arts. The women’s movement didn’t just make culture or use cultural forms, it remade culture in ‘a massive redescriptive task’, something inevitable given culture’s ‘take’ so far on women. And this is one major factor in the strength of the feminist cultural legacy.45

Like its early twentieth-century predecessors, montage composed of the fragment is a key feminist technique. I want to underline the importance of the fragment, as it functions as both vehicle for montage, and signifier of women’s experiences under patriarchy and within women’s liberation. The fragment signifies the subject split from the patriarchal social order or from language; the feminist subject in process (of becoming); the critical subject of feminism, suspicious of claims to wholeness or experience itself; and the feminist creator, working within and beyond previous flawed radical aesthetic movements.

The material for this experimentalism was the female imaginary and female experience, whether used critically or uncritically. Again, this theme is a consequence of the Western Imaginary’s lack or restrictions. If the historical avant-garde aimed to respond to and be part of the newness of fully blown modernity, that is, to be the shock of the new, as Robert Hughes describes it, the women’s movement desired to bring into being another form of the new: female experience from a politicised female perspective. We could term this ‘the shock of the feminist’. This central thematic of experience was a crucial component in the feminist (and characteristically avant-gardiste) refusal of the separation of art from life, as Meaghan Morris explains: ‘The category of experience has always assumed the irrelevance of opposing living and writing, art and life, in feminist cultural activity’.46

Finally, to further contextualise these achievements we should note the range, speed, and hence scale of the women’s movement’s cultural politics. In the 1970s and 1980s the Australian women’s movement attempted to work within and/or subvert virtually every field of cultural production for feminist purposes: dance, theatre and performance, film and later video, radio, journalism, publishing, writing, visual arts, art criticism and theory, and so on. And as noted above, in these sites it refused standard practices, classifications, and institutional frameworks, sometimes working within, but often beyond existing cultural parameters and fields.

Complementing this broad scope is the speed of progress of feminist cultural activism. In the case of film, from 1972-1974 the Sydney Women’s Film Group made four films.47 In the space of five years (1974-1978) six feminist presses or printeries were operating, and from 1971-1979 at least six women’s movement newspapers had appeared.48 This rapidity of change is repeated across the genres and modes, and all of this occurring in a country with a small population (of about thirteen million in 1971 and sixteen million by 1986), an anti-intellectual and masculinist ethos, and a conservative cultural establishment. And the women’s movement’s specific form of dynamism – a short-lived intensity with long term effects – uncannily echoes that of the historical avant-garde.

And What might these Wonders make Possible? Or, When the Other Dead Awaken

So what occurs when we refigure the Australian women’s movement as a late modern avant-garde? First, it foregrounds the wondrous nature of the movement, specifically its cultural production. This, in turn, has implications for feminism’s self-understanding. A cultural focus fills out the movement: it is more than legislative or campaign defeats and victories; indeed, it is a force that used an expansive range of tactics to attempt a social revolution – a project in which cultural activism was intrinsic. This focus on feminist culture’s achievements in reshaping Australian culture and political activism might also temper some of the more pessimistic evaluations of the Australian women’s movement. There was something else going on, and which kept going on (in changing how we think about and undertake writing, film, performance, posters, and so on), and whose effects are neither predictable nor easy to measure.49

Second, such a reading can potentially change the histories and understanding of Australia culture in the 1970s and 1980s. In mainstream and radical histories, general accounts or ones concentrating on a specific cultural form, the women’s movement and its culture is a rather muted presence. Although some accounts are generous and perceptive,50 a common tendency is to focus on the women’s movement as a political or social force while its culture remains invisible.51 Further, genre or discipline-based analyses can only offer limited readings, thus the broad and hence unique nature of the women’s movement’s cultural activism remains suppressed. At best, women’s movement culture remains a paragraph, a page or two, maybe a chapter in a textual field that appears unwilling or unable to change its thematics to make space for radical culture in the national historical record.52

Moving beyond the nation, to see the Australian women’s movement as an avant-garde reformation affects how we understand radical (cultural) politics as working in the course of the twentieth century, and counters unreconstructed masculinist ways of thinking the modern and the postmodern. I refer here specifically to two sets of related debates: the legacy of the historical avant-garde, and the nature and operations of postmodern culture. The successor to the historical avant-garde is generally seen as the neo-avant-garde, a western art movement of the 1950s-1970s.53 The neo-avant-garde was perceived as a failed attempt at resurrecting the avant-garde project, mainly because the historical and institutional conditions of art had changed dramatically since World War II, making an authentic avant-garde impossible.54 This failure is referred to in the phrase ‘death of the avant-garde’, and is a fundamental tenet (and haunting) of postmodern culture. The gender blindness of these critics is obvious: why is the women’s movement not recognised as inheritor of the historical avant-garde’s project, a link that a number of more insightful critics have noted?55 Is it that radical culture’s laws of inheritance are patrilineal? Compared to the neo-avant-garde, the women’s movement, including the Australian movement, operated across far more cultural genres and modes, produced far more texts, and left ongoing representational, ideological, and institutional changes – culture will never be the same. It was, as true avant-gardes are, ahead of its time, politically and culturally. What a difference it could make to radical cultural histories if these achievements were acknowledged. How the maps, timelines, and genealogies would have to be redrawn.

In regards to postmodern culture, while some critics see it as a space of potential for radical arts, there is a strong strand of pessimism, ambivalence, or fatalism on the left and by some feminists. In canonical accounts such as Fredric Jameson’s, the potential for radical art is seriously if not fatally limited by the power of consumer capitalism.56 The conservative theorist, Achille Bonito Oliva trumpets the hedonistic and apolitical trans-avant-garde as ‘the only avant-garde possible’ in such an epoch.57 Here again, however, to see the Australian women’s movement as an avant-garde reformation is to upset understandings of contemporary cultural change denoted by the rubric ‘postmodernism’. A marginalised group, largely dead in terms of existing cultural traditions and practices, reformed and extended a critically important politico-cultural project forty years after its liquidation, and with far-reaching social, cultural, and political effects. And all of this occurring within a historical context (specifically, late capitalism or postmodernism) which seemingly made a genuine avant-garde impossible. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, in Australia and throughout the West, relations of cultural production, reception, and texts all worked together to create the ‘shock of the feminist’. Such a wondrous scenario of fundamental ‘cultural disruption’ (as Magarey describes it) cannot help but blast open the continuum of pessimistic and masculinist history marking much of the left, and the pessimism and superiority in some strands of feminism.58 And hopefully, it will make some other dead awaken.

Margaret Henderson
University of Queensland

Endnotes

1. Susan Magarey, ‘Feminism as Cultural Renaissance’, Hecate, 30 no. 1 (2004): 231.
2. Hank Johnston, Enrique Laraňa, and Joseph R. Gusfield, ‘Identities, Grievances, and New Social Movements’, in New Social Movements: From Ideology to Identity, eds. Enrique Laraňa, Hank Johnston, and Joseph R. Gusfield (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994), 7.
3. Alberto Melucci, Nomads of the Present: Social Movements and Individual Needs in Contemporary Society, ed. John Keane and Paul Mier (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989), 12; Alberto Melucci, ‘A Strange Kind of Newness: What’s “New” in New Social Movements?’, in Laraňa, Johnston, and Gusfield New Social Movements, 125.
4. Melucci, ‘Strange’, 123.
5. Melucci, Nomads, 144.
6. Magarey, 231; Ann Cuthoys, ‘Doing it for Themselves: The Women’s Movement Since 1970’, in Gender Relations in Australia: Domination and Negotiation, eds. Kay Saunders and Raymond Evans (Marrickville, NSW: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1992), 427.
7. Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984).
8. Franco Moretti, Signs Taken for Wonders: Essays in the Sociology of Literary Forms, trans. Susan Fischer, David Forgacs and David Miller (London: Verso, 1997).
9. Critiques include those by Richard Murphy, Theorizing the Avant-Garde: Modernism, Expressionism, and the Problem of Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); and Dietrich Scheunemann, ‘From Collage to the Multiple: On the Genealogy of Avant-Garde and Neo-Avant-Garde’, in Avant-Garde/Neo-Avant-Garde, ed. Dietrich Scheunemann (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005), 15-48.
   
10. Bürger, 49.
11. Ibid., 49.
12. Ibid., 26.
13. Scheunemann argues, however, that montage needs to be read as an index of modern technology’s pressure on the work of art, in Scheunemann, ‘From Collage’, 33.
14. Bürger, 51.
15. Ibid., 79-80.
16. Murphy, 261.
17. Bürger, 53.
18. Ibid., 54. Scheunemann, ‘From Collage’ 35; Andreas Huyssen, ‘The Hidden Dialectic: Avantgarde – Technology – Mass Culture’, in After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988), 6.
19. Bürger, 59.
20. Ibid., 89-90.
21. Janet Lyons makes a similar connection in her interpretation of Valerie Solanas’ SCUM manifesto: ‘SCUM is the vengeful, victorious daughter of the avant-garde manifestoes of Apollinaire, Tzara, Marinetti, Debord’, in Manifestoes: Provocations of the Modern, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), 175.
22. Jean-François Lyotard, ‘Note on the Meaning of “Post-”’, in The Postmodern Explained to Children: Correspondence 1982-1985, eds. Julian Pefanis and Morgan Thomas (Sydney: Power Publications, 1992), 93.
23. Ibid., 93.
24. Hubert Van Den Berg, ‘On the Historiographic Distinction Between Historical and Neo-Avant-Garde’, in Scheunemann, Avant-Garde/Neo-Avant-Garde, 64.
25. Andreas Huyssen, ‘Introduction’, in Huyssen, After the Great Divide, 6.
26. John Rickard, Australia: A Cultural History (London: Longman, 1988), 220-32. We should note that the historical avant-garde was a specifically European phenomenon.
    
27. Magarey, 234.
28. Marilyn Lake, Getting Equal: The History of Australian Feminism (St Leonards, NSW: Allen and Unwin, 1999), 220.
29. Barbara Alysen, ‘Introduction’, A Catalogue of Independent Women’s Film, ed. Barbara Alysen (Sydney: Sydney Women’s Film Group, 1979), 4.
30. Catriona Moore explains the role that the slogan, ‘the personal is political’ plays in feminist art: it ‘formed an influential nexus between feminism and art. … Problems that did not fall within the conventional syllabus of both aesthetic and political programs were articulated in transgressive and personalised terms’, in Indecent, 4.
    
31. Andreas Huyssen, ‘The Search for Tradition: Avantgarde and Postmodernism in the 1970s’, in Huyssen, After, 163.
32. Sarah Gibson and Susan Lambert, ‘Personal Statements’, in Don’t Shoot Darling!: Women's Independent Filmmaking in Australia, eds. Annette Blonski, Barbara Creed, and Freda Freiberg (Richmond, Vic: Greenhouse, 1987), 195.
33. For example, Sue Best’s ‘This Style which is Not One’ explores feminist artists’ rejection of innovation and a definable style as part of a refusal of masculinist art history and value systems, in Dissonance: Feminism and the Arts 1970-90, ed. Catriona Moore (St Leonards, NSW: Allen and Unwin, 1994), 154-68; Eloise Lindsey examines feminist performance art’s refusal of conventional theatrical categories, in ‘The Gender of Theatrical Excess’, in Moore, Dissonance, 249-61.
34. For instance, the 1975 art exhibition, ‘Australian Women Artists: One Hundred Years 1840 to 1940’, curated by Janine Burke.
35. Moore, Indecent, 3-6.
36. See Huyssen’s, ‘Mass Culture as Woman: Modernism’s Other’ in Huyssen, After, for a full discussion of modernity’s gendering of high and mass culture.
37. Bürger, 51.
38. Janet Merewether, ‘Fuck the Mainstream – Let's Make Art: Women Experimenting with Form’, in Womenvision: Women and the Moving Image in Australia, ed. Lisa French (Melbourne: Damned Publishing, 2003), 135.
39. Toni Robertson, ‘Towards A Feminist Art’, (first published in 1973), reprinted in Moore, Dissonance, 19.
40. Anna Couani, ‘Women in the Literary Small Press’, in Telling Ways: Australian Women’s Experimental Writing, eds. Anna Couani and Sneja Gunew (Adelaide: Australian Feminist Studies; Research Centre for Women’s Studies, University of Adelaide, 1988), 10.
41. Gibson and Lambert, 89; Jeni Thornley, ‘Sixteen Years of Women and Film Groups’, in Don’t Shoot Darling!: Women’s Independent Filmmaking in Australia, eds. Annette Blonski, Barbara Creed, and Freda Freiberg (Richmond, Vic: Greenhouse, 1987), 90, 89.
42. Feminist art of the time can be identified by recurrent thematic concerns rather than by one identifiable style, as shown in the diverse range of texts featured in Lip magazine.
43. Peta Tait, Converging Realities: Feminism in Australian Theatre (Sydney: Currency, 1994), 1.
44. Early episodes of The Coming Out Show exemplify aural montage. Megan McMurchy describes the use of montage in feminist film documentaries thus: ‘All these films utilised the “compilation documentary” form, combining archival footage and interview to illustrate historical theses’, in ‘The Documentary’, in Australian Cinema, ed. Scott Murray (St Leonards, NSW: Allen and Unwin, 1994), 197.
    
45. Moore, ‘Introduction: Once Upon A Time’ in Dissonance, 8.
46. Meaghan Morris, ‘“Too Soon Too Late”: Reading Claire Johnston, 1970-81’, in Moore, Dissonance, 135.
47. Barbara Alysen, ‘Women’s Films’, Social Alternatives 1 no. 3 (1978): 14.
48. Louise Poland, ‘The Devil and the Angel? Australia's Feminist Presses and the Multinational Agenda’, Hecate 29 no. 2 (2003): 123-24.
49. Space constraints limit the detail I can provide on feminism’s impact across the arts, however, three examples are suggestive. Bruce Bennett identifies a new literary genre – women’s writing – as a result of the women’s liberation movement, in ‘Literary Culture Since Vietnam: A New Dynamic’, in The Oxford Literary History of Australia, eds. Bruce Bennett and Jennifer Strauss (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1998), 259. Sandy Kirby notes the role played by the women’s movement in the community arts movement; see ‘An Historical Perspective on the Community Arts Movement’, in Community and the Arts: History, Theory, Practice, ed. Vivienne Binns (Leichardt NSW: Pluto, 1991), 19. Peta Tait comments that feminist ideas have been influential ‘in every kind of theatre: comic review to postmodern; naturalism to satiric farce; avant-garde to circus’, in Converging, 7.
50. As in Tom O’Regan, Australian National Cinema (London: Routledge, 1996); Dennis Altman, Rehearsals for Change: Politics and Culture in Australia (first published 1980, Perth: API Network, 2004); and Ken Gelder and Paul Salzman, The New Diversity: Australian Fiction 1970-88 (Melbourne: McPhee Gribble, 1989).
51. For example, Rickard; Verity Burgmann, Power, Profit and Protest: Australian Social Movements and Globalisation (Crows Nest, NSW: Allen and Unwin, 2003); Jan Pakulski, Social Movements: The Politics of Moral Protest (Melbourne: Longman Cheshire, 1991); and Margaret Reynolds’ and Andrew Milner’s chapters in Australian Civilisation, ed. Richard Nile (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1994).
52. I refer here to the methods and categories used by contemporary broad analyses of Australian culture which, even when challenging Australian mythologies, still keep reproducing the same approaches and thematics so that ‘newness’ rarely comes into sight, or only in a limited and acceptable form. See, for example, Imagining Australia: Literature and Culture in the New World, eds. Judith Ryan and Chris Wallace-Crabbe (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Committee on Australian Studies, 2004); Nile’s Australian Civilisation; Australian Cultural History, eds. S.L. Goldberg and F. B. Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); Rickard; and Ken Goodwin’s A History of Australian Literature (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1986).
53. Van Den Berg, 64.
54. For example, Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1991); Huyssen, ‘Mapping the Postmodern’, in After the Great Divide, 199; and Bürger, 58.
55. Diana Coole, ‘Master Narratives and Feminist Subversions’, in The Politics of Postmodernity, eds. James Good and Irving Velody (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 120; Raymond Williams, The Politics of Modernism (London: Verso, 1989) ; Huyssen, ‘Mass Culture as Woman: Modernism’s Other’ and ‘Mapping the Postmodern’ in Huyssen, After; Jochen Schulte-Sasse, ‘Foreword: Theory of Modernism versus Theory of the Avant-Garde’, in Bürger, Theory, xlvi.
56. Jameson, Postmodernism.
57. Achille Bonito Oliva, Trans Avant Garde International, trans. Dwight Gast and Gwen Jones (Milano: Giancarlo Politi Editore, 1982), 149.
58. Magarey, 235.