Tag Archives: Museum of Old and New Art

Springs eternal

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By David Walsh

I’ve been telling tales of death recently. At the risk of reinforcing what I believe to be an unfortunate stereotyping of my interests, here’s another. Just now I rang Jacqui, friend, singer, yoga instructor and, on the end of the phone, sadness personified. This, despite an attempt to conceal her suffering: as always she wants all to feel only good. With prompting she told me her friend had died.

Jacqui had asked for treatment advice for her sick friend. She told me that they had collected some cash to send this friend to an ‘alternate cancer therapist’, Ian Gawler, a long-term survivor of cancer and advocate of ‘mind-body’ medicine. I don’t know if I have accumulated sufficient audience attention, as yet, to not need to mention that I see no merit in such treatments. Survivors survive, and they maintain a dignified silence, or offer advice and therapies, depending on their state of mind before their status as a survivor was assured. Most don’t survive (actually that isn’t literally true, half of those diagnosed with cancer do survive). And some, but very few, haven’t survived at all, but have fabricated their disease and recovery. Noticing that cancer sufferers have little to lose, they peddle false hope for real money. This asymmetry – little downside but considerable upside – is verdant territory for a scammer to graze.

Despite all that, and now all this, I didn’t know how to respond. I muddled through by suggesting that the therapy was unlikely to work, but that they give her the money anyway; maybe send her on a holiday. But I accepted, and accept, that hope, even hopeless, desperate hope, springs eternal.

And that makes me mindful of a perversion of reason I used to subscribe to. I used to think granting the wishes of dying kids was a poor way to spend donated dollars. ‘Look after those who will continue living,’ I mentally admonished them. Now I stand astonished at my insensitivity, and my incapacity to reason my way around such simple moral obstacles. Each day alive is a day to be celebrated, if it holds any possibility of giving the liver of that day some pleasure. The cousin of my nephew went to a Clipper’s game in LA not long before he died, as a guest of Make A Wish foundation. The thrill of a lifetime and, for him at least, set to remain so. Surely a good thing remains a good thing when those who experienced and enjoyed it have died? Even if all memory has been erased? After all I, for one, do believe that the tree made a sound when it fell in the forest, even though no one heard.

My outrageous resistance to organisations like Make A Wish wasn’t just the result of immature reasoning (and at all moments in a life the receding opinions of earlier moments will seem immature). I had many opportunities to form different opinions. Years ago I read a great but obscure book of the human condition, Towards Asmara, within which was all the moral guidance I needed. During the most memorable moment of this most memorable novel, children are slowly starving as the Ethiopian Civil War, and famine, rages around them. The narrator has a conversation with the protagonist concerning the kids learning French and English as they slowly dwindle; as their bodies are distorted by kwashiorkor or marasmus, their minds remain vessels to be filled. They live each little bit of each little day for itself, having no other option. They learn to say ‘hello’. And ‘goodbye’.

Why that wasn’t sufficient to set me straight, I don’t know. And it wasn’t my only opportunity. Much earlier, I had read Fritz Leiber’s romantic science fiction tale, A pail of air, which memorably begins, ‘Pa had sent me out to get an extra pail of air.’ Earth, having been extracted from its orbit by a passing star, is now beyond the orbit of Pluto. A family lingers on, apparently the only people on Earth. They thaw oxygen to breathe. ‘Pa’ contends that

no matter how long the human race might have lived, the end would have come some night. Those things don’t matter. What matters is that life is good. It has a lovely texture, like some rich cloth or fur, or the petals of flowers… or the fire’s glow. It makes everything else worth while. And that’s as true for the last man as the first.

Our biological compulsion isn’t simply to propagate our race, it is more cunning than that. It is to build in the pleasure of living, and the pleasure of seeking to propagate. Most sexual liaisons have no possibility of producing offspring. But they do produce pleasure, and sometimes bind relationships more strongly. Maybe that’s why Leiber persecuted a whole family within his elegantly contrived allegory.

The other day Phillip Adams (and I harvest some pleasure at dropping such a name, but it stemmed from an interview, not a friendship) asked me if I fear death. I answered then, and mentioned to Jacqui just now, that I fear dying, as my biological nature compels me to, but that I contrive, through my evolution-given capacity to reason my way through my world, to see it as an undesirable side effect of the astonishing good fortune of having been born in the first place. The uncountable generations of successful matings since nature’s invention of sex over a billion years ago; the freakish chance of the one of my father’s sperm meeting the one of my mother’s eggs that were each able, through forthcoming fusion, to contain me therein; and the events since, that prevented my dying while allowing this moment and this thought.

To characterise all this more immediately and personally: an incompetent doctor, despite having been informed of my mother’s allergy, used penicillin to treat a minor infection. My mothers illness, and my parent’s anger at his blunder was soon tempered by their becoming aware of an impossible pregnancy, mum having been cured on an infection that had been surreptitiously preventing conception. My sister followed nine months later; I, third in line, emerged reasonably healthy seven years layer, but showing some of the characteristics (fortunately) that are associated with parturition beyond the age of forty. That the probability of my being alive will one day become zero doesn’t in any way change the fact that now that probability is one. Why should my boundless joy be tempered by comprehension of the most basic mathematics?

At Mona we have recently been working on exhibitions that reflect the involvement of evolution in art. That art is universal, and predates most of our cultural constructs, suggests that it is not only built into us, but also good for us (some theorists even assert that our capacity for cognition evolved to expand our capacity for creativity). One speculation is that storytelling, the creation of narrative fiction, allows us to learn to construct possible futures and react to them; to plan. I certainly had all the tools, through these stories and others, to produce a more reasoned ethical self. That I didn’t is a condemnation only of my use of these tools, not the tools themselves. But, here and now, the evolution of the propensity to tell stories, and to gain from them, compels me to observe that all that I believe may be overturned by future learning. If I think that everything I thought twenty years ago was flawed, why not extrapolate that in twenty years I will probably believe that most of what I think now is crap? I’m not suggesting that our lives are narrative and thus contain no reality, just that opinions ebb and flow. Only as a group do we make progress, and acquire knowledge. But if I advocate self-doubt, and I do, why write down something that I may come to believe was errant? I guess the answer to that is that I need feedback for my opinions to be fully constructed. To my surprise, Mona blog gives me that. When Elizabeth suggested it, I resisted. But I’ve learned. So now, when she asked me to write something, I groped about for inspiration, and as always it came from the way recent events have improved my accordance with verity. Jacqui’s friend kept a blog, which I only just now became aware of, within which there are many personal verities, and some things I read as larger truths. From an entry three months ago she reifies my notion of people living while they live, and continuing to attend to the things that make them feel human, and embody humanity; thus, just three months ago she would still ‘pout and wonder whether any true great love stories will ever involve a 30-something year-old girl with a diagnosis of stage 4 cancer and another soul who can see past that and love her right back anyway.’

The author of the book I mentioned before, Towards Asmara, is Thomas Kenneally, who also penned Schindler’s ark, on which the Steven Spielberg masterpiece Schindler’s list was based. My friend Martin Haywood, who has been the subject of a couple of blog entries from me, and whose probability of being alive recently fell by one, said of Schindler’s list: ‘I don’t want to watch such movies. I just want to know they are being made.’ Martin probably meant that we need to see our faults writ large. As a result of his demise, and his prior pattern of living with dignity, he has accidentally become the magnetic north of my moral compass, and so when his long-forgotten words renew my acquaintance, I allow them to direct my thoughts. We don’t just benefit from narratives that plot a possible future, we also gain from those that expose a moribund past. Selection will favour those who have a genetic propensity to learn from their mistakes. And also, as Kenneally and Leiber amply illustrate, from others’ mistakes. Our consciousness is extended by others, even (and often especially) dead others. And here I refer to the quote from Jacqui’s friend’s blog in the previous paragraph.

But evolution operates over a continuum of characteristics that contribute to a greater or lesser degree to our survival. Each of them individually, and together, participates in a strange sort of inverse statistical lottery, wherein luck giveth and luck taketh away. Yesterday Jacqui’s friend’s number came up. My numbers, and yours, haven’t. But we’re still enjoying the thrill of buying tickets.

They didn’t send Jacqui’s friend on a holiday. She had the alternate therapy which, for whatever reason, didn’t heal her. But it did empower her. Just three weeks ago she wrote:

Let me tell you that where I am at now is like having my feet on two very different paths. And it’s hard, but it’s real. One foot is on the reality path – the one with the CT scans, the doctors, the stupid tumours going bonkers, the daily morphine and pain meds… the other foot is on the spiritual, hopeful, optimistic, positive, determined healing path.

She died. But she did get a wish granted.

A few days ago I read in the Age about a terminally ill woman who had met her biological father, an anonymous sperm donor, whom she had been seeking for fifteen years. Despite her considerable effort that anonymity had been preserved until her cancer diagnosis had induced government intervention. She met her father and, as the article recounted, ‘There was an instant connection – how could there not be?’

That article appeared on March 17.  Then, on March 27, Jacqui was sad, because her friend, Narelle Grech, who had just met her father, died the day before. Her father, who one month ago didn’t know he had a daughter is, presumably, distraught. And all the better for it.

Is that subtext, or are you just happy to see me?

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By Luke Hortle

Throat-clearing.
Last night I went to hear Ellen Dissanayake’s lecture, ‘The Deep Structure of the Arts’, which was about the role of art in human evolution. I went because I thought I should, cringing slightly because the whole thing sounded too damnably Mona-ish, and left feeling awkward—not because of the lecture or Dissanayake’s ideas (which were methodical and measured, although I craved a more emphatic statement of her argument), but because of the awkward atmosphere of the question time that followed. Awkward, because the long-winded monologues were not questions, and setting them loose in the lecture hall shifted the mood. The air between people thickened. It felt compromising to be situated within a group of other humans. A caveat: I’m not sure if this awkwardness was objectively so, or more a self-absorbed by-product of my own thought-stream, which is decidedly awkward and neurotic anyway, regardless of any objective social scenario. Performing the opposite of that state of mind is probably a necessity of contemporary social interaction, unless you’re a ‘creative’ and can get away with a whole lot of really irritating shit while other people make excuses for your unconventional and fucking vexing disposition. (Also, I didn’t take a pen and paper.)

The guts of it.
Dissanayake argued in the lecture that art, or ‘artification’ as the behaviour of making art, has a deep structure, and one that is comparable to the deep structure of language advocated for by some linguists and psychologists. She claims that this behaviour is essential and intrinsic to being human. That it’s innate and natural. That it’s universal. She argues that this behaviour has evolutionary benefits. Apparently, behaviours such as singing and dancing with other people produce a hormone called oxytocin, which is also elicited during sex. One of the benefits of oxytocin is that it counteracts cortisol, a stress hormone. I’d like a clarification though. Do you only get the oxytocin hit if you’re having sex with another person, or can you replenish your hormonal stores by treating yourself (singular) to a nice night in?

***
Interlude: A masturbatory call to arms

No one ever talks interestingly about masturbation. Faux Mo flashback: I’m in a darkened cinema and it’s black-bruised-red like the insides of a vital organ. A woman is dancing naked in front of hundreds of pissed people, alternately with a black sack over her head or wearing a gorilla mask. I’m trying to work out what to think of it, when a young balding guy, not unattractive, stands next to me, grinning, and asks, ‘Do you reckon she’s going to flick the bean?’ Oh Christ. If this is indicative of masturbation discourse (and I suspect it might be) then I’m putting a call out for people to lift their game. Pun entirely intended.

***

I can’t comment on the scientific validity of Dissanayake’s claims; I don’t know enough (read: not much at all) about evolutionary biology and I’m not remotely interested in making those kinds of comments about her work. It’s boring (that kind of discussion; not her research, necessarily). My main problem with the lecture was her use of the word ‘human’. It became an oblique invocation of the term, which was disappointingly predictable. Using ‘human’ in such a way is commonplace, but that shouldn’t equate to an excuse. ‘Human’ has a subtext. An uncontainable one. Bare it. Refusal to do so turns use of the word into an act of effacement. It becomes another form of exclusory language, and one that relates only, within the parameters of Dissanayake’s argument, to those types of humans that enjoy regular heterosexual sex and the possibility, and propensity, for procreation. Speaking of the human, and using the term in a critically savvy manner, has to be provisional. I suspect I’m against its use as a commonplace and absolute term because it kills my identity politics boner. Yours too. Oh, the critical impotence. Humanness, particularly in the context of evolution, is anything but a constant or endpoint or intellectual dead-end. If we’re speaking of evolution (and we don’t have to be, not really, not if you don’t want to, but we are), then using ‘human’ as a static term sets up a disconnect with the premise and ideological underpinning of the subject matter. Being human is a state of modulation, of unfinished-ness, regardless of how aware we are of this process. Being human isn’t, and shouldn’t be, a matter of common sense. In other words (and with some quite unrelated, juvenile, yet suspiciously apt imagery), it’s an intellectually stimulating cock and it’s happy to see you.

It boils down to this: given the broad and fascinating cultural implications of Dissanayake’s research into the origins of art as a human behaviour, with art seen as a shaping force of humanness, linguistic and experiential invocations of the ‘human’ demand to be given the commensurate critical attention they deserve.

Death illiterate.
As an English graduate, I’m supposed to be interested in how being human is culturally produced, rather than how it is inherently and essentially substantiated. I get trapped between thinking about myself as a culturally and linguistically realised entity, and the biological reality of my humanness. Because if I’m biologically and genetically human, if I am irrefutably so, then why am I even talking about this? Why are discussions of humanness, life and species booming in politics, the arts and that ever so sexy world of critical theory? Are we just a narcissistic species?

It’s particularly pertinent now, in this contemporary moment, to think about this. Contemporary anxieties, and the various discourses they infiltrate, are underpinned by an almost unspoken fear of extinction. (I could be inflammatory and drop the ‘C’ bomb—climate change—but I won’t.) Perhaps it’s the reality of living out our humanness, the reality of being a species—to be perennially haunted by various other states, those innumerable modes of not-life. The bottom line: we face the fact of our own death, and perhaps our broader concerns with extinction work to absolve personal responsibility for having to deal with the relatively imminent occurrence of our own dying. An implicit choosing of collective anxiety over the personal realities of being a fleshy composite with an expiry date.

I don’t know how to think about my own death. The pure facts of its reality are subsumed, immediately, by the romance of the language I use to talk about it. The word itself, ‘death’, is shockingly seductive. And biologically, I’m at a loss. The biological facts of my bodily aliveness refuse to cross the threshold of my conscious awareness. I can’t ruminate on them. They might enable my consciousness, but they never become usable and recognisable terms within that swarming and personalised mindfuck. Biological subtext, rather than readable narrative. Ungraspable, even in their physical immediacy. It’s terrifying.

In light of the possible

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History

I was asked to give a talk. I gave a talk, and the people listening weren’t really listening. It wasn’t their fault. They weren’t being rude. It was just that they were in their glad rags, freshly arrived on the ferry; they’d descended to the Void bar, cool, sandstone rock and the thuck-thuck of bit.fall, and wanted some champagne and canapés (my sister used to run my Dad’s flash seafood restaurant in Perth, and she told me once about a would-be snooty bride-to-be who made a tremendous fuss about the ‘can-APEs’; I fear that I’ll forget one day to pronounce it the proper, French way).

Then suddenly bit.fall was stopped (via an iPad operated by a back-of-house techie) and a light came up and I alit the small stage, and it was tremendously disappointing and disrupting not to be left alone to enjoy the waterfall and the can-apes. The worst part was, my speech was meaty. What they wanted (slightly less than to just be left alone) was to be told a few juicy things about David (like did you know he doesn’t wear underwear?) or something concrete about the art. The other worst thing was: the people crowding bit.fall didn’t respond much to front-of-house Marty’s request to gather in front of the stage for my talk; in the end, they kind of ended up, um, sort of standing to the side of and behind me while I was talking. It was a little off-putting for us all. It’s hard to deliver with conviction your vision of the futility of history – to a sandstone wall.

My argument ended up being somewhat meatier than it may otherwise have been, because I had dinner with David and Kirsha, and David’s ‘dorky friends’ (Kirsha calls them that, she loves dorks), the night before. I had showed David my speech and he got all frothy-at-the-mouth about it: not because he disagreed with me but because he was sure my audience, scientists, would shout me down for not understanding the difference between history in an abstract sense, and measurable historical progress as part of the scientific endeavor to expand human knowledge. (How preferable it seems now to have been shouted down, as opposed to politely tolerated). We also had Weed Eggs for dinner that night, at David and Kirsha’s. I don’t mean cannabis, simply weeds from the garden. I’ll get to that as well.

This is the speech. I’m sorry but I think it’s good and so did up to two (2) audience members.

I was asked to address in my brief talk this evening the history of the collection, and some key pieces, both old and new; and finally, to shed some light on how – and I quote from the email I was sent – ‘people like us [that is, people like you] – medical professionals and scientists with no real background in art – can come to understand and appreciate these things’.

 I’m going to ignore the first two points. Except to say that we don’t really believe in history at Mona. That doesn’t mean we don’t believe in learning – certainly we do. As you move around the museum, if you choose to use your O device you will find essays written by my colleague Jane Clark, rich in historical information, and designed to contextualise, as far as possible, the object you are looking at. But even as we’re doing it, we’re sure the whole thing’s a bit of a farce, which is why we call those essays ‘Art Wank’, and why we also write ‘Gonzo’ pieces on the art, which do away entirely with the concept of objectivity. The writing of history – recording of known or debated facts, the selecting of events and people deemed relevant to your appreciation of the object – is just one voice with which to speak about art, and one you should never take fully at its word. The only truthful way to speak about the present or the past is in a voice that announces, in its every utterance, its lies and silences, its weaknesses and desire to manipulate you, the listener, for its own ends. There is a kind of freedom in that.

I will give you an example of what I’m talking about. You asked about the history of the collection, which often boils down to moments of beginning. David claims various moments of genesis for his interest in art and decision to build a museum. Among these: his older sister Lindy’s love of Andy Warhol; his viewing of a documentary as a child, called ‘Man on the rim’; the fact that he could see this site, known then as ‘Moorilla’, from the house he used to live in on the other side of the river; and his purchase of his first work – a Nigerian palace door, carved in the first half of the twentieth century by the artist Areogun, depicting a man riding a bicycle with no pedals and no axle.

Areogun Palace Door, Museum of Old and New Art collection, MONA

Palace door, Areogun
1900 to 1954
Carved wood

David bought the door in South Africa, where he had been gambling; at that time, it was illegal to export extra money from the country so he bought the door to suck up surplus cash. In writing this talk, I punched ‘Areogun palace door’ into my laptop search engine to see what turned up. I found an email, written to me from David in December 2010, a month before the museum opened, and which I’d forgotten about entirely. By chance, it hits on exactly what I am trying to say today, so I’m going to read it. 

David’s email:

The palace door is made by Areogun. You already knew that. But what does it mean, why did he make it? He clearly had a flirtatious interest in the West, his unsteerable, downhill bicycle must at least be a joke, perhaps a metaphor.

Presumably he was ordered to make it, but did he make it for the one who gave the order, or did he make it for himself? If for himself, and I think it’s always a bit for himself, presumably the motive was an assemblage of: pride in craftsmanship, need for self-expression, love of status, an urge to serve and maybe even a fear of the consequences of failure.

These are the proximate motives but what generates them? Is the capacity of biology to reproduce genetically selected talent on display here?

I guess I’m saying all the reasons he does stuff were real to him, but there is stuff that is real to everyone. Do all artists, whether tribal or western, antiquarian or contemporary, concrete or conceptual have the same fundamental motives? I think so. That goes for most people from most fields of endeavour, I think.

Culture hides this stuff, but it keeps rippling through. I collect it. Does that make me a bit more sexy? I bloody hope so. I’m grasping at straws here.

The other key motive David sites is the desire to use art to impress women – he can’t make art, he says, so collecting it will have to do. That question of the genetic settings sparking some capacity for art-making (or collecting) is one we are focusing on at Mona at the moment. In future exhibitions we are planning to explore the relationship between creativity and evolutionary biology. I’ll come back to that in a minute, but first, I want to read you David’s other essay about the palace door, the one we printed in our book about the collection, Monanisms: 

Areogun carved this unsteerable downhill bicycle and changed my life. The bike followed a far from straight-line course to a gallery near Johannesburg and then to Hobart. I saw it when I was about to have enough money to pay for it and nothing else to do with the money. I think it’s reasonable to contend that had South Africa allowed money to be exported and not art there would be no Mona.

Customs in Tasmania kept it for ten months. At one point there was talk of it having cocaine residues on it. There was nothing I could do so I did nothing. They eventually released it.

I built the old Moorilla Museum of Antiquities and installed it as one of my favourite works, and so it remains. At a function someone was observed to be smoking inside. To conceal his infringement he stubbed his cigarette out on this work, burning a small hole in it. I assume he’s an art critic.

The house I lived in at the time was very exposed to the weather. People told me that I had to look after my art better. The house was on the foreshore on the eastern side of the Derwent River. Moorilla was directly opposite on the west bank. It looked like a nice place. The owners of Moorilla went broke and the bank put the property up for sale. The germ of an idea entered my head…

There’s a mish-mash of motives here: the artists and David’s, materialising in the known and unconscious realms. The cloud of happenstance gets denser the harder you stare.

And so why stare at all? You’ll give yourself a headache. Instead, I recommend just taking these things, these history-less objects, as you find them, sitting, well lit, on a plinth or whatever, in the gallery. There’s no hope of recovering their context, some germ of origin for existence. They exist just for you now. Maybe they have something to teach you – but don’t just take them at their word. Make it up for yourself. If there’s something there for you, suck it up, and move on. If there’s nothing just push past to the next piece, or go and have a drink at the bar. The point, the only point, is to have something – a thought, feeling, memory or intention – slide into place, or shift its position. There’s no gold star for ‘getting it’ or even enjoying it.

I want to point out, if you haven’t already been annoyed by it, the different relationship to the past enjoyed by the arts and the sciences, and the attendant notion of ‘progress’. For those who work in the sciences – so I’m told – the notion of progress and history is real, and measured by milestones such as (and I’m paddling way out of my depth here) the increased life expectancy for sufferers of a particular condition, for instance. Art, in contrast, changes, but it doesn’t advance (and here I’m stealing the words of the wonderful art critic nun, sister Wendy).

Finally – I said I’d come back to the part about art and biology. I meant for my talk to frame the bridge we want to build at Mona between art and science, specifically. What I was going to say was – ignore the ‘key pieces’, and who cares about the history of the collection. And then I was going to build an argument about how the humanities have been divorced, over the course of the twentieth century, from the reality of the human body, and how we are focusing in future exhibitions on returning the arts to that reality. A grand scheme, and a grand theme for this ten-minute talk. I think I’ll save it for another day. Except to say – ‘people like you’ are just people like us, those who supposedly know nothing about art. Give yourself the permission to view art as part of ‘anything else’ – and I’m thinking now of a line from a much-maligned Woody Allen film – itself called Anything Else – delivered by a taxi driver to the lead character as he ponders ‘how strange life is, how full of inexplicable mystery’. ‘Well,’ the taxi-driver says, ‘you know, it’s like anything else’.

You see – I meant to do one thing and did something else entirely. Just like history.

I left straight after my talk, partly because I was embarrassed and partly because I was running late for dinner with my friends Amy and Kate. As I was leaving, I passed David and Kirsha on the way to their apartment, possibly carrying some weeds or bunny rabbits for Invasive Species Stew (Kirsha’s theme for this year’s market is eating non-native species). David asked how my speech went.

‘Not that great.’

‘I think it’s because you don’t have your tits out.’ (I was wearing a somewhat conservative dress, in comparison, I suppose, to the bustier number I had been wearing at the dork dinner the night before). Kirsha nodded sympathetically.

The cluster fuck

These are the things that we discussed at dinner:

Do women have a duty to other women? Is there such a thing as ‘speaking for’ women, or a need to somehow set a good example?

Arguably, not minding comments about your breasts (ignoring, laughing, or seeking revenge by telling everyone the commenter doesn’t wear underwear) sends a bad message to men: it’s ok to make comments about women’s breasts. And that’s shirking your womanly responsibility.

The truth is, in this case, it actually was ok to make comments about my breasts. I don’t really have an elaborate explanation for that, it’s just that I don’t mind that much. I feel secure in being loved for the range of my other qualities (but that doesn’t mean that women it does bother don’t feel secure in this way). Indeed, I imagine that many (most?) women would be bothered by a breast-related comment made out of breast-related context; as I said, it is arguable that I should pretend it bothers me on their behalf.

That worries me. Firstly because I’m not a good actor and I don’t think I could pull it off (you should have seen me as ‘Prospera’ in my school production of The Tempest: shocking. The audience was shocked). Secondly because it is dead against my principles to fall into ‘cluster fuck’ thinking: that’s when you group together sets of opinions that fit nicely, like being pro-choice/anti-death penalty, without thinking things through independently. Cluster fucking is the death of thought. Cf. A lecture in my third year of journalism at Utas which consisted, in its entirety, of a slide-show of glossy pictures of mossy trees, set to some kind of emotive sound track (Rod Stewart’s ‘We are sailing’ comes to mind but surely that wasn’t it), followed by the moist-eyed lecturer’s request for a ‘show of hands’ for who supported the end of old-growth logging in Tasmania. A big, weepy cluster-fuck. (This is a one-off by the way, on the whole I heart Utas).

Feminism has become a cluster fuck. Or, in the case of a recent, bizarro claim by the UK writer Caitlin Moran in her book How to be a woman, a cluster-fondle:

Here is the quick way of working out if you’re a feminist. Put your hand in your pants. Do you have a vagina? Do you want to be in charge of it? If you said ‘yes’ to both, then congratulations! You’re a feminist.

Attendant to the talk of ‘misogyny’ lately (in place of good-old ‘sexism’) is that of ‘apathy’: young women are just not worried enough about gender politics. This seems to me like a good thing; it shows we’ve made some progress, and it opens up space to be worried about any number of other problems confronting the human race. It doesn’t mean that other ‘worried’ women (and I realise there are many) are not entitled to feel strongly about misogyny; but please listen to me if I say I feel differently. I will (and do) listen to the worried ones, too. Why the arrogant assumption that if a woman says she’s happy with the gender factor, or that (gasp) she’s not a feminist, she must be misinformed, selfish or naïve? In the Age recently: a ghastly poll about ‘what women want’. It opened with a preamble about the importance of letting women speak for themselves, followed by reams of stats about lifestyle, sex, work, and so forth. I won’t quibble with the stats, because my quarrel is not with the numbers but what was said about them (and also, stats are really boring, and if I spent five minutes on Google I’d find some others that refute them). Basically, for a significant majority, ‘being female hasn’t held their career back at all’. Awkward. Wheel in the ‘social commentators’ to ‘warn’ us these women are delusional: if you’re happy with your progress at work, it’s because you ‘tell yourself you don’t want’ to do better. Thank God I’ve got the ‘social commentators’ to tell me I’m unhappy, otherwise I would never have known. Further: those that do feel their sex has held them back ‘blamed the work-family juggle or working in a male-dominated industry’. Now, a male-dominated industry could surely be blamed for thwarted progress for a woman, yes. But ‘the work-family juggle’ is not an inevitable consequence of ‘being female’. It’s an inevitable consequence of having a family, which many women choose to do. There are consequences for that choice i.e. you will have to juggle, sometimes with great difficultly, your roles as worker and parent. We (society) should make this as easy as possible – things like 18 weeks paid maternity leave spring to mind. But being a working mother, in this country at least, is a choice, not a state of victimhood.

It’s not that women don’t face entrenched and overt discrimination in many areas of life – they do. But it’s possible to take a more flexible, less fearful attitude to human frailties and social failures, and to see that they affect us all (a classic feminist conversation-stopper: say something sympathetic about men, and all of a sudden you’re denying female pain. No need to panic, there’s plenty of pain for everyone). I used to think I must be extraordinarily lucky to have avoided all this misogyny. Maybe I just happened to know really nice boys and, you know, I did go to good schools and so forth, and my only two places of employment have been a university and an art gallery, not your usual hunting-ground for putrid male posturing perhaps. Um… Hang on. One of the men I work closely with, one whose name translates from the French into ‘Oliver’, has perpetrated the following behaviours: suggested I lose weight; thrown my shoes away because he didn’t like them; asked me, in the middle of a meeting, how many times a week I have sex; and tried to put his fingers up my nostrils while drunk. Technically this is rampant sexism, but mostly I find it annoying (the first two behaviours) and comically absurd (the second two); I don’t find it hurtful and I certainly don’t think it affects how I live my life or do my job. And look, although it was infuriating to fish my Birkenstocks out of the bin, really he was right: I had no business wearing them. It was not a camping trip.

So does that make me a feminist? I went out to dinner recently with a younger female friend. She’s studying law at uni. She told me, her eyes flickering nervously, that she didn’t feel that sexism was a problem in her life, ‘but it’s not that I don’t think men and women should be, like, equal’ she repeatedly insisted. ‘Of course I’m a feminist’. We both, it seems, feel torn loyalty to the term feminism: not simply because we have inherited its positive outcomes, but because it feels like disloyalty, or failure as a woman, to shirk it, or say we’ve outgrown it. Despite my emotional investment in the word, I don’t know if I’m a feminist. I think our words should do service to our thoughts, not the other way around – and that word is well and truly overworked.  What I do know is that I don’t need an ideological construct to help me decide that I’m ‘in charge of [my] vagina’. I already know that. I take it for granted, just like my young friend takes it for granted that men and women are, like, equal. Most of the men I know (all of them actually, unless they are much better at acting than me) take it for granted, too.

We are lucky in that sense to have been born at the turn of this century as opposed to the turn of the last. I am thinking now of one of my favourite books EVAH – Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique. One of the reasons I love it so much is because she barely discusses ‘men’ (that faceless monolith) at all, let alone indulge vague, lazy thinking about ‘patriarchy’ (whenever I hear that word, I think of the Hobart suburb of Dynnyrne: people talk about it, but no-one’s actually been there). Rather, she elegantly dissects the habits of mind that produce pressure on women to behave in certain ways. The chapter on Freud almost made we weep (I was getting my highlights done at the time, I held back). She starts by nervously acknowledging his ‘genius’1 then proceeds to pinpoint the way pop-Freudianism has helped create the impulse for women to explain away their desires: if you’re unhappy, get therapy, don’t change your life. Ultimately though, despite the truly difficult and disadvantaged position women found themselves in in relation to education, employment, and that more nebulous phenomenon, ‘culture’, Friedan rests responsibility for every woman with herself.

At the start of the book Friedan looks at women’s magazines and critiques the childish, frivolous image of woman she finds there; then works her way backwards – to the source of such images – through various cultural institutions and systems of social sanction, finally to the role of motherhood itself.2 There she finds a misdirected passion. She sees women substitute individual pursuit for the ‘religious cult’ of motherhood; sees them surrender – willingly – ‘the unique mark of the human being’: the capacity to live in the protracted light of the possible, to seek answers to questions of self and the world, and to partake in the ‘mysterious capacity to shape the future’. That’s for me, that capacity. But you can’t have it without a bit of pain. Suck it up. And don’t get cluster-fucked.

-Elizabeth Mead

1 We are a little more circumspect about Sigmund now in comparison to then i.e. we know now, or should know, to enjoy him for his literary as opposed to scientific merits.

2 Of course she isn’t suggesting that motherhood and fulfillment are mutually exclusive.