Tate Britain's 'Women In Revolt!' Isn't Tone Deaf, But It Is Hard of Hearing
For as long as sexism prevails, women will always be in revolt. It's a shame Britain's leading art institution, Tate Britain, is stuck in a 70s time warp of second-wave feminism that includes black and gay women as an afterthought.
For as long as sexism prevails, women will always be in revolt. It's a shame Britain's leading art institution, Tate Britain, is stuck in a 70s time warp of second-wave feminism that includes black and gay women as an afterthought.
Tate Britain's latest blockbuster, Women In Revolt, is a rather complex show, mixing varying graduate degree artists with their serious counterparts. Throw in a bunch of middle-of-the-road school-like propaganda, and you have yourself a winner: a low-value show curated to mimic a community centre in appearance that preaches to the viewer a short history of female rights, focusing specifically on the 1970s in the UK.
It's not all bad, and as English feminist artist Margaret Harrison stated when asked to be involved, covering such a theme is truly 'impossible, but that's no reason not to try'. The Tate have tried - and they haven't exactly failed - but one of the country's top art institutions is much better than catering to a bunch of school children alone; leave the GCSE displays to the teachers.
The period the exhibition looks at focuses on art and activism in the UK between 1970 and 1990, featuring work from over 100 women artists and collectives living and working in the UK, from the lesser-known to the deeply admired. Artists Sonia Boyce, Rose English, Cosey Fanni Tutti and collage maestro Linder are featured, as are posters by See Red Women's Workshop and Rose Finn-Kelcey.
It's a shame some of the exhibition's standout work has been kept for the very end, housed in the two last rooms dedicated to black women's rights, as if somewhat of an afterthought. If you're going to put on an exhibition telling the stories of women excluded, don't then go on to produce a show about revolt, which pivots around a predominantly white narrative until its last leg. In the seventies, black women's rights were seen as lesser in comparison to their white counterparts, an ugly truth in the struggle for freedom as the discourse underpinned by second wave feminism primarily served the interests of white, middle class women; a notion copied in the exhibition's curation by leaving the best work till last.
Titled Black Women Time Now, these two rooms bring the astounding early drawings of Claudette Johnson to light alongside Nina Edge's 1985 Snakes and Ladders installation, included after 30 years of being written out of history since being shown on the cover of Maud Sulter's 1990 book Passion: Discourses on Blackwomen's Creativity. Marlene Smith's Hauntingly eerie papier-mâché depiction of Dorothy 'Cherry' Groce - the woman whose shooting by the Metropolitan police sparked the Brixton Riots in 1985 - also serves as a salient reminder for oppression, made ever the more pertinent once you know it took the Met over 25 sordid years to apologise for the shooting.
What could've been a show filled with very serious, hard-hitting work has undoubtedly been played down by its curators, who've managed to recreate Tate's white walls into a primary school classroom with pinboards of curatorial text to navigate viewers throughout. A room housing a bunch of DIY zines and collages from the period has potential and, if shown on its own, would've made a nice touch. Instead, the display only hammered home the idea of this being an educational show for people who don't know any better. Everyone knows about the angry '70s feminists. What about the women today? Feminism will exist for as long as sexism does - and the latter certainly hasn't fallen off the face of the earth. Looking at a period 50 years ago isn't doing anybody any good, not least when you have figures like Keir Starmer 'hardening their stances' on women's and trans rights, in 2023.
The issue when presenting a dizzying amount of pamphlets, zines, journals, banners, posters and badges alongside each other, cabinet by cabinet, is you're in the danger zone of looking like a sad and fleeting graduate show, curated by the very students whose work it houses. Indeed, there was plenty of actual graduate work on display - including Rose English's Study for a Divertissement here next to Sutapa Biswas's sublime Housewives with Steak Knives, a contemporary vision of the Indian deity Kali reimagined as a British housewife, accompanied by a gore-splattered machete while sporting a necklace decorated with the heads of her victims; a work which plays tribute to Artemisia Gentileschi's paintings of Judith Beheading Holofernes. However, no matter who made the work, if you choose to focus on a subject of such enormity you owe it justice, not a neglected local community centre hall, a purposeful move from Tate, but one that's irrevocably fallen flat on its angry white woman's face.