What is experienced as difficult in the creative arts changes dramatically over time and according to context. What was once considered acceptable might now be considered problematic and similarly what was once censored might now be normative. This session will consider the theme of difficulty and the changing nature of aesthetic reception in the era of cancel culture and #MeToo. Papers will examine difficult topics (such as feminist investigations of rape) now regarded as triggering; the recent cancellation of art projects that hinge on ethnic identity; and the challenges of writing about writers or artists whose lives do not follow current moral codes.
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Speakers
Professor Brigitta Olubas FAHA (Chair)
Brigitta Olubas is Professor of English in the School of the Arts and Media at the University of New South Wales Sydney. Her research is in Australian Literature, with a particular focus on expatriate, diasporic, migrant and refugee writing and more recently in literary biography. Her 2022 biography of Shirley Hazzard was shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Nonfiction (2023), the Nib Literary Award (2023), the Magarey Award for Biography (2024) and the National Biography Award (2024). She is a former president of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature and editor of the Association’s journal. She has also made a major contribution to the field of Australian Literary studies through her work as editor of scholarly editions and collections, including most recently two volumes of literary correspondence funded by ARC DP Reading Writing Lives.
Professor Sue Best FAHA
Susan Best is Professor of Art History and Theory at Queensland College of Art and Design, Griffith University, and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. She is the author of Visualizing Feeling: Affect and the Feminine Avant-garde (2011), which won the Australian and New Zealand Art Association prize for best book in 2012. Her second book, Reparative Aesthetics: Witnessing and Contemporary Art Photography (2016), was the joint winner of the Australian and New Zealand Art Association prize for best book in 2017. Her most recent book is It’s not personal: Post 60s body art and performance (2021). She is currently working on a book on aesthetic reception in the era of #MeToo and cancel culture.
Instagram: @eus_tseb
Abstract: Trigger Warning: Rape, performance and the feminist avant-garde
Abstract: Trigger Warning: Rape, performance and the feminist avant-garde
This paper examines the changing reception of feminist avant-garde art practices from the 1970s about rape, violence and trauma. While in that era of consciousness raising groups, thinking and working through were the guiding principles for the engagement with such work, current reception emphasises the need for trigger warnings to limit the presumed uncontrollability of feeling. While one might argue that the confronting nature of the material was ignored in the 1970s, with little or no attention paid to the audience’s emotional reactions, the pendulum has now fully swung the other way with the presumption that difficult material is deeply affecting, if not traumatising to victims. Is this latest incarnation of the thinking/feeling split useful for thinking about difficult art? Surely the aesthetic realm should be where thinking and feeling can be conducted simultaneously? Examining the work of artists such as Ana Mendieta and performances associated with Womanhouse, the paper examines the framing of difficult art and difficult women in the age of the trigger warning.
Emeritus Professor Andrew McNamara FAHA
Andrew McNamara is an art historian and writer, whose work largely focuses on the modernist legacy for contemporary art and culture. He treats this legacy as contradictory or paradoxical rather than a purely negative or positive phenomenon. His work also seeks to articulate the connections (and differences) between modernist and contemporary practices. Key projects include: Modernism & Australia: Documents on Art, Design and Architecture 1917-1967 (2006), Modern Times: The Untold Story of Modernism in Australia (2008), Bauhaus Diaspora and Beyond (2019), all with Ann Stephen and Philip Goad; Undesign (2018); An Apprehensive Aesthetic? The Legacy of Modernist Culture (2009); Surpassing Modernity (2018/19); the exhibition Bauhaus Now (2020-2021). Forthcoming studies include Voices of the Dunera: Ernst Kitzinger, Exile and Essays on Internment with Kate Garrett and Seumas Spark; as well as a collection, A Cultural History of the Avant-Garde in Oceania, edited with Ann Stephen; as well as a study of the avant-garde in Weimar Germany.
Abstract: Reviewing the Sabsabi case: the tolerance of intolerance, the intolerance of tolerance, the culture wars and art
Abstract: Reviewing the Sabsabi case: the tolerance of intolerance, the intolerance of tolerance, the culture wars and art
In February 2025 Creative Australia decided to appoint the Sabsabi-Dagostino team to represent Australia at the next Venice Biennale (2026). The previous Australian team had won the prestigious Golden Lion award, so much was at stake. Creative Australia, however, quickly rescinded their decision. The reversal caused consternation throughout the arts, provoked even more controversy, and many articles were published on the topic—until the team was reinstated months later after the Federal election. Normally debates about the role and function of art in society do not arise in Senate discussions, nor do they garner much media interest. Yet, the ensuing debate exposed some quandaries: competing definitions of art were at play (sometimes in the same argument); the atmosphere of the culture wars exacerbated the situation by flattening all analysis into highly vexed, crude oppositions, sometimes placing participants in the debate at odds with principles they notionally uphold; finally, each side essentially accused the other of lacking tolerance. Tolerance, however, implies a degree of intolerance. So how do we align tolerance with intolerance? Are there better or worse ways of balancing tolerance with intolerance? Censorship controversies often expose competing assumptions about tolerance, about differentiating free speech from hate speech, about democratic values and politics. Nonetheless, addressing these dilemmas may prove helpful in differentiating, yet also affirming the justifications that underpin liberal democracies, the contemporary arts, as well as the critical endeavour of the humanities.
Professor Nicole Moore
Nicole Moore is Professor in English and Media Studies at UNSW Canberra. Her main research interests include Australian literature, comparative literature, the cultural Cold War, and print censorship in Australia and internationally. Her research pursues issues at stake in the political cultures of reading and writing, and the complex relations of literature, governance and history within and across national boundaries. Her 2012 book The Censor’s Library: Uncovering the Lost History of Australia’s Banned Books won the Walter McCrae Russell award from the Association for the Study of Australian Literature, and was shortlisted for a number of other awards, including the Prime Minister’s Literary Award in Australian History. From September 2022 to July 2023, she was Visiting Professor of Australian Studies in the Centre for American and Pacific Studies at the University of Tokyo. Moore edits the Studies in Australian Literature and Culture book series at Anthem Press (London) and is a member of the editorial boards of Australian Literary Studies, Hecate: A Journal of Interdisciplinary Women’s Studies, the Journal of Australian Studies, the Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature (JASAL) and Studies in Australasian Cinema.
Abstract: Bad memories: Recasting Australian cultural legacies around harm and trauma
Abstract: Bad memories: Recasting Australian cultural legacies around harm and trauma
In March 2022 the National Library of Australia launched a spectacular new exhibition, drawing on its collections to tell a history of the performing arts in Australia. Among the figures and moments represented across the decades was a phalanx of famous playwrights, theatre designers, directors, dancers and performers. To help illuminate the 1970s the curators included some of the glowing, instantly recognisable posters of celebrated artist Martin Sharp and playbills for productions written or directed by the playwright, political speech writer and filmmaker Bob Ellis. Dorothy Hewett, the most prominent woman playwright of the 1970s and 1980s, and arguably the second most prominent Australian playwright of any gender, behind David Williamson, however, was not represented at all. No material from her more than thirty plays and their many productions held in the substantial Hewett collections of the NLA featured on its walls. Viewers knew better than to ask why, however. Hadn’t there been a recent scandal exposing the sexual abuse of her daughters as teenagers in the 1970s, whom she hadn’t protected? It made sense that the Library shouldn’t celebrate her work. Who had the daughters named, though? Oh, yes, Sharp and Ellis, among others. Oh well.
This paper draws from a forthcoming biography of Dorothy Hewett to explore not just how her legacy can be reconsidered in the light of the revelations from her daughters Kate and Rose Lilley, in books released in 2018, but the question of the current status of work by the men involved, most of them well-known cultural producers – poets, artists, actors, directors, film makers, photographers, publishers. The experiences of the Lilley sisters, both of them writers and scholars, expose for contemporary debate the inherited norms of 1970s cultural bohemia. Hewett’s life in turn prompts us to consider the gendered judgements at play for what Karen Guth terms “tainted legacies”. Insofar as women’s art is already about sexuality and gender, is it more vulnerable to retrospective marginalisation in cases such as this?
