40 Years On

We had a look at the Vivian Lynn exhibition at the Adam Art Gallery in the weekend. It is one of a number of revisionist exhibitions that have popped up recently. The most spectacular other example was the Tom Kreisler survey.

As you might expect in a show of this sort there are some pretty strong claims made with the goal of repositioning Vivian Lynn from her comparative obscurity. This includes an extraordinary 1968 quote from Lynn on one of the labels.

“a feminist oil painting on canvas is an oxymoron”

In 1968 most of us were just discovering the term Woman’s Liberation (used for the first time in print in 1966 and not in Ramparts Magazine until 1968), the first issue of Broadsheet was still four years away and Greer’s Female Eunuch two years, as was Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics. To see the word ‘feminist’ used in that way, with that date, is simply incredible and raises lots of questions about timing, sources and context that are not pursued in the shows labels or text panels.

Image: Detail of the Vivian Lynn survey exhibition at the Adam Gallery in Wellington