Project 2022

Hags Of Resistance in Zaniland (HORZ)

Western society has predetermined a woman’s existence before she is even born. Just like children, the disabled, the demented, the non-white, the ethnic and the Indigenous of many different cultures, women are a marginalised group within the power, control and structure of the institutions and laws which rule over us. 

Throughout history the woman has been cast aside once her functionality and beauty is gone. Once she has birthed and nurtured her children to adulthood, worked her fingers to the bone and made immeasurable sacrifices, she is no longer required.

Once, she had dreams of being free and discovering all that life had to offer. As she has always been an object of control and male desire, those dreams were shot down and she was steered into an ‘appropriate’ life: marriage, white picket fence, children, housework, underpaid work and budgeting to make ends meet. Her back now aches, her body is saggy and full of surgery scars, her knees crack, her face is wan and haggard. 

Yet woman exists long after her use-by date has expired. Those tiny seeds of her dreams from childhood have been waiting to sprout. It is this moment that is to be celebrated. The Hags of Resistance in Zaniland create a micro-world in which they mock their own contributions to society in a humorous way, because laughing about it is much better than crying! Blood, sweat and tears have gone into all these years and now we want to entertain, amuse, bewilder, disturb, enlighten and disrupt the viewer’s deeply embedded beliefs surrounding the position and identities of Hags.

DEFINITIONS:

Hag:  an old woman, witch, bitch, cow, old bat, old duck, crone, gorgon, beldame.

Resistance:  the refusal to accept or comply, the ability to not be adversely affected by something.

Zany:  eccentric, bizarre, weird, peculiar, odd, quirky, unconventional, strange, insane, crazy…

Zaniland:   the imaginary, but real land of the zany old hags.

HORZ everywhere! Now is our moment to have fun, reject what we have learned and been conditioned to accept. Now is the time to free ourselves of almost life-long burdens and show “them” who we really are. “Them” being the young, the powerful, the lawmakers, the fat white men in business suits, the politicians (pollies) in their red power ties and nicely pressed lapels and starched collars and ironed, perfectly folded handkerchiefs. We have catered to their whims, and desires, and requests and directives (By Order) for too long and now we must stand up and resist.

Possible Artists* Aligned With HORZ:

• Sally Rees

• Louise Bourgeois

• Meret Oppenheim

• Frances Barrett

• Janine Antoni

• Heath Franco

• Rosie Deacon

• Tony Albert

*Males are NOT excluded. (See below)

FEMALE IDENTITY = construct of male European ideology…. BUT

Women of HORZ are not MAN-HATERS…nor are we particularly feminists. We are resisting against the SYSTEM: Those mostly white males who hold all the power. Australia is still under British rule. Our First Nations people have suffered under colonisation, as have other marginalised groups. This is totally unacceptable, and as a non-Indigenous female citizen of Australia, Brisbane born and bred, I will not succumb quietly to the injustices against all of us. We have loving partners, children and families. Future generations should not be confined to archaic rules and ways of living.

What HORZ seeks to achieve is the SUBVERSION of female identity. Hags want to make art on their own terms, about their own essence, without prescription from society. We want to make art/do the housework on our own terms. We have always been the “OTHER”.

“Herkenhoff: Why have you never made a realistic self-portrait?

Bourgeois: Because I am not interested in myself. I am interested in the Other… I, me, myself horrifies me.”[1]

I am – WE are the OTHER.

We will express ourselves as we see our Selves, our roles in society, our identities, our personal histories, our authentic stories. 

We HORZ are NOT interested in:

• The sensuous

• The desirable

• The beautiful

• Magic, sorcery, spirituality

• Chance...

Everything is deliberate...of course.

We HORZ ARE interested in:

• Expression of labour 

• Expression of trauma

• Prescribed gender roles

• Prescribed female identity

• Subversion of female identity

• Psychoanalysis

• Memory 

• Making a mockery of control, power and hierarchies

• Fun and good old Aussie larrikinism

• The absurd (thanks to Surrealism!)

• Humour: Satire, irony, caricature, sarcasm, toilet humour, and parody

• Semiotics 

• Language: metaphor, idiom, slang

We HORZ grew up watching Lucille Ball, Jeanne Little and Jerry Lewis movies. That childhood that was filled with the absurd, the crazy, the zany and the humorous has assisted in placing the “other” in a specific context. We will use zaniness to show our lived experiences as that of a commodity of labour in a capitalist and consumerist society.

Materials and Media:

Found objects, ready-made objects, old objects, sentimental objects, discarded items, oil paint, timber, wire, plastic, paper, painting, drawing, sculpture, performance. The sky is the limit for HORZ.

“According to cultural theorist Sianne Ngai, zaniness is a specific aesthetic category characterised by the performance of affective labour within late capitalism, its reliance on fragmented, multiple forms of subjectivity, and the economic value given to flexible, fluid social relations.”[2]

The HORZ movement wishes to utilise the “zany aesthetic” to apply humour to express the experience of the female “Other” in a context of labour, in the form of housework, women’s work and female existence in everyday life. 

“MONA’S latest exhibition delves into the folkloric character of the crone and the perceived invisibility of ageing women in society…”

“As I have found myself hurtling towards my 50s and entering a demographic that is increasingly encountering social or economic disadvantage, I wanted to create an effigy of how I wish to evolve as I age. An empowered figure to aspire to; a crone,” Rees said.

“My vision of the contemporary crone is resilient, wise, unruly, fearsome and generous; combining the finest qualities of both her fairytale counterpart and of the elder women I admire most.

“To call a woman a ‘crone’ is purported to be an insult; I want this exhibition to make it feel like an honour.” Shown in Rees’ work is her network of ‘crones’ — female friends, family and colleagues who have inspired her.”[3]

The excerpt shown above, from a newspaper article about the artist, Sally Rees, is inspiring. However, rather than aspire to be a crone I am ALREADY one, although I do prefer the term “hag”, as I am not interested in the spiritual, magic or fairy-tale connotations, or how I will evolve.

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References:

[1] Paul Herkenhoff. “Interview with Louise Bourgeois,” in Louis Bourgeois, ed. Robert Storr, Paulo Herkenhoff and Allan Schwartzman (New York: Phaidon, 2003), 8-25.

[2] Katherine Guinness, “Hard at Play: Zaniness and Labour in Contemporary Art,” Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art 18:1(2018): 90, https://doi.org/10.1080/14434318.2018.1481333

[3] Wilkins, Kasey, “Game of Crones All About Power,” The Mercury, 27 March 2021, 20, http://search.proquest.com.libraryproxy.griffith.edu.au/newspapers/game-crones-all-about-power/docview/2505521339/se-2?accountid=14543.

Selected Bibliography:

Biberman, Efrat. "Beyond Representation: On the Real and its Relation to Visual Art." American Imago 77, no. 4 (2020): 711-737. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/777059.

Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990.

Dayal, Samir. "Blackness as Symptom: Josephine Baker and European Identity." In Blackening Europe: The African American Presence, edited by Heike Raphael-Hernandez, 35-52. New York: Routledge, 2012. https://doi:10.4324/9780203446157.

Foley, Fiona. Biting the Clouds: A Badtjala Perspective on the Aboriginals Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act, 1897. Queensland: UQ Press, 2020.

Guinness, Katherine, “Hard at Play: Zaniness and Labour in Contemporary Art,” Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art 18:1 (2018): 90-107. https://doi.org/10.1080/14434318.2018.1481333.

Herkenhoff, Paulo. “Interview with Louise Bourgeois.” In Louise Bourgeois, edited by Robert Storr, Paulo Herkenhoff and Allan Schwartzman, 8-25. New York: Phaidon, 2003.

Kasey Wilkins, "Game of Crones All About Power," The Mercury, 27 March, 2021, 20. http://search.proquest.com.libraryproxy.griffith.edu.au/newspapers/game-crones-all-about-power/docview/2505521339/se-2?accountid=14543.

Krauss, Rosalind E. The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986.

Lusty, Natalya. Surrealism, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007.

Swinnen, Aagje. “Mumbling Beauty: Louise Bourgeois – portraits of the artist as a much older woman,” Feminist Media Studies 18:1 (2018): 122-137. https://doi:10.1080/14680777/2018.1409995.