Women in Revolt

An exhibition at Tate Britain, subtitled 'Art and Activism in the UK 1970-1990'.

I went with three friends who were right there (I didn't get involved until 1980). One of us even went to the first Women's Liberation Conference at Ruskin College in Oxford in 1970 with all the big names in subsequent feminism and where Stuart Hall was one of the people manning (a word I will not normally use!) the creche.

All of us walked into the first room of the exhibition, saw political posters we recognised and grinned at each other. But all of us left feeling a bit flat, loose-footed. Why? Was it that too much of the art felt separate from the politics? Was it that it didn't tell a coherent story of that period? (But how could it? There isn't one: there were disagreements, divisions, factions and fights - in 1989 I was thrown out of a radical feminist group acting against violence against women.) The exhibition texts acknowledged all that, along with Marxism, housework, race, punk, advertising, Greenham, collective nurseries, sexuality...

Maybe that was the problem: too many artefacts for the curators to distil? Too much evidence for analysis?

Or a museum that is more focussed on the object than its place? I felt there were lots of small 'contexts' but no sense of where we were in 1970 and the journey(s) to where we are now (or even to 1990).

I had a similar problem with Tate Modern's recent 'Capturing the Moment' exhibition about photography and art. Has curation changed? Is it me?

But a useful bit of reflection: it made me wonder about when I come out of an exhibition feeling informed about a 'story' that feels coherent - how much have I not been told? How many gaps and unanswered questions are there that I have failed to spot?