Women in Revolt! Art and Activism in the UK, 1970-1990 at Tate Britain review: impossible and brilliant

You couldn't ever make a perfect version of this show but that's no reason not to try and this attempt is rich and absorbing
Fiat Ad, London, 1979, reprinted 2023
Jill Posener. Courtesy of the artist
Ben Luke7 November 2023

When Linsey Young, the curator of Tate Britain's new exhibition Women in Revolt!, paid a visit to the artist Margaret Harrison, to ask her to be involved, she was told: “it’s impossible, but that’s no reason not to try.” Women in Revolt! is an enormously complex show. It attempts, through the work of more than 100 individuals and collectives, to grapple with the breadth of feminist art made in Britain between 1970 and 1990. Consequently it contains too much to properly consume within one visit.

It’s uneven, it’s demanding, and it even sprawls out into the garden, where Bobby Baker’s An Edible Family in a Mobile Home creates parents and kids in cake and biscuits, in a domestic space plastered with 1970s comics, newspapers and magazines.

Tate Britain should make every entry a season ticket, to allow multiple viewings. Because you will want to go back: it may be complex but it’s also absorbing, well structured, and often revelatory. Perhaps most importantly, it’s stirring, by turns anger-inducing and life-affirming, and emotionally rich.

You immediately witness the exhibition’s broad scope: Maureen Scott’s realist painting Mother and Child at Breaking Point (1970), with its exasperated yet defiant mother holding a crying child, is adjacent to Chandan Fraser’s documentary photographs capturing the Women's Liberation Conference at Oxford in the same year. Nearby are radical posters by the See Red Workshop and feminist pamphlets and journals. 

Linder, Untitled, 1977
Tate

While the show is not rigidly chronological, you take a fragmented journey through the time period. Each section has a core but loose subject. A compelling room takes a nuanced view of motherhood, with distinct uses of photography, from the conceptual, indexical approach of Susan Hiller, as she documents the growth of her stomach during pregnancy, to Christine Voge’s harrowing reportage at Chiswick Women’s Aid.

Another section looks at artists connected to punk and post-punk countercultures, including Linder, with that magnificent collage made for the Buzzcocks’ Orgasm Addict sleeve, with a naked woman with an iron for a head and smiling nipples.

Perhaps the best rooms are titled Black Woman Time Now, with works by figures connected to the Black Arts Movement and other artists of colour, including the fantastic early drawings of Claudette Johnson, the sculpture-paintings of Lubaina Himid, and Sutapa Biswas’s extraordinary Housewives with Steak Knives, a contemporary version of the Indian deity Kali, who with her multiple hands brandishes a blade, severed male heads, a rose and a flag with reproductions of Artemisia Gentileschi’s paintings of Judith Beheading Holofernes. 

In a related video, Biswas criticises the “eurocentricity of feminist discourse”. This reflects the sophistication of the whole endeavour: it leaves scope for critique, for multiple perspectives, and yes, for a certain messiness. In the catalogue Young acknowledges the fact that the Tate, for so long part of what was called “the male artocracy”, didn’t show or collect most of these artists’ works until recently, if at all.

Solidarity with Sisters, 1981
Chila Kumari Singh Burman. Photography Varda Agarwal

So, Harrison was partly right: it is impossible to make a perfect show on this subject. But not an excellent one. 

From Wednesday November 8 to April 7; tate.org.uk

Create a FREE account to continue reading

eros

Registration is a free and easy way to support our journalism.

Join our community where you can: comment on stories; sign up to newsletters; enter competitions and access content on our app.

Your email address

Must be at least 6 characters, include an upper and lower case character and a number

You must be at least 18 years old to create an account

* Required fields

Already have an account? SIGN IN

By clicking Create Account you confirm that your data has been entered correctly and you have read and agree to our Terms of use , Cookie policy and Privacy policy .

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

Thank you for registering

Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged in