The Gothic: Perversity and its Pleasure
Curated by Robyn McKenzie

The Gothic acknowledged '70s feminist art practices that had been dumped but then revived and which would be reworked in the early '90s 'bad girl' exhibitions. I came to the idea of The Gothic through architecture and thinking about classical architecture as the mainstream, and the Gothic as the 'other'. I was interested in Gothic Revival architecture and how Modernist architects and critics despised it and were repelled by that period.

My proposition was that some women artists are drawn to qualities of the other, to aberrant forms of excessive ornamentation, excessive emotion, romantic scale and feeling. The Gothic was a perversity but one that was knowingly revelled in and enjoyed by female artists— and adopted for its subversive potential. This came to be translated into the 'bad girl' idea— cliched feminine characteristics and attributes parodied and inhabited in a way that blew them out of all proportion; doing nicely feminine things in a way that became monstrous.

So this idea of the Gothic is quite distinct from the recent spate of Gothic-inspired exhibitions and artworks in Melbourne including those at Gertrude that relate more to Gothic subculture and style.

Excerpted from 'As I remember it', Charlotte Day interviewing curator Robyn McKenzie, first published in A Short Ride in a Fast Machine, 2005. 

This exhibition was commissioned by the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, where it was first shown in November 1986. We wish to acknowledge the involvement of the IMA with the present exhibition, and we thank the IMA's former Director Peter Cripps, for his assistance with its initial organisation.

Catalogue published by Gertrude Street Artists Spaces Inc,. March 1987.

The assistance and sponsorship of the Victorian Ministry for the Arts, Vitrex-Camden Pty. Ltd. and the Visual Arts Board of the Australia Council is gratefully acknowledged.