Most Women Are Like That – Furious!

Last Sunday two things I wanted to do overlapped. The Forum 6 cinema complex was screening the Met Opera’s production of Cosi Fan Tutte and local entrepreneur and activist Vicki Burkinshaw was launching the exhibition Furious? at her gallery The Curious Curation. Furious?  is described ‘as bringing together contemporary and historical artworks exploring the injustices, contradictions and anxieties shaping our world and our communities’.

I managed to get to both, just! As the Met Opera screening went for 4 hours, I only got a cursory look at the works at Vickie’s Art on Docker Gallery.  Guide sheets had run out so identifying artists and themes was left to me. Family and domestic violence, war, sexual assault, the climate crisis, consumerism and corruption were referenced in works, according to the event description, designed to ‘provoke anger, despair, disbelief’ and perhaps fuel ‘the determination to make things change’.

Artists included Arthur Wicks, Michael Azarian, Scott Howie, Aria Amore, Joel Markham, Karen Walsh, Mary Coughlan, Matilda Hillam and Raeleen Pfeiffer. I recognised Wicks’ bold designs, Markham’s striking photography and Coughlan’s ironic harnessing of embroidery techniques. I’ll need to go again to really appreciate the range of work on display. So this blog post isn’t a review, either of Cosi or of the exhibition, but my thoughts on their juxtaposition in one afternoon.

Cosi Fan Tutte is, to put it mildly, problematic! The title translates as ‘All Women Are Like That’ and the plot involves two soldiers, Ferrando and Guglielmo, being goaded by an older male friend, Don Alfonso, into betting on their fiancées’ fidelity and likely proving women’s universal inconstancy.  The women in question are sisters, Fiordiligi and Dorabella, desolate when their intended husbands stage a phony departure to war and then given a quick lesson in the harsh realities of the game of love courtesy of Despina their worldly maid and their duplicitous fiancés disguised as new suitors.

There are countless articles online about whether this blatantly sexist premise can survive 21stC interpretation and, without an in-depth analysis of the extremely clever and stylish Met Opera production I saw, I can attest that it can. One reason is the wide ranging moods Mozart’s music conjures. We experience everything from devoted first love, cynicism, societal convention around male gallantry/bastardry and matrimony, pragmatism, genuine emotional lability/confusion and how context, not to say blatant manipulation, can sway any of us.

I saw threat to the environment depicted in some of the works in Furious? but overwhelmingly the theme was the vulnerability of women under patriarchy. Several works dealt with sexual assault and the prevalence of femicide and given that Wagga has recently seen the death at the hands of her intimate partner (allegedly) of 23 year old Danielle Madgwick, violence toward women is at the forefront of the consciousness of many of us.

Art can comment on, commemorate, warn of and protest violence towards women in myriad ways and a closer exploration of Furious? will no doubt demonstrate that. In the mean time I am pondering the complicity of dead white male art in the current resurgence of misogyny via the ‘manosphere’. I take comfort that pathetic bullying thugs/influencers such as the Tate brothers are unlikely to track their contempt for women back to Mozart’s Cosi Fan Tutte or Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew but how do rap lyrics and contemporary pornography feed into the creation of toxic masculinity and how do we dissect culture to identify what is nuanced and complex and what is hateful and prescriptive? 

I am no fan of cancel culture and believe we can enjoy Jake Blues’ anarchic rampage in The Blues Brothers while applauding Carrie Fisher’s unrelenting pursuit of vengeance.   These contradictions are what give art its frisson and power.

Art is not documentary. It plays with and explores paradox, ironies, injustices… Cosi Fan Tutte appears to end with the time honoured trope of lovers reconciled and wed, but the celebrant is a play acting ladies’ maid and only moments before the couples were differently aligned.  Randomness, resignation to the path of least resistance and reversion to societal expectations are all invoked. We’re invited to celebrate a pretty dodgy conclusion to the plot but luckily we’re sufficiently sympathetic to the flawed, opportunistic, gullible and passionate protagonists to accept this resolution.

In the real world, the global rate of intentional female killings is 6.5 per 100,000 women (source: https://worldmetrics.org/femicide-statistics/). In 2024 around 50,000 women and girls were killed by someone in their own family, an average of 137 women and girls every day (source: UN Women Global Database 2024)

So far in  2026 Australia’s statistics for  women and children killed  as a result of domestic and family violence is 39 women and  19 children (source: https://australianfemicidewatch.org/). There is cause for fury!

Last Sunday afternoon I was exposed to sexual politics infuriatingly and playfully in Cosi and starkly and viscerally in Furious? The Curious Curation urges us to leave the exhibition questioning. Good advice for confronting most of life.

Matilda Hillam's work in Furious?