The “Dream Weekend”: Feminism and the Domestic Interior at the Merchant Builders’ Display Home (1977)

Abstract

ABSTRACT In 1977 the North American feminist artist Lynn Hershman conducted a three-day installation and performance piece titled “The Dream Weekend” at a Merchant Builders’ display home in Melbourne’s Vermont Park. The site-specific installation explored the aspirations and realities of the dream home through the staging of the life of a suburban woman in states of girlhood, confinement, and escape. Using new archival material, this paper documents Hershman’s project, exploring how a sharp feminist critique of the normative ideologies of the domestic interior was able to be staged and accommodated within the display home. Examining unpublished correspondence between the artist, the curators and personnel from Merchant Builders, this paper analyses the differing perspectives each brought to concepts of Australian suburbia and the progressive Merchant Builders’ home. It documents the conspicuously cosmopolitan and eclectically furnished interiors designed and styled by Nexus, a subsidiary interior design company of Merchant Builders. We argue that the Merchant Builder homes and interiors expressed new late twentieth-century subjectivities emerging from heightened environmental consciousness and individual identity. The complexities of the artwork’s siting drew out the complications, tensions, and collisions of this encounter between a progressive housing company and the feminist rejection of the suburban home.