Baggage reclaim: Some thoughts on feminism and painting (original) (raw)

Feminism AND Art: A Review Essay

Australian Feminist Studies, 2015

Since the revolutions of the 1960s, feminism and art have created spaces for thinking and rethinking the links between gender and creativity. Art has been challenged both within and without the frame, as artists and feminists disrupt and complicate pre-established modes of production and representation. Feminism in turn has been challenged by art that asks: what does a feminist subject look like? What does she read? Think? Feel? Make? Amidst the constant questioning some unexpected encounters occur: art made by women is not necessarily feminist art; patriarchal logics continue to dominate the ongoing boundaries of canon formation; and, it remains necessary to examine gender in all its potentialities. As Susan Best writes, it continues to be our job as feminist artists and art historians to address ‘the refraction of the question of the subject through the lens of gender’ (2013, p.143). Subsequently, this review asks: What do you feel when you encounter feminist art? And, who is art AND feminism for? We pursue these questions through five new or recently updated titles broadly collected under the heading of contemporary feminist art history and theory.

Feminism And Art: Unexpected Encounters

A Multiple Book Review Essay: Susan Best, Visualizing Feeling: Affect and the Feminine Avant-garde. I. B. Tauris: London and New York, 2013. . Katy Deepwell (ed.), Feminist Art Manifestos: An Anthology. KT Press: London, 2014. . Eleanor Heartney, Helaine Posner, Nancy Princenthal and Sue Scott, The Reckoning: Women Artists of the New Millennium, Prestel: Munich, London, New York, 2013. . Amelia Jones (ed.), The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader, (2nd edition) Routledge: New York and London, 2010. . Helena Reckitt (ed.), Art and Feminism, (Abr Rev Up edition,) Peggy Phelan (survey) Phaidon Press: New York, 2012.

Marjorie Och, review of Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard, editors, Reclaiming Female Agency: Feminist Art History After Postmodernism, SECAC Review 15/1 (2006): 49-51.

s anthologies. Feminism and Art History: Questioning the Litany of 1982 and The Expanding Discourse: Feminism and Art History of ten years later. These collections offered important alternatives to traditional art history textbooks. The articles served as models for our own research both in terms of content as well as methodology. We went on to use them in our classrooms, where they inspire a new generation of students for whom feminism is a historicaland often disturbing -phenomenon. It is important here to contextualize these anthologies within the classroom, now perhaps the primary ground for our rereading of the essays. The articles -written before most of our students were born -can be used today as evidence of how our discipline grew in the last decades of the twentieth century. The two anthologies act as "proof" that women artists and patrons are recent and contested additions to our studies, that images of women and representations of the female form are not mere depictions of beauty, and that the language of art and art history as it has developed in the West is neither neutral nor universal. Our discipline has, indeed, benefited from our frequent return to the contributions made by the many and varied authors in these anthologies.