Feminist Perspectives on Art Contemporary Outtakes

When the body is foregrounded in artwork– as in much contemporary performance, sculptural installation and video work – so is gendered and sexualised difference. Feminist Perspectives on Art: Contemporary Outtakes looks to interactions between art history, theory, curation, and studio-based practices to theorise the phenomenological import of this embodied gender difference in contemporary art. The essays in this collection are rooted in a wide variety of disciplines, including art-making, curating, and art history and criticism, with many of the authors combining roles of curator, artist and writer. This interdisciplinary approach enables the book to bridge the theory–practice divide and highlight new perspectives emerging from creative arts research. Fresh insights are offered on feminist aesthetics, women’s embodied experience, curatorial and art historical method, art world equity, and intersectional concerns. It engages with epistemological assertions of ‘how the body feels’, how the land has creative agency in Indigenous art, and how the use of emotional or affective registers may form one’s curatorial method. This anthology represents a significant contribution to a broader resurgence of feminist thought, methodology, and action in contemporary art, particularly in creative practice research. It will be of particular value to students and researchers in art history, visual culture, cultural studies, and gender studies, in addition to museum and gallery professionals specialising in contemporary art.

Introduction; Chapter 1A feminist curator walks into a gallery…; Chapter 2 The value of maturity: Anne Ferran, Judith Wright, Lindy Lee; Chapter 3 Women in the Cross-cultural Studio: Invisible Tracks in the Indigenous artist’s archive; Chapter 4 The Pearl Gibbs ‘Gambanyi’ Kangaroo Cloak; Chapter 5 Still in my mind: Gurindji location, experience and visuality; Chapter 6 The practice of remaining perpetually contingent;Chapter 7 Curating Grief;Chapter 8 The Intimate Monument: Memorialising from a feminist perspective; Chapter 9 FLORINA PREFECTURE: Women in the shadow of ‘The Magnificent Empire’ 1900-1922 & 2017 — a feminist interpretation of Greek-Australian identity as explored in contemporary art; Chapter 10 Feeling seeing: image, sound and touch in the video installations of Angelica Mesiti;Chapter 11 Materialising the Interval: Relationality as a feminist art practice; Chapter 12 Heave, Ho, Ha: Disgust, humour and failure in contemporary feminist art; Chapter 13 Slim evidence of fat fortunes: toward a gendered history of fat acceptance

Jacqueline Millner is Associate Professor of Visual Arts at La Trobe University, Australia. She has published extensively on contemporary art, with a focus on Australian and feminist practices. Her books include Conceptual Beauty (2010), the co-authored Australian Artists in the Contemporary Museum (2014), and Fashionable Art (2015). Catriona Moore lectures in art history at the University of Sydney, Australia. Her ongoing engagement with modern and contemporary art and feminism dates from her pioneering books Indecent Exposures: Australian Feminist Photography 1970–1990 (1994) and Dissonance: Twenty Years of Australian Feminist Art Writing (1994).