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.

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).