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In making her case, McDonald foregrounds the necessary
ambiguity (uncertainty, blurring, complexity) of art and
visual representation in general. She suggests that it is
specifically through their 'negotiation' of this ambiguity
that art practices in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s have been
productive in generating a 'feminised' ideal of the female
body. The recurring tension in McDonald's book issues from
the connection she draws between ambiguity and the possibility
of a feminised ideal at work in recent art practices. Yet
it seemed to me that certain difficulties arise from the
pivotal role McDonald assigns to ambiguity in this book.
Ambiguity is taken to be at once the constant condition
of art, and that which effectively displaces Classical ideals
of the female body in certain forms of contemporary art.
If, as McDonald contends, art is 'always ambiguous', how
does ambiguity distinguish certain art practices from others?
McDonald certainly makes interpretative decisions on this
point - there is 'negative' ambiguity and there is 'productive'
ambiguity - but she tends to elide the key issue of how
she arrives at these determinations. This approach also
leaves aside the question of whether ambiguity is always
the most significant element of the works being analysed.
To take one example discussed by McDonald, in an installation
by Melbourne artist Kate Beynon we see a pair of tiny, beautiful
Chinese slippers next to stuffed calico forms designed to
evoke the damaged shape of mutilated feet once they are
'unbound'. This does not strike me as particularly ambiguous.
It is rather the starkness and vividness of the juxtaposition
that makes this work at once moving and horrifying.
These difficulties also surface in relation to the question
of eroticism. McDonald argues, again, that art is 'always
erotic' - particularly when it has to do with representations
of the body. But is this really the case? Does art have
to be erotic to be 'good'? Don't artists and audiences engage
in a kind of perennial dispute over what is erotic in art
and what isn't? Because the logic that operates here is
one in which increasingly diverse ways of envisioning the
female body - inevitably erotic, inevitably ambiguous -
come to be included within a feminised ideal, the risk McDonald's
book runs is that of ending up with an innocuous, EEO-style
view of erotic ambiguity in art. Reading McDonald's account,
we might get the sense that, while there is not much we
would want to disagree with in it, things would get more
interesting if there were.
This said, the pluralist approach McDonald adopts enables
her to put forward a welcome reassessment of the state of
play between contemporary art and recent debates in feminism.
Her book brings together many valuable insights into the
work of artists as different as Patricia Piccinini, Fiona
Foley, Zoe Leonard and Pat Brassington, as well as offering
thought-provoking reflections on a range of topics - from
pornography and the eroticisation of children in advertising,
to multiculturalism, queer theory and 'bad girl' postfeminism.
Most interestingly, perhaps, her book develops an analytical
framework in which recent developments in art practice,
inside and outside Australia, can be considered in terms
of current feminist concerns.
In broad terms, McDonald outlines a dialectical movement
taking place in the last few decades in art. In the 1970s,
artists like Carolee Schneemann and Judy Chicago scandalised
many observers by contesting traditional representations
of the female body with their use of vaginal imagery and
highly sexualised performances. As McDonald points out,
their art was not meant simply to shock, but also to propose
other ways of figuring femininity in art and, more specifically,
to reconnect artistic representations of the female body
to lived experience. If the strategies adopted by these
artists were soon seen as naïve and limiting for their
apparent consignment of female experience to the realm of
nature, genital corporeality and 'base' matter, the pendulum
was to swing very far the other way in the 1980s, as McDonald
observes. She argues that, in this decade, alliances between
feminism and 'poststructuralism' (postmodernism, deconstruction
and, most importantly, theories of the gaze drawing on psychoanalysis)
tend to lose the thread tying feminist art practice to the
search for alternative ways to represent the female body.
At this point, McDonald suggests, a preoccupation with poststructuralist
theory leads to artistic strategies that remain 'negative'
insofar as they are locked within a critique of dominant
modes of representation, subjectivity and spectatorship.
In McDonald's view, the art that issues from these alliances
remains too rhetorical, too nihilist, and too suspicious
of representation and visuality in general, to be very 'positive'
in its effects. All it can finally do is say, like Barbara
Kruger in a famous work from 1981: 'Your gaze hits the side
of my face.'
According to McDonald, however, by the end of the 1980s
there is something like a 'return of the real' in art (to
use Hal Foster's term) - and with it, a return to a real
engagement with the representation of the female body in
artistic practice. McDonald argues that a more productive
'revisioning' of the representation of the female body arises
from contacts between feminism (or 'postfeminism') and wider
social and political concerns, along with the influence
of 'post-poststructuralist' theories - it arises, for example,
from theories of performativity, postcoloniality, queer
theory and recent debates on the effects of new technologies.
Thus a more complex, 'embodied' and multifaceted conception
of the female body is seen to emerge in the work of artists
like Zoe Leonard, Della Grace, Destiny Deacon and Patricia
Piccinini. Many of the strongest and most engaging passages
in McDonald's book relate to such recent developments, and
these evidently interest her the most.
Interestingly, however, it sometimes appears that the task
of 'revisioning' the female body comes into its own precisely
when art withdraws from a direct engagement with concerns
which are avowedly or primarily feminist - as if feminist
(or postfeminist) art gets 'better' when questions of sexual
difference begin to retreat into the background. In the
account McDonald offers here, a kind of synthesis takes
place in contemporary art between the 'positivity' of the
1970s and the critical and theoretical complexity of the
1980s. This synthesis seems to me to be a little too convenient
- at least for a book entitled Erotic Ambiguities: The
Female Nude in Art. (Why are Stelarc and Bill Henson
discussed here, but not Jenny Saville and Lucian Freud?
A consideration of the nude or nakedness in visual representations
becomes increasingly tangential to McDonald's discussions
of developments in art from the 1980s onward. Although the
misleading title of the book is presumably a publisher's
decision, the diminishing attention McDonald pays to the
problem of representing the naked female body seems to me
to be a missed opportunity.)
What problems arise from this synthesis? What questions
might we ask about the 'inclusive' yet 'feminised' ideal
which, according to McDonald, has been so effective in producing
positive representations of the female body in contemporary
art? To take one example, we could think here of McDonald's
discussion of a series of photographs by the Melbourne-based
artist Linda Sproul, entitled Difficult to Light.
In some of the photographs in this series, Sproul 'parodically
re-enacts' famous images of Marilyn Monroe, Christine Keeler
and Madonna, undermining the glamour attached to these iconic
shots through the glasses she does not remove from her eyes
and through her deliberately tense and awkward posture.
In other images from the series, Sproul re-enacts photographs,
taken in around 1870, of a young Aboriginal woman known
only as Ellen. These photographs, in which this woman appears
in different postures, partly or entirely naked, with measuring-sticks
beside her, evidently belong to a colonialist visual regime
of pseudo-scientific or ethnographic 'research'. According
to McDonald, Sproul's re-enactments of these photographs
function to disturb the authority of her 'whiteness'; she
further argues that through the ambiguity of their critical
displacements, these photographs work toward an ideal that
is at once 'feminist' and 'antiracist'.
Could not more be said here? Of course, there is no way
to know what Ellen would have thought of the 'ambiguity'
of Sproul's re-enactments or whether she would have appreciated
the 'ideal of inclusiveness and positive erotic appeal for
the representation of the female body' that Sproul, according
to McDonald, continues to invoke in her work. These images
reminded me of another performance-based work by an European-Australian
artist, in less than dire material circumstances, who spent
a day or so hunched over a sewing-machine, acting out the
role of an exploited Asian piece-worker. Is there not something
going on in these enactments of difference that trivialises
the political and social concerns that they 'perform'? The
real ambiguity of Sproul's photocompositions lies in the
way that they repeat the colonialist capture of difference
at the same time that they seek to 'destabilise' it.
To turn to the other side of the feminist/antiracist equation
being drawn here, it's significant that McDonald's reading
of Sproul's work is framed by a discussion of Judith Butler's
writings on gender and performativity - and, in particular,
Butler's claims that enactments of gender can be liberating
in exposing the constructedness of gender categories, their
historicality and contingency. Although McDonald expresses
some ambivalence about Butler's position, she nevertheless
appears to support it in her reading of Sproul's work and
in her general proposal that the positivity of (post-)feminist
art arises through a principle of inclusiveness. McDonald's
account of contemporary art tends to suggest an 'all-over'
style of feminism (or postfeminism), a feminism which -
with its re-enactments, its parodies, and its alliances
(appropriative or otherwise) with a range of theoretical,
social and political concerns - seems to be less and less
interested in questions of sexual difference. One of the
issues that McDonald does not pursue here is whether Butler's
view of gender as something constructed is adequate. Yet
if femininity is just a social and historical construction,
why haven't these enactments - which began a long time ago
- liberated us from it? Why do so many women hold on to
markers of femininity - markers which seem not only to survive
but to thrive on these forms of parody?
The questions of why and how lines of division between male
and female, masculine and feminine, continue to matter in
contemporary culture seem strangely peripheral to McDonald's
account of the role of feminism in contemporary art. This
is perhaps because these questions resist explanation in
terms of appeals to notions of ambiguity and the 'blurring
of boundaries', notions which guide McDonald's discussion
here. These difficult questions perhaps require a more incisive
form of analysis than McDonald's pluralist feminism is able
to offer. Yet her book is important, not only because it
may prompt us to reconsider the political stakes and limits
of this pluralism, but precisely because it leaves more
questions than it answers. What kind of erotic ambiguity
is promised by the current 'democratisation' of gender and
sexuality? What kinds of differences resist this democratisation?
Morgan Thomas lectures in art history in the School of
English, Media Studies and Art History at the University
of Queensland.
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