Lesson 3

The feminism referred to in “feminist art” is not a qualification, a description or an adjective. As Lesson 1 shows, feminism is always first and foremost a politics.

If feminism is just a label applied to a work, what does it refer to? Is it a specific quality of the work i.e. is it the same as calling an artwork “melancholic” or “feminine”? Is this “label” a negative or a positive for marketing and publicity purposes in the artworld when there have been moments when feminism is fashionable and out of fashion?

What does the label “feminist” mean if it does not refer to a specific context or any content? Is it used as a label, only as a negative shorthand? To classify and contain an artwork? How could “feminist art” instead be used productively to talk about distinct political approaches to the making of art and its meanings?

No, being a woman artist today producing art is not a definition of feminist art.

However, many prominent woman artists today in the art world typically have to clarify whether or not they are a feminist and whether or not they are producing feminist art. You can find many women artists who receive a great deal of media attention being asked these questions. Their responses are wide-ranging but frequently involve a refusal of a certain kind of feminism (typically a negative characterisation of the 1970s) or popular associations about feminism today. Some women artists positively identify with feminism as a politics and indicate how their work addresses political issues about women’s lives and representations of women. As a result discussion of feminist art practices or assumptions about feminist art will be part of how their work is discussed in art criticism.

Why is the discussion of feminist art so often confined to only women artist’s works? Why is there an assumption that only women artists might produce feminist art? What role does the gender of the artist play in determining the definition of feminist art? Are feminist ideas and discourses only produced by women?
If feminism is an effect produced by the work and not the intention of the work put there by the artist, it must be a condition of the context in which works are read and received.  A feminist reading may be produced by male artists. A feminist reading might be produced in an exhibition, even if the works themselves have many other possibilities for being read and understood. So, if feminist readings determine what feminist art is, then men’s work might be discussed in relation to feminist ideas and discourses about contemporary art. This is known as feminist critique.

Is an artwork feminist because the artist who made it says she is a feminist – and therefore what she makes as art must be feminist as a result?
In the late 20th C/21st C, are all women “feminists” by default, even when they don’t state it, if they support women’s right to vote, women’s rights as citizens, women’s rights as human rights, women’s right to education. Most artists today have extensive higher education, freedom to travel, freedom to run a business: these are pre-requisites to being an artist recognised in the art world.

If an artist makes an artwork which is recognised as a strong feminist statement, does that mean that all her artworks will all be “feminist”? So can an artist who says she is a feminist produce non-feminist artworks – sometimes?
So, is an artwork feminist and not the artist who made it? Or can it work the other way around – the artist is a feminist but not her artworks? Or is this all a question of interpretation and the production of a feminist reading?

Is an artwork only feminist because it is named as such by someone?
Who has the power to name the artwork as feminist – the artist, their dealer, their publicist, a critic, an art historian? Does this naming have to take place in terms of written discourse? A publicity statement? A catalogue? A review? A blogpost? (see Lesson 10)

What happens when the artist says her work is not feminist but a critic says it is? Who is “right”? And which interpretation matters more?

Maybe we need to consider when a label is/was applied to a particular artist, or art work? Can feminism be applied retrospectively as a label? Wouldn’t this just be a “re-reading” of the work?

While many books on contemporary art have chapters or sections on “feminist art”, do their authors argue that feminist art is a category in art? Or a characterisation of some well-known artworks that have been debated and discussed as feminist?

If feminist art, like feminism, is tied to a definition of the women’s art movement, can the category of works or artists identified as feminist art be tied only to participants in the women’s art movement?

This is a question that feminist historiography struggles with today because it tries to apply a modernist version of art history to defining feminism. The artists who participated in modern art movements have been identified largely through their participation in key exhibitions. Their active participation constituted the definition of the movement. Participation in feminist art exhibitions has constituted the history of the women’s art movement, therefore the artists selected for those exhibitions must be the feminist artists producing feminist art. However, the actual history of feminist art exhibitions has been more exploratory, more experimental and often sought to problematize how “feminist art” has been conceived.

Are contemporary versions of feminist art visible only if they are linked as response to the legacies of the early 1970s and to the rise of the women’s art movement?

There have been numerous attempts to link the 1990s to the 1970s and the 2010s to the 1970s and “re-establish” links between a legacy of feminist art in terms of its past and a present group of artists. The effect of this has been to close down on different generations or groups of artists who have identified themselves as feminist artists in the 1980s, in the 2000s. See Mira Schor’s critique of the 2.5 generation, created by the impact of two exhibitions WACK! and Global Feminisms in 2007.

If feminism emerged as a critique of modernism, then feminist art must be an ideal type of postmodern art practice?

Feminism’s critique of modernism could make it postmodern by definition as a form of art-making. However, what modernism was has been undergoing a significant change in analysis and presentation in the last 30 years, precisely to include the history of women artists who were participants in modernist movements. This rewriting of the history of modernism has changed the perception of modernism that existed in the 1970s which automatically associated it with a minority of women artists (around 10% of collections and exhibitions) and as fundamentally a product of  dead, white, European, male (DWEM) culture. This was the characterisation of modernism that feminism challenged.

Postmodernism as an -ism has fallen from popular usage, in spite of being a key point of debate throughout the 1980s. Feminist strategies in postmodernism were associated with the “anti-aesthetic” (the title of a 1985 book edited by Hal Foster later republished as Postmodern Culture). The key essay in this debate is Craig Owen’s ‘The Discourse of Others: Feminists and Postmodernism‘. This essay reflects on feminist debates about language, scripto-visual practices and the gaze in relation to post-structuralist debates.

How does feminism appear in discussion of contemporary art, as a “global contemporary” – i.e. as a sign of a new “global” conception of contemporary art? With the exception of a short section in Terry Smith’s book Contemporary Art: World Currents (2011), feminism and discussion about feminist art has been sidelined in debates about contemporary art. Terry Smith’s ideas of three currents in contemporary art: 1)retro-sensationalism or re-modernism; 2) art from all parts of the world shaped by the post-colonial turn which is anti-colonial or against globalisation; and 3) practices entailing widespread public involvement or a critical tracing of the “New World disorder”: all include women artists, but nowhere is feminism an explicit part of this. This problem of feminism’s diffusion into the situation of the woman artist is discussed in Katy Deepwell ‘‘Other’ and ‘Not-All’, Rethinking the Place of the woman artist in ‘Contemporary Art’‘ (2014).

Is there a feminist avant-garde in the global contemporary? (This last point is the subject of Lesson 7).

The concept of art “informed by feminism” is associated with the work of artist, Mary Kelly. This concept involves an extension of her earlier analysis of the feminist problematic of a work of art identified through analysis of its materiality, sexuality and sociality. Materiality draws attention to the physical properties of the work of art but not in the modernist sense of analysis because it is also the associations of the selected materials (both connotative and denotative) in society which need to be considered. Sexuality draws attention to the complex sex/gender relations embedded in works in terms of look/gaze; producer/receiver; use of materials/contexts of presentation. It considers how psychoanalysis can inform art practice to produce effects which explore human sexuality and produce gendered identities structured by a psychological and a sociologically approach to society. Sociality draws attention to the context in which the work is presented and received in terms of time, history, representation and public debate. This last term considers how social and cultural politics play a part in determining the reading of the work of art. What is important about the concept is the links it makes between the three terms, neither has precedent over the other and all three must be considered.

This concept moves discussion of feminist art away from its association with a label, the gender of the artist, a particular type of art, a category of art-making, or a feminist reading. It is a complex form of cultural analysis which looks at the many factors which go into art production and art reception today – on three different registers. As a “travelling concept”, art informed by feminism, could also be related to theorist Mieke Bal’s ideas of cultural analysis.