Aspects of feminism and art
Including work by forty artists, Frames of Reference served as a major focus for the larger Dissonance Project, an ' umbrella' event comprising exhibitions, lectures, and screenings on feminism and visual art. That the quality and nature of the work in Frames varied greatly, yet has been criticised in terms of its supposed homogeneity, raises relevant issues on the perception of the role of theory in feminist work. For Jacques Delaruelle, reviewing this exhibition for The Sydney Review, "the long accusatory finger of radical artistic consciousness" was peremptorily prominent. 1 I would argue that the posturing to which this comment refers is characteristic only of work that reflects a poor apprehension and a misreading of theoretical concerns, rather than problematising the embeddedness of "Theory" in artwork. Indeed, examination of subjectivity and an emphasis on theory do not necessarily constitute "radical closure", nor do they preclude engagement with the social, as Delaruelle laments in his review. Moreover, it has not always been so, in the history of art, that theory-driven work was regarded in terms of aesthetic impoverishment: quite the contrary.
With this in mind, one could say that a lack in, for instance, Elizabeth Newman's work was occasioned by the way theory was used, rather than a focus on theory, per se: In work like this, polemic has been confused with an ability to propagate cliches that threaten to subsume any real subversive or revelative content feminism may possess.
As well, the 'misuse' of theory (to the extent that this is so), can be explained in terms of a perception of marginality that arms itself for combat with " the mainstream", when in fact, much of "the marginal" is part... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline