Australian Women's Book Review Volume 14.1 - School of English ...

Ambiguity Stripped Bare
Helen McDonald, Erotic Ambiguities: The Female Nude in Art.
London and New York: Routledge, 2001.
Reviewed by Morgan Thomas.
How does contemporary feminist thought approach the erotic potential of visual representations of the
female body? In what ways would a feminist politics, or a feminist ethics, now make sense of this
erotic potential - and of the never-ending fascination with the female body in contemporary art and
culture? To what extent have new political concerns and stakes altered feminist perspectives on visual
representation in recent years? These are only a few of the important questions at the heart of Helen
McDonald's Erotic Ambiguities: The Female Nude in Art.
McDonald retraces the changing fortunes and stakes of feminist approaches to the female body in
critical theory and art practice over the past three decades. Her primary interest here is with the ways in
which a diversity of art practices - whether overtly feminist or informed by feminist thinking - have set
out to challenge pervasive, yet inherently unattainable ideals of female bodily perfection. In
McDonald's account, the disparate art practices arising out of the women's movement have been
effective in resisting the powerful hold of such ideals. She argues that by developing a positive, yet
'conceptual' rather than 'representational' ideal based on a principle of inclusiveness and difference,
contemporary art has worked to displace these ideals - it has really 'made a difference.'
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
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