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

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
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