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

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
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