Doing Feminism: Women’s Art and Feminist Criticism in Australia

Abstract

Doing Feminism: Women’s Art and Feminist Criticism in Australia (2021) is Anne Marsh’s ambitious national survey of art and writing about and alongside feminism. The book begins with the 1960s pre-rumblings of the second wave and ends in the 2010s—bypassing the first half of the twentieth century in favour of the extended period when feminism as a concerted theoretical, political and artistic project has been most impactful in Australia. The publication is comprehensive, featuring over 220 artists, and is lavishly illustrated, with hundreds of colour plates filling its glossy pages. If read as a politically chic coffee table book, Doing Feminism excels. It has a stylish, large-format design with a distinctive highlighteryellow cover. Rather than slowly working through dense theory, readers can flick open to short (around 300 word) essays and enough feminist artworks to animate a thousand consciousness-raising circles. As a scholarly resource, the book is valuable—it will serve as a good starting point for finding under-researched artists and as a handy compendium of key Australian feminist art texts, many of which are difficult to locate online. However, Doing Feminism has limitations. It suffers from a meagre offering of critical feminist texts from the past two decades. More significantly, the book relies heavily on a framework of the “avant-garde”, which, to this reviewer, was a methodological distraction from the central project at hand. Try as one may to distance or repurpose the term away from European modernism, avant-garde is inseparable from its theoretical origins. The term struggles in the context of a twenty first century Australian artworld attempting to decolonise. Doing Feminism already had to contend with the unwieldy categories of ‘Australian’, ‘women’s art’ and ‘feminist criticism’. Did the book really need the added challenge of avant-garde? Doing Feminism could be seen as a monograph bookending the Australian era of the feminist blockbuster exhibition. Hilary Robinson identified this international trend of large-scale multi-artist museum shows dedicated to relations between art and feminism beginning around 2005. Notable examples were WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution (2007) at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang: 45 Years of Art and Feminism (2007) at Bilbao Fine Arts Museum and elles@centrepompidou (2009) in Paris. In Australia, Susan Best tracked a continuation of the trend with Contemporary Australia: Women (2012) at QAGOMA. The trend continued with Unfinished Business: Perspectives on art and feminism (2017-18) at ACCA, Know My Name: Australian Women Artists 1900 to Now, Part