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In the contested landscape of international theory and art production the parameters of feminism have shifted radically and it has seemed at times that the great inheritance for a new generation - the bounty of the frontline battles fought during first and second and third-wave feminism - is that women believe they have earned the right to disavow feminism. 'Feminism Never Happened', for instance, are three words I found difficult to utter publicly. This provocative assertion, however, happened to be the title of a forum discussion I helped host in November 2007. It might be argued that through the processes of identifying the modes of objectification, it is now perceived as empowering to deploy that objectification back on oneself (with raunch culture as one particular pop cultural moment evidencing that shift) ...


During the course of 'Feminism Never Happened', emerging artist Alex Martinis Roe pointed out that a newer generation of artists might argue that it is more important to do feminism than be feminist for the sake of solidarity. To employ feminist aesthetics to be part of feminism, she suggested, is potentially problematic because it risks historicising feminism and engendering nostalgia for an activist past that worked towards a comprehensible agency for the feminist artist. And for a new generation born under the omnipresent lens of myriad media formats, their fluency in the execution and reception of the gaze has led to evolved tactical ways to articulate and disseminate their own representation; a more adapted agency, if you will ...

In recent practice feminism is often claimed as a site of discourse which has become actively recharged via appropriations of feminist visual language. Examples might include the re-enactment of early performance works by artists such as Martinis Roe or the low-fi artist-action videos of Jessie Angwin, Gabriella and Silvana Mangano, Kate Murphy, Rachel Scott or Salote Tawale. Whether intentional or not, works such as these refer directly to those made by feminist precursors including Julie Rrap, Marina Abramovic, Joan Jonas, Gina Pane and Mary Kelly. Having stated that feminists must work with every new technology that is developed to avoid its immediate assumption into the canon, the Viennese artist VALIE EXPORT has been increasingly referenced in recent times by an emerging generation of practitioners. Clearly her ideas have a natural fluency with a group who have grown up with new media and technology embedded in their daily lives.

The deploying of media platforms is also tied to a sophisticated understanding of the audience as complicit producers in the generation of meaning and ideas, another key tenet for classic or first-generation feminist artists. What is so interesting in the Australian situation and in other (often westernised) countries is the literal positing of entanglements between the subject/author in a forthright engagement with audience. In much contemporary feminist work the viewer is struck by the startling directness of the gaze, the pointed performativity, the intermingling of mirroring self-portraiture, the confessional and unabashed extimacy - the revelation of the interior in an action through which our unconscious self is actively projected outside. All of these elements collude, forcing the viewer into a series of negations that create a turbulent understanding of persona and human vulnerability ...

Of the artists I approached for this article, most demurred - quite forcefully - from the attribution of a feminist reading to their work. However, none of them declined involvement. Conversely there was a tacit acceptance that some kind of feminist DNA may linger in the work and that the word feminism will be around as long as it is necessary for women to put a name to the sense of assertiveness, confidence and equality that, unnamed, has always been granted to men. In an email correspondence Anastasia Klose wrote: 'I get really sick of being a ''female'' artist. I just want to be an artist who happens to be a female.' And Danielle Freakley asked: 'Can a female performance artist make non-feminist work since she cannot avoid being female? Since her body is part of her work it will always (without her consent) question and antagonise femininity.' ...

This article appears in excerpted form. You can read the entire article in Art & Australia's Spring 2009 issue.