Women have reached unprecedented positions of influence within the art world but gender inequality is still rife.
High-profile exhibitions on surrealism and abstract expressionism rarely resurrect debates about the validity of Freudian psychoanalytic theory or Clement Greenberg’s rejection of representation. So it might be germane to ask why the current resurgence of institutional, critical and media attention on feminist art has sparked impassioned discussions about the relevance of feminism in today’s allegedly “post-feminist” art world?
The answer is not only because women of all generations remain conflicted about feminism, but because art is arguably the most appropriate medium to represent feminism’s complex history, meaning and purpose. As the best of the recent feminist art survey shows demonstrate, “feminism” is far from a fixed term. Putting aside feminist theory’s distracting obsession with semantics, the term still encompasses too many and too varied ideological factions, political agendas, identities and histories to fit any single definition that is not troublingly essentialist, reductivist or vague.
Only when the practical issues of equality have been put to rest within the art world, it can be taken for granted that a show containing the work of Ana Mendieta like a show of Magritte, or a lecture on Griselda Pollock, like one on Jackson Pollock, will be about the art on its merits, not the ideas or the politics that inspired it