ABSTRACT
I am the Director of a graduate programme I devised in 1991. Titled ‘Master of Arts (MA) in Feminist Historical, Theoretical and Critical Studies in the Visual Arts’, its name registers the complex and expanded character of feminist interventions in the study of the visual arts, past and present, including changes in art history, art theory, art criticism and art practice wrought by a range of theoretical and political initiatives. For brevity, it is known as Feminism and the Visual Arts, a phrasing which sets in direct confrontation a tradition of theoretical reflection and social activism by women-feminism, with the theory, history and practices of visual culture. This already breaks the traditional boundaries of art history which segregate that art history from criticism, distancing art history from the production of living culture and thus disavows its own investments in the writing of history. The speciality of the course is the attempt to bring together, in one space, feminist cultural and historiographical theory, studies in the histories of women’s work in the visual arts, analyses and practices of contemporary art by women. Thus the course attracts students who are or are aiming to be artists, curators, critics, art historians, as well as women from related disciplines interested in a dedicated study of feminism and cultural theory. It refuses to observe the frontiers between art history and contemporary art practice, between academic theory and the visual arts.
