Difference and Excess In Contemporary Art: The Visibility of Women’s Practice

(Ed.) Art History Special Issue. Oxford, UK: Blackwells, 2003.

This book is the result of a collective research project initiated and edited by Perry, and first featured as a Special Issue of the journal Art History. It explores ideas of ‘visibility’ and ‘difference’ in contemporary practice, locating women’s art within a matrix of overlapping historical, cultural and post-colonial frameworks. Perry’s introduction ‘Visibility, Difference and Excess’ is an exploration of pertinent issues which draws on research on British art and gender in the 1990s, positing the idea of a shift in current thinking about the nature of ‘women’s practice’ and its status within contemporary British culture. She argues for an understanding of contemporary practice which is sensitive to the enabling alliances between art practice and theory. The essay also seeks to problematise notions of ‘difference’ in visual representation, exploring the fragmented and sometimes troubled nature of postmodern feminist practice. At its conception, the research project involved a group of art historians and critics, and included specially commissioned interviews with artists and academics whose work was seen to engage with issues of ‘difference’, identity or feminine ‘excess’, in the hope of expanding and developing the genre of the interview to provide rich material for academic debate (see especially interviews between Tickner and Parker, Barber and Maher and Corris and Hobbs). A diverse range of material is featured, including sculpture, painting, photography, installation, video and performance.