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fi Themes in Contemporary Art

Themes in Contemporary Art

Themes in Contemporary Art

‘Dream houses: Installations and the Home’

In: Perry, Gill and Wood, Paul eds. Themes in Contemporary Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), pp. 231–276.

This is chapter 6 of a book Themes in Contemporary Art that looks at different aspects of the postmodernism that has dominated art since the 1960s. The book was set reading for an Open University course Art of the Twentieth Century, first launched in 2004. Focussing on the work of Louise Bourgeois, Doris Salcedo, Mona Hatoum, Rachel Whiteread and Cornelia Parker, Perry’s chapter explores the evolving nature of installation art, and the possible significance of gender issues in the production, viewing and understanding of this form of art practice. She considers several installations that share the character of ‘architectural sculpture’ referring to the (often) enclosed spaces of the ‘home’. The ‘home’, rather than its material correlate the house, is conceived here as a space that is marked by social, economic, cultural and gender relations. As such it is often seen as the site of the ‘feminine domestic’, a concept that is explored by Perry in relation to a range of installation works. She argues that for a full understanding of these ‘architectural sculptures’ we may need knowledge of narrative meanings provided by the artists (for example in Bourgeois’s Passage Dangereux, 1997), alongside that of well established (gendered) associations evoked by their sculptural manipulations and juxtapositions of domestic objects. She argues that these memorials and ‘dream houses’ also reveal these artists as engaged with complex sculptural and tactile processes of making, constructing, casting and assembling, all of which contribute to the aesthetic complexity and imaginative possibilities of installation art.

Placing Faces

Placing Faces: the portrait and the English country house in the long 18th century

Placing Faces

Placing Faces: the portrait and the English country house in the long eighteenth century

Ed. and co-author with eds. Kate Retford, Jordan Vibert. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013.

This is the first book to explore in detail the social, historical, political and aesthetic relationships between two important aspects of 18th-century cultural life: portraiture and the country house, villa or estate. Houses (and their portraits) explored inlcude Wanstead House, Althorp, Chatsworth, Narford Hall, Stowe, Knole House, Windsor Castle. As co-editor Perry has co-wrote the (10,000 word) Introduction which provides an overview of the complex and shifting relationship between works of art and their positioning within the spaces of a country house.

Her own chapter ‘Dirty Dancing at Knole’, explores the country house at Knole as a densely coded space in which portraits could contribute to both public and private meanings, and some of their gendered implications. She considers some of the less well documented aspects of Knole as both a repository of art and precious artefacts, and as a literal and symbolic representation of power and social relations. She focuses on representations of one of its most notorious celebrity occupants, the dancer Giovanna Baccelli, exploring the significance of the portraits of her commissioned by the Duke (Gainsborough, Giovanna Baccelli, 1782; Reynolds, Giovanna Baccelli as a Bacchante, 1783) and placed inside the house, and the ways in which her perceived status and her gender contributed to this accumulation and display of cultural capital at Knole. She also considers the relationship between Knole and the 18th-century celebrity world of the theatre and its female performers, arguing that there was a complex interaction between the spheres of English hereditary power and status, and the brash, sexualised and trans-national culture of masquerade and the 18th-century theatre. Perry suggests that these aspects can be seen to coalesce and even collude in the geography of this building and its valuable contents.

Major publications

Major publications

Major publications

Single-Authored Books

– Islands in Modern and Contemporary Art (Reaktion Books, September, 2024).
– Playing at Home: The House in Contemporary Art (Reaktion Books, 2013).
– Spectacular Flirtations: Viewing the Actress in British Art 1768-1820 (Yale University Press, 2007), shortlisted for the Theatre Book Prize, 2008.
– Women Artists and the Parisian Avant-Garde: Modernism and ‘Feminine’ Art 1900 to the late 1920s (Manchester University Press, 1995).
– Paula Modersohn-Becker: Her Life and Work (The Women’s Press, 1979 and Harper and Row, 1980).
   – (Translated as) Paula Modersohn-Becker: Hennes liv och verk, Bokförlaget Trevi – Stockholm 1980 (translated by Kerstin Karling).
   – (Translated as) Paula Modersohn-Becker: leven en werk, Feministische Uitgeverij Sara, Amsterdam, 1979 (translated by Rita Meyer).

Edited and Co-Authored Books

– Leon Golub: Powerplay – The Political Portraits, co-author with Jon Bird; ‘In Your Face: Immediacy, Masculinity and Skin’ (Reaktion Books, 2016) 30% authored, pp. 34-53.
– Placing Faces: The Portrait and the English Country House in the Long Eighteenth Century, co-ed and co-author, (Manchester University Press, 2013).
– The First Actresses: Nell Gwyn to Sarah Siddons, ed., and co-author (70%), catalogue for exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery London, 2011-12 (NPG and University of Michigan Press), pp. 10-61, 78-102, 122-137
– Themes in Contemporary Art, co-ed. and co-author, including chapter 6, ‘Dream Houses: Installations and the Home’ (Yale University Press, 2004), pp. 230-275.
– Difference and Excess in Contemporary Art: The Visibility of Women’s Practice, ed and co-author, Special Issue of Art History 2002 and Blackwells, 2003 (best-selling special issue).
– Women, Scholarship and Criticism: Gender and Knowledge c.1790-1900, co-ed. and co-author (Manchester University Press, 2001), pp. 1-15, 16-41.
– Gender and Art, ed. and co-author – 30% authored, (Yale University Press, 1999).
– Academies, Museums and Canons of Art, ed., and co-author (Yale University Press,1999)
– Femininity and Masculinity in Eighteenth Century Art and Culture, ed. and co-author, (Manchester University Press, 1994), pp. 1-17, 124-168.
– Primitivism, Cubism and Abstraction, co-author with Charles Harrison and Francis Frascina (Yale University Press, 1993) (30% authored), pp. 2-85. Translated into Spanish and Portuguese.

Exhibition Catalogues/Catalogue Essays

– ‘Home Making’ in Antonia Dewhurst: Gimme Shelter, Ruthin Craft Centre, 2023, pp. 1-10.
– ‘Traces of Home and Changes of Skin’, in Women House (Monnaie de Paris and National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, 2017), pp. 28-34.
– Drawn-Out Games’ in Deanna Petherbridge: Drawing and Dialogue, Manchester Whitworth Gallery and Circa Press, 2016, pp. 30-40.
– The First Actresses: Nell Gwyn to Sarah Siddons, curated exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery London, 2011-12.
– Crystal World, catalogue essay for exhibition including the work of Ackroyd and Harvey and Hubert Duprat (The Royal Society, London, 2011).
-‘Venetian Dreams and “Surrounding Stories”’, Alice Maher’s Dream of St Ursula in in the Oratorio San Lodovigo, Venice, catalogue essay Nuovaicona, Venice, 2006.
-‘Performing Slowly: the work of Anja Shrey’, catalogue essay for Anja Shrey, Milton Keynes Gallery, 2006.

Selected Articles and Book Chapters

– ‘Bad Girls, Hut Myths and Tracey Emin’s ‘Property by the Sea’ in eds D. Cherry and A Kokoli, Tracey Emin: Art into Life ( I.B.Tauris, 2020), pp. 132-146.
– ‘Broken Homes and Haunted Houses’ in Art and Dance in Dialogue: Body, Space, Object, eds Marie-Louise Crawley and Imogen Ratz (Routledge, 2020), pp. 224-240.
– ‘Witches, Housewives and Mothers: Crossing (Irish) Borders in the Body Politic’, in Elliptical Affinities, ed., Fionna Barber (Highlanes Gallery, Drogheda, 2019), pp. 18-25.
– ‘Artists, Institutions and the Global Contemporary’ in After Empire: Modernity to Globalisation, ed. Warren Carter (Manchester University Press, 2018), pp. 99-133.
– ‘Landscaping Islands: Alex Hartley’s Nowhereisland and Floating Histories in Contemporary British Art’, in British Art Journal, Vol.10, Landscape Now 2018:
https://www.britishartstudies.ac.uk/issues/issue-index/issue-10/landscaping-islands
– ‘Les cabanes d’Agnes’, in Agnes Varda Unlimited: Image, Music, Media, ed. Marie Claire Barnet (Legenda, 2017), pp. 157-170.
– ‘A lady on the stage and an actress off it’: Performance and femininity in images of Elizabeth Farren, Countess of Derby. In: Lloyd, Stephen ed. Art, Animals and Politics: Knowsley and the Earls of Derby. (London: Unicorn Press, 2015), pp. 61–80.
– ‘Border Crossings: Installations and Travelling Artists’, in eds, Steve Edwards and Paul Wood, Modernity to Globalisation (Tate Publishing, 2013), pp. 248-294.
– ‘Portraiture and Celebrity in Eighteenth Century Art: The Actress as a Work of Art’, in J Paparo (ed.) (2011) Portrait, Vancouver Art Gallery, Library of Water’, long review Art History, Vol 32.1, 2009, pp. 177-185.
– ‘Playing with Paint in Matisse’s Pink Onions’, in D Aagesen (ed.) (2006) Matisse in the Collection of the Statens Museum for Kunst, Staatens Museum, Copenhagen.
– ‘The Expanding Field: Ana Mendieta’s Silueta series’, in Frameworks for Modern Art, ed. Jason Gaiger (Yale University Press, 2004), pp. 152-205
– ‘Gender and the Fauves: Flirting with Wild Beasts’ in Art of the Avant-Gardes, ed. (Yale University Press, 2004)
– ‘Staging Gender and “Hairy Signs”: Representing Dorothy Jordan’s Curls’, Eighteenth Century Studies, Vol 38(1), 2004, pp. 145-165.
– ‘Ambiguity and Desire in late Eighteenth Century Portraits of the Actress’ in R. Asleson (ed) Notorious Muse: The Actress in British Culture 1776-1812, (Paul Mellon Centre and Yale University Press, 2003), pp. 57-80.
– ‘The Spectacle of the Muse: Exhibiting the Actress in the Royal Academy’ in Art on the Line: The Royal Academy Exhibitions at Somerset House, ed. David Solkin, (Paul Mellon Centre and Yale University Press, 2002), pp. 111-126.

Paula Modersohn-Becker: Her Life and Work by Gill Perry

Paula Modersohn-Becker: Her Life and Work

Paula Modersohn-Becker: Her Life and Work

Paula Modersohn-Becker: Her Life and Work

The Women’s Press, 1979 and Harper and Row, 1980. Translated into Dutch in 1979 and Swedish in 1980.

The first book written by Perry, it evolved out of research for her MPhil at the University of Sussex. It was the first monograph on Modersohn-Becker to be published outside Germany, and draws extensively on the artist’s letters and diaries, and research done by the author in Worpswede, the artists’ colony in North Germany where Modersohn-Becker lived, and the women artists with whom she lived and worked. It explores her interests in the work of contemporary French Post-Impressionist and Fauve artists, her struggles with her role as ‘artist’ and her close friendship with poet Rainer Maria Rilke, while living in Paris. It also explores her repetition of the self-portrait, the ‘always available model’ for a woman artist. Subsequent research, exhibitions and publications by other scholars over recent decades have developed and enriched this early material on Modersohn-Becker, helping to position her work within both feminist and more canonical art histories of the early 20th century.

fi Women Artists and the Parisian Avant-Garde by Gill Perry

Women Artists and the Parisian Avant-Garde

Women Artists and the Parisian Avant-Garde: Modernism and ‘Feminine’ Art 1900 to the late 1920s by Gill Perry, 1995

Women Artists and the Parisian Avant-Garde: Modernism and ‘Feminine’ Art 1900 to the late 1920s

Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995.

This book examines the work and artistic cultures of women artists in France during the period when Picasso, Matisse and Modigliani were widely perceived as the ‘avant-garde’ leaders of modern art movements. Although this period is better known for the canonical fauve and cubist works of artists such as Matisse and Picasso, Gill Perry takes as her focus several women artists who were active on the fringes of modernist groups, and whose works were widely exhibited and reviewed in the early-20th century. This is one of the first research projects to explore and re-position the roles of these artists on the fringes of Modernism and the so-called ‘avant-garde’, examining the critical cultures through which they were marginalised. Apart from the better-known names of Suzanne Valadon and Marie Laurencin, these artists include Emilie Charmy, Maria Blanchard, Alice Halicka, Marevna, Vorobev and Jacqueline Marval. Perry explores the critical culture through which their work was represented and patronised, and contemporary (shifting) perceptions of femininity involved. Drawing on a wealth of primary research and unpublished material, including letters and diary extracts, and works in French public and private collections, Perry argues that a lack of historical material and limited access to relevant works by these artists has encouraged some mis-representations of the many complex relationships which many women negotiated with avant-garde groups and better documented (male) artistic players.

Spectacular Flirtations by Gill Perry.

Spectacular Flirtations

Spectacular Flirtations: Viewing the Actress in British Art 1768-1820 by Gill Perry

Spectacular Flirtations: Viewing the Actress in British Art 1768-1820

Yale University Press, 2007.

Shortlisted for the ‘Theatre Book Prize’, 2008, Spectacular Flirtations explores representations of the actress in artistic and theatrical culture of the late 18th and early 19th centuries in Britain. Focusing on the close relationship between the dramatic and visual arts, the author explores popular ideas of the actress as coquette, ‘whore’, celebrity, muse and creative agent, charting her important symbolic role in contemporary attempts to professionalise both the theatre and the practice of fine art. It is one of the first books to use visual imagery, especially painted and graphic portraits, as a primary source for the study of femininity in 18th-century theatrical culture. The book develops new arguments on spectatorship, perceptions of femininity and social and cultural ideas of ‘flirtation’, exploring a theory of ‘flirtation’ as a tool for interpreting visual and written representations of the actress, and the discourse on women performers. Drawing on a wide range of archival, artistic and theatrical sources, Perry argues that a fashionable culture of ‘dressing up’ and flirtatious masquerade, performed through public drama, concerts, amateur theatricals and painted portraits, provided late 18th-century actresses with many possibilities for unconventional role-playing, both on and off stage.

Playing from Home by Gill Perry

Playing at Home

Playing at Home by Gill Perry

 Playing at Home: The House in Contemporary Art

London: Reaktion Books, 2013.

This is the first published monograph to explore the ubiquity of the imagery of the house in recent and contemporary art, and its rich cultural, aesthetic and interdisciplinary associations. The book considers the ways in which artists working in a range of media (especially installation and video) have embraced the cultural, social and aesthetic challenges of representing domestic space and the ‘home’. Through a series of themed chapters (including ‘Family Traces’, ‘Beach Houses’, ‘Scaled Down’, ‘Haunted Houses’, ‘Broken Houses’ and ‘Green Houses’), which explore examples of British, European, American, Korean art, and some works by artists of the British and Caribbean diasporas, Perry explores representations of the house as sites of memory, nostalgia, metaphor, autobiography, social critique, community involvement and the culture of the ‘everyday’.

A key concern of this book is the various ways in which representations of the house and the home are inflected both with issues of gender, class, ethnicity – and playful humour. Running through these studies of specific art works and installations is a theoretical exploration of the role of play, conceived as a complex creative, philosophical and psychic process which has informed the work of many artists working with the theme of the house, and which can be seen to echo some of the critical and playful concerns of earlier art movements such as Fluxus and Arte Povera. While several studies of related themes have located explored ideas of the ‘uncanny’ and ‘surreal’ nature of some artistic re-workings of the house (for example the Hayward show Psycho-Buildings of 2007; the Barbican Surreal House of 2010; see also Barry Curtis’s Dark Places 2009, on the role of haunted houses in film), Perry argues that an understanding of ironic, parodic and participatory practices are equally important in our interpretations of these compelling works. Many art works are explored which deploy subversive and witty strategies, dismantling artistic conventions and traditional associations of the ‘home’. Drawing on various theories of play, including those of Huizinga, Winnicott, among others, Perry argues for the recurrence of humorous, ironic, critical and playful strategies in works which engage with the (apparently) banal, everyday theme of the home.

Playing at Home was selected by the Evening Standard reviewer Tania Leslau (14 March, 2024) as one of ‘the best Art History books for honing your cultural knowledge’:

‘There’s no place like home. Yet, home is a highly complex concept for many. In her stimulating work Playing at Home, Gill Perry explores how artists have decoded the topic of home across time. The text considers how gender, identity, class and place affect our perceptions of home, doing so by exploring ideas of the home in art via themes such as haunted houses, dollhouses, broken homes and more. Perry animates her text via the works of Tracey Emin, Gordon Matta-Clark, Rachel Whiteread, Cornelia Parker, Louise Bourgeois and other artists who have incorporated the theme of home into their art. Home as a shifting concept also takes the stand, with Perry neatly bringing cross-continental travel and displacement into the conversation.’

Islands in Contemporary Art by Gill Perry. Publication: Sept 2024

Islands and Contemporary Art

Islands and Contemporary Art

Islands and Contemporary Art

Reaktion Books. Published September 2024.

Islands have never been more topical. This is the first book to focus on the important role played by the contemporary visual arts in the exploration of the island theme. Perry shows that pressing concerns with the climate emergency, migration and uncomfortable colonial and gendered histories have inspired some compelling and provocative art works. She argues that over the last few decades visual art has played a vital role in raising the visibility of such issues. She explores imaginative strategies of representation, metaphor, parody and performance in recent projects that (as she argues) have enriched the work of climate scientists, ecologists, cultural historians and geographers, and have enabled the development of rich aesthetic and interdisciplinary languages of representation and resistance.

Drawing on desert island myths and ideas emerging from the cross-disciplinary area of Island Studies, Perry ranges across continents and colonial archipelagos, from the British Isles and Ireland to the Caribbean, Pacific Oceania and the Galápagos. Women artists and their re-imaginings of the (often hidden) gendered histories of many island cultures are prominent in this book; Perry argues that the development of various forms of feminism across academic disciplines (such as hydro-feminism, eco-feminism, island feminism, etc.) have directly and indirectly informed some vivid artistic responses to this multi-layered island theme. She explores installation, multi-media and film projects from the 1970s to the present, including works by Robert Smithson, Lisa Reihana, Yuki Kihara, Roni Horn, Dorothy Cross, Alice Maher, Rodney Graham, Alex Hartley, Wes Anderson, Steve McQueen, Isaac Julian, Chris Ofili, Karen McLean, Rachel Whiteread, Tacita Dean, Louise Bourgeois and Cornelia Parker, among many others.