Co-author with Charles Harrison and Francis Frascina (Yale University Press, 1993) (30% authored), pp. 2-85. Translated into Spanish and Portuguese.
Ed. and co-author, (Manchester University Press, 1994), pp. 1-17, 18-40.
Focussing on the visual arts and written texts, this edited collection emerged from an inter-disciplinary collaboration between Gill Perry and Michael Rossington. The idea for the collection emerged from the over-lapping research interests of individuals working on the Open University’s second level course The Enlightenment (code A206; first published 1993).
Through detailed discussion of written and visual texts, the editors and contributors sought to explore the shifting and nuanced uses of concepts of ‘femininity’ and ‘masculinity’ within 18th-century culture and the different ways in which they informed and influenced artistic practices. Varied methodological approaches are adopted, but overall these studies should encourage us to see that despite the dominance of certain tropes, notions of ‘feminine;’ and ‘masculine’ virtues and values were shifting and contested during the period. Perry’s essay ‘Women in Disguise’ explores portraiture as a powerful medium for the communication of social and cultural ambitions, values, beliefs and gendered assumptions, arguing for the increasing instability of the portrait genre during the later 18th century, and the crucial role played by the medium in contemporary definitions of femininity.
Ed. and co-author (Yale University Press, 1999).
This is the first of six books in the series Art and its Histories which also formed the main texts for an Open University course (code A216), first published in 1999. The book takes the form of a series of case studies but begins with an extended preface by Gill Perry that considers the nature of the modern discipline of art history and its origins in a western canonical tradition. Perry explores the evolving definitions and theories of art history, presenting a picture of a discipline that is in the process of renegotiating its boundaries. She considers historical notions of ‘genius’, ideas of ‘the new art history’ and ‘the social history of art’, theories of ‘looking’ and the problematic notion of the ‘canon’ of art. These are all issues explored in the case studies that follow.
Her chapter: ‘”Mere face painters”? Hogarth, Reynolds and ideas of academic art in eighteenth-century Britain’ (pp. 124 – 168) explores the shifting status of portraiture in mid eighteenth-century Britain, its relationship to ideas of academic art, and the implications of that relationship for the establishment of a canon in art. In seeking to understand what portraits by Hogarth or Reynolds might have meant to a contemporary audience, see explores their different uses of allegory and symbolism. In the process she focuses on the network of relationships between ideas of academic art and art theory, debates about the nature of masculine and feminine portraiture, and the connections between art and theatre in mid 18th-century Britain.
Co-ed. and co-author (Manchester University Press, 2001), pp. 1-15, 16-41.
(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.
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.
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.
