Before I took up my PhD studentship, I was (fairly desperately) job-hunting for a new curatorial role. I’d finished my MA in Curating in January 2016 to a job offer of a maternity cover position as Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at a national museum, feeling fairly smug that I’d now “made it” and was on my dream career ladder heading towards curatorial success. Early into 2017 I came crashing down to the reality that gallery/museum work is extremely insecure and hard to break into, even with experience, qualifications and enthusiasm. My line manager at my previous role had told me that he hoped to be able to make me a permanent staff member but this came at a time of mass voluntary redundancy and funding cuts and was therefore not approved by Senior Management. My studentship interview thus came after months of temping, lengthy job applications and eight unsuccessful interviews for curatorial roles, the feedback of each (apart from one disaster one which I may go into in some future blog post) was “we really liked you, but someone else had better experience.” At this point I’d been so broken down by the process that I couldn’t quite believe it when my now supervisor rang me 10 minutes after the interview to enthusiastically offer me the position.

I, like many others, was therefore a little enraged by the recent “#AskACurator” discussion on twitter which highlighted volunteering and unpaid internships, as well as what can be very costly postgraduate courses, as the only way in to the increasingly competitive sector.

Something really needs to change if this is true as it closes the door to many who simply cannot afford to work for free and/or fund further education. I had to move back in with my parents for six months during my job hunt, which is also just not a possibility for many people. I’m fortunate to now have funding for a three year PhD programme, which I’m hoping will further enhance my employ-ability and help me make more contacts, but again this is not a possibility for everyone. Such elitism and lack of funding opportunities or salaried work experience leads to a further lack of diversity within arts institutions which, lets face it, are already predominantly institutions run by (and often for) the white middle class.

Ellie Miles, a curator I came across through following this hashtag on Twitter, has written a good blog post on her experiences of this with some tips and resources here.

For almost the entirety of my first year, I’ve put off writing a literature review. I still struggle with thinking of myself as An Academic and for me, based on the kind of texts I like to read, a literature review just felt overly formal, forced and something that would interrupt the flow of my writing. I talked to my supervisor about this at length and she agreed that I could bypass this process if I really wanted to as an arts and humanities PhD is slightly different and conducted in a less formulaic way than science-based doctoral research projects.

Then I changed my mind.

Throughout the last twelve months of research I’ve returned again and again to this idea of a “feminine aesthetic” or “feminine sensibility” and whether or not this exists, either consciously or innately, within women’s art practice. This longstanding debate within art history was amplified by the political activism and institutional critique of the 1970s Women’s Art Movement in America, with the ideas slowly spreading into Britain too. Even today there is no conclusive agreement as to whether women make artwork in a fundamentally different way to their male counterparts or what the key features of a feminine aesthetic are.

The task I face in my literature review is to trace this debate from the 1970s to the present day, recording the different voices that have weighed in on the topic and shaped our understanding of it, such as: Linda Nochlin, Sarah Kent, Lucy Lippard, Judy Chicago and Luce Irigaray, amongst others. I’m beginning by making an Excel spreadsheet (one of my favourite things) ((seriously)) of all the reading I’ve done on the topic, so that the data is presented visually for me to analyse. I’ll then turn this in to the first chapter, which will be (hopefully) a solid foundation and starting point for the rest of my PhD thesis.

Karla Black, At Fault (detail), 2011.

Karla Black on discussions of her artwork as conforming to a feminine aesthetic: “Why do people call it feminine? Because it is light, fragile, pale? Because it is weak, impermanent? When you start going to work on it you realise how ridiculous the description is. How can a work of art be feminine?” [1]

[1] Higgins, Charlotte. “Karla Black at the Venice Biennale: ‘Don’t Call My Art Feminine.’” The Guardian, May 31, 2011, sec. Art and design. http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2011/jun/01/karla-black-at-venice-biennale.