An appropriately ambiguous erotic image has been chosen for the book’s cover. We see a lithe woman, her back arched slightly provocatively, as she sits against the wall of an anonymous bedroom. Her face is veiled by a transparent curtain, and we are left to wonder at the scenario – or could this just be savvy marketing. The image bears an uncanny likeness to the publicity still reproduced time and again of a suggestively exhausted Nicole Kidman in Eyes Wide Shut, her nipples showing through a barely-there top. This small example is illustrative of the connections, real or imagined, that cross and filter between popular culture, art, commerce, and porn, as well as the inherent aesthetic dangers of yet again making naked women the object of the male gaze that McDonald seeks to tease out.

It is a timely book. Although there have been few ages in history when the nude has not been of interest to artists, this work focuses on our time, when it is women artists who, arguably, are producing the most important images of the body. They are making the confronting statements and searching for new ways to visually articulate their identities. In contrast to the situation facing the immediate precursors of this genre, working in the 1960s and 1970s, now there are no fixed or obvious battle lines.

The author identifies feminist art as based on the conceptual ideal of the female body as erotically appealing and, with that, the way in which artists choose to negotiate ambiguity becomes crucial. She writes: ‘In art ambiguity is less a foreclosure of meaning than a denial of fixity, and less a naming of nothingness than a negation of naming.’ Therein lives one of the central struggles in this book. As the author states, ‘art is always ambiguous especially when it involves the female body’; if there was a clear, correct answer to the way to read a work of art, I am sure most artists would prefer to pack up and go home – as would many viewers. Much deconstructive feminist theory, on the other hand, has sought to provide specific conceptual frameworks and, as McDonald charts, during the 1980s, attached a negative value to ambiguity, and decried any use of the nude as akin to pornography. She chronicles the way in which artists in the 1990s judged the risks of ambiguity to be worth taking and exploiting, resurrecting the prime visual nature of art.

McDonald details the complexities of competing feminist ethical and theoretical positions over the past two decades, in particular the significance of Griselda Pollock and Roszika Parker’s advocacy of deconstruction:

They shifted attention from the function of idealism in representations of the female nude to that of ideology, from ‘being-looked-at-ness’ to semiotics, psychoanalysis and analysis of the male gaze and from art as the expression of a particular individual … to art as social practice.

While acknowledging their influence on a generation of artists and curators, McDonald also argues that Pollock was inattentive to ambiguities in art and visual representation and refused to see the possibility of positive visual representations of the female body.

It is not only theorists that she analyses: Cathy Freeman and Madonna, in particular, are discussed as power-models of popular culture. It is, however, McDonald’s more in-depth analysis of specific artists that is the core of this book. She brings fresh insights to the art of Linda Sproul, Destiny Deacon, and Tracey Moffat, whose work broadly engages with post-colonial and anti-racist themes, as well as to cyber artists Stelarc and Patricia Piccinini. Perhaps Piccinini’s questioning of the brave new worlds of tissue engineering, with her mock advertising scenario that digitally incorporated a real image of a human ear that had been grafted onto a rat, might have been given greater historical context by contrasting it with work from the decade before by British artist Jo Spence, who produced similarly glaring photographs of her torso following surgery for breast cancer.

Given McDonald’s interest in artists collectively summarised as of ‘the other’, it is surprising to find no artists of Asian origin included. Just one example might be South Korean Yi Bul (exhibited in the First Asian Pacific Triennial as Bul Lee) whose performances and installations have been particularly challenging to her own highly patriarchal culture.

It is also a pity that, in a book about visual art that also makes such a strong case for positive visualisation, there are no colour plates. We are left to imagine the garish velour wallpaper that contrasted so brilliantly against Zoe Leonard’s black-and-white photographs of genitals in the Kassel Museum at Documenta IX 1992, or Narelle Jubelin’s ‘fleshy pink’ curtain installation, or the multitude of reds in Chris Barry’s wall of dyed lingerie.

The concluding chapter rightly argues that artists are not immune from ethical critique and, in particular, discusses the problematic and famously ambiguous work of Bill Henson without, however, reaching a definitive judgment.

Although Erotic Ambiguities is a dense and complex book, it is tightly structured and clearly written. Possibly its greatest contributions are its placing of the work of Australian artists from the periphery within a global context and its identification of the centrality of issues of race upon the representation of the female body.