The lurid yellow jacket with bold black lettering on the art historian Anne Marsh’s weighty 2021 tome screams one thing to art lovers and feminists alike: this is not a coffee table book.

Although the Melbourne University Publishing volume (weighing in at 3kg) features almost 400 beautiful, confronting and thought-provoking glossy colour illustrations and photographs, Doing Feminism is a rigorous and scholarly critique on how women’s art has influenced and changed the Australian and international contemporary art landscape from a feminist perspective.

Punctuated with artists’ statements, curatorial writing and critique, Doing Feminism is possibly the most comprehensive literary dive into Australian women making art since the 1970s.

It took Marsh more than five years to compile, although the author of five other books and professorial research fellow from the University of Melbourne’s Victorian College of the Arts says the idea had been bubbling away for a decade. The subtitle, Women’s Art and Feminist Criticism in Australia, is significant, she says.

“There’s a lot of women in the book who wouldn’t be card-carrying feminists, so I was interested in making a juxtaposition between what was happening in the critical literature, in the catalogues and so on, and what artists were doing on the ground.”

Along with celebrating individual artists’ achievements, the book is peppered with tales of women’s struggles for recognition in the male-dominated art world of the 20th century.

Vivienne Binns’ first solo exhibition at the Watters Gallery in 1967 drew howls of outrage from male and female artists and critics, with her controversial Phallic Monument and Vag Dens singled out for particular ridicule.

According to Melbourne’s Potter Museum of Art, the art historian and collector Stephen Scheding wrote that the Binns exhibition “would be the most unprofessional work I have seen in a well-known gallery”.

Binns abandoned painting after the exhibition, began experimenting with enamel and took to calling herself a craftswoman. “I’d taken as much as I could take,” she revealed in a 1975 interview in Refractory Girl, Australia’s first women’s studies journal, revealing the toll the works had taken on her personal life.

“I’d put myself in isolation and cut myself off from the more enjoyable things in life … I’d made people afraid of me. My images were touching them in areas that they didn’t want to be touched. I felt there was a sheet of glass between me and people. I was very lonely … I’d aged about six years, my face had changed. To other people I’d lost my sense of humour.”

A decade after its creation, Vag Dens was bought by the National Gallery of Australia. In 1993 the NGA also bought Phallic Monument.

‘Her works offend me’

“Specious, ham-fisted, gimmicky, dismal, phoney, unappealing, incomprehensible, shabby, repellent, empty” were just some of the adjectives critics and members of the public used to describe the works of the artist Jenny Watson as she was emerging on the scene in the 1980s.

Reflecting on the reaction in a 1999 Art Monthly essay, the artist Virginia Fraser quipped: “After a while you start to think, gee fellas, what’s this about?”

Fraser quotes one of Watson’s fiercest critics – Peter Timms, a former editor of Art Monthly. “If I’m honest with myself, I’d have to say, yes [Watson’s] works offend me,” Timms told Fraser. “And it’s because they seem to be saying ‘up you’ to me as a viewer. They seem to be dismissing me … ”

Six years after 1987’s public pillory of her seminal confessional work The Key Painting, Watson represented Australia at the 45th Venice Biennale. In 2017 Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art and Melbourne’s Heide Museum of Modern Art both staged major retrospectives of her work.

‘A powerful contribution’

In 2018 the comedian and University of Tasmania art history graduate Hannah Gadsby picked Marsh’s brain for her ABC documentary miniseries Nakedy Nudes, the same year Gadsby attracted international acclaim for her Netflix live standup special Nanette.

While primarily known as a contemporary art historian, academic and critic, Marsh is also something of a statistician, crunching the data on gender imbalance in the Australian art scene. In some ways the trend appears to be mirroring the trajectory of Australian female writers, who have dominated prestigious competitions such as the Miles Franklin award for the past decade.

Data on Australian females artists’ representation at the Venice Biennale, for example, shows an encouraging trend. Female artists were represented at just three Venice Biennales throughout the 1980s and 90s (Rosalie Gascoigne in 1982; Jenny Watson in 1993; and a joint exhibition by Emily Kame Kngwarreye, Yvonne Koolmatrie and Judy Watson in 1997), but since 2001, Australia has been represented by a female artist in eight of the 10 Venice Biennales.

At the first Sydney Biennale in 1973, the work of just one female artist was exhibited, and she wasn’t even Australian. By 2014 women accounted for more than half the works displayed in the show.

But when it comes to the collections and retrospectives in many major Australian public galleries, Marsh believes more affirmative action is needed.

“A retrospective exhibition for a living artist is the most significant one … and you see the male artists getting those retrospective shows but you don’t see the female artists,” she says.

“Making sure our public galleries have as many women as they have men in this field would really change the public’s perspective.

“When I talk to people around a barbecue and none of them know a lot about art, when it comes to women artists, they will say ,‘Oh, we know about Margaret Preston,’ and that’s about it. They might go to a gallery twice or three times a year but each time they go, there’s a bloke on.

“If one in three times it was a major exhibition of a woman, then they would know more names … so I think that’s a failure on the part of most major institutions – they really need to pick up the game.”

Marsh says it was encouraging to see major institutions such as the NGA acknowledge this oversight and move to rectify it. Know My Name, Australia’s largest exhibition of female artists, opened at the NGA in November 2020 and runs until July 2022.

• Doing Feminism is out now through Melbourne University Publishing ($199)

• This article was amended on 19 January 2022. An earlier version incorrectly stated that Know My Name opened in November 2021.