My friend gifted me this book for my birthday but I put off reading it until now as it didn't seem directly related to my research paper. Having said that, when the topic is abuse of power - feminist writing is of course highly relevant and I found many connections between my research and this book. It definitely gave me a lot of things tover which to cosider and reflect.
Quotes
‘“Aesthetics is born as a discourse of the body,” wrote Terry Eagleton, and while I don’t think he was thinking of feminist art when he said it, he’s inescapably right. To be gendered female is to be caught between beauty and excess: made to choose. To be a monster is to insist on both.’ (page 18)
‘“For me the real crux of chauvinism in art and history,” Judy Chicago said ten years earlier, “is that we as women have learned to see the world through men’s eye’s and learned to identify with men’s struggles, and men don’ have the vaguest notion of identifying with ours.” This leaves women’s art stranded in the position of forever either appropriating patriarchy’s worldview, its imagery, its methods – or rebelling against it.’ (page 18)
‘Recent studies have shown social media dangerously impacts young women’s mental health, far worse that the women’s magazines that reigned when I was their age, because now it is all public, with a popularity metric built in. And we seem depressingly far from a context in which the rights of trans people are systematically protected and respected. It has felt critical to think through how these issues of monstrosity, of beauty and excess, of storytelling and form, in order to think about how to be in a female body in the early twenty-first century.’ (page 20)
‘To work in performance was to stick two fingers up to the art establishment: it can’t be preserved on canvas – only on film, but that’s not the same thing. It is art that eats away at the idea of Art; art that desecrates as it creates.’ (page 21)
‘Anything women say about their lives is suspect, especially if there’s a white man nearby with a different account of things. At the 1612 trial of the man who raped her, Artemisia Gentileschi was tortured to be sure she was telling the truth.’ (page 28)
‘It has been an important social act to narrativize our trauma. But when it comes to art, we need to challenge our expectations of story. The monstrous gives us these new words and methods which help us to move past a conception of women’s storytelling that binds us doubly into shame or empowerment, loyalty or betrayal, silence or freedom, domesticity or art. We don’t live in these binaries; not really. And if we listen more attentively to what women are telling us, we’ll find their stories don’t live in them either.’ (page 32)
‘The aesthetic and the political occupy the same body.’ (page 56)
‘These are horrific stories, but we have to face up to them, and retell them, to free our bodies from the double bind in which they’ve been caught. The art monster’s job is to refuse to be silenced, but also to find a material in which to tell the stories of her body.’ (page 73)
‘It was perhaps inevitable that male opinion would turn against women’s crafts as a waste of time, and that women who had previously been encouraged to practise them would be accused of filling their own heads with nonsense.’ (page 85)
‘Nochlin writes that “art is not a free, autonomous activity of a super-endowed individual”, but rather a “total situation of art making”, the interplay of individual and social structures, “mediated and determined by specific and definable social institutions”. The only to-hand mythology we have for female genius is the mad-woman, the suicide.’ (page 86)
‘One of the pitfalls of self-presentation was looking “boastful” – you didn’t want to come across as having too high opinion of yourself or your work; an excess of self-regard would scan as a moral failing.’ (page 96)
‘The rhetorical aligning of photographs seen and unseen underscores the continuity of tyranny, in Woolf’s argument, from the private house to the public sphere to the theatre of war. The personal is political. For daring to point this out, Woolf would be vilifies.’ (page 142)
‘The language Spillers herself uses in the essay is as lacerating as the acts it describes; it lashes and names, academic prose as counter-violence, born knowing that “sticks and bricks might break our bones, but words will most certainly kill us”.’ (page 152)
‘What a culture – even a feminist one – finds “problematic” about images of nude women is an integral part of how it thinks about and constructs “masculinity” and “femininity”, Lynda Nead argued in 1983, in the midst of these debates. Part of the project of feminism was to question and disavow an outdated, mindlessly obedient femininity. Art that seemed to further its values of prettiness, pleasingness, pleasure was politically questionable; in some quarters it could only scan as reactionary, or narcissistic.’ (page 187)
‘Female narcissism is dangerous, Jones speculates, because it has no need of the desiring male subject’s desire or his approval.’ (page 187)
‘It activates the second-wave feminist’s disdain for women who use their beauty to target and bewitch. But perhaps there’s a way of interpreting her seduction, and that of other feminist body artists of the period, that doesn’t necessarily see it as the sort of heterosexual bewitching that Wilke’s feminist critics scorn. Seduction creates a reciprocal relationship between artist and art, art and viewer, one that invites us as viewers to confront the monstrosity of beauty, the desire not for an ethical yuck, as in the case of the more widely approved-of mode of the abject, but for an ethical sensuality, tactility, connection.’ (Page 192)
‘Craft: touch it.
Art: don’t touch it.’
(page 214)
‘The meat dress worn by Lady Gaga, whose designer said, “It won’t last, that’s the beauty of it.” The dress itself was a reference to Jana Sterbak’s Flesh Dress: Vanitas for an Albino Anoretic (1987), fifty pounds of flank steak sliced and sewn into dress form which prompted the art historian Sarah Milroy to read it as an icon of “female disobedience”. These works are implicitly about decay, and transformation. About the way women and their bodies are treated, and the far ranges of perversity where we sometimes don’t mind,’ (page 252)
‘Rococo art teaches us to see the beauty in monstrosity as consisting of unpredictability, an excess of texture. Chadwick was drawn to Rococo specifically because of its relationship to sensory pleasure’ (page 260)
‘Radical feminist expression is a making visible of what we have been told to cover up, to correct, to make smaller, mainstream.’ (page 274)
‘What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence?’ (page 276)
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