revmeg

[revmeg]

"What are the words you do not yet have? What do you need to say? 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? Perhaps for some of you here today, I am the face of one of your fears. Because I am woman, because I am Black, because I am lesbian, because I am myself -- a Black woman warrior poet doing my work -- come to ask you, are you doing yours?"

Audre Lorde quoted in Art Monsters: Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art by Lauren Elkin, p. 276

[revmeg]

"Words are impure medium...Better far to have been born into the silent kingdom of paint."

Virginia Woolf quoted in Art Monsters: Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art by Lauren Elkin, p. 273

[revmeg]

"I was looking for a way of creating a vocabulary for desire where I was the subject, the object, and the author . . . rather than trying to see the female as a desired object, you had to see yourself as a desiring subject."

Helen Chadwick quoted in Art Monsters: Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art by Lauren Elkin, p. 262

[revmeg]

"In [Helen] Chadwick's day feminism still hadn't got over its iconoclastic anti-nude tirades of the 1980s, and she apparently got into quite a lot of trouble with the feminists for showing her body the way she did. But though she said she respected their 'theoretical position', it directly contradicted what she was after as an artist. She was trying to depict the sensation of pleasure and desire, 'and the way to do that is through the body - so the body was central to the project': The idea of a denial of one's body as a no-go area to explore themes of sexuality and desire seemed so torturous that although I could sympathize with the theoretical position it just again didn't square with my own needs and choices that I wanted to make....I wanted to open up a space for the woman as the subject of feeling.

from Art Monsters: Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art by Lauren Elkin, p. 261

[revmeg]

"[Kathy] Acker famously wrote while masturbating: ....writing from the point of orgasm and losing control of the language and seeing what that's like. It was her worries about 'self-censorship' that prompted her desire to find a language to let the body speak...Fifty years after 'Professions for Women', Acker is finally able to let her imagination go where Woolf's couldn't. 'I wanted to see what language passes through my mind - I don't know how to say this precisely - as I' going through sex,' she said.... ...Both Woolf and Acker, at their radically different historical moments, describe the practice of writing as inevitably being faced with some kind of self-censorship, sustaining internalized feelings that they're doing something wrong, that they need to police their thoughts, language, imagery..... Acker: ...The writings I get from masturbation aren't fantasy narratives but are descriptions of architectures, of space shifts, shifting architectures, opening spaces, closing spaces. Hélène Cixous: Censor the body and you censor breath and speech at the same time."

from Art Monsters: Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art by Lauren Elkin, p. 248-9

[revmeg]

"[Eva] Hesse complained that she wanted to love the process and not just the product. 'Stop worrying about big deep things,' [Sol] LeWitt said. 'You must practice being stupid, dumb, unthinking, empty. Then you'll be able to DO.' Stop trying to make the work be about something, I think she understood; let it be expressive of itself, its own materiality. We should all have our own Sol LeWitts."

from Art Monsters: Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art by Lauren Elkin, p. 217

[revmeg]

I'm not interested in the wound (that's a lie) or in wound culture (that's also a lie) but I am interested in (this is the truth) how the wound registers on the canvas, in the work, and also in why I feel in order to sound like a serious critic and not a sappy one I need to pretend I'm no interested in the wound or the culture of the wound. Am I sentimentalizing Eva Hesse? Buying into her myth? Is there any other way, when you fall madly in art love?

from Art Monsters: Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art by Lauren Elkin, p. 216

[revmeg]

"I also resist the suggestion that if the feminist artist does not 'theorise' her work by explicitly situation her experience within social structures, she is lost in the personal, mired in her own problems to the exclusion of anyone else's. This sort of critique isolates the personal from the political, the domestic from the public - and we hear it launched at women who paint or write in the first person all the time. As if women in their houses alone with their bodies were completely cut off from the wider world, unaffected by it, with no concern for it....To have to suggest over and over that the personal is political is exhausting. Even by 1980, it had been said, and said, and said. But we still, it seems, are impoverished when it comes to reading the politics of a work of art. Probably because it moves not only through the mind but through the affects, and through our bodies. We still haven't found that erotics, which is also a politics, of art."

from Art Monsters: Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art by Lauren Elkin, p. 186-187

[revmeg]

"...but now I say it proudly: bad English is my heritage. I share a literary lineage with writers who make the unmastering of English their rallying cry - who queer it, twerk it, hack it...To other English is to make audible the imperial power sewn into the language, to slit English open so its dark histories slide out...

poet Cathy Park Hong quoted in Art Monsters: Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art by Lauren Elkin, p. 153

[revmeg]

"If the work is reprehensible, that work is also me, coming from a reprehensible part of me. I'm not going to stop doing it because what else could I do?"

Kara Walker interviewed by Doreen St. Felix, quoted in Art Monsters: Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art by Lauren Elkin, p. 110

[revmeg]

"...'creative defensiveness,' as [Frances] Borzello terms it, has been in operation for as long as there have been women artists, anticipating what is expected of them, and deciding how to deal with it: do they deliberately calibrate their work to meet public expectation, or take the risk of surpassing it, which could bring glory, but could just as easily bring infamy."

from Art Monsters: Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art by Lauren Elkin, p. 96

[revmeg]

"Unlike other contemporary photographers, [Julia Margaret Cameron] would not use restraints to keep her subjects still, but integrated their natural movements into her aesthetic. She saw that she was on to something, and didn't care if her contemporaries didn't understand it. '[W]ho has a right to say what focus I the legitimate focus?' she wrote in a letter to a friend in 1864. 'My aspirations are to enable Photography and to secure for it the character and uses of High Art by combining the real & Ideal & sacrificing nothing of Truth by all possible devotion to Poetry & beauty.'"

from Art Monsters: Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art by Lauren Elkin, p. 83

[revmeg]

"By reaching after the truth of her own body, the art monster is grasping after an art practice that is not simply a refutation of patriarchy but a gesture at building her own aesthetics."

from Art Monsters: Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art by Lauren Elkin, p. 73

[revmeg]

"If woman has always functioned [within] the discourse of man [. . . ] it is time for her to dislocate this 'within', to explode it, turn it around, and size it; to make it hers, containing it, taking it in her own mouth, biting that tongue with her very own teeth to invent for herself a new language to get inside of."

Hélène Cixous quoted in Art Monsters: Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art by Lauren Elkin, p. 51

[revmeg]

"Barbara Creed...draws on Bakhtin's notion that there are three grotesque moments in the life of a female body: sex, childbirth and death, moments where 'the body's surface is no longer closed, smooth, and intact -- rather the body looks as if it may tear apart, open out, reveal its innermost depths.' If, as Lynda Nead writes, 'the classical forms of art perform a kind of magical regulation of the male body...,' we can perhaps consider it the business of the art monster to display these orifices and tears, and make an art out of them."

from Art Monsters: Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art by Lauren Elkin, p. 44-45

[revmeg]

"The first person...has often been denied women and other marginalized people unless it confirms to what they -- they, the patriarchy, the tastemakers, the one who decide things - expect to hear from us. And then it's rejected or minimized for being small, anecdotal, irrelevant to the Big Concerns like politics, war, business, sport. Particular instead of universal. We get accused of being narcissistic, inappropriate. we say too much; we overshare. (The persistence of feelings!)"

from Art Monsters: Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art by Lauren Elkin, p. 28

[revmeg]

"'For me the real crux of chauvinism in art and history,' Judy Chicago said..., 'is that we as women have learned to see the world through men's eyes and learned to identify with men's struggles, and men don't have the vaguest notion of identifying with ours.'...The art monster, with her diaristic indulgence and her personal clutter, takes for granted that the experiences of female embodiment are relevant to all humankind.... Rachel Cusk asks, in an essay..., 'Can a woman artist -- however virtuosic and talented, however disciplined -- ever attain a fundamental freedom from the fact of her own womanhood?' Perhaps not. Perhaps the only option is to go further in."

from Art Monsters: Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art by Lauren Elkin, p. 19