Lifework
On the autobiographical impulse in contemporary art, writing, and theory
Edited by Moran Sheleg
Book Information
- Format: eBook
- Published Date: July 2024
Description
Following the critical scepticism surrounding the notion of the 'self' as a singular entity during the 1960s, many artists and writers sought to test the apparent problem posed by autobiography as both a traditional genre and as a way of working. Considering the consequent emergence of autotheory, Lifework traces this shift in artistic and literary production during the late twentieth century and beyond, examining a set of diverse practices that mine the line between what it is to make art and what it is to live life. The book's chapters connect a variety of artistic strategies that cut across medium, geography and time, uncovering how the historical marginalisation of first-person experience has taken on larger social, cultural and political implications in the contemporary moment and how the work of living might still relate to the work of art.
Contents
Introduction: the life of work, the work of life - Moran Sheleg
Part I: Working lives
1 Diaristic diagrams - Margaret Iversen
2 Inarticulations - Susan Morris
3 Valuing life - Alistair Rider
Part II: Enveloping me
4 Folds - Rye Dag Holmboe
5 The perversity of her envelopes, or, Kathy Acker's sick clothes and kleptomaniac close writing: a reply to sender - Alice Butler
Part III: Autotheory as medium and message
6 At the altar of her divine: on Audre Lorde and Tee Corrine - Teresa Carmody
7 Autotheorising the unself - Marquis Bey
Part IV: Conceptualising the self
8 'Sources questionable at best': Ree Morton's notebooks and sketchbooks - Abi Shapiro
9 'Hey Mom, I made it and I'm OK': self-help and 1970s conceptual art - Lucy Bradnock
Part V: I remember. remember me
10 A wall for apricots: dedication and loss in Anne Truitt's minimalism - Miguel de Baca
11 Ode to forgetting - Moran Sheleg
12 A life's work - Jo Applin
Index
Editor
Moran Sheleg is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of East Anglia