Why is Deleuze everywhere?
One of the many Rumi lines I have memorized came into my mind as soon as I wrote the title above — “Is the one I love everywhere”? Gawd! Stop! I purposely did not include any Deleuze on my Doctoral Exam reading list, even though I knew several of the scholars I included would be citing him. My exam, in the end, did include discussions of the body without organs and Becoming-Woman. How could it not with a list composed of Doreen Massey, Anna Munster, Jane Bennett…
Forward to rn, as I crouch in the library stacks searching for the books I need, Gilles Deleuze and the Ruin of Representation falls on my knees. I’ve never heard of Dorothea Olkowski, but the topic seems impossible to ignore. Will it propel me towards the five categories of this fucking dissertation proposal? Today I worked for about 5 hours and I don’t feel I’ve gotten any closer. Certainly no ideas. I did learn about some new feminist body artists from random catalogues, and read comprehensive interviews in Angry Women that featured a slew of bad-ass feminist artists I am familiar with— Diamanda Galas, Carolee Schneemann, Valie Export, Kathy Acker, Lydia Lunch, bell hooks, Sapphire, Annie Sprinkle, etc… Angry Women also featured Linda Montano. I knew of her durational performance work with Tehching Hsieh, but I was not familiar with her & her ideas about art/life. She asserts, “I became state of the art.” During the afternoon sunshine yesterday, Erik Bordeleau & I sat at Resonance for several hours discussing exactly that, me in a state of the art, and the contradictory idea(l)s I have about wanting to have a child, or rather, the way I want to proceed with future child-making. What would Deleuze tell me to do? I’m nervous about devoting so much time to books that aren’t leading me straight to the goal — the five themes of the dissertation. I need to have this to Kim by Monday. The five themes my dissertation will focus on (each chapter a theme) and the five leading images to think with. I did start Images in Spite of All by Didi-Huberman that might lead somewhere. What do images do for D-H?
Magda, you are not writing a textbook. Be wild and free. And edit that grammar, please.
trauma
the body object
rhetoric of the pose
space
the self-portrait
What is feminist art? Mary Kelly (p.12) says: “I don’t believe there can be feminist art, only art informed by different feminisms” and “I think you have to talk about feminist interventions in art practice and not ‘feminist art’”.
