[The following excerpt is taken from the thirty-first chapter of D H Laven’s fantastic work-in-progress 'The Story of Forgotten Art’. In the introduction to this pioneering work he writes: ‘There is no such thing as forgotten art. There are only forgotten artists. And a hell of a lot of them too’. In this passage he looks at a contemporary ‘body-artist’ whose achievements are frequently misinterpreted by feminists and cynics alike.]
My body is a work of art. I refer not to myself, of course – I merely repeat that over-familiar cliché for effect. That gaudy, ghastly, insolently persistent battered cod of a cliché, of which so many of the world’s poorest artists’ are so fond (aesthetically poor, that is, not economically). The phrase is a sleeping pill: in its tepid tedium it tires me instantaneously. Whenever it plummets like a putrid pear from the moist mouth of an artist, any audience is well advised to run for cover. Ninety nine percent of the time it functions favourably as a warning sign, painted in bright fluorescent pink on a dull black background, reading as follows: ‘THIS ARTIST IS A WASTE OF TIME’. Read the rest of this entry »
