Overview
The performance artist Joanna Frueh has emerged over the past twenty-five years as a wildly original voice in feminist art. Frueh's uninhibited performances are celebrations of beauty, sensuality, eroticism, and pleasure, and Clairvoyance (For Those In The Desert), featuring eighteen of her essential performance texts, is a celebration of this remarkable artist and her work. Arranged chronologically, from ""The Concupiscent Critic"" (1979) through ""Ambrosia"" (2004), the pieces reveal Frueh's evolution as an artist and intellectual over the course of her career. Many of these texts have never before been published; others have not been easily available until now. This richly illustrated book includes sixteen colour photographs; images from Joanna in the Desert, a 2006 collaboration between Frueh and the photographer Jill O'Bryan; and several photographs of Frueh performing. Frueh's performances are unabashedly autobiographical, as likely to reflect her scholarship as a feminist art historian as her love affairs or childhood memories.For Frueh, eros and self-love are part of a revolutionary feminist strategy; her work exemplifies the physicality and embrace of pleasure that she finds wanting in contemporary feminist theory. Scholarly and rigorous yet playful in tone, her performances are joyful, filled with eroticism, flowers, sexy costumes, and beautiful colours, textures, and scents. Recurring themes include the idea of transformation--a continual reaching for clarity of thought and feeling, as well as her passionate attachment to the desert landscape. In an afterword as lyrical and breathless as her performance pieces, Frueh explores her identification with the desert and its influence on her art. Clairvoyance (For Those In The Desert) includes a detailed chronology of Frueh's performances.
Full Product Details
Author: Joanna Frueh
Publisher: Duke University Press
Imprint: Duke University Press
Dimensions:
Width: 15.50cm
, Height: 2.70cm
, Length: 21.50cm
Weight: 0.889kg
ISBN: 9780822340409
ISBN 10: 0822340402
Pages: 408
Publication Date: 13 March 2008
Audience:
Professional and scholarly
,
Professional & Vocational
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active
Availability: In Print
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Reviews
""There is a lot of talk in academia about innovation and independence, but there is also a lot of what Nietzsche called 'herd mentality.' For those searching for an independent voice, here it is. Joanna is everything academic critics like: theoretically sophisticated, complex, ambiguous, experimental. She is also a lot of things academic critics don't trust: openly sexual, oblivious of convention, dreamy, ecstatic, wild beyond classification. As she says: 'She disobeys injunctions against knowledge, for the severest education forces the initiate to reject the law.' If you aren't dubious about this book, you aren't an academic. But if you don't find something to love in it, you might consider discarding some of the books in your library and substituting this one.""--James Elkins, School of the Art Institute of Chicago ""In this time of fabrication and disconnect--body from image, self from its representation--it is good to be reminded that early feminist artists did not separate body from consciousness from politics from theory. Joanna Frueh's explorations in performance, photography, and texts are the real (un-airbrushed) deal, revealing the works of a particular and specific body-self, just flawed enough to be inspiriting.""--Suzanne Lacy, Otis College of Art and Design
There is a lot of talk in academia about innovation and independence, but there is also a lot of what Nietzsche called 'herd mentality.' For those searching for an independent voice, here it is. Joanna is everything academic critics like: theoretically sophisticated, complex, ambiguous, experimental. She is also a lot of things academic critics don't trust: openly sexual, oblivious of convention, dreamy, ecstatic, wild beyond classification. As she says: 'She disobeys injunctions against knowledge, for the severest education forces the initiate to reject the law.' If you aren't dubious about this book, you aren't an academic. But if you don't find something to love in it, you might consider discarding some of the books in your library and substituting this one. --James Elkins, School of the Art Institute of Chicago In this time of fabrication and disconnect--body from image, self from its representation--it is good to be reminded that early feminist artists did not separate body from consciousness from politics from theory. Joanna Frueh's explorations in performance, photography, and texts are the real (un-airbrushed) deal, revealing the works of a particular and specific body-self, just flawed enough to be inspiriting. --Suzanne Lacy, Otis College of Art and Design
"""There is a lot of talk in academia about innovation and independence, but there is also a lot of what Nietzsche called 'herd mentality.' For those searching for an independent voice, here it is. Joanna is everything academic critics like: theoretically sophisticated, complex, ambiguous, experimental. She is also a lot of things academic critics don't trust: openly sexual, oblivious of convention, dreamy, ecstatic, wild beyond classification. As she says: 'She disobeys injunctions against knowledge, for the severest education forces the initiate to reject the law.' If you aren't dubious about this book, you aren't an academic. But if you don't find something to love in it, you might consider discarding some of the books in your library and substituting this one.""--James Elkins, School of the Art Institute of Chicago ""In this time of fabrication and disconnect--body from image, self from its representation--it is good to be reminded that early feminist artists did not separate body from consciousness from politics from theory. Joanna Frueh's explorations in performance, photography, and texts are the real (un-airbrushed) deal, revealing the works of a particular and specific body-self, just flawed enough to be inspiriting.""--Suzanne Lacy, Otis College of Art and Design"
In this time of fabrication and disconnect-body from image, self from its representation-it is good to be reminded that early feminist artists did not separate body from consciousness from politics from theory. Joanna Frueh's explorations in performance, photography, and texts are the real (un-airbrushed) deal, revealing the works of a particular and specific body-self, just flawed enough to be inspiriting. -- Suzanne Lacy, Otis College of Art and Design There is a lot of talk in academia about innovation and independence, but there is also a lot of what Nietzsche called 'herd mentality.' For those searching for an independent voice, here it is. Joanna is everything academic critics like: theoretically sophisticated, complex, ambiguous, experimental. She is also a lot of things academic critics don't trust: openly sexual, oblivious of convention, dreamy, ecstatic, wild beyond classification. As she says: 'She disobeys injunctions against knowledge, for the severest education forces the initiate to reject the law.' If you aren't dubious about this book, you aren't an academic. But if you don't find something to love in it, you might consider discarding some of the books in your library and substituting this one. -- James Elkins, School of the Art Institute of Chicago Clairvoyance (For Those In The Desert) is an artful, insightful, and important collection of performance texts by artist and scholar Joanna Frueh. Indeed, Clairvoyance could be considered an essential primer for feminists. -- Joanna Chlebus, Feminist Review blog Clairvoyance couples the strength of her words and the stage direction, to give the reader quite a vivid look into the life of this exceptional artist. -- Jenna V. Loceff, Curve [A] a beautiful and very pink 400-page tome that looks great on a coffee table... Clairvoyance is a great place to start learning about not just 20th-century performance art, but also about one of the more intriguing and unheralded performance artists of our time. -- Jarret Keene Tucson Weekly
Author Information
Joanna Frueh is a performance artist, writer, scholar, and teacher. For more than twenty-five years, she has performed one-woman shows throughout the United States and abroad. She is Professor of the Practice of Art at the University of Arizona and Professor of Art History Emerita at the University of Nevada, Reno. She is the author of Swooning Beauty: A Memoir of Pleasure; Monster/Beauty: Building the Body of Love; Erotic Faculties; and Hannah Wilke: A Retrospective. She is a coeditor of Picturing the Modern Amazon; New Feminist Criticism: Art, Identity, Action; and Feminist Art Criticism: An Anthology. Her art, essays, and criticism have appeared in many publications, including Art Journal, New Art Examiner, Art in America, Artforum, Hypatia, and High Performance. Frueh lives in Tucson, Arizona. Jill O’Bryan is an independent scholar and artist. She is the author of Carnal Art: Orlan’s Refacing.
