Lifework

The ambition behind Lifework: On the autobiographical impulse in contemporary art, writing, and theory, edited by Moran Sheleg, is to map the currents of ‘autobiography, and its other lives as autotheory, life-writing, or autofiction’ (p.14), which shape much contemporary art and art writing. In her introduction outlining the notion of ‘lifework’, Sheleg draws attention to Roland Barthes’s consideration of Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (1913) in his essay ‘The death of the author’ (1967). Barthes describes Proust’s seven-volume novel, which he continuously revised until his death in 1922, as ‘a radical reversal’: ‘instead of putting his life into his novel, as is so often maintained, he made of his very life a work for which his own book was the model’.¹ That is, as Sheleg expands, ‘through a twist of convention, Proust disproved the literary assumption that art should imitate life by effectively erasing the distinction between them, if under the guise of fiction’ (p.2).

The origins of ‘autotheory’, which merges a diaristic style of writing with critical theory and fiction, can also be traced to Barthes’s ‘anti-autobiography’, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes (1975), particularly its prologue: ‘It must all be considered as if spoken by a character in a novel’.² It is important to note, however, that the 1970s saw a broader renewal of interest in ‘life-writing’, extending well beyond Barthes’s desire to account for the sensory and emotional dimensions of experience in his work. His reinstatement of the psychological resonated with a ‘wider critique of impersonality’ (p.4) emerging at the time, particularly in feminist and postcolonial thought. Nevertheless, Barthes’s influence on the developments under discussion here is extensive and his work is used both directly and obliquely throughout Lifework to interrogate the ‘perennial and ambivalent tie between life and work’ (p.6) that has animated generations of artists.

The volume has twelve contributions by scholars, writers and artists, which are divided into five parts: ‘Working lives’, ‘Enveloping me’, ‘Autotheory as medium and message’, ‘Conceptualising the self’ and ‘I remember...remember me’. Although several methodological strands emerge, three primary groupings, which traverse the five sections, stand out. The first comprises texts that are avowedly literary, indebted to modernist traditions, such as a preoccupation with self-reflective language and memory. A major theme for this group of writers is the limits of the self and its representation. This is seen, for example, in the work of Susan Morris (b.1962), who appears here as both subject – of Margaret Iversen’s essay on the ‘diaristic diagrams’ she identifies as characteristic of conceptual and post-conceptual art – and author. In her chapter ‘Inarticulations’, Morris ­– a ‘visual artist who has always worked with writing’ (p.41) – details the modernist writers, such as Proust, Virginia Woolf and James Joyce, who provided the inspiration for her project de Umbris Idæarum [on the Shadow Cast by our Thoughts] FIG.1 FIG.2. Adopting the form of a diary, it comprises twelve books – one for each month of the year – and records the artist’s daily notations, interspersed with receipts, emails and transcribed conversations: the itemised ‘litter’ (p.47) of life.

Morris also references the influence of Barthes’s progressively fragmentary and notational writing style on her work. She observes, for example, that the author’s description of his own note-taking process in a 1979 lecture – using such words as ‘immediacy’ and ‘suddenness’ – closely parallels the terms one might adopt in relation to photography.³ Indeed, Barthes’s desire to ‘swipe’ directly from life speaks to Morris’s visual practice, which draws ‘upon the theme of selfhood’s intermittent or flickering character’ (p.45).⁴ In her practice, Morris aims to give definition to the ‘indexical’ signs of life, the referents of which often remain enigmatic, such as financial transactions and waste FIG.3, a racing heartbeat or ‘orphan shadows, thrown by an invisible object’ (p.45).⁵ As Morris points out, however, such ‘ventriloquism produces a disembodied voice’ (p.59): ‘I am there, in the diary, but maybe I am not – maybe it is just a machine talking to itself’ (p.57). It is precisely this immaterial relationship to living that the second, unequivocally embodied, grouping of writers seeks to avoid.

This second classification that arises is characterised by a queer communality: intimate and insistent and with a clear commitment to non-binary thinking. For example, in her essay ‘The perversity of her envelopers or, Kathy Acker’s sick clothes and kleptomaniac close writing: a reply to sender’, Alice Butler stages her method of ‘close writing’ in dialogue with the ‘sartorial scenography’ (p.108) of Kathy Acker (1947–97). Inspired by Acker’s writing, which patterned together ‘piecemeal parts, and borrowed words and bodies that move across time’ (p.108), Butler addresses her own contribution to photographs of the writer, as well as photographs of Acker’s clothes taken after her death by Kaucyila Brooke (b.1952) FIG.4, to theorise how the ‘performance’ of Acker’s dressing ‘can be “read” as a kind of writing, too’ (p.109).

The distinct melancholia of this chapter – it wears its allegiance to Eve Sedgwick’s scholarship on its sleeve – is self-consciously sexy: ‘possessed […] I cannot let her stray garments go. I read and write to them, and with them: closely, affectively, passionately, even perversely’ (p.121). It also recalls Jane Gallop’s ambition to make theory ‘more aware of its moment, more responsible to its erotics’, so that theory is truly inhabited and felt.⁶ There is a rhythmic quality to Butler’s virtuoso enactment of ‘queerness-as-texture’ that she has so ‘thrillingly succumbed to’ (p.114), and her writing, at times, gives in to repetitiveness: continued confirmation of the essay’s ‘feminist perversion’ (p.110) is its methodological warp, so to speak. However, just as for Barthes perversion is ‘a goddess, a figure that can be invoked, a means of intercession’ – as it ‘quite simply, makes happy; or to be more specific, it produces a more’ – so too does the pleasure potential of Butler’s loquacious exchange with ‘Kathy’ spill into subsequent chapters.⁷

The following contribution, by Teresa Carmody, begins with a description of two framed photographs: one of Audre Lorde (1934–92) and one of Tee A. Corinne (1943–2006), a couple of ‘dyke-moms’ (p.154) who inspired this ‘essay-as-altar’. Carmody cherishes the therapeutic potential of autotheory and the possibility for meaningful connection it offers when other more immediate relationships fall short. Lorde’s 1978 essay ‘The uses of the erotic: the erotic as power’ is cited by Carmody as a resource for living, while images from Corinne’s The Cunt Coloring Book (1975), coloured in by Carmody FIG.5, appear throughout the essay. The author’s intensely personal account of using divination to help interpret Lorde’s and Corinne’s personal archives helps to affirm her argument that ‘self-connection is a collaborative project’ (p.161).

Much like Carmody, who, like Butler, revels ‘in the attraction of affinities’ (p.152) that aestheticised citation can bring, Marquis Bey engages in a similarly ‘textured’ unpacking of the gendered and racialised ‘regime’ (p.169) of selfhood in their essay ‘Autotheorising the unself’. Autotheory, according to Sheleg, positions the work of art or text as a ‘site’ where its constitutive components ‘can be pulled apart, examined, and reimagined’ (p.10), a logic that Bey summons to provide ‘the discursive occasion for excavating the conditions of the supposed self in service of its interrogation’ (p.170). It is in the spirit of self-consciousness, therefore, that Bey’s refusal of individuation is made through the review of two of their own books. While Barthes noted that ‘to write on oneself may seem a pretentious idea […] it is also a simple idea: simple as the idea of suicide’, this chapter’s performance of ‘languaging’ (p.171) aligns instead with Michel Foucault’s author-function.⁸ That is, the author is to be understood as a fiction or idea, rather than a point of origin, allowing the superfluity of the ‘individuated self’ to become self-evident: ‘how I am always and already given over to others is […] the aim’ (p.171).

In Abi Shapiro’s words, autotheoretical approaches are indicative of ‘agency’ (p.186), and her chapter asserts the value of the self-reflexive authorial voice, emphasising its apparent ability to evoke an ‘embodied positionality’ (p.185). Indeed, in contrast to Bey, Shapiro’s discussion of the notebooks that belonged to the artist Ree Morton (1936–77) demonstrates the benefits of legible selfhood. Whereas for Bey, ‘gender was and is too wedded to a self’ (p.175), Shapiro considers the use of ‘I’ by women to be ‘a charged act’ (p.182). Her contribution usefully revisits some of the feminist approaches to autobiographical material that have appeared in recent art history, specifically the pitfalls of conventional ‘biographism’ and anxieties concerning an ‘unethical interpretative framework, wherein art historians may claim to know exactly how to separate a woman artist’s lived experience from her artwork’ (p.188).      

Finally, it is possible to identify a third group of texts concerned with a ‘subject-in-process’ (p.217), which is in need of near-constant attention and future-oriented activity. This approach is exemplified by Lucy Bradnock’s discussion of the vernacular narrative forms that characterised Los Angeles conceptual art of the 1970s. Bradnock reads these in relation to the self-help genre that emerged in the United States during the same period, ‘revealing both to be embedded in the logic of capitalism’ (p.235). Crucially, as the author relates, both self-help and the women’s movement emphasised ‘self-actualisation’ and ‘instrumentalised self-metrics’ (p.217). It is, therefore, perhaps not surprising that feminist conceptual practices of the period, which privileged the subjective, first-person perspectives of women artists ‘working on’ themselves, are difficult to divorce from contemporaneous trends in popular psychology.  

The availability of the hand-held video camera played a vital role in the video and performance art that Bradnock discusses, including The Mom Tapes FIG.6 FIG.7 by Ilene Segalove (b.1950) and The Eight Temptations FIG.8 by Eleanor Antin (b.1935), which adopt the format of a pseudo-documentary to make ‘a sort of performative autoethnography’ (p.216) of (white) American womanhood.⁹ Despite its ostensibly historical focus, this chapter offers some of the strongest links to the present. Life ‘under the sign of social media’ (p.8), as Sheleg describes it, has led to the imaging of the self becoming hyper-charged by the rapid ascent of technological capitalism. Although such conditions are not explored in detail in this volume, the reader is still left with a keen sense of its relevancy, owing to Bradnock’s vivid contextualisation of 1960s counter culture, which gave way to the pursuit of self-actualisation, ‘whether as protest or profit’ (p.6). In particular, the epistemology of self-help offered by Bradnock – ‘the confluence of identity-formation, market logic, and ideal self-picturing’ (p.233) – resonates strongly with the regimes and catechisms of today’s beauty culture.

The final chapter, by Jo Applin on the self-portraits FIG.9 of Helene Schjerfbeck (1862–1946), is one of the most compelling in the publication. In ‘A life’s work’, Applin considers how the question of age and an appreciation of a life lived are relevant to art-historical methods – notably, as distinct from standardised discussions of an artist’s ‘late work’. In contrast to many of the previous chapters that are largely literary in approach, Applin grapples with issues specific to the visual arts. She outlines how in the mid-twentieth century, the term ‘lifework’ ‘took on a new and highly specific, self-conscious cadence at the hands of a younger generation of avant-garde artists […] keen to rid itself of the trappings of an advanced art that privileged the atemporality of high modernist abstraction’ (p.292).

Such artists as Robert Rauschenberg (1925–2008) and Allan Kaprow (1927–2006) took material from their lives to create happenings and installations that expanded the logic of abstract expressionist painting’s ‘all-encompassing visual field into a fully three-dimensional and temporally bound experience’ (p.292). However, there were also many artists for whom ‘life’ was an incursion into artmaking. Schjerfbeck, for example, tried to ‘hold a sharp boundary around art’, not letting it ‘go over into reality, as in an old panorama’ (p.293).¹⁰ In contrast to the celebrated strategies of the theatrical avant-garde, Applin introduces the life course, ‘a concept defined in the 1960s by gerontologists as a means of analysing the complicated psychosocial process of ageing’ (p.285), as a means to open up discussion of the ‘fictionalised interrogation of self’ (p.289) performed by Schjerfbeck’s late self-portraits FIG.10, which demonstrate deliberate formal collapse.

Overall, Lifework offers an inspiring intellectual history of the trends flagged by its title, but the fact that almost all of the visual art discussed pre-dates the internet – Morris is the exception – frustrates the possibility of accounting for contemporary art’s ‘autobiographical impulse’. However, Applin’s attempt to revitalise art history with theories drawn from gerontology strikes this reader as radical in a society that appears to fear the visible signs of aging more than ever. Here, the effort of deliberate retrospective reflection – a kind that rejects the neat resolution of chronology and, instead, depends on a recognition of an individual life as fabric ‘akin to and as malleable as art’ (p.298) – transforms the concept of selfhood into something meaningful once again.