Bachelors by Rosalind E. Krauss (review)

© 2000 ISAST LEONARDO REVIEWS LEONARDO, Vol. 33, No. 4, pp. 329–339, 2000 329 LEONARDO DIGITAL REVIEWS Editor-in-Chief: Michael Punt Coordinating Editor: Kasey Rios Asberry Reviews Coordinator: Bryony Dalefield Leonardo Digital Reviews has flourished this year, covering a wide range of materials and generating high-grade debates on- and offline . The achievements of this section of Leonardo are due entirely to the efforts of the panel and the editorial team. It is, then, always a pleasure to be able to publicly thank those involved. First, to the contributing panelists who maintain the flow of reviews , sometimes under severe time constraints , and also those occasional contributors who have responded to specific requests that often involve reading or reviewing in a second language, thank you. Publication of their work would not, however, be possible without the energy and commitment of the editorial team: Kasey Rios Asberry, who makes sure the reviews appear on the world wide web, and Pamela Grant-Ryan, who ensures that as much of our work as possible appears in the journal Leonardo. We would also like to thank Ron Nachmann for his contribution in the past and Craig Harris, who provides links between Leonardo Electronic Almanac and Leonardo Digital Reviews. Thank you all—it’s backstage work, but greatly appreciated. Michael Punt Editor-in-Chief Leonardo Digital Reviews BOOKS AMERICAN VENUS: THE EXTRAORDINARY LIFE OF AUDREY MUNSON, MODEL AND MUSE by Diane Rozas and Anita Bourne Gottehrer. Balcony Press, Los Angeles, CA, U.S.A., 1999. Distributed by Princeton Architectural Press, New York, NY. 144 pp. $27.95. ISBN: 1-890449-04-0. Reviewed by Roy R. Behrens, Ballast Quarterly Review, 2022 X Avenue, Dysart, IA 52224-9767 U.S.A. E-mail: . This is an illustrated account of the tragic life of Audrey Munson (1891– 1996), who modeled for leading American sculptors (e.g. Daniel Chester French, A. Sterling Calder and Sherry Fry) in the so-called “guilded age” of art. She posed for both the “head” and “tail” of the 1916 U.S. dime (the “mercury dime”); as well as for statues that stand at the front of the New York Public Library and the Brooklyn Museum of Art, on the fountain outside of the Plaza Hotel, in the pediments at the entrance to the Frick Collection, and (as the figure of Evangeline) at the Longfellow Memorial in Massachusetts. When the beaux arts tradition in sculpture was quashed by the rise of modernism , Munson tried to survive by performing in films about artists’ models, resulting in a great scandal due to her appearing onscreen totally nude. In 1919, when rumored to have been involved in the murder of her landlord’s wife (she was not), she collapsed emotionally (described back then as “mental blight”), was ostracized as “Crazy Audrey,” and, after a failed quest for a husband, attempted suicide. At age 39, she was committed to an asylum, where she remained in obscurity until her recent death at age 105. This book is a belated but sincere attempt to restore her dignity. (Reprinted by permission from Ballast Quarterly Review, Vol. 15, No. 2, Winter 1999–2000.) BACHELORS by Rosalind E. Krauss. MIT Press, Cambridge , MA, U.S.A., 1999. 222 pp., illus. Cloth, $29.95. ISBN: 0-262-11239-6. Reviewed by Fred Andersson, Ulvsbygatan 29, 6 tr. 654 64, Karlstad, Sweden. E-mail: . In previous essays, most of them collected in her books The Originality of the Avant-Garde (1986) and The Optical Unconscious (1992), Rosalind Krauss has shown how dadaism and surrealism established a tradition of the “horizontal and low,” or of “informe” (Georges Bataille’s concept, meaning “crude” or “unformed”). She opposes this to the formal, vertical grid of Renaissance perspective , which was inherited by gestalt psychology and incorporated into the formalist aesthetics of modernism. The title of Krauss’s new book, Bachelors, signifies a continuation of this discussion. Here, Krauss deals with the art of nine female artists from the 1920s to the 1980s, from Claude Cahun to Louise Lawler. But the really important “bachelors ” in this book are, at least implicitly , the nine forms attached to the “bachelor machine” in Marcel Duchamp’s “La mariée mise à nu par...