The Me in Art
- The Me in Art
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MEET THE AUTHOR
JENNIFER SPERRY STEINORTH
This excerpt is the penultimate sequence of a book-length erasure, Her Read, a Graphic Poem, forthcoming from Texas Review Press in 2021. Her Read reconceives the entirety of The Meaning of Art (Faber & Faber, 1931), a highly regarded exploration of art from prehistory to the modern era by British art and cultural critic Herbert Read. Though the maternal body appears with frequency, zero womxn artists are included in the early printings of this text. In editions published on or after 1951, one female artist, Barbara Hepworth, is admitted.
I began this makeover the summer of 2016, in that preelection heat, finding myself otherwise unable to write. From the voice of the male critic surveying male bodies of work, I began excavating a first-person lyric, the imagined voice(s) of womxn artists.
Though I call this erasure, “collage” is a more accurate descriptor of this late excerpt. The surgical reconstruction contrasts cruder, monochromatic pages early in the text—there, the canvas of Read’s profession treated only with correction fluid. As the book advances, the speaker gains agency over the text, revising the rules to serve newfound fluencies. One rule is not broken: all language excavated and redeployed in this text can be harvested from a single copy of Read’s seminal text.
materials: source text, correction fluid, archival inks, bookbinders’ glue, florist tissue, window shades, general-purpose thread, embroidery floss.
Jennifer Sperry Steinorth is a poet, educator, interdisciplinary artist, and licensed builder. She is the author of A Wake with Nine Shades (Texas Review Press, 2019) and Forking the Swift, winner of the Michigan Writers Cooperative Press chapbook prize in 2010. Her Read, a visual lyric and makeover of Herbert Read’s The Meaning of Art, is forthcoming from Texas Review Press in 2021. She is the recipient of the Connecticut River Review Prize, a Writers@Work fellowship, and grants from Vermont Studio Center, the Sewanee Writers Conference, and the MFA for Writers at Warren Wilson College.
