Weird Women
Image above: Narcissister, Winter/Spring Collection, 2012. Los Angeles. © A.L. Steiner
Image above: Cosey Fanni Tutti, Marcel Duchamp’s Next Work, COUM Transmissions, 1974. London © Courtesy COUM Transmissions and Cabinet
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Weird women, this chapter proposes, are artists who challenge boundaries and are uneasy within neat, already existing categories of art, sex, identity, and desire. Their existence is emphatic; yet the categories we already have cannot account for the complexity of who they are. Weird women seem to suggest that a new language is necessary, one that will point towards our unnamed desires, blind spots, and unknowns. The weird not only points to something we do not yet have the language for but also demands a reconsideration of its articulation. The weird could be thought of as another category, but more accurately as a fascination with the uncategorized.
Weird women continuously evolve and refuse categories, embracing mutation and hybridization as ways of being. Their weirdness creates a rupture into the familiar through which a new understanding of who we are and how we perceive ourselves emerges. This new, weird understanding or conceptualization embraces the unfamiliar, the uncategorized, the inscrutable or unintelligible as tools for unbuilding walls and building forms of belonging. I discuss Carnesky’s work as well as other women artists that, like Carnesky, have been preoccupied with the task of disarticulating identity. I primarily focus on artists such as Rocio Boliver, Cosey Fanni Tutti, Narcissister, Lydia Lunch, and Kathy Acker and on how their articulations of identity might lead to a collective, weird ‘I’. These artists’ collective illegibility and refusal to fit in forms part of the space of the weird.
Image below: Rocio Boliver, Needle Striptease, curators Benjamin Sebastian and Bean on behalf of ]performance space[, 2012. London © Marco Berardi
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Weird women, this chapter proposes, are artists who challenge boundaries and are uneasy within neat, already existing categories of art, sex, identity, and desire. Their existence is emphatic; yet the categories we already have cannot account for the complexity of who they are. Weird women seem to suggest that a new language is necessary, one that will point towards our unnamed desires, blind spots, and unknowns. The weird not only points to something we do not yet have the language for but also demands a reconsideration of its articulation. The weird could be thought of as another category, but more accurately as a fascination with the uncategorized.
Weird women continuously evolve and refuse categories, embracing mutation and hybridization as ways of being. Their weirdness creates a rupture into the familiar through which a new understanding of who we are and how we perceive ourselves emerges. This new, weird understanding or conceptualization embraces the unfamiliar, the uncategorized, the inscrutable or unintelligible as tools for unbuilding walls and building forms of belonging. I discuss Carnesky’s work as well as other women artists that, like Carnesky, have been preoccupied with the task of disarticulating identity. I primarily focus on artists such as Rocio Boliver, Cosey Fanni Tutti, Narcissister, Lydia Lunch, and Kathy Acker and on how their articulations of identity might lead to a collective, weird ‘I’. These artists’ collective illegibility and refusal to fit in forms part of the space of the weird.
Image below: Rocio Boliver, Needle Striptease, curators Benjamin Sebastian and Bean on behalf of ]performance space[, 2012. London © Marco Berardi
