Published in 1997
280 pages
Mira Schor is a New York based artist, writer, editor, and educator, known for her advocacy of painting in a post-medium visual culture and for her contributions to feminist art history. Schor is the author of Wet: On Painting, Feminism, and Art Culture, editor of The Extreme of the Middle: Writings of Jack Tworkov, and co-editor of M/E/A/N/I/N/G: An Anthology of Artists’ Writings, Theory, and Criticism. She teaches in the Fine Arts Department at Parsons The New School For Design. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Award in Painting and the CAA’s Frank Jewett Mather Award in Art Criticism. Her website is http://www.miraschor.com and she received a 2009 Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation Arts Writers grant to create a blog on art and culture at http://ayearofpositivethinking.com/
What is this book about?
Taking aim at the mostly male bastion of art theory and criticism, Mira Schor brings a maverick perspective and provocative voice to the issues of contemporary painting, gender representation, and feminist art. Writing from her dual perspective of a practicing painter and art critic, Schor’s writing has been widely read over the past fifteen years in Artforum, Art Journal, Heresies, and M/E/A/N/I/N/G, a journal she coedited. Collected here, these essays challenge established hierarchies of the art world of the 1980s and 1990s and document the intellectual and artistic development that have marked Schor’s own progress as a critic.
Bridging the gap between art practice, artwork, and critical theory, Wet includes some of Schor’s most influential essays that have made a significant contribution to debates over essentialism. Articles range from discussions of contemporary women artists Ida Applebroog, Mary Kelly, and the Guerrilla Girls, to “Figure/Ground,” an examination of utopian modernism’s fear of the “goo” of painting and femininity. From the provocative “Representations of the Penis,” which suggests novel readings of familiar images of masculinity and introduces new ones, to “Appropriated Sexuality,” a trenchant analysis of David Salle’s depiction of women, Wet is a fascinating and informative collection.
Complemented by over twenty illustrations, the essays in Wet reveal Schor’s remarkable ability to see and to make others see art in a radically new light.
