Art Does (Not!) Exist - Hardcover

Drexler, Rosalyn

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0932511988 ISBN 13: 9780932511980

Publisher: Fiction Collective 2, 1996

Synopsis

Art Does (Not!) Exist is lively, inventive, and artfully wicked. In the world according to video artist Julia Maraini , life is in need of tracking control. Personas warp and twist in a perverse parody of modern life that is, nonetheless, exactly the thing itself. As the protagonist prepares a video for an important grant application, she discovers that the video has been tampered with, and a snuff film of her controversial star (a wealthy Brazilian) added. Does she turn it in? Does she receive an NEA grant? How much hipper can hip be than Art Does (Not!) Exist?

Art Does (Not!) Exist is about Julia Maraini, an artist in her early twenties involved in video and other new genres, who is down on her luck: her mad scientist husband is gone but threatens to return; and her apartment on the lower east side close to Soho, burns down under suspicious circumstances. Through it all she works at completing her art projects hoping to receive an NEA grant for one of them, or at least an invitation to be included in the prestigious Whitney Biennial. One of her projects is an interview with two skeletons purported to be Nag and Nell, the parents of Hamm, a character in Samuel Beckett's Endgame. Her competitors are: a Brazilian steel magnate who writes her sexy letters and appears by two mysterious characters; a famous British feminist who is in the States to promote her first novel; and a pair of near-sighted detectives disguised in Hawiian shirts. At one point her estranged husband, his mother and step-father appear on the Geraldo Show where all hell breaks loose. This is a book about the way an artist thinks, it examines what's at stake in today's art world - and dares to ask the question, what is art anyway? A question that has been pondered ever since someone handed a loaded paintbrush to a chimp and aimed her at a canvas. Written with tongue in one cheek and tofu in the other, Art Does (Not!) Exist is both funny and nourishing.

About this title

About the Author:

Rosalyn Drexler (born 1926) is a Jewish American Pop artist, novelist, Obie Award-winning playwright, and Emmy Award-winning screenwriter.

From Kirkus Reviews:

There must be a reason why stridently feminist fiction falls into two camps: realist novels-of-manners that owe their inspiration to Jane Austen and the tradition she belongs to; and bohemian experimental train wrecks like Drexler's latest. After a couple of books from major publishers in the late '70s and early '80s (Starburn; Bad Guy), Drexler appears to have retreated to the academic fringe for this dialogue-intensive yarn narrated by Julia Maraini, a flip, glib, impoverished young video artist loping across the Manhattan art world's weird landscape, struggling to get an NEA grant so she can continue to work. The book is funny in a willfully absurd sort of way: Julia must contend with vaguely predatory landlords, sexually deviant Brazilian industrialists, a deranged husband, ditzy curators, dependent friends, and a couple of oddly named cops--Detective Flamingo and Detective Palm Trees--who keep showing up, like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, to interrogate and accuse. When Julia discovers a pair of skeletons in her garbage, she incorporates them into her ongoing video project, interviewing them with a supply of Beckettesque dialogue. The tape of these morbid proceedings disappears, only to return as a snuff flick starring the Brazilian industrialist, who has been writing letters to Julia describing his debauched exploits with cows and his daughter-in-law. All of this may be suitably kooky, but it's also mostly unreadable; unlike other American writers, among them Paul Auster, who cleave to witless, cloyingly hip European models for fiction, Drexler at least understands that surrealism isn't supposed to come with a moral, though she appears not to grasp that it requires a supreme clown to make it lively. Roaming the general Kathy Acker neighborhood, this protypically overhip novel will try the patience of even the most ardent enemy of conventional, patriarchal storytelling. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Fiction Collective 2
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0932511988
• ISBN 13: 9780932511980
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 187