After years of swearword-emblazoned book covers, are readers all out of fucks to give about bad language?
Since Adam Mansbuch’s 2011 bestseller, Go the Fuck to Sleep, book titles have been swearing profusely to grab audience attention. The author followed up on the winning formula with You Have to Fucking Eat and Fuck, Now There Are Two of You.
Book covers compete with a barrage of information and images, so it’s no wonder many writers resort to shock tactics. It works. Mark Manson’s The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck is testament to this, selling 2 million copies and being translated into 25 languages. Without the “Fuck” this would very likely have been a different story.
Presumably hoping to ride on the back of this success, upcoming book releases include titles like Fuck Happiness and The Middle Finger Project.
In the English language, at least, fuck and other words on the more extreme end of profanity are the last frontier of using language to shock. In 2020, we find ourselves in a place of extremes so they come in quite handy.
But with so many fucks on book covers, where do writers go from here to express our fear, horror, rage and disgust?
Heard it all before
Eventually we become desensitised to the overuse of words. Shit, a taboo for older generations, is now so lacking as an obscenity it is written on the covers of notebooks and pencil cases available in stationery chain stores popular with schoolchildren, such as Typo.
According to a 2019 ABC study of 1,538 subjects, Australians are seeing and hearing more coarse language than they did five years ago, both in the media and in public.
“In line with this normalisation of coarse language, concerns relating to the use of coarse language in the media have diminished over time,” the study found. Of people studied, 38% were offended by coarse language on TV, radio or the internet in 2019, compared with 47% in 2011.
Tennis, one of the last bastions of politeness, does constant battle with players like Nick Kyrgios who rack up massive fines for dropping the F-bomb on the court.
Fines, like detention, seem to be on the train that has left the station when you consider reputable online booksellers currently carry almost a hundred books with fuck in the title. Most of these are self-help books, because we are, obviously, quite fucked and need help, and cookbooks, such as Yumi Stynes’ The Zero Fucks Cookbook. Kitchens seem to be a hotbed of fucks, a trend set some time ago by Gordon Ramsay.
Meaning and language are in a constant evolution and can act as a moral barometer. Expressing the fears and horrors of her times 200 years ago, author Mary Shelley created a “fiend”, formed through “unspeakable” horrors. Some initially derided the work as “disgusting”, but the extremes of her Frankenstein left an impact on literature and society of mythic proportions, without resorting to profanity or cheap tricks. She left the unspeakable to our imaginations, yet it broke boundaries and challenged our understanding of life and human nature.
In 1959, the unabridged edition of D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover was published with several instances of fuck. The edition was banned. In 1963, fuck was included in the Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, triggering complaints to schools, libraries and the police.
Taboos and standards are forever in flux and younger generations always seek a boundary to break through. In our times of consumption and greed, we are eating our way through those boundaries at a great rate, along with as many of the Earth’s resources as we possibly can.
What now?
Several hundred book covers later, fuck is completely worn out.
Sure, there is still coarser language that will work for a few years until it also becomes a meme; until we wear it out as a book title or, perhaps, if we think too hard about what it means and how we might use it.
Language can only evolve creatively with a dynamic culture, deep education and critical practitioners of the literary arts, within and outside of the academy. Words are weapons; they are our way of making sense of life and without them we are unspeakable.
Language and how we use it really matters. It creates knowledge, culture and community. If we are to navigate our way through the future and avoid reaching a place of anarchy, we need a language for it.
Resorting to coarse language on book covers could be a symptom of society’s collective misery, but it could also be attributable to the starvation of the arts by government and a desperate need to grab readers’ attention. If literature loses the power to shock then it loses an important mode of engagement, according to postcritical theorist Rita Felski. It’s enough to make you want to swear and curse and scream. Unfortunately, as a word to save for extremes, we have really fucked up fuck.
Donna Mazza’s new novel has an f-word in the title but it’s Fauna.
Eamonn Marra’s debut novel makes a study of the mundane: sanding a fence, heating baked beans, three pizzas for $29.99 delivered. Alie Benge reckons it belongs somewhere between Sally Rooney and Elena Ferrante.
It was about page three of 2000ft Above Worry Level. A feeling burst inside me: the joy of recognising something so beautiful and complicated. Perhaps it was the weird romance of, “What are you talking about? … You’re like a big handsome dog. I’m a hairless cat” and, “To make someone like you you’re meant to tell them a secret the first day you meet them.” Or the way these lines sit alongside the efficiency of, “Do you want to see my cock or my face?”
Everything on the page is so perfect and like nothing I’ve read before. I can’t place my finger anywhere and say, “There it is. That’s where it got me.”
2000ft Above Worry Level is a fractured narrative made up of short episodes in the life of an unnamed narrator. The episodes are indiscriminate. Few seem to have any real significance in the narrator’s life, but this isn’t a book about significant moments. It’s about the boring bits, the everyday “horror of living”, as Pip Adam put it in her blurb, the kind of mental breakdowns that occur in New World.
The narrator is a young man, who we first meet as he introduces us to the sad part of the internet, “a special place that only sad people can access … Jokes that make sad people laugh, but would make not-sad people worried”. The novel itself fits comfortably into this description. We watch as the narrator navigates flat meetings, has an appointment at WINZ, and hides from mounting debts. He has intrusive thoughts about throwing his iPod into the river, he tears a wart out with his teeth, and tries not to eat three pizzas. Marra doesn’t faff about with lengthy descriptions. The prose is sharp and clean, zeroing in on incantatory lists of what the character does, eats, and packs in his bag. This meditative rhythm is never dull. It beats like a drum, but it also wraps around you and creates a sense of claustrophobia. It reminded me of a recurring dream I used to have where I was trying to see something above me, but couldn’t lift my eyes from the ground. Anyone who’s struggled with their mental health will recognise this obsessive rumination and concern about detail, the inability to escape your own constant analysis. [Ed: Eamonn wrote an essay for us the other day about mining his mental health for art, and why this’ll be the last time he does it].
Eamonn Marra, shot by Ebony Lamb.
The 12 short stories that make up the narrative are split into three parts. Part 1 deals directly with anxiety and depression, ending with a breakdown of sorts and a Forrest Gump-esque trek out of town. Part 2 swings back to a summer in the narrator’s childhood and across three stories examines family and social dynamics, in which he is a kind of Nick Carraway figure. He observes the way those around him trade in power and social competence, as he struggles to connect with people. Mental illness isn’t dealt with as directly in part 2, but it moves under the surface, vaguely visible, like the shadow of a whale in dark water. Part 3 turns towards something more hopeful, maybe something resembling recovery. The novel doesn’t worry too much about the connective tissue between the stories. We dip in and out of episodes without learning much about anyone. A girlfriend is mentioned in one story, and she’s an ex-girlfriend in the next. We aren’t told how much time has elapsed between stories. The pared back nature of the narrative shows us how much is really important. We don’t need to know what happened with the girlfriend. It’s not that kind of story.
I want to talk about how funny this book is, but I’m unsure how to explain it. I can’t tell you exactly how a scene where the narrator gets his Jobseeker allowance cut for three weeks is funny. I can only tell you that the other passengers on my train would have heard me laugh one minute and gasp the next, then sigh in agony and cover my eyes. I might have whispered, “Come on, man.” The humour is so contained in its context that it can’t be pulled out and quoted. It’s not the humour of snappy one-liners, but of misfortune, and self-sabotage, and grim observations that precisely articulate a common feeling. The book teaches you how to read its humour, partly through its description of the sad part of the internet, and also through a brief scene in a tutorial where the narrator says The Bell Jar is “underrated as a comedy”. Though the scene doesn’t elaborate on how it’s funny, it says something important about the book in your hands. It says, this too is a funny book about being sad. From a less skilled writer, this instruction would have felt ham-fisted, but Marra pulls it off. I needed to be told. I needed Marra to insist that what I was reading was meant to be both funny and devastating.
This style of humour won’t be for everyone. There were moments when I had to walk away from the book, and moments when I skimmed with one eye closed (the wart; you’ll see). To enjoy the book, you’ll need to be able to find the WINZ scene funny, while also recognising the tragedy of it; that similar scenes happen every day, and that we live in a nation where beneficiaries are routinely humiliated by the systems that are supposed to help them. It’s certainly not a failure to not get the humour.
At university, I lent The Bell Jar to a classmate. I might have said it was “relatable”. A week later she thrust the book back into my hands, her eyes wide. Before I could ask if she liked it, she was backing down the hall. Now that I think about it, I can’t recall her ever speaking to me again. Some may have the same experience with 2000ft Above Worry Level. It can be grim, merciless, it reminds you how hard it is to live, but unlike The Bell Jar, the narrator turns to the reader and says, “It’s okay to laugh.”
This book fits into a lineage of work being made by writers like Sally Rooney, Elena Ferrante, and Phoebe Waller-Bridge. These works have a way of turning away from the dramatic in favour of the mundane, and infusing the everyday bumblings of ordinary people with the kind of narrative energy reserved for kidnappings and house fires.
It’s a strange time we live in. We see more crises on our newsfeeds than on a Home and Away finale. It’s likely that we’re living at the end of days. So thank goodness we have art that captures the piercing anxiety and guilt that comes from trying to stay alive during late capitalism. In future years (if we get future years) we might hand this book to someone and say, “This is what it was like for us.”
2000ft Above Worry Level, by Eamonn Marra (Victoria University Press, $30) is available from Unity Books.
Eamonn Marra’s debut novel makes a study of the mundane: sanding a fence, heating baked beans, three pizzas for $29.99 delivered. Alie Benge reckons it belongs somewhere between Sally Rooney and Elena Ferrante.
It was about page three of 2000ft Above Worry Level. A feeling burst inside me: the joy of recognising something so beautiful and complicated. Perhaps it was the weird romance of, “What are you talking about? … You’re like a big handsome dog. I’m a hairless cat” and, “To make someone like you you’re meant to tell them a secret the first day you meet them.” Or the way these lines sit alongside the efficiency of, “Do you want to see my cock or my face?”
Everything on the page is so perfect and like nothing I’ve read before. I can’t place my finger anywhere and say, “There it is. That’s where it got me.”
2000ft Above Worry Level is a fractured narrative made up of short episodes in the life of an unnamed narrator. The episodes are indiscriminate. Few seem to have any real significance in the narrator’s life, but this isn’t a book about significant moments. It’s about the boring bits, the everyday “horror of living”, as Pip Adam put it in her blurb, the kind of mental breakdowns that occur in New World.
The narrator is a young man, who we first meet as he introduces us to the sad part of the internet, “a special place that only sad people can access … Jokes that make sad people laugh, but would make not-sad people worried”. The novel itself fits comfortably into this description. We watch as the narrator navigates flat meetings, has an appointment at WINZ, and hides from mounting debts. He has intrusive thoughts about throwing his iPod into the river, he tears a wart out with his teeth, and tries not to eat three pizzas. Marra doesn’t faff about with lengthy descriptions. The prose is sharp and clean, zeroing in on incantatory lists of what the character does, eats, and packs in his bag. This meditative rhythm is never dull. It beats like a drum, but it also wraps around you and creates a sense of claustrophobia. It reminded me of a recurring dream I used to have where I was trying to see something above me, but couldn’t lift my eyes from the ground. Anyone who’s struggled with their mental health will recognise this obsessive rumination and concern about detail, the inability to escape your own constant analysis. [Ed: Eamonn wrote an essay for us the other day about mining his mental health for art, and why this’ll be the last time he does it].
Eamonn Marra, shot by Ebony Lamb.
The 12 short stories that make up the narrative are split into three parts. Part 1 deals directly with anxiety and depression, ending with a breakdown of sorts and a Forrest Gump-esque trek out of town. Part 2 swings back to a summer in the narrator’s childhood and across three stories examines family and social dynamics, in which he is a kind of Nick Carraway figure. He observes the way those around him trade in power and social competence, as he struggles to connect with people. Mental illness isn’t dealt with as directly in part 2, but it moves under the surface, vaguely visible, like the shadow of a whale in dark water. Part 3 turns towards something more hopeful, maybe something resembling recovery. The novel doesn’t worry too much about the connective tissue between the stories. We dip in and out of episodes without learning much about anyone. A girlfriend is mentioned in one story, and she’s an ex-girlfriend in the next. We aren’t told how much time has elapsed between stories. The pared back nature of the narrative shows us how much is really important. We don’t need to know what happened with the girlfriend. It’s not that kind of story.
I want to talk about how funny this book is, but I’m unsure how to explain it. I can’t tell you exactly how a scene where the narrator gets his Jobseeker allowance cut for three weeks is funny. I can only tell you that the other passengers on my train would have heard me laugh one minute and gasp the next, then sigh in agony and cover my eyes. I might have whispered, “Come on, man.” The humour is so contained in its context that it can’t be pulled out and quoted. It’s not the humour of snappy one-liners, but of misfortune, and self-sabotage, and grim observations that precisely articulate a common feeling. The book teaches you how to read its humour, partly through its description of the sad part of the internet, and also through a brief scene in a tutorial where the narrator says The Bell Jar is “underrated as a comedy”. Though the scene doesn’t elaborate on how it’s funny, it says something important about the book in your hands. It says, this too is a funny book about being sad. From a less skilled writer, this instruction would have felt ham-fisted, but Marra pulls it off. I needed to be told. I needed Marra to insist that what I was reading was meant to be both funny and devastating.
This style of humour won’t be for everyone. There were moments when I had to walk away from the book, and moments when I skimmed with one eye closed (the wart; you’ll see). To enjoy the book, you’ll need to be able to find the WINZ scene funny, while also recognising the tragedy of it; that similar scenes happen every day, and that we live in a nation where beneficiaries are routinely humiliated by the systems that are supposed to help them. It’s certainly not a failure to not get the humour.
At university, I lent The Bell Jar to a classmate. I might have said it was “relatable”. A week later she thrust the book back into my hands, her eyes wide. Before I could ask if she liked it, she was backing down the hall. Now that I think about it, I can’t recall her ever speaking to me again. Some may have the same experience with 2000ft Above Worry Level. It can be grim, merciless, it reminds you how hard it is to live, but unlike The Bell Jar, the narrator turns to the reader and says, “It’s okay to laugh.”
This book fits into a lineage of work being made by writers like Sally Rooney, Elena Ferrante, and Phoebe Waller-Bridge. These works have a way of turning away from the dramatic in favour of the mundane, and infusing the everyday bumblings of ordinary people with the kind of narrative energy reserved for kidnappings and house fires.
It’s a strange time we live in. We see more crises on our newsfeeds than on a Home and Away finale. It’s likely that we’re living at the end of days. So thank goodness we have art that captures the piercing anxiety and guilt that comes from trying to stay alive during late capitalism. In future years (if we get future years) we might hand this book to someone and say, “This is what it was like for us.”
2000ft Above Worry Level, by Eamonn Marra (Victoria University Press, $30) is available from Unity Books.
Also known as Booksellers' Row, Flicker Alley and - for the Potterheads among you - Diagon Alley, Cecil Court sure boasts a lot of cultural credentials. Home to nigh on 20 independent and antique bookshops, many with beautiful Victorian frontages, it's a bibliophile's paradise. Here's why you should bookmark it for next time you're in the West End.
Also known as Booksellers’ Row, Flicker Alley and — for the Potterheads among you — Diagon Alley, Cecil Court sure boasts a lot of cultural credentials. Home to nigh on 20 independent and antique bookshops, many with beautiful Victorian frontages, it’s a bibliophile’s paradise. Here’s why you should bookmark it for next time you’re in the West End.
The only published and available best-selling indie book chart in New Zealand is the top 10 sales list recorded every week at Unity Books’ stores in High St, Auckland, and Willis St, Wellington.
AUCKLAND
1 Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi (Picador, $20)
Before the Dishes Get Done
Before the Marmite Gets Spread
Before the Mail Gets Checked
2 The Overstory by Richard Powers (Vintage, $26)
If everyone could just absorb this book I feel like we’d be in a much better position as a species.
3 Normal People by Sally Rooney (Faber & Faber, $23)
Sally Rooney Sally Rooney
4 Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo (Hamish Hamilton, $40)
Winner of the 2019 Booker Prize; review incoming.
5 A Long Petal of the Sea by Isabel Allende (Bloomsbury, $37)
“Seamlessly juxtaposing exile with homecoming, otherness with belonging, and tyranny with freedom, the novel feels both timeless and perfectly timed for today.” – Publishers Weekly
6 Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid (Bloomsbury Circus, $33)
8Te Tiriti o Waitangi / The Treaty of Waitangi by Toby Morris, Ross Calman & Mark Derby (Lift Education, $20)
The Spinoff, courtesy of the NZ School Journal, put the whole beautiful thing online for free. But also definitely buy it.
9 All Who Live On Islands by Rose Lu (Victoria University Press, $30)
It’s almost like this is a blinder of a book that should be formally recognised with an award or something.
10 Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari (Vintage, $30)
“Within a couple of millennia, humans in many parts of the world were doing little from dawn to dusk other than taking care of wheat plants. It wasn’t easy. Wheat demanded a lot of them. Wheat didn’t like rocks and pebbles, so Sapiens broke their backs clearing fields. Wheat didn’t like sharing its space, water, and nutrients with other plants, so men and women labored long days weeding under the scorching sun. Wheat got sick, so Sapiens had to keep a watch out for worms and blight. Wheat was defenseless against other organisms that liked to eat it, from rabbits to locust swarms, so the farmers had to guard and protect it. Wheat was thirsty, so humans lugged water from springs and streams to water it. Its hunger even impelled Sapiens to collect animal feces to nourish the ground in which wheat grew.”
WELLINGTON
1 The Testaments by Margaret Atwood (Chatto & Windus, $48)
2 Te Tiriti o Waitangi / The Treaty of Waitangi by Toby Morris, Ross Calman & Mark Derby (Lift Education, $20)
3 All Who Live on Islands by Rose Lu (Victoria University Press, $30)
4 Head Girl by Freya Daly Sadgrove (Victoria University Press, $25)
NB: These numbers were crunched on Thursday morning when Unity Wellington was bracing for the absolute carnage of Freya and Eamonn’s double-double launch that afternoon.
5 Uninhabitable Earth: A Story of the Future by David Wallace-Wells (Penguin, $26)
6 The Absolute Book by Elizabeth Knox (Victoria University Press, $35)
Just in from Knox: North American rights to TAB have gone to Viking Penguin, agented by Scott Miller at Trident Media Group. No date yet. UK and other rights are going to the London Book Fair in March.
7 We Are Here: An Atlas of Aotearoa by Chris McDowall & Tim Denee (Massey University Press, $70)
Cries out for a sequel in a year or so, don’t you reckon?
8 Girl, Woman, Other by Bernadine Evaristo (Hamish Hamilton, $40)
9 Life as a Casketeer: What the Business of Death Can Teach the Living by Francis & Kaiora Tipene (HarperCollins, $40)
My barber says that people no longer being able to afford houses is a no-brainer opportunity. He turns on the tele. Cue the leafy suburbs. Cue the dawn chorus. The tent of realty is specially crafted to respond to inequity. Its breathable fabric repels applicants arriving by bus while allowing bond plus four weeks rent to flow out unchallenged. I could go on about this, but I don’t want to ruffle feathers, so I just mumble how buying a second house and renting it out is a bit like dismantling a tree twig by twig to build yourself a giant nest. What’s going to happen to all the baby birds, especially our natives? I don’t know if I say this or think it in the voice of someone from Forest & Bird or my barber says it facetiously. The voices in my head get muddled with the voices in the world. Someone waiting says Dawn Chorus and the Leafy Suburbs is a drag act. Someone else waiting says you know what’s beneath those Supremes’ dance moves and spangly dresses? The usual suspects. Wink wink. Someone waiting says you know what’d solve the housing crisis? Triangle rooms. My barber says to stop the whining put bananas in the diff. No charge for the advice. It’s about Kiwis helping Kiwis. He preens grey nodding heads and sweeps up their locks for the birds. That’s a dead end, if ever I heard one.
The Friday Poem is edited by Ashleigh Young. Submissions are welcome at thefridaypoem@gmail.com
The only published and available best-selling indie book chart in New Zealand is the top 10 sales list recorded every week at Unity Books’ stores in High St, Auckland, and Willis St, Wellington.
AUCKLAND
1 Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi (Picador, $20)
Before the Dishes Get Done
Before the Marmite Gets Spread
Before the Mail Gets Checked
2 The Overstory by Richard Powers (Vintage, $26)
If everyone could just absorb this book I feel like we’d be in a much better position as a species.
3 Normal People by Sally Rooney (Faber & Faber, $23)
Sally Rooney Sally Rooney
4 Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo (Hamish Hamilton, $40)
Winner of the 2019 Booker Prize; review incoming.
5 A Long Petal of the Sea by Isabel Allende (Bloomsbury, $37)
“Seamlessly juxtaposing exile with homecoming, otherness with belonging, and tyranny with freedom, the novel feels both timeless and perfectly timed for today.” – Publishers Weekly
6 Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid (Bloomsbury Circus, $33)
8Te Tiriti o Waitangi / The Treaty of Waitangi by Toby Morris, Ross Calman & Mark Derby (Lift Education, $20)
The Spinoff, courtesy of the NZ School Journal, put the whole beautiful thing online for free. But also definitely buy it.
9 All Who Live On Islands by Rose Lu (Victoria University Press, $30)
It’s almost like this is a blinder of a book that should be formally recognised with an award or something.
10 Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari (Vintage, $30)
“Within a couple of millennia, humans in many parts of the world were doing little from dawn to dusk other than taking care of wheat plants. It wasn’t easy. Wheat demanded a lot of them. Wheat didn’t like rocks and pebbles, so Sapiens broke their backs clearing fields. Wheat didn’t like sharing its space, water, and nutrients with other plants, so men and women labored long days weeding under the scorching sun. Wheat got sick, so Sapiens had to keep a watch out for worms and blight. Wheat was defenseless against other organisms that liked to eat it, from rabbits to locust swarms, so the farmers had to guard and protect it. Wheat was thirsty, so humans lugged water from springs and streams to water it. Its hunger even impelled Sapiens to collect animal feces to nourish the ground in which wheat grew.”
WELLINGTON
1 The Testaments by Margaret Atwood (Chatto & Windus, $48)
2 Te Tiriti o Waitangi / The Treaty of Waitangi by Toby Morris, Ross Calman & Mark Derby (Lift Education, $20)
3 All Who Live on Islands by Rose Lu (Victoria University Press, $30)
4 Head Girl by Freya Daly Sadgrove (Victoria University Press, $25)
NB: These numbers were crunched on Thursday morning when Unity Wellington was bracing for the absolute carnage of Freya and Eamonn’s double-double launch that afternoon.
5 Uninhabitable Earth: A Story of the Future by David Wallace-Wells (Penguin, $26)
6 The Absolute Book by Elizabeth Knox (Victoria University Press, $35)
Just in from Knox: North American rights to TAB have gone to Viking Penguin, agented by Scott Miller at Trident Media Group. No date yet. UK and other rights are going to the London Book Fair in March.
7 We Are Here: An Atlas of Aotearoa by Chris McDowall & Tim Denee (Massey University Press, $70)
Cries out for a sequel in a year or so, don’t you reckon?
8 Girl, Woman, Other by Bernadine Evaristo (Hamish Hamilton, $40)
9 Life as a Casketeer: What the Business of Death Can Teach the Living by Francis & Kaiora Tipene (HarperCollins, $40)
My barber says that people no longer being able to afford houses is a no-brainer opportunity. He turns on the tele. Cue the leafy suburbs. Cue the dawn chorus. The tent of realty is specially crafted to respond to inequity. Its breathable fabric repels applicants arriving by bus while allowing bond plus four weeks rent to flow out unchallenged. I could go on about this, but I don’t want to ruffle feathers, so I just mumble how buying a second house and renting it out is a bit like dismantling a tree twig by twig to build yourself a giant nest. What’s going to happen to all the baby birds, especially our natives? I don’t know if I say this or think it in the voice of someone from Forest & Bird or my barber says it facetiously. The voices in my head get muddled with the voices in the world. Someone waiting says Dawn Chorus and the Leafy Suburbs is a drag act. Someone else waiting says you know what’s beneath those Supremes’ dance moves and spangly dresses? The usual suspects. Wink wink. Someone waiting says you know what’d solve the housing crisis? Triangle rooms. My barber says to stop the whining put bananas in the diff. No charge for the advice. It’s about Kiwis helping Kiwis. He preens grey nodding heads and sweeps up their locks for the birds. That’s a dead end, if ever I heard one.
The Friday Poem is edited by Ashleigh Young. Submissions are welcome at thefridaypoem@gmail.com
Now, more than ever, people are following through with advocating for the under-represented. As of 2019, Phaidon published the most extensive fully illustrated book of women artists, that bolsters incredible artwork spanning 500 years of creativity. It also provides an engaging and diverse range of artists and styles, featuring more than 400 artists from more than 50 countries.
After reading our copy of “Great Women Artists,” we wrote to Rebecca Morrill, the book’s commissioning editor, with questions on the context for creating the book, selecting the artists, and providing a unique glossary that recontextualizes the history these women lived through.
Morgan Everhart: How did you get involved in the project?
Rebecca Morrill: Commissioning art books is my job at Phaidon Press, and while this often involves working with authors to develop their ideas into books, at other times it is about conceiving and executing our own projects under the umbrella of ‘Phaidon Editors.’ I have wanted to see a big, illustrated survey focused on women artists ever since I studied the subject at University in the mid-1990s (when so much of the reading material seemed to be very academic, being connected to feminist theory, or very text-heavy). When I began working at Phaidon, I realised that it was even more important for this kind of project to be undertaken in order to address the fact that female artists have been largely overlooked for generations. Phaidon, afterall, is the publisher of the world’s best-selling art history book (E.H.Gombrich’s “The Story of Art,” first published in 1950), and it only includes one female artist! (Käthe Kollwitz).
There has been an increased interest in art made by women over the past 10 years and this has allowed for a larger diversity of voices to been shown in galleries and museums worldwide. The re-energizing of global feminism in the wake of the #MeToo movement, created a context in which a women-only art book could be seen as a viable, mainstream endeavour, rather than a niche subject for a small audience, and so it finally seemed that the stars were aligning to make this project possible.
In your introductory text, you reference Linda Nochlin’s 1971 essay, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” as the inspiration for the design of the cover. On the cover, “Women” is crossed out. Were you involved in the design of it? Can you tell us more about the process of the design?
We knew we wanted the title and cover design to be very bold, so that it would be clear at a glance what the book was about, and so that it would “stand out” visually in bookshops just as Phaidon previously achieved with other important art surveys (such as “The Art Book”). The idea of striking through the word “women” came from Phaidon’s Publisher, Deborah Aaronson, and it immediately seemed to solve the quandary we were having of both whole-heartedly believing in the importance of doing a book on this subject, while also knowing the problematic issues around separating artists by gender. A line through this word is a simple gesture to demonstrate that we know that it should be enough to call these artists “great” without having to also mention that they are women, but that until there is 50/50 gender representation across the art world (and indeed the wider world) such rebalancing acts are still necessary, to increase awareness of artists whose names are not yet well-known. It’s been very rewarding that so many artists, reviewers and customers have picked up on this aspect of the book’s design and immediately understood and appreciated what it signifies. Thanks must go to the book’s designer, Astrid Stravo, who took this idea and made it into something so elegant and powerful.
In the introductory text, you mention the history of women who have resisted their work being categorized by their gender, for fear of being belittled. You also acknowledge the irrelevance of speaking about artists in terms of gender at all in contemporary society. Were there artists that declined the opportunity to be in this book?
I wondered when we started the project whether artists (and indeed the estates of deceased artists who are still in copyright) would refuse to be included on the grounds of being categorised by gender. As it happened, only a couple of artists declined and we didn’t push this matter as it is the prerogative of an artist to decline permission to reproduce their own work in a book without having to explain why. Furthermore, given how hard it was to narrow down the list already, we had no shortage of other artists we wanted to include, so this kind of self-selection actually made that easier.
It’s been interesting to get feedback from artists who are included in the book, after the book has come out: on the whole, they’re delighted to be featured, although some have expressed frustration that this kind of book still needs to happen. Aleksandra Mir put it very well when she posted the following on her Instagram: “I can only look forward to when the revisionist [sic] project to correct art history, collection displays and the market has been completed, and the culture at large will recognize the absurdity in measuring art according to hormones and genitals, the day we’re finally out of this ghetto and the moniker ‘Woman Artist’ becomes entirely obsolete.”
We know that it should be enough to call these artists “great” without having to also mention that they are women, but that until there is 50/50 gender representation across the art world […] such rebalancing acts are still necessary, to increase awareness of artists whose names are not yet well-known.”
Did you use social media to find any of the artists in the book?
The long list was created by compiling lists of female artists who have featured in previous Phaidon books (both monographs and surveys) and in major solo exhibitions worldwide, and also with the help of the freelance consultant editor, the American, British-based art critic and curator, Karen Wright (who sadly became ill during the project and wasn’t able to continue working on it). She did an incredible job of building a long list of artists and arguing the case for the inclusion of some who she felt particularly passionate about: including a few I didn’t know myself. I don’t know whether she used social media in doing so, she simply arrived week after week with more names for consideration. I didn’t use social media myself because I don’t find it to be an easy way to look for information. It has proved a useful tool for helping promote the book—many of the artists featured in it have posted generous comments about the book on their profiles.
I soon realised that many of these reiterated the exact patriarchal biases that have led to women artists being written out of history.
The glossary of the book, which provides context to where each individual artist is situated historically, provides a new structure for reviewing several generations of artists. Each term, style, and movement is organized alphabetically, like the artists. It seems that in retrospect, the book is not only reasserting these women’s places in history but also re-evaluating the way we reflect on how artists are categorized by time and material. Can you tell us more about developing the glossary? Did the glossary happen before, during, or after the narrowing of the list of 2,000 artists to 400 artists?
The glossary was the final thing to be written, and the decision to include one came out of the realisation that there was an assumed knowledge about what an art historical term, movement or style meant, which felt important to unpack. By doing so in a glossary rather than within the individual artist’s entry, it avoided the need to repeat this information for multiple artists (we couldn’t assume that a reader would move through the book from front to back so it wouldn’t be enough to simply deal with the definition the first time it occurred as one would normally do in a narrative book). Plus, as the word limit per artist was so short, it was better to use the available space to focus on the artist, rather than explaining definitions.
To start with, we thought a glossary could be compiled from the glossaries of existing Phaidon art books (many of which have thorough back matter of this kind), but I soon realised that many of these reiterated the exact patriarchal biases that have led to women artists being written out of history, (for example: citing names of artists connected to a particular style, but then all those names being of male artists) so I ended up rewriting many of the glossary definitions in ways that felt more ‘neutral’ or, at least, less dependent on upholding the dominant, narrow canon of art history. So you’ll see, for example, that the definition for Abstract Expressionism doesn’t namecheck figures of Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, as one might normally see, but rather focuses on the kind of art the artists associated with it—male and female—were making. (Read Mary Gabriel’s excellent “Ninth Street Women” if you want to know more about that particular movement and the central role of women within it.)
As mentioned in the book’s introduction, the intention is not to exclude men entirely (hence individual artist entries do, where relevant, mention male figures in terms of the roles they played in women’s lives and artistic careers), but rather to broaden the existing story. In terms of the glossary, however, it felt important not to simply default to previously published examples. (In the future, I’d like to see museums, galleries and other institutions that create and uphold cultural value to think more about how they can demonstrate gender equality/neutrality in all of the texts they produce, from books to wall labels. It’s not enough to simply programme more women-only exhibitions—every time a curator lists four artists to contextualise a work, they should be thinking ‘who are the women who are part of this story?’) Don’t be so scared to include lesser-known names as examples. It’s the only way they will become better known!
Great Women Artists, Phaidon; Nina Chanel Abney, Class of 2007, 2007 (left), Marina Abramovic, Rhythm 0, 1974 (right), pages 18-19
Now, more than ever, people are following through with advocating for the under-represented. As of 2019, Phaidon published the most extensive fully illustrated book of women artists, that bolsters incredible artwork spanning 500 years of creativity. It also provides an engaging and diverse range of artists and styles, featuring more than 400 artists from more than 50 countries.
After reading our copy of “Great Women Artists,” we wrote to Rebecca Morrill, the book’s commissioning editor, with questions on the context for creating the book, selecting the artists, and providing a unique glossary that recontextualizes the history these women lived through.
Morgan Everhart: How did you get involved in the project?
Rebecca Morrill: Commissioning art books is my job at Phaidon Press, and while this often involves working with authors to develop their ideas into books, at other times it is about conceiving and executing our own projects under the umbrella of ‘Phaidon Editors.’ I have wanted to see a big, illustrated survey focused on women artists ever since I studied the subject at University in the mid-1990s (when so much of the reading material seemed to be very academic, being connected to feminist theory, or very text-heavy). When I began working at Phaidon, I realised that it was even more important for this kind of project to be undertaken in order to address the fact that female artists have been largely overlooked for generations. Phaidon, afterall, is the publisher of the world’s best-selling art history book (E.H.Gombrich’s “The Story of Art,” first published in 1950), and it only includes one female artist! (Käthe Kollwitz).
There has been an increased interest in art made by women over the past 10 years and this has allowed for a larger diversity of voices to been shown in galleries and museums worldwide. The re-energizing of global feminism in the wake of the #MeToo movement, created a context in which a women-only art book could be seen as a viable, mainstream endeavour, rather than a niche subject for a small audience, and so it finally seemed that the stars were aligning to make this project possible.
In your introductory text, you reference Linda Nochlin’s 1971 essay, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” as the inspiration for the design of the cover. On the cover, “Women” is crossed out. Were you involved in the design of it? Can you tell us more about the process of the design?
We knew we wanted the title and cover design to be very bold, so that it would be clear at a glance what the book was about, and so that it would “stand out” visually in bookshops just as Phaidon previously achieved with other important art surveys (such as “The Art Book”). The idea of striking through the word “women” came from Phaidon’s Publisher, Deborah Aaronson, and it immediately seemed to solve the quandary we were having of both whole-heartedly believing in the importance of doing a book on this subject, while also knowing the problematic issues around separating artists by gender. A line through this word is a simple gesture to demonstrate that we know that it should be enough to call these artists “great” without having to also mention that they are women, but that until there is 50/50 gender representation across the art world (and indeed the wider world) such rebalancing acts are still necessary, to increase awareness of artists whose names are not yet well-known. It’s been very rewarding that so many artists, reviewers and customers have picked up on this aspect of the book’s design and immediately understood and appreciated what it signifies. Thanks must go to the book’s designer, Astrid Stravo, who took this idea and made it into something so elegant and powerful.
In the introductory text, you mention the history of women who have resisted their work being categorized by their gender, for fear of being belittled. You also acknowledge the irrelevance of speaking about artists in terms of gender at all in contemporary society. Were there artists that declined the opportunity to be in this book?
I wondered when we started the project whether artists (and indeed the estates of deceased artists who are still in copyright) would refuse to be included on the grounds of being categorised by gender. As it happened, only a couple of artists declined and we didn’t push this matter as it is the prerogative of an artist to decline permission to reproduce their own work in a book without having to explain why. Furthermore, given how hard it was to narrow down the list already, we had no shortage of other artists we wanted to include, so this kind of self-selection actually made that easier.
It’s been interesting to get feedback from artists who are included in the book, after the book has come out: on the whole, they’re delighted to be featured, although some have expressed frustration that this kind of book still needs to happen. Aleksandra Mir put it very well when she posted the following on her Instagram: “I can only look forward to when the revisionist [sic] project to correct art history, collection displays and the market has been completed, and the culture at large will recognize the absurdity in measuring art according to hormones and genitals, the day we’re finally out of this ghetto and the moniker ‘Woman Artist’ becomes entirely obsolete.”
We know that it should be enough to call these artists “great” without having to also mention that they are women, but that until there is 50/50 gender representation across the art world […] such rebalancing acts are still necessary, to increase awareness of artists whose names are not yet well-known.”
Did you use social media to find any of the artists in the book?
The long list was created by compiling lists of female artists who have featured in previous Phaidon books (both monographs and surveys) and in major solo exhibitions worldwide, and also with the help of the freelance consultant editor, the American, British-based art critic and curator, Karen Wright (who sadly became ill during the project and wasn’t able to continue working on it). She did an incredible job of building a long list of artists and arguing the case for the inclusion of some who she felt particularly passionate about: including a few I didn’t know myself. I don’t know whether she used social media in doing so, she simply arrived week after week with more names for consideration. I didn’t use social media myself because I don’t find it to be an easy way to look for information. It has proved a useful tool for helping promote the book—many of the artists featured in it have posted generous comments about the book on their profiles.
I soon realised that many of these reiterated the exact patriarchal biases that have led to women artists being written out of history.
The glossary of the book, which provides context to where each individual artist is situated historically, provides a new structure for reviewing several generations of artists. Each term, style, and movement is organized alphabetically, like the artists. It seems that in retrospect, the book is not only reasserting these women’s places in history but also re-evaluating the way we reflect on how artists are categorized by time and material. Can you tell us more about developing the glossary? Did the glossary happen before, during, or after the narrowing of the list of 2,000 artists to 400 artists?
The glossary was the final thing to be written, and the decision to include one came out of the realisation that there was an assumed knowledge about what an art historical term, movement or style meant, which felt important to unpack. By doing so in a glossary rather than within the individual artist’s entry, it avoided the need to repeat this information for multiple artists (we couldn’t assume that a reader would move through the book from front to back so it wouldn’t be enough to simply deal with the definition the first time it occurred as one would normally do in a narrative book). Plus, as the word limit per artist was so short, it was better to use the available space to focus on the artist, rather than explaining definitions.
To start with, we thought a glossary could be compiled from the glossaries of existing Phaidon art books (many of which have thorough back matter of this kind), but I soon realised that many of these reiterated the exact patriarchal biases that have led to women artists being written out of history, (for example: citing names of artists connected to a particular style, but then all those names being of male artists) so I ended up rewriting many of the glossary definitions in ways that felt more ‘neutral’ or, at least, less dependent on upholding the dominant, narrow canon of art history. So you’ll see, for example, that the definition for Abstract Expressionism doesn’t namecheck figures of Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, as one might normally see, but rather focuses on the kind of art the artists associated with it—male and female—were making. (Read Mary Gabriel’s excellent “Ninth Street Women” if you want to know more about that particular movement and the central role of women within it.)
As mentioned in the book’s introduction, the intention is not to exclude men entirely (hence individual artist entries do, where relevant, mention male figures in terms of the roles they played in women’s lives and artistic careers), but rather to broaden the existing story. In terms of the glossary, however, it felt important not to simply default to previously published examples. (In the future, I’d like to see museums, galleries and other institutions that create and uphold cultural value to think more about how they can demonstrate gender equality/neutrality in all of the texts they produce, from books to wall labels. It’s not enough to simply programme more women-only exhibitions—every time a curator lists four artists to contextualise a work, they should be thinking ‘who are the women who are part of this story?’) Don’t be so scared to include lesser-known names as examples. It’s the only way they will become better known!
Great Women Artists, Phaidon; Nina Chanel Abney, Class of 2007, 2007 (left), Marina Abramovic, Rhythm 0, 1974 (right), pages 18-19
