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Return to Writings & VideosAndrea Juno & V. Vale, Editors
Re/Search Publications, 1991, San Francisco, CA
Excerpt from Wash. Blade Review 3/92
Many feminist theorists lack a sense of humor or delight and many artists eschew politics, so often I go hungry for a form of expression that integrates both art and theory exuberantly. Now I've found Angry Women, interviews with fifteen performance artists. At first, however, even I was intimidated by this book. Perhaps it was the cover -- a gorgon-headed woman with snakes erupting from her scalp; snakes eating missiles, eggs, calculators, mice, lightbulbs and telephones. The oversized text pages, bordered by sketches of poisonous blooms, are also rich with action photos of performances.
Co-publishers/editors Andrea Juno and V. Vale have produced an amazingly fierce work, a text whose voices discourse constantly in my brain as I walk the street, lie down, or go about my job or play. The book's ostensible theme is performance art, and why this kind of art is the prime vehicle for women's rage and vision now. On a deeper level it is about all of us, (artists and non-artists, women and men), about the deep conflicts we don't often admit or touch, much less articulate rationally, with concern, or in dialogue with others who care and understand.
Not all fifteen artists are lesbian but you'd be hard-pressed to find where lesbian consciousness begins or ends because woman consciousness screams off of every page. Loving women, fighting for women, changing the world into a woman-positive place is the theme of the entire flamboyant text.