Beauty is a poison pill. Beauty makes us sick, makes us spend all our money, makes us sad and desperate. We are socially obligated to try to make ourselves look young and beautiful, and then mocked and undermined when we don’t succeed as well as when we do. It is no wonder so many feminist artists have turned to ugliness, abjection and roughness,

The problem of Hannah Wilke is the central problem in this book, and that is the problem of beauty for feminism. When she was beautiful, they told her to stop taking her clothes off. When she was dying, they applauded the bravery of taking off her clothes. She was not a better artist when she was dying. She was not a better artist for having

The turn away from beauty was a way for female artists to reject a racist, othering patriarchy, embodied in a classical aesthetics that were not their own – that cast them, like Schneemann, as beautiful bodies, as muses, or as servants and sex objects, and never as artists. In order to claim authority as artists, they believed they needed to make

For me, when I started making the tapestries that you’re speaking to specifically, one of the problems I felt like I was encountering – and which is always a problem with the work – is that people kind of sit in its prettiness, and its buoyancy, and its tactility, and its shine; but I wanted to find a way that somehow made that difficult to just

Anything women say about their lives is suspect, especially if there’s a white man nearby with a different account of things.

I felt it needed more statement, more work, more completion, and that was a mistake because it left the ugly zone and went to the beauty zone. I didn’t mean it to be that. And it became for me – I don’t even want to use the word in any interview of mine – decorative. That word or the way I use it or feel about it is the only art sin.4 Perhaps

How can we push further, connect with more intention, reach ever outward? These are questions that haunt her – that haunt me, as I write this book.5 To become artists, to be taken seriously, we have had to improvise with our materials. Go big to claim space. Cut and splice, repurpose, take matter and put it out of place. Unsettle those categories.

Ann Hamilton, who asked her students – mostly young women – to carry around a 4 × 8 sheet of plywood with them for a week, so they could get used to taking up more space, and realise how often they apologised for themselves. Hamilton’s own success may have been partly due to the ‘sheer scale and ambition of her work from the outset’, unusual when

To work in performance was to stick two fingers up to the art establishment: it can’t be preserved on a canvas – only on film, but that’s not the same thing.