But the art monster problem, more primary, nagged at me for years before my son was born; it was more to do with having grown up a white American female at the end of the twentieth century, groomed to be appropriate, exacting, friendly and accommodating, as pretty and as small as I could make myself, yet filled with rage at not being allowed to

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

The work that remained to be done, as far as Woolf was concerned, had to do with screwing up the courage to remake the cultural tradition as we had received it, and to focus on the embodied experience as the primary means of doing this.

When we uphold this pretty/ugly binary, we condemn ourselves to remaining the second sex. This version of monstrosity is a trap.

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

the climax of it, actually, in which Woolf compares the process of creating to casting her line into the depths of her imagination like a ‘fisherwoman’, letting it ‘sweep unchecked round every rock and cranny of the world that lies submerged in the depths of our unconscious being’. Then, as the line drifts and the thought flows, something happens,

If Offill’s term has resonated so strongly in recent years, I think it is in part because it points to the ways in which the culture punishes women for being something other than small and silent.

‘[O]f any woman creator,’ Cusk writes, ‘an explanation is required of whether, or how, she dispensed with her femininity and its limitations, with her female biological destiny; of where – so to speak – she buried the body.’ 46 No need to bury the body: it is at the centre of our practice.

Schneemann, that […] our best developments grow from works which initially strike us as ‘too much’: those which are intriguing, demanding, that lead us to experiences which we feel we cannot encompass, but which simultaneously provoke and encourage our efforts. Such works have the effect of containing more than we can assimilate; they maintain