Joanna Frueh – författare

This daring, intensely personal book challenges both conventional and feminist ideas about beauty by asking us to take pleasure in beauty without shame, and to see and feel the erotic in everyday life. Bringing together her varied experiences as a poet, art historian, bodybuilder, and noted performance artist, Joanna Frueh shows us how to move beyond society's equation of youth with beauty toward an aesthetic for the fully erotic human being. A lush combination of autobiography, theory, photography, and poetry, this book continues to develop the ideas about the erotic, beauty, older women, sex, and pleasure that Frueh first addressed in "Erotic Faculties". "Monster/Beauty" examines these issues using a provocative, often explicit, set of examples.Frueh admiringly looks at the bodies and mindsets of midlife female bodybuilders, rethinks the vampire, and revises our ideas about traditional models of beauty, such as Aphrodite. Above all, she boldly brings her personal experience into the text, weaving her reflections on female sensuality with contemporary theory.These linked essays are as much a performance as they are a discussion, breaking down the barriers between the personal and the academic, and the erotic and the intellectual. Frueh writes passionately and beautifully, and the result is a much-needed exploration of beauty myths and taboos.

The erotic and the intellectual come together to create a new kind of criticism in the lushly written work of Joanna Frueh. Addressing sexuality in ways that are usually hidden or left unsaid, Frueh—a noted performance artist and art historian—explores subjects such as aging, beauty, love, sex, pleasure, contemporary art, and the body as a site and vehicle of knowledge. Frueh's language is explicit, graphic, fragmented. She assumes multiple voices: those of lover, prophet, daughter, mythmaker, art critic, activist, and bleeding heart. What results is an utterly original narrative that frees us from the false objectivity of traditional critical discourse and affirms the erotic as a way to ease human suffering. Through personal reflection, parody, autobiography, and poetry, Frueh shows us what it means to perform criticism, to personalize critical thinking. Rejecting postmodern, deconstructed prose, she recuperates the sentimental, proudly asserts a romantic viewpoint, and disrupts academic and feminist conventions. Erotic Faculties seeks to free the power of our unutilized erotic faculties and to expand the possibilities of criticism; it is a wild ride and a consummate pleasure. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1996.

The erotic and the intellectual come together to create a new kind of criticism in the lushly written work of Joanna Frueh. Addressing sexuality in ways that are usually hidden or left unsaid, Frueh—a noted performance artist and art historian—explores subjects such as aging, beauty, love, sex, pleasure, contemporary art, and the body as a site and vehicle of knowledge. Frueh's language is explicit, graphic, fragmented. She assumes multiple voices: those of lover, prophet, daughter, mythmaker, art critic, activist, and bleeding heart. What results is an utterly original narrative that frees us from the false objectivity of traditional critical discourse and affirms the erotic as a way to ease human suffering. Through personal reflection, parody, autobiography, and poetry, Frueh shows us what it means to perform criticism, to personalize critical thinking. Rejecting postmodern, deconstructed prose, she recuperates the sentimental, proudly asserts a romantic viewpoint, and disrupts academic and feminist conventions. Erotic Faculties seeks to free the power of our unutilized erotic faculties and to expand the possibilities of criticism; it is a wild ride and a consummate pleasure. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1996.

The performance artist Joanna Frueh has emerged over the past twenty-five years as a wildly original voice in feminist art. Her uninhibited performances are celebrations of beauty, sensuality, eroticism, and pleasure. Clairvoyance (For Those In The Desert), which features eighteen of her essential performance texts, is a celebration of this remarkable artist and her work. Arranged chronologically, from The Concupiscent Critic (1979) through Ambrosia (2004), the pieces reveal Frueh’s evolution as an artist and intellectual over the course of her career. Many of these texts have never before been published; others have not been readily available until now. Among the sixteen color photographs in this richly illustrated book are pictures of Frueh performing and images from Joanna in the Desert, a 2006 collaboration between Frueh and the artist and scholar Jill O’Bryan.Frueh’s performances are unabashedly autobiographical, as likely to reflect her scholarship as a feminist art historian as her love affairs or childhood memories. For Frueh, eros and self-love are part of a revolutionary feminist strategy; her work exemplifies the physicality and embrace of pleasure that she finds wanting in contemporary feminist theory. Scholarly and rigorous yet playful in tone, her performances are joyful, filled with eroticism, flowers, sexy costumes, and beautiful colors, textures, and scents. Recurring themes include Frueh’s passionate attachment to the desert landscape and the idea of transformation: a continual reaching for clarity of thought and feeling.In an afterword as lyrical and breathless as her performance pieces, Frueh explores her identification with the desert and its influence on her art. Clairvoyance (For Those In The Desert) includes a detailed chronology of Frueh’s performances.

A startlingly powerful collaboration reimagines female beautyWhat is beauty without pain? Compromise is what our culture offers women: cinching, pinching, cutting, shaving, scraping, starving, and, of course, lifting and separating, all in service of one sharply circumscribed model purported to be pleasing-but not to most, if any, women. This extraordinary book reimagines beauty at its most provocative and fetishized locus: the female breast. Artist, writer, and scholar Joanna Frueh scrutinizes ideals of beauty and sensuality, often motivated by her experiences with breast cancer. Frances Murray, her friend and collaborator for more than thirty years, documents Frueh’s journey of unapologetic beauty in a series of intimate, dazzlingly original photographs before and after her bilateral mastectomy and chemotherapy.  Reflecting with insight, directness, and humor-and with contributions from a breast surgeon, an oncologist, and artists and scholars who have had breast cancer-Frueh arrives at a new, liberating view of beauty and of the sensual pleasure found in transformative self-acceptance. Central to this reckoning is her documentation and critique of the notion of hyperbeauty (the flash of flesh appeal, hyperthin, hyperfeminine, hyperbosomy, hypersexy, and hyperyoung sold at the global 24/7 beauty bazaar) and her playful, inventive presentation of tools for remaking minds and hearts disfigured by self-denying ideals.In its bracing critique, passionate argument, and compelling narrative-all illustrative of its own unapologetic beauty-this collaboration is a performance of startling power, stirring to consider and a pleasure to behold.

A startlingly powerful collaboration reimagines female beautyWhat is beauty without pain? Compromise is what our culture offers women: cinching, pinching, cutting, shaving, scraping, starving, and, of course, lifting and separating, all in service of one sharply circumscribed model purported to be pleasing-but not to most, if any, women. This extraordinary book reimagines beauty at its most provocative and fetishized locus: the female breast. Artist, writer, and scholar Joanna Frueh scrutinizes ideals of beauty and sensuality, often motivated by her experiences with breast cancer. Frances Murray, her friend and collaborator for more than thirty years, documents Frueh’s journey of unapologetic beauty in a series of intimate, dazzlingly original photographs before and after her bilateral mastectomy and chemotherapy.  Reflecting with insight, directness, and humor-and with contributions from a breast surgeon, an oncologist, and artists and scholars who have had breast cancer-Frueh arrives at a new, liberating view of beauty and of the sensual pleasure found in transformative self-acceptance. Central to this reckoning is her documentation and critique of the notion of hyperbeauty (the flash of flesh appeal, hyperthin, hyperfeminine, hyperbosomy, hypersexy, and hyperyoung sold at the global 24/7 beauty bazaar) and her playful, inventive presentation of tools for remaking minds and hearts disfigured by self-denying ideals.In its bracing critique, passionate argument, and compelling narrative-all illustrative of its own unapologetic beauty-this collaboration is a performance of startling power, stirring to consider and a pleasure to behold.

A Practice of Pleasure is an intimate and panoramic entrée into the life and work of Joanna Frueh (1948-2020), an art historian and performance practitioner for whom life and art were inseparable. Written during a key transitional moment in her life and work (2005-2012), the volume makes available primarily unpublished performance texts and writings that give an intimate insight both into Frueh’s everyday life and the thinking of an artist and scholar well known for offering her personal experiences as a means of embodying and speaking about pleasure. A self-described ‘pleasure activist’, Frueh’s book offers a highly original perspective on pleasure—frank, scholarly, philosophical, romantic, and conversational. Taken together, the texts comprising A Practice of Pleasure are an ode to pleasure in the widest sense: female pleasure, sexual pleasure, and the pleasures of prosaic and domestic beauties, such as enjoying the reality of her own body and the luxurious simplicities of the senses.