Bad Material

Sliding between the coolly critical and the bracingly personal, Bad Material ambles through the gallery and the archive, scoping out signs of gender disruption. Delving deeply into artists' archives and the feminist turn in archival studies, the poems in Bad Material complicate feminist materialisms and art histories by investigating where the gendered body situates itself within artistic production and reception. Playfully responding to the work of artists like Liz Magor, Adrian Piper, Martha Rosler, and Gillian Wearing, the poems in Bad Material ask how art and its sharpened ambivalences refract and explode self-image, changing the body of the viewer one warped reflection at a time. The result is an autotheoretical and proprioceptive excavation connecting information and women's subjectivity or selfhood.