![]() The Swedish video artist was granted supervised visitation: three hours, twice a week. Her husband, I should say, was American, as was his lawyer, as was the judge, and it was of course in America that this trial took place. In court, during the Swedish video artist’s testimony, the judge seemed unable or unwilling to look her in the face. Then she sits down at the table and begins eating the dirt-covered weeds. With the sword she decapitates each sex doll. She goes into another room and retrieves a sword. She serves dinner-bowls of soapy water a salad of unwashed weeds uncooked spaghetti, halved, covered in motor oil-to a family of blow-up sex dolls. Beneath the chain mail-this is her husband’s lawyer- I will draw your attention to the fact that beneath the chain mail respondent is completely nude. There she was, in chain mail, in the kitchen, preparing dinner. ![]() She reads from Book Twenty-Two, the slaughter of the suitors. There she was, in a bathtub, naked, bleeding from between her legs: a miscarriage. Several videos by the Swedish video artist were entered into evidence. ![]() ![]() He charged that his soon-to-be ex-wife was an unfit mother. During the divorce proceedings, the husband sued for full physical and legal custody of both children. The Swedish video artist and her husband had two children together. The day I met my friend at the museum, I was not yet divorced. Her second husband, I am moved to say, in the spirit of pettiness. Several years before, the Swedish video artist had divorced her husband. There were more screens-a man and a woman running hurdles on a track what might have been a job interview, with a man, suited, behind a desk, if not for the woman before him, her hair shorn, her body encased in sackcloth-and, next to each, a pair of headphones. Occasionally the terrier reared up on its hind legs and pawed at the tails of the woman’s button-front shirt. At her heels, nipping and barking, a terrier, brown and white. On yet another: a stage, a curtain, red velvet, drawn, and a woman, pacing, declaiming on the proscenium. Bad luck if your husband had short fingers, diminutive palms. On another: two opera singers, one male, one female, mouths open, chests heaving. In the eighteenth century, the ideal wife’s waist was no larger than the span of her husband’s hand. On one screen: a ballerina in pink and her male partner in black, his hands firm about her waist. In one room of the museum a series of screens had been mounted. Just a narcissistic bitch, isn’t she? Not that I believe this. The woman as object is art and the man who objectifies her an artist. I never wore the ring.” Rather: he had broken up with her.ĭid I, do I, admire the artist for claiming her pain is worthy of art, or did I, do I, find the act of aestheticizing also trivializing, or in fact is that feeling, that impulse to call the art trivializing, a way to conceal the true feeling, guiltier, that her art is vulgar, that it is indulgent, because she is her own subject? Because she elevates herself as subject? The woman as object is less vulgar than the woman as subject. She had broken up with her boyfriend and called me and I had driven down. She kept her sunglasses on when we went inside. I drove down the coast to the museum and at the museum, I met my friend. She makes, in her art, a spectacle of herself. By female pain I mean female subjugation and exploitation, and humiliation. This Swedish video artist: her work is largely about female pain. The museum was hosting a Swedish video artist’s first American exhibition. Louis and has written for The New Republic, The New Yorker‘s Page-Turner blog, the Paris Review Daily, The Hairpin, The Awl, GQ, and New York magazine’s The Cut. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from Washington University in St. Composed almost exclusively of conversations between women, Popkey’s debut novel is about desire, disgust, motherhood, loneliness, art, pain, feminism, anger, envy, guilt–written in language that sizzles with intelligence and eroticism. The following is from Miranda Popkey's Topics of Conversation.
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