Johanna Drucker, Susan Bee, and the Performance of A Girl’s Life
Abstract
Born from the collaboration between visual poet Johanna Drucker and painter Susan Bee, A Girl’s Life (2002) employs heterogeneous materials - images from popular culture (teen magazines, old Dick and Jane books, and covers of pulp novels), stickers, paper dolls, original artwork, layout and typographic variation - to expose and explode clichés about a young woman’s life. Eschewing literary and book conventions as well as traditional word-image relationships, this artist’s book involves readers in an eccentric performance that flouts gender, narrative, and textual scripts, exploring novel forms of visuality that might foster new perception, vision, and change on and off the page.
DOI: 10.17456/SIMPLE-228
Keywords: Johanna Drucker, Susan Bee, collaboration, word-image relationships, artist’s book, textual performance, girl culture and discourse.
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