Mailing List


Kate Zambreno
Kate Zambreno is the author most recently of Drifts (Riverhead) and To Write As If Already Dead, a study of Hervé Guibert (Columbia University Press). Forthcoming in Summer 2023 from Riverhead is The Light Room, a meditation on art and care, as well as Tone, a collaboration with Sofia Samatar, from Columbia University Press in early 2024. ‘Insekt’ is part of an in-progress work of fiction, Realisms. She is a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow.

Articles Available Online


Insekt or large verminous thing

Fiction

September 2022

Kate Zambreno

Fiction

September 2022

Around dusk one evening in March, I went out back to the small garage, and switched on my small square of artificial light at...

Feature

January 2018

Accumulations (Appendix F)

Kate Zambreno

Feature

January 2018

I’ve been keeping a mental list of all the pieces of art that I’ve nursed Leo in front of...

The memorial for the artist was as inconclusive as her work, or anybody’s life Organised haphazardly on Facebook by one of her old friends, it was held beside the ‘lake’ in Echo Park in the middle of a heat wave on a summer Sunday afternoon For an hour after the appointed time, ten or twelve of us sat around in thin wedges of shade waiting to see if others would show up But no one did  — Chris Kraus, What I Couldn’t Write, 2016   While Julie Becker’s death rites were sparsely attended in 2016, the ICA’s 2018 summer retrospective of her work was one of many, much-discussed tributes in the UK to the art of dead young women In May, Tate Liverpool mounted a bumper anniversary show of Francesca Woodman’s ‘intimate’ portraits, alongside the work of fellow doomed youth Egon Schiele By the time of its close in November, the V&A’s display of Frida Kahlo’s paintings, together with her clothes, make-up and prosthetic leg, will have been consumed by visitors in the hundreds of thousands This summer, almost fifty years since Linda Nochlin raised and responded to the question: Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?, viewers have had ample opportunity to gorge on the artwork of consecrated women A current problem seems to have less to do with a lack of women artists, or their invisibility, and more with the predominant status of these women as dead and, often, dead young   From the Guardian to the Daily Mail, critics expressed resounding displeasure with the V&A’s ‘excessive adoration of a dead woman’s stuff’ borne out in its brazen display of ‘more pill bottles than paintings’ in its Kahlo exhibition In the Guardian, Jonathan Jones found the decision to co-cast Woodman and Schiele on the basis of their shared premature demise to be ‘so shallow and patronising that it suggests Tate Liverpool has lost all respect for its audience’ We, the audience, are left only to ponder our facile, morbid attraction, both to these artists and to their ‘stuff’   In the disproportion of dead-to-living women on show, there is an element

Contributor

August 2014

Kate Zambreno

Contributor

August 2014

Kate Zambreno is the author most recently of Drifts (Riverhead) and To Write As If Already Dead, a study...

Heroines

feature

March 2013

Kate Zambreno

feature

March 2013

I am beginning to realise that taking the self out of our essays is a form of repression. Taking the self out feels like...

READ NEXT

Art

December 2011

James Richards: Not Blacking Out...

Chris Newlove Horton

Art

December 2011

Artist James Richards appropriates audio-visual material gathered from a range of sources, which he then edits into elaborate, fragmented...

Prize Entry

April 2015

Posman

Nick Mulgrew

Prize Entry

April 2015

After a while you memorise the steps. You read the addresses and your calves just know, hey. They just...

feature

July 2013

Occupy Gezi: From the Fringes to the Centre, and Back Again

Alexander Christie-Miller

feature

July 2013

Taksim Square appears at first a wide, featureless and unlovely place. It is a ganglion of roads and bus...

 

Get our newsletter

 

* indicates required