Waiting for the shoe to drop

I sent in a paper to the Rutgers Art Review. It's a grad student publication, and I had thought that I'd have a pretty good chance. That is until I looked up past issues and saw that there are about six papers per year accepted. Oh, now there goes my self-confidence. No way I'll get in now. So I'm waiting for my rejection letter.

The paper is pretty good, though, if I do say so myself. It's about an artist named Hannah Wilke. She was a performance artist and photographer. She did a lot of pieces that involved her being all nakey and stuff. And since she was pretty, she got a lot of craph for it from feminist writers. Ah yes, the f word again. So the gist of the paper is the limitations of working within the feminist rubric when dealing with Wilke's art. Here's the kicker. She died of Lymphoma, a type of cancer, when she was in her early fifties. And she documented the deterioration of her body on film. In brilliant color, not black-and-white, which would give it a more documentary effect. There was also this strong Catholic underpinning in the imagery. And the posthumous show in which this Intra-Venus work was shown served as a memorial/pilgrimmage/relic of her life. Because she showed herself going through these changes and disfiguring of her once-beautiful body, she was lauded for her courage. And her early work was championed in that it served as reminder of her former self. One has to ask oneself-- if she had not gotten sick and died, would her earlier work have been so widely accepted and praised, retrospectively.

Ah, I go on. But that's what the paper is about. I'm pretty proud of it, but I don't think it'll get accepted. Paying dues sucks, and I can't wait to have the PhD after my name to make this all worth my while.

And just so you know, since I never really do this, the second post of the day is so that my blog doesn't have 13 posts in it. Cause I'm crazy superstitious like that. ;)