Saturday, March 11, 2023

Martha Wilson | Journals








Martha Wilson
Journals
Brussels, Belgium: michèle didier, 2021
272 pp., 27.9 × 21.6 cm., softcover
Edition of 400 signed copies


"Martha Wilson – Journals collects the most representative pages of performance artist Martha Wilson’s diaries between 1965 and 1983. In 2018 art dealer and publisher Michèle Didier asked Wilson if she could find in her diaries when she decided to become an artist and begin Franklin Furnace (the artist-run space and archive dedicated to artists’ publishing and performance initiated in New York in 1976).

Reading the multitude of pages which were scanned for the occasion, Wilson could not find what she calls “ah-ha moments,” so instead, she selected about 270 pages to be published in Journals, which allow us to approach intimately her thoughts during these seminal years. Within the book, these pages are presented in chronological order in their original size against an elegant black background. Page after page, the autobiographical, mostly handwritten texts reflect Wilson’s activities and concerns. If in 1965 she was still a teenager who defined herself as a “status seeker,” from 1971 onwards she questioned progressively her character, her ways of relating to others, and her (artistic) identity: “Why not be happy in the personality I have?”; “What is a relationship based on?”; “The object of my work should be to not care what other people think of me.”"
- Francesca Valentini



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