AN EXORCISM
Signed first printing of Penny Slinger's legendary photobook, the pinnacle of 20th century feminist high-art gothicism.
Very good in a good jacket.
Price: $800.00
AN EXORCISM
"Collage is a naughty medium." — Penny Slinger
Characterized by The New York Times as "a blend of REBECCA and THE STORY OF O", the photo collages of AN EXORCISM follow a young woman "brought as a bride to a crumbling country estate" — Lilford Hall, the sprawling Jacobean mansion whose stately decay is exquisite backdrop to the psychodramatic tableaux within. Roland Penrose writes: "The great house, formerly noble, has become menacing, tainted, mysterious, the habitation of ghosts..."
Slinger's early collage work is laden with references to Max Ernst, whose own remarkable collage books were the subject of her thesis and to whom she was introduced by Penrose; in AN EXORCISM she steps beyond Ernst into a symbolic universe of her own creation. Slinger's use of herself as model — a self estranged, mirrored, and reduplicated, a aesthetic object posed by the same representing intelligence that inhabits it — sets her work immediately apart from the many artists whose own dreamscapes faltered and collapsed under the misapplied weight of a sexual symbolism dependent on women's visual centrality and absent agency. The violent and beautiful images of AN EXORCISM provoke a variety of responses, but one traditional art-world pleasure is denied the viewer: that of voyeurism; espionage; all the visual superiority of the gaze. We see deeply into a frightening world, but the woman depicted within that world sees all that we do, and more.
Read more: Slinger, "Collage is a Naughty Medium," nationalgalleries.org; Holland Cotter, "Penny Slinger: 'An Exorcism Revisited, 1977-2012'", The New York Times.
The Object
First edition. (London): (Villiers Publications), (1977). 9'' x 11''. Original black cloth with gilt device and gilt spine lettering. In original unclipped (£17.50) photographic dust jacket. Introduction by Roland Penrose. Unpaginated. Boards slightly bowed. Touches of edgewear. Some residue to rear endpaper. Rear panel of jacket with large closed wear, with a bit of chipping and attendant crease.
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