Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery

by Jeanette Winterson

In these ten intertwined essays, one of our most provocative young novelists proves that she is just as stylish and outrageous an art critic. For when Jeanette Winterson looks at works as diverse as the Mona Lisa and Virginia Woolf's The Waves , she frees them from layers of preconception and restores their power to exalt and unnerve, shock and transform us.

" Art Objects is a book to be admired for its effort to speak exorbitantly, urgently and sometimes beautifully about art and about our individual and collective need for serious art."-- Los Angeles Times

Genres: Nonfiction, Essays, Art, Writing, Philosophy, Criticism, Feminism

192 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1995

About the author

Novelist Jeanette Winterson was born in Manchester, England in 1959. She was adopted and brought up in Accrington, Lancashire, in the north of England. Her strict Pentecostal Evangelist upbringing provides the background to her acclaimed first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, published in 1985. She graduated from St Catherine's College, Oxford, and moved to London where she worked as an assistant editor at Pandora Press.

One of the most original voices in British fiction to emerge during the 1980s, Winterson was named as one of the 20 "Best of Young British Writers" in a promotion run jointly between the literary magazine Granta and the Book Marketing Council.

She adapted Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit for BBC television in 1990 and also wrote "Great Moments in Aviation," a television screenplay directed by Beeban Kidron for BBC2 in 1994. She is editor of a series of new editions of novels by Virginia Woolf published in the UK by Vintage. She is a regular contributor of reviews and articles to many newspapers and journals and has a regular column published in The Guardian. Her radio drama includes the play Text Message, broadcast by BBC Radio in November 2001.

Winterson lives in Gloucestershire and London. Her work is published in 28 countries.

Reviews

[Jo (The Book Geek) · Rating 5 out of 5]

'There are people who tell me that I am cut off but to what are they connected? My connections are to the earth under my feet and the words that fill both hands. and not hands only, mouth, liver, gut, bowel, mind, blood, cunt.'


My love of Jeanette Winterson and her works began just five years ago, but to me, it feels like decades ago. It all started with Written on the Body, and amusingly enough, it was my lovely Mother that recommended it to me. I'll be the first to admit that the eroticism initially stalled my reading of it, as I was expecting multiple, and possibly uncomfortable sex scenes, with very little else to it.

I dislike being wrong, but it happens.

Written on the Body took me on an unforgettable journey of love in it's most powerful and erotic form, and without any specific plot to follow I kind of melted into the story that Winterson created that knew no bounds. It made me look at myself in a different light, as although I don't always show it, I am an intensely passionate person, and I've not found a story that measures up to this one since.

I don't think I want to, either.

Since then, apart from maybe one or two books, I've found Winterson to be the delicious cream filling in my cake, and I've made it a lifelong objective of mine to read anything and everything that has her name attached to it.

Concerning Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery, I more or less went in blind, and I'm glad I did actually, because surprisingly, being my first nonfiction from Winterson, this went beyond my expectations.

It made me question myself.

Winterson discusses her love of Virginia Woolf, looking beyond the fact that Woolf was more than someone that saw women as people, and said some things the feminists would enjoy. She was a truly iconic writer for her time, with so much sparkle and wit, it would be impossible not be inspired by such.

There are ten essays within these pages, and the themes are connected to literature, art and writing. As always with Winterson, I find some of her writing overwhelmingly electric, and I have to read a particular passage over again, just to let it soak in, and to let that feeling take over me once again.

Winterson writes with a uniqueness that leaves me feeling a sense of awe and admiration. She seems to continuously break the boundary of what is expected in society, and she does this with such ease, and with an infectious charismatic flare.

Winterson doesn't know it, but she wants to take me for a latte, but preferably on a Wednesday.

[Andrea · Rating 5 out of 5]

I wish that I could spend just a single afternoon with Jeanette Winterson. This book was transformative. If you have an interest in literature as an evolving art form, if you are interested in how to be a reader or what it means to be an artist, or if you're just a person searching for deeper meaning in a shallow world, you need to read this book.

While I was resistant to some of the philosophical principles presented here this book provided lots to think about and launched a reevaluation of my own consumption of media and art.

[Nathan "N.R." Gaddis]

There used to be something called The Canon

This was regularly used to blast iconoclasts who said terrible things at tea parties, such as ‘Surely Katherine Mansfield is as fine writer as Proust?’
The Canon allowed no debate; it guarded the entry and exit points to the Hall of Fame and stood firmly behind t(T)he t(T)imes.
When not routing offenders in petticoats it fired warning shots over the heads of the uneducated. The Canon was admirably free from modern Existentialist Doubt.
It knew who belonged and who didn’t belong.
No Question.
‘Excuse me?’
‘Who said that?’
It was Virginia Woolf Addressing The Canon. --Jeanette Winterson

A few (more) Theses on The Canon and anti-Canonites (of 95, still unnumbered and perhaps innumerable) ; nothing to see here ;; move along ;;; move along


Sure, Mansfield is as fine as Proust. If you’re interested in The Short Story, you kind of have to read Mansfield. I mean, she is Required Reading.

If anyone wants to talk about Modernism, High Modernism, Twentieth Century Fiction, and Things Of This Nature, and they do not drop the name ‘Woolf’ within the first five name drops, you can safely ignore everything else that person might say. Whether you prefer Woolf or Joyce matters not a wit more than whether you prefer Haydn or Mozart. And if you don’t give a wit about Literary Modernism, or Classical Music, then why would you give a wit about Joyce or Woolf or Haydn or Mozart?

If one of your novels gets picked up by a network or moviehouse and gets made into a film or Television Mini=Series, you really shouldn’t be posing as an anti-Canonite.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0098032/?...

There are two reasons to reject The Canon :: 1) No one can find anywhere anything that even begins to look like a Definitive List subsisting in the Real World (no matter that Bloom’s pub’er insisted he write one up) ; ie, I can’t find it, therefore it don’t exist. OR 2) It does exist as a definitive list of 100 Books and it excludes so many that ought to be on there that it can’t function as its concept demands it function ; ie, we reject The Canon because it’s not Complete and Definitive.

Like everything else that is important, no one can come up with an adequate Definition.

Most rants by anti=Canonites are Pure Strawmanism. Ie, ‘regularly used to blast iconoclasts’. Is Winterson implying that she is herself an ‘iconoclast’? What should be noted is how the Icon itself is first constructed by the Iconoclast him/herself. This is called ‘Tilting...’.

“The Canon allowed no debate”. The Canon moves and has its being within debate. How it’s constituted, kind of thing. You can conjure up a figment of White Men playing Doormen if you like ; but that’s your fantasy. I mean, typically, The Most Powerful Person in the Room is not the one holding the door for you ;; rather it is those for whom the Doorman does his doormanning.

The folks that guard entry and exits are publishers. And frankly, some of the biggest publishers in the world, ie, Penguin, are digging up any and every old book in the world and pushing it within Classics Covers. This is a good thing. True enough that it’s a hell of a lot easier to get a dissertation on Shakespeare approved than it is to get one on Dorothy Richardson approved ;; nevertheless, Richardson is getting a critical=edition treatment by Oxford in the coming years. This is the kind of work Gatekeepers do.

“Warning shots over the uneducated” ;; this is a potshot about how people will read what they like and the market is perfectly happy to supply it? [or maybe we should be primping these uneducated who spend their time playing Video Games and then how the job of the Critic and the Gatekeeper is to lionize the importance of playing Video Games and how they are just as Valid as the plays of Shakespeare?] Who is it constructing these ‘uneducated’ and why aren’t you out voting for Sanders so the USofA can catch up with the rest of the Developed World and provide things like Education and Health Care to ALL of our citizens?

Early 20th century Canon projects were merely Educational projects. The Harvard Five=Foot Bookshelf. Great Books of the Western World. But Liberal Education is getting beaten up on all sides these days. Why do I feel so old=fashion for standing behind a Liberal Arts Education? What this world needs is more MBA’s!

What the hell is “Existentialist Doubt” and what does it have to do with The Canon? All that Existentialist Doubt bs is firmly in, if not The Canon, then within the reading habits of many millions of persons. Even coffee shops get called “Angst”.

“It knew who belonged and who didn’t belong.” Bullshit.

Yeah, Virginia Woolf, along with a small handful (Joyce, Proust) of others is Modernism.

Seriously, posing as an anti-Canonite and appealing to The Names of Woolf and Mansfield?!!!

“There used to be” ; no, there inevitably will always be. It’s the kind of thing that happens with Culture. Take this concept of No Canon to, say for example, a postcolonial country and you’ll see the Imperialistic nature of the anti-Canonite who wants to remind Others that they don’t have a Literature which constitutes their culture, tell them that what’s really important is that they read the books they like, which The Market will be more than happy to supply.

The anti-Canonite should be unveiled as standing in opposition to something like The Murty Classical Library of India. And the Library of Arabic Literature. Because they are both Canon Projects. See, just like the Loeb, they are scheduled to publish everything. What the pro=Canon folks are doing, whether Murty or Penguin or Oxford or etc, is publishing everything.

It’s not polite to say ; but what Winterson says up there I find simply stupid. I mean best of luck to her and her books and her readers and suchnot, but this little piece of stuff.... I mean, does she stand behind it?

Fine if you don’t give a fig about The Canon. But why should you be esteemed for posing as an anti-Canonite when everything you have to say seems to rise very little beyond an adolescent anti=Authoritarianism?

[Vartika · Rating 4 out of 5]

'Wordsmith' is a title I use very sparingly, but one that I can never spare in a discussion about Jeanette Winterson's writing — any of it. While she is a marvellous novelist; her works wrought straight from liquid imagination; her adroitness extends far beyond the realms of fiction. Art Objects is not just a collection of potent observations on art and wordsmithery, but also a highly potent example of the same.

In these essays on ecstasy and effrontery, Winterson excavates the true value of art as it is, a value that lies buried under the burgeoning mass of a consumer civilisation. For her, art is experimentation and originality, it is new ways of seeing, and that which treats these as matters of choice is neither persistent (and prescient) nor art. Art Objects harks back (and forth) to a philosophy of appreciation that is full of rapture on both the reader and the writer's part, that has respect for language, form and novelty, but not necessarily for rules, and definitely not for utilitarianism.

I particularly enjoyed "Imagination and Reality," as well as the titular essay on visual art. The essay on Virginia Woolf's The Waves is also a uniquely transformative read for what it says and teaches about the rhythms of each work of writing and our own various approaches to reading them in a world that has been enslaved by the clock. In general, Art Objects is a hypnotic volume, and true to the author's own words, it isn't always so for what she says but for how she says it. I would recommend this highly to anyone interested in art, writing, and creating some of our own, or for someone looking for that rare piece of writing that blends theory and praxis into something ebullient and delicious.

[Stephanie B · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a collection of essays that seems to work best as a book to own as (at least for me) I found it most pleasurable as a page or two here and there vs. reading straight through.

It is a book to make you fall in love with art (again and again). Winterson is a beautifully effervescent writer and most of these essays serve as a glowing ode to the pleasure of art. Both in creating it and in experiencing it. Her language is often gorgeous, and there are many quotable passages, and so this “review” is going to just serve as a collection of quotes (mostly for me to remember them, but if you happen to be here reading this, namaste, and enjoy! :)

From “Writer, Reader, Words”:
“I believe that art puts down its roots into the deepest hiding places of our nature and that its action is akin to the action of certain delving plants, comfrey for instance, whose roots can penetrate far into the subsoil and unlock nutrients that would otherwise lie out of the reach of shallower bedded plants.
In the haste of life and the press of action it is difficult for us to examine our feelings, to express them coherently, to express them poetically, and yet the impulse to poetry which is an impulse parallel to civilization, is a force towards that range and depth of expression. We do not want language as a list of basic commands and exchanges, we want it to handle matters far more subtle.”

From “A Gift of Wings”:
“Art is large and it enlarges you and me. To a shrunk-up world its vistas are shocking. Art is the burning bush that both shelters and makes visible our profounder longings. Through it we see ourselves in metaphor. Art is metaphor, from the Greek, meta (above) and pherein (to carry) it is that which is carried above the literalness of life. Art is metaphor. Metaphor is transformation.”

About Virginia Woolf (of whom Winterson is clearly an enormous fan):
“...she loved words. That is she was devoted to words, faithful to words, romantically attached to words, desirous of words. She was territory and words occupied her. She was night-time and words were the dream.”

From “A Veil of Words” this truth:
“Art, in its making and in its enjoying, demands long tracts of time. Books, like cats, do not wear watches.”

From “The Semiotics of Sex”:
“I mean the ability to engage with a text as you would another human being. To recognise it in its own right, separate, particular, to let it speak in its own voice, not in a ventriloquism of yours. To find its relationship to you that is not its relationship to anyone else. To recognize, at the same time, that you are neither the means nor the method of its existence and that the love between you is not a mutual suicide. The love between you offers an alternative paradigm; a complete and fully realized vision in a chaotic unrealised world. Art is not amnesia, and the popular idea of books as escapism or diversion, misses altogether what art is. There is plenty of escapism and diversion to be had, but it cannot be had from real books, real pictures, real music, real theatre. Art is the realization of complex emotion.”

“Complex emotion is pivoted around the forbidden.”

“Complex emotion often follows some major event in our lives; sex, falling in love, birth, death, are the commonest and in each of these potencies are strong taboos. The striking loneliness of the individual when confronted with these large happenings that we all share, is a loneliness of displacement. The person is thrown out of the normal groove of their life and whilst they stumble, they also have to carry a new weight of feeling, feeling that threatens to overwhelm them. Consequences of misery and breakdown are typical and in a repressive society that pretends to be liberal, misery and breakdown can be used as subtle punishments for what we no longer dare legislate against. Inability to cope is defined as a serious weakness in a macho culture like ours, but what is inability to cope, except a spasmodic, faint and fainter protest against a closed-in drugged-up life where suburban values are touted as the greatest good? A newborn child, the moment of falling in love, can cause in us seismic shocks that will, if we let them, help to re-evaluate what things matter, what things we take for granted. This is frightening, and as we get older it is harder to face such risks to the deadness that we are. Art offers the challenge we desire but also the shape we need when our own world seems most shapeless. The formal beauty of art is threat and relief to the formless neutrality of unrealised life.”

From “Imagination and Reality”:
“Art is visionary, it sees beyond the view from the window, even though the window is its frame. This is why the arts fare much better alongside religion than alongside either capitalism or communism. The god-instinct and the art-instinct both apprehend more than the physical biological material world.”

[Ally Armistead · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not only can she write beautiful novels and short stories, but Jeanette Winterson can hold her own as a solid philosopher, art critic, and essayist. "Art Objects" is just that--a meditation on art and the men and women who create and view it. Whether discussing the Mona Lisa or Gertude Stein's poetry or Virginia Woolf's The Waves, Winterson explores the complexities of learning to "sit" with art, allowing what at first seems perplexing and foreign to seep in, confuse us, and open us to enlightenment.

While Winterson explores a number of topics--art as action, art as communal--the subject that moves me most as a reader is the idea of remaining open as a viewer--however uncomfortable--to the art itself. Of her many insightful observations about viewers and art, the ones she captures in the first chapter "Art Objects" are by far the most powerful about WHY, as viewers, we may may find ourselves struggling, wriggling, worming our way out of the experience of SEEING. She suggests that we, as a society, are not trained to "see"--we expect immediate gratification, animation, distraction, entertainment. We grow anxious, she says, because we are uncomfortable with something unresolved in ourselves. Similarly, she suggests that art--good art--strikes a chord in each of us, rattling our understanding of reality and our sense of "I": "True art, when it happens to us, challenges the 'I' that we are."

Winterson also explores what it means (what it really means) when we say "I like" that book, painting, film, etc.," observing that it is not essential to "like a thing" in order to recognize its worth. The trick, the goal for humanity then (she argues), is for viewers to reach a point of self-awareness and sophistication that transcends the mere matter of "liking" or "not liking."

Overall, this collection of essays is absolutely worth reading, particularly for artists, but also for the everyday human being who has a fondness for film, painting, and literature and wishes to "go deeper."

[Hande Kılıçoğlu · Rating 5 out of 5]

Winterson beni şaşırtmadı ve harika denemelerinden oluşan bu kitabı ile beni yine mest etti. Sanata, yazına, resme güzellemeler içeren ve günümüzün sanat anlayışına dair bir nevi başkaldırı olan kitabının neredeyse her bir cümlesinin altını çizerek okudum. Hatta yakın zamanda tekrar okumayı düşünüyorum.

[Jessica · Rating 5 out of 5]

After dog-earing far too many pages, I realized I'm just going to have to buy myself a copy and reread this, on occasion, for the rest of my life. The chapter 'Reality and Imagination' is my favourite, I want to make photocopies and send it to people! :)

[Nadia]

I read this book again as an escape at lunchtime while I was doing a summer language course. When I read it this time, I paid special attention to what she had to say about art and artists. Art, in her opinion is as essentail as eating and breathing. Infact, she might say why do the first two, if you don't have the third. As is well publicized by now, JW attempted to commit suicide just a few years ago. She pulled her heavy load out of the black whole she was in to go on to give the world more great works and even a more involved public activists role in the art community. I have seen numerous interviews where she speaks about the connection between her first known work, "Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit" and her recent book, "Why Be Happy When You Can Be Normal?". She continues to live her beliefs. She believes that art is hard work, she knows that it takes time to conceive or produce a great work of art, she is a collector because she is of the belief that books and paintings are like close friends, and she wants to support the people of the art community when she can afford it. Those with millions only do so when it's trendy. This is all contained within Art Objects. It is a thought-provoking work, best read slowly, invited in, respected as you would a friend, and in the dialogue, the reader might find that something inside begins to change.

[Rozh · Rating 3 out of 5]

قسمتی از کتاب:《به باور من، هنر ریشه هایش را در ژرفای پنهان ترین جای طبیعتمان می کارد و کارکردش مانند برخی گیاهانی است که در دل زمین فرو می روند مثل هماور طبی که ریشه هایش تا ژرف ترین جای ممکن در زمین فرو می روند و مواد غذایی را آزاد می کنند. اگر هماور طبی نبود، گیاهانس که تنها روی سطح می مانند هرگز به این موار غذایی دسترسی پیدا نمی کردند.》
کتاب در کل نکات و نقد آموزنده زیاد داشت ولی ترجمه رونی نداشت مخصوصا اون اولاش...

[Hon Lady Selene · Rating 1 out of 5]

"Art takes time. To spend an hour looking at a painting is difficult. I do not only mean the crowds and the guards and the low lights and the ropes, which make me think of freak shows, I mean the thick curtain of irrelevancies that screens the painting from the viewer. Supposing we made a pact with a painting and agreed to sit down and look at it, on our own, with no distractions, for one hour. The painting should be an original, not a reproduction, and we should start with the advantage of liking it, even if only a little. What would we find? Distraction. Irritation. There are very few people who could manage an hour alone with the Mona Lisa."

I always did think this author is uselessly pretentious - now I understand - she's just a Karen that likes to complain a lot. I bet she rereads her own books over and over and over again, marvelling at her own great depth of perception that allowed for such profound thoughts.

"It may seem hopelessly old-fashioned to have returned to Bloomsbury, but I do not care about fashion, only about permanencies, and if books, music and pictures are happy enough to be indifferent to time, then so am I."

All this self-righteousness, I'm surprised she has a concept of Time so far up that high horse that reaches into outer space.

Art is not.... permanent. Nor is it indifferent to time. At the very least, one could argue not physically, looking at oil paintings from the Masters, such as the Mona Lisa, whose colours have more often than not faded. Metaphysically, I could sit here and muse on how no piece of Art is ever seen in the same way, to look at it once is one thing but one never looks at it the same way again, a second time clearly altering or adding to the perception of the piece.

It is the same with books - don't we all lament that we cannot read some particular book for the first time again?

Nothing is truly permanent. To say otherwise is puerile.

[elizabeth · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Although there are clear differences between myself and D.H. Lawrence, I share with him the suspicion that there is something immoral about central heating."

[Carissa · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book made me so angry. I hated reading it, but I forced myself to finish it. I originally picked it up because I loved the bits of it read in class. As I started it, I loved each essay and how it made me reevaluate art. However, a few essays in, I realized they were all the same. Winterson is just a bitter old lady. Every essay is a rant about how certain things are done, how nothing is any good anymore, how people don't appreciate art. Additionally, the end of an essay has nothing to do with the beginning. She goes off tangent to the point that I cannot even figure out what she's arguing.
Overall, what I got from the book is that if I don't like a piece of art, it's because I don't understand it, or because I not comfortable with how it makes me feel. She is an elitist and considers herself one of the greats.
The only reason I gave it two stars is because I like the way she can form a sentence. Her writing, when read in snippets, is beautiful. And if I had stuck with only reading a few essays, I would have rated her much higher. I did enjoy what she had to say about art for a short period of time.
I'm glad I finally finished the book, but I would not read it again. I'll go reward myself with reading a book I know I love already.

[Shae Cornelius]

actually really cool. experienced an exalted flow of nowness

[sarah ౨ৎ · Rating 5 out of 5]

1/7/2024: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
STILL HITS 🔥🔥🔥 I need to reread this every time before I try to write anything. Jeanette Winterson is to me as Nick Cave is to me, that is brilliant and dear.


3/13/2021: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Sharp, brilliant, electric, prismatic. Winterson donned her miner’s helmet and dove into the back alleys of my heart. When she reemerged it was with hands brim with an artist’s half-forgotten fears, frustrations, bright hopes and tenuous longings, now glittering in the hard light and handed back to me.

[Susan · Rating 5 out of 5]

These ten essays on art, literature, and writing are sharp, insightful, and surprising, often sparking fresh thoughts and exemplifying in their originality the author’s own observations about art. This short book was enthusiastically recommended to me by a fellow student in a writing course awhile back, and I wish we were still in touch so I could just as enthusiastically thank him for the tip.

[Joanna · Rating 1 out of 5]

I'd say Winterson should stick to the novels. She's old school naive in her criticism & I felt annoyed with her the entire time I read this.

[johannaevida · Rating 4 out of 5]

Så befriande läsning som kontrast till den idiotiska debatten kring kritiken för närvarande rasar på våra kultursidor.

[Dani Dányi · Rating 3 out of 5]

Jó sok esszé az írás művészetéről, alkotói folyamatról, olvasásról (éljen!!) és költészetről, írókról, időről, esztétikáról, műről és alkotóról és műélvezőről. Mindez kimerítő, hosszas, repetitív, ismert, kissé már közismert, néhol közhelyes, szinte kínos hogy erről ilyen sokat és hosszan... Persze nem mindenki ismeri ezt az alapvetést, manifesztót vagy evidenciát, a megszállott alkotásról, az íróról aki nyelvi médium, kísérletező, munkájának alárendeltje, totális hivatás, integritás, ilyesmik.
Winterson kimaxolja a kimaxolást - és a cím is erre mutat, mert művészet itt nem tárgy, hanem ellenszegül (ige!), lázad, különutasan szembemegy. Egyfelől ez szuper, érdekes, érdemes, olvasható és szívlelhető. Másfelől engem picit nyomaszt ez a totális elhivatottság, megszállottság, eksztázis. Nálam ez egy idő után kiváltja a nanemár-reflexet. Mégis végigolvastam, mert szakma, mert frusztrációk ide-oda de mégis érdekel az írás, és keresem a tereket, módokat, szavakat.
Csak most egy jó darabig nem szeretnék semmilyen okfejtést- pláne kényszeres küldetéstudatút- olvasni íróról és nyelvről és szavakról, nehogy alkalmatlankodva elbőgjem magam.

[Derek · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a new favorite work of criticism. Why? It’s so well written that I felt like I needed to underline hundreds of perfect sentences. It demonstrates a startling coherent and sustained critique of the Victorian novel (and realism in general) and a highly convincing defense of modernism. It offers an extension of Virginia Woolf’s seminal work, A Room of One’s Own. It explains the essence of the artistic life or project better than I’ve seen it explained anywhere else. It’s got a lot of original things to say about Shakespeare and the English Renaissance. It has many fascinating things to say about the relationship between poetry and prose. It offers important ideas not only about becoming a serious writer but also about becoming a serious reader. It’s unapologetic and informed. It also tells one a few things about how to think about market capitalism and about how to live more authentically. It says new things about TS Eliot, Dickens, Stein, Woolf, the biblical authors, Dante, etc. did I mention how beautifully written it is? She says many difficult things with a precision I’ve rarely encountered.

[Nirvana · Rating 5 out of 5]

Arts Objects is by no means law-abiding; unsurprisingly so, as Winterson herself saw no glory in staying on safer lands, where boundaries are clear and everything is put into little categories by the little convenience soldiers residing in our twenty-first century minds. the essays go back and forth and linger in the middle, somewhere between dense lessons for artists and eccentric, downright comedic poking at anything and everything (cough cough D. H. Lawrence cough). what is ever-present throughout them all is her enriching, uplifting and very much necessary perspective. By delving into the nature of art and the tradition of artists, she touches practically every scope of human existence and strips naked in front of the reader's mind, the inter-relatedness of art and society, art and sexuality, art and class, art and self. Art by nature, objects and leads the world forward, to horizons ripe for exploration.

[Shatterlings · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a series of essays about art and artists with a lot about Virginia Woolf. Some of them are most interesting than others but all are well written. It does seem like Jeanette hates tv and CD-ROMs, which is slightly odd as surely it was the tv adaptation of Oranges that made her a well known author? The one about book collecting was the most enjoyable and perhaps the most personal. I wonder if twenty years on we could do with an update to this

[incipit mania]

Incipit
Un Natale di qualche anno fa mi trovavo ad Amsterdam; nevicava e il freddo aveva trasformato i canali in losanghe di ghiaccio.
Continua su Incipitmania

[Öykü · Rating 5 out of 5]

Üzerine düşünme sürecim bitmesin istediğim için kalan on sayfayı haftalar boyunca okumadığım kitaptır. Sanatsal üretime bakışımı kökünden değiştirdi, yer yer ne kadar sığ olabildiğimle yüzleşmek zorunda kaldım. Her zamanki gibi bir Jeanette Winterson kitabı daha hayatıma doğru zamanda girdi diyebilirim yani. Yalnızca yazarın değil okurun da aslında “eserin hakkını vermek” için uğraşmak ve gelişmek mecburiyetinde olduğuna da ikna olmuş oldum. Modernistlere yeniden bakmak isteyenler için başucu, cesur yazar adayları için bir manifesto, okur için de neyi nasıl okuyacağını öğreten bir ders kitabı niteliğinde. Üslup ise romanlarındaki gibi çok çarpıcı ve coşkuluydu. İyi ki var bu kişi. İyi ki okuyabiliyoruz. Hayatımdan bu kadar seve seve kaçmamı ve vakit harcayarak, mücadele ederek okumamı sağlayan birkaç kişiden biri. Hastasıyım gerçekten.

[Kirralee · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ecstasy and Effrontery weren't exaggerations: I can't say i especially enjoyed reading this book, but it's resonated with me more strongly than other books i enjoyed reading much more.
Winterson is totally passionate and unashamedly subjective about her approach to Art, she argues for her version of it through her personal favourites, through poetic use of language, through inflammatory opinions. i found that quite offputting until chatting to my housemate about her work: she said she loved it for exactly those reasons, for that passion and clarity of opinion, and especially as a woman for taking space without asking for permission. Even within the form of an essay she is transgressing by not taking an objective stance in her writing.
What i really enjoyed about Art Objects was feeling invigorated to look again at where Art and life intersect, and an appreciation for the form of literature, and how beautiful that language can be because it is elevated beyond the language of everyday use.
I'd recommend provoking yourself by reading it

[Angie · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book, as others have said, is not necessarily revolutionary, but it made me reexamine everything I have have ever learned or taught myself about art.

It changed me.

This is going to sound really cheesy, but it's not - I mean it in the deepest sense...there is this one passage in the book that I think perfectly articulates what it is to really feel something to core, and one of those things that you feel is what love really is. It is in her passage about Complex Emotion in "The Semiotics of Sex" that really taught me something about life outside of writing. It's pages 112-114 in the paperback version.

No matter what you're seeking, I think ALL writers should read Art Objects, whether you write poetry or prose, or if you just enjoy great literature. This is a seriously overlooked book.

[Michelle Beaulieu-Morgan · Rating 5 out of 5]

I wrote this review in about ten minutes pretty much stream-of-consciousness, so apologies in advance.

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I can't review Winterson without detailing my relationship to her books, so I really have to start at the beginning here to explain my reaction and thoughts about Art Objects.

Like most folks, I was introduced to Winterson via Oranges are Not the Only Fruit. It was my sophomore year of hs. That this book made it my way was nearly miraculous: I went to a tiny rural hs in the middle of Maine in the mid-1990s. It was a weird time to be public school educated in rural Maine: all the kid's parents were conservative, but we had a lot of teachers who were back-to-the-landers or hippies of one sort or another, and I wound up with a SUPER lefty education for the time and place. All my English classes were structured around the theme "society +" so I took Society and Racism, Society and Gender, Society and Technology, etc. My biology teacher applied for a grant to teach a Women's Studies course (!!!) and as the hs's resident skater riot grrl feminist, I obviously signed up. I chose Oranges for a book report for that class; I remember also reading Carol Gilligan. Not typical for a 15 yo in rural Maine's public schools, I am sure.

When I was 21 and struggling to come out and very ill-at-ease with my life, I read Winterson's Written on the Body in a Sexuality and Lit course. I fell in love immediately, not least because that text broke such new ground around narrative voice and perspective; finally a novel about erotic love and desire that had nothing to do with heterosexuality or even plot, lol. I still make everyone read this book; the young romantic in me is always searching for something that will move me as much.

Over the years I have read most of what Winterson has written, fiction and essays and so on. I came to Art Objects with the sense that I would be impressed-- she's clearly a frickin' genius and I'm never not challenged by her words. I was also hoping to feel a little redeemed. I read Frankisstein last fall, her most recent novel, and felt a bit hammered by it. Frankisstein, I think, is a great novel if you're not someone who thinks about sex and gender and technology very much. It has so much to say on these topics. Because I've spent the better part of my life and indeed all of my adult life thinking about them, it felt heavy-handed, a bit obvious, and pedantic. Winterson's brain is so immense, she just cannot help but show off and the philosophy of the text excited me. With its obvious parallels to Frankenstein and it's unmentioned by equally obvious parallels to Orlando (Winterson's love for Woolf is well known and the subject of several essays in Art Objects), I enjoyed the kind of historical time-warp she employed, but I think she's handled it better in her other novels set in the actual past. In fact, in Art Objects, she discusses how she uses the past in her novels precisely to distance her readers from expectations about what should happen; at one point, she argues that we cannot see the present because we are too close to it, etc. etc. It's funny to me then that Frankisstein does the reverse-- it brings the past into the present and tries to hypermodernize it, outlining the features of the present and the ethics of biotech that we are dealing with without being able to even see it in its fullest range. Maybe this is why the characters in Frankisstein however did not move me-- in fact I pretty much loathed them, despite their queerness. I felt like I was the target audience for this novel, but I saw very little of myself in any of them, and every single one of them seemed like a warning.

The irony, then, is that the essays in Art Objects really make a case for refusing the easy identifications that readers seek when they approach a novel. I shouldn't identify with the characters in Frankisstein-- because Winterson has never been a writer who cares if you see yourself in the pages. That kind of identity politic is one she dismisses as belonging to Lesser Art. Art Objects is a call to arms in a way about how we approach literature, and how difficult it should be, not because an author or artist is sloppy but because truly great art and literature is so antagonizingly precise that we must consider every word and stroke to get to meaning. In other words, we should identify with the feeling or sense experience, but not necessarily the particular details of plot or character.

This seems to skirt dangerously close to universalism and if we know anything in 2020, we should know that arguments about universalism are BAD. And yet... I was completely compelled by her argument throughout, insofar that it made me really truly want to *dig* into art and literature that refuses-- or objects-- to facile gleanings of meaning. I kept underlining passages that made me want to really become a better writer and artist, that made me want to cut cut cut to the bone of my story in my art. The essays eschew memoir and autobiography for the sake of memoir and autobiography, which is a hard pill to swallow in an age where so much good writing is happening in the genres of memoir and autobiography. But I appreciated so much the call to something more. It struck me that the things I loved so much about Forna's Happiness are the things Winterson celebrates in Art Objects-- slowness, exactness, lack of plot, a call to humanity.

Anyway, this is less of a review than an autobiography so I probably need to re-read the essays :P

[Karith Amel · Rating 5 out of 5]

I need to own this book. And read it often.

Its exploration of art, what it is and what it does, is inspiring and challenging. It re-awakens my longing to be a person who lives a life of wakefulness and meaning -- a person who sacrifices much to attain the pearl of great price, and great beauty.

This is an excellent text. And my appreciation is certainly not diminished by the fact that its author finds much of the same life and power in Virginia Woolf's texts as I do.

[Nasar · Rating 5 out of 5]

”The healing power of art is not a rhetorical fantasy. Fighting to keep language, language became my sanity and my strength. It still is, and I know of no pain that art cannot assuage. For some, music, for some, pictures, for me, primarily, poetry, whether found in poems or in prose, cuts through noise and hurt, opens the wound to clean it, and then gradually teaches it to heal itself. Wounds need to be taught to heal themselves.”

Art is a slippery thing to talk about, even more to write about. You feel like you are starting to edge close to it with a phrase, a sentence, a meandering paragraph, and then, by the end of that arc, you see the folly of your presumption. It slips away into that sacred space which doesn't allow language to reign, especially language that doesn't elevate itself out of the mire of everyday talk. Oscar Wilde suggested that to be a worthy literary critic, one has to worship at the temple of Art with the devotion of an artist. Jeanette Winterson, in these essays concerning Art in its many-dimensional wonder, has managed to betray that devotion (being herself a novelist) and thus blessed a marriage of Art and Words that rests on a harmony rarely encountered. In these inspired pieces, words glide over the page with a grace befitting only the very best of poets, and their meaning follows close leaping along with insight, and together they achieve in the mind of this humble reader something akin to ecstasy. Ecstasy, which the author argues, is the rightful domain of Art.

‘Imagination and Reality’ is the finest of them all. It is the kind of essay one yearns to learn by heart, not just in spirit, but in the very words it is rendered. "Children who are born into a tired world as batteries of new energy are plugged into the system as soon as possible and gradually drained away. At the time when they become adult and conscious they are already depleted and prepared to accept a world of shadows. Those who have kept their spirit find it hard to nourish it and between the ages of twenty and thirty, many are successfully emptied of all resistance. I do not think it an exaggeration to say that most of the energy of most of the people is being diverted into a system which destroys them. Money is no antidote. If the imaginative life is to be renewed it needs its own coin." People deprived of imagination still need a vision, being human, so what they resort to is a 'dead vision'. This consists of labeling people with an imaginative bent as deluded. But, she writes in response, that 'to see outside of a dead vision is not an optical illusion.' And the vision that helps one see past the dead vision of the unimaginative is made accessible through Art. Art is visionary. “We are naturally suspicious of faculties that we do not ourselves possess and we do not quite believe that the poet can read the sermons in stones or the painter know the purple that bees love. Still we are drawn to books and pictures and music, finding in ourselves an echo of their song, finding in ourselves an echo of their sensibility, an answering voice through the racket of the day.
Art is for us a reality beyond now. An imaginative reality that we need. The reality of art is the reality of the imagination.”

Ruminating further on the 'reality of the imagination' and how an artist fleshes it out, she writes, “The reality of the imagination leaves out nothing. It is the most complete reality that we can know. Imagination takes in the world of sense experience, and rather than trading it for a world of symbols, delights in it for what it is. The artist is physical and it is in the work of true artists in any medium, that we find the most moving and the most poignant studies of the world that we can touch and feel. It is the writer, the painter, and not the realist, who is intimate with the material world, who knows its smells and tastes because they are fresh in her nostrils, full in her mouth. What her hand touches, she feels.”

The book is endlessly quotable, having lines that burn on the page with a glow fiery enough to melt minds and hearts of the coldest kind. “Naked I came into the world, but brush strokes cover me, language raises me, music rhythms me. Art is my rod and staff, my resting place and shield, and not mine only, for art leaves nobody out. Even those from whom art has been stolen away by tyranny, by poverty, begin to make it again. If the arts did not exist, at every moment, someone would begin to create them, in song, out of dust and mud, and although the artifacts might be destroyed, the energy that creates them is not destroyed.” With regards to the growing importance of machines, alongside the fading vision of our essential humanness, she writes in a moment of impatience, “As machines become more delicate and human beings coarser, will antennae and fibreoptic claim for themselves what was uniquely human? Not rationality, not logic, but that strange network of fragile perception, that means I can imagine, that teaches me to love, a lodging of recognition and tenderness where I sometimes know the essential beat that rhythms life.”

Many essay collections might further adorn the rather disorganized bookshelf of my mind, but this one would remain there never gathering dust, as I intend to keep returning to what I feel, in the words of Emerson, was already mine.

[Kati Stevens · Rating 4 out of 5]

She is self-assured as fuck, so most of what she writes is convincing.