Spero’s Curses* - Am MIT spezialisierte KI-Forschung

Spero’s Curses*

MIGNON NIXON

NEIN, I will not challenge

the ancient Mystery, the Oracle

—H. D., Helen in Egypt, Book 5 (1961)

Homage to New York (1958), the work of a thirty-two-year-old, Chicago-trained
ﬁgurative painter, parodies the mute bravado of the New York School. “I did this
painting,” Nancy Spero observes, “with a tombstone right in the middle, and then
on each side are two heads with dunce caps and rabbit-like ears, and their tongues
are sticking out. And on this phallic-like tombstone . . . are the initials of the
artists who were prevalent then. . . . On top I wrote, ‘I do not challenge,’ and then
‘Homage to New York’ below.”1

Produced, coincidentally, around the same time Marcel Duchamp cast a dead-
pan self-portrait inscribed With My Tongue in My Cheek (1959)—a work often
interpreted as a cunning critique of Abstract Expressionism’s heroic posturing—
Spero’s parody conversely is expressionistic in tone, mimicking in its liquid, gestural
application of paint the self-conscious performance of alienated, dumb virility that
had become a defining characteristic of late-modernist painting. Duchamp’s
tongue-in-cheek caricature renders the artist inarticulate, autistically self-silenced,
gagged by his own tongue. In a gesture of deﬁance that parodies the urgency of self-
expression in a mode of painting whose funeral Homage would celebrate, Spero’s

*
The research for this essay was undertaken on a Clark Fellowship in 2006. I would like to thank
Jon Bird for granting me access to unpublished material and for his encouragement and tactful advice.
Special gratitude is due to Nancy Spero for taking the time to talk with me about her work.
1.
Nancy Spero, “Jo Anna Isaak in Conversation with Nancy Spero,” in Jon Bird, Jo Anna Isaak,
Sylvère Lotringer, Nancy Spero (London: Phaidon, 1996), P. 9. It has been suggested that Spero plays on
the phrase “I do not challenge” from H. D.’s lyric narrative Helen in Egypt, anticipating her later strategy
of quoting from literary texts in the Codex Artaud (1969–72) and H. D. Fragments (1979). As Helen in
Egypt was published in 1961, Jedoch, it seems that Spero’s use of the phrase instead functions retro-
spectively as an allusion to this poem, in which Helen narrates her own tragic history. "NEIN, I will not
challenge/the ancient Mystery, the Oracle,” she declares. Helen does, Jedoch, address all those
“brothers” who “fought, forgetting women” and “died imprecating her”—who sacriﬁced their lives to a
fantasy. H. D., Helen in Egypt (1961; New York: New Directions, 1974).

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OCTOBER

twin ﬁgures, tongues dangling listlessly
from their mouths, dramatize instead the
author’s own exclusion from speech,
underscoring the futility of the very ges-
ture that is being enacted. In contrast to
the painter s Homage imprecates, WHO
effectively deﬁed the cultural authority of
logos with the mute gestures of abstrac-
tion—and in contrast to Duchamp, whose
punning tongue is loose enough to lam-
poon even when tied—Spero’s “I” is that
of the subject whose rebellion falls on
deaf ears. This is the voice of the silenced
subject that yet speaks.

For the painting is vocal.2 It deﬁles
symbolic space with initials and carica-
tural figuration, mimicking a routine
gesture of social alienation. It marks the
absence of its author, a woman artist (nicht
Spero, or N. Spero, or N. S., but Nancy
Spero), from such rosters as the “phallic-
like tombstone” displays. Misplacing the
signature—shifted from the corner of the
canvas to be emblazoned on the chests of
the twin message bearers with their ﬂat,
ﬂapping tongues—the painting performs,
but also alters, an ordinary function of
ﬁrst-person voice and of signature, which “by deﬁnition,” Jacques Derrida observes,
“implies the actual or empirical nonpresence of the signer.”3 Here, the author
declares her absence not only from the document she has signed—a document

Nancy Spero. Homage to New York (I Do Not
Challenge). 1958. Courtesy Galerie Lelong,
New York. All photographs by David Reynolds.

2.
The voice and its silencing assume the greatest signiﬁcance in Spero’s art. As Mladen Dolar has
observed, following Lacan’s analysis of the voice as an objet petit a, the voice is split between reverbera-
tion and signiﬁcation, and so ensures that the system of language cannot be “isolated as a sphere on its
eigen (‘the symbolic’).” Mladen Dolar, A Voice and Nothing More (Cambridge, Masse.: MIT Press, 2006),
P. 145. Nor is the voice restricted, Dolar reminds us, to “linguistic voices,” or phonemes, but also
encompasses “all the non-voices, from coughing and hiccups to babbling, screaming and laughing, Und
singing.” These vocal nonvoices might seem to exist “outside the linguistic structure,” but Dolar claims
ansonsten: not only that “the voice untamed by structure is not external to linguistics” but that it is
“particularly apt to embody the structure as such.” For voices untamed by structure, the nonvoice and
the voice-as-object, are “aiming at meaning.” The scream and the song, at opposite ends of the spec-
trum of vocal articulacy, embody a “zero-point” in Dolar’s scheme: “the structure at its minimal,”
“meaning as such, beyond the discernible meaning” (P. 32). In Spero’s work, the tongue and the
scream are vocal in protesting their own exclusion as linguistic voices.
3.
University of Chicago Press, 1982), P. 328.

Jacques Derrida, “Signature, Ereignis, Context,” in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago:

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Spero’s Curses

created for the express purpose of announcing the existence of the author who
inscribes it with her signature—but also from a select class of artists so well known
that their initials alone are adequate to represent them. These include a number
of female painters.4 The circle of artists to which Homage refers is deﬁned, Es
seems, not by the exclusion of women per se, but by the abstraction of difference.5

Travestying homosocial rituals of tribute, Spero mocks the dynamics of infat-
uation and rivalry, aspiration and antagonism, that deﬁned the New York School,
like many another avant-garde movement, as an Oedipal affair. The act of
homage, capable of concealing aggression behind the mask of excessive esteem,
historically constitutes an indispensable rhetorical device for the artist as a young
man. For the artist as a young woman, In 1958, homage, played straight, could
only reinforce a subordinate role. Played derisively, Jedoch, homage could have
subversive effects: it could, as Freud observed of jokes, promote the deﬁance of
deference.6 Implicit in the classic Oedipal scenario, in which the artist-disciple
aspires to unseat the master and occupy his place, is the hostility that shadows
masculine rituals of tribute. The disciple sublimates competition with the master,
or rivalry with brother artists, through rituals of homage, often by incorporating
signature devices. Quelling appropriation through quotation, turning artistic
theft into respectful borrowing, the act of homage nevertheless serves notice on
its object, marking the object of esteem as a target of emulation and desire, Aber
also of envy and aggression. For to pay homage, whether abjectly or aggressively—
even ambivalently—is to assert one’s place in discourse. It is to speak, even if by
mouthing another’s words; to signify, even if by copying.

Homage to New York invokes instead the contempt that burns from exclusion.
If the act of homage lends itself to parody—if its ﬁdelity of emulation is suscepti-
ble to the betrayal of mockery—Spero’s Homage is a parody of homage itself. Mit
her mocking disavowal of agency—comically mouthing the subordinate’s refrain,
“I do not challenge,” even while symbolically burying a generation of artist rivals—

On late modernism and sexual difference, see Anne Middleton Wagner, Three Artists (Three Women):

4.
Amei Wallach identiﬁes the “initials of artists all-too-often cited in ARTnews (including Lee
Krasner, Grace Hartigan, and Helen Frankenthaler, as well as Robert Motherwell, Jackson Pollock, Und
Mark Rothko)” in “Hysterical Men, Castrated Women: Nancy’s Spero’s Exquisite Corpse,” in Nancy
Spero: Selected Works from Codex Artaud 1971–72, exh. cat. (Dartmouth, Masse.: University Art Gallery,
University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth, 2001), P. 9.
5.
Modernism and the Art of Hesse, Krasner, and O’Keeffe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996).
Sigmund Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905), in The Standard Edition of the
6.
Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Hrsg. and trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press,
1953–1964), Bd. 8. A generation earlier, in riposte not to the New York School but to their European
idols, the Surrealists in exile, Louise Bourgeois dramatized the potential of mock deference in avant-
garde sexual politics, posing with Joan Miró for a dinner-party tableau on the theme of homage.
Cloaked in the very mantle of the Surrealist movement, the banner of the 1947 Surrealist exhibition,
Miró sits barefoot upon an armchair throne, his feet resting on books about his “master,” Picasso.
Flanked by the kneeling Bourgeois, her hands raised in tribute, Miró plays the part of the infantile idol
to Bourgeois’s own subversive supplicant. “I do not challenge” might make a ﬁtting caption for this
doubly disingenuous scene. For a discussion of this photograph, see my Fantastic Reality: Louise
Bourgeois and a Story of Modern Art (Cambridge, Masse.: MIT Press, 2005), Kerl. 1.

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OCTOBER

Spero ﬁnds her tongue in derision. It is a strategy with a ﬁrm feminist pedigree,
recalling Virginia Woolf’s advice to women, “to remember, learn from, and use
derision, of which they had long been objects.”7 Naming derision one of the
estimable “unpaid teachers” of women, Woolf counsels us to apply its lessons to
patriarchal hierarchies and rituals of deference in every sphere, even if, Wann
voiced by a woman, derision invites “ridicule, obscurity, and censure.”8 In keeping
with Woolf’s injunction to deride, and putting on stark display the very emotions
the act of homage disavows, Homage to New York is a curse. And homage itself,
Spero suggests, is also a kind of curse. To pay homage, she implies, is to curse
one’s own inferior position. It is to curse cultural rituals of mastery and rivalry in
the very act of conforming to them. It is to curse the hierarchy in which one seeks
a foothold (through self-abasement) and to curse one’s own obedience to that
Befehl. It is a cursed business, more so for women, who have no claim on the disci-
ple’s share. No wonder, Dann, that Woolf recommends derision as preferable, “for
psychological reasons,” to obsequy.9 Cursing the curse of homage, Spero made
Homage to New York the token of her adherence to the discipline of derision, and so
began a career in ridicule, obscurity, and censure.

she whom you cursed
was but the phantom and the shadow thrown
of a reﬂection;

—H. D., Helen in Egypt, Book 1

In 1959, the year after Homage, Spero and her husband, the painter Leon
Golub, decided to “jump over New York” for the sake of their “artistic survival”
and moved to Paris with their two young sons.10 Like Golub, Spero considered
herself, as a ﬁgurative painter, alienated from the New York scene.11 The two had

Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas (1938), in A Room of One’s Own/Three Guineas, Hrsg. Michèle Barrett

7.
(London: Penguin Books, 1993), P. 204.
Ebenda., P. 205.
8.
9.
Ebenda. See also Rosalyn Deutsche, “Louise Lawler’s Rude Museum,” in Twice Untitled and Other
Bilder (looking back), Hrsg. Helen Molesworth, exh. cat. (Columbus, Ohio and Cambridge, Masse.:
Wexner Center for the Arts and MIT Press, 2006): “Woolf’s classic essay of ethico-political thought
counts derision among the great ‘un-paid’ teachers of women, educating them about the behavior and
motives of human beings, um, das ist, Psychologie, a ﬁeld that Woolf, unlike many leftist critics today,
did not separate from that of the political," P. 123.
10.
Spero, in Irene Sosa, Woman as Protagonist: The Art of Nancy Spero, documentary video, 1993;
Spero, quoted in Elaine A. King, Nancy Spero: The Black Paris Paintings 1959–1966, exh. cat. (Pittsburgh:
Hewlett Gallery, Carnegie-Mellon University, 1985), P. 10.
11.
“New York was the center of the art world and Abstract Expressionism was so powerful then. In
Chicago we were always aware of New York. There was a theater group at the time called Second City; Wenn
you were in Chicago, you knew you were in the Second City. Auch, I was very resistant to New York
because I was a ﬁgurative artist.” “Jo Anna Isaak in Conversation with Nancy Spero," P. 9.

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Spero. Lovers VIII. 1964. Private Collection.

met as students at the Art Institute of Chicago in the mid 1940s, und in 1951,
when Spero was twenty-five, they married. “And that’s when all the troubles
began,” Spero once drily remarked.12 She knew Paris from her student days, hav-
ing studied at the École des Beaux-Arts and been recognized, she archly recalls, als
“a brilliant student of André L’Hote,” who “put together a Salon des Indépendants
at the Grand Palais, and he put me in it.” “And then I got married and I had a
Kind. . . . Er [Golub] was going out and being collected, and I was busy with the
Kinder, killing myself painting.”13

“The art world in Paris,” Spero claims, “opened for me as it hadn’t in
Chicago. Perhaps because I wasn’t characterized as ‘wife’ or ‘mother.’”14 In Paris,
where the couple’s third son was born in 1961, Spero worked intensively on a
series she called the Black Paintings, opaque, oneiric, sensuous vignettes of re-
cumbent couples—lovers, mothers and children—bodies entwined, enamored,

Spero, in Sosa, Woman as Protagonist: The Art of Nancy Spero.
12.
Spero, as quoted in Wallach, “Hysterical Men, Castrated Women," P. 7.
13.
14.
Nancy Spero, “Creation and Pro-creation,” from “Forum: On Motherhood, Art and Apple Pie,”
M/E/A/N/I/N/G 12 (1992), S. 38–40. Reprinted in Bird et al., Nancy Spero, P. 118. “I was able to show
my work in different galleries, and people were receptive to what I was doing. I had my ﬁrst one-
woman exhibition at the Galerie Breteau in 1962 and continued to exhibit there until 1968.” Quoted
in King, The Black Paris Paintings 1959–1966, P. 10.

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OCTOBER

entranced. Noch, the artist remarks, “These ﬁgures were meant to be about isola-
tion. The ﬁgures are related and yet they are not.” Spero painted late into the
night while her young sons slept. Enveloped in darkness, the scenes revealed, als
the artist observed, “things that happen in the night.”15 Each slowly worked canvas
began with a bright palette that steadily, inexorably darkened over until only
ghostly ﬁgures remained.16 The Black Paintings portray the disappearance of the
visible world in deepening shadow, plunging ﬁgures into nocturnal blindness, Das
faltering state in which sight reluctantly cedes to a fumbling touch. To portray, In
painting, a blindness, is to evoke the losses exacted by time, but also the contin-
gency of connection. Figures face toward each other across the darkness, but gazes
fail to meet. The intimacy of touch conceals, but also conﬁrms, a distance, reach-
ing into those shadowy depths to which the other, however close at hand, Ist
palpably lost.

These scenes of sexual and familial intimacy, recording incidents that take
place in the night, also recall nocturnal journeys into infantile states, in which
contours of self and other, body and object, space and time, are blurred. Der
estrangement of the couple, or of parent and child, and even of the self from
selbst, under the inﬂuence of darkness, schlafen, and dreams, is both ampliﬁed and
remedied by the Black Paintings, in which few ﬁgures are left alone. Hier, night is
a medium in which existential alienation and sensual intimacy converge. In
mood, the Black Paintings, if skeptical of intimacy, encompass every shade of emo-
tional proximity, from the watchful silence of a guardian of sleep, to the tender
companionability of a couple, to the longing attraction of lovers, to the gray
fatigue, stoically endured, of a sleepless mother. Despair, melancholia, and rage,
Jedoch, remained elusive, at least until the second winter in Paris when, “sud-
denly in the midst of doing these Black Paintings,” Spero recalls, “I did a few
works on paper and they were violent . . . and angry. I was frustrated with my
position.”17

“There’s something very angry,” ventured Jon Bird in an interview with the
artist, “about these images of mothers and children and lovers and suddenly in
the middle here’s this ‘fuck you’ image with a tongue out.”18 In a drawing entitled
Les Anges, Merde, Fuck You (1960), those words ﬂoat in white script on a page
scoured with black ink. Sweeping across the sheet like ghostly furies, trailing the
phrase “les anges” [the angels], are three disembodied skulls whose mask-like
pallor, vacant, dark eye sockets, and gaping mouths are animated only by a bright
blood-red tongue issuing from the rictus of the middle ﬁgure. “What I did to
rationalize this,” Spero recalls, “I harked back to medieval art. . . . I thought I

Quoted in ibid., P. 11.
On Spero’s technique in the Black Paintings, see “Jo Anna Isaak in Conversation with Nancy

15.
16.
Spero," P. 10, and King, The Black Paris Paintings 1959–1966, P. 11.
17.
18.

Nancy Spero, interview with Jon Bird, Oktober 25 Und 26, 1986.
Jon Bird, interview with Nancy Spero, Oktober 25 Und 26, 1986.

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Spero’s Curses

remembered in the Apocalypse of Gerona, the drowning ﬁgures had their tongues
sticking out.”19

Three little heads, three pairs of blank unseeing eye holes, three voracious
mouths, and one protruding bloody tongue—a nocturnal scene veiled in shadows.
Even in an artistic milieu immersed in existentialist philosophy and the raw vio-
lence of art brut, this spectre of maternal aggression prompted Spero to offer up “a
rationale.” She found it not in art brut but in the Christian tradition that outsider
art itself so often invokes for its imagery of the subject in extremis. For the cultural
repression of maternal ambivalence is so complete that maternal anger takes on,
in this rare representation, the annihilating force of a maternal apocalypse.20

Reﬂecting on the place of writing in Spero’s art, Benjamin Buchloh has
underscored “the contorted conditions of articulation” dramatized in her use of
Wörter. Les Anges, Merde, Fuck You exempliﬁes what Buchloh has described as Spero’s

Spero, interview with Jon Bird, Oktober 25 Und 26, 1986.
19.
20.
In her classic reﬂection on the subjectivity of the artist as mother, Adrienne Rich recalls that
“for years I believed I should never have been anyone’s mother, that because I felt my own needs acutely
and often expressed them violently, I was Kali, Medea, the sow that devours her farrow, the unwomanly
woman in ﬂight from motherhood, a Nietzschean monster.” Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood
as Experience and Institution (New York: W. W. Norton, 1976), Kerl. 1, “Anger and Tenderness," P. 32.

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Spero. Les Anges, Merde, Fuck You. 1960. Courtesy Galerie Lelong, New York.

OCTOBER

“deep involvement with the structure and morphology of the grafﬁto as much as
with its poetical/textual equivalent of written profanity”—further intensiﬁed, as so
often in Spero’s work, by its lingual/vocal equivalent, what Mladen Dolar calls
the nonvoice.21 Resorting to grafﬁti and to profanity—two forms of symbolic vio-
lence, two types of broken language—to evoke the subjects of maternal anxiety
and aggression, Spero aligns the mother with the mythical outsiders of avant-
garde history, ﬁgures of transgressive identiﬁcation such as the primitive, Die
hysteric, and the criminal. Adding to this cast of social misﬁts the woman artist as
Mutter, she disavows the conventional role the mother is assigned by the avant-
garde as the very symbol of paternal law—a figure portrayed perhaps most
histrionically by the Surrealists, WHO, in an open letter of 1927, decried, with their
own burst of profanity, “those bitches who become, in every country, the good
mothers, good sisters, good wives, those plagues, those parasites of every sentiment
and every love.”22

“Mothers don’t write, they are written,” Susan Suleiman has remarked.23 Spero’s
curses—penned in a cursive, “feminine” script—write the mother by cursing the
curses called down on mothers and the social restrictions that constrain mothers
from speaking freely. Spero’s writing is characterized, as Buchloh has observed, von

the continuous oscillation between retentive disgust and elated dis-
charge between which all grafﬁti gestures—authentic or consciously
adopted—hover: disgusted with the conditions of conﬁnement and
the evident absence of the linguistic competence to articulate oneself
publicly, a condition that condemns the speaker precisely to the clan-
destine forms of speech, and elated at ﬁnding any means and sites of
articulation at all in an overall regime of interdiction.24

This is an apt description of the dynamics of Les Anges, Merde, Fuck You, a work in
which “disgust with the conditions of conﬁnement” is overpowering. Hier, “the
evident absence of the linguistic competence to articulate oneself publicly” is an
Wirkung, precisely, of “being characterized as ‘wife’ or ‘mother.’” The splitting off of
the maternal role from public discourse produces “a condition”—motherhood—
“that condemns the speaker” to “clandestine forms of speech,” an interdiction
that is never more aggressively enforced than when that utterance is an expression
of maternal ambivalence.

21.
Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “Spero’s Other Traditions,” in Inside the Visible: An Elliptical Traverse of
Twentieth-Century Art in, von, and from the Feminine, Hrsg. M. Catherine de Zegher (Cambridge, Masse.: MIT
Drücken Sie, 1996), P. 242; Dolar, A Voice and Nothing More (see footnote 2).
22.
“Hands Off Love!” (1927), an open letter against the wife of Charlie Chaplin, signed by thirty-
two male Surrealists, quoted in Susan Rubin Suleiman, Subversive Intent: Gender, Politik, and the Avant-
Garde (Cambridge, Masse.: Harvard University Press, 1990), P. 165.
23.
Susan Rubin Suleiman, “Writing and Motherhood,” in The (M)other Tongue: Essays in Feminist
Psychoanalytic Interpretation, Hrsg. Shirley Nelson Garner, Claire Kahane, Madelon Sprengnether (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1985), P. 356.
24.

Buchloh, “Spero’s Other Traditions," P. 242 (Hervorhebung im Original).

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Spero’s Curses

“A manifesto of countersublimation,” Buchloh declares Spero’s work, eins
that coincides historically with “modernism’s climactic project of demythifying
painting.”25 Spero’s painting, Jedoch, bears directly upon another cultural trend,
the re-mythifying of women, and the maternal feminine in particular, in postwar
Kultur. After World War II, in reaction to the expansion of women’s social roles in
the war effort, a cult of maternal domesticity restored women to the home, reviving
the “moral motherhood” of the nineteenth century, as the British psychoanalyst
Juliet Mitchell has noted.26 This postwar return to order was accompanied by con-
cessions of authority in designated “women’s spheres,” and by a fresh recognition
of what Mitchell refers to as “women’s psychological signiﬁcance,” born of the
advances of feminism earlier in the century. The “psychological signiﬁcance” of
Frauen, Jedoch, was seen to reside pre-eminently in the maternal role, as is amply
demonstrated by a period classic, Helene Deutsch’s 1945 Studie, The Psychology of
Frauen. The “chief characteristic” of motherhood, observed Deutsch—psychoana-
lyst, writer, and working mother that she was—“is tenderness.” “All the aggression
and sexual sensuality in the woman’s personality are suppressed and diverted by
this central emotional expression of motherliness.”27 At the very moment, Dort-
Vordergrund, when maternal subjectivity emerged for the ﬁrst time as a focus of psycho-
analytic study, it was reconﬁned to the condition of normative femininity.28 The
psychic struggle to contend with the trends of anxiety and aggression—the waves
of tenderness (les anges), ﬂashes of aggression (merde), and tide of disgust (fuck you)
Spero highlights, echoing the poet Adrienne Rich’s allusion to “waves of love and
hate” in which a mother may ﬁnd herself “caught up”—was suppressed.29

Ebenda.
Juliet Mitchell, Mad Men and Medusas: Reclaiming Hysteria and the Effect of Sibling Relationships on

25.
26.
the Human Condition (London: Allen Lane, 2000), P. 189.
27.
Helene Deutsch, The Psychology of Women (1945), as quoted in Suleiman, “Writing and
Motherhood," P. 353. Rozsika Parker has observed that “Deutsch was well aware of the role of aggres-
sion in mothering.” Her aim was to align that aggression with the protective role of the mother and to
counter the caricature of the mother as dominated by penis envy, or masculine aggression turned
against the child. For Parker, “the tragic irony for Deutsch’s standing as a theorist” is that in proposing
that “maternal aggression is prompted not by overprotectiveness in response to destructive penis envy,
but by protectiveness,” she was “inevitably drawn into producing a maternal norm.” Rozsika Parker,
Mother Love/Mother Hate: The Power of Maternal Ambivalence (New York: Basic Books, 1995), S. 150, 151.
28. Melanie Klein had placed the mother-child relationship at the center of the psychoanalytic the-
ory of object relations, but it was the subjectivity of the child, not the mother, that she privileged. A
central theme of The Psychology of Women is a perceived conﬂict between feminine narcissism and moth-
erly altruism. In what Suleiman refers to as Deutsch’s menopausal theory of artistic creation, the puta-
tive incompatibility of selﬂess maternity and selﬁsh creativity is most readily resolved by deferring seri-
ous creative work until the work of mothering is done. (Suleiman, “Writing and Motherhood," P. 358).
Das, Natürlich, is an advance on the patriarchal construction of woman as deﬁned exclusively by the
maternal role. Trotzdem, even apart from the severe limitation that suspending creative work for a period of
years would impose, the implication of Deutsch’s theory is that a woman in the maternal role lacks,
precisely, “the linguistic competence to articulate oneself publicly.”
29.
“To be caught up in waves of love and hate, jealousy, even of the child’s childhood; hope for its
maturity; longing to be free of responsibility, tied by every ﬁber of one’s being.” Rich, Of Woman Born,
journal entry, Mai 1965, P. 22.

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OCTOBER

Summoning love and death, and tracking the tender, wishful, fearful,
mournful, sexual, resentful, occasionally violent fantasies of a mother “killing her-
self” painting while her children sleep, the works on paper entitled Fuck You or
Merde throw light into dark corners of maternal subjectivity. The “drowning ﬁg-
ures” with their tongues sticking out might be taken for children swept away on
waves of maternal rage, or as, selbst, maternal furies, avenging injury—or as
apotropaic angels, guardians of the night. What is plain is that “all the aggression
and sexual sensuality in the woman’s personality” here is not “suppressed and
diverted” by “motherliness,” but brought to bear on a maternal subjectivity inextri-
cably bound up with the dangers of regression, suggesting that the artist as
mother might have privileged access to malevolent as well as solicitous states of
feeling. The psychic resources of expression, Spero suggests, expand and deepen
with the maternal role. The maternal subject as artist might be supremely well
equipped to access the regressive trend that modern art has pursued in myths of
the primitive, the outsider, the cultural other. For the further implication of
Spero’s gesture is that the artist/mother might be psychically capable—even
within “an overall regime of interdiction” that denies the very existence of the
maternal subject as a speaking subject—of representing, and exploiting, the vicis-
situdes of maternal ambivalence. Her protestation—les anges, merde, fuck you—is
that “far from being in contradiction with creativity . . . motherhood can . . . favor
a certain feminine creation.” It “makes passion circulate,” in Julia Kristeva’s evoca-
tive phrase.30

As Spero narrates it, the pattern of her work as an artist shadowed the rou-
tines of her work as a mother. She painted at night while her children slept. Her
intimate theme was the recumbent couple. The nocturnal rituals of painting,
devoted to a slow, patient labor of making, nurtured the motif of the sensual dyad,
but were, the artist recalls, interrupted by occasional bursts of rage when, “sud-
denly in the midst of doing these Black Paintings,” she found herself making a
“fuck you one.”

so they fought, forgetting women,
hero to hero, sworn brother and lover,
and cursing Helen through eternity.

—H. D., Helen in Egypt, Book 1

In 1964, Spero and Golub returned to the United States and settled in New
York. Confronted with the escalating American involvement in Vietnam, beide
artists assumed an obligation to respond. Acknowledging that “we weren’t in Paris

Julia Kristeva, “Un nouveau type d’intellectuel: Le dissident,” Tel Quel 74 (Winter 1977), P. 6, als

30.
cited in Suleiman, “Writing and Motherhood," P. 366.

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Spero’s Curses

as expatriates anymore,” Spero abruptly abandoned the “elegiac mode” of the
Black Paintings.31 “I started working rapidly on paper,” she recalls, “angry works,
often scatological, manifestos against a senseless obscene war, a war that my sons
(too young then) could have been called up for. Those works were exorcisms to
keep the war away.”32 Spero now permanently rejected the medium of painting on
canvas and worked exclusively on paper, wetting and scouring the fragile, wrin-
kled sheets with gouache and ink, generating a cartoon-like imagery of ferocious,
apocalyptic violence.33 “I started off painting the bomb and total destruction. ICH
was so impatient I would spit and rub. I even rubbed holes into the paper,” she
recalls.34 Abrading, soaking, and scarring the page, she grabbed Dada’s paper tail,
“demythifying” painting to deplore war.

“My anger really ﬂowed with the War Series . . . thinking as a mother,” Spero
recalls. “Everything burst out.”35 Taking an active part in resistance to the Vietnam
Krieg, Spero exhibited her work in antiwar shows and beneﬁts. Yet the imagery she
devised hardly complies with conventional expectations of what a woman artist,
thinking as a mother, might produce. “In the War Series,” she narrates, “angry
screaming heads in clouds of bombs spew and vomit poison onto the victims
below. Phallic tongues emerge from human heads at the tips of the penile exten-
sions of the bomb or helicopter blades.”36 Spero explicitly connects both the
imagery and the emotional stimulus of those few small paintings on paper enti-
tled Fuck You or Merde to the War Series, suggesting that the anger she felt at being
“characterized as ‘wife’ or ‘mother,’” and ignored by the art world, was incorpo-
rated in her public denunciation of a war whose obscenities she protested in part
“as a mother.”37

With the War Series, Spero enacts, in effect, an apotropaic inversion of the
maternal apocalypse of the Les Anges, Merde, Fuck You. Here maternal rage is
unleashed on an external threat and is invoked as a protection, an “exorcism to
keep the war away.” It began with “black angels—nightmare ﬁgures swooping
down with screaming heads,” the artist recalls, and metamorphosed into a graphic
phantasmagoria of technological warfare. In Les Anges—La Bombe (1966), Die

Quoted in Wallach, “Hysterical Men, Castrated Women," P. 11. Spero refers to the “elegiac

31.
mode” of the Black Paintings in an unpublished statement of 1982.
32.
Spero, “Creation and Pro-creation,”S. 118–19.
“I was working exclusively on paper; part of my resistance as an artist in the War Series was a deci-
33.
sion not to work any more on canvas. I shifted completely to work on paper.” Margit Rowell and Sylvère
Lotringer, “A Conversation with Nancy Spero,” in Antonin Artaud: Works on Paper, Hrsg. Margit Rowell,
exh. cat. (New York: Museum of Modern Art 1996), P. 157.
Quoted in Wallach, “Hysterical Men, Castrated Women,”S. 11–12.
34.
Artist’s statement, unpublished, no date.
35.
Spero, “Creation and Pro-creation," P. 119.
36.
37.
“Jo Anna Isaak in Conversation with Nancy Spero," P. 10: Spero observes “the Fuck You series of
works on paper, which were very angry . . . are a precursor of the War Series; they are screaming and
their tongues are sticking out.” To this, Isaak replies: “Just like Caliban, the ﬁrst thing you do when you
start to speak is to curse.”

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OCTOBER

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Spero. Les Anges—La Bombe. 1966. Collection Rhode Island School of Design.

sheet is washed blood-red.38 “I used bloody color,” Spero recalls, “and literally a lot
of spit with the gouache paint.”39 Here the rusty tone bleeds into the body of a
scythe-shaped bomb, a hydra-headed explosive cloud propelling bodies, tongues
screaming bloody murder, onto the ground. A blue mushroom cloud ﬁlls the page
in Sperm Bomb (1966), its contour traced by the comet-like tails of shrieking heads
whose gaping mouths spew out the furious phrases—“Merde,” “Fuck you”—in a
rain of profanity, while needle-stiff bodies litter the ground below. The medium of
gouache diluted with spit and applied to ultra-thin sheets confers on some draw-
ings an eerie, incongruous delicacy, as in The Male Bomb (1966), with its erect
penis, grotesquely extended, ejaculating murderously, multiplied in an army of
dagger-sharp tongues hurtling to the ground from the watery nimbus of a pale
mushroom cloud. “The angrier Spero got,” one writer has observed, “the more . . .
vaporous grew her imagery.”40

Spero, quoted in King, The Black Paris Paintings, P. 13.
Spero, quoted in Robert Enright, “On the Other Side of the Mirror: A Conversation with Nancy

38.
39.
Spero,” Border Crossings 19, NEIN. 4 (2000), P. 30.
40.

King, The Black Paris Paintings, P. 18.

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Spero. Top: Sperm Bomb. 1966. Private Collection.
Bottom: The Male Bomb. 1966. Collection Crown Gallery, Brussels.

OCTOBER

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Spero. Male Bomb. 1966.
Collection Hiroshima City
Museum of Contemporary Art.

“Making these extreme images,” Spero recalls, “I worried that the children
might be embarrassed with the content of my art, what ‘their mother’ might be
doing as an artist.”41 What Spero does as an artist, “thinking as a mother,” is to
incarnate the phantasmic dimension of war, to invoke the infantile, sadistic, often
sexualized mania that pervades even the most calculated and controlled forms of
aggression.42 At the extremes of aggressive fantasy, as the psychoanalyst Melanie
Klein observed, the body in the grip of the drives experiences itself as an annihi-
lating force. Its urine burns, its feces cut, its mouth devours. The body, or more
precisely the body-in-pieces, fragmented and in turmoil, wreaks indiscriminate
destruction on the entire world—a world that is, for the infant, synonymous with
the maternal body. The infant, Klein theorized, fantasizes through these bodily
drives, wreaking vengeance for the pain and frustration visited on it, manically
working off aggression by projecting it onto external objects, in particular the
breast, welche, in extremis, the infant imagines as a lethal enemy, a primal persecu-
tor. And forever after, Klein maintained, in states of intense anxiety, we helplessly
invoke the most primitive and comprehensive defenses available to us against a

Spero, “Creation and Pro-Creation," P. 119.
41.
42.
“Anal and ejaculatory metaphors were common speech in Vietnam—‘I laid my stuff all over it,'
in pilot’s language—and Spero’s apocalyptic imagery exposed the sexual and sadistic obscenity of
modern warfare.” Lisa Tickner, “Nancy Spero: Images of Women and la peinture féminine,” in Nancy
Spero, exh. cat. (London: ICA, 1987), P. 6.

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Spero’s Curses

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Spero. Fuck. 1966. Private Collection.

threat that is, in some shadowy precinct of the imagination, bound up with the
original objects of love.43

Spero’s imagery of war—with its bombs shitting, helicopters shredding,
planes shattering, victims shrieking—invokes the origins of aggression in the
infantile drives. The oral and anal sadism that, in Klein’s account, inaugurate the
paranoid-schizoid mechanisms of defense are revived in the service of a death
drive grotesquely agitated by the machinery of war. Abandoning the elegiac mode
of the Black Paintings and the sustained intensity of oil painting as a medium,
Spero turned to a process that, in its apparent immediacy, volatility, “impatience,”
and obsessional repetition of graphic motifs recalls children’s drawings.44 Works
such as Fuck and Gunship reproduce a recognizable iconography of children’s war
drawings in which machines such as airplanes and helicopters commonly appear,
but here enhanced by grim supplements—minute skulls and bones falling to the
earth, naked corpses, a compulsive repetition of profane utterance. Cannibalistic

43.
“From the beginning the destructive impulse is turned against the object and is ﬁrst expressed
in phantasied oral-sadistic attacks on the mother’s breast, which soon develop into onslaughts on her
body by all sadistic means.” Melanie Klein, “Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms” (1946), in The
Selected Melanie Klein, Hrsg. Juliet Mitchell (New York: Free Press, 1986), P. 177. Klein also observes: “The
fear of the destructive impulse seems to attach itself at once to an object—or rather it is experienced
as the fear of an uncontrollable overpowering object” (P. 179).
44.
(London: Vintage, 1998).

On children’s drawings and bombing, see Melanie Klein, Narrative of a Child Analysis [1961]

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Spero. Bomb Shitting. 1966.
Collection Bard College.

fantasies of devouring and incorporating the object of aggression, so vividly
described by Klein as the work of the infantile imagination, are compounded by
an extreme sexual imagery. Not only do the sheets detail a relentless shattering of
bodies, but that annihilating aggression is the effect of frenzied sexual violence.

“How do we,” asks Juliet Mitchell, “account for the rampant sexuality of
war”—for the fact that “sexual violence seems to ‘automatically’ accompany war
violence”? “How has it been possible,” she demands, “to ignore the intimate rela-
tionship of rampant sexuality and war violence?”45 The War Series poses this very
question. Cartoon erections detonate male bombs in ecstatic displays of sexual
sadism. A sperm bomb ejaculates a toxic cloud. Female bombs rain blood. Bombs
shit infant heads. Conﬂating sex and violence, Spero’s imagery renders the two
inseparable, indistinguishable, coextensive. For a deﬁning theme of the War Series
is war sexuality. And “war sexuality,” Mitchell has noted, is “hysterical sexuality.” In
hysteria, she writes, “it is not just that sex and death have come together as a fused
drive; it is rather that something violent has been sexualized.”46

Male hysteria, in the twentieth century, is pre-eminently an effect of war and
is associated most closely with the so-called shell-shock sufferers of the First World
Krieg, war hysterics whose most striking symptoms were disturbances of speech.
These soldiers, Mitchell observes, exhibited symptoms that in women would have

45. Mitchell, Mad Men and Medusas, P. 129.
46.

Ebenda., P. 135.

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Spero. Gunship. 1966. Private Collection.

been classiﬁed as hysteria—disorders such as paralysis and mutism that, stilling
the body and the tongue, rendered the sufferer excessively, pathologically passive.47
For the soldier, Mitchell observes, hysteria is a reaction to the violence that war-
fare exacts. Forced to break the social taboo against killing, the soldier is urged to
revive, and to act upon, infantile fantasies of murder and revenge. To put it
another way, warfare exploits the fantasies of its agents, unleashing a violence that
is both exhilarating and terrifying for the subject.48 For some, this aggression
rebounds on the aggressor who, traumatized by the effects of his own violence, oder
unconsciously dreading revenge from those he has threatened, injured, or killed,
turns against himself, cuts out his own tongue.49 Playing out the hysterical logic of
Krieg, in which agents are stimulated to act out their fantasies of destruction but not
to speak of them, the male war hysteric dramatizes the trauma of killing by annihi-
lating himself, silencing himself—turning himself, in effect, into a woman.

Hysteria, Mitchell observes, is “a condition that everyone wishes to repudiate.”
Und so, she remarks, “the solution to this profound repudiation of the condition

47.
A solider may ﬁnd that the reality of war is passive rather than aggressive. As the military psychi-
atrist W. H. R. Rivers reﬂects, in Pat Barker’s novel Regeneration (1991), contemplating the suffering of
soldiers in the trenches: “The war that had promised so much in the way of ‘manly’ activity had actually
delivered ‘feminine’ passivity, and on a scale that their mothers and sisters had scarcely known. NEIN
wonder they broke down.” Pat Barker, Regeneration (London: Penguin, 1992), S. 107–8.
48. Mitchell, Mad Men and Medusas, P. 29. “The sufferer of the illness [hysteria] in the condition of
war has not only been a victim of aggression but has also been an aggressor. . . . By considering the vic-
tim of the illness only as a victim of war, we are missing the point. What the soldier . . . may also be suf-
fering from is the knowledge that he has broken a taboo and that in doing so he has released his wish
to do so—his wish, his ‘wanting’ to murder. . . . In addition to the shock and fear of death, the person
who becomes hysterical following a war is also unconsciously dreading vengeance of possession by the
person he has killed or threatened.”
49.

Ebenda.

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OCTOBER

is to make sure that someone else has it.”50 After the First World War, the diagno-
sis of male hysteria waned, replaced by “war neurosis”—a term untainted by
association with women, madness, and sexual incapacity. “Hysteria,” Mitchell sum-
marizes, was “made woman,” and in time was resolved, or disappeared, into theory
of femininity itself.51 The disappearance of hysteria into femininity is a historical
trend that converges with the appearance, in Surrealism, of the female hysteric as
muse and of feminine hysteria as a mode of artistic thought. The repudiation of
hysteria, “made woman” to promote a restoration of virile masculinity in the after-
math of war, is shadowed by this avant-garde embrace of hysteria “made woman”
to signal a resistance to that same order. Spero’s recourse to hysteria in the War
Series summons both these trends, while also anticipating the roles hysteria would
play in her own work, and in the discourse of feminism, in the years to come.

Hysteria was the pivotal dynamic of Spero’s work for over a decade, a period
that coincided with her self-invention as a “woman artist,” and that culminated
with the Codex Artaud, an extended reﬂection on hysterical subjectivity. She ﬁrst
adopted the posture of the hysteric to dramatize the alienation of women from
public speech: with the grafﬁto paintings of the early sixties, underscoring “the
contorted conditions of articulation” that constrained a female subject from
asserting “the linguistic competence” to speak, she initiated an extensive body of
work in which hysterical speech exempliﬁes the desperation of the subject whose
urgent cries go unheard. “Women,” Spero has commented, “are often put down
as screamers or irrational, characterized as one who screams but can’t act.”52
Speaking in the voice of the hysteric, a technique instigated by her cursive curses,
Spero protested the silence and invisibility imposed on the woman artist.

Dann, in the War Series, Spero spoke out publicly against the war in Vietnam,
dramatizing the hysterical violence of warfare—its stimulation of the desire to
kill, its fusion of sex and violence, its toll in “psychic death”—but also the hysteria
that is projected onto political resistance as the protests of victims and critics alike
are “put down” as “irrational,” dismissed as impotent rage. Krieg, Spero suggests, Ist
hysterical in its very recourse to action in preference to speech. The culture of war
is one in which hysterical effects proliferate as enactment, or acting out, triumphs
over representation. And this hysteria of war is in turn projected onto victims,
onto soldiers whose fantasies are exploited by warfare—who are deprived of
speech and exhorted to act—and onto all those who protest or resist the violence
of war—onto civilian victims, onto critics, onto artists, and onto mothers.53 War,
Spero suggests, is the culture of hysteria par excellence.

Ebenda., P. 186.
50.
Ebenda., P. 161.
51.
Nancy Spero, “Issues and Symbolism,” M/E/A/N/I/N/G 8 (November 1990), P. 8.
52.
53.
George W. Bush’s dismissive response to Cindy Sheehan’s protests against the Iraq War provides
a recent example of this projection of hysteria onto victims and critics. Nicole Loraux recalls that in
tragedy, a mother’s “mourning leads to cursing.” In the ancient Greek city-state, mourning was regulated
as a feminine excess, representing a potential threat to civic order. Nicole Loraux, Mothers in Mourning,
trans. Corinne Pache (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998), S. 5–29.

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The ranks of bloody, sword-
sharp “phallic tongues” bristling
in so many fur ious “screaming
mouths” in the War Series are also
castrated, cut off from speech.
Indignant, convulsive cries spring
from serpentine bodies, fantasti-
cally intercepting the churning
blades of the helicopter (Victims
and Helicopters, 1966)—with the
result that victims cut out their
own tongues. Bodies become
tongues (Victims, 1967), dancing
like ﬂames, lashing the enemy over-
Kopf, straining, as Leon Golub
once wrote, to “lick the Bomb.”54

54. Leon Golub, “Bombs and Helicop-
ters: The Art of Nancy Spero,” Caterpillar 1
(1967); reprinted in Dominique Nahas, Jo
Anna Isaak, Robert Storr, Leon Golub, Und
Ronald A. Kuchta, Nancy Spero: Works Since
1950, exh. cat. (Syracuse, N.Y.: Everson
Museum of Art, 1987), P. 39.

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Spero. Top: Victims and Helicopters. 1966. Bottom: Victims. 1967. Both in private collections.

OCTOBER

Her concern is with the past, with the anathema or curse.

—H. D., Helen in Egypt, Book 1

“I thought it was a perfect transition from talking about war to talking about
ich selbst,” Spero recalls of her encounter with the writings of the French poet, play-
wright, and actor Antonin Artaud. It was on a family vacation in the summer of
1969 that she picked up a copy of the ﬁrst English translation of Artaud’s writings,
edited by her friend Jack Hirschman.55 “I thought it was a perfect vehicle for my
state of mind and my position as an artist at that time. I would use the sexual lan-
guage of Artaud.”56

Spero’s paradoxical move to begin talking about herself by appropriating
the words of another—a male French poet whom she herself describes as a misog-
ynist—is as contrary to the expectations of a woman artist ﬁnding her voice as her
earlier claim that it was thinking as a mother that produced the graphic violence
of the War Series.57 Thinking as a mother, she investigated the psychic trends of ter-
ror and aggression, sexual violence and hysterical rage. Talking about herself, sie
appropriated the words and assumed the voice of a male author whose writings
are replete with anxious, agonized references to women and to mothers, an author
whose existential declaration—“Me, Antonin Artaud, born September 4, 1896, out
of a uterus I had nothing to do with,” Spero records in one Artaud Painting.

“‘Feminine’ discourse,” Pamela Wye has noted, “entered the art of this cen-
tury on the tongues of men, not women.”58 Reclaiming the voice of hysteria from
Artaud, Spero restores this tendency (“made woman,” as Mitchell remarks, in post-
war culture) to a “woman artist.” Assuming the mantle from Artaud, Spero in turn
performs, to the point of (hysterical) excess, an homage to hysteria.59 She under-
scores the “contorted conditions of articulation” that constrain the subject whose
wanting to speak is the very substance of speech. The rhetoric of Artaud offers
“the perfect vehicle” for a discourse that, in mouthing another’s words—in echo-
ing the voice of another protesting his own silencing—exempliﬁes the anxiety of
exclusion, the fear of not being heard that, in hysteria, shades into a fear of not
Sein. The suffering of the hysteric, Mitchell observes, arises from a fear of anni-
hilation, from a trauma that is experienced, at the extreme, as a psychic death—

Spero, interview with Jon Bird, Oktober 25 Und 26, 1986, referring to Antonin Artaud Anthology,

55.
Hrsg. Jack Hirschman (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1965).
Spero, interview with Jon Bird, Oktober 25 Und 26, 1986.
56.
57.
“I think that the anger in the War Series and the Artaud Paintings came from feeling that I didn’t
have a voice . . . that I didn’t have an identity.” Spero, in “Jo Anna Isaak in Conversation with Nancy
Spero," P. 10.)
Pamela Wye, “Nancy Spero: Speaking in Tongues,” M/E/A/N/I/N/G 4 (November 1988), P. 38.
58.
59.
“A man can scream like a woman and become a cultural hero, whereas a woman who screams is
ignored. By taking over Artaud’s voice in a way, I broke down a male/female barrier.” Spero, quoted in
Amy Ingrid Schlegel, “Codex Spero: Feminist Art and Activist Practices in New York Since the Late
1960s” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1997), P. 197.

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Spero. Links: Artaud Painting—Me, Antonin Artaud, Born . . . . 1969. Private Collection.
Rechts: Artaud Painting—Letter from Spero. 1969. Collection Vancouver Art Gallery.

“the absolute inexistence from which I sometimes suffer,” as Artaud himself
described the emotion.60 In the Artaud works, Spero adopts the rhetoric of hyster-
ical dramatization to portray the predicament of the (woman) artist, cut off from
Rede, yet compelled to speak. It is an exercise of self-dramatization by proxy. Von
exploiting the logic of hysteria—in which doubling, mimicry, and copying are at
once symptoms of “inexistence” and defenses against it—Spero adopts the voice of
the male hysteric, whose screams “are given male worth.”61

“I used Artaud, you see, as a voice for my frustration and anger,” Spero
recalls.62 Yet, she confesses, “I took great liberties.” Artaud “would have disap-
proved, even hated what I was doing, using and disrupting his language for my

60.
“The hysteric’s dramatizations,” Juliet Mitchell observes, “are protests against the vanishing of
its own body/mind; the drowning man’s struggling cry, ‘Look I am here!” Mitchell, Mad Men and
Medusas, P. 226.
61.
Spero, “Issues and Symbolism," P. 8. “Artaud hated women, and perhaps he is not recognized as
playing the role of a woman because his symbolic worth is given male guise. His screams are granted
male worth, the male rebel.”
62.

Spero, in Sosa, Woman as Protagonist: The Art of Nancy Spero.

OCTOBER

Zwecke. That’s why I wrote/painted this letter to him.”63 “Artaud I could not
borne to know you alive, your despair, Spero,” she wrote, left-handed, in a thick
red script on a large sheet, adopting, on this unique occasion, the ﬁrst-person
voice that was his own almost exclusive mode of address. Ansonsten, in the body of
work that comprises the sixty Artaud Paintings, executed in gouache and collage
on uniformly sized sheets of paper, like the leaves of a manuscript, and in the
thirty-six scrolls of the vast Codex Artaud, written in bulletin type, Spero’s own
name is absent. The name Artaud, umgekehrt, is registered more than a hundred
mal, appended to each and every one of scores of quotations and repeated
almost ad inﬁnitum in passages of dense, stuttering, insistent typographic signa-
ture in the Codex.64

Zuerst, Spero copied the passages in English translation. Soon, Jedoch, sie
reverted to French, now reproducing Artaud’s words verbatim, the more faithfully
to echo his voice but also the more actively to articulate a difference. By using
Artaud’s original words, Spero contrived “not to facilitate the reading of the quotes”
(by an English-speaking audience), but to erode their legibility in the very act of
inscribing them, to silence Artaud in the very act of quoting him.65 Adhering even
more rigorously than before to the principle of exact quotation, she eschewed leg-
ibility at the level of language while still preserving, even enhancing, its appearance
at the level of the written character.66 While the Artaud Paintings are scripted, verwenden
the left hand both to estrange the autograph mark, and to embody what Derrida
describes as Artaud’s proclivity to write against meaning, the quotations in the
Codex are writ large in type, a decision partly motivated by a practical economy of
scale.67 Wishing to quote Artaud at greater length, Spero began pasting sheets of
paper together end to end, producing scrolls two feet in height (or width, if verti-
cal) and up to twenty-ﬁve feet in length, initially conceived to be shown pinned
directly to the wall. And from these epigrams—interrupted and punctuated, ampli-
ﬁed and displaced by collage motifs—she constructed, as the critic Corinne Robins
observed, “giant blackmail notes to the world.”68

Rowell and Lotringer, “A Conversation with Nancy Spero," P. 137.
63.
64.
On the repetition of Artaud’s name as a device of “critical mimicry,” see Schlegel, “Codex
Spero”: “Why would Spero include the proper name ‘Artaud’ nearly two hundred times in the Codex,
after each and every quotation, except to perform the kind of deliberately improper, excessive ‘over-
reading’ characteristic of the position of ‘the feminine’?” (P. 197). Lucy Bradnock has suggested that
the repetition of Artaud’s name “acts as both incantation and attribution.” Lucy Bradnock, “Lost in
Translation? Nancy Spero/Antonin Artaud/Jacques Derrida,” Papers of Surrealism 3 (Frühling 2005), P. 8.
Jon Bird, “Nancy Spero—Inscribing Woman—Between the Lines,” in Nancy Spero, P. 25.
65.
As Schlegel observes, “Spero’s paradoxical treatment of ‘text’ as simultaneously legible and
66.
incomprehensible, as both readable and unreadable, and as immaterial idea and material object is the
crux of the Codex and its central Artaudian characteristic.” Schlegel, “Codex Spero," P. 160.
67.
Art of Antonin Artaud, trans. Mary Ann Caws (Cambridge, Masse.: MIT Press, 1998), P. 85.
68.
Zeitschrift 4, NEIN. 1 (Frühling 1975), P. 21.

Jacques Derrida, “To Unsense the Subjectile,” in Jacques Derrida and Paule Thévenin, The Secret

Corinne Robins, “Nancy Spero: ‘Political’ Artist of Poetry and the Nightmare,” Feminist Art

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Artaud’s own career—a career that would yield, by the time of his premature
death from cancer in 1948, over twenty volumes of writings—is itself deﬁned by
an epistolary drive, resulting, as Susan Sontag observed, in “hundreds of letters,
his most accomplished ‘dramatic’ form—all of which amount to a broken, self-
mutilated corpus.”69 Spero quotes extensively from these letters, extracting from
the litany of anguished appeals to correspondents both real and imaginary a sear-
ing set of fragments. “You yourself will choose the extracts; you will arrange the
letters,” Artaud once instructed his editor, Jacques Rivière, issuing a directive that
Spero would adopt as the compositional principle of the Artaud works.70 One
Codex panel reproduces this letter, written by the unknown twenty-seven-year-old
poet to the editor of the Nouvelle Revue Française, following an extended correspon-
dence that begins, inauspiciously, with a rejection notice. In return, Artaud
wheedles, chides, importunes, and accuses the editor of having, although with
“just cause . . . forgotten me”—then, climactically, in the famous letter of January
29, 1924, declares, “I submit to your judgment.”71 Like Spero’s own motto, “I do
not challenge,” Artaud’s submission is dangerously disingenuous, and Rivière
makes no immediate reply. At last, he counters the wrenching emotional plea for
“judgment” with a proposal.72 “Why not,” he asks, “publish the . . . letters you have
written to me? . . . The whole might form a little novel in letters.”73 While ecstatic
at the prospect of this publication (he had, he assures Rivière, some time ago
thought of it himself), Artaud reacts with characteristic vehemence to the editor’s
suggestion that the letters be presented in a ﬁctional form, with “invented names.”
“Why lie,” he demands, “why try to place on the literary level a thing which is the
very cry of life?” “I do not care whether or not the letters are signed with my name,” he
insists (exhibiting what Mitchell describes as the hysteric’s characteristic tendency
to dramatize his own suffering at the cost of greatly increasing it). Trotzdem, unter
whatever name, “it is absolutely necessary that the reader feels that he has in his
hands the elements of a true story.”74

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Susan Sontag, “Approaching Artaud,” in Under the Sign of Saturn (New York: Picador/Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, 2002), P. 17. “Artaud’s contempt for literature” has, Sontag contends, “less to do
with a diffuse nihilism about culture than with a speciﬁc experience of suffering.” “The verbal humilia-
tion of literature” is, in effect, an apotropaic technique by which Artaud acts to preserve the act of writ-
ing from being “transformed into artistry,” from attaining “the benign status of a ﬁnished, literary
product”(P. 20). In Spero’s Artaud works, a hybrid form of writing, drawing, and collage, consecrated
to an “extreme sexual imagery,” is used to “humiliate” painting. Or, as Buchloh suggests, Spero
demythiﬁes painting—even as the Artaud Paintings “point equally to painting’s lost resources in myth”
(S. 242, 243). Like Artaud, who attacks literature in order to preserve writing, Spero destroys paint-
ing in order to salvage it.
70.
71.
72.
terly piece of literary blackmail with its tortured writer in turn playing the part of the torturer.”
73.
74.

Antonin Artaud to Jacques Rivière, Mai 25, 1924, in Hirschman, Antonin Artaud Anthology, P. 20.
Artaud to Rivière, Januar 29, 1924, in Hirschman, Antonin Artaud Anthology, S. 10–12.
Robins, “Nancy Spero: ‘Political’ Artist of Poetry and the Nightmare," P. 20. “The letter is a mas-

Rivière to Artaud, Mai 24, 1924, in Hirschman, Antonin Artaud Anthology, P. 19.
Artaud to Rivière, Mai 25, 1924, in Hirschman, Antonin Artaud Anthology, P. 19 (emphasis added).

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Throughout the Artaud works, Spero faithfully repeats his words, signing his
name not only to every Artaud Painting and panel of the Codex, but to each individ-
ual epigram. This compulsive reiteration of the protocols of homage, zealously
performing the conventions of citation and tribute that characterize the Oedipal
culture of discipleship, perversely honors Artaud through the execution of a liter-
ary ritual abjured by its object, a devoted hysteric and, as Sylvère Lotringer
observes, a vampire plagiarist.75 Rather than plagiarize the plagiarist, Spero
quotes Artaud excessively, enacting, but also disavowing, through compulsive
attribution, the habit of copying, or mimicry, that is among hysteria’s deﬁning
tendencies. Plagiarism, notes Mitchell, “is a kind of hysterical enactment: one has
taken over the other who, in a sense, thus becomes non-existent or dead.”76 If pla-
giarism testiﬁes to hysteria’s main complaint, “an absence of boundaries,” Spero’s
citational excess, umgekehrt, announces a preoccupation with borders and, in par-
besonders, with margins.

A horizontal scroll around ten feet long, Codex Artaud VI (1971) is sugges-
tiv, in its format and in certain details of iconography and facture, of the
Egyptian Book of the Dead, a medieval illuminated manuscript, a papier collé, Und
a concrete poem. Typing, gilding, gouache, and collage, applied to a scroll formed
by pasting sheets of paper end to end, all evoke the fragile medium of paper on
which Artaud himself constantly relied. Three gilded, human-headed, phallic-
tongued snakes make stately progress toward the body of the self-sucking Nut, Die
Egyptian goddess doubled over to form the pedestal for Artaud’s urgent letter
from Rodez, from where, incarcerated in a psychiatric hospital, he issued innu-
merable appeals, declaring himself a dead letter, unceremoniously passed from
hand to hand. This letter, written in the bulletin typeface of a telegram, impinges
on a block of geometric design that, upon inspection, turns out to be a vast signa-
tur, revealing, in its intricate typographic pattern, “the repetition of the poet’s
name in a visual form” that, as Bird has noted, “is the phonetic equivalent of a
shout or scream.”77 Juxtaposed with Artaud’s urgent petition, this signature-
scream concrète, displaced and enlarged from its customary abased position on the
page to dominate and overshadow the scene from above, enacts both the annihila-
tion and the excessive restitution of identity that the Codex as a whole performs.

The motifs that Spero interjects in the margins and between the lines of
Artaud’s words perform a graphic interruption (its recurrent form the scream),
underscoring, but also intercepting, the poet’s own hysterical speech. “I fragmented
these quotes,” Spero has recalled, “with images I had painted—disembodied heads,

75.
Artaud, Sylvère Lotringer has observed, was “the model and protégé of all plagiarism.” Convinced
that he had many doubles, he “vampired them to mitigate the hemorrhage of his own identity.” Sylvère
Lotringer, “Artaud à New York: L’anxieté de l’inﬂuence,” ViceVersa 42 (Montreal) ( June–Aug. 1993),
P. 49. As cited in Schlegel, “Codex Spero," P. 193.
76. Mitchell, Mad Men and Medusas, P. 60.
77.
Jon Bird, “Present Imperfect: Word and Image in Nancy Spero’s ‘Scrolls’ of the 1970s,” in
OtherWorlds: The Art of Nancy Spero and Kiki Smith, Hrsg. Jon Bird (London: Reaktion Books, 2003), P. 118.

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Spero. Codex Artaud VI. 1971. Courtesy Galerie Lelong, New York.

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OCTOBER

deﬁant phallic tongues . . . victims in strait-jackets. . . . I was literally sticking my
tongue out at the world—a woman silenced, victimized, and brutalized, hysterical,
talking ‘in tongues.’”78 “L’OBSCÈNE PESANTEUR PHALLIQUE D’UNE LANGUE
QUI PRIE” [THE OBSCENE PHALLIC WEIGHT OF A BESEECHING TONGUE]
announces Codex Artaud XVII (1972). This crude tongue, plunging into a pristine
array of letters—interrupting the phrase langue qui prie with a tongue that screams—
performs an act of oral interpretation. “Often,” Spero observes, “there is a juxta-
position of his writing and my head that more or less coalesced,” as if the act of
reading had become an awkward physical intimacy between the reader and the
text.79 The subject of the Codex Artaud is a close reader, a cunning linguist, zu mit-
noisseur of obscenities, inserted between the lines of a tale told by a tongue thick
with fury. Critics have interpreted Spero’s interjections in text in terms of an
inscription of the feminine “between the lines” of patriarchal discourse, welche
dominates the printed page. Artaud voiced a more brutal condemnation of the
written word. “All writing is pigshit,” declared the poet in a line Spero quotes in
one Artaud Painting. By intervening “between the lines” of a text by Artaud, Spero
colludes in his violence, displays a mimetic sympathy with his tongue-lashing
protests against writing, but also, as Lisa Tickner has observed, stages a strategy of
mimetic excess, or overdoing.80 An overdoing of phallocentric discourse can con-
tribute to its undoing, suggests Luce Irigaray. Spero, Jedoch, ﬁnds in Artaud a
ﬁgure whose rhetorical overdoing also contributes to his own physical and emo-
tional undoing, who becomes the victim of retributive excesses (“I died at Rodez
under electroshock” is the agonized cry of one Artaud Painting) as well as of his
own hysteria. The Codex Artaud is a work of ﬁtful ambiguity, in which hysterical
excess is both ﬂaunted and feared.

Exiled to the foot of the page is an even more obscene vignette, a head in
proﬁle, bright tongue thrusting at the crotch of a naked female ﬁgure. “A small
woman is penetrated, as though impaled, by the reddish tongue of a huge male
Kopf,” suggests one critic.81 Yet if the head with thrusting tongue does function as
Spero’s graphic signature, her auto-icon, or as the sign of Spero/Artaud, then this
act of oral aggression is more ambiguous.82 The concatenated ﬁgure of the phallic

Spero, “Creation and Pro-creation," P. 119.
Quoted in Jeanne Siegel, “Nancy Spero: Woman as Protagonist,” Arts Magazine 62 (September

78.
79.
1987), P. 12
80.
Both Tickner and Bird describe Spero’s work in terms of an inscription of the feminine
between the lines of masculine writing or its mimetic repetition. Tickner writes: “A woman has to copy
male language to be understood, and the ‘feminine’ can be read only in spaces left between the lines
of her own mimicry. But Irigaray doubles the mimicry back on itself, miming the miming, to the point
where it becomes a strategy. Her aim is ‘to undo the effects of phallocentric discourse simply by overdo –
ing them.’” Tickner, “Nancy Spero,” quoting Toril Moi on Irigaray, P. 16.
Robins, “Nancy Spero: ‘Political’ Artist of Poetry and the Nightmare," P. 38.
81.
82.
As Jon Bird has noted, “Artaud offered Spero a provisional position from which to perform her
own identity, visually encoded in the image of the head with protruding tongue.” Bird, “Present
Imperfect," P. 135.

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Spero. Codex Artaud XVII. 1972. Courtesy Galerie Lelong, New York.

OCTOBER

tongue and the ecstatic/hysteric body encapsulate the predicament in which
Artaud and Spero are mutually entangled.

The margin is shared by the avant-garde and by “woman,” Suleiman has
remarked.83 In avant-garde discourse, culture is spatialized as a printed page.
Through the manifesto and the collage, the avant-garde announces itself as a
print culture, its pages in turn thickly laden with others—scraps of newspaper,
posters, handbills and other discarded sheets picked up, at least metaphorically,
from the street and brandished “‘on the fringe,’ in the margins.”84 But in contrast
to avant-garde movements, which adopted their marginal position “the better to
launch attacks at the center,” Suleiman notes, “woman” was edged out by force.85
The ﬁgure sticking its tongue out from the margin—from one margin, to which
“woman” is consigned, into another, marked by the writings of the feminized and
hysterical Artaud—signiﬁes the “doubly marginal” status accorded the avant-garde
woman artist. The narrow format of Codex Artaud XVII, and the concentration of its
motifs at the edges, make it, in effect, all margin: a meditation on the audacity,
and the precariousness, of speech for those who, as Hélène Cixous declared in a
feminist manifesto that was soon to appear, had bitten their tongues too often.86

On what note, Dann, to conclude concerning Spero’s association with the ﬁg-
ure of Artaud—this mad muse, this suicidal alterego, this Virgil of hysteria? Jetzt
might be the moment to borrow another leaf from psychoanalysis, and to suggest
that Spero found in Artaud a ﬁgure of transference. In psychoanalytic terms,
transference is a process by which a stranger becomes an object of obscure fascina-
tion, reviving unconscious longings and fears. One is moved, as Spero declared
herself to be by the writings of Artaud, to “force a collaboration” between such a
figure and oneself.87 In its unreconstructed form, transference is a verbatim
repetition of the past. Through a process of translation, or reinscription, transfer-
ence however yields repetition with a difference. Thought of in this way—as an
encounter with the past, the other, and the stranger in oneself—transference
might begin to describe the process by which Spero came to ﬁnd in the ﬁgure of
Artaud “a perfect vehicle” for talking about herself as a “woman artist.”

83.
Susan Rubin Suleiman, “A Double Margin: Women Writers and the Avant-Garde in France," In
Subversive Intent: Gender, Politik, and the Avant-Garde (Cambridge, Masse.: Harvard University Press,
1990), P. 14.
Ebenda.
84.
Ebenda.
85.
86.
Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” trans. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen, Signs: Zeitschrift
of Women in Culture and Society 1, NEIN. 4 (1976), P. 886. Portraying speech as an oral drive, even an oral-
sadistic one, Cixous called on women to ﬁnd their voices as writers by plying their tongues. Those who
have bitten their tongues too often “are either dead from it,” she declared, “or more familiar with their
tongues and their mouths than anyone else” (P. 886); woman should attack the “discourse of man” by
“biting that tongue with her very own teeth” (P. 887).
87.